Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  The Time of Troubles came to an end in 1613, when the Assembly of the Land elected the sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov to the Muscovite throne. The head of the Romanov clan was the new tsar’s father, Fedor, who had competed for the tsar’s throne after the death of the last Rurikid tsar, also named Fedor. He lost, and after Boris Godunov’s election he was tonsured as a monk and exiled to a northern monastery. As a victim of Godunov, he was later brought back to Moscow and consecrated metropolitan of Rostov under the name Filaret. He was arrested by the Poles in 1610 and spent the next eight years as a prisoner of honor in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

  Filaret returned to Moscow in 1619, after the signing of a Polish-Muscovite armistice and an exchange of prisoners. By that time, his son Mikhail Romanov had already been tsar of Muscovy for six years. The return of Filaret, who assumed the vacant position of patriarch of Moscow in the following year, created a unique situation in which the tsar was the son of a patriarch. Both had the designation “sovereign” in their respective titles, but it was quite apparent that the imperious patriarch dominated his meek son. The Byzantine model, in which the emperor held sway over the Orthodox patriarch, had been effectively reversed.

  The new patriarch was not well disposed to all Orthodox outside the tsardom. During his Polish captivity, Filaret had become convinced that the Orthodox of Ukraine and Belarus were spiritually corrupt, as they were subject to a Catholic monarch and obliged to deal constantly with the non-Orthodox. There was also the grave issue of the church union concluded in the Commonwealth between the Catholic Church and part of the Orthodox Church. The new Uniate Church, created at the Council of Brest in 1596, recognized the supremacy of the pope and accepted Catholic dogma while maintaining its traditional Byzantine rite. Filaret accused the Uniates of “walking two paths” simultaneously and considered not only them but also the Orthodox of the Commonwealth as less than fully Orthodox and Christian, even if they rejected the union.

  Under Patriarch Filaret, who was the de facto ruler of Muscovy from 1619 until his death in 1633, the Orthodox Church and the state itself fused into something of a last bastion of “true Orthodoxy.” But while questioning the credentials of every Christian outside Muscovy, Filaret was eager to make political alliances with non-Orthodox rulers in order to defeat the hated Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and retake the lands lost to it during the Time of Troubles. He died in the midst of another war with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which brought new defeats to Muscovy. Orphaned by the death of his domineering father, Mikhail Romanov was now the sole ruler of Muscovy. But the tradition of treating the patriarch as a sovereign and the chronic tension between the secular and spiritual authorities in Muscovy did not disappear overnight. It would not be fully resolved in favor of the tsar for another three decades.

  WITH EUROPE EMBROILED IN THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR (1618–1648), which pitted Catholic countries against Protestant ones, Muscovy was eager to make alliances with the Protestant powers against the Catholic Poles, but was constrained by the refusal of its church to treat the rest of the Christian world as fully legitimate. That limitation became embarrassingly apparent in 1644, when the Muscovite elite welcomed Prince Valdemar of Denmark, who had come to marry Tsar Mikhail’s daughter, Irina. The wedding was meant to set the seal on the alliance between Muscovy and Denmark, which was long in the making—Valdemar and Irina had been engaged since 1640. But the long-awaited wedding fell through. Under the influence of church hierarchs, the tsar insisted that Valdemar, who had no plans to stay in Muscovy or claim its throne, convert to Orthodoxy before marrying his daughter. The prince refused. The tsar, for his part, would not let him go. Valdemar was detained and allowed to leave the country only after the death of Tsar Mikhail and the coronation of his son, Aleksei Mikhailovich, in 1645.

  The disrupted marriage of Irina, who was very close to Aleksei, indicated to the new tsar and his advisers that the Orthodox Church was becoming a political hindrance. Further evidence of this was the failure of Muscovite Orthodox theologians to hold their own against Valdemar’s Lutheran preachers on issues of Christian dogma and marriage. But there was a reform movement growing within the church that aspired to raise the educational level of the clergy and eradicate corruption. The Zealots of Piety, as they came to be known, included Archimandrite Nikon, who became patriarch of Moscow in 1652 and, with the tsar’s consent, included the word “sovereign” in his title. Nikon initiated an ambitious reform of the church, remodeling it along lines established not long before by the Orthodox metropolitan Peter Mohyla, who had reformed the Kyiv metropolitanate in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in response to challenges presented by the Protestant Reformation and Catholic reform.

  Peter Mohyla, a son of the Moldavian ruler, became the metropolitan of Kyiv in 1633 and worked hard to reform Ukrainian and Belarusian Orthodoxy. He began with the education of the clergy. In 1632, he merged two existing schools for Orthodox youth, establishing a Kyivan college—the first Western-type educational institution in Ukraine, modeled in structure and curriculum on the Jesuit colleges of the era. The Catholic reform, launched by Rome at the Council of Trent (1545–1563), became the inspiration and model for Mohyla’s reform of the Orthodox Church of the Commonwealth.

  Catholic influences were apparent in the new metropolitan’s liturgical innovations and in his Confession of Faith—an Eastern Christian catechism that the Orthodox had lacked. An Orthodox catechism was compiled in the 1640s by a circle of intellectuals working under Mohyla’s supervision and approved by the Kyivan church council. In 1643, it was approved by the Eastern patriarchs. The confession that Mohyla and his learned circle composed became an official exposition of the dogmas and articles of the Orthodox faith throughout the Orthodox world, with the notable exception of Muscovy.

  The rise of Kyiv as a center of Orthodox learning took place at a time when Muscovy and its church were in almost complete isolation, oblivious to the challenges that faced their fellow Orthodox abroad. But the desire of the young Tsar Aleksei to reform his church changed the attitude of the Muscovite state to Kyiv and its teachings. Nowhere was this more evident than in the sphere of publishing. In 1649, Moscow printers published a Brief Compendium of Teachings on the Articles of Faith, based on Peter Mohyla’s Orthodox Confession of Faith. Muscovite Orthodoxy was rejoining the rest of the Orthodox world, now defined by the theological teachings of Kyiv.

  There was a certain irony in that development. The Muscovites had sought to remedy problems arising from the self-imposed isolation of their church by returning to the basics of their faith as presented in the uncorrupted texts of the Eastern church fathers. But that required checking the old Muscovite translations of the Greek texts and, if necessary, producing revised ones. Since there were no qualified translators in Moscow, they were summoned from Kyiv, bringing along Kyiv’s understanding of the Greek texts and of Orthodox Christianity in general. The conflict between the Kyivan vision of church reform and the traditionalist Muscovite view would bring about a profound schism (Raskol) in the Muscovite church and society.

  The turn of the Muscovite clerics toward Kyiv, which seemed almost an accidental detour on their way to the Orthodox East, coincided with the emergence of a new force in Ukraine that was interested in close ties with Muscovy, not only in religion but also in politics. That force was Cossackdom and the state that it created—the Hetmanate. In the spring of 1648, Ukraine was shaken by a new Cossack uprising, the seventh since the end of the sixteenth century. The Cossacks, who had begun as trappers and brigands in the fifteenth century, were now emerging as a major fighting force and demanding special rights and privileges from the Commonwealth government. By 1648, they wanted a polity of their own.

  In December 1648, the leader of the uprising, the veteran Cossack officer Bohdan Khmelnytsky, solemnly entered the city of Kyiv. He was hailed by the professors and students of the Kyivan College as the Moses of the Rus’ people and their liberator from the Polish yoke. The Orthodox metropolitan of
Kyiv also welcomed Khmelnytsky. More important, the metropolitan was accompanied by no less a hierarch than Patriarch Paisios of Jerusalem. The patriarch had been on his way to Moscow, where he had intended to ask the tsar for alms, when he was intercepted by the rebel Cossacks and brought to Kyiv on Khmelnytsky’s orders in anticipation of his grand entrance into the ancient capital of the Rus’ princes and Rus’ Orthodoxy.

  Paisios did not mind. He referred to Khmelnytsky as an illustrious princeps (prince), thereby granting his ecclesiastical blessing to the new ruler, and engaged him in a discussion about creating a world alliance of Orthodox powers, starting with Muscovy and Ukraine. Khmelnytsky needed little encouragement. When he wrote his first letter to the Muscovite tsar in June 1648, he presented the Cossack revolt as a struggle against the oppression of the “ancient Greek faith” and stated: “We would wish for ourselves such an autocratic ruler in our land as Your Tsarist Majesty, the Orthodox Christian Tsar.” Khmelnytsky wanted direct Muscovite military intervention in support of the Cossacks. He asked Patriarch Paisios, who was leaving Kyiv for Moscow, to intervene with the tsar on his behalf. Paisios, wishing to promote a new Orthodox alliance, obliged. He asked the tsar to “take the Cossacks under his high hand” and provide them with military assistance, all in the name of the Orthodox religion.

  Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich was cautious. It was explained to the confessionally minded patriarch that the tsar could not do as Khmelnytsky requested because, as a Christian ruler, he was bound by the peace treaty concluded with the Commonwealth in 1634. He could take the Cossacks under his protection only if they secured their own liberation. Otherwise, he could allow them to resettle to Muscovy if they were persecuted by the Poles because of their Orthodox faith. The tsar seemed to be caught in a religious dilemma—whether to violate the oath he had given to a fellow Christian—but not Orthodox—ruler, or to protect his fellow Orthodox Christians. For the next four years, he would stay out of the Ukrainian conflict. Muscovy was not prepared to make war on a country that had defeated it more than once in recent decades and had even managed to place a garrison in Moscow itself.

  Muscovy began preparing for war with the Commonwealth in the spring of 1651, when the tsar realized that the Commonwealth was too weak to effectively suppress the Cossack uprising. It was then that Muscovite diplomats began preparing the ground for a breach with the Commonwealth, casting themselves as protectors of the Polish king’s Orthodox subjects. They claimed that Khmelnytsky had risen in protest against religious persecution, as the Poles had forced the Cossacks to “accept their Roman faith, sealed godly churches, and imposed the Union on the Orthodox churches, and oppressed them in every way.” The final decision to go to war with the king was made in the Assembly of the Land, which met in Moscow in a number of sessions between June and October 1653. The delegates concluded that the tsar was free to take the Cossacks and their lands under his high hand (protection) for the sake of “the Orthodox Christian Faith and the holy Churches of God.”

  An embassy was sent to Khmelnytsky to break the news: Muscovy was entering the war on the side of the Cossacks. The embassy’s path through Ukrainian territory was marked by religious processions and church services celebrating the newfound unity of the two Orthodox peoples. At a Cossack officers’ council convened by Khmelnytsky in the town of Pereiaslav southeast of Kyiv, the hetman presented three alternatives: go back under the rule of the Catholic king; recognize the suzerainty of the Muslim sultan, who ruled over the Crimea and was interested in extending his authority northward; or accept the protectorate of the Orthodox tsar. He called on his officers to accept protection from a ruler “of the same worship of the Greek rite, of the same faith.” The gathering supported the hetman, shouting that they wanted the “eastern Orthodox tsar.”

  The Orthodox alliance had been born. But whereas the wars of religion in Western and Central Europe had ended with the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, those between Orthodox and Catholics in Eastern Europe were expanding in scope. The Muscovites and the Cossacks disagreed on important elements of their alliance at the Pereiaslav negotiations, including the obligations of the tsar and the duties of his new subjects. There was a minor crisis when the Muscovite envoys refused to swear an oath on behalf of the tsar to ratify the conditions, but it was soon resolved, as Khmelnytsky did not want to jeopardize the alliance. The differences in the two parties’ geopolitical agendas and political culture (the Cossacks were accustomed to Polish officials swearing an oath on behalf of the king, who was then obliged to keep his end of the bargain) were papered over by the rhetoric of Orthodox brotherhood.

  THE METAPHOR OF THE THIRD ROME, WHICH FIRST ENTERED official Muscovite discourse with the elevation of the metropolitanate of Moscow to a patriarchate, was elastic enough to accommodate major changes in Muscovites’ thinking about themselves and the world during the first half of the seventeenth century. At its core was the notion of the tsar’s status as the only remaining Orthodox emperor after the fall of Byzantium. That trope could be used to declare Muscovy a fortress under siege, as the monk Filofei did in the early sixteenth century, or to insist on the special status or even primacy of the Muscovite church over any other Orthodox church. “The only pious tsar under the sun was in Constantinople,” said a learned Muscovite monk to Patriarch Paisios in 1650, “… and now, in place of that tsar, we have a pious sovereign tsar in Moscow, the only pious tsar under the sun.” A broader audience was reminded of Moscow’s special role in the Orthodox world by the Kormchaia kniga of 1653 (a collection of ecclesiastical and civil laws), which included a reference to the Third Rome in Patriarch Jeremiah’s address to the tsar on the creation of the Moscow patriarchate.

  By the mid-seventeenth century, Muscovy had overcome the shock of the Time of Troubles. It returned to the international arena with new confidence in its mission in the Orthodox world. The “rehabilitation” of Orthodox Ukrainians and Belarusians as legitimate Orthodox faithful for whose sake Muscovy was making war on Poland-Lithuania indicated a major change in the country’s dealings with the outside world. That change was in keeping with the demands of the new age of religious wars and confessionalization of international politics brought on by the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Reform. Moscow as the Third Rome was switching from a defensive to an offensive strategy, of which there would be a great deal more in the decades and centuries to come.

  3

  THE IMPERIAL NATION

  ON JANUARY 8, 1654, WHEN THE TSARIST ENVOY VASILII BUTURLIN accepted a loyalty oath from the Ukrainian hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky and his officers in the city of Pereiaslav, he took a major step toward what Russian imperial historians would call the “reunification of Rus’” and their Soviet successors rendered as the “reunification of Ukraine and Russia.” But the act later hailed as a “reunification” was accompanied by the signing of a document that stressed not unity but diversity. That day Bohdan Khmelnytsky wrote to the tsar, addressing him not as sovereign of all Rus’, as was customary at the time, but as sovereign of Great and Little Rus’. This revision was probably discussed with Buturlin, as the tsar soon changed “all Rus’” to “Great and Little Rus’”in his official title.

  These names had originated in the early fourteenth century, when the Metropolitanate of All Rus’ was divided in the wake of the Mongol invasion and a new Metropolitanate of Little Rus’ was established in the Ukrainian town of Halych. The “Great” and “Little” Rus’ terminology was brought back to Eastern Europe in the late sixteenth century with the help of Middle Eastern hierarchs who traveled through the Rus’ lands of the Commonwealth in search of alms from the tsar. Under the new circumstances, “Little Rus’” meant the Orthodox lands administered from Kyiv, while “Great Rus’” referred to the Muscovite realm. The religious terminology was transferred to the political realm at the time of the Pereiaslav Agreement.

  White Rus’ (Belarus) was added to the tsar’s title in 1655. These changes marked a departure from the old religious ter
minology, reflecting the new military and political situation in the region. The name Little Rus’, earlier applied to the territory of the Kyiv Metropolitanate, was now applied to Ukraine, or the Rus’ lands of the Kingdom of Poland. They were either under the control of the Cossacks or claimed by them, and they enjoyed special rights and privileges granted by the tsar to the Cossack hetman. Those rights and privileges did not apply to White Rus’, which was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. When a successful Muscovite military campaign brought White Rus’ under the rule of the tsar, no special rights were granted to its inhabitants. Nor did the Orthodox connection help the Belarusians secure such rights: the Orthodox parishes of White Rus’ came under the jurisdiction of Moscow, while those of Ukraine remained subordinate to Kyiv.

  Just as the tsarist scribes insisted on differentiating not only Great and Little Rus’ but also White Rus’, so the intellectuals of the latter two realms maintained that the identities of Little and White Rus’ were separate from that of Great Rus’. Educated in the same Kyivan College under Metropolitan Peter Mohyla, those intellectuals considered themselves part of a distinct Rus’ community, basing their view not only on dynastic and religious considerations but also on the new idea of nationality. In their minds, they constituted one Rus’ nation. Curiously enough, from today’s point of view, they were reluctant to extend membership in the nation that they called “Rossian” (in present-day English, “Russian”) to the inhabitants of Great Rus’.

  On July 5, 1656, one of the best-known alumni of the Kyivan College, Simeon of Polatsk, and his students welcomed a distinguished guest, Tsar and Grand Prince Aleksei Mikhailovich of Muscovy, to their city in northern Belarus. They greeted him as a true Eastern or Orthodox ruler and as the legitimate master of Rus’ lands inherited from Prince Volodymyr of Kyiv, but not as a member of the same nation. “Live, long-awaited solace of the nation Granted to the persecuted Russian clan,” declaimed one of the students, referring to the Rus’ population of the former Commonwealth. Another student explained that his “Russia” consisted of two parts: “All Russia, White and Little, kisses [the tsar] Having become enlightened with the light of faith under you.” For the Polatsk students, Aleksei Mikhailovich was an Eastern or Orthodox tsar who had come to their “Russia” from abroad, a place called the “northern country.”