Icon and Axe

2. The Coming of the West

FEW PROBLEMS have disturbed Russians more than the nature of their relationship to the West. Concern about this question did not begin either in the salons of the imperial period or in the mists of Slavic antiquity, but in Muscovy from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century. This account will attempt to suggest both that there was an over-all psychological significance for Muscovy in the rediscovery of the West during this early modern period, and that there were a number of different “Wests” with which important contact was successively established. A consideration of how the West came to Russia may throw some light not only on Russian but on general European history.

The general psychological problem posed by confrontation with the West was in many ways more important than any particular political or economic problem. It was rather like the trauma of adolescence. Muscovy had become a kind of raw youth: too big to remain in childhood surroundings yet unable to adjust to the complex world outside. Propelled by the very momentum of growth, Muscovy suddenly found itself thrust into a world it was not equipped to understand. Western Europe in the fifteenth century was far more aggressive and articulate than it had been in Kievan times, and Russia far more self-conscious and provincial. The Muscovite reaction of irritability and self-assertion was in many ways that of a typical adolescent; the Western attitude of patronizing contempt, that of the unsympathetic adult. Unable to gain understanding either from others or from its own resources, Muscovy prolonged its sullen adolescence for more than a century. The conflicts that convulsed Russia throughout the seventeenth century were part of an awkward, compulsive search for identity in an essentially European world. The Russian response to the inescapable challenge of Western Europe was split—almost schizophrenic—and this division has to some extent lasted down to the present.

Novgorod

MUCH OF THE COMPLEX modern Russian feeling about the West begins with the conquest and humiliation of Novgorod by Moscow in the late fifteenth century. The destruction of the city’s traditions and repopulation of most of its people shattered the most important natural link with the West to have survived in the Russian north since Kievan times. At the same time, the absorption of Novgorod brought into Muscovy new ecclesiastical apologists for autocracy who had come to rely partly on Western Catholic ideas and techniques in an effort to combat the growth of Western secularism in that city. Here we see the faint beginnings of the psychologically disturbing pattern whereby even the xenophobic party is forced to rely on one “West” in order to combat another. The ever more shrill and apocalyptical Muscovite insistence on the uniqueness and destiny of Russia thus flows to some extent from the psychological need to disguise from oneself the increasingly derivative and dependent nature of Russian culture.

Other contacts with the West besides those in Novgorod had, of course, survived the fall of Kiev, and might have helped make the rediscovery of the West less upsetting. Travelers to the Orient during the Mongol period like Marco Polo and the Franciscan missionaries to China passed through southern Russia; western Russian cities, such as Smolensk and Chernigov, remained channels of cultural and economic contact; and even in Great Russia, Western influence can be detected in the ecclesiastical art of Vladimir and Suzdal.¹ The division between East and West was, moreover, far from precise. Techniques and ideas filtering in from Paleologian Byzantium and from the more advanced Southern and Western Slavs were often similar to those of the early Italian Renaissance with which these “Eastern” regions were in such intimate contact.²

Nevertheless, there was a decisive cultural and political break between Latin Europe and the Orthodox Eastern Slavs in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Catholic Europe concentrated its interest on the Western Slavs, and displayed more interest in the Mongol and Chinese empires to the east than in Great Russia. Muscovy, in turn, became preoccupied with the geopolitics of the Eurasian steppe, and lost sight of the Latin West except as a harassing force that had occupied Constantinople and encouraged Teutonic forays against Russia.

Novgorod, however, retained and increased the many-sided Western links that had generally prevailed in the major cities of Kievan Rus’. “Lord Great Novgorod,” as it was called, was the “father,” just as Kiev was the “mother,” of Russian cities.³ The peaceful coexistence of Eastern and Western culture within this proud and wealthy metropolis is dramatized by one of its most famous and imposing landmarks: the twelfth-century bronze doors of the Santa Sophia cathedral. One door came from Byzantium, the other from Magdeburg; one from the seat of Eastern empire, the other from the North German city that had received the model charter of urban self-government from the Western Empire.⁴ Novgorod had older traditions of independence and more extensive economic holdings than Magdeburg or any other Baltic German city. But Novgorod faced in the rising grand dukes of Muscovy a far more ambitious central power than the Holy Roman Emperors had become by the fifteenth century.

The cultural split between Moscow and Novgorod was far more formidable than the geographical divide which the wooded Valdai Hills defined between the upper tributaries of the Volga and the river-lake approaches to the Baltic. Novgorod had completely escaped the Muscovite subjection to the Mongols, and had developed extensive independent links with the Hanseatic League. Novgorodian chronicles reflected the commercial pre-occupations of the city by including far more precise factual information on municipal building and socioeconomic activity than those of any other region.⁵ When Moscow launched its military assault against Novgorod in the 1470’s, it was still paying tribute to the Tatars and using Mongol terms in finance and administration, whereas Novgorod was trading on favorable terms with a host of Western powers and using a German monetary system.⁶ Literacy was, moreover, almost certainly decreasing in Moscow because of the increasingly ornate language and script of its predominately monastic culture; whereas literacy had risen steadily in Novgorod to perhaps 80 per cent of the landholding classes through the increasing use of birch-bark commercial records.⁷

The Muscovite assault on Novgorod was, thus, in many ways, the first internal conflict between Eastward- and Westward-looking Russia—foreshadowing that which was later to develop between Moscow and St. Petersburg. In subjugating Novgorod, the Moscow of Ivan III was aided not just by superiority of numbers but also by a split between East and West within Novgorod itself. This split became a built-in feature of Westward-looking Russian gateways to the Baltic. Sometimes the split was clearcut, as between the purely Swedish town of Narva and the Russian fortress of Ivangorod, built by Ivan III across the river on the Baltic coast. The split ran directly through the great port of Riga, when Russia took it over and surrounded a picturesque Hanseatic port with a Russian provincial city. One Riga centered on a towering late Gothic cathedral containing the largest organ in the world; the other Riga was dominated by a xenophobic Old Believer community that forbade any use of musical instruments. The split became more subtle and psychological in St. Petersburg, where completely Western externals conflicted with the apocalyptical fears of a superstitious populace.

The split in Novgorod was all of these things. There was, to begin with, a clear division marked by the Volkhov River between the merchant quarter on the right and the ecclesiastical-administrative section on the left. There was an architectural contrast between the utilitarian, wooden structures of the former and the more permanent and stately Byzantine structures of the latter. Most important and subtle, however, was the ideological split between republican and autocratic, cosmopolitan and xenophobic tendencies. By the fourteenth century, Novgorod had both the purest republican government and the wealthiest ecclesiastical establishment in Eastern Slavdom.⁸ The latter acted, for the most part, as a kind of ideological fifth column for Moscow: exalting the messianic-imperial claims of its grand prince in order to check the Westward drift of the city.

As early as 1348 the Novgorod hierarchy haughtily referred the king of Sweden to the Byzantine emperor when the Western monarch proposed discussion of a religious rapprochement.⁹ Conscious of its unique role of independence from the Tatars and unbroken continuity with Kievan times, articulate and imaginative Novgorodian writers cultivated a sense of special destiny. They argued that Novgorod received Christianity not from Byzantium, but directly from the apostle Andrew; that Japheth, the third son of Noah, had founded their city; and that holy objects—the white monastic hood allegedly given by the Emperor Constantine to Pope Silvester and the Tikhvin icon of the Virgin—had been miraculously brought by God from sinful Byzantium to Novgorod for the uncorrupted people of “shining Russia.”¹⁰

As political and economic pressures on Novgorod increased in the fifteenth century, the Novgorodian church frequently interpreted negotiations with the West as signs that the end of the church calendar in 1492 would bring an end to history.¹¹ Archbishop Gennadius of Novgorod and Pskov took the initiative shortly after his installation in 1485 in imploring a still-reluctant Moscow to prepare for this moment of destiny by cleansing its realm of heretics just as he had in the see of Novgorod.¹² Subsequently, of course, the leaders of two key monasteries within the see of Novgorod, Joseph of Volokolamsk and Philotheus of Pskov, became the architects of the Muscovite ideology. Some of its nervous, apocalyptical quality almost certainly came from the fear that secularization of both intellectual life and church property was imminent in this westerly region, and that the Tsar himself might emulate the new state builders of the West (or indeed the iconoclastic emperors of Byzantium) by presiding over such a revolution. The holy fools, who did so much to charge the atmosphere of Muscovy with prophetic expectation, trace their Russian beginnings to the confrontation of Byzantine Christianity and Western commercialism in Novgorod. Procopius, the thirteenth-century itinerant holy man who was the first of this genre to be canonized in Russia (and whose widely read sixteenth-century biography made him the model for many others), was in fact a German who had been converted after years of residence in Novgorod.¹³

Both economic and ideological factors tended to check any far-reaching Westernization of Novgorod. Unlike Tver, the other important westerly rival of Moscow subdued by Ivan III, Novgorod was firmly anchored against political drift toward Poland-Lithuania.¹⁴ Novgorod had its most important Western economic links with German cities far to the west of Poland, and was linked with the northern and eastern frontiers of Great Russia through a vast, independent economic empire. Psychologically, too, the “father” of Russian cities felt a special obligation to defend the memory and honor of Rus’ after the Kievan “mother” had been defiled by the Mongols. Riurik was, after all, said to have established the ruling dynasty in Novgorod even before his heirs moved to Kiev; and the fact that Novgorod was spared the Mongol “scourge of God” was seen by many as a sign that Novgorod enjoyed special favor and merited special authority within Orthodox Slavdom.

The political subordination of Novgorod to Moscow intensified Muscovite fanaticism while crushing out three distinctive traditions which Novgorod and Pskov had shared with the advanced cities of the high medieval West: commercial cosmopolitanism, representative government, and philosophic rationalism.

Cosmopolitanism was shattered by Ivan III’s and Vasily III’s destruction of the enclave of the Hanseatic League in Novgorod, and by subsequent restrictions on the independent trade and treaty relations that Novgorod and Pskov had enjoyed with the West since even before association with the Hanse. Representative government was destroyed by ripping out the bells which had summoned the popular assembly (veche) in Novgorod, Pskov, and the Novgorodian dependency of Viatka to elect magistrates and concur on major policy questions. Though neither a democratic forum nor a fully representative legislature, the veche assembly did give propertied interests an effective means of checking princely authority. The Novgorod veche had gradually introduced property qualifications for participation, and had also spawned smaller, more workable models of the central assembly in its largely autonomous municipal subsections. Like the druzhina (or consultative war band of the prince), the veche represented a survival from Kievan times that was alien to the tradition of Byzantine autocracy. The veche was a far more serious obstacle to the Josephite program for establishing pure autocracy, for it had established solid roots in the political traditions of a particular region and in the economic self-interest of a vigorous merchant class.

The activity of the critical secular intellectuals was even more feared by the monastic establishment than that of republican political leaders. For the monks were more interested in lending mythologized sanctity to a Christian emperor than in defining concrete forms of rule. Their fascination with Byzantine models led them to conclude that ideological schisms and heresies had done far more to tear apart the empire than differences in political and administrative traditions. Accompanying the extraordinary reverence for whatever “is written” within the monastic tradition was an inordinate fear of anything written outside. In the early modern period, the phrase “he has gone into books” was used to mean “he has gone out of his mind”; and “opinion is the mother to all suffering, opinion is the second fall” became a popular proverb.¹⁵ As Gennadius of Novgorod wrote during the ideological ferment prior to the church council of 1490:

Our people are simple, they are unable to talk in the manner of books. Thus, it is better not to engage in debates about the faith. A council is needed not for debates on the faith, but in order that heretics be judged, hanged and burned.¹⁶

The ecclesiastical hierarchy sought—and gradually obtained—the help of princes in stamping out the rationalistic tendencies of the “Judaizers” through procedures strangely reminiscent of the show trials of a later era. Though little can be known for certain about the “heretics,” their ideas clearly came in through the trade routes into Novgorod as had those of the anti-ecclesiastical “shorn heads” of the previous century. The “Judaizers” were anti-trinitarian, iconoclastic, and apparently opposed to both monasticism and fasting. Linked in some ways with the European-wide phenomenon of late medieval heresy, they nevertheless differed from the Lollards and Hussites of the West by appealing not to popular sentiments with emotional revivalism, but rather to the intellectual elite with radical rationalism. Revulsion at the anti-rational historical theology of the xenophobic masses thus led cosmopolitan intellectuals into the diametrically opposite thought world of rational, anti-historical philosophy. Whether or not the Judaizers were as interested in “the cursed logic” of Jewish and Moslem thinkers as their persecutors insisted,¹⁷ that very accusation served to suggest that the logical alternative to Muscovite Orthodoxy was Western rationalism. This became the alternative when St. Petersburg succeeded Novgorod as the cosmopolitan adversary of Moscow, and gradually gave birth to a revolution in the name of universal rationalism.

The initial crippling of Novgorod under Ivan III was accompanied by some of the same obsessive fear of the West that was to recur under Ivan IV and Stalin. The ideological purge of cosmopolitan intellectuals was accompanied by massive deportations east—the first of the periodic depopulations of the more advanced Baltic provinces by the vindictive force of Muscovy.¹⁸ The pretext for this first fateful move on Novgorod was that Novgorod had gone over to the “Latins.” Although probably untrue in any formal political or ecclesiastical sense, the accusation does highlight the unsettling effect produced by the first of the “Wests” to confront Muscovy in the early modern period: the Latin West of the high Renaissance.

“The Latins”

ITALIAN INFLUENCES in Russia may have been far more substantial than is generally realized even in the early period of the Renaissance. Italian products and ideas came to Russia indirectly through Baltic ports and directly through the Genoese trading communities in the Crimea in the late thirteenth and the fourteenth century. By the mid-fourteenth century there was a permanent colony of Italian tradesmen in Moscow, and Italian paper had come into widespread usage in Russia.¹⁹ The only example of Russian church architecture from the mid-fourteenth century to survive down to modern times contains frescoes that were closer to the style of the early Renaissance than to that of traditional Byzantine iconography—including animation and realism that would have been advanced even in Italy and purely Western compositions, such as a pietà.²⁰ How far this Italian influence might have persisted in the decor of churches is one of the many no doubt insoluble mysteries of early Russian history. Subsequent Russian iconography does not appear to have been affected by these frescoes, however; and the next clear point of Italian cultural impact occurred nearly a century later, at the Council of Florence.

About a hundred representatives from various parts of Russia accompanied Metropolitan Isidore on his Italian journey. Some had previous contact, and some may have sympathized with Isidore’s ill-fated endorsement of union with Rome. Though the Russians recoiled from the secular art and culture of the high Renaissance—two monks from Suzdal left a rather unflattering description of an Italian mystery play which they saw in 1438 in the Cathedral of San Marco²¹—contact with Italy increased thereafter. Gian-Battista della Volpe was put in charge of coinage in Muscovy. Through his intermediacy, the Italian influx reached a climax in the 1470’s, with the arrival of a large number of Venetian and Florentine craftsmen in the retinue of Sophia Paleologus, Ivan III’s second wife. These Italians rebuilt the fortifications of the Moscow Kremlin and constructed the oldest and most beautiful of the churches still to be found there and in the monastery of St. Sergius.²²

Sophia came to Russia after long residence in Italy as the personal ward of the Roman pontiff and a vehicle for bringing the “widowed” Russian Church into communion with Rome. The persecution of the Judaizers was a cooperative effort on the part of Sophia (and the court supporters of her son Vasily’s claim to the succession)²³ and the leaders of the Novgorod hierarchy. Both parties were acquainted with the stern methods of dealing with heretics that had been adopted by the Latin Church in the high Middle Ages. Joseph of Volokolamsk, whose grandfather was a Lithuanian, leaned heavily on the writings of a Croatian Dominican living in Novgorod to defend his position on monastic landholding, just as Gennadius of Novgorod had set up a kind of Latin academy in Novgorod to combat the heretics. Gennadius’ leading consultants were two Latin-educated figures whom he brought to Russia for what proved to be long and influential years of service at the imperial court: Nicholas of Lübeck and Dmitry Gerasimov. Gennadius’ entourage produced the first Russian translations of a number of books from the Old Testament and Apocrypha; and the model for the “Bible of Gennadius,” which later became the first printed bible in Russia, was, significantly, the Latin Vulgate.²⁴ In the early sixteenth century, moreover, the Josephites supported ecclesiastical claims to vast temporal wealth with the spurious document that had long been used by Western apologists for papal power: the Donation of Constantine.²⁵

If the apprentice inquisitors of Muscovy can be said to have borrowed from the Latin West, the same is even more clear in the case of their victims. “The trouble began when Kuritsyn [the diplomat and adviser of Ivan III] arrived from Hungarian lands,” Gennadius wrote.²⁶ The rationalistic heresy which he sponsored and protected in Moscow was only part of a many-sided importation of ideas and habits from the secular culture of the high Renaissance. Indeed, the Josephites—like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor—conceived of their mission as a service to the people. Like the original inquisitors of the medieval West, the Russian clergy was faced with appalling ignorance and debauchery in the society they were attempting to hold together. If the ignorance was part of the Russian heritage, the debauchery was at least partly Western in origin. For vodka and venereal disease, two of the major curses of Russia in the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century, appear as part of the ambiguous legacy of the Italian Renaissance to early modern Russia.

Venereal disease first came to Moscow along the trade routes from Italy, apparently by way of Cracow in the 1490’s, and a second wave of infection was to come in the mid-seventeenth century (along with the black plague) by way of mercenaries from the Thirty Years’ War.²⁷ The designation of the disease as “the Latin sickness” is one of the first signs of growing anti-Latin sentiment.²⁸

Vodka came to Russia about a century earlier, and its history illustrates several key features of the Renaissance impact on Muscovy. This clear but powerful national drink was one of several direct descendants of aqua vitae, a liquid apparently first distilled for medicinal purposes in Western Europe at the end of the thirteenth century. It appears to have reached Russia by way of a Genoese settlement on the Black Sea, whence it was brought north a century later by refugees fleeing the Mongol conquest of the Crimea.²⁹

It was fateful for Russian morals that this deceptively innocuous-looking beverage gradually replaced the crude forms of mead and beer which had previously been the principal alcoholic fare of Muscovy. The tax on vodka became a major source of princely income and gave the civil authority a vested interest in the intoxication of its citizens. It is both sad and comical to find the transposed English phrase Gimi drenki okoviten (“Give me drink aqua vitae”: that is, vodka) in one of the early manuscript dictionaries of Russian. A Dutch traveler at the beginning of the seventeenth century saw in the Muscovite penchant for drunkenness and debauchery proof that Russians “better support slavery than freedom, for in freedom they would give themselves over to license, whereas in slavery they spend their time in work and labor.”³⁰

The fact that vodka apparently came into Russia by way of the medical profession points to the importance of Western-educated court doctors as channels for the early influx of Western ideas and techniques.³¹ The fact that vodka was popularly believed to be a kind of elixir of life with occult healing qualities provides a pathetic early illustration of the way in which the Russian muzhik was to gild his addictions and idealize his bondage. This naive belief also indicates that the initial appeal of Western thought to the primitive Muscovite mind lay in the belief that it offered some simple key to understanding the universe and curing its ills. If one were to resist the overwhelmingly traditionalist Muscovite ideology it could best be in the name of another way to truth outside of tradition: some panacea or “philosopher’s stone.”

Together with the works of Galen and Hippocrates, which began to appear in Russian translation in the fifteenth century, doctors in Muscovy—and throughout Eastern Europe—began to incorporate into their compendia of herbs and cures extracts from the Secreta Secretorum. This work purported to be the secret revelation of Aristotle to Alexander the Great about the true nature of the world, contending that biology was the key to all the arts and sciences, and that this “science of life” was ruled by the harmonies and confluences of occult forces within the body.³² This book held a key place among the works translated by the Judaizers and was destroyed during the Josephite persecution of heretics in the early sixteenth century, along with the Jewish doctors who presumably either translated or possessed the work.

The interest in alchemistic texts continued, however, and became a major preoccupation of the translators in the foreign office, who soon replaced the doctors as the major conveyor of Western ideas. Fedor Kuritsyn, the first man effectively to fill the role of foreign minister in Russia, was accused of bringing back the Judaizing heresy from the West. One of the earliest surviving documents from the foreign office was a memorandum written by a Dutch translator at the beginning of the seventeenth century, “On the Higher Philosophical Alchemy.”³³ Later in the century Raymond Lully’s 350-year-old effort to find a “universal science,” his Ars magna generalis et ultima, was translated and made the basis of an influential alchemistic compilation by a western Russian translator in the same office.³⁴

Hardly less remarkable was the Russian interest in astrology. Almost every writer of the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century was taken at one time or another with “delight in the laws of the stars” (zvezdoza-konnaia prelest’). Archbishop Gennadius was himself fascinated with the astrology he felt called on to destroy;³⁵ and after his death, Nicholas of Lübeck, his original protégé, became an active propagandist for astrological lore in Muscovy. Known as a “professor of medicine and astrology,” he had come to Moscow by way of Rome to help draw up the new church calendar. He stayed on as a physician, translating for the imperial court in 1534 a treatise written in Lübeck on herbs and medicine, The Pleasant Garden of Health, and campaigning actively for unification of the Catholic and Orthodox churches. He produced astrological computations which lent urgency to his pleas for reunion by purporting to show that the end of the world had been merely postponed from 1492 to 1524.³⁶ Maxim the Greek devoted most of his early writings to a refutation of Nicholas’ arguments but revealed in the process that he too had been fascinated by astrology while in Italy. Maxim’s follower, the urbane diplomat Fedor Karpov, confessed that he found astrology “necessary and useful to Christians,” calling it “the art of arts.”³⁷ The first Russians sent to study in England at the turn of the sixteenth century were particularly interested in the famous Cambridge student of astrology, magic, and spiritism, John Dee.³⁸ The rapid spread of fortune-telling, divination, and even gambling in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveals in part a popularization of astrological ideas current throughout Renaissance Europe.³⁹

Thus, during this early period of Western contact, Russians were fatefully conditioned to look to the West not for piecemeal ideas and techniques but for a key to the inner secrets of the universe. Early diplomats were interested not in the details of economic and political developments abroad but in astrological and alchemistic systems. These Renaissance sciences held out the promise of finding either the celestial patterns controlling the movements of history or the philosopher’s stone that would turn the dross of the northern forests into gold. Thus, secular science in Russia tended to be Gnostic rather than agnostic. There is, indeed, a kind of continuity of tradition in the all-encompassing metaphysical systems from the West that fascinated successive generations of Russian thinkers: from the early alchemists and astrologers to Boehme’s occult theosophy (literally, “divine knowledge”) and the sweeping totalistic philosophies of Schelling, Hegel, and Marx.⁴⁰

The most consistent opponents of astrology and alchemy in Muscovy were the official Josephite ideologists. In a formulation which, again, seems closer to Roman Catholic than Orthodox theology, Joseph’s principal disciple, Metropolitan Daniel of Moscow, argued that “man is almost divine in wisdom and reason, and is created with his own free power”; and again “God created the soul free and with its own powers.”⁴¹ The individual was, thus, responsible for working out his salvation without reference to the humors of the body or the movements of the stars. The good works evidenced in the disciplined and dedicated life were as important to the Josephites as to the Jesuits. But this emphasis on human freedom and responsibility was a lonely voice in the Christian East—never fully developed by the Josephites and totally rejected by others as threatening the social order.⁴²

Not all early Russian writings about the heavenly bodies can be dismissed as occult astrology. The Six Wings of the late-fifteenth-century Judaizers provided an elaborate guide to solar and lunar eclipses and was, in effect, “the first document of mathematical astronomy to appear in Russia.”⁴³ Such a document was, however, deeply suspect to Josephite ideologists; for it was the translated work of a fourteenth-century Spanish Jew based on Jewish and Islamic authorities who seemed to propose that a logic of the stars replace that of God. Throughout the Muscovite period there was an enduring fear that “number wisdom” was a challenge to divine wisdom—although mathematics was—as a practical matter—widely used and even taught in monasteries.⁴⁴

The Josephites feared that Russian thinkers would make a religion of science if left free of strict ecclesiastical control. To what extent the Judaizers and other early dissenters actually intended to do so will probably never be known. But it is clear that the fear of the Russian Church gradually became the hope of those who resented its authority—and the supreme reality for the revolutionary forces that eventually overthrew that authority.

A final aspect of the early Latin impact was the muffled echo of Renaissance humanism that was heard in Muscovy. Early-sixteenth-century Russia produced a small band of isolated yet influential individuals that shared in part the critical spirit, interest in classical antiquity, and search for a less dogmatic faith which were characteristic of Renaissance Italy. It is, of course, more correct to speak of random influences and partial reflections than of any coherent humanist movement in Russia; but it is also true that this is generally characteristic of humanism outside the narrow region stretching up from Italy through Paris and the Low Countries into southern England.

A critical attitude toward religion became widespread among the civilians in the tsar’s entourage who traveled abroad on diplomatic missions in the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century. Both Fedor Kuritsyn, who headed the foreign office under Ivan III, and Fedor Karpov, who headed the much larger one under Ivan IV, became thoroughgoing sceptics; and the perspectives of Ivan IV’s most trusted clerk, Ivan Viskovaty, and his leading apologist for absolutism, Ivan Peresvetov, appear to have been predominately secular.⁴⁵ Sacramental worship—and even the unique truth of Christianity—was implicitly questioned in the mid-fifteenth century by a literate and sophisticated Tver merchant, Afanasy Nikitin. In the course of wide travels throughout the Near East and South Asia, he appears to have concluded that all men were “Sons of Adam” who believed in the same God; and, although he continued to observe Orthodox practices in foreign lands, he pointedly wrote the word “God” in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish as well as Russian in his Journey over Three Seas.⁴⁶

The search for a more rational and universal form of faith appears to have attracted considerable interest in cosmopolitan western Russia, where a syncretic, unitarian offshoot of the Protestant Reformation had to be anathemized by a special church council of 1553-4. Like the Judaizers who were condemned by a council just a half century before, this movement is shrouded in obscurity. Once again, some connection with Judaism seems probable in view of the importance that the leader, Fedor Kosoy, attached to the teaching of the Pentateuch and his later marriage to a Lithuanian Jewess.⁴⁷ Kosoy insisted eloquently at the council of 1553–4 that “all people are as one in God: Tatars, Germans and simple barbarians.”⁴⁸ It seems reasonable to assume that this movement like that of the Judaizers continued to have sympathizers after official condemnation; and that the rapid subsequent flowering of anti-trinitarian Socinianism in Poland continued to attract attention in western Russia.

Four influential Russians of the mid-sixteenth century, Andrew Kurbsky, Fedor Karpov, Ermolai-Erazm, and Maxim the Greek, reproduced on Russian soil the philosophic opposition to both superstition and scholasticism that was characteristic of Western humanism. Each of them had a vital interest in classical antiquity—particularly Ciceronian moralism and Platonic idealism.

Despite his traditional, Muscovite view of politics and history, Kurbsky was the most deeply enamored with the classical past and was the only one to leave Russia to soak up the Latinized culture of the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom. Having acquired a direct knowledge of Platonic and early Greek thought from Maxim the Greek, he added an even more extensive knowledge of the Latin classics during his long stay abroad. Informally associated with a coterie of Latinized White Russian noblemen, Kurbsky visited the easternmost Latin university of medieval Europe at Cracow and sent his nephew to Italy. In the later stages of his correspondence with Ivan the Terrible, he included a long translation from Cicero as a means of proving that forced flight cannot be considered treason.⁴⁹

An even deeper absorption of classical culture is evident in the writings of Karpov, a Latin interpreter and leading official for more than thirty years in the Russian foreign office. He consciously strove to write with “Homeric eloquence” in a pleasing, grammatical “non-barbaric” way.⁵⁰ His few surviving compositions reveal subtlety of intellect as well as considerable style and a sense of irony and concern for moral order.⁵¹ This latter quality bordered on the subversive in Muscovy, for it led him to conclude that moral laws were higher than the will of the sovereign. Almost alone in his day he contended that civil and ecclesiastical affairs should be separated, and that justice is both a moral imperative and a practical necessity for human society. The monastic virtue of “long suffering” is not sufficient for civil society, which will be ruined if law and order are absent. Law is, however, not bracketed with terror as it was in the writings of Peresvetov. Together with justice must go mercy, because “mercy without justice is faintheartedness, but justice without mercy is tyranny.”⁵²

In keeping with the spirit of the time, Karpov invokes a providential theory of history; but his style is ironic and his conclusion pessimistic. Man has progressed from a primitive law of nature through the Mosaic law to the Christian law of grace; but the men who live under this law do not live by it. Greed and lust prevail, so that even the first of the apostles would be denied a hearing in contemporary Muscovy without money for bribery.

An equally pessimistic view of Muscovite life is propounded in the writings of the monk Ermolai-Erazm, who echoes another favorite theme of Western reformers: the dream of a pastoral utopia, of a return to a natural economy and true Christian love. The source of all the world’s ills is pride and estrangement from the land; peasants should be freed of all duties save a single donation of a fifth of each harvest to the tsar and nobility. Other exactions should be taken from parasitic merchants and tradesmen; gold and silver exchange should be eliminated; knives should be made unpointed to discourage assassins—such are some of the often naive ideas contained in his handbook of the 1540’s: On Administration and Land-measurement.⁵³ The number mysticism and cosmic neo-Platonic theologizing of the high Renaissance is also apparent in Ermolai’s efforts to vindicate the doctrine of the trinity by finding triadic patterns hidden in almost every natural phenomenon.⁵⁴

The finest representative of Renaissance culture in early-fifteenth-century Russia and the teacher of Kurbsky, Karpov, and Ermolai-Erazm, was the remarkable figure of Maxim the Greek. Through him humanism acquired an Orthodox Christian coloration and made its strongest efforts to modify the uncritical fanaticism of the Muscovite ideology.⁵⁵ An Orthodox Greek brought up in Albania and Corfu, he spent long years studying in Renaissance Italy before becoming a monk and moving to Mount Athos. From there, he was called in 1518 to Russia, where he remained—at times against his will—for the thirty-eight remaining years of his life. Summoned by the Tsar to help translate holy texts from the Greek and Latin, Maxim proceeded to write more than 150 surviving compositions of his own, and attracted a large number of monastic and lay students. He was the first to bring news to Russia of Columbus’ discovery of America, and he called attention as well to undiscovered areas of classical antiquity.⁵⁶

Maxim illustrates the humanist temperament not only in his knowledge of the classics and interest in textual criticism, but also in his concern for style and his inclusion of poetry and a grammar among his works. He delighted in the favorite humanist pastime of refuting Aristotle⁵⁷ (even though this hero of the medieval scholastics was barely known in Russia), and had a typical Renaissance preference for Plato. He frequently wrote in dialogue form, and identified reason closely with goodness and beauty:

True Godly reason not only beautifies the inner man with wisdom, humility and all manner of truth; but also harmonizes the outer parts of the body: eyes, ears, tongue and hands.⁵⁸

Florence, the home of the Platonic Academy of the cinquecento, infected Maxim not only with neo-Platonic idealism, but also with the authoritarian and puritanical passion of Savonarola, whose sermons he admired as a young student.⁵⁹ His admiration for this famed prophet may hold a key to his fate in Russia. Like Savonarola, Maxim commanded attention for his passionate opposition to the immorality and secularism of his day, and was lionized by prophetic and apocalyptical elements. Like the Florentine, Maxim suffered martyrdom—though both his ordeal and his influence lasted longer than Savonarola’s.

Unlike Savonarola, Maxim retained the style and temperament of the humanist, even in prophecy. There is a poetic quality to his denunciation of the three evil passions: “love of sweets, praise and silver” (slastoliubie, slavoliubie, srebroliubie).⁶⁰ He defends his efforts to correct faulty translations in Russian churchbooks, and pleads with those who have placed him in monastic imprisonment at least to let him return quietly to his library: “If I am wrong, subject me not to contempt, but to correction, and let me return to Athos.”⁶¹ Maxim always felt close to this center of the contemplative life and of Hesychast spirituality. Opposition to clerical wealth and dogmatism forged a link between his early humanist teachers from Italy and his later monastic followers from the upper Volga.

Maxim opposed the Josephite defense of monastic wealth not only for bringing “a blasphemous, servile, Jewish love of silver”⁶² into holy places, but also for tampering with sacred texts for calculating, political purposes. In the course of his sustained debate with the Josephite Metropolitan Daniel of Moscow, Maxim voices the fear that the church is coming under the authority of “devious rules” (krivila) rather than “just rules” (pravila)—thus anticipating the opposition between “crookedness” and “truth” (krivda-pravda) which was to become so important in Russian moral philosophy.⁶³ In a skillful dialogue, Maxim likens the Josephite argument that monastic property is a common trust to a group of sensualists’ justifying their relations with a prostitute on the grounds that she “belongs to us all in common.”⁶⁴

Maxim gradually turned to political writings denouncing Tsar Vasily III’s divorce, and unsuccessfully attempting to make young Ivan IV “the just” rather than “the terrible.” Maxim’s political philosophy was moralistic and conservative: a kind of moral rearmament program designed by a sympathetic foreigner for the less-educated leader of an underdeveloped area. All conflict can be resolved without changing the social order. The first task is to infuse the prince with moral fervor. “Nothing is so necessary to those ruling on earth as justice”;⁶⁵ but no prince can ultimately be just without the accompanying virtues of personal purity and humility.⁶⁶

The fall of Byzantium was a moral warning to Muscovy against pride and complacence in high places rather than an assurance that Moscow was now the “third Rome.” In a letter to young Ivan IV Maxim implies that adherence to the true faith will not in itself guarantee God’s favor to an unjust prince, because evil Christian kings have often been struck down, and a just pagan like Cyrus of Persia enjoyed God’s favor “for his great justice, humility, and compassion.”⁶⁷ Maxim juxtaposed the classical Byzantine idea of a symphony of power between imperial and priestly authority to the Muscovite arguments for unlimited tsarist power. Like his friend Karpov, Maxim explicitly said that the tsar should not interfere in the ecclesiastical sphere, and implied that he was bound even in the civil sphere by a higher moral law.

This foreign teacher was revered, however, not for the logic of his arguments or the beauty of his style but for the depth of his piety. In his early years he argued for a crusade to liberate Constantinople and for a preventive war against the Crimean khan;⁶⁸ but as time went on, the simple Pauline ideals of good cheer, humility, and compassion dominate his writings. In and out of monastic prisons, confronted with false accusations, torture, and near starvation, Maxim underscored with his own life his doctrine of love through long-suffering. Far from showing bitterness toward the ungrateful land to which he had come, he developed a love of Russia, and an image of it different from that of the bombastic Josephite monks in the Tsar’s entourage.

Maxim shows almost no interest in the mechanics of rule or the possibilities of practical reform, but he feels compassion for the oppressed and sorrow for the wealthy in Muscovy. He is convinced that “the heart of a mother grieving for her children deprived of the necessities of life is not so full as the soul of a faithful Tsar grieving for the protection and peaceful well-being of his beloved subjects.”⁶⁹ Whatever its faults, Russia is not a tyranny like that of the Tatars. She bears the holy mission of Christian rule in the East, through all her harassment from without and corruption from within.

Toward the end of his life and during the early years of Ivan the Terrible’s reign, Maxim transposes the image of the fallen church in Savonarola’s De ruina ecclesiae into that of a ruined Russian empire. Maxim describes how in the midst of his travels he noticed a woman in black weeping by a deserted path and surrounded by wild animals. He begs to learn her name, but she refuses, insisting that he is powerless to relieve her sorrow and would be happier to pass on in ignorance. Finally, she says that her real name is Vasiliia (from the Greek Basileia, “Empire”), and that she has been defiled by tyrants “unworthy of the title of Tsar” and abandoned by her own children for the love of silver and sensual pleasure. Prophets have ceased to speak of her, and saints to protect her. “And thus I sit here like a widow by a desolate road in a cursed age.”⁷⁰

Here, in essence, is the idea of “Holy Rus’ ”: humiliated and suffering, yet always compassionate: a wife and mother faithful to her “husband” and “children,” the ruler and subjects of Russia, even when mistreated and deserted by them. Although the idea has been traced to Maxim’s pupil Kurbsky,⁷¹ and shown to have first acquired broad popularity during the troubles of the early seventeenth century,⁷² the concept of “Holy Rus’ ” as an ideal opposed to the mechanical and unfeeling state finds its first expression in Maxim.

At the same time, Maxim linked the Hesychast ideal of continual prayer outside established worship services to the humanist ideal of a universal truth outside the historical truths of Christianity. He implored his readers to pray without ceasing that Russia would “put away all evil, all untruth, and embrace the truth.”⁷³ “Truth” (pravda) already carried for Maxim some of that dual meaning of philosophic certainty and social justice which the word carried for later Russian reformers. Like many of these figures, Maxim was frequently accused of sedition, and died a virtual prisoner.

After his death, Maxim (like Nil Sorsky before him) gradually came to be officially revered for the very pious intensity which the official church had feared and sought to discipline during his lifetime.⁷⁴ But his efforts to leaven the Muscovite ideology with humanistic ideals failed. Archimandrite Artemius of the monastery of St. Sergius, who had been a learned follower of Nil and a devoted patron of Maxim, was banished to Solovetsk for heresy by the council of 1553–4. Artemius later fled to Poland like Maxim’s pupil, Kurbsky—both of them remaining faithful to Orthodoxy, but despairing of any further attempt to blend humanist ideals with the Muscovite ideology.

Maxim had refused to participate in the church council of 1553–4, just as Nil had opposed the condemnation and execution of the Judaizers. When Maxim expired in 1556 in the monastery of St. Sergius, the last influential advocate of a tolerant Christian humanism vanished from the Muscovite scene. A many-sided assault against foreign cultural influence was under way. A severe penance was imposed on the Tsar’s closest lay adviser, Ivan Viskovaty, for opposing a strict prohibition on alien influences in iconography. The brief flicker of interest in Renaissance art shown by Ivan’s priestly confidant, Silvester (who had ordered Pskovian artists to provide Moscow with copies of paintings by Cimabue and Perugino), was also extinguished.⁷⁵ Interest in the ornate polyphonic music of Palestrina (which had been awakened by Maxim’s friend and collaborator in Latin translations Dmitry Gerasimov, during his diplomatic visit to Rome in 1524–5) was also snuffed out by Ivan’s decision to codify the prevailing system of church chant as the sole form of musical “right praising” for Russian churches.⁷⁶ Finally, and most important, the work of reproducing sacred texts was taken away from critical and linguistically gifted figures like Maxim and put in the hands of more ignorant but dependable imperial servants. The Josephite monks around Ivan preferred vast compendia to a rational ordering of ideas. The objection to textual criticism extended even to the use of printing as a means for propagating the faith and reproducing holy books. The brief and unproductive effort to set up a state printing shop in Moscow under the White Russian Ivan Fedorov ended in disaster in 1565, when the press was destroyed by a mob and the printers fled to Lithuania.⁷⁷ This was the year of Kurbsky’s flight and the establishment of the oprichnina. A new xenophobia was in the air, and the period of relatively harmonious small-scale contact with the many-sided culture of Renaissance Italy was giving way to the broader and more disturbing confrontation which began in the late years of Ivan’s reign.

The main result of a century of fitful Italian influences was to arouse suspicion of the West. These feelings were strongest among the monks whose influence was on the rise, and were increasingly channeled into animosity toward the Latin church. This anti-Catholicism of official Muscovy is puzzling, since the aspects of Renaissance culture most feared by the Josephite—astrology, alchemy, utopian social ideas, philosophical scepticism, and anti-trinitarian, anti-sacramental theology—were also opposed by the Roman Church. In part, of course, anti-Catholicism was merely an extension of the earlier Hesychast protest against the inroads of scholasticism within the late Byzantine empire. Maxim the Greek was faithful to his Athonite teachers in telling the Russians that “the Latins have let themselves be seduced not only by Hellenic and Roman doctrines, but even by Hebrew and Arab books … attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable cause trouble for all the world.”⁷⁸

To understand fully, however, why resentment was particularly focused on the Roman Church, one must keep in mind both the nature of Muscovite culture and the perennial tendency to conceive of other cultures in one’s own image. Since Muscovy was an organic religious civilization, Western Europe must be one. Since all culture in eastern Russia was expressive of the Orthodox Church, the bewildering cultural variety of the West must be expressions of the Roman Church, whatever that Church’s formal position on the matter. Latinstvo, “the Latin world,” became a general term for the West, and the phrase “Go to Latinstvo” acquired some of the overtones of “Go to the devil.” By the mid-sixteenth century prayers were being offered for the Tsar to deliver Russia from Latinstvo i Besermanstvo: the Latin and the Moslem worlds; and the terms used to contrast Russians and Westerners were “Christian” (krest’ianin) and “Latin” (latinian).⁷⁹ Since political rule in the Christian East was now concentrated in the tsar of the “third Rome,” it was assumed that such rule in the West was concentrated in the hands of the Holy Roman Emperor (Tsezar’). Other princely authorities in the West were equated with the lesser appanage princes of Russia. Their diplomatic communications were translated into the new vernacular “chancery language,” which provided the basis for modern Russian, while the predominantly Latin communications from the Emperor were translated into Church Slavonic.⁸⁰

It would be a mistake to read back into this early period the systematically cultivated anti-Catholicism that developed in the following century of struggle with Poland. During this earlier century, relations were relatively cordial with the Vatican despite the Muscovite rejection of union. There was a Catholic church in Moscow in the late fifteenth century,⁸¹ numerous Catholic residents throughout the sixteenth, and several occasions when dynastic marriages nearly enabled Rome to parallel in Great Russia the proselyting success it was enjoying in White and Little Russia. Nevertheless, the basis for Russian anti-Catholicism was already being established in the need for a lightning rod to channel off popular opposition to the changes which the triumphant Josephite party was imposing on Russian society. One did not dare challenge the newly exalted figure of the tsar and his ecclesiastical entourage; but many conservative elements in Russian society felt a profound if inarticulate repugnance at the increase in hierarchical discipline and dogmatic rigidity which the Josephites had brought to Russia. Accordingly, there was a growing tendency to attack ever more bitterly the distant Roman Catholic Church for the very things one secretly hated in oneself.

Thus, even while borrowing ideas and techniques from the Roman Catholic Church, the Josephite hierarchy found criticism of that Church a useful escape valve for domestic resentments. A Western scapegoat was also sought for the inarticulate opposition to the concentration of power in the hands of the Muscovite tsars. At precisely the time when autocracy was crushing out all opposition in Muscovy a new genre of anti-monarchical pantomime appeared in Russian popular culture. The name of the play—and of the proud, cruel king who is eventually smitten down—was Tsar Maximilian, the first Holy Roman Emperor with whom the Muscovites had extensive relations.⁸²

Distrust of Rome thus had from the beginning in Russia a psychological as well as an ideological basis. During this first formative century of contact from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century “the West” was for Russia the urbane Latin Church and Empire of the high Renaissance. Fascination mixed with fear, however; for the Russian Church had begun its fateful series of partial borrowings from the West, and the small literate elite, its gradual turn from Greek to Latin as the main language of cultural expression.

“The Germans”

MUSCOVITE CONTACT with the West changed decisively during Ivan IV’s reign from indirect and episodic dealings with the Catholic “Latins” to a direct and sustained confrontation with the Protestant “Germans.” It is doubly ironic that the point of no return in opening up Russia to Western influences occurred under this most ostensibly xenophobic and traditionalist of tsars, and that the “West” into whose hands he unconsciously committed Russia was that of the Protestant innovators whom he professed to hate even more than Catholics. It was Ivan who suggested that Luther’s name was related to the word liuty (“ferocious”); and that the Russian word for Protestant preacher (kaznodei) was really a form of koznodei (“intriguer”).⁸³ Yet it was Ivan who began the large-scale contacts with the North European Protestant nations, which profoundly influenced Russian thought from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century.

Even as Ivan swept the icons and banners of Muscovy past Kazan down the Volga to the Caspian Sea in the early 1550’s, he granted extensive extra-territorial rights and economic concessions to England in the White Sea port of Archangel far to the north. The English became Ivan’s most eager collaborator in opening up the lucrative Volga trade route to the Orient. The Danes simultaneously supplied technologists ranging from key artillerists in the battle for Kazan to the first typographer to appear in Muscovy (who was in fact a disguised Lutheran missionary). The best mercenaries for Ivan’s rapidly expanding army came largely from the Baltic German regions that were among the first to go over to Protestantism.

Other Germans gained places in the new service nobility through membership in the oprichnina; and the entire idea of a uniformed order of warrior-monks may well have been borrowed from the Teutonic and Livonian orders with which Muscovy had such long and intimate contact. In any event, Ivan’s organization of this anti-traditional order of hooded vigilantes followed his turn from east to west, and coincided with his decision to increase the intensity of the Livonian War. Baltic Germans had already moved in large numbers to Muscovy during the early, victorious years of the war, as prisoners or as dispossessed men in search of employment. In the 1560’s and 1570’s began the first systematic organization four miles southeast of Moscow of the foreign quarter—then called the “lower city commune,” but soon to be known as the “German suburb”: nemetskaia sloboda. The term nemtsy, which was applied to the new influx of foreigners, had been used as early as the tenth century⁸⁴ and carried the pejorative meaning of “dumb ones.” Although usage often varied in Muscovy, nemtsy became generally used as a blanket term for all the Germanic, Protestant peoples of Northern Europe—in short, for any Western European who was not a “Latin.” Other “German” settlements soon appeared (often complete with “Saxon” or “officers’” churches) in key settlements along the fast-growing Volga trade route: Nizhny Novgorod, Vologda, and Kostroma. By the early 1590’s, Western Protestants had settled as far east as Tobol’sk in Siberia, and the Orthodox Metropolitan of Kazan was complaining that Tatars as well as Russians were going over to Lutheranism.⁸⁵

The pressures for conformity with local customs were, however, strong in Muscovy; and few enduring traces remained of these early Protestant penetrations. More important than direct conversions to foreign ways and beliefs at the hands of assimilated Baltic and Saxon Germans was the increasing Russian dependence on the more distant “Germans” from England, Denmark, Holland, and the westerly German ports of Lübeck and Hamburg. By invading Livonia and involving Russia in a protracted struggle with neighboring Poland and Sweden, Ivan IV compelled Russia to look for allies on the other side of its immediate enemies; and these industrious and enterprising Protestant powers were able to provide trained personnel and military equipment in return for raw materials and rights for transit and trade. Although Russian alliances shifted frequently in line with the complex diplomacy of the age, friendship with these vigorous Protestant principalities of Northwest Europe remained relatively constant from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. This alignment was a function of the same “law of opposite boundaries” (Gesetz der Gegengrenzlichkeit) which had earlier caused Ivan III (and Ivan IV) to look with a friendly eye at the Holy Roman Empire for support against Poland-Lithuania, and was later to transfer Russian attention from the Germans to the French in the mid-eighteenth century, when the Germans had replaced the Poles and Swedes as the principal rivals to Russia in Eastern Europe.

The mounting fury of Ivan IV’s last years seems less a product of his paranoia than of a kind of schizophrenia. Ivan was, in effect, two people: a true believer in an exclusivist, traditional ideology and a successful practitioner of experimental modern statecraft. Because the two roles were frequently in conflict, his reign became a tissue of contradictions. His personality was increasingly ravaged by those alternations of violent outburst and total withdrawal that occur in those who are divided against themselves.

The Livonian War provides the background of contradiction and irony. Launched for astute economic and political reasons, the war was portrayed as a Christian crusade in much the same manner that the Livonian order had once spoken of its forays with Russia. To aid in fighting, this zealot of Orthodoxy participated in a mixed Lutheran-Orthodox church service, marrying his niece to a Lutheran Danish prince whom he also proclaimed king of Livonia. At the same time, Ivan made strenuous, if pathetic, efforts to arrange for himself an English marriage.⁸⁶ To aid in making peace, Ivan turned first to a Czech Protestant in the service of the Poles and then to an Italian Jesuit in the service of the Pope.⁸⁷ Though antagonistic to both, Ivan found a measure of agreement with each by joining in the damnation of the other. He was, characteristically, hardest on the Protestants on whom he was most dependent—calling the Czech negotiator “not so much a heretic [as] a servant of the satanic council of the Antichrists.”⁸⁸

Meanwhile, this defender of total autocracy had become the first ruler in Russian history to summon a representative national assembly: the zemsky sobor of 1566. This was an act of pure political improvisation on the part of this avowed traditionalist. In an effort to support an extension of the war into Lithuania, Ivan sought to attract wandering western Russian noblemen accustomed to the aristocratic assemblies (sejmiki) of Lithuania, while simultaneously enlisting the new wealth of the cities by adopting the more inclusive European system of three-estate representation.⁸⁹ As constitutional seduction gave way to military assault, Lithuania hastened to consummate its hitherto Platonic political link with Poland. The purely aristocratic diet (sejm) that pronounced this union at Lublin in 1569 was far less broadly representative than Ivan’s sobor of 1566; but it acquired the important role of electing the king of the new multi-national republic (Rzeczpospolita) when the Jagellonian dynasty became extinct in 1572.

Ivan and his successors (like almost every other European house) participated vigorously in the parliamentary intrigues of this body, particulady during the Polish succession crisis of 1586. Then, in 1598, when the line of succession came to an end in Russia also, they turned to the Polish procedure of electing a ruler—the ill-fated Boris Godunov—in a specially convened zemsky sobor: the first since 1566. For a quarter of a century thereafter these sobors became even more broadly representative, and were in many ways the supreme political authority in the nation. Not only in 1598 but in 1606, 1610, 1611, and 1613 roughly similar representative bodies made the crucial decisions on the choice of succession to the throne.⁹⁰ Despite many differences in composition and function, these councils all shared the original aim of Ivan’s council of 1566: to attract western Russians away from the Polish-Lithuanian sejm and to create a more effective fund-raising body by imitating the multi-state assemblies of the North European Protestant nations.⁹¹

Thus, ironically, this most serious of all proto-parliamentary challenges to Muscovite autocracy originated in the statecraft of its seemingly most adamant apologist. Increasingly torn by contradiction, Ivan brought the first printing press to Moscow and sponsored the first printed Russian book, The Acts of the Apostles, in 1564. Then, the following year, he let a mob burn the press and drive the printers away to Lithuania. He increased the imperial subsidies and the numbers of pilgrimages to monasteries, then sponsored irreverent parodies of Orthodox worship at the oprichnik retreat in Alexandrovsk. Unable to account for the complexities of a rapidly changing world, Ivan intensified his terror against Westernizing elements in the years just before abolishing the oprichnina in 1572. In 1570, he razed and depopulated Novgorod once again, and summarily executed Viskovaty, one of his closest and most worldly confidants. One year later, Moscow was sacked and burned by a sudden Tatar invasion. In 1575, Ivan—the first man ever to be crowned tsar in Russia—retired to Alexandrovsk and abdicated the title in favor of a converted Tatar khan. Though he soon resumed his rule, he used the imperial title much less after this strange episode.

Ivan’s denigration of princely authority provided a shock that terror by itself could not have produced on the toughened Muscovite mentality. The image of the tsar as leader of Christian empire, which Ivan had done so much to encourage, was severely damaged. The divinized prince—the focal point of all loyalties and “national” sentiment in this paternalistic society—had renounced his divinity. The image was impaired not so much by the fact that Ivan was a murderer many times over as by the identity of two of his victims. In murdering Metropolitan Philip of Moscow in 1568, Ivan sought primarily to rid himself of a leading member of a boyar family suspected of disloyalty. But by murdering a revered First Prelate of the Church, Ivan passed on to Philip something of the halo of Russia’s first national saints, Boris and Gleb, who had voluntarily accepted a guiltless death in order to redeem the Russian people from their sin. Philip’s remains were venerated in the distant monastery of Solovetsk, which began to rival St. Sergius at nearby Zagorsk as a center for pilgrimage. The close ties between the great monasteries and the grand dukes of Muscovy were beginning to loosen.

An even more serious shock to the Muscovite ideology was Ivan’s murder of his son, heir, and namesake: Ivan, the tsarevich. The Tsar’s claim to absolute kingship was based on an unbroken succession from the distant apostolic and imperial past. Having spelled this genealogy out more fully and fancifully than ever before, Ivan now broke the sacred chain with his own hands. In so doing he lost some of the aura of a God-chosen Christian warrior and Old Testament king, which had surrounded him since his victory at Kazan.

The martyred Philip and Ivan became new heroes of Russian folklore; and the Tsar’s enemies thus became in many eyes the true servants of “holy Russia.” In the religious crisis of the seventeenth century both contending factions traced their ancestry to Philip: Patriarch Nikon, who theatrically transplanted his remains to Moscow, and the Old Believers, who revered him as a saint. In the political crises of the seventeenth century the idea was born that Ivan the tsarevich had survived after all, that there still existed a “true tsar” with unbroken links to apostolic times. Ivan himself had helped launch the legend by donating the unprecedented sum of five thousand rubles to the Monastery of St. Sergius to subsidize memorial services for his son.⁹²

The struggle between the two became one of the most recurrent of all themes in the popular songs of early modern Russia.⁹³ The most dramatic of all nineteenth-century Russian historical paintings is probably Repin’s crimson-soaked canvas of Ivan’s murder of his son, and Dostoevsky entitled the key chapter in The Possessed, his prophetic novel of revolution, “Ivan the Tsarevich.”

Ivan the Terrible was succeeded by a feeble-minded son Fedor, whose death in 1598 (following the mysterious murder of Ivan’s only other son, the young prince Dmitry, in 1591) brought to an end the old line of imperial succession. The accession to the throne of the regent Boris Godunov represented a further affront to the Muscovite mentality. Boris, who had a non-boyar, partly Tatar genealogy, was elected amidst venal political controversy by a zemsky sobor, and with the connivance of the Patriarch of Russia (whose position had been created only recently, in 1589, and by the somewhat suspect authority of foreign Orthodox leaders). Kurbsky’s anti-autocratic insistence that the Tsar seek council “from men of all the people” was seemingly gratified by the official proclamation that Boris was chosen by representatives of “all the popular multitude.”⁹⁴

Once in power, Boris became an active and systematic Westernizer. He encouraged the European practice of shaving. Economic contacts were greatly expanded at terms favorable to foreign entrepreneurs; thirty selected future leaders of Russia were sent abroad to study; important positions were assigned to foreigners; imperial protection was afforded the foreign community; Lutheran churches were tolerated not only in Moscow but as far afield as Nizhny Novgorod; and the crown prince of Denmark was brought to Moscow to marry Boris’ daughter Xenia, after an unsuccessful bid by a rival Swedish prince.

Any chance that Russia might have had under Boris for peaceful evolution toward the form of limited monarchy prevalent in the countries he most admired, England and Denmark, was, however, a fleeting one at best. For he was soon overtaken with a series of crises even more profound than those brought on Russia by Ivan. In the last three years of Boris’ reign, his realm was struck with a famine that may have killed as much as one third of his subjects and with a wild growth of brigandage and peasant unrest. At the same time his daughter’s prospective Danish bridegroom suddenly died in Moscow, and all but two of his thirty selected student-leaders elected to remain in the West.⁹⁵

Death must have come almost as a relief to Boris in 1605; but it only intensified the suffering of a shaken nation which proved unable to unite behind a successor for fifteen years. This chaotic interregnum produced such a profound crisis in Muscovy that the name long given to it, “Time of Troubles,” has become a general historical term for a period of decisive trial and partial disintegration that precedes and precipitates the building of great empires.⁹⁶ This original “Time of Troubles” (Smutnoe vremia) was just such an ordeal for insular Muscovy. A rapid series of blows stunned it and then propelled it half-unwittingly into a three-cornered struggle with Poland and Sweden for control of Eastern Europe. As it summoned up the strength to defeat Poland in the First Northern War of 1654–67 and Sweden in the Second or Great Northern War of 1701–21, Russia was transformed into a continental empire and the dominant power in Eastern Europe.

The Religious Wars

ONE OF THE GREAT MISFORTUNES of Russian history is that Russia entered the mainstream of European development at a time of unprecedented division and degradation in Western Christendom. Having missed out on the more positive and creative stages of European culture—the rediscovery of classical logic in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, of classical beauty in the fourteenth and fifteenth, and the religious reforms of the sixteenth—Russia was suddenly drawn into the destructive final stages of the European religious wars in the early seventeenth.

By the late sixteenth century, the genuine concern for religious reform and renewal which had precipitated the many-sided debates between Protestant and Catholic Europe had been largely sublimated into a continent-wide civil war. All of Europe was succumbing to the dynamics of a “military revolution” that weighed down each state with vast, self-perpetuating armies subject to ever-tightening discipline, more deadly weapons, and more fluid tactics. By harnessing ideological propaganda and psychological warfare to military objectives and by silencing in the name of raison d’état “the last remaining qualms as to the religious and ethical legitimacy of war,”⁹⁷ Europe in the early seventeenth century was savoring its first anticipatory taste of total war. The religious wars were late in coming to Eastern Europe. But the form they assumed at the turn of the sixteenth century was that of a particularly bitter contest between Catholic Poland and Lutheran Sweden. When both parties moved into Russia during the Time of Troubles, Orthodox Muscovy was also drawn in under conditions which permanently darkened the Russian image of the West.

Muscovy had been living in political uncertainty and ideological confusion ever since the late years of Ivan the Terrible’s reign. He had done much to break the sense of continuity with a sacred past and the internal solidarity between sovereign, church, and family on which Muscovite civilization was based. The early seventeenth century brought the deeper shock of military defeat and economic spoliation. Twice—in 1605 and 1610—the Poles overran and dominated Moscow; as late as 1618 they lay siege to it and held lands far to the east. To combat the powerful Poles, Muscovy deepened its dependence on the Swedes, who in turn helped themselves to Novgorod and other Russian regions. To lessen dependence on the Swedes, Russia turned to the more distant “Germans,” particularly the English and the Dutch, who extracted their reward in lucrative economic concessions.

The confrontation with Poland represented the first frontal conflict of ideas with the West. This powerful Western neighbor represented almost the complete cultural antithesis of Muscovy. The Polish-Lithuanian union was a loose republic rather than a monolithic autocracy. Its cosmopolitan population included not only Polish Catholics but Orthodox believers from Moldavia and White Russia and large, self-contained communities of Calvinists, Socinians, and Jews. In striking contrast to the mystical piety and formless folklore of Muscovy, Poland was dominated by Latin rationalism and a stylized Renaissance literature. Poland not only contradicted Russian Orthodox practice by using painting and music for profane purposes but was actually a pioneer in the use of pictures for propaganda and the composition of instrumental and polyphonic music.

Most important, however, the Poland of Sigismund III represented the European vanguard of the Counter Reformation. Sigismund was newly enflamed by the Jesuits with the same kind of messianic fanaticism that the Josephites had imparted to Ivan the Terrible a half century earlier. Obsessed like Ivan with fears of heresy and sedition, Sigismund used a translation of Ivan’s reply to the Czech brethren as an aid in his own anti-Protestant campaign in White Russia.⁹⁸ Because his realm was more diffuse and Protestantism far more established, Sigismund became in many ways even more fanatical than Ivan. If Ivan resembled Philip II of Spain, Sigismund became a close friend and Latin correspondent of the Spanish royal family.⁹⁹ If the Josephites borrowed some ideas from the Inquisition, Sigismund virtually turned his kingdom over to a later monument to Spanish crusading zeal: Ignatius Loyola’s Jesuit Order.

The wandering monks and holy men that traditionally accompanied the Muscovite armies and lent prophetic fervor to their cause were now confronted by a rival set of clerical aides-de-camp: the Jesuits in Sigismund’s court. It is precisely because the Jesuits gave an ideological cast to the war with Muscovy that the order became a subject of such pathological hatred—and secret fascination—for subsequent Russian thinkers.

The Jesuit order had long tried to interest the Vatican in the idea that losses to Protestantism in Western and Northern Europe might be at least partially recouped in the east by combining missionary zeal with more flexible and imaginative tactics. They had encouraged the formation in the Lithuanian and White Russian Orthodox community of the new Uniat Church—which preserved Eastern rites and the Slavonic language while accepting the supremacy of the Pope and the Latin formulation of the creed—and helped secure its formal recognition by the Vatican in 1596.

In the late years of Ivan the Terrible’s reign, the Jesuit statesman Antonio Possevino had entertained the idea that Russia might be brought into union with Rome; and this suggestion was frequently echoed throughout the seventeenth century, particularly by uprooted Eastern European Catholics and leaders of the newly formed Society for the Propagation of the Faith. But by the beginning of the century, the Jesuits had succeeded in committing Vatican policy in Eastern Europe to a close working partnership with Sigismund III of Poland. Since Sigismund exercised full control over Lithuania and had a strong claim on Sweden, he seemed the logical bearer of the Catholic cause in Northeast Europe; and he sealed his allegiance to the cause of Rome with two successive Hapsburg marriages.

One of the most eloquent and strategy-minded Jesuits, Peter Skarga, was responsible for capturing the imagination of Sigismund and his court in his “Sermons to the Diet” of the late 1590’s.¹⁰⁰ Capitalizing on the knightly and apocalyptical cast of Christian thought in the still-embattled East, Skarga inspired Sigismund’s entourage with that mixture of gloomy premonition and crusading romanticism which was to become an essential part of the Polish national consciousness. Capitalizing on the confused Muscovite hopes that a “true Tsar” was still somewhere to be found, the Jesuits helped the Poles ride to power in the retinue of the pretender, Dmitry. Capitalizing on the rising power of the press in the West, the aged Possevino, under a pseudonym, printed pamphlets in support of Dmitry in a variety of European capitals.¹⁰¹ Capitalizing on the religious reverence accorded icons in Muscovy, pictures of Dmitry were printed for circulation to the superstitious masses. Anxious to secure the claims of the new dynasty, a Catholic marriage for Dmitry was staged within the Kremlin.

The combination within the Polish camp of proselyting Jesuit zeal at the highest level and crude sacrilege at the lowest led to the defenestration and murder of Dmitry by a Moscow mob in 1606. The pretender who had entered Moscow triumphantly amidst the deafening peal of bells on midsummer day of 1605 was dragged through the streets and his remains shot from a cannon less than a year later. However, the Polish sense of mission was in no way diminished. A Polish court poet spoke of Cracow in 1610 as “the New Rome more wondrous than the old,”¹⁰² and Sigismund described his cause in a letter to the Catholic king of Hungary as that of “the Universal Christian republic.”¹⁰³ Despite the coronation in Moscow of Michael, the first Romanov, in 1613, there was no clear central authority in Muscovy until at least 1619, when Michael’s father, Patriarch Philaret Nikitich, returned from Polish captivity. Pro-Polish factions continued to be influential inside Muscovy until the 1630’s, and Polish claimants to the Muscovite throne continued to command widespread recognition in Catholic Europe until the 1650’s.

The identification of the Catholic cause with Polish arms weakened whatever chance the Roman church might have had to establish its authority peacefully over the Russian Church. The military defeat of Poland became the defeat of Roman Catholicism among the Eastern Slavs—though not of Latin culture. For in rolling back the Polish armies in the course of the seventeenth century, and slowly wresting from them control of the Latinized Ukraine and White Russia, Muscovy absorbed much of their literary and artistic culture.¹⁰⁴

Forms of the Virgin

PLATES I–II

Russia brought new tenderness and imagination to the depiction of the Virgin Mary in Christian art. The famed early-twelfth-century “Vladimir Mother of God” (Plate I) has long been the most revered of Russian icons: and the restoration of the original composition (completed in 1918) revealed it to be one of the most beautiful as well. Originally painted in Constantinople, the icon was believed to have brought the Virgin’s special protective power from the “new Rome” to Kiev, thence to Vladimir, and finally to Moscow, the “third Rome,” where it has remained uninterruptedly since 1480.

This icon was one of a relatively new Byzantine type emphasizing the relationship between mother and child; it was known and revered in Russia as “Our Lady of Tenderness.” Characteristic of this general type was the “Virgin and Child Rejoicing” (Plate II), a mid-sixteenth-century painting from the upper Volga region. The downward sweep of the Virgin’s form conveys in visual terms the spiritual temper of the icon’s place of origin: combining physical exaggeration with a compassionate spirit. The liberation and semi-naturalistic portrayal of the infant’s arms are designed to heighten the rhythmic flow of sinuous lines into an increasingly abstract, almost musical composition.

PLATE I

PLATE II

PLATE III

PLATE IV

Forms of the Virgin

PLATES III–IV

Hardly less revered than the omnipresent individual icons of the Virgin and Child were the various representations of the Virgin on the icon screens of Muscovy. The third picture in this series shows the Virgin as she appears to the right of Christ on the central tryptich (deēsis) of a sixteenth-century screen. The richly embossed metal surface, inlaid with jewels, that surrounds the painted figure is typical of the increasingly lavish icon-veneration of the period. This icon, presently in the personal collection of the Soviet painter P. D. Korin, bears the seal of Boris Godunov, who presumably used it for private devotions.

The picture to the left illustrates the survival of the theme of Virgin and Child amidst the forced preoccupation with socialist themes and realistic portraiture of the Soviet era. This painting of 1920 (popularly known as “Our Lady of Petersburg” despite its official designation of “Petersburg, 1918”), with its unmistakable suggestion of the Virgin and Child standing in humble garb above the city of Revolution, continues to attract reverent attention in the Tret’iakov Gallery of Moscow. It is the work of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, who had studied under Leonid Pasternak, illustrator of Tolstoy and father of Boris Pasternak. Petrov-Vodkin turned from painting to teaching for the same reason that the poet Pasternak turned to translating—to keep his integrity during the oppressive period of Stalinist rule; both men attracted talented young followers and quietly passed on to later generations some sense of the older artistic traditions and spiritual concerns of Russian culture.

The Vatican-supported Polish offensive against Orthodox Slavdom served mainly to stimulate an ideological and national rising in Muscovy which drove out the Poles and gradually united Russia behind the new Romanov dynasty. For more than three hundred years the Romanovs reigned—even if they did not always rule or ever fully escape the shadows cast by the dark times in which they came to power. From early ballads through early histories into the plays and operas of the late imperial period, the Time of Troubles came to be thought of as a period of suffering for the sins of previous tsars and of foreboding for tsars yet to come. The name of Marina Mnishek, Dmitry’s Polish wife, became a synonym for “witch” and “crow”: the Polish mazurka—allegedly danced at their wedding reception in the Kremlin—became a leitmotiv for “decadent foreigner” in Glinka’s Life for the Tsar and later musical compositions. The anti-Polish and anti-Catholic tone of almost all subsequent Russian writing about this period faithfully reflects a central, fateful fact: that Muscovy achieved unity after the troubles of the early seventeenth century primarily through xenophobia, particularly toward the Poles.

Operatic romanticism about the national levée en masse against the Polish invader has, however, too long obscured the fact that the price of Russian victory was increased dependence on Protestant Europe. The subtle stream of Protestant influence flowed in from three different sources: beleaguered Protestants in nearby Catholic countries, militant Sweden, and the more distant and commercially oriented “Germans” (England, Holland, Denmark, Hamburg, and so on).

The diaspora of the once-flourishing Protestants of Poland (and of many in Hungary, Bohemia, and Transylvania) remains a relatively obscure chapter in the complex confessional politics of Eastern Europe. It is fairly clear that the Counter Reformation zeal of the Jesuits combined with princely fears of political disintegration and social change to permit an aggressive reassertion of Catholic power throughout East Central Europe in the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century. But it seems implausible to assume that these relatively extreme communities of Calvinists, Czech brethren, and Socinians simply vanished after military defeat and passively accepted Catholicism. To be sure, many regions were totally exhausted by the end of the fighting, and had no alternative to capitulation. But in eastern Poland, where Protestantism had some of its strongest supporters and the power of the Counter Reformation had come relatively late, the anti-Catholic cause was strengthened by the Orthodox community of White Russia and the proximity of Orthodox Muscovy. Forced Catholicization tended to make defensive allies of the large Protestant and Orthodox minorities under Polish rule. It seems probable that the Orthodox community absorbed some of the personnel as well as the organizational and polemic techniques of the Protestants as they were hounded into oblivion. Thus, when the anti-Catholic Orthodox clergy of White Russia and the Ukraine eventually turned to Muscovy for protection against the onrushing Counter Reformation, they brought with them elements of a fading Polish Protestantism as well as a resurgent Slavic Orthodoxy.

The formation of the Uniat Church accelerated this chain of developments by securing the allegiance to Rome of most of the Orthodox hierarchy in the Polish kingdom. The union with Rome was not accepted so readily at the lower levels of the hierarchy or among local lay leaders anxious to maintain their historic liberties and autonomy. In organizing for their resistance to Catholicization, Orthodox communities leaned increasingly on regional brotherhoods, which took on a Protestant tinge. Their origins, though still obscure, appear to lie in contact with the neighboring Czech dissenters who had also helped steer Polish Protestants into the closely knit “brotherhood” form of organization.¹⁰⁵ The initial strength of the Orthodox brotherhoods was concentrated in many of the same semi-independent cities in eastern Poland, where Polish Protestants had made their most spectacular gains a half century earlier. The anti-hierarchical bias, close communal discipline, and emphasis on a program of religious printing and education in the vernacular among the Orthodox brotherhoods are reminiscent of both Hussite and Calvinist practice.

Sigismund helped further the sense of identification between non-Uniat Orthodox and Protestants by lumping them together as “heretical,” and thus denying the Orthodox the somewhat preferred status of “schismatic” traditionally accorded in Roman Catholic teaching. Protestants and Orthodox began the search for a measure of common action against Sigismund’s policies at a meeting of leaders from both communities in Lithuania in the summer of 1595.¹⁰⁶ During the decade preceding this meeting, the Orthodox had formed at least fourteen brotherhood organizations and a large number of schools and printing shops.¹⁰⁷ During the years that followed, Protestant communities were often forced into the protective embrace of the more established Orthodox communities as Sigismund’s persecution of religious dissenters increased. At the same time, the Orthodox opponents of Catholicism adopted many of the apocalyptically anti-Catholic ideas of Protestant polemic writings and absorbed into their schools harassed but well-educated Polish Protestants as well as Slavic defectors from Jesuit academies.

The brotherhood schools and presses of White Russia were the first broad media of instruction to appear among the Orthodox Eastern Slavs. The first two brotherhood presses—those of Vilnius and Lwow—made particularly great contributions to enlightenment. The former published the first two Church Slavonic grammars (in 1596 and 1619), and the latter published more than thirty-three thousand copies of basic alphabet books (bukvar’) between 1585 and 1722.¹⁰⁸ The school at Ostrog taught Latin as well as Greek, and sponsored the printing in 1576–80 of the first complete Slavonic bible.¹⁰⁹ The brotherhood schools continued to multiply in the early seventeenth century, and spread to the east and south as the Orthodox communities in those regions sought to combat the spread of Catholic influence. The Kiev brotherhood played a particularly important role, setting up (while still under Polish control in 1632) the first Orthodox institution of higher education ever to appear among the Eastern Slavs: the Kiev Academy.

Two leading Orthodox personalities of the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century illustrate the Protestant influence on the beleaguered Russian Orthodox community during this period. Stephan Zizanius, the White Russian author of the first Slavonic grammar in 1596, followed the Lutheran practice of inserting catechistic homilies and anti-Catholic comments into his instructional material. His Book of Cyril, a gloomy, anti-Uniat compilation of prophetic texts, incorporated many of the polemic arguments used against the Roman Church by Protestant propagandists. Just as the Kiev Academy became the model for the monastic schools and academies that began to appear in Muscovy in the late seventeenth century, so Zizanius’ arguments that the reign of Antichrist was at hand became the basis for the xenophobic and apocalyptical writings of the seventeenth-century Muscovite Church.¹¹⁰

Even more deeply influenced by Protestantism was Cyril Lukaris, the early-seventeenth-century Greek Patriarch of Constantinople, who had served as a parish priest and teacher in the brotherhood schools of Vilnius and Lwow during the 1590’s. Deeply influenced by their anti-Catholicism, he was one of the two representatives of the Orthodox hierarchy to vote against the final acceptance of the union at Brest in 1596. In the course of his subsequent career, Lukaris became a close friend of various Anglicans as well as Polish and Hungarian Calvinists, and became doctrinally a virtual Calvinist. After his elevation to the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1620, he “attached himself to the Protestant powers,”¹¹¹ and was called by the Hapsburg ambassador to the Porte “the archfiend of the Catholic Church.”¹¹² Through his close links with Patriarch Philaret, Lukaris was instrumental in bringing Russia into the anti-Hapsburg coalition in the second half of the Thirty Years’ War.

A final link between the Orthodox and Protestant worlds that was forged by a common Slavic and anti-Catholic association may be found in the great seventeenth-century Czech writer and educator, Jan Comenius. Though distressed at the low educational level of the Eastern Slavs, Comenius wrote, after the destruction of the Czech Protestant community in 1620, that Muscovy offered the only hope of defeating the Catholic cause in Europe.¹¹³ Subsequently, as an émigré among the Protestant communities of Poland, Comenius became interested in the Orthodox brotherhoods and was probably influenced by their curricula and pedagogical theories while drawing up his own famous theories of education and public enlightenment.¹¹⁴

Hardly less important than the influx of Protestant influences by way of the anti-Uniat movement in western and southern Russia was the direct impact of Sweden, the powerful Protestant rival and northern neighbor of Muscovy.

The Swedish presence began to be felt in the 1590’s with the Swedish sack and occupation of the northernmost Russian monastery, at Petsamo on the Arctic Ocean,¹¹⁵ and the movement of Swedish colonists and evangelists into the region of Lake Ladoga. The real influx began, however, with the Swedish efforts to curb the Polish advance into Russia during the Time of Troubles. Sigismund’s Protestant uncle, Charles IX of Sweden, launched a campaign to stiffen the resistance of the new tsar Shuisky to Catholic Poland in the name of “all Christianity.”¹¹⁶ In 1607 Charles sent the Russians the first treatise to appear in Russia on the burgeoning new European art of war;¹¹⁷ and in the following year addressed the first of three unprecedented propaganda appeals directly to “all ranks of Russia” to rise up against “the Polish and Lithuanian dogs.”¹¹⁸ In the ensuing months, the Swedes began a large-scale intervention that extended from Novgorod through Yaroslavl and involved the occupation of the venerable Orthodox monastery of Valaam on islands within Lake Ladoga and the issuance of anti-Catholic propaganda to the Solovetsk monastery and other centers in the Russian north.

The Swedes were, indeed, the unsung heroes of the liberation of Moscow from Polish occupation. Intervention against Poland in 1609 was followed by the dispatch to Muscovy of money and of a Dutch-trained general in the Swedish service, Christernus Some, who helped organize the army of Skopin-Shuisky for the critical campaigns of 1609–10, which expelled Sigismund from without and suppressed Cossack insurrection within.¹¹⁹ The non-noble militia of Minin and Pozharsky which drove the aristocratic Polish legions from Moscow for the second and final time in 1612–13 was in some respects a rudimentary version of the revolutionary new citizen type of army with which the Swedes were shortly to crush the aristocratic Hapsburg armies in the Thirty Years’ War. At the high point of the Polish penetration in 1612, a zemsky sobor convened at Yaroslavl entered into negotiations with Sweden for the Swedish crown prince to take over the vacant throne of Russia.¹²⁰ At the same time, the English extended Russia an offer of protectorate status.¹²¹ The Dutch, who rivaled and soon supplanted the English as the main foreign commercial power in Russia, helped launch the first organ of systematic news dissemination inside Russia in 1621, the hand-written kuranty, and provided much of the material and personnel for the rapidly growing Russian army.¹²² Twice—in 1621–2 and 1643–5—the Danes nearly succeeded in foreclosing royal marriages with the insecure new house of Romanov.¹²³

The extent of Swedish influence in the early years of the Romanov dynasty is still insufficiently appreciated. Not only did Sweden take away Russia’s limited access to the eastern Baltic by the terms of the Treaty of Stolbovo in 1617, but Swedish hegemony was gradually extended down the coast beyond Riga and Swedish trading prerogatives maintained in Novgorod and other important Russian commercial centers. The Swedes were granted fishing rights on the White Lake, deep inside Russia, by the Monastery of St. Cyril in 1621, and there was considerable intercourse between Sweden and Solovetsk on the White Sea until a general crackdown on relations with Lutherans was decreed in 1629 by the Metropolitan of Novgorod, for the entirety of northern Russia.

The reason for his concern was the energetic proselyting that was being conducted by the Swedes, who had founded a Slavic printing press in Stockholm in 1625. Orthodox priests living under Swedish rule were required to attend a Lutheran service at least once a month, and a Lutheran catechism was printed in Russian in 1625 in the first of two editions. Another catechism was later printed in a Cyrillic version of the Finnish language for evangelizing the Finns and Karelians. In 1631 the energetic new governor general of Livonia, Johannes Skytte, founded a school on the future site of St. Petersburg that included the Russian language in its curriculum. In 1632 a Lutheran University was founded at Tartu (Dorpat, Derpt, Yur’ev) in Esthonia, in the place of a former Jesuit academy.¹²⁴ In 1640 a higher academy was founded in Turku (Åbo), the chief port and capital of Swedish Finland (whose name may derive from the Russian “trade,” torg). During 1633–4 a Lutheran over-consistory was established in Livonia with six under-consistories and a substantial program of public instruction. The university at Tartu and the academy at Kiev—both founded in 1632 by non-Russians with an essentially Latin curriculum—were, in a sense, the first Russian institutions of higher education, founded more than a century before the University of Moscow in 1755. The conquest of Kiev from the Poles in 1667 and Tartu from the Swedes in 1704 were, thus, events of cultural as well as political importance.

Nor were the reformed Protestant churches inactive. By the late 1620’s there was at least one Calvinist church in Moscow supported mainly by Dutch residents as well as three Lutheran Churches;¹²⁵ and the existence of a Russian-language Calvinist catechism of the 1620’s or 1630’s for which no known Western model has been found indicates that there may have been some attempts to adopt Calvinist literature for Russian audiences.¹²⁶

With such a variety of Protestant forces operating inside Muscovy in the early seventeenth century, it is hardly surprising that anti-Catholicism grew apace. One of the first acts of Patriarch Philaret, after becoming in 1619 co-ruler of Russia with his son Tsar Michael, was to require the rebaptism of all Catholics; and discriminatory regulations were enacted in the 1630’s to exclude Roman Catholics from the growing number of mercenaries recruited for Russia in Western Europe.¹²⁷ The continued expansion of Jesuit schools in western Russia and the Polish Ukraine, the establishment of a new Catholic diocese of Smolensk, and Sigismund’s proclamation of a “Universal Union” of Orthodoxy with Catholicism had intensified anti-Catholic feeling in the 1620’s.¹²⁸ The Swedes supported and encouraged the Russian attack on Poland in 1632; and the Swedish victory over the Catholic emperor at Breitenfeld in the same year was celebrated by special church services and the festive ringing of bells in Moscow. Orthodox merchants in Novgorod placed pictures of the victorious Gustavus Adolphus in places of veneration usually reserved for icons.¹²⁹

Indeed, it was not until the crown prince of Denmark arrived in Moscow in 1644 to arrange for a Protestant marriage to the daughter of Tsar Michael that Russian society became aware of the extent that the young dynasty had identified itself with the Protestant powers. The successful campaign of leading clerical figures to block this marriage on religious grounds combined with the intensified campaign of native merchants against economic concessions to foreigners to turn Muscovy in the 1640’s away from any gradual drift toward Protestantism. But by the time Russia began to restrict the activities of Protestant elements and prepare for battle with the Swedes, it had established a deepening technological and administrative dependence on the more distant “Germans”—and particularly the Dutch. This dependence was hardest of all to throw off, because it arose out of the military necessities of the struggle against the Poles and Swedes.

Beginning in the 1550’s, Russia had plunged into its “military revolution,” as Ivan the Terrible mobilized the first full-time, paid Russian infantry (the streltsy) and began the large-scale recruitment of foreign mercenaries.¹³⁰ The number of both streltsy and mercenaries increased; and in the first three decades of the seventeenth century, the total number of traditional, non-noble elements fell from one half to about one fourth of the Russian army.¹³¹ Swedish and Dutch influences became evident in the introduction of longer lances, more mobile formations, stricter drill methods, and the first use of military maps. Polish foes begrudgingly—and not inaccurately—referred to the “Dutch cleverness” of the Russian troops.¹³²

As the Dutch joined the Swedes in the building of the Russian army for its inconclusive war with Poland in 1632–4, the Muscovite army began the most dramatic expansion of its entire history, increasing from its more or less standard size of about 100,000 to a figure in the vicinity of 300,000 in the last stages of the victorious campaign against Poland in the 1660,s.¹³³ Most of the officers and many of the ordinary soldiers were imported from North European Protestant countries, so that a good fourth of this swollen army was foreign.¹³⁴

Those Western arrivals (like many newly assimilated Tatars, Southern Slavs, and so on) were uprooted figures, completely dependent on the state. They became a major component in the new service nobility, or dvorianstvo, which gradually replaced the older and more traditional landed aristocracy. Other developments which accompanied and supported the “military revolution” in early-seventeenth-century Russia were the growth of governmental bureaucracy, the expanded power of regional military commanders (voevodas), and the formalization of peasant serfdom as a means of guaranteeing the state a supply of food and service manpower.

Typical of the new military-administrative leaders that helped transform Russian society during the weak reign of Michael Romanov was Ivan Cherkasky.¹³⁵ His father was a converted Moslem from the Caucasus who had entered the service of Ivan the Terrible and served as the first military voevoda of Novgorod, where he married the sister of the future Patriarch Philaret and befriended the brilliant Swedish mercenary general de la Gardie. Young Ivan was brought up as a soldier with his loyalty to the Tsar uncomplicated by local attachments. He studied the military methods of the nearby Swedes and collaborated with them in mobilizing Russian opinion against the Poles during the Time of Troubles. His military activity earned for him (along with the co-liberator of Moscow, Dmitry Pozharsky) elevation to boyar rank on the day of the Tsar’s coronation in 1613. By amassing personal control over a number of Moscow chanceries, including a new, semi-terrorist organization known as the “bureau for investigative affairs,” he became probably the most powerful single person in the Muscovite government until his death in 1642.¹³⁶ Throughout his career, his use of (and friendship with) Swedish and Dutch military and administrative personnel was indispensable to his success. He hailed the Swedes and the alliance “of the great tsar and the great king” against “the Roman faith of heretics, papists, Jesuits.”¹³⁷ He insisted that the Russians, like the Swedes, should defend their “sovereign nature” against new Roman pretensions to universal Empire. He emulated the Swedes and Dutch (who showered him with gifts often more lavish than those given the Tsar) by introducing secret writing into Russian diplomatic communications.¹³⁸

In 1632 the Dutch built the first modern Russian arms plant and arsenal at Tula; and in 1647, printed in the Netherlands the first military manual and drill book for Russian foot soldiers, which was also the first Russian-language book ever to use copper engravings.¹³⁹ French Huguenot fortification specialists were put to work, and the building of the first fortified line of defense in the south spelled the end to the traditional vulnerability to pillaging raids from that direction.¹⁴⁰

A final by-product of the Russian links with their more distant “German” allies was the turning of Russian eyes at last toward the sea. The eastern Baltic (and indeed some of the lakes and rivers of the north) had become areas of contention in which the Swedes had exercised humiliating advantages over the landlocked Muscovites; and the southward movement of Russian power down the Volga and Don confronted Russia with Persian and Turkish naval power at the point where these rivers entered the Caspian and Black seas respectively. Thus, the period from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century—which also saw the opening of Siberia and the Russian drive to the Pacific—witnessed a series of efforts to build a Russian navy. The Russians received aid and encouragement in this endeavor from the Danes (who were anxious to strengthen Russia against the Swedes) and even more from the English and Dutch (who were anxious to protect trade routes from their respective ports of Archangel and Kholmogory on the White Sea through Russian rivers to the Orient). Ivan IV was the first to think about a navy; Boris Godunov, the first to buy ships for sailing under the Russian flag; Michael Romanov, the first to build a river fleet; and Alexis, the first to build an ocean-going Russian warship.¹⁴¹

The fateful feature of this Russian orientation toward the North European Protestant countries was that it was so completely military and administrative in nature. Muscovy took none of the religious, artistic, or educational ideas of these advanced nations. Symptomatic of Muscovy’s purely practical and military interest in secular enlightenment is the fact that the word nauka, later used for “science” and “learning” in Russia, was introduced in the military manual of 1647 as a synonym for “military skill.”¹⁴² The scientific revolution came to Russia after the military revolution: and natural science was for many years to be thought of basically as a servant of the military establishment.

The long military struggle which led to the defeat of Poland in the war of 1654–67, and of Sweden a half century later, produced a greater cultural change in the Russian victor than in either of the defeated nations. Poland and Sweden both clung to the forms and ideals of a past age, whereas Russia underwent a far-reaching transformation that pointed toward the future. What had been a monolithic, monastic civilization became a multi-national, secular state. Under Alexis Mikhailovich and his son Peter the Great, Russia in effect adopted the aesthetic and philosophic culture of Poland even while rejecting its Catholic faith, and the administrative and technological culture of Sweden and Holland without either the Lutheran or the Calvinist form of Protestantism.

Symbol of the Polish impact was the incorporation into the expanding Muscovite state in 1667 of the long-lost “mother of Russian cities,” the culturally advanced and partially Latinized city of Kiev. The acquisition of Kiev (along with Smolensk, Chernigov, and other cities) inspired the imagination but upset the tranquillity of Muscovy, marking a return to the half-forgotten unity of pre-Mongol times and the incorporation of far higher levels of culture and enlightenment.

Symbol of the Swedish impact was the last of the three great centers of Russian culture: St. Petersburg, the window which Peter forced open on Northern Europe in the early eighteenth century and transformed into the new capital of Russia. Built with ruthless symmetry on the site of an old Swedish fortress and given a Dutch name, Petersburg symbolized the coming to Muscovy of the bleak Baltic ethos of administrative efficiency and military discipline which had dominated much of Germanic Protestantism. The greatest territorial gains at the expense of Poland and Sweden were to follow the acquisition of these key cities by a century in each case—the absorption of eastern Poland and most of the Ukraine occurring in the late eighteenth century and the acquisition of Finland and the Baltic provinces in the early nineteenth. But the decisive psychological change was accomplished by the return of Kiev and the building of St. Petersburg.

Bringing these two Westernized cities together with Moscow into one political unit had disturbing cultural effects. The struggle for Eastern Europe had produced profound social dislocations while increasing popular involvement in ideological and spiritual controversy. As the stream of Western influences grew to a flood in the course of the seventeenth century, Russians seemed to thrash about with increasing desperation. Indeed, the entire seventeenth and the early eighteenth century can be viewed as an extension of the Time of Troubles: a period of continuous violence, of increasing borrowing from, yet rebelling against, the West. The deep split finally came to the surface in this last stage of the confrontation between Muscovy and the West.