The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  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 G_exrnans_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 begarrthe first systematic organization four miles southeast of Moscow of the foreign quarter--then called the "lower city ^mmuneT'but soon to be known as the "German suburb": nemetskaia sloboda7T^TFrmriemisy, which was applied to the new influx of foreigners, had been used as early as the tenth "century84 and carried the pejorative mein1ng~of "duinF ones." Although usage often varied in Muscovy, nemtsy became generally used as a blanket term for all the Germanic, Protestant peoples of Northern Europe-irishortTTor 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 Mus'coyy; 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 EngTaHfl, Denmark, Holland, and the westerly German ports of Liibeck 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 remame3"~relativ©ly 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 xeplaced the Poles and Swedes as the principal rivals toTCussia 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 fre-queritly in "cSffiflict,~ffir~relgn 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 hadfohce 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 makihgpeace, Ivan turned first to a Czech Protestant in the service of the Poles and theh to an Italian Jesuit in the service of the Pope.87 Though antagonisticJx› both, Ivan found a measure of agreement with each by joiniug in the damnation of the other. He was, characteristically, hardest on the Protestants oh whom he was most dependent-calling the Czech negotiator J^not so muclf a heretic [as] a servant of the satanic council of the Antichrists."88

  Meanwhile^this defender of total autocracy_had_become thejirst ruler in Russian^istOTj_Jo_s^mmpn_„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 attracTwandering 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 importahTrbTe of electing the king of the new multi-national republic (Rzeczpospolitd) 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, particu-

  larly 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 sobers became even more broadly representative, and were in many ways thestrpfeme 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 aff / j shared the original aim of Ivan's council of 1566: to attract western Rus-!"-'| sians away from the Polish-Lithuanian sejm and to create a more effective I 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 tKeTitle 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_Jeader-ofChristian empire, which IvanJn^donejio .-«-MtaucTTtoTmcourage, 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 tinies~Qyef""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^ "^ 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 1 apostolic and imperial past. Having spelled this genealogy out more fully 1 and fancifully than ever before, Ivan now broke the sacred chain with his 1 own hands. In so doing he lost some of the aura of a God-chosen Christian warrior andjQld 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_ Isareyich 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 themesjn the popirlur 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 -V* successionTThe"accession to the throne of the regent Boris Godunov represented a further affront to"the Muscovite mentality7Boris, 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 encoufagecHEe 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~en 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.

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  The Religious Wars

  One of the great misfortunes of Russian history is that Russia entered the mainstream of European development at a time of unprece-

  dented 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'etat "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 -^LgS 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 Jhe-Terribje's^ reign. Irjejiad 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 aficT economic spoliation. Twice-in 1605 and 1616-the Poles overran and dominated Moscow; as late as 1618 they lay siege to it ancfneld 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 "GerTnUfis7rp^articularly;the English and the Dufch7who extracted their reward in lucrative economic concessions.

  The confrontation with Poland lepresented 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 popula-

  i tion 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. PolancLnot^only contradicted Russian Orthodox pract
ice 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 JosephitesJxgd 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-ProtestajrtjC_ampaign 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." 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.