3. From Muscovy towards St Petersburg 1598–1689
HANS-JOACHIM TORKE
From the time of Ivan the Terrible’s oprichnina to the ascension of the Romanovs in 1613, Muscovy experienced uninterrupted crisis—extinction of a dynasty, foreign intervention, and tumultuous social and political upheaval. The seventeenth century witnessed a restless transition, as, amidst continuing upheaval at the dawn of modernity, Muscovy embarked on state-building, Westernization, and territorial expansion.
THE seventeenth century has long been a focus of historiographic debate. Impressed by the broad-ranging reforms of Peter the Great (1689–1725), most early historians tended to emphasize the ‘break’, juxtaposing a traditional Muscovy of the seventeenth century to a Westernizing state of the eighteenth. But for over a century specialists have realized that the Petrine reforms built upon changes initiated by his predecessors in the seventeenth century. The army, finances, state administration—favourite areas of Petrine reform—were also the subject of government reforms in the seventeenth century. While many of these reforms were driven by practical need, they reflected a desire not only to import Western technology and military experts, but also to reshape foreign and domestic policy in terms of Western ideas and theories.
Crisis: The Time of Troubles (1598–1613)
The age of transformation began with acute crisis—the ‘Time of Troubles’ (smutnoe vremia). This protracted crisis inaugurated a new period in Russian history, marked by fundamental changes that would culminate in the passing of ‘Old Russia’ and the onset of new ‘troubles’ in the 1680s. Perhaps the best schema for the Time of Troubles, devised over a century ago by the historian Sergei Platonov, divides this period into successive ‘dynastic’, ‘social’, and ‘national’ phases that followed upon one another but, to a significant degree, had some overlap.
The period begins with the extinction of the Riurikid line in 1598. The general crisis also had long-term social causes—in particular, the exhaustion of the land and its resources by the Livonian War and the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible, which had devastated the boyars and triggered new restrictions on the peasants’ freedom of movement. Without the trauma of 1598, however, the ensuing disorder would probably neither have been so intense nor have persisted for the entire seventeenth century, which contemporaries aptly called a ‘rebellious age’. This first phase was portentous both because the only dynasty that had ever reigned in Russia suddenly vanished without issue, and because the ensuing events triggered the first assault on the autocracy. In the broadest sense, the old order lost a principal pillar—tradition (starina); nevertheless, there remained the spiritual support of the Orthodox Church (which held firm for several more decades) and the service nobility (which retained its resiliency until well into the eighteenth century). The year 1598 had one further consequence: a tradition-bound people could not believe that the dynasty had actually come to an end and therefore tended to support false pretenders claiming to be descendants of the Riurikids.
Muscovy responded to the extinction of its ruling dynasty by electing a new sovereign. Interestingly, no one as yet proposed to emulate other countries by electing someone from a foreign ruling house—a remarkable testament to the insularity of Muscovite society. Such a proposal, undoubtedly faced an insuperable religious obstacle—obligatory conversion to Orthodoxy. In the end the choice fell on Boris Godunov—a Russian nobleman, though not from an élite family (i.e. descending from another Riurikid line or the Lithuanian grand princes). Nonetheless, Boris had single-mindedly prepared his advancement under Tsars Ivan the Terrible (1533–84) and Fedor Ivanovich (1584–98): he himself married the daughter of a favourite in Ivan’s court; his sister Irina married Ivan’s successor, Fedor. Because the latter was personally incapable of exercising power, Godunov became regent and excluded all other competitors. After Fedor’s death, on 17 February 1598 Boris was formally ‘elected’ as Tsar Boris by a council (sobor) of approximately 600 deputies drawn from the upper clergy, the boyar duma, and representatives of the service nobility who had gathered in Moscow. Although transparently stage-managed by Boris, the council seemed to confirm that the realm had ‘found’ the candidate chosen by God Himself.
The Church, which Boris had earlier helped to establish its own Patriarchate, supported his election. The new tsar could also count on the sympathy of the lower nobility. But Boris also had to use coercion to eliminate rivals among the boyars—such as Fedor Nikitich Romanov, the head of a family with marital ties to the Riurikids, who was banished in late 1600 and forced to take monastic vows in 1601 (with the name Filaret). That tonsure effectively eliminated him from contention for worldly offices.
Nevertheless, Boris’s position was anything but secure. Apart from the fact that his government was beset with enormous burdens and problems, Boris himself failed to evoke veneration from his subjects. In part, that was because he had married the daughter of Grigorii (Maliuta) Skuratov—the oprichnik blamed for murdering Metropolitan Filipp of Novgorod in 1569. Moreover, his blatant efforts to ascend the throne lent credence to rumours that he had arranged the murder of Tsarevich Dmitrii, Ivan’s last son, in 1591. Although an investigatory commission under Vasilii Shuiskii (a rival whom Boris had deftly appointed to lead the investigation) confirmed that the death was accidental, the death of the 9-year-old Tsarevich remains a mystery to this day. Indeed, it made no sense for Boris to kill the boy: at the time of Dmitrii’s death, it was still conceivable that Fedor would father a son and avert the extinction of the Riurikid line. Nevertheless, Boris’s adversaries exploited suspicions of regicide—a view which, because of Alexander Pushkin’s play Boris Godunov (which Modest Mussorgsky later made into an opera), has persisted to the present.
Nor was Boris able to consolidate power after accession to the throne. His attempt to tighten control over administration failed—largely because of the traditional ‘Muscovite procrastination’ and corruption. His plan to reconstruct the towns also went awry, chiefly for want of a middle estate. Nor was he able to train better state servants: when, for the first time, Muscovy dispatched a contingent (eighteen men) to study in England, France, and Germany, not a single one returned. He recruited large numbers of European specialists (military officers, doctors, and artisans), but met with remonstrations from the Orthodox Church. Clearly, Boris had an open mind about the West: he not only solicited the support of ruling houses in the West, but also sought to consolidate his dynastic claims through attempts to marry his daughter Ksenia to Swedish (later Danish) princes, although such plans ultimately came to nought.
Boris attempted to establish order in noble-peasant relations, but nature herself interceded. From the early 1590s, in an attempt to protect petty nobles and to promote economic recovery, the government established the ‘forbidden years’, which—for the first time—imposed a blanket prohibition on peasant movement during the stipulated year. In autumn 1601, however, Boris’s government had to retreat and reaffirm the peasants’ right to movement: a catastrophic crop failure in the preceding summer caused massive famine that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The following year the government again had to rescind the ‘forbidden year’, a step that virtually legalized massive peasant flight. Moreover the government welcomed movement towards the southern border area (appropriately called the dikoe pole, or ‘wild field’), where they helped to reinforce the Cossacks and the fortified towns recently established as a buffer between Muscovy and the Crimean Tatars. But many peasants sought new landowners in central Muscovy adding to the social unrest. In fact, in 1603 the government had to use troops to suppress rebellious peasants, bondsmen (kholopy), and even déclassé petty nobles.
That uprising signalled the onset of phase two—the social crisis. This stage, however, overlapped with the dynastic crisis: as the general sense of catastrophe mounted, rumours suddenly spread that Tsarevich Dmitrii had not died at Uglich, but had miraculously survived in Poland-Lithuania. In 1601 a pretender surfaced in Poland, winning the support of adventurous magnates (in particular, the voevoda of Sandomierz, Jerzy Mniszech); he was actually a fugitive monk, Grigorii, who had fled from Chudov Monastery in Moscow and originally came from the petty nobility, bearing the name Iurii Otrepev before tonsure. That, at least, was the public claim of Boris Godunov, who himself had fallen ill and steadily lost the ability to rule. That declaration had no more effect than his representations to the Polish king, Zygmunt III, who remained officially uninvolved, but had secret assurances from the ‘False Dmitrii’ that Poland would receive Smolensk and other territories were he to succeed.
When the Polish nobles launched their campaign from Lvov in August 1604, their forces numbered only 2,200 cavalrymen. When they reached Moscow in June 1605, however, this army had grown tenfold, for many others—especially Cossacks—had joined the triumphal march to Moscow.
By the time they entered the Kremlin, Boris himself had already died (April 1605), and his 16-year-old son Fedor was promptly executed. Of Boris’s reign, only the acquisition of western Siberia (with outposts as remote as the Enisei) and the expansion southward were achievements of enduring significance.
The pretender initially succeeded in persuading the populace that he was the real Dmitrii. The boyars were less credulous; several were judged guilty of a conspiracy under the leadership of Vasilii Shuiskii. But the pretender had the support of Boris’s enemies (seeking personal advantage) and those who believed that the ‘Pseudo-Dmitrii’ (ostensibly a ‘Riurikid’) would restore the old order. Dmitrii, however, had secretly converted to Roman Catholicism, promised enormous territories to his Polish benefactors (especially Mniszech, whose daughter Maryna he had married), and even agreed to permit missionary activities by Catholic priests and to participate in a crusade against the Turks. Before fulfilling these commitments, he attempted to ensure the support of the petty nobility, for example, by issuing a decree in 1606 that re-established the five-year statute of limitations on the forcible return of fugitive peasants.
None the less, Dmitrii failed to consolidate his hold on power. Above all, the Polish presence exposed old Russian culture to massive Western influence and provoked a strong reaction, especially against the foreigners’ behaviour—their clothing, customs, and contempt for Orthodox religious rites. Popular unrest reached its peak during the wedding ceremonies in May 1606 (intended to supplement Catholic rites conducted earlier in Cracow, though without formal marriage of the betrothed). Offended by the provocative behaviour of Polish aristocrats, Vasilii Shuiskii and fellow boyars organized a conspiracy that resulted in the overthrow and murder of the ‘False Dmitrii’.
It is hardly surprising that Shuiskii himself mounted the throne—this time ‘chosen’ by fellow boyars, not a council of the realm. The scion of an old princely line and descendant of Alexander Nevsky he represented the hope of aristocratic lines pushed into the background by Boris and Dmitrii. During the coronation ceremonies, Shuiskii openly paid homage to the boyars, not only promising to restore the right of the boyar duma to judge cases of capital punishment (denied by Ivan the Terrible), but also vowing neither to punish an entire family for the offence of a single member nor to subject their property to arbitrary confiscation. These concessions did not constitute an electoral capitulation for a limited monarchy, but were meant only to ensure a return to genuine autocracy.
Shuiskii immediately faced a serious challenge—the Bolotnikov rebellion, the first great peasant uprising in the history of Russia. To oppose the ‘boyar tsar’, Ivan Bolotnikov—himself a fugitive bondsman—mobilized a motley force of peasants and Cossacks from the south (who for several years had been fomenting disorder in the region), service nobles with military experience, and some well-born adversaries of Vasilii. The rebels did manage to encircle Moscow in October 1606, but their movement collapsed when petty nobles—alarmed by the insistent demand of peasants for freedom—abandoned Bolotnikov to join the other side. Bolotnikov, who had poor administrative skills, retreated to Tula; a year later, after months of siege by government troops, the town finally capitulated and turned Bolotnikov over for execution. In the interim, Vasilii cleverly attempted to win the nobility’s allegiance by promulgating a peasant statute (9 March 1607) that extended the statute of limitations on the forcible recovery of fugitive peasants from five to fifteen years. The decree answered their primary demand: by tripling the period of the statute of limitations, his decree greatly increased the chances for finding and recovering fugitives. The statute also afforded some legal protection to the bondsmen: henceforth they might be held in bondage only on the basis of a written document (kabala).
Hardly had Vasilii eliminated the threat from peasants and Cossacks when he faced a new menace from the Poles: in late 1607 yet another pretender, likewise claiming to be Tsarevich Dmitrii, crossed the border with an army of Polish-Lithuanian warriors. The past of this second False Dmitrii is murky but he apparently came from the milieu of the first. Although the Polish government and Catholic Church remained in the background, members of the Polish nobility under Jan Sapieha participated in his siege of Moscow in mid-1608. After establishing headquarters in the village of Tushino, he was joined by the wife of the first False Dmitrii, ‘Tsarina Maryna’, who ‘recognized’ the husband who had so miraculously survived. Filaret Romanov (whom the first False Dmitrii elevated to metropolitan, thereby facilitating a return to politics) also made his way to Tushino. As other adversaries of Vasilii also came, Tushino became the centre of a counter-government, with its own administration, and was recognized as the legitimate power by much of the realm.
Simultaneously, several towns along the upper Volga established their own army (the ‘first contingent’), which proceeded to liberate Vladimir, Nizhnii Novgorod, and Kostroma. This army evidently had no ties with Vasilii, who was forced to accept the assistance of some 5,000 Swedish mercenaries.
Muscovy now entered phase three—the ‘national crisis’: in May 1609 the Polish Sejm approved a request by King Zygmunt III for funds to invade Russia—nominally under the pretext of repulsing a Swedish threat to Poland-Lithuania. Thus, by the autumn of 1609, two foreign armies—Swedish and Polish—were operating on Russian soil: the Poles concentrated on taking Smolensk, while the Swedes forced Vasilii to cede Korela and Livonia as compensation for their help. After some initial tensions, Moscow and Sweden soon enjoyed military success, overrunning the camp at Tushino at the end of 1609; a few months later the Swedish troops marched into Moscow. As most of the Poles retreated toward Smolensk, the second False Dmitrii settled down in Kaluga, but was slain by his own supporters at the end of 1610.
Nevertheless, Vasilii’s hold on power steadily deteriorated, partly because of suspicions that the jealous tsar was responsible for the mysterious death of a popular commander, M. V. Skopin-Shuiskii. Vasilii’s forces, moreover, had failed to liberate Smolensk from Polish control.
As Vasilii’s power waned, in February 1610 his foes struck a deal with the king of Poland: his son Władysław, successor to the Polish throne, would become tsar on condition that he promise to uphold Orthodoxy and to allow the election of a monarch in accordance with Polish customs. He also had to guarantee current landholding relations and official ranks (chiny), the legislative power of the boyar duma and an imperial council (analogues to the Sejm and Senate), and the preservation of peasant dependence. The agreement also provided for a military alliance between the two states. Thus, for the first time in Russian history, élites set terms for accession to the throne. These conditions were reaffirmed in a new agreement on 17 August 1610, with the added proviso that the future tsar convert to Orthodoxy.
A month earlier, the conspirators (who evidently included Filaret) had already deposed Vasilii and forced him to take monastic vows. The Polish negotiator was hetman S. Żótkiewski, who had conquered Moscow and, as commander of the Polish-Lithuanian occupation, held power in the capital. The agreement provided for a council of seven boyars (legitimized by an ad hoc council of the realm), which, with a changing composition, sought to govern during the interregnum. The boyars hoped to use the Polish tsar to overcome the internal strife, but their attempt would ultimately founder on the lesser nobility’s fear of a boyar oligarchy.
That Muscovy obtained neither a Polish tsar nor a limited monarchy in 1610 was due to a surprising turn of events in Smolensk. There the Polish king received a ‘great legation’ from Moscow (with over 1,200 persons) to discuss the details of succession. Despite the mediation of Żótkiewski, the negotiations broke down as the two parties refused to compromise—chiefly over the demand by Russians (especially patriarch Germogen) that the future tsar convert to Orthodoxy, and over the Polish insistence that Moscow cede Smolensk. Zygmunt now announced that he himself wished to become tsar, which effectively eliminated any possibility of conversion to Orthodoxy. The tensions were soon apparent in Moscow, where the high-handed behaviour of the Poles and their Russian supporters triggered a popular uprising in February-March 1611. The leader of resistance was Patriarch Germogen, who issued impassioned proclamations against the Poles before finally being interned. In April the king had members of the ‘great legation’ (including Metropolitan Filaret and the former Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii) deported to Poland and put on exhibition before the Sejm.
All this culminated in a great national uprising led by towns on the Volga. The provinces were still aflame with unrest and disorder: by mid-1611 eight pretenders claimed to be the ‘true’ Tsarevich Dmitrii; countless bands of peasants and Cossacks, purporting to fight for ‘freedom’, engulfed the land in conflict and plunder; Swedes tightened their hold on Novgorod (intended as a pawn to press other territorial demands) and ruled the entire north; and the Tatars invaded from the south.
In response Nizhnii Novgorod and Vologda raised the ‘second levy’, which united with the former supporters of the second False Dmitrii and advanced on Moscow. The army was led by P. Liapunov, the district governor (voevoda) of Riazan; like other district governors, he was originally a military commander, but had since become head of civil administration in his district. The supreme council of his army functioned as a government (for example, assessing taxes), but avoided any promise of freedom for fugitive peasants once the strife had ended. Despite written agreements, Liapunov’s forces suffered from profound internal conflict, especially between peasants and petty nobles; Liapunov himself was murdered in the summer of 1611, marking an end to the ‘second contingent’. The ‘Council of Seven Boyars’ in Moscow, meanwhile, continued to hope for the arrival of Władysław.
The ‘third levy’, though beset with internal differences, nevertheless liberated Moscow in October 1612. This army had been created a year earlier by K. Minin, the elected head of Nizhnii Novgorod, who persuaded the population to endorse a special tax amount (up to 30 per cent of their property). Many nobles joined this army, including its commander—Prince Dmitrii Pozharskii, who established headquarters in Iaroslavl. Minin and Pozharskii later became national heroes, memorialized to this day in a monument on Red Square. But the critical factor in their victory was the decision of Cossacks under Prince Trubetskoi to join their side in the midst of the battle.
The liberation of Moscow did not mean an end to the turbulent ‘Time of Troubles’: for years to come, large parts of the realm remained under Swedish and Polish occupation. But it was at least possible to elect a new tsar in 1613, a date traditionally accepted as the end to the Time of Troubles. Still, the ramifications of this era were momentous and enduring, especially the large-scale intrusion of the West, which generated much commentary—and controversy—among writers such as Ivan Timofeev, Avramii Palitsyn, Semen Shakhovskoi, and Ivan Khvorostinin. And, despite the election of a new tsar, society became more self-conscious as it entered upon decades of tumult in the ‘rebellious century’.
New Beginnings: The First Romanov (1613–1645)
In 1613 Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov—Tsar Michael in popular literature—was only one of several candidates for the throne of Muscovy. Although not yet even 17 years of age, he had already been considered for this position three years earlier. But circumstances were now more complex: in contrast to Boris’s election in 1598, this time some proposed to summon a foreigner—either Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg or the Swedish prince, Karl Phillip.
Because of the patriotic mood after the expulsion of Poles from the Kremlin, however, there was nevertheless a strong preference to choose a Russian candidate. Rivalry among candidates eventually eliminated all but one—the young Romanov, widely regarded as a surrogate for his father Filaret, still in Polish detention; the latter’s martyr-like captivity, in fact, contributed to his son’s election. Michael came from a relatively young boyar family, which first gained prominence when it provided the first wife of Ivan the Terrible. But the old boyar clans, given to bickering among themselves, savoured this humble background—and Michael’s youth, which promised to make him easier to manipulate. The electoral assembly of 700 delegates was initially unable to reach a consensus, but on 21 February 1613 finally acceded to vigorous agitation from nearby towns that Michael be chosen as the compromise candidate. In the aftermath of the Time of Troubles, when the throne had changed hands so frequently, few could have foreseen that this dynasty would remain pure-blooded until 1762 and, with the infusion of some outside (mainly German) elements, retain the throne until 1917.
In contrast to Shuiskii, Michael made no concessions to obtain the throne. Indeed, the participants themselves wanted to restore the autocracy ‘of the good old days’ that had ensured order and stability. In foreign policy, restoration meant expulsion of foreign foes; in domestic policy, it meant resolving the conflict between landholders and peasants, which had disintegrated into virtual chaos. Despite this call for restoration, the election did not bring an end either to popular unrest or to the intrusion of Western culture.
The re-establishment of autocracy naturally did not mean that Michael—above all, given his youth—ruled alone. Initially, he was under the influence of powerful favourites from the Mstislavskii and Saltykov clans. After 1619, when peace with Poland brought an exchange of prisoners (including Filaret), the young tsar fell under the dominance of his father, who became a virtual co-ruler and even bore the tsarist title of ‘Great Sovereign’: in Muscovy it was simply inconceivable that a father might occupy a lower rank than his son. This paternal dominance also corresponded to their personalities, Filaret being energetic, his son meek and pious.
Foreign Policy and War
The accomplishments before Filaret’s return, however, should not be underestimated. The primary task was to equip an army to fight the Swedes and Poles; because of the economic destruction and havoc wrought by marauding bands of peasants and Cossacks, however, it proved extremely difficult to raise the requisite funds. To obtain the needed levies, Michael summoned several ‘councils of the realm’ (sobory); although these could not issue binding resolutions (contrary to what historians once assumed), they provided the government with information about economic conditions in the provinces. The government used this information to levy special taxes—normally 5 per cent, sometimes up to 10 per cent, of the property value and the business turnover. In addition, it forced the richest merchants of the realm, the Stroganovs of Novgorod, to make contributions and loans. By 1618 the government had raised seven special levies to cut a budget deficit that, in 1616, had run to over 340,000 roubles.
Moscow finally concluded peace with its two adversaries. After Vasilii had been deposed, the Swedes remained ensconced in Novgorod and Ingermanland—perhaps with the intent of preventing an alliance between Muscovy and Poland. But Gustavus Adolphus decided to make peace, partly because the resistance of Novgorodians was so intense, partly because he needed Moscow as an ally in an impending conflict that would mushroom into the Thirty Years War. On 25 February 1617 the two sides signed the Treaty of Stolbovo, on terms favourable to Moscow: although the latter had to pay 20,000 silver roubles and to cede Ingermanland and eastern Karelia, in exchange it obtained the return of Novgorod and Swedish recognition of the tsarist title. Nevertheless, the agreement reaffirmed Swedish predominance on the Baltic Sea for another century.
Relations with Poland-Lithuania were more difficult. The Poles declined to recognize Michael; the Russians naturally refused to accept Władysław as tsar. After mediation efforts collapsed, the Poles launched a new military offensive in 1617 and were able to attack the city of Moscow in the autumn of 1618. That same year, however, the two sides agreed to an armistice of fourteen and a half years: both were exhausted from the conflict, the Polish Sejm (confronted with the outbreak of the Thirty Years War) denied more funds, and Moscow fervently wanted an exchange of prisoners. The armistice, signed in the village of Deulino (north of Moscow), compelled Moscow to renounce its claim to west Russian areas (Severia, Chernigov, and—with a heavy heart—Smolensk). The question of Smolensk, together with the Poles’ refusal to renounce their claim to the throne of Moscow, carried the seeds of future conflict.
Internal Affairs and the Smolensk War
After his return in 1619, Filaret became the patriarch of Moscow (which, for the sake of propriety, was formally bestowed by the patriarch of Jerusalem). The world now seemed to be in order, even in the relations between father and son. Nevertheless, the government faced serious problems; in addition to seeking vengeance on Poland, Filaret had to address the question of tax reform. To finance the Streltsy (a semi-regular military unit of musketeers created to defend the court and borders), in 1614 the government already imposed some new special levies—‘Streltsy money’ from townspeople and ‘Streltsy grain’ from peasants. The government also increased the ‘postal money’, the largest regular tax. It assessed these levies on the basis of a land tax unit (sokha), which took soil quality into account, but was none the less so high that many commoners preferred to abandon their community and become indentured bondsmen of a secular lord, a monastery, or tax-free town. Because of the principle of collective responsibility (krugovaia poruka), those who remained behind had to assume the obligations of the bondsmen and thus pay even higher taxes. Ever since 1584 the government had periodically prohibited this form of tax evasion, but with scant effect. Filaret also failed to achieve a satisfactory solution, partly because he himself was an interested party: the Patriarchate owned approximately a thousand plots of land in Moscow, which were duly exempted from the ban. In effect, the government only forbade indentureship, not the acceptance of tax evaders. More successful in the long run was the gradual conversion of the tax base from land to household, a process that commenced in the 1620s but only reached completion in 1679.
Filaret’s policy towards towns was still less successful. The basic problem was that, without a strong middle class, the towns did not constitute juridical entities. Filaret moved the rich merchants to Moscow to serve in central administrative offices (prikazy), but that policy only emptied towns at the provincial level. Moreover, the government put foreign policy over the interests of indigenous merchants: foreigners, especially British, engaged in retail trade throughout Muscovy, enjoyed exemption from most customs duties, and even had fishing rights in the White Sea. These privileges were the target of a collective petition from thirty-one Russian merchants in 1627—the first of numerous such complaints in the next decades. The townsmen of Moscow also complained of other burdens, such as billeting, in a collective petition of 1629.
In 1621–2 Filaret considered a new attempt to reconquer Smolensk and compel the Poles to recognize the Romanov dynasty. On the basis of information from a council of the realm, however, he realized that the country was simply unprepared for such an undertaking. But the Thirty Years War soon afforded an opportunity for vengeance; as an important ally of Sweden, Moscow was later named in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Although Moscow did not directly participate in the conflict, from 1628 it delivered commodities such as grain (which, as a state monopoly, yielded a huge profit) and, more important, in 1632–4 went to war with Poland, which was forced to divert forces to the east. Meanwhile, with Swedish aid, the Russians built their military force into a standing army with approximately 66,000 soldiers (the so-called ‘Troops of the New Order’), which included approximately 2,500 Western officers under the Scottish colonel, Alexander Leslie. Nevertheless, Filaret, who died in 1633 in the midst of the war, had overestimated Moscow’s power: the campaign proceeded so badly that the commander-inchief, M. B. Shein, in the wake of mass desertion by his soldiers (which was hardly unusual at the time) and the futile siege of Smolensk, was found guilty of treason and executed. The two sides agreed to a new peace at Polianovka in 1634. Wladystaw did renounce his claim to the tsarist throne, but in exchange Moscow had to pay 20,000 roubles and to return all the areas that it had occupied.
The Final Years
Nevertheless, the war drew Muscovy even closer to the West. Besides the Troops of the New Order (temporarily disbanded for lack of funds), the most tangible sign of Europeanization was the influx of Western merchants and entrepreneurs. Dominance shifted from the English to the Dutch: Andries Winius obtained monopoly rights to construct ironworks in the towns of Tula and Serpukhov (the first blast furnace began operations in 1637); the Walloon Coyet established the first glass plant in the environs of Moscow. The driving impulse, as in other spheres, was the demand for military armaments.
For the time being, the Orthodox Church was able to contain Western influence in cultural matters. The main spiritual influence, instead, came from Ukraine—for example, a proposal in 1640 by the metropolitan of Kiev, Petr Mohyla, to establish an ecclesiastical academy in Moscow, and the import of books with the ‘Lithuanian imprint’ (which, because of their Roman Catholic content, were prohibited). The Church also denounced as ‘heresy’ the correction of church books, which had commenced in 1618 (in conjunction with the development of printing) and sought to compare Russian liturgical texts with the Greek originals.
The religious tensions were also accompanied by increasing social conflict. In 1637 the tsar’s service people filed their first collective petition and later persuaded him to reduce their service obligations by half. But as yet the government spurned their other demands—for a decentralization of the judicial system (to avoid expensive trials, corruption, and procrastination in Moscow) and for the total abolition of a statute of limitations on the return of runaway peasants. Michael did, however, extend the statute of limitations for the recovery of fugitives (from five to nine years). After another petition in 1641, he increased the term to ten years for the general fugitives and fifteen years for peasants who had been forcibly seized by other landowners.
In foreign affairs too the tsar had to make a difficult decision. In 1637 the Don Cossacks of Muscovy attacked the Turkish fortress of Azov and for four long years held out against the Ottoman army and fleet. A council of the realm in 1642, however, expressed deep reservations, and the tsar persuaded the Cossacks to abandon the fortress. War with Turkey would have certainly entailed immense losses, and the Sultan had already threatened to exterminate the entire Orthodox population of his empire. Similarly, Moscow continued to spurn the centuries-old urging of the West for a crusade against the Ottoman Empire.
By contrast, Muscovy’s eastward expansion proved far more successful. After the first penetration into Siberia in the late sixteenth century, the government had sanctioned—sometimes ex post facto—the conquests of Cossack units acting on their own initiative: they thus founded Eniseisk in 1619 and Iakutsk in 1632, and reached the Pacific at the Sea of Okhotsk in 1639. To the south Moscow established timid contacts with China, sending its first envoy to Peking in 1619.
In general, the first Romanov tsar achieved a certain consolidation, but could not quell mounting social and spiritual ferment that would soon explode into major upheavals during the next reign.
The End of an Era: Tsar Alexis (1645–1676)
The New Tsar
The new tsar—father of Peter the Great—embodied the cultural confrontation of the seventeenth century: devotion to old Russian tradition versus attraction to the achievements of West European civilization. Tsar Alexis (Aleksei Mikhailovich) overcame this cultural conflict, which proved profoundly disturbing in domestic life, through success in foreign affairs. His eventful reign was marked by a fierce battle between the old and the new, which indeed was reflected in the personality of the tsar himself. On the one hand, he took Ivan the Terrible as the ideal model and understood old Russian autocracy as rulership that was simultaneously gentle and harsh; on the other hand, he was the first tsar to sign laws on his own authority, to permit realistic portraits of his person, and to receive and write personal letters in the real meaning of the word. Throughout his lifetime he sought friendships—for example, with Patriarch Nikon and the head of the foreign office, A. L. Ordin-Nashchokin, whose human individuality (like that of the tsar) for the first time is reflected in contemporary sources. Indeed, the pre-revolutionary historian Platonov suggested that the individual personality made its first appearance in old Russia.
The Moscow Uprising of 1648
The young tsar’s first friend, brother-in-law, and former teacher, was B. I. Morozov. One of many ‘powerful magnates’ (sil′ nye liudi), Morozov amassed enormous wealth by taking personal control of the most important and lucrative central offices (prikazy). By the time of his death, Morozov owned 9,100 peasant households (55,000 peasants) in nineteen districts—along with numerous manufactories, mills, and illicit distilleries. Tsar Alexis, following an order from his father, also empowered Morozov to investigate government administration and to conduct reforms to reduce social tensions. Morozov could in fact boast of certain achievements, but some of his measures aroused popular discontent. Thus, after being forced to cancel a new salt tax, in 1648 he attempted to collect arrears from the preceding two years—in effect tripling the tax burden for 1648.
This measure ignited a major uprising in June 1648, which together with the fires that swept through Moscow, cost approximately two thousand lives. Crowds murdered high-ranking, corrupt officials; with tears in his eyes, the tsar could do nothing more for Morozov than secure Morozov’s banishment. By the end of July the rebellion generated more than seventy petitions that led to some concrete changes, including the cancellation of tax arrears as well as monetary levies for the tsar’s bodyguards, the Streltsy. The latter, in fact, felt threatened by the new foreign troops and tended to support the rebels. Morozov did return in late October, but was never again to play a major role. The government faced the fearful spectre of a new Time of Troubles, especially when nobles and merchants aggressively pressed demands, sometimes even filing joint petitions. This solidarity, and the fact that Moscow itself was practically in rebel hands, forced the government in June 1648 to accede to an ultimatum that it convoke a council of the realm. The council, which convened that autumn, elected to compile a new law code (the Ulozhenie), which was promulgated on 29 January 1649 to replace the law code (sudebnik) of 1550.
At least 8.5 per cent of the 967 articles in this law code derived from initiatives of the population. It also drew upon earlier legislation and the Lithuanian Statute (from which came the first formal defence of the tsar and court). In general, it conceded many of the demands that had been raised during the preceding decades. The most famous was the establishment of serfdom, which at first only bound the peasant to the soil (i.e. restricted their mobility). The preparations for enserfment had been laid by earlier decrees extending the time-limit for the search and return of fugitive peasants; as early as February 1646, the government indicated its intention to issue a total ban on peasant movement. The law code thereby satisfied the nobility’s demand to retrieve runaways without any time-limit. This initial bondage to the soil would evolve into a far more comprehensive ‘serfdom’ in the eighteenth century. Significantly, the prohibition on mobility also applied to the towns: anyone who owed taxes could not change their residence. The law code also forbade boyars to accept taxpayers as ‘bondsmen’ (kholopy); it also attacked the special interests of the Church by forbidding the clergy to accept landed estates and by reducing the competence of ecclesiastical courts. At the same time, however, the government still repulsed demands to decentralize the judicial system and to expand locally elected government.
Hence the victory of the petty nobility and townspeople did not mean a weakening of autocracy. On the contrary the uprising impelled the tsar to take measures that had been long deferred and that served primarily to strengthen the bonds between autocracy and the lower nobility.
The law code itself did not address the long-standing grievances of the Russian merchants against foreign competition. But the government found a pretext to expel foreigners on 1 June 1649, when Alexis expressed his outrage over the execution of Charles I and banished the English from domestic trade in Muscovy. In 1654 he extended the prohibition to merchants from Holland and Hamburg. In general, the law code (published in a press run of 2,400 copies and distributed to all officials as the first law code) did more to bolster the old order than to build a new one. It was, consequently, already outdated by the time of Peter the Great. Remarkably enough, however, it officially remained in force until 1 January 1835, as Alexis’s successors found themselves unable to compile a new code or even to issue a revised edition.
Continuing Instability
After the bitter experience of 1648, the tsar never again let the initiative slip from his grasp during subsequent urban uprisings. New disorders erupted three years later in Novgorod and Pskov; located on the western border, the two cities had always held a special status because of their commercial relations and were especially opposed to the competition of Western merchants. The discontent intensified because of the government’s pro-Swedish policies, which, in accordance with the Peace of Stolbovo of 1617, required Muscovy to deliver grain to Sweden; that, however, caused higher grain prices at home and produced particular hardship for a grain-importing area like Pskov. The result was an uprising that erupted first in Pskov and soon spread to Novgorod. After Alexis’s forces occupied the latter city and carried out several executions, the people of Pskov peacefully surrendered, bringing the rebellion to an end.
In 1662 the tsar faced far greater peril during the ‘coppercoin uprising’ in Moscow. The unrest itself was due to the war begun in 1654 against Poland-Lithuania: to finance the war, the government not only assessed special taxes and loans, but also minted copper coins that the people deemed to be worthless. Meanwhile, the owners of copper kitchenware bribed the mint masters to make coins from their copper pots; when the guilty officials were given only a light punishment, popular anger only intensified. The copper minting also caused inflation: whereas one copper rouble was equal to one silver rouble in 1658, this ratio rose to four to one by 1661, and then jumped to fifteen to one two years later. Compounded by other hardships, popular discontent in the summer of 1662 led to the formation of mobs, which demanded to speak to the tsar himself and moved en masse towards his summer residence in Kolomenskoe, south of Moscow. After Alexis promised to investigate the matter, the throng headed back towards Moscow. On the way, however, they came upon other rebels and decided to return to Kolomenskoe, which once again found itself in peril. This time the tsar ordered his Streltsy to disperse the crowd (now some nine thousand strong) with force; in the aftermath sixty-three rebels were executed, and many others sent into exile.
The ‘rebellious century’ was not limited to urban revolts: in 1670–1 peasants joined the greatest rebellion of the seventeenth century—a mass insurrection that began on the periphery under the leadership of Stepan (‘Stenka’) Razin. The rebellion sprang from the ranks of the Don Cossacks, who lived south of Muscovy’s ever-expanding border and had their own autonomous military order (military council as well as the election of the ataman as chief and other officials). Through the influx of fugitive peasants, bondsmen, and petty townsmen, the Cossacks had multiplied to the point where they had their own ‘proletariat’—some ten to twenty thousand Cossacks who could no longer support themselves by tilling the land. Their plight was aggravated by Moscow’s decision to reduce its paid ‘service Cossacks’ to a mere 1,000 persons. War with Poland in 1654–67 increased the flight of people to the untamed southern steppes (dikoe pole). Although the government was not unhappy to see the strengthening of barriers against the Crimean Tatars, it promulgated a statute of limitations on fugitives and ordered the forcible return of 10,000 fugitives. Amidst this unrest, in 1667 Stepan Razin summoned Cossacks to join a traditional campaign of plunder and led some 2,000 Cossacks to the lower Volga, ultimately reaching the Persian coast in 1668–9. Over the next two years, however, the expedition turned into a popular rebellion against landowners and state authorities. With some 20,000 supporters, Razin prepared to strike at Moscow itself. Although he did establish a Cossack regime in Astrakhan and issued radical promises to divide all property equally, he had no coherent political programme and explicitly declared autocracy inviolable. In Simbirsk his forces attracted peasants, some non-Russian peoples, and petty townsmen and service people from the middle Volga. In the spring of 1671, however, Razin was betrayed by his own Cossack superiors: handed over to tsarist authorities, he was later executed in Moscow.
Cossacks and Borderland Politics
Cossacks, certainly those on the Dnieper, exerted a major influence on Alexis’s foreign policy. Indeed, together with the Moscow uprising, their actions made 1648 a watershed in Russian history: under the leadership of hetman Bohdan Khmelnitskii, they rebelled against their Polish-Lithuanian authorities. They had several main grievances: the oppression of Ukrainian peasants by Polish magnates and their Jewish stewards, discrimination against the Orthodox Church by Roman Catholicism, and a reduction in Cossack registration (i.e. the number of Cossacks in the paid service of the Polish king). Khmelnitskii hoped to achieve his goal—formation of a separate Cossack republic of nobles—with the aid of the Moscow tsar. The latter, while sympathetic to the idea of protecting his Orthodox brethren, was nevertheless exceedingly cautious: support for the Cossacks clearly meant war with Poland-Lithuania. Although Moscow yearned to settle old scores (dating back to its defeat in 1634 and above all the forfeiture of Smolensk), as yet it did not feel strong enough for such an undertaking. It was the Orthodox Church, particularly after Nikon’s elevation to the Patriarchate in mid-1652, that induced Moscow to support the Cossacks in February 1653.
For Moscow, of course, this co-operation was conceivable only if it entailed Cossack recognition of the tsar’s sovereignty, and Khmelnitskii duly complied, taking a unilateral vow of loyalty in Pereiaslavl on 8 January 1654. Russian and Soviet historians subsequently portrayed this oath as a merger of Ukraine with Muscovy, even a ‘reunification’ of Muscovy with Kiev Rus. By contrast, Ukrainian historiography depicts this oath as the beginning of an independent ‘hetman state’, which lasted until the time of Catherine the Great. In reality however, the oath merely signified nominal subordination and guaranteed the hetman and his followers a social and legal order with a considerable autonomy, even in foreign affairs (except for relations with Poland and the Ottomans). Although Alexis henceforth proclaimed himself ‘Autocrat of All Great and Little Rus’, incorporation of Ukraine into the Russian Empire did not actually come until the eighteenth century.
The anticipated war, which commenced immediately in 1654 and lasted until 1667, was waged in western Russia. The very first year Moscow reconquered the long-sought Smolensk, and the next year its forces captured Minsk and Vilna as well. For Moscow, the only dark cloud was the fact that their quick victories had tempted the Swedes to intervene and attempt to seize the Polish ports in the Baltic. In 1656 Moscow opened hostilities against Sweden and by the following year had conquered most of Livonia. But Reval (Tallin) and Riga withstood the Russian siege; confronted with new military hostilities with Poland, Moscow concluded the Peace of Cardis with Sweden in 1661 on the basis of status quo ante bellum. In 1667 Moscow and Poland agreed to the armistice of Andrusovo, with a compromise partition of Ukraine: Poland renounced its west Russian gains of 1618, Moscow its claims to right-bank Ukraine (i.e. west of the Dnieper), with the exception of Kiev. The armistice was of considerable significance: it marked the beginning of the end for Poland’s status as a great power in Eastern Europe but also brought an epoch-making reversal in Moscow’s relationship to the Turks.
Initially, the driving force behind foreign policy was Ordin-Nashchokin, the Western-oriented ‘foreign minister’. As the district governor (voevoda) of Pskov in the first half of the 1660s he had excelled in reducing social tensions, and he was also responsible for the ‘New Commercial Statute’ (1667), which strengthened the merchant class on the basis of mercantilistic ideas. His Western orientation contributed significantly to the Europeanization of Russia, which now became still more pronounced. In 1671 he was succeeded as head of the foreign chancellery by A. S. Matveev, who had married a Scottish woman (Lady Hamilton) and who was still more open-minded about the West. In contrast to Ordin-Nashchokin, who was interested chiefly in the Baltic Sea, Matveev was far more concerned about the southern border. In 1672, in the wake of Andrusovo, Moscow reversed a centuries-old tendency and now urged the West to support Poland against the Turks. The reason for this shift was simple: Moscow itself now shared a common border with the Ottoman Empire.
Western Influence and Church Schism
Acquisition of left-bank Ukraine was important for yet another reason: it brought an influx of learned men, and their new ideas, from that region. One was F. M. Rtishchev, who introduced polyphonic music, founded the first poorhouse and first hospital, and brought Ukrainian educational influence to Moscow (with the establishment of a school at Andreev Monastery). For the first time the state began to take up social tasks, in effect embarking on the path of Western absolutism. Similarly, it also began to require more education of those in civil service, created state economic monopolies, and established a ‘Secret Chancellery’ (originally just the tsar’s private chancellery, but after 1663 a kind of economic administration that foreigners often regarded as a supervisory or police organ). Beginning in 1649 it refurbished its ‘troops of the new order’ and in 1668 even attempted to construct the first naval fleet (its five ships, however, being torched during the Razin rebellion in Astrakhan).
Alexis also behaved differently, especially after his marriage in 1671 to a woman who was more open-minded about the West. In 1672 the tsar and his family attended the first theatrical performance in Russia: the tragicomedy Ahasuerus and Esther, composed by the Lutheran pastor Johann Gottfried Grigorii. The play, which lasted nine (!) hours and was staged at the family’s summer residence in Preobrazhenskoe, marked the emergence of a ‘court theatre’; the following year it staged the ballet Orpheus und Eurydice by Heinrich Schütz. And table music also became common at the court.
The Orthodox Church opposed the penetration of Western culture, but with declining effectiveness. However, its will did initially prevail: in 1652, for example, foreigners were forcibly resettled from Moscow to its environs—the North Europeans (‘Germans’) to the so-called ‘new German suburb’ (novaia nemetskaia sloboda) and the Poles to special districts. Subsequently, however, the influence of the Church steadily declined. One reason was the establishment of the ‘Monastery Chancellery’ in 1649, a secular body responsible for judicial matters involving both lay and ecclesiastical parties. Its creation was a distant analogue to the ‘Church Regulatory Charters’ in the West. Two other critical factors in the Church’s decline were the ‘Nikon affair’ and the schism.
In the first half of the seventeenth century the Church had already split into opposing camps of reformers and conservatives, their position partly traceable to Ukrainian influences, but also to the practical problem of correcting liturgical books. With respect to the latter, the central question was whether to standardize texts on the basis of Greek originals presumed to be uncorrupted (the opinion of Patriarch Iosif), or concentrate on internal spiritual life (as demanded by a group of clergy under Vonifatev, the father-confessor of Tsar Alexis). The latter’s circle of ‘Friends of God’ (subsequently known as the ‘Zealots of Piety’ in the literature) included the future Patriarch Nikon, who served as metropolitan of Novgorod for three years before his elevation to the patriarchate in 1652. As patriarch he expanded the correction of texts into a fundamental reform of church ritual in 1653; the primary goal was to reverse the separate development of Russian Orthodoxy that had been in progress ever since the fall of Constantinople in the mid-fifteenth century. Moreover, by re-establishing ritual unity with the Kiev metropolitanate, such reform could also reinforce the political union with Ukraine.
These reforms, however, evoked fierce opposition from his former friends in the Zealots of Piety. Among them was the cathedral archpriest, Avvakum Petrovich, who became Nikon’s intransigent adversary and leader of the ‘old ritualists’ or ‘old believers’—that is, those who remained loyal to the old rites and defended the national religious idea against ‘re-Hellenization’. Nikon, however, enjoyed the support and friendship of the tsar; by 1653 Avvakum and his friends were already imprisoned, and two years later Avvakum himself was banished into exile, where he wrote his autobiography, the first in Russian history and justly famous for its literary and stylistic qualities. In 1667 a church council upheld Nikon’s reforms and excommunicated its opponents, thereby formalizing the schism (raskol) in the Church.
Naturally, the causes of the schism went much deeper than a blind attachment to the old rites. Rather, the Old Belief represented a much broader social movement—a protest against enserfment, the centralizing activities of the government, and the intrusion of Western innovations. It also acquired apocalyptical expectations (especially in the north) and, after martyrdom of Bishop Pavel of Kolomna in 1657, claimed many more victims, Avvakum himself being burnt at the stake in 1682. The Old Believers also established a powerful centre at the Solovetskii Monastery on the White Sea, where the resistance of some 500 monks and fugitives from the Razin rebellion grew into an outright uprising. With a heavy heart Tsar Alexis used force to suppress the rebellion; the monastery, however, fiercely resisted and was finally taken only through betrayal.
The council of 1667 recognized the Nikonian reforms as valid, but also took measures against Nikon himself. At issue was his conception of the patriarch’s power: this peasant’s son stubbornly insisted that the tsar be subordinate to the patriarch—i.e. that they did not constitute a diarchy, the model that prevailed under Filaret and Michael. The tsar, favourably inclined towards Nikon, at first acquiesced and conferred the title ‘Great Sovereign’ on the patriarch in 1654, despite the absence of kinship (in contrast to Filaret’s case). But Nikon later far exceeded the Byzantine conception of a ‘symphony’ between the secular and sacred domains and exploited the fact that the status of the tsar in the Russian Church had never been precisely formulated. Alexis cautiously expressed a different opinion in 1657–8, and it soon came to a personal confrontation between the two men. Nikon withdrew, but refused to resign from his office; according to canon law, only the Eastern patriarchs could order his removal. At the end of 1666 the tsar convened such a council, but with only the less important patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria personally present. Not surprisingly, the latter—who were materially dependent upon Russian support—found Nikon guilty and even recommended expanding the tsar’s power in the Church. After a few Russian bishops protested, the council settled on a compromise that ascribed worldly matters to the tsar, spiritual matters to the patriarch. Although this formula nominally preserved the status of the Church, it could not conceal the fact that the Church emerged from the schism and the Nikon affair deeply weakened. Thus the devastation that the Time of Troubles had dealt to tradition (starina) now extended to the Church, hitherto the sole spiritual power and a second pillar of autocracy. The reign of Alexis, so rich in rebellion, came to an end; the way was now free for a breakthrough to the modern era.
The New Tsar
The new tsar—father of Peter the Great—embodied the cultural confrontation of the seventeenth century: devotion to old Russian tradition versus attraction to the achievements of West European civilization. Tsar Alexis (Aleksei Mikhailovich) overcame this cultural conflict, which proved profoundly disturbing in domestic life, through success in foreign affairs. His eventful reign was marked by a fierce battle between the old and the new, which indeed was reflected in the personality of the tsar himself. On the one hand, he took Ivan the Terrible as the ideal model and understood old Russian autocracy as rulership that was simultaneously gentle and harsh; on the other hand, he was the first tsar to sign laws on his own authority, to permit realistic portraits of his person, and to receive and write personal letters in the real meaning of the word. Throughout his lifetime he sought friendships—for example, with Patriarch Nikon and the head of the foreign office, A. L. Ordin-Nashchokin, whose human individuality (like that of the tsar) for the first time is reflected in contemporary sources. Indeed, the pre-revolutionary historian Platonov suggested that the individual personality made its first appearance in old Russia.
The Moscow Uprising of 1648
The young tsar’s first friend, brother-in-law, and former teacher, was B. I. Morozov. One of many ‘powerful magnates’ (sil′ nye liudi), Morozov amassed enormous wealth by taking personal control of the most important and lucrative central offices (prikazy). By the time of his death, Morozov owned 9,100 peasant households (55,000 peasants) in nineteen districts—along with numerous manufactories, mills, and illicit distilleries. Tsar Alexis, following an order from his father, also empowered Morozov to investigate government administration and to conduct reforms to reduce social tensions. Morozov could in fact boast of certain achievements, but some of his measures aroused popular discontent. Thus, after being forced to cancel a new salt tax, in 1648 he attempted to collect arrears from the preceding two years—in effect tripling the tax burden for 1648.
This measure ignited a major uprising in June 1648, which together with the fires that swept through Moscow, cost approximately two thousand lives. Crowds murdered high-ranking, corrupt officials; with tears in his eyes, the tsar could do nothing more for Morozov than secure Morozov’s banishment. By the end of July the rebellion generated more than seventy petitions that led to some concrete changes, including the cancellation of tax arrears as well as monetary levies for the tsar’s bodyguards, the Streltsy. The latter, in fact, felt threatened by the new foreign troops and tended to support the rebels. Morozov did return in late October, but was never again to play a major role. The government faced the fearful spectre of a new Time of Troubles, especially when nobles and merchants aggressively pressed demands, sometimes even filing joint petitions. This solidarity, and the fact that Moscow itself was practically in rebel hands, forced the government in June 1648 to accede to an ultimatum that it convoke a council of the realm. The council, which convened that autumn, elected to compile a new law code (the Ulozhenie), which was promulgated on 29 January 1649 to replace the law code (sudebnik) of 1550.
At least 8.5 per cent of the 967 articles in this law code derived from initiatives of the population. It also drew upon earlier legislation and the Lithuanian Statute (from which came the first formal defence of the tsar and court). In general, it conceded many of the demands that had been raised during the preceding decades. The most famous was the establishment of serfdom, which at first only bound the peasant to the soil (i.e. restricted their mobility). The preparations for enserfment had been laid by earlier decrees extending the time-limit for the search and return of fugitive peasants; as early as February 1646, the government indicated its intention to issue a total ban on peasant movement. The law code thereby satisfied the nobility’s demand to retrieve runaways without any time-limit. This initial bondage to the soil would evolve into a far more comprehensive ‘serfdom’ in the eighteenth century. Significantly, the prohibition on mobility also applied to the towns: anyone who owed taxes could not change their residence. The law code also forbade boyars to accept taxpayers as ‘bondsmen’ (kholopy); it also attacked the special interests of the Church by forbidding the clergy to accept landed estates and by reducing the competence of ecclesiastical courts. At the same time, however, the government still repulsed demands to decentralize the judicial system and to expand locally elected government.
Hence the victory of the petty nobility and townspeople did not mean a weakening of autocracy. On the contrary the uprising impelled the tsar to take measures that had been long deferred and that served primarily to strengthen the bonds between autocracy and the lower nobility.
The law code itself did not address the long-standing grievances of the Russian merchants against foreign competition. But the government found a pretext to expel foreigners on 1 June 1649, when Alexis expressed his outrage over the execution of Charles I and banished the English from domestic trade in Muscovy. In 1654 he extended the prohibition to merchants from Holland and Hamburg. In general, the law code (published in a press run of 2,400 copies and distributed to all officials as the first law code) did more to bolster the old order than to build a new one. It was, consequently, already outdated by the time of Peter the Great. Remarkably enough, however, it officially remained in force until 1 January 1835, as Alexis’s successors found themselves unable to compile a new code or even to issue a revised edition.
Continuing Instability
After the bitter experience of 1648, the tsar never again let the initiative slip from his grasp during subsequent urban uprisings. New disorders erupted three years later in Novgorod and Pskov; located on the western border, the two cities had always held a special status because of their commercial relations and were especially opposed to the competition of Western merchants. The discontent intensified because of the government’s pro-Swedish policies, which, in accordance with the Peace of Stolbovo of 1617, required Muscovy to deliver grain to Sweden; that, however, caused higher grain prices at home and produced particular hardship for a grain-importing area like Pskov. The result was an uprising that erupted first in Pskov and soon spread to Novgorod. After Alexis’s forces occupied the latter city and carried out several executions, the people of Pskov peacefully surrendered, bringing the rebellion to an end.
In 1662 the tsar faced far greater peril during the ‘coppercoin uprising’ in Moscow. The unrest itself was due to the war begun in 1654 against Poland-Lithuania: to finance the war, the government not only assessed special taxes and loans, but also minted copper coins that the people deemed to be worthless. Meanwhile, the owners of copper kitchenware bribed the mint masters to make coins from their copper pots; when the guilty officials were given only a light punishment, popular anger only intensified. The copper minting also caused inflation: whereas one copper rouble was equal to one silver rouble in 1658, this ratio rose to four to one by 1661, and then jumped to fifteen to one two years later. Compounded by other hardships, popular discontent in the summer of 1662 led to the formation of mobs, which demanded to speak to the tsar himself and moved en masse towards his summer residence in Kolomenskoe, south of Moscow. After Alexis promised to investigate the matter, the throng headed back towards Moscow. On the way, however, they came upon other rebels and decided to return to Kolomenskoe, which once again found itself in peril. This time the tsar ordered his Streltsy to disperse the crowd (now some nine thousand strong) with force; in the aftermath sixty-three rebels were executed, and many others sent into exile.
The ‘rebellious century’ was not limited to urban revolts: in 1670–1 peasants joined the greatest rebellion of the seventeenth century—a mass insurrection that began on the periphery under the leadership of Stepan (‘Stenka’) Razin. The rebellion sprang from the ranks of the Don Cossacks, who lived south of Muscovy’s ever-expanding border and had their own autonomous military order (military council as well as the election of the ataman as chief and other officials). Through the influx of fugitive peasants, bondsmen, and petty townsmen, the Cossacks had multiplied to the point where they had their own ‘proletariat’—some ten to twenty thousand Cossacks who could no longer support themselves by tilling the land. Their plight was aggravated by Moscow’s decision to reduce its paid ‘service Cossacks’ to a mere 1,000 persons. War with Poland in 1654–67 increased the flight of people to the untamed southern steppes (dikoe pole). Although the government was not unhappy to see the strengthening of barriers against the Crimean Tatars, it promulgated a statute of limitations on fugitives and ordered the forcible return of 10,000 fugitives. Amidst this unrest, in 1667 Stepan Razin summoned Cossacks to join a traditional campaign of plunder and led some 2,000 Cossacks to the lower Volga, ultimately reaching the Persian coast in 1668–9. Over the next two years, however, the expedition turned into a popular rebellion against landowners and state authorities. With some 20,000 supporters, Razin prepared to strike at Moscow itself. Although he did establish a Cossack regime in Astrakhan and issued radical promises to divide all property equally, he had no coherent political programme and explicitly declared autocracy inviolable. In Simbirsk his forces attracted peasants, some non-Russian peoples, and petty townsmen and service people from the middle Volga. In the spring of 1671, however, Razin was betrayed by his own Cossack superiors: handed over to tsarist authorities, he was later executed in Moscow.
Cossacks and Borderland Politics
Cossacks, certainly those on the Dnieper, exerted a major influence on Alexis’s foreign policy. Indeed, together with the Moscow uprising, their actions made 1648 a watershed in Russian history: under the leadership of hetman Bohdan Khmelnitskii, they rebelled against their Polish-Lithuanian authorities. They had several main grievances: the oppression of Ukrainian peasants by Polish magnates and their Jewish stewards, discrimination against the Orthodox Church by Roman Catholicism, and a reduction in Cossack registration (i.e. the number of Cossacks in the paid service of the Polish king). Khmelnitskii hoped to achieve his goal—formation of a separate Cossack republic of nobles—with the aid of the Moscow tsar. The latter, while sympathetic to the idea of protecting his Orthodox brethren, was nevertheless exceedingly cautious: support for the Cossacks clearly meant war with Poland-Lithuania. Although Moscow yearned to settle old scores (dating back to its defeat in 1634 and above all the forfeiture of Smolensk), as yet it did not feel strong enough for such an undertaking. It was the Orthodox Church, particularly after Nikon’s elevation to the Patriarchate in mid-1652, that induced Moscow to support the Cossacks in February 1653.
For Moscow, of course, this co-operation was conceivable only if it entailed Cossack recognition of the tsar’s sovereignty, and Khmelnitskii duly complied, taking a unilateral vow of loyalty in Pereiaslavl on 8 January 1654. Russian and Soviet historians subsequently portrayed this oath as a merger of Ukraine with Muscovy, even a ‘reunification’ of Muscovy with Kiev Rus. By contrast, Ukrainian historiography depicts this oath as the beginning of an independent ‘hetman state’, which lasted until the time of Catherine the Great. In reality however, the oath merely signified nominal subordination and guaranteed the hetman and his followers a social and legal order with a considerable autonomy, even in foreign affairs (except for relations with Poland and the Ottomans). Although Alexis henceforth proclaimed himself ‘Autocrat of All Great and Little Rus’, incorporation of Ukraine into the Russian Empire did not actually come until the eighteenth century.
The anticipated war, which commenced immediately in 1654 and lasted until 1667, was waged in western Russia. The very first year Moscow reconquered the long-sought Smolensk, and the next year its forces captured Minsk and Vilna as well. For Moscow, the only dark cloud was the fact that their quick victories had tempted the Swedes to intervene and attempt to seize the Polish ports in the Baltic. In 1656 Moscow opened hostilities against Sweden and by the following year had conquered most of Livonia. But Reval (Tallin) and Riga withstood the Russian siege; confronted with new military hostilities with Poland, Moscow concluded the Peace of Cardis with Sweden in 1661 on the basis of status quo ante bellum. In 1667 Moscow and Poland agreed to the armistice of Andrusovo, with a compromise partition of Ukraine: Poland renounced its west Russian gains of 1618, Moscow its claims to right-bank Ukraine (i.e. west of the Dnieper), with the exception of Kiev. The armistice was of considerable significance: it marked the beginning of the end for Poland’s status as a great power in Eastern Europe but also brought an epoch-making reversal in Moscow’s relationship to the Turks.
Initially, the driving force behind foreign policy was Ordin-Nashchokin, the Western-oriented ‘foreign minister’. As the district governor (voevoda) of Pskov in the first half of the 1660s he had excelled in reducing social tensions, and he was also responsible for the ‘New Commercial Statute’ (1667), which strengthened the merchant class on the basis of mercantilistic ideas. His Western orientation contributed significantly to the Europeanization of Russia, which now became still more pronounced. In 1671 he was succeeded as head of the foreign chancellery by A. S. Matveev, who had married a Scottish woman (Lady Hamilton) and who was still more open-minded about the West. In contrast to Ordin-Nashchokin, who was interested chiefly in the Baltic Sea, Matveev was far more concerned about the southern border. In 1672, in the wake of Andrusovo, Moscow reversed a centuries-old tendency and now urged the West to support Poland against the Turks. The reason for this shift was simple: Moscow itself now shared a common border with the Ottoman Empire.
Western Influence and Church Schism
Acquisition of left-bank Ukraine was important for yet another reason: it brought an influx of learned men, and their new ideas, from that region. One was F. M. Rtishchev, who introduced polyphonic music, founded the first poorhouse and first hospital, and brought Ukrainian educational influence to Moscow (with the establishment of a school at Andreev Monastery). For the first time the state began to take up social tasks, in effect embarking on the path of Western absolutism. Similarly, it also began to require more education of those in civil service, created state economic monopolies, and established a ‘Secret Chancellery’ (originally just the tsar’s private chancellery, but after 1663 a kind of economic administration that foreigners often regarded as a supervisory or police organ). Beginning in 1649 it refurbished its ‘troops of the new order’ and in 1668 even attempted to construct the first naval fleet (its five ships, however, being torched during the Razin rebellion in Astrakhan).
Alexis also behaved differently, especially after his marriage in 1671 to a woman who was more open-minded about the West. In 1672 the tsar and his family attended the first theatrical performance in Russia: the tragicomedy Ahasuerus and Esther, composed by the Lutheran pastor Johann Gottfried Grigorii. The play, which lasted nine (!) hours and was staged at the family’s summer residence in Preobrazhenskoe, marked the emergence of a ‘court theatre’; the following year it staged the ballet Orpheus und Eurydice by Heinrich Schütz. And table music also became common at the court.
The Orthodox Church opposed the penetration of Western culture, but with declining effectiveness. However, its will did initially prevail: in 1652, for example, foreigners were forcibly resettled from Moscow to its environs—the North Europeans (‘Germans’) to the so-called ‘new German suburb’ (novaia nemetskaia sloboda) and the Poles to special districts. Subsequently, however, the influence of the Church steadily declined. One reason was the establishment of the ‘Monastery Chancellery’ in 1649, a secular body responsible for judicial matters involving both lay and ecclesiastical parties. Its creation was a distant analogue to the ‘Church Regulatory Charters’ in the West. Two other critical factors in the Church’s decline were the ‘Nikon affair’ and the schism.
In the first half of the seventeenth century the Church had already split into opposing camps of reformers and conservatives, their position partly traceable to Ukrainian influences, but also to the practical problem of correcting liturgical books. With respect to the latter, the central question was whether to standardize texts on the basis of Greek originals presumed to be uncorrupted (the opinion of Patriarch Iosif), or concentrate on internal spiritual life (as demanded by a group of clergy under Vonifatev, the father-confessor of Tsar Alexis). The latter’s circle of ‘Friends of God’ (subsequently known as the ‘Zealots of Piety’ in the literature) included the future Patriarch Nikon, who served as metropolitan of Novgorod for three years before his elevation to the patriarchate in 1652. As patriarch he expanded the correction of texts into a fundamental reform of church ritual in 1653; the primary goal was to reverse the separate development of Russian Orthodoxy that had been in progress ever since the fall of Constantinople in the mid-fifteenth century. Moreover, by re-establishing ritual unity with the Kiev metropolitanate, such reform could also reinforce the political union with Ukraine.
These reforms, however, evoked fierce opposition from his former friends in the Zealots of Piety. Among them was the cathedral archpriest, Avvakum Petrovich, who became Nikon’s intransigent adversary and leader of the ‘old ritualists’ or ‘old believers’—that is, those who remained loyal to the old rites and defended the national religious idea against ‘re-Hellenization’. Nikon, however, enjoyed the support and friendship of the tsar; by 1653 Avvakum and his friends were already imprisoned, and two years later Avvakum himself was banished into exile, where he wrote his autobiography, the first in Russian history and justly famous for its literary and stylistic qualities. In 1667 a church council upheld Nikon’s reforms and excommunicated its opponents, thereby formalizing the schism (raskol) in the Church.
Naturally, the causes of the schism went much deeper than a blind attachment to the old rites. Rather, the Old Belief represented a much broader social movement—a protest against enserfment, the centralizing activities of the government, and the intrusion of Western innovations. It also acquired apocalyptical expectations (especially in the north) and, after martyrdom of Bishop Pavel of Kolomna in 1657, claimed many more victims, Avvakum himself being burnt at the stake in 1682. The Old Believers also established a powerful centre at the Solovetskii Monastery on the White Sea, where the resistance of some 500 monks and fugitives from the Razin rebellion grew into an outright uprising. With a heavy heart Tsar Alexis used force to suppress the rebellion; the monastery, however, fiercely resisted and was finally taken only through betrayal.
The council of 1667 recognized the Nikonian reforms as valid, but also took measures against Nikon himself. At issue was his conception of the patriarch’s power: this peasant’s son stubbornly insisted that the tsar be subordinate to the patriarch—i.e. that they did not constitute a diarchy, the model that prevailed under Filaret and Michael. The tsar, favourably inclined towards Nikon, at first acquiesced and conferred the title ‘Great Sovereign’ on the patriarch in 1654, despite the absence of kinship (in contrast to Filaret’s case). But Nikon later far exceeded the Byzantine conception of a ‘symphony’ between the secular and sacred domains and exploited the fact that the status of the tsar in the Russian Church had never been precisely formulated. Alexis cautiously expressed a different opinion in 1657–8, and it soon came to a personal confrontation between the two men. Nikon withdrew, but refused to resign from his office; according to canon law, only the Eastern patriarchs could order his removal. At the end of 1666 the tsar convened such a council, but with only the less important patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria personally present. Not surprisingly, the latter—who were materially dependent upon Russian support—found Nikon guilty and even recommended expanding the tsar’s power in the Church. After a few Russian bishops protested, the council settled on a compromise that ascribed worldly matters to the tsar, spiritual matters to the patriarch. Although this formula nominally preserved the status of the Church, it could not conceal the fact that the Church emerged from the schism and the Nikon affair deeply weakened. Thus the devastation that the Time of Troubles had dealt to tradition (starina) now extended to the Church, hitherto the sole spiritual power and a second pillar of autocracy. The reign of Alexis, so rich in rebellion, came to an end; the way was now free for a breakthrough to the modern era.
The Dawning of Modernity (1676–1689)
The Reign of Fedor (1676–1682)
Alexis’s eldest son, who had received elaborate preparation to accede to the throne, died in 1670. Thus, when Alexis himself died six years later, the throne passed to his second eldest son, the sickly and bed-ridden Fedor, who was not quite 15 years old and had only another six years to live. Next in line included Ivan, who was mentally retarded, and then the 4-year-old Peter (Petr Alekseevich) from Alexis’s second marriage, a strong and robust child who would go down in history as Peter the Great. Under the circumstances, the head of the foreign chancellery, A. S. Matveev, urged Peter’s mother, Natalia Naryshkina, to speak out in favour of her son. But his suggestion ignited a power struggle between the Naryshkins and the family of Alexis’s first marriage (the Miloslavskiis, from which had come Fedor, Ivan, and their sister Sofia). Once the Miloslavskiis gained the upper hand, Matveev paid dearly for his initiative: dismissal and banishment into exile. The new tsar Fedor thus lost a Western-oriented statesman of great ability and a main conduit for West European cultural influence. It must have been a heavy blow to the tsar, who himself had been educated by Simeon Polotskii (a West Russian monk and poet), knew Polish, and wore Western clothing.
However, the West could hardly be ignored over the long term. That was clearly demonstrated by the ‘Turkish question’: after centuries of spurning appeals for an alliance against the Turks, Moscow now chose to confront the Ottoman Empire and waged its first war (from 1676 to 1681, virtually the entire reign of Fedor). The campaign, conducted without Western support, focused on Ukraine and hetman P. Doroshenko’s attempt to unite both the right and left banks of the Dnieper. But the war ended inconclusively, as the Peace of Bakhchisarai (1681) simply reaffirmed the status quo ante bellum and hence Moscow’s possession of left-bank (eastern) Ukraine.
Domestically, xenophobic measures (for example, closing the tsar’s ‘German’ theatre) foundered on needs for systematic Europeanization. Thus, in contrast to the gradual military and economic policies of earlier decades, Moscow now began a conscious modernization of autocracy—amazingly enough, during the ‘weak’ reign of Fedor. The changes occurred not merely because the time was ‘ripe’, but because of vigorous support from the tsar’s favourites and advisers, especially V. V. Golitsyn.
The two most elemental reforms concerned taxation and the army—those spheres where the premodern state made the greatest demands on subjects. In 1679 the state completed a fiscal reform begun in the 1620s: it shifted the tax base from land to household, using a census of 1678–9 (which indicated an approximate population of 11.2 million subjects) and recorded in special ‘revision books’. According to historian P. N. Miliukov, the new household-based tax produced revenues of 1.9 million roubles and enabled Moscow to abolish the ‘Streltsy levies’. Altogether, the army consumed 62 per cent of state revenues (1.5 million roubles). The new standing army, which now essentially displaced the noble regiments, put at the tsar’s disposal approximately 200,000 troops (including Ukrainian Cossacks). It was divided into eight military districts, which later formed the basis for Peter’s division of the realm into eight administrative regions (gubernii).
Closely related to the military reform was the abolition of the ‘system of precedence’ (mestnichestvo). This system, which tied service position to birthright and the career of forefathers, was a serious problem: it blocked appointment on the basis of merit and ability and spawned endless litigious disputes. It was already subjected to some restrictions: in 1550 for wartime service and in 1621 for diplomatic missions. The well-born opposed these incursions, not only because they were so materially bound to service (in contrast to Western nobles), but also because they regarded precedence a matter of honour.
Nevertheless, in 1682 Fedor abolished precedence. Above all, his government understood that precedence must not be extended to the ever-expanding lower strata of servitors (chancellery secretaries; big merchants [gosti]), where individual merit was critical. Abolition of precedence actually formed part of a larger reform proposal prepared under Golitsyn’s leadership and approved by the tsar. Abolition of precedence was also closely linked to military reform—the disbanding of military units called the ‘hundreds’ and the introduction of regiments, companies, and Western service ranks. Lineage books were still compiled (to determine claims to noble status), but they included the lower nobility and even non-noble ranks. The manifesto abolishing precedence is still more remarkable for its invocation of natural law—dramatic testimony to the declining influence of the Orthodox Church. Specifically, in justifying the reform, Fedor explained that he held the reins of power from God in order to govern and to issue laws for the ‘general welfare’ (obshchee dobro). Thus this manifesto, composed entirely in the spirit of European absolutism, marked the onset of modernity in Russia. The government now had philosophical support for borrowing from the West; the traditional touchstone—‘as it was under earlier great sovereigns’—no longer prevailed. Although other reform plans did founder on the opposition of clergy and noble élites, Western rationality began to displace Orthodoxy, hitherto the sole authority.
Moreover, Fedor’s reforms improved administration and, especially, finances. The government achieved a certain level of bureaucratization in Moscow, if not a general centralization. At the same time, it also strengthened its power at the provincial level, chiefly by investing more authority in the district governor (voevoda). The underlying dynamic was a pragmatic response to the shortage of competent people (a fundamental problem throughout Russian history), which was most apparent at the provincial level. The government also decided to conduct a land survey, which had long been demanded by the nobility and was finally undertaken after Fedor’s death. But further discussions of tax reform and the convocation of townspeople and peasants under Golitsyn’s leadership were interrupted by Fedor’s death. These initiatives suggest a programme of reform that, had he lived longer, could have reached the scale it did under Peter the Great.
The reform, moreover, also included plans to establish the first institution of higher learning. The proposal originated with Simeon Polotskii: although Polotskii himself died in 1680, his pupil Silvestr Medvedev prepared the draft statute for a ‘Slavic-Greek-Latin’ school in 1682. Its programmatic introduction also invoked the concept of ‘general welfare’, thus reflecting the influence of the early Enlightenment; although still alluding to the sagacity of Solomon, the document also spoke of orderly justice and administration and adduced cameralist ideas of the well-ordered ‘police state’ (Policeystaat). Fedor, whose first wife was Polish, had a marked propensity for the Polish Latin world; as the historian V. O. Kliuchevskii observed, Russia would have obtained its Western culture from Rome, not Peter’s Amsterdam, had Fedor reigned for ten to fifteen years and bequeathed a son as his successor.
Struggle for Succession
Fedor’s death in 1682 unleashed a new power struggle between the Miloslavskii and Naryshkin clans, each determined to resolve—to their own advantage—the succession claim of the two half-brothers, Ivan (a Miloslavskii) and Peter (a Naryshkin). Legally and especially theologically, precedence rested with the feeble-minded Ivan. Fearful that the Miloslavskiis would continue Fedor’s ‘Latinizing’ tendencies, however, the patriarch himself interceded on behalf of the intelligent Peter: he convoked a council to proclaim the new ruler and annulled the exile of Matveev. But before the latter could return to Moscow, the situation had radically changed.
Whereas Peter’s interests were represented by his mother Natalia Naryshkina, his half-sister Sofia became the leader of the Miloslavskiis. Her education marked by strong Ukrainian and Polish influences, Sofia herself symbolized the emancipation of élite women, who had been kept in the background in old Russia. During the next seven years she actually governed the country and thus became a precursor to the empresses who would rule in the eighteenth century. The pro-Petrine historiography has propagated a highly negative image of Sofia (including the insinuation that, from the outset, she conspired to seize power for herself). In fact, however, Sofia at first sought only to secure her family’s position by ensuring the coronation of Ivan.
But she could hardly have succeeded had she not been able to exploit a simultaneous revolt of the Streltsy—élite troops created a century and a half earlier, but since subjected to a precipitous economic and social decline. Indeed, their salaries had fallen and at the very time that they were forbidden to supplement their income by plying a trade in Moscow. They especially resented the ‘troops of new order’ and felt themselves to be victims of discrimination. Hostility towards them was in fact widespread: the government distrusted the Streltsy because so many of them were Old Believers; the nobility despised them for giving refuge to fugitive serfs; and taxpayers identified them with the loathsome ‘Streltsy tax’. The Streltsy also complained that they were maltreated by their superiors and even used as unfree labour.
Although Peter had already ascended the throne, the Miloslavskiis conspired to exploit this discontent. They set 15 May 1682 (the anniversary of the suspicious death of the Tsarevich Dmitrii in Uglich) as the date for a massacre that, according to plans, was to take the lives of forty-six adversaries. To incite the mass of Streltsy, they spread false rumours that the Naryshkins had murdered Ivan; it did not help when the Streltsy who stormed the Kremlin were shown that Ivan was alive. For three days long they raged, killing some seventy victims, including Matveev (who had just returned from exile) and other high officials. The young Peter had to watch this bloodbath and suffered a nervous shock that had a profound impact on the rest of his life.
To Sofia’s credit, she herself acted with moderation and persuaded the Streltsy to allow the mere banishment of many other boyars. She also reached a compromise agreement with I. A. Khovanskii (head of the Streltsy Chancellery and the rebels’ leader) for the coronation of both tsareviches, as Ivan V and Peter I, on 26 May (using a specially constructed double throne). The manifesto justifying this diarchy cited precedents in world history but also practical advantages: one tsar could remain in the Kremlin while the other led military campaigns. More problematic was the regency of Sofia (which had been offered by the Streltsy): Ivan was already of age and Peter’s mother could have been his regent.
As the rebels continued to indulge in a violent reign of terror (the ‘Khovanshchina’) and declared all bondsmen to be free, Sofia attempted to pacify them with gifts of money. But the Streltsy felt increasingly insecure. In early June they demanded that the government rename them ‘court infantry’ and also acknowledge the honourable goals of their rebellion—through a formal declaration and erection of a column on Red Square that would explain why so many famous men had to perish. Their political programme could have exerted considerable influence had the Streltsy themselves enjoyed the support of the general populace. But they had the support only of Old Believers, who—after Avvakum’s immolation (on the eve of the rebellion)—regarded Khovanskii as their leader. At his insistence a debate over the true belief was staged in the Kremlin, with the participation of the patriarch and numerous high-ranking church officials. But the most sensational moment came when, contrary to tradition, Sofia herself intervened in the debate and, using deft arguments, dealt Khovanskii a defeat. She then put the rebels under pressure by announcing that the court was moving out of Moscow.
It did so that summer. Although élites usually went to Kolomenskoe to pass the summer, her real intent became apparent when the tsars failed to return to the Kremlin for new year celebrations on 1 September. The Streltsy were now blamed for having driven off the government. Shortly thereafter Sofia charged Khovanskii with high treason and had him executed without trial. The government finally returned to Moscow in November, but only after the Streltsy had begged for forgiveness and removed their column from Red Square. Security for the Kremlin was now assigned to a noble regiment (a step that inadvertently laid the foundations for the recurring palace coups by guard regiments in the eighteenth century). The Streltsy threat neutralized, Sofia now assumed the reins of power, with the ‘tsars’ appearing only for Kremlin celebrations.
The Regency of Sofia (1682–1689)
Her regency lasted just seven years, almost as brief as Fedor’s reign. V. V. Golitsyn, her leading official and probably her lover, continued his predecessor’s foreign policy and cultivated contacts with the West.
However, reform initiatives were now rare; because plans for domestic reform were, unfortunately, poorly preserved, much about her reign must remain speculative. The tensions between the Miloslavskiis and the Naryshkins apparently hampered decision-making, but Sofia did tackle three problems: she finally began the long-awaited land survey, intensified the search for fugitives, and gave the conditional service estate (pomest′e) the same juridical status as the hereditary family estate (votchina). The last reform thus eliminated any distinction between the two forms of landholding—something that the service nobility had demanded. But this concession also served to level the nobility—something that the autocracy itself had wanted.
Golitsyn’s tolerant attitude towards the West proved advantageous for the foreigners’ suburb and even Jesuits. This was in marked contrast to the vigorous persecution of Old Believers, who were even burned at the stake if they refused to recant. Such harshness derived from the government’s lingering fear of a new uprising of the Streltsy. But immolation failed to quell the religious dissenters and even impelled them to commit mass suicide—from apocalyptical fears that the Last Judgement was imminent, that they might somehow be ensnared in the service of Anti-Christ. As a result, some 2,700 Old Believers in Paleostrov Monastery and several thousand more in Berezov (on the Volok) burnt themselves alive in 1687–8 alone; after a year of siege another 1,500 in Paleostrov put themselves to the torch.
The infusion of Western culture also brought a major confrontation between ‘Latinizers’ and ‘Hellenizers’. The two chief protagonists included a monk Evfimii (a collaborator of Patriarch Ioakim) and Silvestr Medvedev (the Polotskii pupil who drafted the charter for the Slavonic-Greek-Latin academy in 1682). Under the patriarch’s direction, Evfimii revised that statute so as to replace Latin with Greek and to exclude teachers from Ukraine and Lithuania. The struggle, which lasted for several years, produced a number of learned treatises. When the academy finally opened in 1687 as the first school of higher learning in Russia, its curriculum nevertheless included Latin—as well as such subjects as grammar, poetics, rhetoric, didactics, and physics. Nevertheless, pressure against the ‘Latinizer’ Medvedev steadily mounted, for Sofia feared a new schism, particularly when many Old Believers—from anti-Hellenistic sentiments—expressed sympathy for the Latinizers.
By then Sofia had come to nourish her own ambitions. In 1685 she began to appear at public ceremonies that had traditionally been reserved for the tsar; in 1686 she affixed the title of ‘Autocratrix’ to her portrait. And, apparently, she sought formal coronation after signing the Eternal Peace with Poland in 1686, the greatest triumph of her regency. The agreement ratified the Armistice of Andrusovo (1667), for the Poles now realized the need to co-operate with Russia on the Ukrainian-Ottoman border. Therefore they now recognized the partition of Ukraine and approved Russia’s entry into an anti-Turkish coalition that had been formed as the ‘Holy League’ (Habsburg, Poland, and Venetia) in 1684. In addition, the rulers recognized each other’s title and granted freedom of confession to each other’s fellow believers—the Orthodox in Poland-Lithuania, Catholics in Muscovy. This religious policy had been preceded by subordination of the Kievan metropolitanate to the Moscow Patriarchate in 1685, a long-cherished goal of the Russian Orthodox Church. Moscow also obtained a stronger claim to a protectorate over the Orthodox Christians under the Turkish yoke, something which it had already asserted for several decades. However, the tolerance promised to Catholics alienated the distrustful patriarch and impelled him to embrace Peter in the next coup of 1689.
Peter: Seizure of Power
This coup indirectly stemmed from the Eternal Peace itself. After the Poles and Habsburgs dealt a decisive defeat to the Turks at Vienna in 1683, the allies demanded that Russia launch an attack on the Crimea to ease the burden on the West. Under the supreme command of Golitsyn, Russian troops thereupon made two campaigns against the Crimean Tatars (in 1687 and 1689) and both times met with defeat. But in both cases Sofia—who needed success—suppressed the truth: to portray the military campaign as a victory, she lavished praise and gifts on Golitsyn and the returning troops. Her Eastern policy was no more successful: Russia established diplomatic relations with China (through the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689), but did so at the price of renouncing claims to the Amur region. The deception and disinformation generated growing tensions between Sofia and Peter, even to mutual suspicions of murder. Fearing a new Streltsy uprising, in August 1689 Peter fled to the Trinity-Sergius Monastery north of Moscow. The turning-point came in September when the troops came over to his side, enabling Peter to claim power in his own right and to place his half-sister under house arrest in Novodevichii Convent.
Although Peter had seized power, for the moment he changed nothing in his own life, as he himself continued to take more interest in sea travel than in state affairs. Nevertheless, the rebellious turbulence of the seventeenth century had come to an end; the Streltsy mutiny in 1698 was merely an epilogue. If one looks at the government of the great tsar in the light of the seventeenth century, it is clear that his reforms—which made so great an impression in the West—emerged directly from the traditions of the seventeenth century and hardly constituted a ‘revolution’. The seventeenth century had already signalled a major breakthrough—a self-conscious emancipation from the fetters of ‘Old Russia’.
The Reign of Fedor (1676–1682)
Alexis’s eldest son, who had received elaborate preparation to accede to the throne, died in 1670. Thus, when Alexis himself died six years later, the throne passed to his second eldest son, the sickly and bed-ridden Fedor, who was not quite 15 years old and had only another six years to live. Next in line included Ivan, who was mentally retarded, and then the 4-year-old Peter (Petr Alekseevich) from Alexis’s second marriage, a strong and robust child who would go down in history as Peter the Great. Under the circumstances, the head of the foreign chancellery, A. S. Matveev, urged Peter’s mother, Natalia Naryshkina, to speak out in favour of her son. But his suggestion ignited a power struggle between the Naryshkins and the family of Alexis’s first marriage (the Miloslavskiis, from which had come Fedor, Ivan, and their sister Sofia). Once the Miloslavskiis gained the upper hand, Matveev paid dearly for his initiative: dismissal and banishment into exile. The new tsar Fedor thus lost a Western-oriented statesman of great ability and a main conduit for West European cultural influence. It must have been a heavy blow to the tsar, who himself had been educated by Simeon Polotskii (a West Russian monk and poet), knew Polish, and wore Western clothing.
However, the West could hardly be ignored over the long term. That was clearly demonstrated by the ‘Turkish question’: after centuries of spurning appeals for an alliance against the Turks, Moscow now chose to confront the Ottoman Empire and waged its first war (from 1676 to 1681, virtually the entire reign of Fedor). The campaign, conducted without Western support, focused on Ukraine and hetman P. Doroshenko’s attempt to unite both the right and left banks of the Dnieper. But the war ended inconclusively, as the Peace of Bakhchisarai (1681) simply reaffirmed the status quo ante bellum and hence Moscow’s possession of left-bank (eastern) Ukraine.
Domestically, xenophobic measures (for example, closing the tsar’s ‘German’ theatre) foundered on needs for systematic Europeanization. Thus, in contrast to the gradual military and economic policies of earlier decades, Moscow now began a conscious modernization of autocracy—amazingly enough, during the ‘weak’ reign of Fedor. The changes occurred not merely because the time was ‘ripe’, but because of vigorous support from the tsar’s favourites and advisers, especially V. V. Golitsyn.
The two most elemental reforms concerned taxation and the army—those spheres where the premodern state made the greatest demands on subjects. In 1679 the state completed a fiscal reform begun in the 1620s: it shifted the tax base from land to household, using a census of 1678–9 (which indicated an approximate population of 11.2 million subjects) and recorded in special ‘revision books’. According to historian P. N. Miliukov, the new household-based tax produced revenues of 1.9 million roubles and enabled Moscow to abolish the ‘Streltsy levies’. Altogether, the army consumed 62 per cent of state revenues (1.5 million roubles). The new standing army, which now essentially displaced the noble regiments, put at the tsar’s disposal approximately 200,000 troops (including Ukrainian Cossacks). It was divided into eight military districts, which later formed the basis for Peter’s division of the realm into eight administrative regions (gubernii).
Closely related to the military reform was the abolition of the ‘system of precedence’ (mestnichestvo). This system, which tied service position to birthright and the career of forefathers, was a serious problem: it blocked appointment on the basis of merit and ability and spawned endless litigious disputes. It was already subjected to some restrictions: in 1550 for wartime service and in 1621 for diplomatic missions. The well-born opposed these incursions, not only because they were so materially bound to service (in contrast to Western nobles), but also because they regarded precedence a matter of honour.
Nevertheless, in 1682 Fedor abolished precedence. Above all, his government understood that precedence must not be extended to the ever-expanding lower strata of servitors (chancellery secretaries; big merchants [gosti]), where individual merit was critical. Abolition of precedence actually formed part of a larger reform proposal prepared under Golitsyn’s leadership and approved by the tsar. Abolition of precedence was also closely linked to military reform—the disbanding of military units called the ‘hundreds’ and the introduction of regiments, companies, and Western service ranks. Lineage books were still compiled (to determine claims to noble status), but they included the lower nobility and even non-noble ranks. The manifesto abolishing precedence is still more remarkable for its invocation of natural law—dramatic testimony to the declining influence of the Orthodox Church. Specifically, in justifying the reform, Fedor explained that he held the reins of power from God in order to govern and to issue laws for the ‘general welfare’ (obshchee dobro). Thus this manifesto, composed entirely in the spirit of European absolutism, marked the onset of modernity in Russia. The government now had philosophical support for borrowing from the West; the traditional touchstone—‘as it was under earlier great sovereigns’—no longer prevailed. Although other reform plans did founder on the opposition of clergy and noble élites, Western rationality began to displace Orthodoxy, hitherto the sole authority.
Moreover, Fedor’s reforms improved administration and, especially, finances. The government achieved a certain level of bureaucratization in Moscow, if not a general centralization. At the same time, it also strengthened its power at the provincial level, chiefly by investing more authority in the district governor (voevoda). The underlying dynamic was a pragmatic response to the shortage of competent people (a fundamental problem throughout Russian history), which was most apparent at the provincial level. The government also decided to conduct a land survey, which had long been demanded by the nobility and was finally undertaken after Fedor’s death. But further discussions of tax reform and the convocation of townspeople and peasants under Golitsyn’s leadership were interrupted by Fedor’s death. These initiatives suggest a programme of reform that, had he lived longer, could have reached the scale it did under Peter the Great.
The reform, moreover, also included plans to establish the first institution of higher learning. The proposal originated with Simeon Polotskii: although Polotskii himself died in 1680, his pupil Silvestr Medvedev prepared the draft statute for a ‘Slavic-Greek-Latin’ school in 1682. Its programmatic introduction also invoked the concept of ‘general welfare’, thus reflecting the influence of the early Enlightenment; although still alluding to the sagacity of Solomon, the document also spoke of orderly justice and administration and adduced cameralist ideas of the well-ordered ‘police state’ (Policeystaat). Fedor, whose first wife was Polish, had a marked propensity for the Polish Latin world; as the historian V. O. Kliuchevskii observed, Russia would have obtained its Western culture from Rome, not Peter’s Amsterdam, had Fedor reigned for ten to fifteen years and bequeathed a son as his successor.
Struggle for Succession
Fedor’s death in 1682 unleashed a new power struggle between the Miloslavskii and Naryshkin clans, each determined to resolve—to their own advantage—the succession claim of the two half-brothers, Ivan (a Miloslavskii) and Peter (a Naryshkin). Legally and especially theologically, precedence rested with the feeble-minded Ivan. Fearful that the Miloslavskiis would continue Fedor’s ‘Latinizing’ tendencies, however, the patriarch himself interceded on behalf of the intelligent Peter: he convoked a council to proclaim the new ruler and annulled the exile of Matveev. But before the latter could return to Moscow, the situation had radically changed.
Whereas Peter’s interests were represented by his mother Natalia Naryshkina, his half-sister Sofia became the leader of the Miloslavskiis. Her education marked by strong Ukrainian and Polish influences, Sofia herself symbolized the emancipation of élite women, who had been kept in the background in old Russia. During the next seven years she actually governed the country and thus became a precursor to the empresses who would rule in the eighteenth century. The pro-Petrine historiography has propagated a highly negative image of Sofia (including the insinuation that, from the outset, she conspired to seize power for herself). In fact, however, Sofia at first sought only to secure her family’s position by ensuring the coronation of Ivan.
But she could hardly have succeeded had she not been able to exploit a simultaneous revolt of the Streltsy—élite troops created a century and a half earlier, but since subjected to a precipitous economic and social decline. Indeed, their salaries had fallen and at the very time that they were forbidden to supplement their income by plying a trade in Moscow. They especially resented the ‘troops of new order’ and felt themselves to be victims of discrimination. Hostility towards them was in fact widespread: the government distrusted the Streltsy because so many of them were Old Believers; the nobility despised them for giving refuge to fugitive serfs; and taxpayers identified them with the loathsome ‘Streltsy tax’. The Streltsy also complained that they were maltreated by their superiors and even used as unfree labour.
Although Peter had already ascended the throne, the Miloslavskiis conspired to exploit this discontent. They set 15 May 1682 (the anniversary of the suspicious death of the Tsarevich Dmitrii in Uglich) as the date for a massacre that, according to plans, was to take the lives of forty-six adversaries. To incite the mass of Streltsy, they spread false rumours that the Naryshkins had murdered Ivan; it did not help when the Streltsy who stormed the Kremlin were shown that Ivan was alive. For three days long they raged, killing some seventy victims, including Matveev (who had just returned from exile) and other high officials. The young Peter had to watch this bloodbath and suffered a nervous shock that had a profound impact on the rest of his life.
To Sofia’s credit, she herself acted with moderation and persuaded the Streltsy to allow the mere banishment of many other boyars. She also reached a compromise agreement with I. A. Khovanskii (head of the Streltsy Chancellery and the rebels’ leader) for the coronation of both tsareviches, as Ivan V and Peter I, on 26 May (using a specially constructed double throne). The manifesto justifying this diarchy cited precedents in world history but also practical advantages: one tsar could remain in the Kremlin while the other led military campaigns. More problematic was the regency of Sofia (which had been offered by the Streltsy): Ivan was already of age and Peter’s mother could have been his regent.
As the rebels continued to indulge in a violent reign of terror (the ‘Khovanshchina’) and declared all bondsmen to be free, Sofia attempted to pacify them with gifts of money. But the Streltsy felt increasingly insecure. In early June they demanded that the government rename them ‘court infantry’ and also acknowledge the honourable goals of their rebellion—through a formal declaration and erection of a column on Red Square that would explain why so many famous men had to perish. Their political programme could have exerted considerable influence had the Streltsy themselves enjoyed the support of the general populace. But they had the support only of Old Believers, who—after Avvakum’s immolation (on the eve of the rebellion)—regarded Khovanskii as their leader. At his insistence a debate over the true belief was staged in the Kremlin, with the participation of the patriarch and numerous high-ranking church officials. But the most sensational moment came when, contrary to tradition, Sofia herself intervened in the debate and, using deft arguments, dealt Khovanskii a defeat. She then put the rebels under pressure by announcing that the court was moving out of Moscow.
It did so that summer. Although élites usually went to Kolomenskoe to pass the summer, her real intent became apparent when the tsars failed to return to the Kremlin for new year celebrations on 1 September. The Streltsy were now blamed for having driven off the government. Shortly thereafter Sofia charged Khovanskii with high treason and had him executed without trial. The government finally returned to Moscow in November, but only after the Streltsy had begged for forgiveness and removed their column from Red Square. Security for the Kremlin was now assigned to a noble regiment (a step that inadvertently laid the foundations for the recurring palace coups by guard regiments in the eighteenth century). The Streltsy threat neutralized, Sofia now assumed the reins of power, with the ‘tsars’ appearing only for Kremlin celebrations.
The Regency of Sofia (1682–1689)
Her regency lasted just seven years, almost as brief as Fedor’s reign. V. V. Golitsyn, her leading official and probably her lover, continued his predecessor’s foreign policy and cultivated contacts with the West.
However, reform initiatives were now rare; because plans for domestic reform were, unfortunately, poorly preserved, much about her reign must remain speculative. The tensions between the Miloslavskiis and the Naryshkins apparently hampered decision-making, but Sofia did tackle three problems: she finally began the long-awaited land survey, intensified the search for fugitives, and gave the conditional service estate (pomest′e) the same juridical status as the hereditary family estate (votchina). The last reform thus eliminated any distinction between the two forms of landholding—something that the service nobility had demanded. But this concession also served to level the nobility—something that the autocracy itself had wanted.
Golitsyn’s tolerant attitude towards the West proved advantageous for the foreigners’ suburb and even Jesuits. This was in marked contrast to the vigorous persecution of Old Believers, who were even burned at the stake if they refused to recant. Such harshness derived from the government’s lingering fear of a new uprising of the Streltsy. But immolation failed to quell the religious dissenters and even impelled them to commit mass suicide—from apocalyptical fears that the Last Judgement was imminent, that they might somehow be ensnared in the service of Anti-Christ. As a result, some 2,700 Old Believers in Paleostrov Monastery and several thousand more in Berezov (on the Volok) burnt themselves alive in 1687–8 alone; after a year of siege another 1,500 in Paleostrov put themselves to the torch.
The infusion of Western culture also brought a major confrontation between ‘Latinizers’ and ‘Hellenizers’. The two chief protagonists included a monk Evfimii (a collaborator of Patriarch Ioakim) and Silvestr Medvedev (the Polotskii pupil who drafted the charter for the Slavonic-Greek-Latin academy in 1682). Under the patriarch’s direction, Evfimii revised that statute so as to replace Latin with Greek and to exclude teachers from Ukraine and Lithuania. The struggle, which lasted for several years, produced a number of learned treatises. When the academy finally opened in 1687 as the first school of higher learning in Russia, its curriculum nevertheless included Latin—as well as such subjects as grammar, poetics, rhetoric, didactics, and physics. Nevertheless, pressure against the ‘Latinizer’ Medvedev steadily mounted, for Sofia feared a new schism, particularly when many Old Believers—from anti-Hellenistic sentiments—expressed sympathy for the Latinizers.
By then Sofia had come to nourish her own ambitions. In 1685 she began to appear at public ceremonies that had traditionally been reserved for the tsar; in 1686 she affixed the title of ‘Autocratrix’ to her portrait. And, apparently, she sought formal coronation after signing the Eternal Peace with Poland in 1686, the greatest triumph of her regency. The agreement ratified the Armistice of Andrusovo (1667), for the Poles now realized the need to co-operate with Russia on the Ukrainian-Ottoman border. Therefore they now recognized the partition of Ukraine and approved Russia’s entry into an anti-Turkish coalition that had been formed as the ‘Holy League’ (Habsburg, Poland, and Venetia) in 1684. In addition, the rulers recognized each other’s title and granted freedom of confession to each other’s fellow believers—the Orthodox in Poland-Lithuania, Catholics in Muscovy. This religious policy had been preceded by subordination of the Kievan metropolitanate to the Moscow Patriarchate in 1685, a long-cherished goal of the Russian Orthodox Church. Moscow also obtained a stronger claim to a protectorate over the Orthodox Christians under the Turkish yoke, something which it had already asserted for several decades. However, the tolerance promised to Catholics alienated the distrustful patriarch and impelled him to embrace Peter in the next coup of 1689.
Peter: Seizure of Power
This coup indirectly stemmed from the Eternal Peace itself. After the Poles and Habsburgs dealt a decisive defeat to the Turks at Vienna in 1683, the allies demanded that Russia launch an attack on the Crimea to ease the burden on the West. Under the supreme command of Golitsyn, Russian troops thereupon made two campaigns against the Crimean Tatars (in 1687 and 1689) and both times met with defeat. But in both cases Sofia—who needed success—suppressed the truth: to portray the military campaign as a victory, she lavished praise and gifts on Golitsyn and the returning troops. Her Eastern policy was no more successful: Russia established diplomatic relations with China (through the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689), but did so at the price of renouncing claims to the Amur region. The deception and disinformation generated growing tensions between Sofia and Peter, even to mutual suspicions of murder. Fearing a new Streltsy uprising, in August 1689 Peter fled to the Trinity-Sergius Monastery north of Moscow. The turning-point came in September when the troops came over to his side, enabling Peter to claim power in his own right and to place his half-sister under house arrest in Novodevichii Convent.
Although Peter had seized power, for the moment he changed nothing in his own life, as he himself continued to take more interest in sea travel than in state affairs. Nevertheless, the rebellious turbulence of the seventeenth century had come to an end; the Streltsy mutiny in 1698 was merely an epilogue. If one looks at the government of the great tsar in the light of the seventeenth century, it is clear that his reforms—which made so great an impression in the West—emerged directly from the traditions of the seventeenth century and hardly constituted a ‘revolution’. The seventeenth century had already signalled a major breakthrough—a self-conscious emancipation from the fetters of ‘Old Russia’.
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