Russia under the first Romanovs from Cambridge history of Russia, volume 1

Moscow remained the centre of Russian commercial life in this period. Some scholars assert that the city's population rose to 200,000 people during the course of the century, but this seems high.[194] The sources are incomplete and ambiguous and the population seems to have fluctuated considerably in any case.[195] A spectacular instance of the latter came in 1654 when the city was devastated by plague, killing up to 80 per cent of the population in the opinion of some.[196] Nevertheless it is clear that the city, with its mixed population and enormous range of occupations and activities, was a focus for trade and production of all kinds. Moreover, Moscow merchants played a major role in linking the various parts of the country's commercial network together, as with the northern trade via Archangel, the Volga trade, that towards the Urals and Siberia, and to a lesser extent that with the north-west and the Baltic.[197]Moscow's role was clearly a reflection of its status as the country's capital and the fact that it was the home of the country's wealthiest merchants.

Outside the Kremlin seventeenth-century Moscow was subdivided into a series of 'hundreds' (sotni) and suburban settlements (slobody) which were the habitations of different social groups. Their exact number appears to have varied through time, and the sources disagree. Accordingto Snegirev, however, they included suburbsbelongingto the court and treasury, those ofthe military servitors, monastic and Church settlements, foreign suburbs and the 'black' suburbs.[198] Basic to the commercial life of the city were the 'black' hundreds and suburbs, the core of the posad community. Whatever may have been the original difference in meaning between sotnia and sloboda, by the seventeenth century the two words were synonymous, designating a settlement populated by people of one status or origin (or sometimes occupation). In principle a sloboda also had one communal organisation, but this was not always the case in Moscow.[199] In 1649, as a result of the Ulozhenie, nineteen private ('white') suburbs with 1410 households were transferred to the 'black' hundreds and suburbs, thus enhancing the significance of the latter to the commercial life of the city as a whole.[200] According to one source, eleven years earlier in 1638 the 'black' and 'white' commercial suburbs together with those belonging to the court and treasury accounted for 48.7 per cent of the city's population.[201] This population formed the core of the city's commercial life.

An important feature of Moscow's economy in the seventeenth century was the extensive 'in house' production for the benefit of the court, govern­ment, army and other central agencies. Much of this took place in the court and treasury suburbs located mainly to the west of the Kremlin. The residents of these suburbs had a status which was rather similar to that of minor state servitors, being obliged to supply the court or government agencies with nec­essary goods and services in return for payments made in money or in kind. Whenever possible, they might supplement their income by producing for the market or in response to private orders. Many court craftsmen, for example, worked for the Armoury, making firearms or other kinds of light weaponry, or engaged in other skilled pursuits like joinery, cabinet-making, icon-painting, map-making and ornamental arts. The Great Palace chancellery was respon­sible for provisioning the court, whilst those working for the Treasury Court prepared costume and cloth, and also furs for diplomatic exchanges. Trea­sury craftsmen worked for the various government chancelleries as smiths, carpenters, carriage makers, furriers, coinage makers, builders, brick makers, stonemasons, furriers, costumiers, jewellers, workers in precious metals and gems, cloth makers and so on. To the extent that such craftspeople also pro­duced for the marketplace their relatively privileged situation caused resent­ment among the 'black' posad dwellers.

Craftspeople among the latter group, working mainly for the market, engaged in a wide variety of pursuits. Thus Moscow had many metalworkers. An inventory of 1641 lists sixty-nine smithies in the Earth Town[202] beyond the Tver' Gate, thirty-five in different parts of the White Town,[203] twenty-nine south of the river in Zamoskvorech'e and various others.[204] Other metalwork­ers worked in copper, tin, gold and silver, all metals which were lacking in seventeenth-century Muscovy. Carpentry in various forms employed many in the city. For large projects like court or government buildings teams of car­penters were sometimes brought to Moscow from other towns and regions. Workers with hemp and flax and their derivatives were limited in number, per­haps because of the significance of such crafts as rural pursuits, but Moscow did provide a market for some specialists. Workers in leather were many - perhaps 200 in 1638 - whilst there were about 100 furriers.[205] Other significant crafts in the posad included wool-working, working in tallow and wax (there were thirty-five candle makers and ten soap makers in 1638), producing food (about 600 producers and traders of various kinds in 1638, including those working for the court) and cloth (about 250 producers and traders in 1638).

Large-scale activity in the seventeenth-century city was essentially restricted to that under the aegis of the government. It included the cannon foundry, which dated from the fifteenth century but which expanded from the 1620s, the already-mentioned Armoury with its offshoots the Gold and Silver Chambers (palaty), state powder mills, state brickworks, the mints, two paper mills, and others. Such manufactories worked predominantly to state orders rather than to the market.

Something was said in Chapter 13 about the hierarchy of merchants and posad traders which characterised sixteenth-century Russian towns. This hier­archy continued to be significant in the seventeenth century and nowhere more so than in Moscow where the richest merchants of the realm lived. At one extreme, wealthy merchants (gosti and members of the gost' hundreds) traded over wide regions and also with foreigners, and sometimes controlled or had interests in local trade as well. At the other were minor traders, selling their wares in local shops (bought or rented), from mere temporary stalls and carts in the marketplace, or working in shops belonging to others. The organ­isation of trade lagged behind that of a growing number of European states. Merchants lacked capital, there were no banks or modern credit facilities, and Russian merchants sometimes found it difficult to compete with foreigners. Not until the New Trade Statute of 1667 did they enjoy a measure of protection from foreign competition, particularly in local and retail trade.

The essential geographical patterns of trade in seventeenth-century Moscow did not greatly differ from those of the sixteenth century, for the city continued to be a great consumer of food and other necessities as well as of the many raw materials needed by its manufactories. As before, the Kitai gorod with its large trading square adjacent to the Kremlin continued to be the focus of activity. Retail trade was still conducted through shops organised into specialised trading rows (and also through warehouses, cellars and other outlets). The names of about 120 trading rows are known from the seventeenth century. Wholesale trade and trade by foreign merchants was also conducted through the two merchants' bazaars (gostinnye dvory), completed in 1641 and 1667. Olearius and other travellers noted the liveliness and diversity of trade in the city - of the ancestor of Red Square, for example, he asserts that 'all day long it is full of tradespeople, both men and women, and slaves and idlers'.[206]But his account also makes it clear that there was a lively trade in other parts of the city, notably in the White Town ('Tsargorod'). In the latter, he asserts 'are located the bread and flour stalls, the butchers' blocks, the cattle market, and taverns selling beer, mead and vodka'.[207]

The seventeenth-century geography of trade and commerce outside Moscow can only be reconstructed in part thanks to the patchy nature of the evidence. Something has been said already about the location of the towns with the largest posad communities along the major trading routes. Space will allow a brief discussion of towns on only one of these routes.

The route northwards from Moscow to Archangel was the most important seventeenth-century route for trade with Western Europe. After 1600 this trade was dominated by the Dutch. Although the English had first arrived at the mouth of the Northern Dvina in the 1550s, the town itself was constructed only in 1583-4 close to the nearby monastery. At first the foreign trade had mainly taken place at Kholmogory, the goods being transferred upriver to that town by shallow draft vessels from the anchorages in the mouth of the river.

Gradually, however, Archangel assumed the character of a proper port. In the 1620s it contained 115 posad households,⁴³ and the 1622-4 cadastre describes government offices, warehouses and trading establishments.⁴⁴ A proportion of the trade was in the hands of local servitors. It has been estimated that foreign trade at Archangel increased by two to three times on average between the beginning and the middle of the century.⁴⁵ The liveliest time for commerce was the annual fair between June and September when the foreign ships arrived and merchants and traders came from many parts of Russia, especially Moscow, various northern towns and the important northern monasteries. Between 1668 and 1684 a large new stone merchants' bazaar was constructed to government order to cope with the trade. A community of foreign merchants resided permanently in the town. But the overall population remained small, no doubt reflecting the restricted period for trading. In fact Archangel's seventy shops in the 1620s (not counting the trading spaces in the merchants' bazaar) and limited number of trades contrasted poorly with nearby Kholmogory which had 316 shops and a much wider variety of craft activities. The latter was the true centre of the region for local commerce.⁴⁶

From Archangel the main trading route ran up the Northern Dvina and then up the Sukhona to the transhipment point at Vologda. Before reaching Vologda, however, traders would arrive at Ustiug Velikii, where the main route to Siberia began. Ustiug Velikii had played an important role in the fur trade, connecting Siberia with Archangel, and was also noted for a range of manu­facture and commerce including metalworking, carpentry and woodworking, leather, fur-dressing, clothing, food and others.⁴⁷ Nearby Tot'ma, also on the Sukhona, was a centre for salt production.⁴⁸ Vologda itself was the principal commercial point on the route to Moscow because merchants would wait here for the winter freeze before proceeding overland to the capital by sledge. In the 1620s it had a population of perhaps 5,000 and contained the houses of eleven foreign traders and five Moscow gosti. It had a wide variety of crafts, over 300 shops, a large merchants' bazaar and other commercial facilities.⁴⁹

43 Eaton, 'Decline and Recovery', p. 235.

44 Iu. A. Barashkov, Arkhangel'sk:arkhitekturnaiabiografiia(Arkhangel'sk: Severo-Zapadnoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1984), p. 18.

45 Bushkovitch, The Merchants of Moscow, pp. 51, 56.

46 O. V Ovsiannikov, 'Kholmogorskii i Arkhangel'skii posady po pistsovym i perepisnym knigam XVII v.', in Materialy po istorii Evropeiskogo Severa SSSR, vol. i (Vologda, 1970), pp. 197-211.

47 A. Ts. Merzon and Iu.A. Tikhonov Rynok Ustiuga Velikogo v period skladyvaniia vserossi- iskogo rynka (XVII vek) (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1960).

48 R. E. F. Smith and David Christian, Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History ofFood and Drink in Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 46-8.

49 A. E. Mertsalov, Ocherki goroda Vologdy po pistsovoi knige 1627 goda (Vologda, 1885).

The final important point on the road to Moscow was Iaroslavl' on the Volga, a major centre for leather and other kinds of manufacturing and a centre of trade interlinking the Volga and routes to Siberia with those to the north-west, as well as Moscow and the centre with Archangel and the north.

As noted in Chapter 13, not all commerce took place in towns. Monastic centres like Tikhvin Posad were also significant, as were numerous villages. Not until the eighteenth century, however, do the statistics on trade at this level permit anything like a comprehensive picture of the geography of trade to be drawn.[208]

The symbolic and religious role of towns

Religion was central to the life of Russian towns in the seventeenth century. Something of its significance for the individual town emerges in the 1627 cadas­tre for Vologda, as discussed by Mertsalov.[209] In that year, the town of about 5,000-6,000 inhabitants had sixty churches, including the cathedral, and three monasteries. In addition to more than eighty inhabited houses of priests and other church officials, there were the houses and homes of monastic personnel, their dependents and the servants and dependents of the archbishop. Monas­teries outside Vologda, including some of Russia's most important, maintained establishments in the town. All this infrastructure underpinned the elaborate life of religious observance and regulation which characterised all Russian towns in this period. Thus the lives of urban dwellers were punctuated by the round of religious holidays, festivals, fasts and days of abstinence which marked the Orthodox year. For the devout both public religious worship and private devotion were regular and demanding. Processions and pilgrimages were normal parts of urban life. The town itself, furthermore, was an assem­blage of sacred spaces. Whether in the individual house, which might devote a sacred corner to a holy icon, or in church confronted by the cosmic sym­bolism of its architecture and its elaborate arrays of mosaics, icons and other decorations, to say nothing of the verbal, musical and dramatic enactments of its rituals, the town dweller was constantly reminded of religious truth, and his or her behaviour was affected accordingly. Chapter 1 of the Ulozhe­nie, for example, specifies the severest penalties for blasphemy or for any kind of unruly behaviour in church.[210] Chapter 10 enforces the observance of Sundays and the principal religious holidays, and restricts trade during reli­gious processions.[211] And chapter 19 forbids foreign churches from locating in central Moscow - they were to be located beyond the Earth Town 'in places distant from God's churches'.[212] In a similar spirit of spatial exclusiveness and religious purity, legislation forced Europeans to sell their property in Moscow and move to a new suburb north-east of the city (1652), and also forbade uncon­verted foreigners to wear Russian dress, enter Orthodox churches or employ Orthodox servants.[213] Whilst foreigners might be tolerated, the Russian town was meant to radiate values which were at one and the same time Russian and Orthodox. Those towns which served as episcopal centres, moreover, were charged with the task of upholding those values in their surrounding regions.

Numerous social thinkers, among them Elman Service and Paul Wheat- ley,[214] have argued for the close relationship between political power and sacred authority in traditional complex societies, and Wheatley in particular has noted how cities in such societies were frequently structured to reflect pre­vailing notions of cosmic order. The claim by the Russian tsars to divine sanction for their rule has been noted by many writers, and in particular the quest by the sixteenth-century tsars to have Moscow recognised as the 'Third Rome', successor to Rome itself and to Constantinople as the centre of world Christendom.[215] The location of the palace of the patriarch, or head of the Russian Orthodox Church, in the seventeenth-century Moscow Kremlin next to the palace of the tsar himself may be taken to symbolise the 'symphony' between Church and state which supposedly reigned under Orthodoxy. The life of the seventeenth-century tsars and of their court was saturated with religious symbolism, observances and practices, as noted by many foreign visitors who were generally hard put to understand the significance of what they saw. The tsars, for example, partook of numerous religious pilgrimages and on particular feast days, notably on Palm Sunday and at Epiphany, the city itself formed the setting for the acting out of the elaborate ceremonials which were performed.[216] How far such ceremonials derived some of their meaning from a symbolism which was enshrined within the actual fabric of the city - in the orientation of certain of its streets, for example, or in the religious imagery associated with certain buildings (for example, the imagery of the 'new Jerusalem' associated by some writers with St Basil's Cathedral in Red Square or with Boris Godunov's plans to reconstruct the Kremlin) - is a matter which deserves further research.[217] What seems quite clear is that Russian towns were, to use Wheatley's phrase, 'generators of sacred space' and as such helped underpin the prevailing political and religious order. That being so, it is hardly surprising that the founding of a new town, as of Archangel in 1583-4, or Tsarev Borisov in 1599, was an act invariably inaugurated in religious ceremonial.[218]

But that, of course, cannot be the full story, for what has been said above in a sense reflects the outlook of the state and of its rulers, rather than that of ordinary people. It is by no means certain, for example, that Christianity had in fact entirely managed to eradicate the remnants of paganism, even by the seventeenth century.[219] Moreover, the seventeenth century was itself a time of change and that fact was bound to be reflected in the heterogeneous life of towns, especially the biggest ones. The mixing of foreigners with Russians in Moscow and other towns meant the mixing of Orthodoxy with new ideas and perhaps with 'heresy', no matter how much the latter might be resisted by religious conservatives. The period was one of growing controversy. The deposition of the Patriarch Nikon, and the schism in the Orthodox Church, split society asunder. But such events were mere harbingers of the much greater challenges to traditional religious authority and to the religious unity of Russia which would follow from the time of Peter the Great. The religious symbolism of the town, in other words, no longer reflected the beliefs of all Russians. It seems likely that it had never done so.

The physical form of towns

The great majority of Russian towns in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were fortified. Not until the end of the latter century did fortification begin to lose its significance.[220] This fact tells us much about the nature of life in Russia at the time - a realm which was open to the threat of invasion from many directions and within which the tsar's writ was constantly frustrated. Nowhere was such frustration liable to be felt more keenly than towards the frontiers. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, for example, a series of northern centres, including Archangel, Kargopol', Kholmogory and Sol'vychegodsk, began to be fortified.[221] They were felt to be vulnerable from the west and also, in the case of those close to the White Sea, from the northern coast. The two centuries also witnessed considerable efforts to fortify towns close to the western frontier.[222] And the energy which was expended upon the defence of the southern frontier and on the building of fortified towns as an integral component of that defence was particularly intense. It was in these regions in particular where the military role of towns became dominant as every effort was made to make all aspects of life subservient to it.[223]

The tendency to fortify particular parts of the town as it expanded - first, perhaps, the gorod, then the nearby posad, then perhaps individual slobody, or newer parts of the posad as the latter expanded beyond the old walls - gave rise to the characteristic 'cellular' structure of towns which has been alluded to by many writers.[224] Moscow provides a characteristic example. From 1485 the Kremlin began to be fortified in brick thanks to the efforts of Italian architects. These walls replaced earlier ones. Some years later in 1535 what is now the Kitai gorod (then known as the 'Great Posad') was also walled in stone. What is now known as the Boulevard Ring was guarded by an earthen rampart. This was rebuilt in brick in 1586-93, the space within it gradually becoming known as the 'White Town'. After the 1591 raid by the Crimean Tatars, a fourth fortification line in earth with a wooden wall was built along what is now the Garden Ring.[225] The area within this final rampart became known as the 'Earth Town'. Thus arose the ring and radial pattern which is still a feature of Moscow's plan today. In other towns, however, the cells were less concentric or regular. And in many cases, especially in the south, the fortifications were wooden rather than of stone.

From a distance Russian towns typically made a great impression on foreign­ers. Thus, encountering Plesko (Pskov) in I66I, the Scottish mercenary Patrick Gordon noted that it 'had a glorious show, being environed with a stone wall, with many towers. Here are many churches and monasteries, some whereof have three, some five steeples or towers, whereon are round globes of six, eight or ten fathoms circumference, which - make a great and pleasant show.' On closer acquaintance, however, Gordon was much less impressed. 'Having lodged in the town', he noted that it 'stunk with nastiness, and was no wise answerable to the glorious show it hath afar off, and our expectations -'.[226]To foreigners Russia's towns seemed dirty, unplanned, badly maintained and primitive. Only the churches called forth praise, but even they were vitiated by superstition and their strange architecture. Other buildings were predom­inantly wooden and seemed quite unimpressive when compared to those common in the West.

The towns, of course, suffered from severe disadvantages. Most of the build­ing, as noted already, was in wood, which had the great advantage of being cheap and readily available but the supreme disadvantage of being vulnerable to fire. In fact so frequent and so devastating did urban fires tend to be that rebuilding had to be done as quickly as possible and at minimum expense, paying little attention to aesthetics or to style. No wonder the results failed to inspire admiration. But the towns were not in fact quite as disordered as they often appeared to foreign observers, particularly in the case of Moscow. From the time of Ivan III, for example, measures were taken to provide fire patrols and also to uphold law and order through forms of policing and controls over traffic, especially at night. From the sixteenth century the tsars gave encour­agement to building in stone. Some attention was paid to drainage and to the planking of unpaved and often barely passable streets. From the early seven­teenth century concerted efforts were made to widen and straighten certain important streets, especially in the city centre, and to prevent infringements of the building line. This was partly as a fire protection measure.[227] Wells were constructed to give easy access to water in cases of fire. The security and well- being of the capital, where the tsar himself resided, was naturally of crucial importance to the government. Much less seems to have been done in other towns.

Moscow and other towns remained quite 'medieval' in appearance down to the end of the century. The typical house or 'court' (dvor), for example, consisted of a wooden structure, perhaps accompanied by outbuildings, and the whole surrounded by a high wooden fence. A gate gave access to the street. But Moscow had begun to change its appearance to some degree by the mid-century when new stone and brick homes and mansions of some of the wealthier were noted by the visiting Paul of Aleppo.[228] According to some scholars, the stone and brick houses and mansions which began to appear in the latter part of the century reflected evidence of an interest in new architectural forms and a departure from those based on traditional wooden construction.[229] By European standards Russian towns spread over enormous areas, necessitating the construction of very lengthy walls in order to encompass them. Towns typically included considerable areas of open space between their built-up areas, used for growing food and pasturing livestock. They also tended to sprawl beyond their walls into the countryside beyond and many activities, especially some of those involving fire, were confined to those regions.

There has been considerable debate among scholars over the extent to which Russian towns were subject to planning. L. M. Tverskoi, for example, argued for a degree of regularity in street patterns and suggested that towns were generally planned even when their street patterns seemed irregular.[230]Regularity is particularly noticeable in the layout of some of the southern military towns. Other scholars have spoken of the 'spontaneous' develop­ment of towns.[231] A somewhat original argument has been advanced by G. V Alferova.[232] According to her, towns were planned, but the planning took a different form from the regular, geometrically based system of much West­ern planning from medieval times onwards which ultimately derived from the Greek conceptions of Hippodamus. Alferova believed that Russian ideas on planning took their origin from Byzantine laws and practices which were translated and appeared in Russian legal anthologies and similar texts from an early period. The latter were used in princely law courts, but it is unclear how far the laws applying to urban affairs were applied, at least before the seventeenth century (there is a faint echo of Byzantine urban conceptions in the Ulozhenie).[233] The argument is that the Byzantine tradition paid less heed to regularity of form than to such matters as heights of and distances between buildings (views, ventilation, effects of shadow), the width of streets, prop­erty boundaries, hygiene, vegetation, drainage and water supply. There was, according to Alferova, overall concern with the profile of the townscape. After about the fourteenth century, she avers, towns were founded and developed according to a well-regulated procedure which included proper documenta­tion and adherence to ritual practice. The problem is that there appears to be only limited documentary evidence to support some of these assertions. What may or may not have appeared in legal texts may tell us little or nothing about actual practice. Moreover, some of Alferova's claims almost amount to a belief in a sophisticated form of landscape architecture long before such a thing was possible. Clearly this is an area which demands more research. It may be that Alferova's study points the way to a deeper understanding of the symbolism enshrined in townscape than has been usual to date. But whether what she writes about is 'planning' is quite a different matter.

Conclusion

Whereas a traditional approach to the study of Russian towns has emphasised their sluggish development and particularly their backwardness relative to European towns of the period, this chapter has emphasised another angle, following the thought of Jan de Vries.[234] This is to view towns as elements in a network and to consider their role as co-ordinators of a growing series of activities across the state. By the seventeenth century most Russian towns were multifunctional and acted as important nodes (albeit varying in their individual importance) for the organisation of commercial, administrative, military, cultural and sacred space. This process of growing nodal significance is termed by de Vries 'structural urbanisation'.[235] To view the towns only in terms of their commercial role, in other words, is to miss one of the most important things about them. And it is to overlook the vital role they played in the building of the Russian state.

26

Popular revolts

MAUREEN PERRIE

The election of Michael Romanov as tsar in 1613 is conventionally seen as marking the end of the Time of Troubles, but social unrest continued for some time. The cossack leader Ivan Zarutskii based himself in Astrakhan' in 1613-14 with his mistress Marina Mniszech, the widow of the First and Second False Dmitriis, and promoted the claim to the throne of her infant son, 'Tsarevich' Ivan Dmitrievich. Zarutskii and the little pretender were executed in the summer of 1614 and, although the cossacks continued to create problems for the government in 1614-15, subsequent protests against the new regime were only sporadic. The conclusion of peace with Sweden in 1617 and with Poland in 1618 brought an end to foreign intervention, and the next decade and a half was a period of relative stability for Russia, both internally and externally.

In 1632 Tsar Michael's government took advantage of the interregnum in Poland-Lithuania which followed the death of King Sigismund III. An army led by the boyar M. B. Shein was dispatched to the western frontier in a bid to regain Smolensk, which had been ceded to the Poles in the Treaty of Deulino of 1618. Thereafter Russia was to be involved almost continuously in warfare (see Chapter 21); the economic and social strains created by these wars contributed in large part to the series of popular revolts which caused the period to be described as 'the rebellious century'. The principal urban uprisings occurred in Moscow and other towns in 1648-50, and in the capital in 1662 and 1682; the most extensive revolt was the great cossack-peasant uprising led by Sten'ka Razin, in 1670-1. The first part of this chapter will provide a chronological overview of the revolts; the second will examine the social composition of their participants; and the third will consider the aims and demands they embodied, within the common framework of 'rebellions in the name of the tsar'.

The sequence of revolts

The first symptoms of unrest occurred against the background of the unsuc­cessful Smolensk war of 1632-4. The government called for volunteers to supplement the regular army, and many peasants and bondsmen rallied to the appeal, calling themselves 'free cossacks' and acting semi-independently as partisans in the vicinity of the front, sometimes in association with bands of Don cossacks. Their actions were often directed against the property of local Russian landowners rather than against the Poles, and their ranks were swollen by deserters from Shein's army. Soviet historians called this movement the 'Balashovshchina' after one of its early leaders, Ivan Balash, an enserfed monastery peasant from Dorogobuzh uezd who died in captivity in 1633. The rural unrest soon subsided, and its remnants were suppressed by government troops after the conclusion of the Peace of Polianovka with Poland in June 1634. The episode had echoes in the capital. When the irregular 'cossack' leaders Anisim Chertoprud and Ivan Teslev came to Moscow for negotiations with the government, many discontented slaves and other members of the lower orders took advantage of the opportunity to escape from the city by volunteer­ing to join their bands.[236] The Russians' failure to capture Smolensk provoked allegations that the army commanders had turned traitor; according to the Holstein envoy Adam Olearius, the government was obliged to execute Shein under pressure from the Moscow mob, who threatened a popular uprising.[237]Two years later, a fire in the central Kitai-gorod district of the capital in March 1636 was followed by extensive looting of merchants' property; but this seems to have been primarily a case ofcriminal opportunism rather than a significant episode of social or political conflict.[238]

The events of 1648-50 were much more serious. The uprising which began in Moscow in June 1648 is often known as the 'salt riot'. In fact the unpopular tax on salt, introduced in 1646, had been abolished at the end of 1647, but other direct taxes were tripled to compensate for the loss ofrevenue, and resentment of the tax burden was an important underlying cause of the subsequent unrest. On 1 June the young Tsar Alexis was returning from a pilgrimage when he was met on the outskirts of the capital by a crowd who attempted to present him with a petition. The citizens were complaining about abuses committed by L. S. Pleshcheev, the head of the Zemskii prikaz, the chancellery which had primary responsibility for the administration of Moscow. The fact that the tsar - in defiance of the traditionally paternalistic relationship between ruler and subject in Muscovy - not only refused to accept the petition, but also ordered the arrest of some of the petitioners, angered the crowd. The next day Alexis again found himself surrounded by indignant Muscovites, who heckled and jostled the boyars and officials who were sent out to nego­tiate with them. On 2 and 3 June the crowds, now joined by many of the strel'tsy (musketeers) stationed in the capital, began to attack the homes and property of the most unpopular members of the ruling elite. These included not only Pleshcheev, but also the tsar's brother-in-law B. I. Morozov, and P. T. Trakhaniotov, the head of the Pushkarskii prikaz (Artillery Chancellery). Nazarii Chistyi, who was held responsible for the hated salt tax, was lynched by the mob - he was cut to pieces and his body was dumped on a dung heap. On 3 June Alexis sent a new delegation of boyars, including his kinsman N. I. Romanov, to speak to the people. The boyars agreed to hand Pleshcheev over, and he was butchered by the crowd. On 5 June, in response to the insur­gents' demands, Trakhaniotov was executed. Fires broke out in various parts of Moscow - leading to predictably contradictory accusations of arson - and much of the city was burned to the ground. The disturbances continued, and a week later Morozov was exiled to the Kirillo-Belozerskii monastery, after the intervention of some nobles and merchants who persuaded the govern­ment to convene an Assembly of the Land. A broadly representative assem­bly met in September, and in January 1649 it approved the new Law Code known as the Ulozhenie, which finally enserfed the peasantry and abolished the tax-immune 'white quarters' in the towns. By a judicious combination of concessions and repressions, the government gradually restored its authority; Morozov was allowed to return from his northerly place of exile in October 1648, and by the beginning of the following year he had regained the reins of

power.[239]

Uprisings also occurred in various provincial towns in 1648-9: in Kozlov, Kursk, Voronezh, Novosil' and others in the south; in Sol'vychegodsk and Ustiug Velikii in the north; and in several parts of Siberia.[240] The Siberian town of Tomsk remained in the hands of insurgents for a particularly long period: a revolt against the governor, Prince O. I. Shcherbatyi, which had begun in April 1648 (even before the uprising in Moscow) continued until August 1649.[241]

In some cases the revolts in provincial towns were triggered by news of the events in Moscow. In Kozlov the local servicemen had been complaining to the Moscow authorities about abuses by the town governor and other officials since i647.On 11 June 1648, when a group of petitioners returned from Moscow with news of the uprising in the capital, attacks were launched on the 'best people' (the wealthy and privileged), and the governor and many of the gentry fled from the town.[242] In Kursk the conflict arose over the government's right to search for runaway strel'tsy and cossacks who had found refuge in the town as monastery peasants. The musketeer captain Konstantin Teglev was murdered on 5 July when he tried to enforce the search, and an indignant crowd threatened the lives and property of other representatives of the local authorities. The townspeople cited the killing of 'traitors' in Moscow as a precedent for the lynching of Teglev: 'Better men than he are being killed in Moscow,' affirmed the monastery peasant Kuz'ma Vedenitsyn, who had just returned from the capital.[243] In Voronezh, Novosil', Sol'vychegodsk and Ustiug Velikii, too, there is evidence that the disturbances were stimulated by the arrival of news that boyars and officials were being attacked in Moscow. Reports that the insurgents in the capital had not been punished, and that concessions had been made to their demands, produced a strong impression in the provinces, and led to 'copy­cat' actions in some towns.[244] In parts ofthe south-west, urban disturbances may have been influenced not only by news ofthe events in Moscow, but also by the cossack rising led by Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi, which broke out in i648 in the neighbouring Ukrainian and Belarusian territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.[245]

The risings of 1650 in Pskov and Novgorod, in the north-west of Russia, had a specific context of their own. In i649 a Russian embassy to Stockholm agreed to pay compensation to the Swedes for fugitives who had settled in Muscovy from territory ceded to Sweden in the Peace of Stolbovo of 1617. Part of the payment was to be made in the form of rye, and the Pskov merchant Fedor Emel'ianov was entrusted by the Moscow government with the task of buying up this grain. As a result of Emel'ianov's transactions the price of rye soared, creating severe hardship and subsequent discontent in both Pskov and Novgorod. The unrest in Pskov came to a head when the Swedish agent Login Nummens arrived in the town on 28 February to collect the grain; the appearance in Novgorod on 15 March of the Danish envoy Evert Krabbe, who was suspected of being a Swedish agent, triggered a similar reaction. In both towns the homes of rich merchants were raided and the city gov­ernors were placed under house arrest. The Moscow authorities dispatched the military commander Prince I. N. Khovanskii against the rebellious cities. Novgorod surrendered on 13 April, but Pskov remained defiant and with­stood a siege from Khovanskii's troops until a settlement was negotiated in August.[246]

The next major uprising in the capital, the 'copper riot' of 1662, occurred against the background of the protracted war with Poland (which had been under way since 1654), exacerbated by a conflict with Sweden in 1656-8. In its search for revenue to fund its military operations, the government resorted not only to increased taxation, but also to a currency reform which sub­stituted copper coinage for silver. Counterfeit coins also came into circula­tion, adding to price inflation. Measures taken by the government against the forgers, many of whom occupied prominent positions in the chancel­leries, did little to appease the citizens; rather, they simply fuelled suspi­cion of treason in high places. On 25 July the musketeer Kuz'ma Nagaev summoned the citizens to assemble on Red Square. A large contingent marched to the village of Kolomenskoe, on the outskirts of Moscow, where the tsar and his court were in residence. Alexis managed to persuade the protestors that their allegations would be fully investigated, and they returned to Moscow. In the capital, meanwhile, attacks had already begun on the homes of the wealthy merchants Vasilii Shorin and Semen Zadorin. The tsar sent Prince I. A. Khovanskii to calm the situation in the city centre, but his mission was unsuccessful and another crowd of insurgent Muscovites headed for Kolomenskoe. Alexis again tried to appease them with promises, but when words failed he used loyal troops to disperse and bloodily repress the rebels.[247]

The 'copper riot' lasted for only a single day, and was confined to Moscow; but the next major upheaval - the Razin revolt - was much more protracted and extensive.[248] After the legal enserfment of the peasantry in 1649 the gov­ernment took active measures to prevent peasants from fleeing to the south­ern and eastern frontier regions, where they had traditionally found refuge with the cossack bands who frequented the basins of the rivers Don, Volga, Terek and Iaik. Pressure was exerted on the Don cossacks, in particular, to return peasant fugitives to the centre. The government cut its supplies of food, money and weaponry to the Don host. This policy resulted in consid­erable hardship for the poorer cossacks, and symptoms of their distress soon appeared. In 1666 a detachment of several hundred Don cossacks, led by Vasilii Us, rode northwards; from their encampment near Tula they sent a delegation to Moscow with a request that they be taken into state service. While they awaited the tsar's response, their ranks were swollen by runaway peasants and bondsmen from the Tula and Voronezh regions, and even from Moscow itself. In order to obtain provisions, they raided and looted landowners' estates. The government mustered regular troops against them, and the cossacks retreated to the Don, accompanied by significant numbers of their new recruits from the central districts. Many ofthem, including Vasilii Us himself, were to participate in the Razin revolt which broke out soon afterwards.

In 1667, on the conclusion of the prolonged war with Poland, the situation on the Don deteriorated further, as cossacks returned from fighting in the Ukraine, and there was a further influx of refugees. It was in this context that the ataman (chieftain) Stepan Timofeevich (Sten'ka) Razin organised a piratical expedition in which several hundred cossacks crossed to the Volga above Tsaritsyn and sailed downstream to the Caspian Sea, where their raids went north to Iaitsk at the mouth of the Iaik River, and then south into Persian waters. In the late summer of i669 Razin left the Caspian and returned to the Don by the Volga route, having been allowed to pass through Astrakhan' and Tsaritsyn unmolested by the tsarist authorities. He wintered on an island in the Don near Kagal'nik, where he attracted a host of impoverished and discontented followers.

In the spring of 1670 Razin decided on a much bolder enterprise than his primarily piratical expedition of 1667-9: an attack on the Russian heartland to eradicate the 'traitor-boyars' in Moscow. In May Razin and his cossacks crossed again from the Don to the Volga, and captured Tsaritsyn. But instead ofheading up the Volga towards Moscow, they decidedto consolidate their rear, and moved downriver to take Astrakhan'. The cossacks' capture of the fortress was facilitated by a popular uprising in the city. There ensued a massacre of the privileged elites of Astrakhan': the governor, Prince I. S. Prozorovskii, was thrown to his death from the top of a tower, and his two young sons were tortured. In July Razin again headed upstream, the mid-Volga towns of Saratov and Samara surrendering to him without resistance. As the cossacks moved up the Volga, they distributed 'seditious letters' in the surrounding villages, provoking a widespread peasant revolt. Estates were looted, manor houses burned and landowners murdered. Some of the non-Russian peoples of the Volga were also drawn into the rising, especially the Mordva, the Mari and the Chuvash. The rebels' triumphant advance was eventually arrested at Simbirsk. The town's garrison held out against the rebel siege for more than a month, before being relieved by fresh troops from Kazan', who defeated Razin at the beginning of October. At about the same time Sten'ka's brother Frol, who was sailing up the Don in a parallel enterprise, was halted south of Voronezh by government troops. By the winter of 1670-1, although the rebellion continued to spread in some regions, its back had been broken, and the government was on the offensive. Punitive expeditions were sent down the Volga and the Don, brutally repressing the revolt. Razin himself was captured on the Don by service cossacks in April 1671 and executed in Moscow in June.

A major uprising, often known as the 'Khovanshchina' (and depicted in Musorgskii's opera of that name) occurred in the capital in 1682.[249] Although the eponymous Khovanskii princes played an important part in the events, the main role in the revolt belonged to the strel'tsy, nearly 15,000 of whom were stationed in Moscow at the beginning of the year. The musketeers had complained about harsh treatment by their officers in the winter of 1681-2, but they failed to obtain satisfactory redress from the authorities. The situation was exacerbated by a dynastic crisis. On 27 April Tsar Fedor died childless, creating a problem for the succession to the throne. The choice lay between Ivan, Fedor's only surviving full brother (from their father's first marriage to Mariia Miloslavskaia), and Peter, the only son of Tsar Alexis's second wife, Natal'ia Naryshkina. Ivan was sixteen, but physically and mentally handicapped; Peter was intelligent and healthy, but not yet ten years old. On the day of Fedor's death, a hastily convened Assembly of the Land chose the younger brother as tsar; custom therefore dictated that his mother should be regent. This resolu­tion of the succession issue was controversial, however, and the grievances of the strel'tsy against their commanders were soon extended to the Naryshkins and their supporters, who had - it was claimed - usurped the throne from Ivan, the rightful heir, in order to establish boyar rule during Peter's minority.

On30 April, in response to a petition from the rank-and-file strel'tsy, Tsaritsa Natal'ia ordered that some of their most corrupt officers should be flogged. This did not satisfy the strel'tsy, and on 15-17 May they rioted, bursting into the Kremlin and brutally murdering members of the Naryshkin clan and their allies. A compromise solution to the dynastic crisis was provided by the novel arrangement that Ivan and Peter should rule jointly, but with Ivan as the 'first' tsar and his full sister Sophia as de facto regent. The strel'tsy continued to influence events throughout the summer. They insisted on being renamed 'court infantry', and on 6 June they erected a large column on Red Square on which they listed the victims of the uprising of 15-17 May and justified their 'execution' as traitors. Prince I. A. Khovanskii, who had become head of the Musketeer Chancellery (Streletskii prikaz) after the uprising, tried to use the situation to promote his own interests. In July he organised a debate between a deputation of Old Believers (who enjoyed considerable support among the strel'tsy) and representatives of the official Church, in the presence of Tsarevna Sophia and her sisters. Sophia, however, soon gained the upper hand. Khovanskii and his son Andrei were accused of treason and executed in September. In October the regent was able to muster regular troops to protect her, the strel'tsy submitted to her authority and she established control over the capital.

Unrest continued for some time on the Don and in other parts ofthe south. This had begun before the Moscow events, when the Peace of Bakhchisarai of 1681 with Turkey and the Crimea blocked the cossacks' access to the Black Sea. In the spring of 1682 some Don cossacks planned to follow Razin's example and attack the Russian heartland; news of the unrest in the capital subse­quently encouraged them to go to the aid of the strel'tsy against the boyars.

The initiative was nipped in the bud by government troops, but sporadic dis­turbances occurred in a number of south-western districts in 1682-3.[250]

The social composition of the rebels

What was the nature of these revolts, and how much did they have in common? Soviet historians drew a distinction between the Razin revolt, on the one hand, which was characterised as a 'peasant war' (more specifically, as the 'second peasant war', following that of Bolotnikov in 1606-7), and the urban revolts, such as those of 1648-50, on the other. In practice this distinction is somewhat artificial. The term 'peasant war' is just as problematic in its application to the Razin revolt as it is to the Bolotnikov episode.[251] Not only was the main leadership provided by cossacks, but the rebellion also involved uprisings in the lower Volga towns, from Astrakhan' to Tsaritsyn, whose participants were similar to those of the urban revolts in 1648-50, 1662 and 1682. But if the 'peasant war' of 1669-71 included urban participants, some of the urban risings of 1648-50 spilled over into the surrounding countryside and involved peasants in neighbouring villages.

Let us look first at the uprisings in the capital. The initial impulse for the revolt in Moscow in 1648 was provided by the ordinary townspeople (arti­sans and tradesmen) whose petition was rejected by the tsar; the strel'tsy also became involved at an early stage. The gentry took advantage of the unrest to present their own petitions, and they ended up as the main beneficiaries when the government made a major concession to them (the convening of the Assembly of the Land which approved the Ulozhenie of 1649) in order to split the opposition. The social composition of the revolt was therefore fairly heterogeneous, including representatives of relatively privileged groups, such as the gentry and merchants. The main participants in the 1662 'copper riot' were artisans and tradesmen, and petty military servitors; the strel'tsy played only a minor role. The 1682 uprising, by contrast, was largely dominated by the strel'tsy. For both the 1648 and 1682 revolts, there is some evidence that these were not purely spontaneous outbursts of protest by the lower classes, but that various individuals from the ruling elites incited or influenced the course of events. In 1648 the popular protests about Morozov benefited his enemies, N. I. Romanov and Prince Ia. K. Cherkasskii; in 1682 Tsarevich Ivan's kins­men, the Miloslavskiis, were thought to have encouraged the protests of the strel'tsy against Peter's election as tsar, while the subsequent conflict between Tsarevna Sophia and Prince I. A. Khovanskii affected the outcome of the affair.[252]

The role of the bond-slaves in the Moscow revolts was a somewhat ambigu­ous one. In terms of their social position, the bondsmen themselves ranged from impoverished domestic servants to the relatively privileged military slaves. The latter were likely to support their masters against the insurgents, while the house-slaves, even if they sympathised with the poorer sections of the townspeople, were often too dependent on their lords to risk participating in any challenges to their authority. Nevertheless, there is some evidence of the involvement of slaves in the revolts. One source indicates that runaway slaves participated in the looting which followed the fires in Moscow in early June 1648, and another claims that on 27 June the boyars' slaves in the capi­tal demanded their freedom, as a result of which six of them were executed and seventy-two were imprisoned.[253] In 1662 there were relatively few slaves among the insurgents, while some actively participated in the suppression of the revolt.[254] In 1682 the 'boyars' people' (slaves) presented a petition to the two tsars on 26 May, asking for freedom, but they received little support from the strel'tsy, whose grievances had been largely assuaged by the election of Ivan as 'first tsar'.[255]

The composition of the participants in the urban revolts in the provinces in 1648-50 reflected the varied social structures of the towns affected. The frontier towns in the south and in Siberia were primarily fortresses, and here the main role in the uprisings was played by the petty servicemen 'by con­tract', such as the strel'tsy and urban cossacks. Many of these servicemen were engaged in crafts and trades, and even in peasant-style agriculture, in order to supplement the inadequate monetary payments they received from the state. Their interests and grievances were therefore very similar to those of the taxpaying townspeople in other regions. The northern towns of Ustiug and Sol'vychegodsk, where unrest occurred in 1648, were important manu­facturing and trading centres. Here the main participants in the disturbances were the poorer townspeople, such as artisans and traders, and their actions were directed primarily against local officials responsible for tax collection, and against those merchants who were regarded as the closest allies of the town authorities. Pskov and Novgorod were the two largest commercial cities of the north-west. In both cases in 1650 the townspeople as a whole, together with the musketeers from the garrison, rose up against the city governors and rich merchants who were implicated in the sale of grain to Sweden. In Pskov, where the uprising continued for six months, sharp divisions developed between the richer merchants and hereditary servicemen, on the one hand, and the poorer townspeople and strel'tsy, on the other, concerning the terms on which they would surrender to the besieging government forces. During the siege of Pskov the peasants in some neighbouring villages joined raiding parties of insurgent townspeople in attacking Khovanskii's troops and looting landlords' estates.[256]

The Razin revolt was the most heterogeneous of all the later seventeenth- century uprisings. Its main leadership was provided by cossacks. For Soviet historians, this was not inconsistent with their designation of the rebellion as a 'peasant war', since many cossacks were of peasant origin. But, as other scholars have recognised, cossacks had a very different identity from peas­ants. The Don cossacks who spearheaded the Razin revolt were independent mercenary cavalrymen who voluntarily offered their services to the tsar in return for the supplies they received from his government. Razin himself belonged to the more prosperous section of the cossacks, but most of his followers came from the poorer strata. Many of these destitute cossacks had only recently come to the Don, and settled in its upper reaches. In the sum­mer of 1670, as Razin conquered the lower Volga, his cossacks were joined by strel'tsy, soldiers and other petty servicemen from the garrisons of the occupied towns, together with some sailors from the ports, and townspeo­ple who had taken part in the urban uprisings which were triggered by the rebels' approach. Non-Russians from the mid-Volga - Chuvash, Mordva, Mari and Tatars - gave the rebellion a distinctively multi-ethnic character. Russian peasants played a part only in the latter stages of the insurrection, as the rebels moved into the mid-Volga region with its gentry estates farmed by serf labour. One of the few recorded examples of female involvement in these seventeenth-century revolts is the case of Alena, a nun of peasant origin from the town of Arzamas, who commanded a detachment of 7,000 men before being captured and burned alive on the orders of the tsar's general, Prince Iu. A. Dolgorukii.[257]

Soviet historians sometimes defined 'peasant wars' as 'civil wars of the feudal period',[258] but in comparison to the Time of Troubles (and even to the Bolotnikov episode within it) the geographical scope of the Razin revolt was relatively limited, focusing on the river basins of the Volga and Don. Thus it is more appropriate to describe it as a 'frontier rebellion' rather than a 'civil war': in that respect - and in its social composition - it is more similar to the Pugachev revolt of 1773-5 than to the Time of Troubles. Like Pugachev's, Razin's uprising had professional military leadership, provided by the cossacks, and the insurgents formed large armies which engaged in open conflict with government troops. To that extent it constituted a more significant threat to political stability than the urban insurrections; and it was met with a much harsher and less conciliatory response from the authorities.

Finally, it is worth noting that religious issues played a part in some revolts. The non-Russian peoples of the mid-Volga who supported Razin were mostly Muslims, and their grievances against the Russian government's policy of forcibly converting them to Christianity had fuelled the constant series of rebellions which they had staged since Muscovy's annexation of the Volga khanates in the mid-sixteenth century. Razin made a bid for their support, and one of his appeals to the Kazan' Tatars invoked the Prophet Mohammed.[259]After the schism in the Orthodox Church, Old Beliefbecame an issue in some ofthe uprisings. There is evidence that Razin had contacts in the Old-Believer stronghold of Solovki, the island monastery in the White Sea which held out against a siege by government forces for eight years, from 1668 to 1676. But Razin's religious appeal was somewhat inconsistent: not only did he invoke the Prophet, but he also presented himself as a champion of Nikon, who had been deposed as patriarch in 1666 and imprisoned in the Ferapontov monastery. The rebels claimed that Nikon accompanied them on their voyage up the Volga. The cossacks believed that Nikon, whom they described as their 'father', had been removed from office by the boyars. They cursed his successor Ioasaf, and planned to restore Nikon to the patriarchate.[260] In 1682 Khovanskii appealed to Old-Believer sympathies among the strel'tsy when he organised the debate with the schismatics; and Old Belief among the Don cossacks was an influence on their unrest in 1682-3.

'Rebellions in the name of the tsar'

All of these revolts, to a greater or lesser extent, assumed the form of'rebellions in the name of the tsar': that is, they were directed primarily against the 'traitor-boyars' rather than against the reigningtsar. In this respect they differed significantly from most ofthe rebellions during the Time of Troubles, which were aimed against rulers, such as Boris Godunov or Vasilii Shuiskii, who were identified as usurpers; the insurgents sought to replace them with pretenders whom they claimed to be the 'true' tsar, treacherously removed from the throne or from the succession (the first two False Dmitriis).

In the revolts which took place under the first Romanovs, the rebels com­monly described their main targets as 'traitor-boyars'. These were not exclu­sively 'boyars' in the narrow sense of the tsar's highest-ranking counsellors; rather, they belonged to a category sometimes identified as 'the strong men'. In addition to boyars and okol'nichie, this group included high chancellery officials, rich merchants and provincial governors. In Moscow in 1648 the chief 'traitors' whose deaths the crowds demanded were the boyar Boris Morozov, the okol'nichie Petr Trakhaniotov, the conciliar secretary (dumnyi d'iak) Nazarii Chistyi and the judge Leontii Pleshcheev.[261] In 1662 the eight 'traitors' listed in the insurgents' proclamation were the boyars I. D. and I. M. Miloslavskii, the okol'nichie F. M. Rtishchev and B. M. Khitrovo, the secretary D. M. Bashmakov and the merchants V. G. and B. V. Shorin and S. Zadorin.[262] Sten'ka Razin called on his cossacks 'to go to Rus' against the sovereign's enemies and traitors and to eradicate the traitor boyars and counsel­lors from the Muscovite state, and the governors and officials in the towns'.[263]The seventeen victims of the revolt of 15-17 May 1682 included five boyars (the Princes Iu. A. and M. Iu. Dolgorukii, Prince G. G. Romodanovskii, A. S. Matveev and I. K. Naryshkin); and the conciliar secretaries L. I. Ivanov and A. S. Kirillov.[264]

Not allboyars were regarded as traitors, however. On3 June 1648 the Moscow crowd cried out that N. I. Romanov should rule them alongside the tsar, in place of B. I. Morozov; and in Pskov, in 1650, Romanov was identified as a boyar who 'cared about the land'.[265] Prince I. A. Khovanskii was described as a 'good' person by the Moscow insurgents of 1662; and in 1682 the strel'tsy referred to him as their 'father'.[266] In his address to the cossack circle at Panshin Gorodok in May 1670, Razin described some boyars as 'good', because they provided the cossacks with food and drink when they visited Moscow.[267]

The insurgents therefore distinguished between 'good' and 'bad' members of the ruling elite, so that the revolts were not simply indiscriminate attacks on all 'feudal' lords, as some of the cruder Soviet Marxist class-struggle interpre­tations implied, but were directed only against those who were most detested by the ordinary people. In some cases the rebels invited the crowd to pass judgement on their proposed victims. Razin asked the people of Astrakhan' to decide who should be put to death; and in Moscow in 1682 the strel'tsy called for the crowd's approval before killing their enemies.[268]

The cruelty of the insurgents' punishment and killing of their victims is a common theme in contemporary accounts of these revolts. The 'traitors' were sometimes literally torn apart in an explosion of mob violence; after death their bodies were frequently defiled and abused. The looting of the victims' property may be seen as a crude form of redistribution of wealth; its burning and destruction was a more symbolic form of popular rejection of privilege. For all the understandable indignation expressed in elite sources about the violence involved in the rebels' reprisals against their victims, the forms assumed by popular retribution often resembled those of official pun­ishments, especially the torturing and execution of'traitor-boyars' during Ivan the Terrible's oprichnina.[269] And it should be borne in mind that the tsarist gov­ernment's repression of the revolts - especially the Razin uprising - involved much greater and more extensive cruelty than that practised by the rebels themselves.

In order to legitimise their attacks on their chosen victims, the rebels reg­ularly accused them of treason. They commonly alleged that the 'traitor- boyars' exploited and oppressed the peasants and townsfolk. The com­plaints of the insurgents in Moscow in 1648, for example, focused on abuses and maladministration by the power holders.[270] Exploitation of the ordi­nary people was frequently associated with harm to the interests of the state, as the Russian historian N. N. Pokrovskii has noted in his detailed study of the uprising of i648-9 in Tomsk, where the petitioners accused the town governor, Prince O. I. Shcherbatyi, of reducing the tsar's revenue through his impoverishment of the peasants and indigenous peoples of the district.[271]

Other types of treason were also alleged - although often these allegations had little or no foundation. Claims of plots against the life of the tsar and other members of the royal family were very common. In 1648-50 rumours spread to provincial towns that the boyars had tried to kill Tsar Alexis. Razin blamed the boyars for the recent deaths of Tsaritsa Mariia Il'inichna and the tsareviches Aleksei and Simeon Alekseevich. In 1682 the rebel Muscovites accused the 'traitors' of having murdered Tsar Fedor and Tsarevich Ivan, in order to clear the way for Peter's succession to the throne.[272]

Finally, the insurgents' adversaries were regularly accused of 'external' trea­son, that is, of secret dealings with Russia's foreign enemies. In Pskov and Novgorod in i650 the dispatch of grain and money to Sweden led to suspi­cions that the city governors and local merchants were Swedish agents, and that the conspiracy also involved some of the boyars in Moscow, including B. I. Morozov. In 1662 the boyars were accused of corresponding with the Polish king and planning to surrender Muscovy to the Poles; and rumours circulated that officials in the Musketeer Chancellery had substituted sand for gunpowder in supplies of ammunition sent to the army at the front. In 1682 the boyar Prince G. G. Romodanovskii was said to have sympathised with the Turkish sultan and the Crimean khan in the recent Chyhyryn campaign.[273] In their choice of allegations against their enemies, as well as in the forms of cruel punishment they inflicted upon them, the seventeenth-century insur­gents may have modelled themselves on state terror directed against 'traitors': in the period of the oprichnina, Tsar Ivan IV had made accusations of both 'internal' and 'external' treason against the boyars, and their 'internal' treason was said to have involved oppression of the people as well as harm to the prosperity of the state.[274] More broadly, protestors often made use of the same type of rhetoric against corruption as was employed in official statements by the Moscow government.

In most popular revolts, the 'evil' traitor-boyars were contrasted with the 'good' tsar. In 1648-50, however, there is some evidence that the rebels criticised the ruler himself. In Moscow, Alexis was described as 'young and foolish', and even as a 'traitor'; similar 'unseemly words' were recorded in Pskov and Novgorod. Rumours had circulated in Tsar Michael's reign that Alexis and his younger brother, Tsarevich Ivan, were changelings, non-royal boys substituted for baby daughters born to Tsaritsa Evdokiia. But the tsar's critics in 1648-50 do not appear to have questioned his legitimacy as ruler, or to have rejected the monarchy as an institution: rather, Alexis was depicted as a tool of the traitor- boyars, and pressure was exerted on him to replace them with 'wise advisers'.[275]Young and inexperienced tsars were evidently seen as particularly susceptible to the influence of'wicked counsellors': in 1682 the strel'tsy expressed fears that the nine-year-old Peter's election as tsar would mean that unjust and corrupt boyars would be the real rulers.[276]

Doubts about the legitimacy of the new dynasty had been expressed in the reign of Tsar Michael, when the authorities reported numerous cases of 'sovereign's word and deed' (slovo i delo gosudarevy, lese-majeste) allega­tions criticising the Romanovs. Rumours even spread that 'Tsar Dmitrii' was still alive. In spite of these concerns, royal impostors (samozvantsy), who had played such a prominent part in the Time of Troubles, were much less evident in Russia in subsequent decades. Pretenders claiming to be Tsarevich Ivan Dmitrievich, Marina Mniszech's son by the Second False Dmitrii, were reported in Poland and the Crimea in the 1640s; and false Shuiskiis (including the notorious Timoshka Ankudinov, who claimed vari­ous royal identities) appeared in Poland and Moldavia - but none of these had any connection with the popular revolts within Muscovy itself.[277] Some cases were recorded of Russians calling themselves tsars or tsareviches; but, according to a recent study, this 'popular pretence' was more of a cul­tural than a political phenomenon: a reflection of the notion that to be a tsar meant the possession of exceptional superiority over ordinary peo­ple.[278] The apparently non-political nature of many of these claims to royal status did not, however, mean that the tsarist government considered them to be innocuous: on the contrary, they were rigorously prosecuted as political crimes.

The first evidence ofpretence associated with popular revolt is found in the Razin uprising. Although the revolt had begun in May 1670 as a classic 'rebellion in the name of the tsar' against the 'traitor-boyars', by the late summer, as the cossacks moved up the Volga, Razin was spreading rumours that they were accompanied by Tsarevich Aleksei Alekseevich (who had died in 1670) as well as by the deposed patriarch Nikon. It is not clear whether there was an actual pretender-tsarevich in Razin's flotilla, or whether the cossacks were simply using his name in order to justify their actions. Certainly there is no evidence that the rebels planned to overthrow Tsar Alexis and replace him with his 'son' - rather, it seems that they were claiming that the tsarevich would lead them to Moscow to attack the 'traitor-boyars' who had supposedly plotted to kill him. In 1673 a false Tsarevich Simeon Alekseevich appeared in Zaporozh'e (the real Simeon had died in 1669 at the age of four): he too seemed to be hostile to the boyars rather than to his 'father', Tsar Alexis. These pretender-tsareviches were not counterposed to the reigning tsar, but served to provide legitimacy for popular revolts against the 'traitor-boyars'.[279]

Other forms of 'popular monarchism' in this period involved rumours about official documents. The disturbances in Voronezh and Ustiug Velikii in 1648 were triggered by (unfounded) reports that official letters had been received calling on the townspeople to follow the example of the Muscovites and attack rich merchants: the alleged existence of such documents served to legitimise attacks on the local elites. In other cases, for example in Tomsk in 1649 and in Novgorod and Pskov in 1650, when real documents condemning the revolts arrived from Moscow, the rebels maintained that they had been falsified by the boyars or officials: these claims rationalised the insurgents' refusal to obey orders instructing them to surrender to the authorities. Such rumours reflected the popular belief that true justice would be sanctioned by

the tsar, and that letters in his name must embody such justice.[280]

***

The evidence which we have considered in this chapter suggests that these seventeenth-century revolts were directed primarily against individuals rather than against institutions, and that their participants were mainly concerned with the redress of specific grievances rather than with the advocacy of any coherent programme of reform, let alone revolution. Only in the case of the Razin revolt do we find an indication of broader aims. In his speech to the cossacks at Panshin Gorodok, Razin called on them all 'to drive the traitors out of the Muscovite state and to give the common people freedom'.[281] Accord­ing to a contemporary English account of his Volga campaign: 'Every where he promised Liberty, and a redemption from the Yoak (so he call'd it) of the Bojars or Nobles; which he said were the oppressors of the Countrey . . . '.[282]The aim of 'liberty' and freedom from oppression is rather vague; but some indication of what it meant in practice is provided by accounts of the rebels' sojourn in Astrakhan', indicating that they destroyed the documents which reg­istered slaves, thereby granting the bondsmen their freedom. Similar actions are recorded in the Moscow risings of 1648 and 1682.[283] In some towns which were under the insurgents' control, cossack-style 'circles' replaced the existing authorities.[284] But it would be rash to conclude on the basis of this kind of evidence that the rebels aimed to abolish slavery and serfdom as institutions, or to introduce some type of grass-roots democracy.

In so far as there was a common factor in the very diverse popular revolts which occurred under the first Romanovs, it may be identified as protest against the expansion of the state, against its infringement of the traditional rights and freedoms of townspeople, peasants and cossacks, and against the increased burden of taxation which it imposed upon them. These protests took place in the name of good tsars with wise advisers, who would protect their people against traitor-boyars and corrupt officials (an idealised version of the paternalistic monarchy of the sixteenth century); but they did little to prevent the further growth ofthe bureaucratic state under Peter the Great and his successors.

The Orthodox Church and the schism

ROBERT O. CRUMMEY

The seventeenth century was a time of bitter conflict and wrenching change in the Orthodox Church of Russia and its relationship with the tsars' govern­ment and society. In this respect, the Church reflected the fissures in Muscovite society and culture of which it was an integral part. After the successful build­ing of a 'national' Church in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, described in an earlier chapter, its leaders faced grave challenges. Critics from within demanded liturgical purity and moral reform and representatives of other branches of Eastern Orthodoxy challenged the legitimacy of Russian national tradition. At critical moments - especially in the pivotal years, 1649-67 - the clashing interests of the tsars' government and Church's leaders disrupted the 'symphony' that, in Orthodox tradition, ideally characterises the relations of Church and state. And laymen and women increasingly rebelled against the Church's claims and its economic power and social privilege. By the first decades of the eighteenth century, the results of these conflicts included a radical redefinition ofthe relationship between Church and state and a schism among the faithful.

The legacy of the past

Several of the most important themes in the history of the Russian Church after 1613 can be traced to pivotal events at the end of the sixteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth. First, in 1589, while visiting the Russian capital in search of financial support, Patriarch Jeremiah of Constantinople agreed, under extreme pressure, to the creation of the Patriarchate ofMoscow and, in 1590 and 1593, the other Orthodox patriarchs accepted the fait accompli. This act both culminated and symbolised the changing relationship between the Greek and Russian branches of Orthodoxy Even after 1589, the Greeks who came to Moscow for alms remained convinced that the Greek 'mother Church' was still the ultimate arbiter of Eastern Orthodox belief and practice.

For their part, the leaders of the Muscovite government and Church were acutely aware of the fact that, after the fall of Byzantium in 1453, the tsardom was the only major Orthodox state left on earth and thus primary guardian of true Christianity.

Second, in the late sixteenth century, the Orthodox Church in the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth faced many threats. The Roman Catholic hier­archy and missionary orders, in alliance with the government of Sigismund III, worked energetically to convert Orthodox believers as did various Protes­tant groups. The Orthodox response took two forms. Lay leaders established centres of Orthodox scholarship and publishing and founded schools. The Ostrih Bible of 1581, the first published translation of the Old and New Testa­ments into Church Slavonic, is the best-known result of these early initiatives. In 1596, however, all but two members of the Orthodox hierarchy of the Commonwealth accepted the Union of Brest under which they recognised the supremacy of the Pope in return for the right to retain the Orthodox liturgy in Slavonic.

From the outset, many Orthodox believers, particularly the leaders of the laity, rejected the union. A network of confraternities spread to all the main urban centres in the Orthodox regions of the Commonwealth and every­where founded schools modelled on the best pedagogical practices of Roman Catholic Europe. By 1633, moreover, the revitalised Orthodox hierarchy had won legal recognition from the crown. In short, the Orthodox Church in Ukraine successfully rebuilt itself as an institution and developed networks of schools and scholars fit to defend Eastern Orthodoxy against its enemies, especially post-Tridentine Roman Catholicism. For the rest of the century, the Orthodox Church in Muscovite Russia had the opportunity to draw upon these experiences and cultural resources.

Third and last, the experience of the Time of Troubles (1598-1613) shaped the later history of the Muscovite Church in two important ways. First, Russia's sufferings undermined the conviction that, as the last Orthodox realm on earth, Muscovy enjoyed God's special blessing. Again and again, contem­poraries asked why God had allowed His people to suffer such devastation. Second, the Troubles emphasised the potential role of the Russian patriarch as leader in revitalising the community. However accurately, tradition holds that Patriarch Hermogen (Germogen) (1606-12) sent out pastoral appeals urging Russians to hold fast to the native tradition of Orthodoxy, reject all com­promise with foreigners and their ways, and give their lives to restore the tsardom. Hermogen's three most powerful seventeenth-century successors - Filaret (1619-34), Nikon (1652-8 or 1666) and Ioakim (1674-90) - all followed his lead, attempting to use their office to impose their convictions and agendas on the Church.

Patriarch Filaret

The election in 1613 of Michael Romanov, teenage scion of a powerful boyar clan related by marriage to the old Riurikid dynasty, traditionally marks the end of the Time of Troubles. The new tsar's father, Filaret, would have been a far stronger candidate for the throne but for the fact that in 1600 he had been tonsured against his will on Boris Godunov's orders - vows that were irrevocable by Eastern Orthodox tradition even though made under duress. Thereafter, although by origin a lay politician and courtier, he could hold only ecclesiastical office. Filaret's career as a prince of the Church was both meteoric and confusing: the First False Dmitrii appointed him Metropolitan of Rostov, and both Vasilii Shuiskii and the Second Pretender recognised him as patriarch, at least temporarily.

In 1619, on his return to Moscow, Filaret ascended the vacant patriarchal throne and, in practice, also acted as effective head of his son's government. Historians have usually characterised him as a forceful, but unimaginative conservative and, after years of imprisonment in Poland, a staunch defender of Muscovite Orthodoxy against Roman Catholic influence.

Filaret strove to strengthen the Church in three ways. First, beginning with his consecration by Patriarch Theophanes ofJerusalem, he systematically built up the power and prestige of the Moscow Patriarchate. He adopted the title Velikii Gosudar' (Great Sovereign), normally applied only to tsars, and, on many occasions, used it in decrees issued jointly with his son. In light of Filaret's position as head of the ruling family, this practice made sense, but set a dan­gerous precedent. He also took practical steps to make the patriarch the most powerful and richest man in Muscovy other than the tsar himself. Through royal grants, he built up an impressive portfolio of estates in all parts of Rus­sia from which he collected revenue and in which he had judicial authority over all but the most serious crimes. To administer these territories and col­lect revenue from the clergy, Filaret created separate patriarchal chancelleries for administration, finances and judicial affairs, parallel to the offices of the state bureaucracy, and a corps of servitors - laymen as well as clergy - to manage them and also to serve as his retinue. In short, as patriarch, he virtu­ally made himself ruler of a separate principality within the realm, a precedent that the more ambitious of his successors eagerly followed.

Second, he adopted practical and symbolic measures to preserve the purity of Muscovite Orthodoxy. Rebuking his immediate predecessor, Metropolitan Iona of Krutitsy, locum tenens in his absence, he insisted, for example, that only Orthodox baptism by triple immersion was valid and therefore that all for­eigners - even Eastern Orthodox believers from the Polish Commonwealth - had to be baptised again in order to be received into the Russian Church. In 1620, a Church Council in Moscow adopted his policy. The driving force behind this exceptionally rigorous stance was probably fear of the corrupt­ing influence of the Uniate movement in the Commonwealth: the anti-Union Orthodox in Ukraine took the same position.

Although Filaret saw Roman Catholicism as Orthodoxy's most danger­ous foe, he also tried to shelter his flock from the pernicious influence of freethinkers and Protestants. As is well known, he had two intellectuals from prominent aristocratic families, S. I. Shakhovskoi and I. A. Khvoros- tinin, imprisoned temporarily in monasteries for disrespect to Orthodoxy or immoral conduct. As for Protestants, many of whom had come to Moscow as mercenary soldiers, he ordered them in 1633 to live exclusively in their own settlement - a foreign, non-Orthodox enclave within the city, later nick­named 'The German Quarter' (nemetskaia sloboda). Military exigencies, how­ever, ruled out any additional limitations on their freedom to work and worship in Moscow.[285]

Third, the 'Gutenberg revolution' belatedly took root in Muscovite Russia at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Printing presented the Church with both an opportunity and a challenge. Well aware of the dangers of open public discussion in print, tsars and patriarchs maintained a virtual monopoly over this revolutionary technology: the official Printing Office (Pechatnyi dvor) published the overwhelming majority of books that appeared in Russia during the seventeenth century. Printing made it possible to provide parishes and monasteries with reliable copies of the service books that the Orthodox liturgy requires. Even so, there were perils, for publishing uniform editions of liturgical books requires the editors to establish authoritative texts. Given centuries of evolving liturgical practice within the Orthodox Commonwealth, leading to different practices in different communities, and the inevitable variations in hand-copied manuscripts, how were editors to decide which variant was truly Orthodox?

As soon as he returned to Moscow, Filaret faced a crisis over this issue. In his absence, Tsar Michael had turned to the leaders of the Holy Trinity monastery, the only important centre of learning in a devastated cultural landscape, and commissioned Abbot Dionysii to prepare new editions of fundamental litur­gical texts beginning with the Sluzhebnik (Missal). He and his collaborators, Arsenii Glukhoi and Ivan Nasedka, compared recent Muscovite editions with a selection of earlier Slavonic and Greek texts and found a number of passages that, in their eyes, were illogical or tinged with heresy. Their work elicited a violent reaction. In 1618, led by Metropolitan Iona, an ecclesiastical council attacked their editions, particularly for small changes in the ceremony of bless­ing the waters at Epiphany, condemned Dionysii and the others as heretics and defrocked them.

Filaret immediately made clear that the Printing House would continue to publish new editions of the liturgical books prepared by the best native scholars. Accordingly, at the urging of Patriarch Theophanes, he pardoned the disgraced editors and sent them back to work. At the same time, he remained vigilant for signs of heresy, particularly Latin influence. He refused to publish the catechism of the Ruthenian monk, Lavrentii Zyzanii; condemned the Evangelie uchitel'noe (Gospels with commentary) of another Ruthenian, Kyryl Tranquillon Stavrovetsky; and attempted to prohibit the importation of all books from the Polish Commonwealth. The patriarch's caution meant that the Pechatnyi dvor published a very modest number of books in his lifetime. But, by setting the programme in motion and assembling the scholars, he laid the groundwork for the flowering of ecclesiastical publishing under his unimposing successors, Ioasaf I (1634-40) and Iosif (1642-52).[286]

The Church in the seventeenth century

At this point, let us pause for a very brief survey of the institutional struc­ture and economic position of the Russian Orthodox Church in the seven­teenth century. This is no easy task: historians have given remarkably little systematic attention to these subjects. We can therefore present only general impressions, supported by fragmentary or anecdotal information. One thing is clear, however. Like the secular administration, the seventeenth-century

Church appeared to be an imposing institutional structure, but, in practice, the patriarch and the metropolitans, archbishops and bishops who served under him had very little effective control over monastic communities or the parish clergy and their flocks to say nothing of the many self-appointed priests, monks and nuns who reported to no human authority. The crises that shook the seventeenth-century Church arose, in considerable measure, from the attempts of the hierarchy to exercise more effective control over the body of Christ.[287]

The enormous size of Russian eparchies (dioceses) - compared, for exam­ple, with those of the Greek Church - is one obvious reason why the hierarchy had so little impact on the day-to-day life of its flock. The leaders ofthe Church had long recognised the problem, but, over the course of the seventeenth cen­tury, Church Councils consistently resisted proposals to create new dioceses by subdividing existing jurisdictions, presumably because bishops feared the loss of revenue and power that reform would inevitably entail. In 1619, for exam­ple, the Russian hierarchy consisted of Patriarch Filaret, four metropolitans, six archbishops and one bishop.[288] Obvious pastoral needs, created by the ter­ritorial expansion of the Russian state and the challenge of religious dissent, however, led to the creation of some new jurisdictions, Tobol'sk in Siberia (1620), Viatka (1656), Belgorod (1667), Nizhnii Novgorod (1672) and four in 1682 - Ustiug Velikii, Kholmogory, Voronezh and Tambov. By 1700, the size of the hierarchy had risen to twenty-four - the patriarch, fourteen metropolitans, seven archbishops and two bishops.

By and large, seventeenth-century parish priests, like their predecessors, lived far from their bishops both geographically and socially. Anecdotal evi­dence indicates that the parish priesthood was usually an ascribed occupation, handed down from father to son with the approval of the local community. At best, its members' education consisted of the customary instruction in read­ing and writing, using familiar religious texts, and hands-on training in the liturgy. The parish clergy were intimately interconnected with local society. As a married man - unlike his celibate bishop - a priest had to provide for his family through farming and collecting the customary fees for his services. He was vulnerable to pressure from officials of the crown, at the mercy of the nobles who owned land nearby, and could easily become the enemy of his parishioners if he attempted to challenge the syncretism of Christian and traditional folk beliefs and practices that shaped their lives.

In the second half of the century, however, these conditions began to change. Patriarchs and bishops began to insist that all candidates for priestly office be literate and receive formal ordination charters from them. Moreover, having installed new priests, the hierarchy attempted to make sure that they followed the official policies of the Church.[289] The success of these initiatives naturally varied widely from place to place depending on the energy of the bishop and the responsiveness or resistance of the parish priests involved. In addition, as Daniel Kaiser's studies show, diocesan courts conscientiously investigated alleged breaches of canon law on marriage, the family and sexual mores and, in most cases, strictly upheld the Church's traditional teachings.[290]

In the seventeenth century, monasteries remained a vital force in Russian Orthodoxy: at the same time, the emergence of competing centres of author­ity, especially the patriarchate, probably reduced their relative power within the Church as compared with earlier centuries. Monasteries such as the Holy Trinity, the Kirillo-Belozerskii and the Solovetskii were still very wealthy and influential, each one a complex hierarchical organisation of monks and lay dependents that functioned largely independently of outside control. Foun­dations like these stood out as exceptional, however: the vast majority of the 494 men's and women's communities which owned populated land in 1653 were very small.[291] All, large and small, depended heavily on the patronage of laymen and women of all stations, from the imperial family to peasants and townspeople.

In the seventeenth century, monastic estates continued to grow in spite of repeated legal prohibitions on new acquisitions of land. The pace of acquisition through bequests, however, slowed to a trickle after mid-century.[292] In addition, all members ofthe hierarchy, above all the patriarch, likewise controlled exten­sive tracts and the revenues they produced.[293] A summary of the landholdings of the hierarchy, the monasteries and the lay elite in 1678 provides a rough indication of the relative wealth of the leaders of the Church. At that time, the patriarch owned lands with 7,128 peasant households, the six metropolitans a total of 7,167 - of which the Metropolitan of Rostov owned 3,909 - and six arch­bishops a total of 4,494. Monasteries and churches owned lands with almost 100,000 peasant households, led by the Holy Trinity with close to 17,000. To be sure, the overwhelming majority of monasteries on the list had fewer than 200 households. By comparison, the members of the boyar council, the tsar's most prominent officials and courtiers, controlled a total of 46,771 households. The richest layman on the list, I. M. Vorotynskii, owned 4,609. Thus the data from 1678, however flawed they may be, show the great wealth, in laymen's terms, of the hierarchy and the largest monasteries. No wonder the provincial gentry and townspeople considered them 'strong people' against whose power and privileges they complained so bitterly in the 1630s and 1640s!

Liturgy and public ceremony also brought the leaders of the Church and the secular elite together. In the most dramatic example, tsar and patriarch acted out the 'symphony' of Church and state in the public rituals of Epiphany and Palm Sunday, commemorating Christ's baptism and entry into Jerusalem. These ceremonies, created by sixteenth-century Muscovite churchmen from the repertoire of ecumenical Christian symbolism, underwent some alter­ations in detail and emphasis during the seventeenth century. Their central message did not change. Moscow, capital ofthe only powerful Eastern Ortho­dox monarchy, was the centre of the Christian world and its ruler, consecrated and supported by the Church, justified his authority by defending the true faith. The ceremonies' symbolic complexity, however, left the issue of the rel­ative importance of tsar and patriarch in the economy of salvation open to differing interpretations.[294]

These great festivals formed only a small part of the ritual tapestry that shaped the life ofthe hierarchy and the imperial court. As Orthodox Christians, the tsars and their families and attendants took part in all the main services of the liturgical calendar, celebrating the most solemn feasts such as Easter in the cathedrals of the Moscow Kremlin with full magnificence. And the imperial family continued the tradition of regular pilgrimages to the Holy Trinity and other monasteries to venerate their saintly founders.[295]

Pressure for reform

After the relatively uneventful tenure of Patriarch Filaret, the Muscovite Church began to feel pressure for change from within and from without. Like their counterparts in Roman Catholic and Protestant Europe, would-be reformers among the clergy strove for consistency and good order in the cel­ebration of the liturgy and attempted to raise the moral tone of parish life. Many of their complaints were not new. In 1636, for example, Ivan Neronov and other parish priests in Nizhnii Novgorod sent a petition to Patriarch Ioasaf, asking for his support in restoring order and dignity to services of worship. The petitioners recited a litany of long-standing abuses - mnogoglasie (the practice of chanting up to 'five or six' different parts of the service simultaneously) and other liturgical short-cuts. They also complained at length about rowdy behaviour during services.[296] In a series ofpastoral instructions, Patriarch Ioasaf strongly supported their demands for pious behaviour during the liturgy. Ten years later, his successor, Iosif, issued a general decree that all priests, deacons and 'all Orthodox Christians fast. . . and refrain from drunkenness, injustice and all kinds of sin'. Worshippers 'should stand in God's church with fear and trembling . . . silently . . .' and pray 'over their sins with tears, humble sighs and contrite hearts ...'

The Nizhnii Novgorod petitioners also attacked the laity's boisterous celebration of non- or pre-Christian festivals such as Rusalii and Koliada at the most solemn times of the liturgical year. Folk minstrels (skomorokhi) drew their particular ire (for depictions of skomorokhi and other popular entertain­ers, see Plate 23). On this issue too, the hierarchy agreed but could see no way to uproot these ancient practices.[297]

Attacking mnogoglasie was more controversial. Liturgical short-cuts had crept into Russian Orthodoxy for good reason. Over the centuries, monastic services had become the norm in parishes, putting severe demands on the patience and stamina of even the most devout laypeople.[298] When the first attempts to set some limits to these traditional practices encountered vig­orous opposition, Iosif retreated and, in 1649, to the reformers' chagrin, an ecclesiastical council chose to maintain the status quo.[299]

Paradoxically, the reformers' desire for an orderly and consistent liturgy opened the Muscovite Church to books and scholars from Ukraine - precisely what Filaret had feared. From the late i630s to the early i650s, the Pechatnyi dvor published new editions of the most important service books, a number of saints' lives and classics of Eastern Christian spirituality such as writings of St John Chrysostom, St Efrem the Syrian and St John Climacus, works in which the editors avoided offending Muscovite sensibilities. In the i640s, however, the Pechatnyi dvor also published a number of works from Ukraine including Petr Mohyla's catechism, the Nomokanon of Zakhariia Kopystenskii and the pioneering Slavonic grammar of Meletii Smotritskii. Moreover, since the Printing Office desperately needed more editors who knew Greek and Latin, three scholars from Ukraine joined its staffin i649. Finally, from Ukraine came a book that stimulated apocalyptic reflection among the cultural elite of Moscow, Hegumen Nafanail's compilation of apocalyptic writings, the Book of Faith, an Orthodox interpretation of the Union of Brest as a prelude to the End Time. The Muscovite miscellany, the Kirillova kniga, and the writings of St Efrem also contributed to the climate of apocalyptic speculation.[300]

In 1645, Aleksei (Alexis) Mikhailovich became tsar. His decisive role in the stormy events of the following decades demonstrates the extent to which, long before Peter I, the attitudes and choices of the secular ruler ultimately determined the fate of the Russian Orthodox Church. Strong supporters of reform, the young ruler and his confessor, Stefan Vonifat'ev, gathered like- minded men, traditionally known as the Zealots of Piety, including parish priests such as Neronov and his protege Avvakum, and in time the future patriarch Nikon. Everyone in this diverse group agreed that parish life must be revitalised through effective preaching, the full and orderly celebration of the liturgy, and strict enforcement of the Church's moral teachings.

Before long, Alexis and his allies in the Church made several of the reform­ers' demands official policy. The tsar, already known for his personal antipathy towards folk entertainment, issued a series of decrees, beginning in December 1648, ordering local governors to ban skomorokhi and suppress the folk cus­toms associated with them in every village and hamlet in their jurisdictions.[301]Issuing decrees, however, was much easier than changing deep-rooted pat­terns of behaviour: scattered evidence suggests that the skomorokhi continued to practise their ancient trade in the remote countryside into the eighteenth century and many of the agrarian rites and folk festivals survived long enough for modern ethnographers to record them.[302]

The reformers also won their battle for edinoglasie (celebrating the liturgy with no overlapping or short-cuts). Reversing the decision of 1649, another ecclesiastical council, in February 1651, made the practice obligatory in parish churches as well as in monasteries.[303]

Not surprisingly, the implementation of the Zealots' programme aroused violent opposition among the laity. Avvakum's hagiographic autobiography, written roughly twenty years after the events, describes his clashes with a prominent aristocrat, other local notables, and ordinary parishioners while parish priest of Lopatitsy. Twice, in 1648 and 1652, in fear for his life, he fled his parish for the safety of Moscow. The second time, he received a major promotion to become dean ofthe cathedral in Iurevets on the Volga, but could serve only eight weeks until'... the priests, peasants and their women.. .'beat him and drove him out of town. As he recalled them, Avvakum's methods of enforcing liturgical and moral order and rebuking sinners were hardly subtle.[304]Moreover, his clashes with his parishioners took place at a time of extreme unrest in many urban centres of Russia. Nevertheless, his problems with his parishioners ultimately arose from his commitment to radical change. Other reformist priests suffered through similar tribulations. As foot soldiers in a campaign ofreform from above, they took the brunt ofparishioners' anger at the demand that they abruptly change their traditional way of life.

Legal and economic issues also threatened the reformers' campaign. The Law Code of 1649 significantly changed the legal relationship of Church and state. It created a Monastery Chancellery (Monastyrskii prikaz) and gave it authority to try criminal and civil cases involving clergymen and inhabitants of Church lands except the patriarchal domain.[305] Moreover, under pressure from urban taxpayers, the government confiscated the tax-exempt urban set­tlements in which the Church's dependents conducted trade. Although neither the judgement of churchmen by the secular government nor the confiscation of ecclesiastical property was unprecedented - the Great Court Chancellery had previously handled legal cases involving the clergy - the sweeping provi­sions of the Code made clear that neither the Church's judicial privileges nor its lands were sacrosanct.

Patriarch Nikon

When Nikon became patriarch in 1652, many of the latent tensions within the Russian Church erupted into open conflict. Nikon aroused enormous controversy in his own day and still fascinates and perplexes us. Born into a peasant family in the Nizhnii Novgorod area, he served briefly as a parish priest before taking monastic vows in the Anzerskii Skit on an island in the White Sea. In this small idiorrhythmic community, he followed a severely ascetic rule of life. He also displayed great energy and administrative talent, qualities that ultimately brought him to the position of abbot of the Kozheozerskii monastery on the coast ofthe mainland. In this capacity, he travelled to Moscow in 1646 and was introduced to Tsar Alexis.

From that moment, Nikon became a favourite of the tsar and an ally of the Church reformers at his court. Although his long-term relationship with Alexis was very complex, his meteoric rise to the patriarchal throne unques­tionably required the unconditional support of the tsar and his advisers. Alexis immediately appointed him archimandrite of the Novospasskii monastery in Moscow, a favourite foundation of the Romanov family. In 1649, he was con­secrated Metropolitan of Novgorod, the second most powerful position in the hierarchy. In both of these capacities, he carried out the programme of the reformers with characteristic determination. In 1650, he also displayed great physical courage and political astuteness in quelling an uprising in Novgorod with minimal bloodshed.

During his tenure in Novgorod, Nikon made it clear that, in his opinion, the ecclesiastical hierarchy was the natural leader in the campaign to revi­talise Russian Orthodoxy. He did everything he could to increase his own effective power and ceremonial dignity as metropolitan and to emphasise that the ultimate responsibility for the spiritual well-being of Russia lay with the Church's leaders, not the secular ruler. For example, in 1652, as part of a cam­paign to canonise martyred leaders of the Russian Church, he brought the relics of Metropolitan Filipp, already recognised as a saint, from the Solovet- skii monastery to Moscow. While in Solovki, he publicly read Tsar Alexis's statement of contrition for the sin of his predecessor, Ivan IV in ordering Fil- ipp's murder. At the same time, it is difficult to be sure how accurately Nikon's fullest statements of his theories on the relations of Church and state reflect his views during his active ministry since he wrote them years later while in self-imposed exile. For example, in his Refutation, he repeatedly attacked the Ulozhenie of 1649 for usurping the Church's legal autonomy and property rights.[306] In 1649, however, he had signed the new law code - under duress, he later insisted - and his scruples had not prevented him from accepting the patriarchal dignity in the hope, he subsequently claimed, of reversing the policies to which he expressed such strong aversion.

Once enthroned as patriarch with the enthusiastic support of the tsar and the rest of the reformers, Nikon immediately took steps to assert his authority. According to his later testimony, at his consecration he made the tsar, the boyars and the bishops swear to obey him as their pastor. In his capacity as patriarch, Nikon evidently saw himself as the personification of the Church. He strove to transform its organisational structure into an effective hierarchi­cal administration with the patriarch at the top: he reacted with particular ruthlessness to any sign of opposition from other members of the hierarchy. Like Filaret, he added extensive lands to the patriarch's own domain and, in addition to building or repairing other churches, maintained three important monasteries -the Iverskii, the Kretnyi and the Voskresenskii (also known as the New Jerusalem) - as his own foundations. A man of imposing appearance, he impressed visiting clergymen with his magnificent vestments, his long sermons and his dramatic manner of celebrating the liturgy. Moreover, beginning in 1653, with the tsar's consent, he began to use the epithet, Velikii gosudar' (Great

Sovereign), previously used by only one patriarch - Filaret, father of a tsar and effective head of state.

He also continued the reformers' campaign to purify Russian Orthodoxy. Within weeks of his consecration, to protect the faithful from temptation, decrees prohibited the sale of vodka on holy days and required all non- Orthodox foreigners in Moscow to move to a new 'German Quarter' on the Iauza River further from the centre of the city.[307]

The long-standing campaign to publish accurate liturgical books and dis­tribute them throughout Russia, however, quickly took a fateful turn. The tsar, the new patriarch and some of their collaborators decided that the best way to revitalise Russian Orthodoxy was to forge closer ties with ecumenical Eastern Orthodoxy, especially the Greek mother Church. In 1649, the latest of a long line of Greek visitors, Patriarch Paisios of Jerusalem and a scholar of dubious background, known as Arsenius the Greek, appeared in Moscow and tried to convince the tsar and Nikon that, in so far as they differed, Greek liturgical practices were faithful to the Orthodox tradition and Russian cus­toms were erroneous local innovations. To test this claim, a Russian monk, Arsenii Sukhanov, made two journeys in 1649-50 and 1651-3 to investigate the condition of the Greek Church. His findings included a report that monks on Mount Athos had burned Russian liturgical books as heretical and his experi­ences led him to conduct a bitter debate with visiting Greeks in Moscow in 1650 on the orthodoxy of Russian practices.[308] Following the advice of the Greeks took the tsar and Nikon down a dangerous path, for, as their contemporaries were well aware, it was the Greeks' apostasy at the Council of Florence that had thrust Orthodox Russia into the centre of world history. Moreover, in the mid-seventeenth century, the main centres of Greek Orthodox learning and publishing were in the Roman Catholic world, especially Venice.

Against this background, on 11 February 1653, the Printing Office published a new edition of the Psalter which omitted the customary article instructing worshippers on the correct way to cross themselves. Then, within days, Nikon filled the gap with an instruction (pamiat') to the faithful to use the so-called three-finger sign of the cross, holding their thumb, index and middle fingers together. Muscovite tradition, embodied in the protocols ofthe Stoglav Council of 1551, held to the two-finger sign with only the index and middle fingers extended. Then, in early 1654, a council of the Russian Church approved the principle of revising Russian liturgical books 'according to ancient parchment and Greek texts (po starym kharateinym i grecheskim knigam)'. New editions followed one another in rapid succession - missals (Sluzhebniki) in 1654 and 1655 and, in 1654, the Skrizhal, a treatise on the nature of liturgy along with Nikon's justification of his reforms.

In addition to the sign of the cross, the most controversial changes in the details of the liturgy included the four-pointed instead of eight-pointed cross on the sacred wafer and on church buildings; the triple rather than double Alleluia after the Psalms and the Cherubic hymn; the number of prostrations and bows in Lent; a new transliteration of 'Jesus' into Slavonic (Iisus instead of 'Isus'); and small, but significant alterations in the wording of the Nicene Creed.

As Nikon's contemporary opponents and the best modern scholars have argued, the new editions of the service books were based, not on ancient manuscripts, but on very recent Greek editions and mandated the substitu­tion of contemporary Greek practices for traditional Russian usages.[309] The standardisation of Russian and Greek liturgies arose from the desire, shared by Tsar Alexis's government and Nikon, to build a more united Orthodox com­monwealth with Russia at its head. The Orthodox hierarchy in Ukraine had made similar changes decades earlier without significant opposition. Recently, scholars have also argued that Nikon's liturgical reforms arose from a new understanding of the nature and function of liturgy as a commemoration of Christ's life, death and resurrection in which words, gestures and ritual objects may legitimately have several different levels of meaning simultaneously.[310]

Whatever their deeper meaning, the new service books altered some of the most frequently repeated words, gestures and visible symbols in the liturgy. Even more jarring was the autocratic manner in which Nikon introduced the new editions: against the advice of the Patriarch of Constantinople and his royal protector, he insisted that only the reformed usage was acceptable. In 1656, he repeatedly branded the two-finger sign of the cross and other traditional Russian practices as heretical.[311]

Resistance to Nikon's reforms

The reforms and the patriarch's intransigence in enforcing them split the reform coalition. In a series of increasingly agitated letters written in late 1653 and early 1654 to the tsar and Vonifat'ev, Ivan Neronov severely criticised Nikon's abandonment of Russia's heritage and the arrogance with which he was treating his former friends. The three-finger sign of the cross and the altered number of deep bows (poklony) in services were specific examples of these destructive policies. In one letter to Vonifat'ev, he told of hearing a voice from an icon urging him to resist Nikon's reforms, a story later retold in his friend Avvakum's autobiography.[312] For their outspoken protests, the author­ities excommunicated Neronov and imprisoned him in a remote northern monastery and exiled Avvakum to Siberia. According to tradition, the one bishop who in 1654 openly questioned the reforms, Pavel of Kolomna, lost his see and his life for his stand.[313]

As these examples indicate, resistance to the liturgical reforms began with individuals and small, scattered groups. Beginning with Spiridon Potemkin in 1658, a few prominent clergymen, members of the ecclesiastical elite, wrote detailed critiques of Nikon's reforms. They received valuable support from Bishop Aleksandr of Viatka who, although he did not write any polemics of his own, encouraged those who did and collected a library of texts to sup­port the anti-reform position. Despite some differences in details, the works of Potemkin, Nikita Dobrynin 'Pustosviat', the priest Lazar' and others all attacked the internal inconsistencies in the new service books and raised fun­damental questions about the legitimacy of Russian Orthodoxy. For if tradi­tional Russian usages were heretical, were all previous generations of Russian Christians - saints and sinners alike - damned as heretics? Although these manuscripts had very limited circulation, they served as a valuable resource for later generations of polemicists against the reformed Church.

Nikon's critics faced formidable polemical opponents armed with the two weapons they lacked - the resources of the Printing Office and the support of the hierarchy and government. In addition to the Skrizhal, Simeon Polotskii, resident court poet and tutor to the tsar's children, published Zhezl pravleniia in 1668. Afanasii of Kholmogory's Uvet dukhovnyi of 1682 was to be the next in a long succession of attacks on critics of the reformed Church.[314]

Small numbers of uneducated laypeople also expressed opposition to the reforms. In 1657, the ecclesiastical and governmental authorities imprisoned the Rostov weaver, Sila Bogdanov, and two companions for publicly condemning the new service books.[315]

More radical still were the small groups that made up the Kapiton move­ment. Beginning in the 1620s or 1630s, Kapiton and his followers rejected the Orthodox Church and its clergy as corrupt and practised extreme forms of asceticism, such as rigorous fasting in all seasons and, if official accusations can be believed, some even starved themselves to death. In 1665 and 1666, the authorities investigated several informal monastic communities that followed his fundamental teachings. And although not their central concern, these later followers of Kapiton included the new liturgical books in their list of grievances against the Church.

In the short run, isolated objections to the new liturgical texts did nothing to shake Nikon's overwhelming power over the Church and influence at court. The only threat to his position lay in his dependence on his royal patron, Tsar Alexis. Historians have advanced many hypotheses, none completely convincing, to explain the deterioration of their relationship. Many of the tsar's courtiers, much of the hierarchy - and perhaps Alexis himself - had probably become weary of the patriarch's imperious manner and jealous of his influence and wealth. Be that as it may, Alexis and Nikon abruptly parted ways in 1658. After the tsar refused to settle several seemingly trifling conflicts to Nikon's satisfaction, on 10 June, the patriarch withdrew from Moscow to the New Jerusalem monastery and left the day-to-day business of the Church in the hands of the usual second-in-command, the Metropolitan of Krutitsy. At the same time, Nikon still thought of himself as the patriarch. For example, in 1659, he attempted to anathematise Metropolitan Pitirim of Krutitsy for replacing him in the role of Christ in the annual Palm Sunday procession.

Nikon's self-imposed exile without abdicating from the patriarchal office created an extremely awkward situation. As messages and emissaries shuttled back and forthbetween Moscow and New Jerusalem, it became clearthat there was no hope of reconciliation, for, in addition to intense personal animosity, Nikon and Alexis's government had radically different ideas about the relations of Church and state in a Christian monarchy. In his lengthy Refutation of 1664 Nikon insisted in the strongest possible terms on the superiority of the spiritual power to the secular arm.[316] Therefore, in matters of principle such as, for example, the complete judicial independence of the Church from lay justice, the Church and its primate should prevail. Was Nikon, as he claimed, simply restating fundamental Orthodox principles? Many of his arguments and examples do indeed come from classic Orthodox texts. Nevertheless, the vehemence with which he made his case stretched the elastic notion of 'symphony' beyond the breaking point. And, as many scholars have noted, Nikon borrowed some of his most telling images - for example, likening the Church to the sun and secular government to the moon - from Papal polemics of the high Middle Ages.[317] Finally, Nikon's attitudes ran counter to the tendency of governments and ecclesiastical leaders all across sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Europe to collaborate in making the Church a force for maintaining political cohesion and social order.

In this situation, Alexis had no choice but to replace Nikon. But with what procedures and on what grounds could a patriarch be deposed? It is a measure of the tsar's desperation that his most valuable agent in arrang­ing Nikon's deposition was Paisios Ligarides, a former apostate to Roman Catholicism who styled himself Metropolitan of Gaza, an office from which he had been deposed. After a local ecclesiastical council in 1666 was unable to reach a compromise whereby Nikon would abdicate the patriarchate, but maintain his episcopal dignity and administrative control of his favourite monasteries, the government chose a more radical solution, an 'ecumeni­cal' council of Eastern Orthodoxy with the participation of the other patri­archs, only two of whom actually appeared. Its decisions were a foregone conclusion. On 12 December 1666, the council deposed Nikon for derelic­tion of duty, insulting the tsar and mistreating the clergy, reduced him to the rank of an ordinary monk, and imprisoned him in the remote Ferapontov monastery.

Old Belief and the official Church after 1666

The government and its ecclesiastical allies dealt with the critics of the reformed liturgy in a similar fashion. Taking a reconciliatory position, the local council of i666 had proclaimed that the new rites were correct, but avoided condemning traditional Russian practices. Several of the leaders of the opposition, partic­ularly Ivan Neronov and Aleksandr of Viatka, reconciled themselves with the new dispensation in order not to divide the body of Christ. Others resisted to the bitter end.

The ecumenical council of 1666-7 settled the issue simply and radically. It declared that only the reformed liturgy was true Orthodox usage and con­demned traditional Russian practices and the Stoglav which sanctioned them as heretical. Simultaneously, its representatives exerted intense pressure on the recalcitrant critics of the new liturgy to recant. One, Nikita Dobrynin, yielded - temporarily as it turned out. Five others - Avvakum, Lazar', Epifanii, Nikifor and deacon Fedor - held out. All were defrocked, two had their tongues cut out for insulting the tsar, and all were sent to prison in Pustozersk on the Arctic coast.

The councils of 1666-7 had far-reaching implications for the future of the Russian Church. They made clear that Tsar Alexis and his advisers - the secular government and its ecclesiastical allies - had decisive power over the Church. Thereafter any religious dissenters understood correctly that the state was also their enemy. Moreover, for better or worse, in exercising its leadership of ecumenical Orthodoxy, Alexis's government chose to make scholars from Ukraine and the Greek world and their local disciples the intellectual leaders of the Russian Church.

The decisions of 1666-7 appeared to have restored peace and uniformity to the Russian Church. Reality soon proved to be far more complicated. Even in disgrace and prison, Nikon retained the allegiance ofmany ofthe faithful who revered him as the true patriarch and turned to him for spiritual counsel. He remained intransigent in his belief that the state - the agent of the Antichrist - had trampled on the rights of the Church. Nevertheless, in 1681, Alexis's son, Fedor, gave him permission to return to his beloved New Jerusalem although he died before reaching it.

The enforcement of the reformed liturgy seemed to proceed successfully. As Michels has shown, the Printing Office quickly sold each printing of the new service books and, by 1700, the new liturgical texts had spread to even the most remote parts of the realm.[318] Once again, however, matters were not so simple.

The determined defenders of traditional Russian practices - the Old Believ­ers - understood full well that, after 1667, there could be no compromise with the official Church or the state. Avvakum and his fellow prisoners smuggled virulent attacks on the new order to small groups of supporters in Moscow and elsewhere. Their execution at the stake in 1681 only added the authority of martyrdom to their teachings. Ironically, they agreed with Nikon, their old enemy, that the reign of the Antichrist, precursor of the End Time, had begun. During the 1670s, persecution and intimidation - or widespread indifference to the liturgical reforms, as Michels argues - limited the number of open adherents of the Old Belief.

Yet the decisions of 1666-7 had brought not peace but the sword. Outbursts of violent resistance to the state and the Church became a regular feature of the Russian landscape in the last decades of the seventeenth century. Local grievances fuelled each uprising: opposition to the reformed Church and its new liturgy also played a prominent part in the rebels' demands. In the most dramatic instance, the Solovetskii monastery, long a law unto itself, rebelled against the imposition of the new liturgy and held out against besieging gov­ernment troops from 1668 until 1676. Even though its surviving defenders were massacred, its example strengthened the determination of other opponents of the new order in state and Church. For example, Old Belief was a significant element in the resistance of the Don cossacks to Moscow's administrative control.

The bloody uprising in Moscow in 1682, in which Old Believers led by Nikita Dobrynin joined forces with the mutinous garrison, made the explosive mix­ture of political and religious opposition unmistakably clear. When Sophia emerged from the crisis as regent for her two brothers, her government issued the decree of December 1684 which mandated death at the stake for all unre­pentant Old Believers and severe penalties for anyone who sheltered them. Her government sent troops to enforce the law even in the most remote areas of the country.[319]

The government's intransigence elicited equally militant responses. Scat­tered groups of religious radicals had already demonstrated the ultimate form of protest against the powers of this world - suicide by fire. Following their lead, in the 1680s and 1690s, groups of militants seized isolated monasteries and vil­lages - notoriously the Paleostrovskii monastery in 1687 and 1689 and Pudozh in 1693 - and, when government forces attacked them, burned themselves alive rather than surrender. These episodes of mass suicide which combined social banditry and religious fanaticism profoundly shocked the government, the Church and more moderate Old Believers, one of whom, Evfrosin, in 1691 wrote a denunciation of the practice as a violation of the traditional Christian prohibition of suicide.[320]

The second response of the opponents of the reformed Church was less spectacular but ultimately more successful. Many fled to remote corners of the realm or beyond the borders of the empire, founded unofficial communi­ties, and began to adapt Orthodox liturgical observances to their new circum­stances. Some fugitive groups soon fell victim to governmental persecution; others, such as the Vyg community, managed to survive and became the prin­cipal centres of the Old Belief in the first decades of the eighteenth century.

The official Church after 1667

In the last years of the century, Patriarch Ioakim (1674-90) set the agendas for the official Church. By background a member of the service nobility, he proved to be a strong-willed leader who, like Nikon, saw the patriarch as the personification of the Church. At the same time, he understood the necessity of collaboration with the governments that followed one another in rapid succession during his tenure and recognised the practical limitations of his position. For example, when Tsar Fedor insisted on pardoning Nikon, he acquiesced in spite of grave personal misgivings. In the crises of 1682 and 1689, he supported the claims of Peter I to the throne.

Within the ecclesiastical administration, he strove for a disciplined, clearly organised hierarchy free from the routine interference of the state. Following the recommendation ofthe councils of 1666-7 and the decision of a local council in 1675, Ioakim abolished the Monastyrskii prikaz in 1677 and replaced it with a system under which members of the clergy conducted trials of churchmen and supervised the administration of Church lands. The elaborate plan of Tsar Fedor's government to address the enormous size of Russian dioceses achieved very limited success, however, thanks to the resistance of the episcopate, led by Ioakim, who feared a system in which bishops would report to archbishops and not directly to the patriarch. In the end, the Church created eleven new dioceses by dividing the territory of existing jurisdictions and, in 1682, succeeded in filling only four.

Ioakim's greatest achievement, however, may well be the agreement, con­cluded with the support of Hetman Samoilovych in 1686, that the new Metropolitan of Kiev, Gedeon, would recognise the ultimate jurisdiction of the Patriarch ofMoscow, not of Constantinople as previously. Since then, the fates of the Orthodox Churches in Ukraine and Russia have been inextricably linked, with profound consequences for both.[321]

Ioakim's understanding of the Church required that the hierarchy, under the patriarch's leadership, control devotional life and ecclesiastical culture. In dealing with popular religion, as part of his crusade against the Old Believers and other dissidents, Ioakim and his supporters sponsored miracle cults that gave divine sanction to the three-finger sign of the cross, but suppressed unoffi­cial and unverifiable saints' cults, notably the veneration of Anna of Kashin. He also believed that, since an embattled Church required educated priests, it was vital to found a theological academy in Moscow. The first two attempts, how­ever, collapsed because of the theological and political controversies between the so-called Latinophile and Grecophile parties within the ecclesiastical elite - both of which, in reality, adapted international Latin scholarship to Orthodox uses.

In 1700 when Ioakim's successor, Adrian, died, Peter I chose to leave the patriarchal throne vacant, a harbinger of radical changes to come. Looking back over a century of dramatic events, many of the Church's fundamental characteristics had changed little. In spite of attempts to strengthen the office ofpatriarch and the role ofChurch Councils, the tsars' government repeatedly took the initiative in establishing ecclesiastical policy and intervened to settle disputes among the faithful. At their best, the clergy provided the population with spiritual guidance and social and cultural leadership. Yet attempts to create an orderly hierarchical system ofadministration and to respond to the cultural changes in other branches of Eastern Orthodoxy had only limited success. As a wealthy landowner, moreover, the Church attracted popular discontent and was an inviting target for a cash-starved state. And, most dangerously, the Russian Orthodox community had fallen into schism. In competition with the state-supported official Church, the Old Believers had begun to build their own organisations, select their own cadre of leaders and create their own religious culture. Thus, for all its apparent strength, the Russian Orthodox Church soon had to bend before the onslaught of a wilful reforming autocrat.

Cultural and intellectual life

LINDSEY HUGHES

Culture 'in transition'

Modern historians have categorised Russia's seventeenth century as a 'transi­tional period' (perekhodnyi vek), when tradition vied with innovation, indige­nous culture with imported trends. The conceptual framework ofbinary oppo­sitions has proved particularly fruitful.[322] High culture in particular underwent changes that have been explained with reference to Westernisation, moderni­sation and secularisation. Some scholars have argued that developments in art, architecture and literature constituted a Muscovite version of the Baroque,[323]others, adopting Dmitrii Likhachev's formula, that they represented some­thing 'close to the significance of the Renaissance in the cultural history of Western Europe'.[324] Such phenomena as the illusionistic use of light, shade and perspective in icons, portrait-painting from life, elements of a modified classi­cal order system in architecture and new genres and subjects in literature are treated as curtain-raisers to the eighteenth century, when Russia would begin to fulfil its destiny by catching up with Western Europe with the assistance of Peter the Great.

If we accept the view that Russia had to 'catch up' with the West, with preconceptions about what Russia ought to have been, we may well conclude that, culturally speaking, here was a 'blank sheet' waiting to be filled. By the start of the seventeenth century the Renaissance had made little impact on Muscovy. In the figurative arts there was no free-standing portraiture, still life, landscapes or urban scenes, history painting or domestic genre. There were icons, wood prints and illuminated manuscripts, but no painting in oil on canvas. Sculpture deep chiselled in stone or cast in metal (bell-making excepted) was unknown. Printing (introduced in 1564) was in its infancy. Muscovy had no theatres or universities. It had produced no poets, dramatists, philosophers, scholars or even theologians. It lacked both theoretical concepts of 'the arts' and political theory. Historians who prioritise written records will search in vain for a scholarly rationale of autocracy, for example. If we go on to play the 'great names' game, Muscovy will not figure in the world pantheon. The special emphases and prohibitions of Orthodoxy, a dependent nobility, weak urbanisation and economic backwardness created a climate that distinguished Russian elite culture sharply from that of Protestant and Catholic Europe.

To understand Muscovite high culture (peasant culture and its regional variations are beyond the scope of our survey) we must initially abandon the search for the genres, activities and practitioners defined by Western expe­rience. Political ideology, for example, was expressed first and foremost not in erudite tracts but in images and rituals. The combined efforts of artists and craftsmen created and embellished 'sacred landscapes' in a complex inter­action of architecture, iconography, fabrics and vestments, choreography (of processions), and sacred chant. This culture was conservative, but it was not impervious to the contemporary events described elsewhere in this volume. Indeed, in the seventeenth century 'a transformation of cultural consciousness' was to occur.⁴

Culture after the Time of Troubles

The resolution ofthe Time of Troubles was, on the face ofit, backward-looking. Official rhetoric emphasised the restoration of God's favour and of old values through a universally acclaimed new ruling dynasty with strong links with the old. The violation of the sacred Kremlin by Poles (bearers of demonic culture) was interpreted as punishment for sins. The visible evidence of repentance were rituals that mirrored the harmonious realm with the restored tsar at its divinely ordered centre, enhanced by new churches, icons and religious artefacts.

4 Viktor Zhivov, 'Religious Reform and the Emergence of the Individual in Seventeenth- Century Russian Literature', in Samuel H. Baron and Nancy Shields Kollmann (eds.), Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Uni­versity Press, 1997), pp. 184-98.

Muscovite ceremonial customs were revived, for ritual continuity was more necessary than ever as a buttress of royal authority. Michael was crowned in 1613 according to the Byzantine-influenced rite of 1547. Courtly pomp was particularly impressive during the reign of Tsar Alexis (1645-76). Among the annual highlights was the Palm Sunday parade to St Basil's cathedral, when the tsar on foot and the patriarch seated on a colt enacted the 'symphony' of tsardom and priesthood, and the feast of Epiphany on 6 January, when the patriarch blessed the waters of the Moskva River at a sacred spot desig­nated 'the Jordan'.[325] On such occasions the skills of craftsmen were displayed in all their brilliance in icons, crosses, vessels and vestments, banners, cer­emonial saddles, harnesses and weapons. Family events were also treated with great solemnity. For example, the name-days of Alexis's numerous rel­atives were celebrated by processions and liturgies for the feasts of patron saints.[326]

The meticulous records of the tsars' progresses (vykhody) do not dwell on secular diversions. Since women were excluded from most public occasions, the masques and balls of Western court life were out of the question.[327] We should not draw a rigid line between sacred and profane activities, however. After name-day liturgies special pastries were distributed to courtiers and churchmen. Weddings and royal births were marked by lavish banquets with singing and games. Alexis maintained country palaces for summer recreations, for example at Kolomenskoe (seebelow) and Izmailovo, whichboasted gardens with hothouses and a menagerie. He was particularly devoted to hunting and devised a ceremonial book of rules for the 'glorious sport' of falconry.[328]

Michael instituted a programme of building in the historic centre. In the 1630s Russian masters constructed the Kremlin's Terem palace. Not only its numerous chapels but also the royal living quarters were decorated with religious frescos that drewparallels between Moscow's rulers and their biblical predecessors. There was no clear boundary between sacred and secular space.

In the same period the cathedral of the Icon of Our Lady of Kazan' on Red Square was built to commemorate the national resistance of 1612.[329] Processions for the feasts of this and other wonder-working icons were staged several times a year throughout the century In 1625 Muscovites celebrated the acquisition of a fragment of Christ's garment. The feast of the Deposition of the Robe of Our Lord (10 July) was one of several added to the liturgical calendar that formed the basis of cultural life at court.[330] In 1642-3 teams of artists from all over Russia repainted the murals in the Kremlin Dormition cathedral, following the outlines of older images. Frescos depicting the princes and tsars of Rus' in the Archangel cathedral were similarly renovated, beginning in 1652.[331] But we have no authentic likeness of Tsar Michael, although there are records of his image (obraz, suggesting a Byzantine-style effigy) being made in the Kremlin workshops for presentation abroad.[332]

The Romanov succession was backward-looking but it also drove innova­tion. National recovery and independence required armies, alliances, trade and foreign expertise. The primary need was for military specialists, but oth­ers came too. In the 1620s the Scottish engineer Christopher Galloway added ornate upper portions with Gothic and Renaissance features to the Kremlin's Saviour tower and installed a clock. The Swede Johann Kristler designed a never-completed bridge over the Moskva River.[333] The first Western painter to arrive, in 1643, was Hans Deters (Deterson) from the Netherlands. Among the elite a taste grew for foreign 'novelties' and cunning technical devices (khitrosti). At the same time, Patriarch Filaret banned books published in Lithuania to combat the 'Latin' influences that had proliferated during the Time of Troubles. Tension between opening access to new ideas and protect­ing Orthodoxy from heresy was a defining characteristic of the seventeenth century.

Architecture and sculpture

The first masonry churches to be built after the Troubles continued sixteenth- century trends, displaying tiers of kokoshnik gables beneath the elongated drums of their cupolas or capped with tent (shater) roofs. (In the 1650s Patri­arch Nikon banned 'tent' churches as uncanonical.) A sort of compendium of seventeenth-century ecclesiastical architecture is provided by the five-domed church of the Holy Trinity in Nikitniki (1631-53), built for a wealthy mer­chant not far from Red Square (see Plate 24).[334] The architect's imaginative flair was expended on picturesque annexes (a bell-tower and porch surmounted by tents) and on the exterior decoration. Kokoshnik gables and ornamental brickworkjostle with modified elements of the Western-order system, such as recessed half-columns and classically profiled window surrounds, pediments and cornices. The interior, constructed without internal piers, was covered in frescos. Similar churches were built all over Russia in towns, villages and monasteries, visible evidence of economic recovery In the commercial city of Iaroslavl' on the Volga merchants built dozens of churches, richly decorated outside with a veritable 'encrustation' of carved brickwork and polychrome ceramics, inside with brilliantly coloured frescos.[335] Impressive architectural projects were carried out in Rostov Velikii and in the new monasteries founded by Patriarch Nikon.

Soviet scholars associated such architecture with 'secularisation' (obmir- shchenie). By reducing domes to mere decorative appendages, they argued, and articulating facades with carved window frames, builders made their churches look like palaces and hence undermined their sacredness. But clearly neither builders nor congregations thought in such terms. Their distinctive silhou­ettes and lavish decorativeness made these churches highly visible landmarks in praise of God.

The culmination of the 'ornamental' style came with the 'Moscow Baroque' (a late nineteenth-century term) that flourished in and around the capital from the late 1670s and in the provinces into the 1700s.[336] Builders demonstrated a refined sense of symmetry and regularity in their ordering of both structural and decorative elements, replacing Russian ornament almost entirely with motifs derived from the classical orders: half-columns with pediments and bases, window surrounds and portals with broken pediments, volutes, fluted and twisted columns and shell gables. A particularly impressive concentration of such buildings was commissioned from unknown Russian craftsmen in the 1680s by Tsarevna Sophia for the Moscow Novodevichii convent. Civic buildings were constructed on similar principles, for example Prince Vasilii Golitsyn's Moscow mansion (1680s) and the Pharmacy on Red Square (1690s).

Structural innovation appeared in the so-called 'octagon on cube' churches in Moscow Baroque style. One of the finest examples, the church of the Inter­cession at Fili, built in 1690-3 by unknown architects for Peter I's uncle Lev Naryshkin, has a tower of receding octagons flanked by four annexes, each capped with a cupola and decorated with intricately carved limestone details (see Plate 25). Inside an ornate gilded iconostasis holds round and octagonal, as well as 'standard' rectangular icons, all painted in a distinctly 'Italianate' style far removed from traditional Russo-Byzantine painting.[337] This and other tower churches such as the Trinity at Troitse-Lykovo and the Saviour at Ubory (by Iakov Bukhvostov, the leading exponent of the style) may owe something to prototypes in Russian wooden architecture, as well as to 'Ruthenian' influ­ence. Craftsmen from Belorussia and Ukraine introduced Polish Baroque and Renaissance architectural elements through the medium of wood-carving and decorative ceramics. The theory of the cultural interaction of the 'fraternal' nations fitted comfortably into the Soviet ideological framework, but Russia's 'elder brother' status limited the extent to which such borrowing could be acknowledged, as did its mainly religious character.[338] The topic requires fuller investigation.

Western architectural ideas emanated from the Armoury (see below) and Foreign Office workshops, where craftsmen had access to prints, maps and illustrated books.[339] Tsar Alexis owned a book of 'the stone buildings of all German states' and works by Vignola, Palladio and other theoreticians of the Renaissance and Baroque eras. Russian builders (zodchie)[340] were unacquainted with the theoretical underpinnings of the five orders of architecture and none, as far as we know, had first-hand experience of Western buildings, although some had been to Ukraine. But a few potential patrons picked up ideas abroad, not least Alexis himself, whose encounters with city architecture and magnates' estates while on military campaigns in Lithuania and the Baltic in the 1650s inspired him, according to his English doctor Samuel Collins, to remodel his residences.[341] Some Russians may even have ventured into Moscow's Foreign Quarter (nemetskaia sloboda) and gazed at its Protestant churches, shops and taverns, although restrictions on access limited the Quarter's impact.[342]

The hybrid nature of seventeenth-century Russian architecture is demon­strated by Tsar Alexis's wooden palace at Kolomenskoe (1660s-1670s) (see Plate 26). Simon Petrov, the director of works, was not an architect, but a master carpenter. He and his men employed traditional timber construction, but also added broken pediments and twisting columns. Ceilings were painted with signs of the Zodiac and the Seasons and Ruthenian craftsmen made such 'curiosities' as automata in the shape of lions. The tsar's wooden palace was an idiosyncratic example of the carpenters' skills that dominated both urban and rural landscapes in seventeenth-century Russia. Because so few timber buildings survive intact from the period and because there were no Russian Canalettos to record them, we can only reconstruct the urban scene from stylised images in miniatures and icons and foreigners' sketches.[343]

Woodwork, especially iconostases, survives mostly from interiors. Away from Moscow craftsmen made not just carvings but also three-dimensional reli­gious images, rather like high-relief icons. Popular subjects were St Nicholas of Mozhaisk and St Paraskeva.[344] The first known examples of free-standing stone sculpture in Russia are the statues of saints outside the tower church of the Sign at Dubrovitsy (1690-1704). The church's design also departed radically from traditional Orthodox conventions by dispensing with cupolas in favour of an open-work crown. Inside there were Latin inscriptions.[345] The Westernised tastes of its owner, Peter I's tutor Prince Boris Golitsyn, who knew Latin and had access to Italian craftsmen, place the church at Dubrovitsy at the very limits of 'transitional' culture. There would be strong resistance to 'graven images' well into the eighteenth century.

The Armoury: icons, portraits, applied art

The Kremlin Armoury Chamber (Oruzheinaiapalata), established at the begin­ning of the sixteenth century, comprised a complex of studios making, storing and repairing high-quality items for the tsars' ceremonial and everyday use. Under the directorship of the boyar Bogdan Khitrovo from 1654 to 1680 it emerged as a virtual 'academy of arts'.[346]

The royal churches and residences swallowed up icons by the dozen and the Armoury's studios employed some of the best icon painters (ikonopistsy) in the land. The most famous was Simon Ushakov (1629-86), who is regarded as the very embodiment of 'transition', a pioneer of new effects in icon-painting, but never a fully-fledged easel painter.[347] In particular, he was known for his ability to apply chiaroscuro effects, especially to faces in such traditional com­positions as Christ Not Made by Hands. Ushakov was acquainted with Western art. The classical arch in the background of his icon The Old Testament Trinity (1671), for example, was copied from a print of a painting by the Italian Paolo Veronese. In his epistle to Ushakov, written some time between i656 and i666, fellow icon painter Iosif Vladimirov asked: 'How can people possibly claim that only Russians are allowed to paint icons and only Russian icon-painting may be revered, while that of other lands should neither be kept nor honoured?' In the reply attributed to him, Ushakov wrote of the usefulness of image- making for commemorating the past and recording the present, comparing the painter's skill with the properties of a mirror.[348] But he remained firmly within an Orthodox context.

His icon The Planting of the Tree of the Muscovite Realm (i668) demonstrates several aspects of his art. It includes images of Tsar Alexis, his first wife Mariia and two of their sons, the only surviving 'portrait' of the tsar known for sure to have been produced during his lifetime and signed by the artist. (The signing of icons, hitherto anonymous, is itself evidence ofthe growth of artistic autonomy.) The icon also contains accurate representations of the walls of the Kremlin and the Spasskii (Saviour) tower. But far from being a vehicle for 'realism' that 'undermines the religious-symbolic basis of early Russian art',[349]the iconography conventionally ignoresthe laws oftime, space andperspective, bringing together heaven and earth and architecture and holy men of different epochs, presided over by an image of the twelfth-century Vladimir Mother of God.[350] Notional likenesses of rulers and their families in poses of supplication or prayer, as here, were in the Byzantine tradition. Another example is the icon Honouring the Life-Giving Cross (1677-8), by another Armoury painter, Ivan Saltanov, in which Constantine the Great and St Helena venerate the cross together with Alexis, Mariia and Patriarch Nikon.[351]

Clearly neither Ushakov nor Saltanov had any intention of depicting the 'struggle between the secular and the religious' detected by some modern historians.[352] More recently Russian scholars have shifted the emphasis from the novelty of Ushakov's work to its traditional elements - Byzantine, Kievan and Muscovite - categorising it as 'late medieval'.[353] The painter Fedor Zubov (d. 1689) copied some of his icons directly from foreign religious paintings, for example, his Crucifixion of 1685, in which blood, usually omitted from the Orthodox iconography of this subject, drips from Christ's hands and sides. But he also worked in a strictly Orthodox idiom. Icons such as Nativity of the Mother of God (1688) are remarkable for their stylised ornamentation, intricate details of architecture and landscapes and the application of highlights to fabrics.[354]Other leading painters of the era, such as Karp Zolotarev, Ivan Bezmin and Kirill Ulanov, remained true to Orthodox iconography, while adopting certain 'Italianate' stylistic features.[355] But subjects such as landscapes and still life that in Western art had long been treated independently in a secular context, in Russia remained within the framework of icons and frescos.

Soviet scholars attempted to identify distinct 'schools' of icon-painting beyond Moscow, for example, in the Kostroma workshops of Gurii Nikitin,[356]but their studies were compromised by the ideologically motivated quest for 'progressive' features in 'democratic' art away from the oppressiveness of the tsar's court. Fine-quality icons were produced in Iaroslavl', Ustiug, Vologda and other regional centres. Small icons rich in miniaturised detail are often attributed to the Stroganov school. The intricately decorative effects, lavish application of gold and glowing colours that are hallmarks of seventeenth- century icons had analogies in applied art. Coloured enamelling on gilded silver (a speciality of Sol'vychegodsk), decorative leather work and fabrics sown with gold and silver thread and seed pearls displayed a mixture of traditional floral and Western motifs.[357]

The most 'democratic' form of religious art were the single-sheet wood block prints (lubki) of icon subjects, often with decorative borders of flowers and geometric patterns, that circulated widely among all classes of the popula­tion. A whole collection of such prints makes up Vasilii Koren's illustrated Bible and Apocalypse (1692-6), fusing folk and Baroque motifs. Some served liturgi­cal purposes, for example, printed antiminsy for use at the altar, others featured non-devotional topics, for example The Feast of the Pious and Impious and The Mice Bury the Cat (see Plate 27).[358] The most sophisticated prints came from Ukraine, where artists produced illustrations from wood and metal blocks for religious books and also allegorical conclusiones, engraved programmes for debates in the Kiev Academy.[359] In the 1680s these spread to Moscow. One of the most ambitious official graphic projects was Karion Istomin's illustrated Alphabet (Bukvar'), which was first made in manuscript for the royal children, then printed in 1694. Many of the illustrations for each letter of the Cyrillic alphabet were copied from Western sources.

In the Armoury and other studios Russian artists worked alongside foreign painters, including the Pole Stanislaw Loputskii and the Germans (or Dutch?) Daniel Wuchters (in Russia 1663-7) and 'master of perspective' Peter Engels (i670-80s).[360] Western artists introduced oil painting on canvas and new bib­lical and historical subjects, including scenes from classical history, for the interiors of secular buildings. Unfortunately, too little of their work survives to pass judgement on their skills or to define precisely their influence. Russian artists' receptiveness to the outside world and ability to work in a fully-fledged Western style were limited by Orthodox artistic conventions, lack of travel opportunities, inadequate technical knowledge and ignorance of classical his­tory and mythology. As far as we know, there were no master works for them to copy. Where the use of foreign models is well documented, for example, simplified imitations of plates from Piscator's illustrated Bible, they worked mainly in a religious context.[361]

In 1683 a separate Armoury workshop for non-religious art (zhivopisnaia palata) was established under Ushakov's directorship.[362] Armoury employment rolls for 1687-8 record twenty-seven ikonopistsy and forty zhivopistsy, the latter making maps and charts, prints, banners, theatrical scenery (for Tsar Alexis's short-lived theatre: see below) and decorating such items as furniture, Easter eggs, chess sets and children's toys. Icon painters diversified their skills. In a petition of 1681, for example, Vasilii Poznanskii announced that he was adept at both ikonopis' and zhivopis' and could do historical subjects, 'perspective' studies and portraits.[363]

The introduction of the secular portrait (parsuna or persona, the term bor­rowed from Latin via Polish) was a significant innovation.[364] The earliest known examples, posthumous images of Prince Mikhail Skopin-Shuiskii and Tsar Fedor Ivanovich (1630s?), were icon-like studies in tempera on wood.[365] Free­standing likenesses of Russians painted in oils on canvas depicting persons detached from an iconic composition or a dynastic cycle are extremely rare before the 1680s. Although there is documentary evidence of parsuny being painted in the i650s-i660s, extant examples are elusive. Not one of Ushakov's portraits survives, for example. The first written reference to a Russian artist doing a portrait from life is Fedor Iur'ev's non-extant study of Tsar Alexis of 1671.[366] The largest surviving collection of portraits are the Russian and foreign rulers in the Book of Titled Heads (Tituliarnik), a sort of dynastic reference work produced for the Foreign Office by Armoury artists in 1672-3. The images are highly stylised, identifying individuals by inscriptions and appropriate regalia.

Little distinguishes Tsar Alexis from twelfth-century Prince Vladimir Mono- makh.⁴⁷

A key period in the evolution of the parsuna portrait was the short reign of Tsar Fedor Alekseevich (i676-82), which saw the further spread of Polish cultural influences. In i677 Fedor ordered portraits for the tombs of Tsars Michael and Alexis from Fedor Zubov and in 1682 two half-length portraits of his father from Ivan Saltanov. Rare 'naive' equestrian studies of Michael and Alexis, painted in tempera on canvas but with gold icon-like backgrounds, also date from Fedor's reign.⁴⁸ In 1678 Ivan Bezmin went to the palace to paint the tsar (pisal gosudarskuiu personu).⁴⁹

The best-known surviving oil painting of Tsar Alexis may date from this time. This stiff and stylised Byzantine image of the tsar in his regalia suggests some development towards three-dimensionality in the background and in the moulding of the face. Both it and a posthumous portrait on a wooden panel of Fedor himself, made for placing by his tomb, are reminiscent of similarly static and decorative panel portraits of Tudor kings and queens painted in England more than a century earlier, with attention devoted to sumptuous fabrics, gems and regalia.⁵⁰

From the 1680s boyars, too, appear in easel portraits modelled on the stiffly formal 'Sarmatian' portraits of nobles in Poland-Lithuania and Ukraine.⁵¹ An image engraved from a painting of Prince Vasilii Vasil'evich Golitsyn (c. 1687), attributed to the Ukrainian Leontii Tarasevich, with its coat of arms and heraldic verses, is wholly in this Polish-Ukrainian manner.⁵² Golitsyn, one of the few Russians to know Latin, also owned 'German' prints, maps, musi­cal instruments, foreign books, clocks, furniture and mirrors. He amassed a portrait gallery, as did another boyar, Artamon Matveev. Matveev, who had a Scottish wife, also staged home theatricals and hired a foreign tutor to teach his son Latin and Greek.⁵³

47 See V Kostsova, 'Tituliarnik sobraniia Gosudarstvennogo Ermitazha', Trudy Gosu- darstvennogo Ermitazha 3 (1959): 16-40; Cracraft, Imagery, pp. 68-70; Kostotchkina, 'Baroque', pp. 82-4.

48 Ovchinnikova, Portret, pp. 27-8; Danilova and Mneva, 'Zhivopis'', p. 457.

49 A. E. Viktorov, Opisanie zapisnykh knigibumagstarinnykh dvortsovykhprikazov, 1584-1725 g., 2 vols. (Moscow: Arkhipov, 1883), vol. 11, p. 446.

50 Hughes, 'Images', 177; Kampfer, Herrscherbild, pp. 214, 242; Briusova, Russkaiazhivopis', plate 36.

51 See L. I. Tananaeva, 'Portretnye formy v Pol'she i v Rossii v XVII v. Nekotorye sviazi i paralleli', Sovetskoe iskusstvoznanie '81 (1982), pp. 85-125; Cracraft, Imagery, pp. 190-1; Hughes, 'Images', i72-3.

52 Lindsey Hughes, Sophia Regent of Russia 1657-1704 (New Haven: Yale University Press,

i990), pp. i44-5.

53 On Golitsyn: Lindsey Hughes, Russia and the West, the Life of a Seventeenth-Century West- ernizer, Prince V. V. Golitsyn (1643-1714) (Newtonville, Mass.: ORP, 1984); A. Smith, 'The

Both these men were exceptional. Even allowing for high rates of destruc­tion of noble property overthe centuries, the meagre evidence ofportraits from the seventeenth century undermines attempts to demonstrate their 'wide dis­tribution ... not only in the capital but also in the provinces'.⁵⁴ James Cracraft describes Muscovite parsuny as 'exceedingly provincial and even regressive by contemporary Western European standards'.⁵⁵ We should add, however, that 'Western European standards' were by no means uniformly professional and that 'naive' portraits painted by semi-trained or untaught provincial artists remained the norm outside court circles all over Europe. The point is that in Russia portraits were still a novelty whereas in much of Western Europe they were commonplace.

The gap between Russia and the West was at its widest in respect of female portraits. Recent studies argue that Muscovite royal women were empowered by religious symbolism and rhetoric; for example, the murals in their reception chamber in the Kremlin featured images ofstrong female rulers from the Bible and Byzantium.⁵⁶ But likenesses of living women remained a rarity as long as elite women were kept in semi-seclusion. The first known free-standing female portraits in Muscovy depict the exceptional figure of Tsarevna Sophia, regent 1682-9. A version engraved in Amsterdam was even surrounded by seven allegorical Virtues and verses in Latin (see Plate 28). All Sophia's portraits emphasised traditional attributes of rulership, as symbolised by regalia in the setting of a double eagle.⁵⁷ Celebrations of female beauty and sexuality were out of the question in Russia and remained so for some time. While late seventeenth-century England enjoyed the 'age of the pin-up', with prints of royal mistresses and assorted actresses (sometimes nude) widely available for sale, most Muscovite women remained faceless.⁵⁸ The few known oil

Brilliant Career of Prince Golitsyn', HUS 19 (1995): 639-54; Richard Hellie, The Economy and Materia Culture of Russia 1600-1725 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 571-627. Robert O. Crummey writes: 'Only one boyar . . . Golitsyn, could claim to be a whole-hearted devotee ofthe new cultural standards': Aristocrats and Servitors: The Boyar Elite in Russia, 1613-1689 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 161. On Matveev, Paul Bushkovitch, Peter the Great. The Struggle for Power, 1671-1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 43-79.

54 Ovchinnikova, Portret, p. 101.

55 Cracraft, Imagery, p. 192.

56 See Thyreet, Between God and Tsar; Lindsey Hughes, 'Women and the Arts at the Russian Court from the 16th to the 18th Century', in J. Pomeroy and R. Gray (eds.), An Imperial Collection. Women Artists from the State Hermitage (Washington, DC: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2003), pp. 19-49.

57 See Hughes, Sophia, pp. 139-44, and her 'Sophia, "Autocrat of All the Russias": Titles, Ritual and Eulogy in the Regency of Sophia Alekseevna (i682-89)', Canadian Slavonic Papers 28 (i986): 266-86.

58 David Piper, The English Face (London: National Gallery, i978), pp. i03-4.

paintings of seventeenth-century women, for example, Tsar Fedor's widow Martha, in modest Muscovite robe and headdress, and Peter I's mother Natalia Naryshkina, her hair hidden by a severe black scarf like a nun's veil, date from the 1690s.[367]

Theatre and music

In October 1672 Alexis sat down at Preobrazhenskoe outside Moscow to watch a company of German amateur actors directed by a Lutheran pastor perform the 'Play of Ahasuerus and Esther', the first such spectacle to be staged at court. The tsar was aware of fellow monarchs' enthusiasm for theatre and a decade earlier had instructed the agent John Hebdon to bring players to Moscow. He was persuaded to revive this unfulfilled plan by Artamon Matveev, a pio­neer of amateur dramatics, who staged a production of the ballet Orpheo at Shrovetide 1672.[368] The repertoire of Alexis's theatre was largely religious and moralising, with biblical stories providing the plots; but contemporary refer­ences and slapstick humour were built in. All plays, regardless of content, had spectacular lighting effects, 'perspective' scenery and colourful costumes. The Comedy ofBacchus even featured drunkards, maidens and performing bears.[369]Staged within the confines of royal palaces before restricted audiences, these performances were extensions of courtly spectacle. The theatre was in opera­tion only until the tsar's death, after which it was closed under pressure from the patriarch. There is no basis for the legend that Tsarevna Sophia wrote and performed plays.[370] The first public theatre in Russia opened in Moscow in 1701, but was not a great success.

The tsar's theatre accelerated the importation of Western instruments and musical scores, previously virtually unknown. It also featured traditional vocal music, which in the course of the century assimilated a number of 'novel­ties' via Ukraine, including linear (five-line) notation and the increased use of polyphonic (part-singing) compositions. The two most prestigious church choirs belonged to the tsar and the patriarch. They and smaller ensembles maintained by monasteries and private individuals performed not only litur­gical music, but also 'interludes' (kontserty) in church and spiritual chants (dukhovnye kanty), which could be sung at home. One of the most prolific composers in the medium of sacred music was the singer Vasilii Titov, who set Simeon Polotskii's rhymed Psalter to music.[371] Another composer, Nikolai Diletskii, a Ukrainian who studied in Vilna, produced Ideia grammatiki musiki- iskoi, the first treatise on music to be translated into Russian. Many vocal scores from the period await analysis and publication.

Instrumental music was restricted by the Church, which permitted only vocal music during the liturgy. A campaign spearheaded early in Alexis's reign by the Zealots of Piety prompted an edict of 1645: 'Take great care that nowhere should there be shameful spectacles and games, and no wander­ing minstrels with tambourines and flutes either in the town or the villages.' Tambourines, flutes and horns were to be smashed 'without exception'. A foreign witness reported that about five cartloads of instruments were confis­cated and burnt.[372] The Zealots' targets were pagan entertainers, but 'seemly' musical entertainments were permissible at court functions and diplomatic receptions. In 1664, for example, musicians from the suite ofthe English ambas­sador Charles Howard gave some private performances. Tsar Alexis employed a Polish organist, Simeon Gutkovskii. Organs, pipes and drums were played at the tsar's wedding to Natalia Naryshkina in 1671.[373] Even so, Alexis was at first hesitant about permitting instrumental music in his new theatre 'as being new and in some ways pagan, but when the players pleaded with him that without music it was impossible to put together a chorus, just as it was impossible for dancers to dance without legs, then he, a little unwillingly, left everything to the discretion of the actors themselves'. Foreign musicians supplied the accompaniment, some specially hired from abroad.[374] The entry of the Dutch embassy of Konraad van Klenk into Moscow in 1676 was greeted by 'the con­tinual and unceasing sounds of trumpets and percussion', as well as pipes and flutes.[375] Such music was to become a regular feature of Peter I's parades and entertainments.

Literary and intellectual life: publishing and printing

Anthologies and surveys generally include the seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth as the last chapter of Early Russian literature. There was indeed much continuity from the sixteenth century. Russian tra­ditional literature - lives of saints, miracle stories of the Virgin Mary, folk tales - was enjoyed by most classes. Increasingly, however, these were supple­mented by new 'high' genres - poetry, drama, sermons - for selected readers. The separation of elite from popular literature continued, as the concept of belles lettres emerged.[376] Little of this was reflected in print, however. In the whole of the seventeenth century the Moscow Press (Pechatnyi dvor), for most of the period the only one in Russia, published fewer than ten books that were not wholly religious in content. These included the 1649 Law Code, Meletii Smotritskii's Grammar and a manual for training infantry regiments. The Press's best-sellers were alphabet primers forteachingbasicliteracy, closely followed by the Psalter. Its total output between 1601 and 1700 amounted to only 483 editions, of which more than 80 per cent were for liturgical use.[377]In other words, the medium of print was virtually reserved for sacred texts, mostly heavy tomes for use in church, while profane or secular works were confined to manuscripts or oral transmission.

Historians who measure Russia with a Western yardstick generally link low achievements in 'book culture' with lack of learning. The idea runs like a refrain through accounts written by Western travellers, many of whom had some form of higher education. The absence of Russian names among the luminaries of the so-called 'scientific revolution' is hardly surprising when we consider that not only did Muscovy have no universities or academies, but also apparently lacked even elementary schools. Some Orthodox churchmen magnified the negative impression by equating foreign learning with 'guile' and 'deception'. At the same time, we should not exaggerate the gap. Even Isaac Newton, a devout Christian, studied topics such as astrology and alchemy that today would be regarded as 'unscientific'. For the mass of people all over Europe the world was explained by divine providence, not the laws of physics. Everywhere book learning, an urban phenomenon, was for the few. Even noblemen often had a minimal grasp of classical languages and Latin

humanism. [378]

Books printed in Cyrillic in foreign centres of Orthodox learning reached Russia, as well as secular books in foreign languages. Translations on secular topics such as medicine and mathematics were commissioned in government departments and works in manuscript on diverse subjects circulated among lit­erate people, while a flourishing oral tradition brought a variety oftexts even to the remote countryside. After the Time of Troubles many historical narratives appeared that retold real-life events and showed an interest in personalities, for example Avraamii Palitsyn's Skazanie of the Troubles and Katyrev-Rostovskii's Book of Chronicles. Such works circulated alongside fictional tales of adventure and mystery. Particularly popular were translations via the Polish from the Great Mirror (Magnum speculum exemplorum) and Deeds of the Romans. Nobles and townspeople read chivalric romances, picaresque tales and parodic works like Liturgy to the Ale House and Shemiaka's Judgement. A new genre was the 'literature of roguery' in which characters constantly transform themselves and adopt new identities.[379] Tales in this category include Savva Grudtsyn and Frol Skobeev, the latter remarkable for its lack of a moral message. Soviet histo­rians exaggerated the significance of such tales, treating them as 'democratic satires' that criticised the status quo. A more nuanced reading is now pos­sible, revealing a mixture of hagiographic framing, foreign borrowings and local embellishments. Redating has pushed these stories to the very end of the century and to the 'margins' of the literary scene.[380]

Traditional forms could accommodate new content, for example the 'Life' of the pious laywoman Iuliania Lazarevskaia written by her son, who stressed her humility and charity rather than her asceticism or devotion to the liturgy.[381]The autobiographical 'Life' of Archpriest Avvakum, composed in the 1670s, contained earthy scenes of family life written in a robust vernacular alongside rhetorical passages underlining the theme of personal struggle.[382]

The emergence ofliterature as an activity with distinct aesthetic and formal requirements carried out by named authors is reflected in the work of the so- called 'chancellery' or Printing Office poets of the first half of the century, who specialised in didactic verse, epistles and appeals in syllabic metre derived from Ruthenian models.[383] The first translated treatise on rhetoric in Russian dates from 1623. The assimilation of new literary forms and a genre system was accelerated by the Church's programme for correcting service books. A major pioneer of sermons, for example, was the Ukrainian scholar and corrector Epifanii Slavinetskii.

The career of Simeon Polotskii (Samuil Gavrilovich Petrovskii-Sinianovich, 1629-80) exemplifies new trends in Latin/Slavonic literary culture.[384] This Kiev- educated monk came to Moscow in i664 to serve as tutor to Tsar Alexis's children. He left a massive legacy ofsacred and secular writings in manuscript, while his published works make him one of the rare authors active in Muscovy whose name appeared in print during his lifetime or very shortly after his death.[385] Most of his publications were produced in the Palace Typography (Verkhniaia tipografiia), which in the 1670s to early 1680s operated alongside the Moscow Press. His Psalter in Verse (1680) was a best-seller. Writings preserved in manuscript include Vertograd mnogotsvetnyi, a massive anthology of 2,763 didactic poems written in syllabic verse, the content borrowed from Latin originals by Jesuit writers, and the Rifmologion of occasional verses for royal events. Polotskii makes frequent reference to classical authors and tales from antiquity. The title page to his History ofBarlaam andJosaphat (1681), designed by Ushakov, has been hailed as 'the first example ofthe use of Classical symbolism by a Russian artist'.[386] In general, poetry was still regarded as a higher form of spiritual activity. Even secular poems concentrated on moral improvement, especially the curbing of pride and avarice.

Along with acceptance of poetry came some sponsorship of education. Some boyars learned Latin and Polish from foreign tutors.[387] The young Tsar Alexis's early lessons were from primers and biblical texts, but later he read cos­mographies, astronomy and mechanics, ancient history and travel accounts. A few schools sprang up, attached to monasteries (Miracles (Chudovskii), St Andrew's and Zaikonospasskii), to the Moscow Printing House and gov­ernment departments, although information about them is fragmentary.[388]Tsar Alexis's son Alexis, instructed by Polotskii, in 1667 was able to deliver a speech in Latin and Polish to a delegation from Poland. In 1682 another son, Tsar Fedor, approved a charter of privileges for an academy in Moscow to teach grammar, poetics, rhetoric, dialectics, rational, natural and legal philos­ophy and the 'free sciences'. The prototype was the Mohyla academy in Kiev, founded in the 1630s on the Jesuit model. Fedor's plan was implemented under Sophia in 1685-7 when the Slavonic-Greek-Latin academy opened its doors. All its classes were conducted in Latin. The teachers were churchmen. The curriculum included Aristotelian cosmology in the context of Jesuit natural philosophy in an attempt to harmonise secular learning with faith.[389]

Conclusion: secularisation revisited

Our knowledge of seventeenth-century Russian culture is far from complete. Attributions and dating are often imprecise, especially in the case of icons. Surviving monuments may be too few to allow generalisations - wooden buildings, for example - or there may be no examples left at all, as in the case of 'history' paintings executed on the walls of royal palaces. New literary texts in manuscript continue to be discovered and scholars constantly revise the dating of the known ones. Provincial culture in particular requires further study.[390] We may conclude that, by and large, 'high' Russo-Byzantine Ortho­dox models and 'low' folk culture met most of the needs of the sort of society that Muscovy was in the seventeenth century and reflected the sort of view of the world that most Muscovites still held. Hence, tsars in their portraits, including the young Peter the Great, looked more like Byzantine emperors than French or English kings; Orthodox church design remained distinct from

Catholic or Protestant; you could buy an icon or an edition of the Psalter in most towns, but not an oil painting or a book of poetry. At the same time, there is compelling evidence of growing receptiveness to selected aspects of Western culture, for example, in the desire of the boyar elite to acquire portraits with coats of arms. Patterns of borrowing and receptiveness suggest a timid but growing attachment to 'the West' as a desirable source of new ideas, filtered through 'fraternal' cultures (notably Ukraine), contradicted by discourses of the dangers of alien customs and limited by economic and social realities. Hence seventeenth-century Muscovites failed to assimilate many things that were commonplace for members of the European elites, including statues, classical mansions and pictures of their wives and daughters. Boyars still had to adhere to the royal calendar and independent, participatory cultural life outside the tsar's household was extremely restricted. Unlike many of his Western contemporaries, the average Russian boyar did not compose or play music, read or write poetry or philosophy, speak foreign languages, travel abroad or take an interest in architecture (as opposed to building), horticul­ture or science. There were exceptions, such as Matveev and Golitsyn, but by and large in their accomplishments and culture Muscovite nobles were closer to the rest of the population than to their European counterparts. A consis­tently 'Westernising' programme for the arts was patently absent during the reigns ofthe seventeenth-century tsars. Foreign 'novelties' belonged to 'closed' society; they were not intended for and still less imposed upon a wider public as later were Peter I's dress reforms, for example. Religion dominated high culture.

Soviet historians, obliged to demonstrate an atheistic world-view, dealt with the awkward fact of the prolonged control of established religion over seventeenth-century Russian culture by emphasising the 'discovery of the value of the human personality' (lichnost') behind religious facades. They min­imised or denied the religiosity of religious art, underlining instead its humane (gumanitarnye), popular (narodnye) and 'life-enhancing' (zhizneradostnye) qual­ities.[391] Icons and frescos were scrutinised for evidence of realism, naturalistic landscapes, peasant physiognomies and everyday (bytovye) details. Soviet archi­tectural historians detected 'progress' in an increase in the number of domes­tic and civic buildings constructed of stone and brick rather than wood. Cult architecture could be the bearer of advanced features, too. Churches, for exam­ple, were said to have 'drawn closer' to civic buildings in their design. Soviet scholars, particularly during the Stalin period, played down foreign borrowing

and exaggerated the indigenous roots of new ideas, especially 'democratic'

ones.[392]

The evidence presented above shows that traditional religious culture remained strong and that Western, secular trends operated within limits. Tsar Alexis conducted experiments in horticulture with the help of foreign experts, but he also had holy water sprinkled to form signs of the cross on fields. He employed foreign medics, but carried around a tooth of St Sabbas to cure toothache. Simeon Polotskii wrote his works explicitly 'for the spiritual benefit of Orthodox Christians' (polzy radi dushevnyia pravoslavnykh khristian). Literature and art were firmly rooted in the acceptance of well-defined hier­archies and in a world of opposites in which a constant struggle is waged between good and evil and where ultimately people must renounce worldly things.

There was fierce opposition to what were perceived as 'Latin and Lutheran' innovations in religious art. In 1674, for example, Patriarch Ioakim banned the sale of paper prints 'made by German heretics, Lutherans and Calvin- ists, according to their own damned persuasion, crudely and wrongly'. He and his predecessors denounced icons that 'depict everything after the man­ner of earthly things'.[393] Their Old Believer opponents agreed with them in this respect. The most frequently quoted pronouncement on the subject is Archpriest Avvakum's complaint that some icon painters made Christ 'look like a German, big-bellied and fat, except that no sword is painted on his hip'.[394] Henceforth Old Believers strove to preserve ancient artistic tradi­tions. Warnings were aimed at both non-canonical compositions and non- traditional, three-dimensional depictions that added improper 'worldliness' to images which, according to Orthodox tradition, should intimate the divine world beyond the icon, not imitate the flesh and blood of the here and now. The Church had no quarrel with secular painting as such. Indeed, Patriarch Nikon had his portrait painted several times.[395] In general, seventeenth-century debates demonstrate a new awareness of the shifting boundaries between the sacred and profane and an attempt to establish what was permissible for the devout Orthodox. There was an increased concern with individual morality as opposed to asceticism.[396]

In 1690 Patriarch Ioakim was still appealingto Tsars Ivan and Peter to 'resist new Latin and alien customs and not to introduce the wearing of foreign dress'.[397] The culture of the 1690s, still inadequately studied, bears witness to the proliferation of Western influences. Among the royal family's orders from the Armoury we find images of patron saints not on wooden panels but in oils on canvas,[398] battle paintings 'after the German model' and pictures on canvas depicting 'troops travelling by sea' copied from German engravings.[399]Armoury artists found themselves making regimental banners and decorating the new ships that Tsar Peter built at Voronezh. The victory parade held in Moscow in 1696 to celebrate the capture of Azov from the Turks took place against a backdrop of classical architectural devices, allegorical paintings and wooden sculptures set on triumphal gates inscribed with the words of Julius Caesar: 'I came. I saw. I conquered.'[400]

Peter's Great Embassy to Western Europe (1697-8) consolidated his view of what constituted 'civilised' art and architecture. In January 1698 he became the subject of the first portrait of a Russian ruler wholly in the Western manner, painted in London by Sir Godfrey Kneller.[401] By 1701 only two icon painters remained on the Armoury payroll and by 1711 nearly all Armoury personnel were transferred to the new capital of St Petersburg.[402] Yet we are still far from the 'liberal' atmosphere that Western thinkers such as David Hume regarded as essential for the flourishing of the arts.[403] There was still no sign of an independent public sphere. The arts in Russia remained firmly harnessed to higher authority, even though power shifted from the Church to the state.

From the early eighteenth century most things 'pre-Petrine' were regarded as a blank. Russia must achieve cultural salvation by imitating and assimilating

Western culture. The idea that Russian art began with Peter held sway for the next century and a half, roughly coinciding with the period that classi­cism dominated the arts in Russia and most of Europe. Only from the mid- nineteenth century did Russia's seventeenth century begin to be rehabilitated and recreated in the Russian imagination. Its buildings were widely imitated in the Neo- or Pseudo-Russian style. Artists, illustrators and designers - Ivan Bilibin, Apolinarii Vasnetsov, Andrei Riabushkin, Viacheslav Shvarz - tried to capture the century's spirit. Faberge and Ovchinnikov recreated the shapes and colours of seventeenth-century objets de vertu for elite clients.⁹⁶ A roman­ticised seventeenth-century style became the fashion preference at the court of Nicholas II, who liked to see himself as a latter-day Tsar Alexis. This imag­ined seventeenth century is a fairy-tale world of turrets and cupolas, exotic fabrics, elaborate carvings and jewel-like surfaces that awakes nostalgia for a pre-Western, pre-classical world. In this vision, far from being the period that prepared the ground for Westernisation, the seventeenth century remains the last bastion of true Russian culture.

96 See E. I. Kirichenko, The Russian Style (London: L. King, 1991), ch. 3.

i8 V N. Tatishchev, Istoriia rossiiskaia, vol. vii (Moscow and Leningrad: Nauka, i968), p. 296.