A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

by Bushkovitch, Paul

  The seventeenth century was also the first full century of serfdom, yet Russia’s agriculture and population rapidly recovered from the Troubles and trade boomed. The resettlement of areas devastated by the Troubles brought agriculture back to feed an expanding population, and over the century, in spite of a general European rise in prices and growing demand, food prices in Russia remained virtually static. We know little about the life of the Russian peasant in this century beyond these larger facts, but it seems that the village community known from later times had taken final form by the end of the century. The peasants held the land from their lords as a village, and themselves managed the distribution of land among households. Craft production grew and spread, not only in the towns but even in the villages, and at the end of the century men who were peasant serfs in legal status began to enter the ranks of the merchants and entrepreneurs. Siberia came under as effective Russian control as it ever would, and its border with China was defined by treaty in 1689 to run along the Amur river. Every year a caravan of Chinese goods that was modest in extent came to Moscow, but over the years the annual trade brought profit to merchants and tsars alike.

  The growth of population, commerce, and the state meant that Moscow swiftly became a major city. By the middle of the seventeenth century it contained within its walls perhaps one hundred thousand inhabitants. Half of these Muscovites were part of the army or the palace complex: the soldiers of the elite regiments of musketeers (some 10,000 to 15,000 of them) and their families, and the servants and dependents of the tsar’s household. These palace servants formed whole neighborhoods that supplied the tsar with cloth and silverware, took care of his hundreds of horses, and cooked the food for his giant banquets. Several thousand Muscovites were the bond servants of the great aristocrats, the richest of whom by 1650 had several hundred in their Moscow houses. The other half of the city’s population were the true urban population, the great merchants and innumerable artisans of all types, along with clergy, wage laborers, beggars, and all the variety of folk that peopled a great city. All of them lived on narrow winding streets lined with wooden houses that made the city vulnerable to frequent fires. Only the more important churches were stone, and only boyars and a few great officials or merchants built houses of stone or brick. These larger houses were set deep in courtyards surrounded by high wooden fences and jammed with stables and storehouses filled with food and drink brought from the country by the master’s serfs. Boyars built their houses according to traditional Russian form, not European architectural norms, and divided them into separate women’s and men’s quarters.

  Outside the city walls to the northeast was a whole settlement of foreigners, the “German suburb” that was composed of merchants, mercenary officers, and the many others who supplied their needs. Established in 1652 on the initiative of the church, which feared foreign corruption, the German suburb was a small replica of northern Europe, with a brick Lutheran church with a pointed spire and regular streets with brick houses, taverns, and a school. The “Germans” (who included also Dutchmen, Englishmen, and Scots) were the most numerous of the foreigners, ultimately to be the most important, but Moscow was a rather cosmopolitan city. Ukrainian monks and priests found homes in Moscow’s churches and monasteries, bringing a new variant of Orthodoxy to Russia. The Greeks also had their own monastery, and Greek merchants mixed with Armenians and Georgians from the Caucasus. More exotic peoples came from the southern borders and farther east: Circassians serving the tsar, Kalmuks and Bashkirs bringing huge masses of horses every year to sell, Tatars of all sorts, and even “Tadzhiks,” the merchants from Khiva and Bukhara in far-off Central Asia.

  Economic prosperity went hand in hand with the recovery and development of the state. By the end of the century several hundred clerks now staffed dozens of offices that tried to administer the vast Russian land. They had developed complex procedures and practices, keeping records of the tsar’s decrees that defined their actions and recording their own decisions on innumerable rolls of paper housed in their archives. Like most early modern states, Russian administration concentrated on the collection of taxes, the administration of justice, and (when needed) on military recruitment. In Russian conditions these were daunting tasks. In order to collect taxes from the peasants, Moscow attempted to discover and record how much land each peasant household had and how good it was. The central authorities had the resources to survey the population for tax purposes every fifteen or twenty years at best, and then not in the most efficient of ways. Given the paucity of local administrators, Moscow sent its officials to a few district centers and relied on the gentry and village elders to provide them with information about each village and household. Obviously everyone, landholder and peasant alike, had an interest in underreporting assets, and the officials could check on them only in the most obvious cases of evasion. Again it was the village elders who actually brought in the taxes, many of which were still paid in kind. The only sure source of revenue was the sales tax and the tsar’s monopoly on the sale of vodka and other alcoholic drinks, sure because it was collected in towns and markets and was often farmed out to merchants and other entrepreneurs.

  The attempts to administer justice were no easier. Russia before Peter was not a lawless land of arbitrary rule as later liberals often portrayed it. Indeed the officials of the Moscow offices who administered justice erred as much or more by legal pedantry than arbitrariness. They followed the Law Code of 1649, and indeed the Code circulated in the provinces as well, among officials and gentry alike. The greatest problem was that the Moscow offices (and then the tsar) were the only real courts for most cases, with provincial governors and officials often acting more as investigators than judges. The life of these governors was not easy, and in the investigation of criminal cases they and their few subordinates relied largely on polling the neighbors of the accused and the victim, in order to find evidence. Provincial governors were required to rule areas the size of small European countries with a handful of assistants and no effective armed force. Only on the distant borders did Moscow send out enough men and soldiers to run things effectively and maintain order. Local governors and central offices tried to provide a court of first instance for disputes over land ownership and decisions regarding major crimes, but the lack of officials outside of Moscow and a few provincial capitals on the borders forced the government to rely on the cooperation of local inhabitants, which lead to mixed results. Even with extra manpower, the far borders were still difficult to control, often with disastrous consequences.

  At Michael’s death in 1645 the boyars and clergy quickly acclaimed his eldest son Aleksei as his successor. Again the tsar was young, only sixteen years old, as he was born in 1629. The constellation of boyars around him at court determined the course of events for the first decade or so. Tsar Aleksei soon married Mariia, the daughter of Ilya Miloslavskii, an ally of the young tsar’s tutor, the powerful boyar Boris Morozov. Morozov in turn married Mariia’s sister, consolidating his position at court and his influence over the young tsar. Morozov’s taxation schemes, which involved substituting a high tax on salt for the usual sales taxes, soon created a crisis. In July 1648, the Muscovites rioted, killed several prominent boyars and officials, and demanded Morozov’s head. Aleksei was able to save him, and the unrest subsided. Part of the resulting compromise was a new Assembly of the Land – this one to confirm a new law code, and in 1649 the printing presses issued Russia’s first compilation of laws, the Conciliar Code of 1649. Morozov returned to the court, but it was Ilya Miloslavskii, Aleksei’s father-in-law, a man whom the tsar feared rather than loved, who held sway. Soon Miloslavskii had a rival in Patriarch Nikon, who ascended the patriarchal throne in 1652. Nikon would set in motion changes in the church that ultimately led to a schism, but his political role outside of the church was no less important. For Russia was already faced with a new crisis, and this time it was a foreign crisis.

  Russia was not alone in defending its southern frontier with bands
of Cossacks. Poland-Lithuania as well maintained such a force of irregular troops on the Dniepr river facing the Crimeans. The Cossacks settled beyond the frontier in the islands below the rapids (Zaporozh’e). These Cossacks were largely Ukrainian peasants in origin and thus Orthodox in religion. They had come to the border much like Russian Cossacks fleeing serfdom at home, but in this case they fled religious oppression as well, for the usually tolerant Poland did not extend this favor to the Orthodox. The surrender of the Orthodox hierarchy in Poland-Lithuania to Rome in 1596 formed a new Catholic Uniate church on the basis of the previous Orthodox church. The king declared Orthodoxy illegal, confiscated Orthodox church buildings and property, and handed them over to the Uniates. In 1632 a new King of Poland partially reversed his father’s policy and declared a compromise, allowing an Orthodox metropolitanate in Kiev and Orthodox worship in some areas. The compromise was not enough, for the enserfed Ukrainian peasants saw religious as well as social oppressors in their mainly Polish masters. Then in the winter of 1648 the Ukrainian Cossacks elected a new hetman, or commander, without the king’s approval. The new hetman, a minor nobleman named Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi, and his Cossack host began to move northwest out of Zaporozh’e, proclaiming relief from religious and other oppression. The hastily gathered Polish army was utterly annihilated and the Ukrainian lands exploded in revolt; peasants and Cossacks alike murdered and expelled the Polish gentry, the Uniates, and the Jews.

  Khmel’nyts’kyi could defeat the king’s army in the field, but he knew that soon he would need allies. At first he allied with Crimea, but this alliance was difficult to maintain as the interests of the two parties differed greatly. The hetman turned to Tsar Aleksei, begging him to support his Orthodox brethren. This message was not welcome news in Moscow. The Ukrainian Cossack emissaries arrived soon after the 1648 riot in Moscow, and neither Aleksei nor the boyars had any desire to support peasant rebels in neighboring countries. Besides, Tsar Michael (in his last years) and his son Aleksei had been trying to come to an agreement with Poland to form an alliance against the Crimeans. Aleksei hesitated for five years, offering vague promises to the Cossacks and sending peace feelers to the king of Poland. In the spring of 1653, the hetman sent yet another embassy to Moscow and offered Aleksei overlordship of the Ukrainian Cossack host. This time the tsar agreed, apparently at the prompting of Patriarch Nikon. Shortly afterward in January 1654, an embassy from the tsar signed an agreement at Pereiaslav in the Ukraine with the hetman to take the Cossacks and their land “under his high hand” while affirming their newly-won autonomy, now within Russia. The agreement also committed Russia to war with Poland, a war that fundamentally reshaped the balance of power in Eastern Europe.

  The war was to last for thirteen years, until 1667. Aleksei had a new army, for he had hired western officers to form regiments of Russian soldiers on European lines. In the first years of the war the Russian army quickly recaptured Smolensk and went all the way to Wilno. After considerable back-and-forth, and Khmel’nyts’kyi’s death in 1656, Russia and Poland signed a treaty in 1667. Poland regained most of its territory, but the treaty was nevertheless a distinct Russian victory: Smolensk remained Russian and the Ukraine east of the Dniepr with the city of Kiev continued to form an autonomous hetmanate under the tsar. Though even the Russians did not yet realize this, Poland’s time as the great power of Eastern Europe was over, for the Cossack revolt and the war had done too much damage to the social and political fabric of the Polish-Lithuanian state. Its economy and population stagnated for the next hundred years, leaving the field to Russia.

  Russia had not escaped entirely unscathed. The war had led to an adulteration of the silver currency with copper coins that moved the people of Moscow to riot in the “copper revolt” of 1662. The tsar had to call out the new-style infantry regiments officered by foreign mercenaries to restore order. Far more serious was the ferment on the Don that broke out as the great Cossack revolt of Stenka Razin in 1670. Similar in some respects to the Ukrainian revolt, the Russian events lacked the religious and ethnic element; indeed, many of the native peoples of the southern border joined Razin. The Russian Cossacks were also more plebeian than the Ukrainian, who included minor gentry among their leaders. They struck terror into the tsar’s court, capturing Astrakhan’ and other Volga towns with the slaughter of nobles and officials alike. Tsar Aleksei’s armies finally defeated and captured Razin in 1671 and brought him to Moscow, where he was executed. As the revolt showed, expansion into the southern steppe added enormously to Russia’s territory, its agricultural potential, its population, and its power, but it also added to the tensions in Russian society.

  The southern steppe and its peoples were only one part of the larger complex of territories and peoples that made Russia an increasingly multi-national society. The territory lost to Sweden in 1619 meant the loss of some smaller Finnish groups, the Ingrians and part of the Karelians who had inhabited part of the Novgorod lands from the beginning of recorded history. Swedish attempts to force the Orthodox Karelians into the Lutheran faith and the arrival of Swedish landlords in villages of free peasants brought a sizeable migration across the Russian border into the lands around Lake Onega and even south towards Tver’. Lesser Finno-Ugrian peoples continued to populate parts of the Russian north, but until 1654 the largest of the non-Russian peoples included the Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvash and other Volga peoples brought under Russian rule in the sixteenth century. They continued to live under a separate status as payers of yasak rather than the usual Russian taxes. This separate status continued after the establishment of serfdom, with the paradoxical result that the Tatar peasantry was not enserfed. The Russian authorities continued to accept but not encourage Islam, and they staged no organized attempts at conversion. Conflicts were over land, as Russian peasants settled more and more among them, primarily among the Bashkirs, who mounted several small rebellions. Farther south the arrival in the 1630s of the Kalmuks, a Mongolian Buddhist people fleeing internal strife in their homeland, disrupted the relations among the nomads just beyond Russia’s border. As Buddhists the new arrivals had poor relations with the Crimean and other Muslim peoples in the area. The Kalmuks formed important allies for the Russian tsar, accepting his general overlordship and providing him troops in foreign wars and internal disturbances. The Circassians were loyal as well, siding with the tsar against Razin’s rebels.

  The Pereiaslav treaty of 1654 brought into the Russian state a new element in the form of the Ukrainian Hetmanate. The originally democratic Cossack host quickly turned into a society ruled by a hereditary elite of Cossack officers. Under the Pereiaslav agreement the Cossacks continued to elect the hetman who in turn appointed the officers, administered justice (according to the old Polish laws), managed his own treasury, and commanded the Cossack army, all this without consulting the tsar. The tsar maintained garrisons in Kiev and other principal towns, whose commanders also exercised control over the towns, though those retained their elected urban governments. The Ukrainian church was more complicated, as the Metropolitan of Kiev was not under the jurisdiction of Moscow but rather of the Greek patriarchate of Constantinople, which accepted the Moscow Patriarch as its head only in 1687.

  The inclusion of the Ukrainian hetmanate in Russia had such profound effects because it strengthened the ties between Kiev and Moscow at a time when changes were taking place in the Russian Orthodox church. These changes led the elite of the Russian clergy to turn to Ukrainian models of piety, but also sparked a religious upheaval that ultimately led to schism. Even in the time of Tsar Michael there had been symptoms of renewal in the church. Voices arose among the clergy complaining that Russian priests did not do enough to bring Orthodox teaching to their congregations. No one challenged the centrality of the liturgy, but the reformers called for more systematic preaching and that meant a more learned clergy and a more varied religious literature. By the accession of Tsar Aleksei to the throne, the leader of the new trend was his spiritual father Stefan Vonifat’
ev, and the group included Nikon, the Metropolitan of Novgorod, and Avvakum, a village priest from the Volga area who had risen to become archpriest in one of the main Moscow churches. They had the favor of the tsar, but until 1652 they made little headway.

  Increased contract with the Orthodox in the Ukrainian lands had given the Russians new ideas, as the Ukrainians were engaged in a continuous battle to defend Orthodoxy by reinforcing it in the minds and hearts of the believers. In the Kiev Academy the Ukrainian clergy had a new type of education, unknown in Russia, derived from Jesuit models. It emphasized language and rhetoric, the arts of persuasion, as well as philosophy. The Kiev Academy taught its pupils not just Slavonic but also Latin, which was still the language of scholarship in both Catholic and Protestant Europe. In 1649 Tsar Aleksei brought the first group of Ukrainian monks to Moscow to teach and also to help with the editing and publication of liturgical and devotional texts. Then Patriarch Iosif died in 1652, and with prompting from the tsar, the clergy elected Nikon to be his replacement. Patriarch Nikon took with particular fervor to the examination of the service books, and in 1653 he began to issue service books with corrected texts. These corrections were made so as to bring the Russian texts in line with the Greek (and Ukrainian) versions, which he considered more authoritative. The new versions also mandated a few changes in daily devotional practices, such as the manner of making the sign of the cross. For some centuries Russians had done this holding straight the index and middle finger (symbolizing the dual nature of Christ) and folding the other three, while the Greeks held folded together the first two fingers and the thumb (for the Trinity). Nikon, however, commanded the Greek practice, arguing that the Russian version slighted the Trinity. As the Russian (and older Greek) tradition asserted that the entire liturgy and all associated practices recreated the sacrifice of Christ rather than merely reminding one of it, these small actions were of critical importance. Some of Nikon’s former allies in the reform movement under the leadership of the archpriest Avvakum, however, refused to conform. Avvakum recounted later that he heard of the changes during Easter week in 1653 and “we saw that winter was on the way – hearts froze and legs began to shake”. Since Avvakum persisted in his refusal to conform and began to preach against the new books, Nikon and the tsar sent him and his followers into exile, as far away as possible into Siberia to the east of Lake Baikal.