Russia A History Page 9
In the sixteenth century this vision became more universalist and less accurate. Genealogical tales of the Muscovite grand princes began to extend the family line through Kiev to ancient Rome in a typically Renaissance quest for a classical heritage. By the mid-century even more grandiose visions were constructed, with their roots firmly in the Orthodox past. Metropolitan Makarii’s mid-century compilations of hagiography chronicles, and didactic texts presented Muscovy as a holy kingdom, part of universal Christianity, linked through Kiev Rus to Byzantine Christianity and ultimately to God’s creation of the earth. Icons such as ‘Blessed is the Heavenly Host’ (popularly known as the ‘Church Militant’), new court ceremonies such as Epiphany and Palm Sunday processions, and fresco cycles that filled the interiors of the Kremlin churches and palaces after the fires of 1547, all elaborated a ‘Wisdom Theology’ that immersed the reader or viewer in a biblical world. This vision was decidedly apocalyptic, lending great drama to the symbolic message and perhaps dispensing tension or exaltation among the viewers.
One should be quite clear about what Muscovite ideology was not saying in the sixteenth century. Moscow was not, for example, styling itself the ‘Third Rome’, heir to Rome and Byzantium and natural leader of the world. The ‘Moscow, the Third Rome’ text was a minor theme encountered in only a few ecclesiastical texts; it was originally used only to exhort the tsars to be just and humble, not to justify overweening power. It was most warmly embraced in the seventeenth century, and then by the schismatic Old Believers, at the same time that it was being discredited by the official Church. Nor did Muscovite ideology primarily exalt the tsar as next to God in power and as separate and above the common man. Although this viewpoint, associated with the Byzantine philosopher Agapetus, makes its appearance in mid-sixteenth-century texts, it was usually balanced with Agapetus’ injunction to rulers to govern justly and with mercy. Nor did Muscovy see itself as a secular or pluralistic kingdom. There is no trace in sixteenth-century Muscovy of the keen debates over the natio that flourished in sixteenth-century England, France, Poland, and seventeenth-century Ukraine. Russia was outside that world of discourse; it defined itself in religious, not secular terms, as a family and community, not a state.
Much of this imagery directly appealed to the élite by making use of allegorical military themes. Moscow’s boyars and élite, although illiterate, could absorb a consistent vision of the state and their place in it by gazing at the frescos, battle standards, and icons that decorated the churches and chambers where they attended the tsar. Allegorically these depicted the state as the Lord’s heavenly army, a remarkably apt and probably compelling image for a state whose élite was defined by military service.
The image of the state as a Godly community of virtuous warriors and dependents of the tsar was acted out in collective meetings that first appeared in the mid-sixteenth century. Councils of the Land (zemskie sobory) were summoned at the initiative of the ruler; he set the agenda which usually concerned the issue of war and peace, but occasionally succession and taxation. Those present generally came from non-taxed social strata. The Councils were not parliamentary assemblies; they possessed neither legal definition, nor legislative initiative, nor decision-making power, nor consistent and representative composition. They seem to have fulfilled other functions than legislation; indeed, in the wake of the abolition of regional governors, they served as means of communication of state policy to the countryside to mobilize support for its military and fiscal policy. They also played an important symbolic role by physically creating a community of tsar and people in ritual fashion that may have worked cathartically as Emile Durkheim described rituals working to energize the community, to build bonds, and to resolve tensions. Clearly these were the challenges that stood before Muscovite rulers in the sixteenth century as they sought to bolster stability in constantly growing and vastly diverse lands.
The Autocratic Project
They were not alone in facing such challenges. Religious, linguistic, cultural, and regional diversity was typical of premodern states across the European plain. French kings, for example, ruled over several language communities and had to contend with a basic division in legal relations between pays d’etat (where estates negotiated laws and finances with the kings) and pays selection (where the king’s officers had direct authority). French towns and rural communities used many different legal codes and fiscal systems; corporate groups—estates, guilds, municipalities, professions—enjoyed privileged status. Rulers tried to make diversity work for them, tolerating differences, co-opting élites, maintaining established customs and regional associations as a means to consolidate their own power in the long run.
At first glance Muscovy would seem to have been less successful at these ‘absolutizing’ goals than England or France in the sixteenth century. With the débâcles of the oprichnina, the Livonian Wars, exorbitant taxation, and peasant flight, Muscovy ended the sixteenth century impoverished and politically vulnerable. But if judged over the longer term, Muscovy had achieved a surprising degree of success. The course charted by Ivan III and Vasilii III endured. Ivan IV did not transform political relationships or institutions, nor create a new élite. Many boyar families who dominated politics from Ivan III’s time survived the oprichnina and remained part of the élite into the next century; the new families that Ivan IV patronized by and large fell to provincial gentry status by the end of the century. Resource mobilization, development of a bureaucracy, military reform, and the consolidation of the élite survived the traumas of the 1560s-1580s, as did the march towards enserfment.
At this point it might be appropriate to reflect on the historical significance of Ivan IV ‘the Terrible’, whose enigmatic personality and actions have often been the main concern of narratives of Russia in the sixteenth century. His importance has been exaggerated in part because the oprichnina has long been considered Muscovy’s equivalent to the great clashes of monarchy and nobility or Church and state that made sixteenth-century European politics so turbulent. In other words, Ivan was writ large for historiographical imperatives. But, as already suggested, the oprichnina had no discernible political programme and no lasting results. Ivan’s significance has also been inflated because of the writings attributed to him, primarily a series of letters addressed to the émigré boyar, Prince A. M. Kurbskii, that articulated a claim to unlimited patrimonial power. But Edward L. Keenan has raised serious questions about the authenticity of Ivan’s and Kurbskii’s letters on the basis of manuscript history, content analysis, and linguistic style. Although most scholars have not accepted Keenan’s arguments, many recognize as apocryphal some later pieces of the correspondence and some related texts; the debate and manuscript research on the question endures. Keenan’s challenge sparked a fresh round of enquiry into the political and cultural world Ivan inhabited: was he literate, classically educated, and ahead of his time in political philosophy, or was he—like grand princes, tsars, and boyars before and after him to the mid-seventeenth century—cut from the same cloth as the Muscovite warrior élite, illiterate and little educated, but fiercely loyal to the ethos of Orthodox patrimonial authority? In any case, quandaries over Ivan’s personality and motives pale in the face of Braudel’s ‘longue durée’: Ivan IV did not divert, although he did disrupt, the Daniilovich project. His government, like that of his father and grandfather, made its main task the expansion of the tsardom, the consolidation of the élite, and the integration of a large and disparate realm. Perhaps the best indicator that the Muscovite rulers had managed to increase cohesion in their realm by the end of the sixteenth century was the fact that disparate forces—service tenure landholders from the centre, Cossacks of the steppe frontier, communes of the north—mobilized in the Time of Troubles to rescue the state from foreign invasion. Moscow’s rulers had at least consolidated an élite sufficiently cohesive to hold the state together. This achievement, done at the high human cost of enserfment, was possible because of the skilful use of coercion and co-option,
but especially because of the state’s minimalism. However autocratically they styled themselves, Moscow’s rulers could exert their authority in only very narrow arenas. Sixteenth-century Russia is customarily called an ‘autocracy’, taking up the appellation (samoderzhets) that Boris Godunov introduced into the tsar’s title. But if this was an autocracy, it was a pragmatically limited one.
3. From Muscovy towards St Petersburg 1598–1689
HANS-JOACHIM TORKE
From the time of Ivan the Terrible’s oprichnina to the ascension of the Romanovs in 1613, Muscovy experienced uninterrupted crisis—extinction of a dynasty, foreign intervention, and tumultuous social and political upheaval. The seventeenth century witnessed a restless transition, as, amidst continuing upheaval at the dawn of modernity, Muscovy embarked on state-building, Westernization, and territorial expansion.
THE seventeenth century has long been a focus of historiographic debate. Impressed by the broad-ranging reforms of Peter the Great (1689–1725), most early historians tended to emphasize the ‘break’, juxtaposing a traditional Muscovy of the seventeenth century to a Westernizing state of the eighteenth. But for over a century specialists have realized that the Petrine reforms built upon changes initiated by his predecessors in the seventeenth century. The army, finances, state administration—favourite areas of Petrine reform—were also the subject of government reforms in the seventeenth century. While many of these reforms were driven by practical need, they reflected a desire not only to import Western technology and military experts, but also to reshape foreign and domestic policy in terms of Western ideas and theories.
Crisis: The Time of Troubles (1598–1613)
The age of transformation began with acute crisis—the ‘Time of Troubles’ (smutnoe vremia). This protracted crisis inaugurated a new period in Russian history, marked by fundamental changes that would culminate in the passing of ‘Old Russia’ and the onset of new ‘troubles’ in the 1680s. Perhaps the best schema for the Time of Troubles, devised over a century ago by the historian Sergei Platonov, divides this period into successive ‘dynastic’, ‘social’, and ‘national’ phases that followed upon one another but, to a significant degree, had some overlap.
The period begins with the extinction of the Riurikid line in 1598. The general crisis also had long-term social causes—in particular, the exhaustion of the land and its resources by the Livonian War and the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible, which had devastated the boyars and triggered new restrictions on the peasants’ freedom of movement. Without the trauma of 1598, however, the ensuing disorder would probably neither have been so intense nor have persisted for the entire seventeenth century, which contemporaries aptly called a ‘rebellious age’. This first phase was portentous both because the only dynasty that had ever reigned in Russia suddenly vanished without issue, and because the ensuing events triggered the first assault on the autocracy. In the broadest sense, the old order lost a principal pillar—tradition (starina); nevertheless, there remained the spiritual support of the Orthodox Church (which held firm for several more decades) and the service nobility (which retained its resiliency until well into the eighteenth century). The year 1598 had one further consequence: a tradition-bound people could not believe that the dynasty had actually come to an end and therefore tended to support false pretenders claiming to be descendants of the Riurikids.
Muscovy responded to the extinction of its ruling dynasty by electing a new sovereign. Interestingly, no one as yet proposed to emulate other countries by electing someone from a foreign ruling house—a remarkable testament to the insularity of Muscovite society. Such a proposal, undoubtedly faced an insuperable religious obstacle—obligatory conversion to Orthodoxy. In the end the choice fell on Boris Godunov—a Russian nobleman, though not from an élite family (i.e. descending from another Riurikid line or the Lithuanian grand princes). Nonetheless, Boris had single-mindedly prepared his advancement under Tsars Ivan the Terrible (1533–84) and Fedor Ivanovich (1584–98): he himself married the daughter of a favourite in Ivan’s court; his sister Irina married Ivan’s successor, Fedor. Because the latter was personally incapable of exercising power, Godunov became regent and excluded all other competitors. After Fedor’s death, on 17 February 1598 Boris was formally ‘elected’ as Tsar Boris by a council (sobor) of approximately 600 deputies drawn from the upper clergy, the boyar duma, and representatives of the service nobility who had gathered in Moscow. Although transparently stage-managed by Boris, the council seemed to confirm that the realm had ‘found’ the candidate chosen by God Himself.
The Church, which Boris had earlier helped to establish its own Patriarchate, supported his election. The new tsar could also count on the sympathy of the lower nobility. But Boris also had to use coercion to eliminate rivals among the boyars—such as Fedor Nikitich Romanov, the head of a family with marital ties to the Riurikids, who was banished in late 1600 and forced to take monastic vows in 1601 (with the name Filaret). That tonsure effectively eliminated him from contention for worldly offices.
Nevertheless, Boris’s position was anything but secure. Apart from the fact that his government was beset with enormous burdens and problems, Boris himself failed to evoke veneration from his subjects. In part, that was because he had married the daughter of Grigorii (Maliuta) Skuratov—the oprichnik blamed for murdering Metropolitan Filipp of Novgorod in 1569. Moreover, his blatant efforts to ascend the throne lent credence to rumours that he had arranged the murder of Tsarevich Dmitrii, Ivan’s last son, in 1591. Although an investigatory commission under Vasilii Shuiskii (a rival whom Boris had deftly appointed to lead the investigation) confirmed that the death was accidental, the death of the 9-year-old Tsarevich remains a mystery to this day. Indeed, it made no sense for Boris to kill the boy: at the time of Dmitrii’s death, it was still conceivable that Fedor would father a son and avert the extinction of the Riurikid line. Nevertheless, Boris’s adversaries exploited suspicions of regicide—a view which, because of Alexander Pushkin’s play Boris Godunov (which Modest Mussorgsky later made into an opera), has persisted to the present.
Nor was Boris able to consolidate power after accession to the throne. His attempt to tighten control over administration failed—largely because of the traditional ‘Muscovite procrastination’ and corruption. His plan to reconstruct the towns also went awry, chiefly for want of a middle estate. Nor was he able to train better state servants: when, for the first time, Muscovy dispatched a contingent (eighteen men) to study in England, France, and Germany, not a single one returned. He recruited large numbers of European specialists (military officers, doctors, and artisans), but met with remonstrations from the Orthodox Church. Clearly, Boris had an open mind about the West: he not only solicited the support of ruling houses in the West, but also sought to consolidate his dynastic claims through attempts to marry his daughter Ksenia to Swedish (later Danish) princes, although such plans ultimately came to nought.
Boris attempted to establish order in noble-peasant relations, but nature herself interceded. From the early 1590s, in an attempt to protect petty nobles and to promote economic recovery, the government established the ‘forbidden years’, which—for the first time—imposed a blanket prohibition on peasant movement during the stipulated year. In autumn 1601, however, Boris’s government had to retreat and reaffirm the peasants’ right to movement: a catastrophic crop failure in the preceding summer caused massive famine that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The following year the government again had to rescind the ‘forbidden year’, a step that virtually legalized massive peasant flight. Moreover the government welcomed movement towards the southern border area (appropriately called the dikoe pole, or ‘wild field’), where they helped to reinforce the Cossacks and the fortified towns recently established as a buffer between Muscovy and the Crimean Tatars. But many peasants sought new landowners in central Muscovy adding to the social unrest. In fact, in 1603 the government had to use troops to suppress rebellious peasants, bondsmen (kholopy), an
d even déclassé petty nobles.
That uprising signalled the onset of phase two—the social crisis. This stage, however, overlapped with the dynastic crisis: as the general sense of catastrophe mounted, rumours suddenly spread that Tsarevich Dmitrii had not died at Uglich, but had miraculously survived in Poland-Lithuania. In 1601 a pretender surfaced in Poland, winning the support of adventurous magnates (in particular, the voevoda of Sandomierz, Jerzy Mniszech); he was actually a fugitive monk, Grigorii, who had fled from Chudov Monastery in Moscow and originally came from the petty nobility, bearing the name Iurii Otrepev before tonsure. That, at least, was the public claim of Boris Godunov, who himself had fallen ill and steadily lost the ability to rule. That declaration had no more effect than his representations to the Polish king, Zygmunt III, who remained officially uninvolved, but had secret assurances from the ‘False Dmitrii’ that Poland would receive Smolensk and other territories were he to succeed.
When the Polish nobles launched their campaign from Lvov in August 1604, their forces numbered only 2,200 cavalrymen. When they reached Moscow in June 1605, however, this army had grown tenfold, for many others—especially Cossacks—had joined the triumphal march to Moscow.
By the time they entered the Kremlin, Boris himself had already died (April 1605), and his 16-year-old son Fedor was promptly executed. Of Boris’s reign, only the acquisition of western Siberia (with outposts as remote as the Enisei) and the expansion southward were achievements of enduring significance.