Russka

by Edward Rutherfurd

  Bogdan had given the envoys three letters: one for the Tsar, one for his adviser the boyar Morozov, and one for the Moscow Patriarch.

  ‘Send word by messenger on how you are received, then if things look promising, stay in Moscow and keep your ears open.’

  These were the instructions Andrei carried with the letters as he went on his thrilling mission.

  Muscovy. Two Cossacks led the party – Kondrat Burlay and Silvian Muzhilovsky. Andrei was their aide.

  Swiftly they made their way eastward from the River Dniepr, through the thinning woods until finally, leaving the trees behind them, they ventured out on to the open steppe. They travelled east another day before turning northwards. The winter had been long and bitter. The ground was still hard, with little snowdrifts in places.

  It was a strange frontier region, this. Andrei had never been here before, though he knew that many Cossacks and Ukrainians had fled to these broad borderlands where they had come, at least in name, under the protection of the Russian Tsar.

  ‘And the Tsar has been making his presence felt here, too,’ Burlay told him. ‘In the old days, the Russian fortress line against the Tatars was a long way north, almost up at the River Oka. They’ve just finished a new line now, though. It runs right across the steppe.’ He laughed. ‘It’s quite impressive.’

  Nothing, however, had prepared Andrei for what he saw when they came to it the next day.

  He simply gasped. So this was the might of Muscovy!

  The new, so-called Belgorod line of the Muscovite state was an awesome undertaking. The completed line ran across the steppe from near the fortress town of Belgorod all the way to the distant Volga as it descended towards the deserts by the Caspian Sea. Huge earth walls with trenches in front of them, wooden palisades above, stout towers with sharpened wooden stakes pointing outwards from their tops: this was Muscovy’s mighty barrier against the Crimean Khan who, even now, a century after Ivan the Terrible had conquered Kazan, still demanded tribute, from time to time, from the Russians in their forest empire.

  It was as he gazed upon this tremendous wall that the young Cossack received his first impression of the true character of the Russian state of the north.

  These people are not like the Poles at all, he suddenly realized. The Poles would never build like this. Poland had simply given the huge tracts of the Ukraine to a few magnates to exploit as they thought best. True, they set up forts to protect their income; they employed Cossacks to keep the raiders at bay. But they were just a collection of great lords, concerned with reaping a profit from these rich borderlands, to keep themselves in comfort in their European palaces in the west.

  This colossal fortification, though, was not the work of mere aristocrats. It was the work of a mighty emperor – of a great, dark power, half-Slav, half-Tatar. It’s like a Tatar city on the steppe, he thought, looking at the high pointed stakes on the parapet, but huge, endless.

  And, indeed, the great wall itself seemed to speak, as though to say: ‘We know you horsemen of the steppe, for we are partly of your blood; but see, we can out-build you – for our heart is greater than yours. Thus we shall carry our mighty Russian forest, even across the endless steppe, until one day even the proud Khan shall bow before our Holy Russia.’

  It was Burlay, riding beside him, who now remarked: ‘If you want to understand the Russians, Andrei, always remember – whenever they feel threatened, they rely upon size.’

  So it was that the little party continued, into the great fortress of the Russian state.

  At first, Andrei noticed nothing very different. When they began to encounter woodland again, the broad-leaved forests seemed very like those around Kiev: the villages with their thatched roofs and timber stockades seemed familiar, too.

  Yet gradually he began to see a change. The thatched roofs petered out, to be replaced by heavy logs. It grew colder: the snow lay more thickly upon the ground. Somehow the woods, and the fields, looked grey.

  And there was something else.

  He was used to Russians: there had been plenty of them at the Cossack camp. They spoke Great Russian of course, but that was not difficult for a Ukrainian to understand. Not that they compared with a man from the south. ‘Those Russians are crude fellows,’ the Ukrainians used to say. For just as the Poles despised the Ukrainians, so they in turn liked to despise their Orthodox cousins in the north.

  Yet now that he had entered Russia Andrei was surprised to feel a faint sense of unease as he travelled north. It was something to which, at first, he could not put a name. Something oppressive.

  The forest grew thicker and darker. Sometimes, in the forest, they encountered little settlements where the people produced potash. In these, the Cossacks noticed, the peasants looked healthy enough. But in the ordinary villages it was a different story.

  ‘This is the third year the winter has gone on too long,’ the people told them. ‘Even in a good year, we only have just enough. With these poor crops, another year and we’ll be starving.’

  When Andrei looked at their villages and heard their sad story, there was one thing that puzzled him. ‘Your fields are huge,’ he exclaimed. ‘Surely you should have enough even in bad years.’ ‘No,’ they told him, ‘it’s not so.’ And only at the third such village did Andrei discover the reason.

  ‘You see, for every measure we sow, we only get three back at harvest,’ a peasant explained.

  A yield of three to one. A miserable rate, unthinkable in the rich Ukraine.

  ‘Our land is poor,’ the man said sadly.

  And badly cultivated, he could have added. For this three to one crop yield in north Russia was no more than farmers in western Europe had been getting in the Dark Ages, a thousand years before.

  But if the poverty of these little villages struck Andrei, he was soon to see something very different.

  The party was about fifty miles below the great eastward loop of the River Oka when they came to the old frontier line. Though not as impressive as the new Belgorod line, it was another sign of the formidable power of the Muscovite state. The stout wooden forts and palisades were still intact.

  ‘They stretch another hundred miles, all the way to Riazan,’ Burlay remarked.

  In many places there was long-established open parkland in front of the line; but where there was not, huge swathes had been burned through the woodland so that the Tatar raiders would not have any cover.

  And it was just past this great line that they came to the sprawling industrial town of Tula.

  Andrei had never seen anything like it. It was a town, yet not a town. Everywhere there seemed to be long, stout houses, of wood or brick, filled with the sounds of men hammering. Half the buildings seemed to be smithies.

  ‘The whole place is like a giant armoury,’ he remarked.

  And most impressive of all, there were the big, grim buildings with continually smoking chimneys which contained the blast furnaces.

  These were the first blast furnaces that Russia had seen. Operated by the Dutch family of Vinius, they had been set up at Tula because of the ancient iron ore deposits in the region. Not only were the mighty furnaces here, but innumerable workshops where armaments were made.

  ‘They make more weapons here than anywhere except Moscow itself,’ Burlay remarked. ‘They say these Romanov Tsars are bringing in new foreigners all the time, because they’re the only ones who know how to operate these new machines.’

  Cannons, muskets, pikes and swords: Andrei saw wagon-loads of them. As a soldier, he was impressed; but he found the huge, smoky place rather frightening, and was glad soon to be on his way to Moscow again.

  They reached the capital a week later.

  It had been a long, hard winter. The huge city of Moscow was still under snow, although the Lenten season had begun.

  Over the vast, snowbound city, the skies were grey, heavy and monotonous. In the streets, where the snow had not been cleared, there was also greyness, as though at some point the clouds had let fal
l not flakes of snow, but a dismal settling of ice-dust and cinders in their place.

  Yet the scene was not without colour. The roofs of the houses were white. Above, the domes of the churches were gold, silver, or brightly painted. Occasionally in the street one might encounter a noble in a voluminous, fur-trimmed cloak of red or blue; there might be a glimpse of rich brocade beneath; the patrols of musketeers, the streltsy, were to be seen in the citadel with their red coats and gleaming pikes; even the simple townswomen often went out with brightly coloured scarves wrapped over their heads.

  It was hardly surprising that, for some time after his arrival in Moscow, Andrei lived in a state of happy excitement. After all, it was a fine thing for a young Cossack to enter a mighty capital and find himself well received.

  For they had been warmly welcomed. When they delivered their letters to the Kremlin, a senior functionary let them know that the Tsar and the boyars were well disposed towards them; and when they left the Kremlin and went to the Palace of the Patriarch on Ilinka Street, they were told that the great churchman would give them a personal audience in a few days.

  Andrei was full of hope. After the hard months of fighting and uncertainty, he felt like a schoolboy suddenly granted a holiday.

  And if Tula had been impressive, he found Moscow awe-inspiring. He would walk across the vast expanse of Red Square towards the extraordinary building already called St Basil’s Cathedral. The floor of Red Square was slightly curved so that, as one walked, St Basil’s seemed to rise up over a shortened horizon. He would advance three-quarters of the way, to the tribune platform where announcements were made and stare with wonder at those strange, barbaric Asiatic towers and domes. Nearby, the high, massive Kremlin walls, so blank, so pitiless, seemed both threatening and protective. On one of the towers there was now a huge English-designed clock, as though to suggest that, despite the huge, tomb-like silence of the Kremlin, it was still watching each minute of the present, passing world.

  Sometimes he would wander through the suburbs, through street after street of dark brown, stolid wooden houses, whose roofs were still thick with snow. At every corner, it seemed, there was a church. Many were wooden, with high tent roofs but often, over the wooden houses, he would see the big, squat, pale shape of a masonry church looming over the quarter, with softly glowing domes and, perhaps, those gay little tiers of false arches arranged in a pyramid that the Russians called kokoshniki, meaning ‘headdresses’, such as women wore.

  And above all, as he wandered about in the icy city, he noticed the endless sound of bells. How many churches could there be, to produce such a continuous noise?

  ‘They say there are forty times forty and I believe it,’ he concluded.

  Indeed, a friendly priest assured him, in the summer, when the nights were short, the monastery bells could be heard all through the night. ‘Just like so many nightingales,’ the priest said, laughing.

  Truly this was the capital, the northern fortress of the Orthodox Church.

  But what a study in contrasts Moscow was. He had always heard that the Muscovites were given to whoring and drinking. ‘They get as drunk as us Cossacks after a victory,’ his father had always told him. And to be sure, Andrei saw plenty of people getting drunk, even lying helplessly in the freezing streets by dusk. Yet at the very same time, he would see crowds of men and women moving in a solemn stream into the churches to pray.

  And how they prayed! While the priests appeared before the iconostases in their gorgeous vestments, the people stood for hours – longer even than in the great cathedral in Kiev. Many of the faithful even suffered from an incurable foot ailment because of this, he learned. There was a communal zealousness about some of them, too, that he had not seen in the Ukraine. A little knot of women was often to be seen by the church doors and he had supposed they might be asking for alms until one day he saw a drunken man approach, and watched, astonished, as the women suddenly turned upon the fellow with scorn and shoved him brutally away. Truly these Russian women were devout.

  Everything is done to extremes in this land, he concluded.

  He noticed something else, too. There were quite a few foreigners in the streets, each wearing different national costumes. Some were merchants, but most seemed to be soldiers.

  The Tsar is drawing men from all countries into his service, he thought, with some satisfaction.

  It was at the end of his first week that Andrei made a new friend.

  He had gone into the Kremlin to visit the cathedrals. His mood was light-hearted. The sun had appeared once or twice through the clouds that morning and just as he had left his lodgings, he had had a delightful experience. A young girl had gone tripping by, so close that he had nearly bumped into her as he came out. She could not have been more than fifteen. She wore a long pink cloak trimmed with fur, a tall cylindrical fur hat, and her hands were tucked neatly into a fur muff. She was very fair, her fresh young face glowing in the sharp air, and the long golden plait of hair that hung down her back was gaily tied with a bright red ribbon.

  Before he had time to collect his thoughts, she was gone, but he smiled to himself as he thought: When this business is over, it will be time to think of getting married. Perhaps I’ll take one of these pretty Russian girls with me.

  Now, as he walked past the palace in the Kremlin, he paused for a moment below the window in the Terem Palace where one of the streltsy guards stood to receive the people’s petitions.

  How remarkable it was that anyone, even the lowest peasant, could come here, place his petition in the little box provided, and know that it would go straight to the Tsar’s personal secretariat in the famous Golden Room above – very likely be read out to the Tsar himself. The mighty autocrat was like a personal father to his people. And a kindly one too. Andrei had already heard stories of the young Tsar’s kindness: how he would visit the prisons in person, give the poor fellows sheepskin coats, even sometimes set them free by paying off their debts. ‘The Tsar is like a sparkling sun,’ the Russians liked to say.

  He had just turned towards the cathedrals when he heard a friendly voice behind him: ‘Well, if it isn’t my friend the Cossack.’

  He turned and saw a young fellow in a beaver coat grinning at him. He had to think for a moment to remember where he had seen him before, then realized that it had been in the government office where they had delivered their letters: this was the young clerk who had greeted them and conducted them to the senior secretary who had interviewed them.

  He was a pleasant young man of about Andrei’s own age. Andrei now noticed that he had pale, rather ivory skin and a broad, handsome forehead crowned with thick, wavy black hair parted in the middle and brushed carefully back. Yet if this upper part of his face made Andrei think of a Polish nobleman, the rest seemed to derive from a quite different source. His high cheekbones and rather slanting eyes, despite the fact that they were blue, suggested a Turkish or Tatar ancestry. It was as though a high European face had been compressed in its middle section to produce a slightly squashed though quite agreeable effect.

  He introduced himself as Nikita, son of Ivan, Bobrov. The name meant nothing to Andrei.

  The two young men fell into an easy conversation. The clerk seemed eager to talk to this visitor from the south and it was not long before he warmly suggested: ‘Come to my lodgings today. We can talk better.’

  It seemed an excellent chance to learn more about this great state which the Ukrainians were trying to join, and Andrei accepted willingly. He agreed to come that afternoon.

  The lodgings of Nikita Bobrov were in the fashionable kitaygorod quarter, but they were modest, consisting of three rooms on the upper floor of a stout wooden house belonging to a merchant.

  His host was not alone when Andrei arrived. Standing at one side of the main room was a middle-aged man in a heavy sheepskin. At the far end stood a plump woman with a younger one beside her, whose face Andrei could not quite see in the shadows.

  The man in the sheepskin was of me
dium height. His bad-tempered face might once have been pale but now it was blotched; he had small dark eyes and his hair was parted in the middle and pulled tightly down his head so that it seemed to become one with his flowing beard. Everything about him, his body, his eyebrows, his entire character, appeared to be close-knit. He might have been a small merchant. And he was obviously as angry as he dared be.

  Nikita briefly excused himself while he turned back to this man, whom he now addressed with an air of finality.

  ‘I can talk to you no more, Ivan,’ he said firmly. ‘My mind is made up. You see for yourself that Elena has hurt her leg and needs Maria to help her. She can’t even get to the market. You can’t object to your wife helping her mother. And even if you do, I’m ordering you, so there’s an end of it. You’re to leave now and return here after Easter with those missing rents.’

  ‘I should never have brought her,’ the fellow mumbled angrily.

  ‘That’s beside the point. And take care you bring those rents when you return,’ the young man added severely, ‘or I’ll have you thrashed.’

  The man glowered in the direction of the two women, but reluctantly placed his hand on his heart and made a low bow to Nikita before going out. His heavy steps could be heard going down the stairs outside. Andrei thought he detected a stifled laugh from the younger of the two women, but a moment later they, too, bowed and vanished into the next room.

  ‘My steward,’ Nikita explained with a smile. ‘A difficult fellow.’ He indicated two benches by the window and they went over to them. ‘The fact is,’ he confessed, ‘I brought a widow from my village as housekeeper to save myself the expense of hiring servants in Moscow. Now,’ he added ruefully, ‘I have family quarrels on my hands. The penalty of being poor,’ he grinned. ‘Let’s talk of other things.’

  Andrei soon discovered, rather to his surprise, that he and his host shared several things in common. As his face suggested, young Bobrov’s mother, who had come from Smolensk, was Polish and thanks to her he had early on been taught to read and write and scan a little Latin – in fact, a similar education to the one Andrei had got in Kiev. He even knew some Polish courtly tales. But while this degree of education was becoming more common in the Ukraine, it was still very rare in Russia and the young clerk had been delighted to discover someone his own age who shared these attainments.