The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  tions with Sweden for the Swedish crown prince to take over the vacant throne of Russia.120 At the same time, the English extended Russia an offer of protectorate status.121 The Dutch, who rivaled and soon supplanted'the English as" the main foreign commercial power in Russia, helped launch the first organ of systematic news dissemination inside Russia in 1621, the hand-written kuranty, and provided much of the material and personnel for the rapidly growing Russian army.122 Twice-in 1621-2 and 1643-5- the Danes nearly succeeded in foreclosing royal marriages with the insecure new house of Romanov.123

  ,4 The extent of Swedish influence in the early years of the Romanov

  y'dynasty is still insufficiently appreciated. Not only did Sweden take away Russia's limited access to the eastern Baltic by the terms of the Treaty of Stolbovo in 1617, but Swedish hegemony was gradually extended down the coast beyond Riga and Swedish trading prerogatives maintained in Novgorod and other important Russian commercial centers. The Swedes were granted fishing rights on the White Lake, deep inside Russia, by the Monastery of St. Cyril in 1621, and there was considerable intercourse between Sweden and Solovetsk on the White Sea until a general crackdown

  ion relationsjvith Lutherans was decreed in 1629 by_the_ Metropolitan of

  V Novgorod^ for the entirety of northern Russia.

  The reason for his concern was the energetic proselyting that was being conducted by the Swedes, who had founded a Slavic printing press in Stockholm in 1625. Orthodox priests living under Swedish rule were required to attend a Lutheran service at least once a month, and a Lutheran catechism was printed ??Russian in 1625 in the first of two editions. Another catechism was later printed in a Cyrillic version of the Finnish language for evarfgelizing the Finns and Karelians. In 1631 the energetic new governor general of Livonia, Johannes Skytte, founded a school on the future site of St. Petersburg that included the Russian language in its curriculum. In 1632 a Lutheran University was founded at Tartu (Dorpat, Derpt, Yur'ev) in Esthonia, in the place of a former Jesuit academy.124 In 1640 a higher academy was founded in Turku (Abo), the chief port and capital of Swedish Finland (whose name may derive from the Russian "trade," torg). During 1633-4 a Lutheran over-consistory was established in Livonia with six under-consistories and a substantial program of public instruction. The. university at Tartu and the academy at Kiev-both founded in 1632 by non-Russians with an essentially Latin curriculum- wereTin a sense, the first Russian institutions of higher education, founded more than a century before the University of Moscow in 1755. The conquest of Kiev from the Poles in 1667 and Tartu from the Swedes m 1704 were, thus, events of cultural as well as political importance.

  Nor were the reformed Protestant churches inactive. By the late 1620's there was at least one Calvinist church in Moscow supported mainly by BrnxHTesfdents as well as three Lutheran Churches;128 and the existence of jTRussian-language Calvinist catechism of the 1620's or 1630's for which no known Western model has been found indicates that there may have been some attempts to adopt Calvinist literature for Russian audiences.126

  With'such a variety of Protestant forces operating inside Muscovy in the early seventeenth century, it is hardly surprising that anti-Catholicism grew apace. One of the first acts of Patriarch Philaret, after becoming in 1619 co-ruler of'Russiawith his son tsar Michael, was to require the re-baptism of all Catholics; and discriminatory regulations were enacted in the 1630's to exclude Roman Catholics from the growing number of mercenaries recruited for Russia in Western Europe.127 The continued expansion of Jesuit schools in western Russia and the Polish Ukraine, the establishment of a new Catholic diocese of Smolensk, and Sigismund's proclamation of a "Universal Union" of Orthodoxy with Catholicism had intensified anti-Catholic feeling in the 1620's.128 The Swedes supported and encouraged the Russian attack on Poland in 1632; and the Swedish victory over the Catholic emperor at Breitenfeld in the same year was celebrated by special church services and the festive ringing of bells in Moscow. Orthodox merchants in Novgorod placed pictures of the victorious Gustavus Adolphus in places of veneration usually reserved for icons.129

  ,-- Indeed, it was not until the crown prince of Denmark arrived in Moscow iri 1644 to arrange for a Protestant marriage to the daughter of Tsar Michael that Russian society became aware of the extent that the young dynasty had identified itself with the Protestant powers. The successful campaign of leading clerical figures to block this marriage^on religious grounds combined with the intensified campaign of native merchants against economic concessions to foreigners to turn Muscovy in the 1640's away from any gradual drift toward Protestantism. But by the time Russia began to restrict the activities of Protestant elements and prepare for battle with the Swedes, it had established a deepening technological and administrative dependence on the more distant "Germans"-and particularly the Dutch^this dependence was hardest of all to throw off, because it arose out of the military necessities of the struggle against the Poles and Swedes.

  Beginning in the 1550's, Russia Had plunged into its "military revolution," as Ivan the Terrible mobilized the first full-time, paid Russian infantry (the streltsy) and began the large-scale recruitment of foreign mercenaries.130 The number of both streltsy and mercenaries increased; and in the first three decades of the seventeenth century, the total number of traditional, non-noble elements fell from one half to about one fourth of

  the Russian army.131 Swedish and Dutch influences became evident in the introduction of longer lances, more mobile formations, stricter drill methods, and the first use of military maps. Polishjoes begrudgingly-and not inaccurately--referred to the "Dutch cleverness" ???? Russian troops.132

  As the Dutch joined the^ Swedes in the building of the Russian army for its inconclusive war with Poland in 1632-4, the Muscovite army began the most dramatic expansion of its entire history, increasing from its more or less standard size of about 100,000 to a figure in the vicinity of 300,000 in the last stages of the victorious campaign against Poland in the 1660's.133 Most of the officers and many of the ordinary soldiers were imported from North European Protestant countries, so that a good fourth i of this swollen army was foreign.134

  Those_Western arrivals (like many newly assimilated Tatars, Southern Slavs, and so on) were uprooted figures, completely dependent on the state. They became a major component in the new service nobility, or dvorianstvo, which gradually replaced the older and more traditional landed aristocracy. Other developments which accompanied and supported the "military revolution" in early-seventeenth-century Russia were the growth of governmental bureaucracy, the expanded power of regional military commanders (yoevodas), and the formalization of peasant serfdom as a means of guaranteeing the state a supply of food and service manpower.

  Typical qf_the new military-administrative leaders that helped transform Russian society during the weak reign of Michael Romanov was Ivan Cherkasky.135 His father was a converted Moslem from the Caucasus who had entered the service of Ivan the Terrible and served as the first military voevoda of Novgorod, where he married the sister of the future Patriarch Philaret and befriended the brilliant Swedish mercenary general de la Gardie. Young Ivan was brought up as a soldier with his loyalty to the Tsar uncomplicated by local attachments. He studied the military methods of the nearby Swedes and collaborated with them in mobilizing Russian opinion against the Poles during the Time of Troubles. His military activity earned for him (along with the co-liberator of Moscow, Dmitry Pozharsky) elevation to boyar rank on the day of the Tsar's coronation in 1613. By amassing personal control over a number of Moscow chanceries, including a new, semi-terrorist organization known as the "bureau for investigative affairs," he became probably the most powerful single person in the Muscovite government until his death in 1642.13‹i Throughout his career, his use of (and friendship with) Swedish and Dutch military and administra-* tive personnel was indispensable to his success. He hailed the Swedes and the alliance "of the great tsar and the great king" against "the Roman faith of heretics, papists, Jesuits,"137 He insisted tha
t the Russians, like the

  Swedes, should defend their "sovereign nature" against new Roman pretensions to universal Empire. He emulated the Swedes and Dutch (who showered him with gifts often more lavish than those given the Tsar) by introducing secret writing into Russian diplomatic communications.138

  In 1632 the Dutch built the first modern Russian arms plant and arsenal at Tula; and in 1647, printed in the Netherlands the first military manual and drill book for Russian foot soldiers, which was also the first Russian-language book ever to use copper engravings.138 French Huguenot fortification specialists were put to work, and the building of the first fortified line of defense in the south spelled the end to the traditional vulnerability to pillaging raids from that direction.140

  A final by-product of the Russian links with their more distant "Ger- ., man" alEesfwas the turning of Russian eyes at last toward the sea. The/j-eastern Baltic (and indeed some of the lakes and rivers of the north) had become areas of contention in which the Swedes had exercised humiliating advantages over the landlocked Muscovites; and the southward movement of Russian power down the Volga and Don confronted Russia with Persian and Turkish naval power at the point where these rivers entered the Caspian and Black seas respectively. Thus^ the period from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century-which also saw the opening of Siberia and j% the Russian drive to the Pacific-witnessed a series of efforts to build a I "' Russian^ navy. The Russians received aid and encouragement in this en-deavor from the Danes (who were anxious to strengthen Russia against the j ~%› Swedes) and even more from the English and Dutch (who were anxious to protect trade routes from their respective ports of Archangel and Khob- mogory on the White Sea through Russian rivers to the Orient). Ivan IV was the first to think about a navy; Boris Godunov, the first to buy ships for sailing under the Russian flag; Michael Romanov, the first to build a river fleet; and Alexis, the first to build an ocean-going Russian warship.141

  The fateful feature of this Russian orientation toward the North European Pr6testant countries was that it was so completely military and administrative in nature. Muscovy took none of the religious, artistic, or educational ideas of these advanced nations. Symptomatic of Muscovy's purely practical and military interest in secular enlightenment is the fact that the word nauka, later used for "science" and "learning" in Russia, was introduced in the military manual of 1647 as a. synonym for "military skill."142 The scientific revolution came to Russia after the military revolution: and naturaTscience was for many years to be thought of basically as a servaffl^rthe^lniritary establishment.

  The long military struggle which led to the defeat of Poland in the war of 1654-67, and of Sweden a half century later, produced a greater

  cultural change in the Russian victor than in either of the defeated nations. -Poland ancf "Sweden both clung to the forms and ideals of a past age, ' whefeas Russia underwent a far-reaching transformation that pointed toward the future. What had been ajnonolithic, monastic civilization became a multi-national, secular stateT Under Alexis Mikhailovich and his son Peter the Great, Russia in effect adopted the aesthetic and philosophic culture of Poland even while rejecting its Catholic faith, and the administrative and technological culture of Sweden and Holland without either the Lutheran or the Calvinist form of Protestantism.

  Symbol of the Polish impact was the incorporation into the expanding Muscovite state in 1667'of the long-lost "mother of Russian cities," the culturally advanced and partially Latinized city of Kiev. The acquisition of Kiev (along with Smolensk, Chernigov, and other cities) inspired the ii nation but upset the tranquillity of Muscovy, marking a return to the forgotten unity of pre-Mongol times and the incorporation of far higher levels of culture and enlightenment.

  Symbol of the Swedish impact was the last of the three great centers of Russian culture:Hit. Petersburg, the window which Peter forced open on NorffleTnTiuropeJn the^arly eighteenth century and transformed into the new capital of Russia. Built with ruthless symmetry on the site of an old Swedish fortress and given a Dutch name, Petersburg symbolized the coming to Muscovy of the bleak Baltic ethos of administrative efficiency and military discipline which had dominated much of Germanic Protestantism. The greatest territorial gains at the expense of Poland and Sweden were to follow the acquisition of these key cities by a century in each case -the absorption of eastern Poland and most of the Ukraine occurring in the late eighteenth century and the acquisition of Finland and the Baltic provinces in the early nineteenth. But the decisive. psychological change was. accomplished by the return of Kiev" and the building of St. Petersburg. Bringing these two Westernized cities together with Moscow into one political unit had disturbing cultural effects. The struggle for Eastern Europe had produced profound social dislocations while increasing popular involvement in ideological and spiritual controversy. As the stream of Western influences grew to a flood in the course of the seventeenth century, Russians seemed to thrash about with increasing desperation. Indeed, the entire seventeenth and the early eighteenth century can be viewed as an extension of the Time of Troubles: a perjc^jjiLeonJinuous violence, of increasing^^borrowing from, yet rebelling against, the West. The deep split finally came to the surface in^this last stage of the confrontation between Muscovy "andTETWest

  – amp;? III |f^2›-

  THE CENTURY OF SCHISM

  /

  The Mid-Seventeenth to the Mid-Eighteenth Century

  The profound conflict in the seventeenth and the early eighteenth century between the practical need to master the skill and cleverness (khitrosf) of foreigners and the emotional need to continue the ardent devotion (blagochestie) to the religious traditions of Old Muscovy.

  Religious leadership in the national revival that resulted from the political humiliation of the Time of Troubles and continued economic and military dependence on the West. The growth in monastic prestige and wealth and the resultant schism (raskol) between two reforming parties within the Church during the reign of Tsar Alexis (1645-76). The effort of the "black," or celibate, monastic clergy to maintain the centrality of religion in Russian culture through expanding the power of the Patriarch of Moscow, a position first created in 1589; invested with special authority under the patriarchate of Philaret (1619-33), father of Tsar Michael; and raised to theocratic pretensions under Patriarch Nikon (1652-8, formally deposed in 1667). The concurrent campaign of the "white," or married, parish clergy to maintain the centrality of traditional religion through popular evangelism, puritanical exhortation, and fundamentalist adherence to established forms of worship. The mutual destruction of the theocrats led by Nikon and the fundamentalists led by the Archpriest Avvakum (1621-82); condemnation of both by the Church Council of 1667; points of similarity with the earlier conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism in the West, which also led to the exhaustion of both religious approaches and the triumph of the new secular state.

  The advent of Western-type drama, painting, music, and philosophy during the later years of Alexis' reign. Efforts to find religious answers from the West, especially during the regency of Sophia (1682-9); the beginnings of the flagellant, sectarian tradition. The consolidation of a Westernized, secular state under Peter the Great (1682-1725), particularly after his first visit to Western Europe in 1697-8. The foundation of St. Petersburg in 1703; the Dutch-type naval base on the Baltic which became an enduring symbol of the geometric uniformities, Westward-looking vistas, and underlying cruelty and artificiality of rule by the Romanov dynasty. The found-

  ing of the Academy of Sciences in 1726, and the discovery of the human body in portraiture and ballet. Various attempts in the eighteenth century to defend and reassert the old Muscovite order amidst the general trend toward centralized and secularized aristocratic rule; the communalism of the Old Believers; recurrent, Cossack-led peasant rebellions; and the monastic revival by the "elders" of the late eighteenth century.

  The price of Russian involvement in Europe was participation in the almost continuous fighting out of which
emerged the new monarchical absolutism of the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century. Russian involvement was part of a deeper interrelationship that was developing between Eastern and Western Europe. Gustavus Adolphus, who made Sweden a model for much of Europe, sensed the interconnection in the late 1620's, explaining-even before his alliance with Russia-that "all European wars are being interwoven into one knot, are becoming one universal war."1

  Universal war seems, indeed, a good designation for a combat which moved rapidly from super-celestial ideals to subterranean behavior, and swept back and forth across the continent with a certain rhythm and logic of its own. The Catholic-Protestant war between Swedes and Poles at the beginning of the century abated just as the conflict spread West via Imperial Bohemia in 1618. Then, in 1648, the very year that the complex and savage Thirty Years' War drew to a close in Western Europe, fighting erupted again in the east with the greatest single massacre of Jews prior to Hitler.2 For most of the next seventy-five years Eastern Europe was a battlefield. Veterans of the Thirty Years' War and English Civil War hired on as mercenaries for the highest bidder, bringing with them plague, disease, bayonets, and the resigned belief that "the very state of mankind is nothing else but status belli."* Gradually, though by no means decisively, Russia emerged victorious in fighting that was animated by the passion for total victory (and the unwillingness to grant more than a temporary truce) previously confined to frontier warfare between Moslems and Christians."1 Confessional lines disintegrated altogether in the fighting of the 1650's and 1660's. Russians fought Russians and used Scottish Catholic royalists to humiliate the Catholic king of Poland. Simultaneously, Catholic France fought Catholic Spain; Lutheran Denmark, Lutheran Sweden; Protestant Holland, Protestant England. As exhaustion set in and fighting spread out to such distant places as New York, Brazil, and Indonesia, forces of stabilization ????? to bring order back to continental Europe. By the end of the