Russia: People and Empire: 1552–1917

Most of the boyar clans were thus discontented with Godunov from the outset. The service nobles formed the bulk of his support, but many of them were worried that the peasants on whom they relied for their livelihood were being enticed away from them by wealthier landowners or monasteries, who could offer better conditions. Boris reacted to their complaints by limiting the peasants’ right to move and facilitating procedures for reclaiming those who had done so. He combined this with trying to impose greater control over the Cossacks and small landowners of the vulnerable southern frontier regions.

As factionalism mounted, Boris set his minions to spy on his rivals and enemies: he imprisoned or murdered some, and exiled others to remote regions. Deportations, confiscations and executions multiplied, recalling sinister memories of Ivan the Terrible. These afflictions might have been tolerated in a Tsar who had come to the throne by heredity. But Boris had been chosen, and it followed that alternatives could be contemplated. The last straw was a series of bad harvests in 1601–3.

Before long a pretender appeared, claiming to be Ivan IVs son Dmitrii, escaped from his reported death in Uglich. He immediately attracted a large and diverse following: boyars jealous of Godunov, service nobles desirous of larger estates and a firmer grip on their peasants, Cossacks anxious to reassert their ancient freedoms, peasants calling for an easing of serfdom. Although representatives of all these classes flocked to his banner, their aspirations contradicted each other, and there was no way any ruler, no matter how skilful, could have reconciled them. However, Boris’s sudden death in April 1605 opened the capital to them, without their mutual differences having been resolved.

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The chaos was compounded by international intervention: Poland-Lithuania and Sweden, eager to take advantage of the weakening of their threatening eastern neighbour, sent their troops in to enforce their own territorial, religious and dynastic interests. Over the next few years, Muscovy was torn apart by boyar feuds, social revolution and international warfare. Sovereignty over it was claimed or temporarily exercised by three pretenders, a leading boyar, a boyar council, a Polish prince and a triumvirate of service nobles. This was the epoch which Russians refer to as the ‘Time of Troubles’ (smutnoe vremia).

Yet in the end Muscovy did not disintegrate, and in 1613 the motley and disreputable parade of pretenders came to an end when a zemskii sobor elected a new Tsar, Mikhail Romanov, from a boyar family which had been a principal rival of the Godunovs. However one explains it, some sense of shared identity and destiny impelled the various warring groups to find sufficient common ground to cooperate in expelling the foreigners from their capital city and in restoring the authority of the state. The way in which the ‘land’ recovered in the absence of a legitimate Tsar suggested that Muscovy had the potential to outgrow the dynastic patrimonial framework, that a potentially state-bearing people existed.

Precisely because the state was falling apart and had to be reconstituted, the Time of Troubles was quite fruitful in political programmes, some of which indicate the way a Russian civic nation might have evolved had the relentless pressure of empire and great power status been eased. The founding document of a civic nation is often an agreement reached during a conflict between a ruler and his elites: witness the Magna Carta of 1215 in England and the Golden Bull of 1222 in Hungary. An analogous agreement was mooted in February 1610 when protagonists of the second pretender switched their support to the Polish crown. They presented King Sigismund with a set of conditions on which they were prepared to elect his son Wladyslaw as Tsar. The first was that the Orthodox faith should remain inviolate. Then came stipulations on the rights of individual estates, for example, not to be punished or to have property confiscated without trial before a properly constituted court, not to be demoted from high chin without clear and demonstrable fault. The document implied a state structure in which supreme authority would be shared with a combined boyar assembly and zemskii sobor (duma boiar i vseia zemli), in agreement with which questions of taxes, salaries of service people and the bestowal of patrimonial and service estates would be decided.

(#litres_trial_promo) Such a document might have laid the basis for a constitutional Muscovite monarchy in personal union with Poland.

However, it never took effect, since Wladyslaw did not come to claim his throne. Instead, Sigismund declared his intention of doing so himself. This prompted the Patriarch, Hermogen, to issue a stern injunction that the Russian people were not to ‘kiss the cross before a Catholic king’. This assertion of Orthodox fundamentalism seems to have struck a chord, and the death of the second pretender at about the same time removed an obstacle to combined national action. At any rate, within a few months an ad hoc alliance of service nobles and Cossacks had formed a militia and a provisional government and issued a statement recognizing as the supreme authority ‘the whole land’. As we have seen, this term signified the power of local communities, separate from but allied with the supreme power. For the moment, the army council reserved to itself the exercise of this authority, but promised not to take certain steps, such as imposing the death penalty, without consulting the whole army. They indicated that lands wrongfully appropriated by boyars were to be returned to the state land fund, from which they would be awarded to servitors strictly in accordance with the duties they had discharged. Serving Cossacks were to be offered the choice of a pomest’e to settle down on or a salary for continuing military service on the borders. Peasants were to be forbidden to leave the estates on which they worked, and provisions were made for their recapture and return if they did so.

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This declaration represented a compromise between the interests of the Cossacks and those of the service nobility. It did not fully satisfy either: Cossacks in particular were suspicious that it would breach their ancient freedom. Moreover, it offered nothing to the towns or to the ordinary peasant soldiers. Relations between the different social groups broke down, and Prokopii Liapunov, a service noble from Riazan’ who commanded the militia, was murdered. The first attempt to unite the nation behind a programme of expelling infidels and foreigners had failed because of the incompatible social interests of those involved.

The second and more successful attempt originated in the towns of the north and east. It began with a traditional skhod, or assembly, of the zemstvo elders in Nizhnii Novgorod, the principal city of the middle Volga. A merchant, Kuz’ma Minin, made an eloquent appeal to his colleagues to reject the rule of Cossacks and aliens as divisive and offensive to the true faith, and to take the initiative themselves in setting up a voluntary militia to march on Moscow, free it and enthrone a new Tsar ‘whom God shall send us’. The assembly approved the idea and composed appeals to other towns for money and recruits: ‘Let us be together of one accord … Orthodox Christians in love and unity, and let us not tolerate the recent disorders, but let us fight untiringly to the death to purge the state of Muscovy from our enemies, the Poles and Lithuanians.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Towns in the north and east, and on the Volga one by one joined the movement, sending contributions and troops, while subsidies were also received from the Stroganovs and from some monasteries.

The way the movement was built up demonstrates the importance of the wealth Moscow was by now receiving from the Volga basin and from its new northern and eastern territories, and also the potential of the elective mir assemblies which Ivan had tried to institutionalize at the start of his reign. As the historian Platonov put it, this was a movement of ‘zemskaia Rus’, of church, land and traditional local gatherings against disunity and foreign domination’.

(#litres_trial_promo)The militia was placed under the command of a service noble and voevoda, Dmitrii Pozharskii, who had earlier distinguished himself in fighting against the Poles.

Pozharskii took up position in Iaroslavl’, as a large town on the Volga much closer to Moscow, and established there a provisional government headed by Minin, with the title of ‘The Man Chosen by the Entire People’. From there the militia advanced on Moscow and drove out the Poles. Then the military council issued invitations to all towns and districts to send their ‘best, most sensible and trustworthy people’, each equipped with a mandate, to a ‘council of the land’ (sovet vseia zemli) which would elect the new Tsar.

Some five hundred delegates came from everywhere between the White Sea and the Don, representing boyars, service nobles, clergy, merchants, Cossacks, posad people (townsfolk), and ‘black’ (non-enserfed) peasants. The bitter divisions which had plunged Russia into anarchy for so long were not fully stilled by the common victory: service nobles and Cossacks were at loggerheads, boyar clans continued to feud and insist on their pedigree, while some supported foreign candidates. The latter, however, were rejected by the assembly as a whole ‘for their many injustices’. It was decided that the new monarch must be Russian and Orthodox.

On 7 February 1613 the sobor elected the sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov as the new Tsar. This choice illustrates the prevailing yearning for stability, the desire to restore a state of affairs as close as possible to what might be called ‘normality’. Mikhail was the eldest son of a family closely related to the Riurik dynasty, and hence the nearest thing to a hereditary monarch that the assembly could find. To legitimate his choice, a story was assiduously put around that Fedor Ivanovich, the last Riurik Tsar, had entrusted his sceptre and crown to Mikhail’s uncle. No explicit conditions were imposed or even requested: the dynastic sense triumphed over the aspiration to set a limit to the monarch’s power, for which this would have been the ideal moment. The delegates, it turned out, had come to the meeting not with binding conditions to put to candidates in the course of the election, but with petitions to submit to him once he was elected.

In its greatest test hitherto, then, the people of Muscovy showed that they felt their vulnerability, from within and without, sufficiently to wish a dynastic, hereditary and autocratic ruler. The forces seeking unity – service nobles, townsfolk, clergy, ‘black’ peasants – triumphed over those – boyars, Cossacks, serfs – better able to profit from discord. The whole movement drew its inspiration, organization and financial support from the areas in the north and east which had been least affected by the oprichnina and by the encroachments of serfdom.

The whole protracted affair suggested that, in moments of supreme crisis, the Russians could and would eventually work together, temporarily putting aside their conflicts, their clannish and socio-economic interests and reconstituting themselves as a potential nation. The Nizhnii Novgorod militia was extremely suspicious of both boyars and Cossacks, but nevertheless cooperated with individuals from both categories when that seemed necessary for the common good. The outcome also suggested that Russians identified themselves with strong authority, backed by the Orthodox Church and unrestrained by any charter or covenant, such as might prove divisive and set one social group against another. Maureen Perrie has shown how, during the Time of Troubles, tales circulated among the common people of a ‘good’ or ‘just’ monarch, who would protect them against their oppressors.

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All the same, the election of a new autocrat did not just mean a return to old Muscovite ways. For one thing, the Time of Troubles had succeeded far better than Ivan IV in weakening the boyars. Individual boyars and their families continued to play a role in politics, but now through their presence at court and through the Tsar’s service, rather than through their patrimonies and retainers. By contrast, the service nobles had gained in influence, and used it during the next half-century to put the final clamps on serfdom, which they achieved in the new Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649.

At the same time, the first serious breach had been created in the patrimonial state. In the Time of Troubles Muscovy had been like an estate whose master had died intestate: relatives, servants and labourers had fought among themselves to seize it, and a few neighbouring owners had joined in the fray. But then the zemlia had for the first time constituted itself as a reality, based on elective local government institutions, and had chosen a new master: they had demonstrated that the state was not just a patrimony. Platonov goes so far as to assert that ‘the old patrimonial state had yielded to a new and more complex type, the national state’.

(#litres_trial_promo) That was still far from being the case, as the next three centuries would show, but a movement had been made in that direction.

The Church Schism

The outcome of the Time of Troubles also enormously enhanced the standing of the Orthodox Church, which had shown that at a time of national breakdown it was capable of rousing people to a united effort and of helping to finance that revival. Besides, the first Romanov Tsar, Mikhail, being very young when he came to power, relied a great deal on his father, Metropolitan Filaret, who became Patriarch in 1619 and remained in effect co-ruler, using the title ‘Great Sovereign’ till his death in 1633. For a time it looked as if Tsardom and Patriarchate were a partnership in which the Patriarch was the senior.

However, the church itself was undergoing a period of upheaval caused by the import of new religious ideas from the West, and fuelled by memories of the horrors foreign intervention could inflict. The influence which appeared most threatening was the Counter-Reformation Catholicism of Poland, mediated through the Uniate Church. By the middle of the seventeenth century a reform movement had taken shape which aimed to outbid the intellectual sophistication of the Catholics by purifying the Orthodox Church and spreading its message to ordinary Russian people.

The Zealots of Piety (Revniteli blagochestiia) were a group of parish priests, mainly from the Volga region, who in the 1630s began to agitate for a programme of thorough-going church reform. They were concerned by drunkenness, debauchery and the persistence of pagan practices among the common people, and attributed these deficiencies to the low educational and spiritual level of the clergy, and to the negligent conduct of the liturgy, which they claimed hindered ordinary parishioners from obtaining a real understanding of the faith. In particular they criticized the custom of mnogoglasie, conducting different portions of the divine service simultaneously, so that it was impossible to follow any of them properly (this was done because parish churches had taken over the full monastic liturgy, under which each service would otherwise have lasted several hours). The Zealots recommended heightened discipline, regular fasting, confession and communion, and the frequent preaching of sermons.

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This was a reform programme not unlike that of the Cluniacs in eleventh-century France, and it had something in common with sixteenth-century Protestantism in much of Europe. At the same time it was firmly rooted in the tradition of Metropolitan Makarii and took a pride in Muscovy’s religious mission. Clerics of this tendency drew attention to themselves by their fiery preaching, notably one Archpriest Avvakum, originally a peasant from beyond the Volga, a vehement protagonist of the simple Russian virtues in contra-distinction to western khitrost’ (cunning or sophistry): he sometimes aroused the resentment of his Moscow parishioners by castigating their worldly vices. The Zealots became influential both in the Patriarchate and at court, especially following the accession of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich in 1645. His personal confessor, Stefan Vonifat’ev, was a sympathizer, as were two of his leading advisers, Boris Morozov and Fedor Rtishchev.

Another peasant from beyond the Volga who rose up through the Zealots’ movement was the Mordovian monk Nikon, a tall and dominating figure who became one of Alexei’s most trusted friends and Metropolitan of Novgorod, before being elevated in 1652 to the Patriarchate. In this position Nikon assumed the title of ‘Great Sovereign’ and exercised real secular as well as spiritual authority whenever Alexei was absent, as for example during the Polish war which began in 1654.

If the Zealots of Piety thought that through Nikon they would win a decisive influence over church policy, they were to be rudely disabused. True, he implemented certain aspects of their programme, for example by banning mnogoglasie and prohibiting the sale of vodka on holy days. But his priorities were different and much more ambitious, If they were the Cluniac reformers, he was Pope Gregory VII. The Zealots’ vision was limited to Muscovy and their aim was to bring about an educated and morally pure church close to the people. Nikon by contrast wanted to create a theocracy in which the church would dominate the state and would take the lead in an imperial and ecumenical mission of expansion and salvation. Whereas Ivan Neronov, one of the leading Zealots, advised against war with Poland in 1648, because he feared the moral consequences of war, as well as further incursion of heresy, Nikon welcomed it as an opportunity to enhance the standing of both church and state, and actually encouraged Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi to rebel against Poland in the name of Orthodoxy. Nikon was in close touch with the Eastern Patriarchs, and was eager for the Russian church to play the leading role in Orthodoxy they could no longer fulfil because of their subjection to Ottoman rule.

(#litres_trial_promo) In a word, Nikon took absolutely seriously the notion of Moscow as the Third Rome and believed that it meant the creation of a universal Christian empire.

His contact with Greek and Ukrainian churchmen had made him aware of the many discrepancies between Russian and Byzantine liturgical practice which had been discussed at the Stoglav Council. He hastened the work of studying and correcting the printed service books, so that the Russian church would be ready for the ecumenical role he intended it should play in Ukraine and perhaps beyond that in the Balkans. As early as the spring of 1653, he issued a new psalter and a set of instructions requiring congregations to introduce a number of ritual changes, including making the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of the traditional two. From the outset there were protests from priests who disliked the alterations and who objected that they had been introduced uncanonically, without a church council. Nikon plunged ahead regardless, with assurance of the Tsar’s support, and during the next years added further amendments, none of them of dogmatic significance, but nevertheless repugnant to believers who held that ritual and faith were indissolubly connected.

In 1655 Nikon convened a church council and, with the help of his Greek supporters, pushed his liturgical reforms through. With the approval of the secular power, he set about dismissing his opponents and exiling them. By now, however, Alexei was beginning to be alarmed by the threat to his own authority represented by the Patriarchate, especially when occupied by an overweening character like Nikon. On his appointment, Nikon had made him swear to obey him in everything which concerned the church and God’s law – an exceedingly broad concept in the seventeenth century. As Metropolitan of Novogorod, he had resisted the subordination of monasteries in his diocese to the new Monastyrskii Prikaz, the state monastic administration, and had fought the encroachment of secular courts on what he considered ecclesiastic jurisdiction. As Patriarch he continued to fight these battles.

At first Alexei had acquiesced in ecclesiastical hegemony, but as he gained in experience and self-confidence he grew to resent the domineering tone of his erstwhile ‘bosom friend’, and to worry that if the church acquired too much power, it might seriously obstruct the efforts of the secular state to mobilize the country’s resources by taxation or by the assignment of land to nobles. The high-handedness which Nikon displayed in implementing his liturgical reforms confirmed Alexei’s fears and eventually undermined his relationship with the Tsar.

Affronted by Alexei’s increasingly conspicuous coolness towards him, Nikon in July 1658 suddenly and dramatically renounced the Patriarchate in the middle of a service. Declaring that he felt unworthy of the office, he took off his patriarchal robes and assumed the simple habit of a monk. This gesture of simulated humility was certainly calculated to compel concessions from Alexei, but it had the opposite effect. Alexei after much hesitation and heart-searching accepted his resignation.

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Whatever this rift was, it emphatically did not arise from a dispute over Nikon’s reforms. Alexei was as keen on them as Nikon himself, since he thought they would raise the standing of the state in alliance with the church. He therefore took over the sponsorship of the reforms, while removing their originator. In this way the innovations became as closely identified with the state as they were with the church: a fateful development.

A church council of 1666–7, again attended by the Eastern Patriarchs, not only approved all the textual amendments and liturgical innovations, but went on to pronounce anathema on those who refused to accept them. It also reversed the decision of the Stoglav Council of 1551, which had upheld existing practices in the face of Greek questioning. This was a radical turning-point in more than ecclesiastical policy, since the 1551 Council had consolidated the whole Muscovite ideology propounded by Metropolitan Makarii. Its repudiation implied a rejection of the entire outlook. Symbolically the Council of 1666 explicitly condemned the legend of the ‘white klobuk’ (monk’s cap): this was a story which enjoyed wide currency among ordinary people, telling how, after the Byzantine church had sold out to the Catholics at the Council of Florence, it had been punished by the fall of its capital city to the Turks, and the mission of defending true Christianity had devolved on the Russians. Condemnation of this tale implied rejection of the whole notion of Moscow the Third Rome.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Tsars had never explicitly invoked the Third Rome, but all the same to repudiate it undermined much of the justification for their authority.

The Council of 1666–7 thus converted the Russians’ existing national myth into a heritage of those who opposed the state and its increasingly cosmopolitan outlook. It thereby opened up a rift in Russians’ national consciousness which has never been fully healed. The Old Believers pointed out, with impeccable logic, that all the Tsars and hishops had hitherto lived by practices now deemed so heinous that they merited anathema. ‘If we are schismatics,’ they argued, ‘then the Holy Fathers, Tsars and Patriarchs were also schismatics.’ Quoting from the church’s own Book of Faith of 1648, they charged Nikon with ‘destroying the ancient native piety’ and ‘introducing the alien Roman abomination’.

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘To make the sign of the cross with three fingers’, they protested, ‘is a Latin tradition and the mark of the Antichrist,’ Archpriest Avvakum, the most articulate and consistent of Nikon’s opponents, wrote from his prison cell to Tsar Alexei: ‘Say in good Russian “Lord have mercy on me”. Leave all those Kyrie Eleisons to the Greeks: that’s their language, spit on them! You are Russian, Alexei, not Greek. Speak your mother tongue and be not ashamed of it, either in church or at home!’

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The anathema supported by the secular power blew up minor liturgical problems not just into major theological issues but into criteria of a person’s whole attitude to church and state. As Robert Crummey has remarked, ‘Once opposition to the liturgical reform and all its implications carried the Old Believers into opposition to the Russian state, their movement became a rallying point for the discontented and dispossessed of Muscovite society.’

(#litres_trial_promo) That included those who objected to the fixation of serfdom, Cossacks defending their ancient liberty, local communities losing their self-governing powers to voevodas and their agents, townsfolk fixed to their communes by ‘mutual responsibility’ and heavy taxation, as well as parishes who found that the Council of 1666 had also curtailed their power to choose their own priest.

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The combining of religious and secular motifs fanned the flames of an apocalyptic mood which was already abroad in Muscovite society, exemplified in the preachings of the hermit Kapiton, which were popular in the Volga basin and the north of the country. For if the piety of the Third Rome had indeed been disavowed by both church and state, then what could one conclude but that the reign of Antichrist had arrived and the end of the world was at hand? After all, according to prophecy, there was to be no Fourth Rome.

The final decades of the seventeenth century saw the culmination of this mood in a series of rebellions and mass suicides. The suicides started among communities of people who were determined not to defile themselves before the Judgement Day by contact with the forces of Antichrist, but rather, at the approach of government agents or troops, would shut themselves inside their wooden churches and set fire to them.

The rebellions began in 1668 in the island monastery of Solovki, the great centre both of piety and of economic life in the mouth of the White Sea. Its monks refused to accept the new prayer books. stopped praying for the Tsar and deposed their abbot when he seemed disposed to compromise. They told Alexei: ‘We all wish to die in the old faith, in which your lordship’s father, the true-believing lord, Tsar and Grand Prince Mikhail Fedorovich of all Russia and the other true-believing Tsars and Grand Princes lived out their days.’