The exile in 1655 of Avvakum and his few followers among the clergy seemed to put an end to the controversy. Nikon’s reforms of the liturgy and his sponsorship of the Ukrainian teachers and scholars in Moscow continued. Nikon was a powerful figure and a personality who brooked no opposition or perceived slight. In 1658 one of the tsar’s favorites insulted Nikon’s servant at a reception for a visiting Georgian prince, and Nikon announced that he was leaving the patriarchal throne. Perhaps he expected an apology from the tsar and the boyar in question, but they were not forthcoming. Nikon retired to his newly founded Monastery of the New Jerusalem to the west of Moscow and remained there. His actions produced a crisis, for he had not abdicated the office of patriarch, he had merely left its duties. Tsar Aleksei sent emissaries to persuade him to return, but he refused.
While Nikon sulked, the remaining church authorities continued to produce new versions of the texts with the help of the Ukrainians. They published new translations of the Greek fathers of the church, this time working from Western printed editions of the Greek texts rather than Byzantine manuscripts. The Ukrainians preached at major court occasions and the principal holidays of the Orthodox calendar, and taught a few Russian clergy their skills. All of this innovative activity took place in and around the court, while at the opposite end of Russian society a storm was brewing. In the provinces the new books began to produce discontent, and local priests and monks remembered Avvakum and his protest. The dissidents began to pick up wider support among the groups of ascetics that had arisen since the 1640s in the upper Volga towns and villages. Aleksei and the bishops were forced to take action. In 1666–1667, just as the Polish war was coming to a close, they called a council of the Russian church, which two of the Greek Orthodox patriarchs and other Greek clergy also attended. The council formally deposed Nikon and selected a successor, though Nikon refused to acknowledge its its authority. The Greek patriarchs also tried to convince Avvakum of his errors, reminding him that in the whole world the Orthodox crossed themselves with three fingers. This argument had no effect, for Avvakum replied that the faith of the other Orthodox peoples was impure: only the Russians had kept the true faith. The council condemned him and approved the changes in the texts. Nikon went into exile in the northern Ferapontov Monastery, but his cause of reform had triumphed. The new books became the standard texts, and most Russians adopted the new rituals. That is, most people – those among the bishops, the clergy, and the population of central Russia – but the dissidents did not disappear. Avvakum went into exile to Pustozersk, a small fort north of the Arctic Circle, but he did not stop writing until his execution in 1680. His teaching began to spread in the northern villages, in the Urals and Siberia as well as the Don and the southern frontier. Tsar Aleksei and his successors sent soldiers to try to force them back to Orthodoxy, and in 1678 in remotest Siberia some of the Old Believers, as they came to be known, tried a new tactic. When the soldiers approached, the entire community assembled in a wooden church and set it on fire, burning themselves to death. This tactic made persecution extremely difficult, for church and state could declare victory only if the Old Believers came back to Orthodoxy. Their deaths, while still unreconciled, signified failure. The result was a standstill, and the Old Belief continued to spread. Its followers already numbered in the tens of thousands and the movement continued to find new adherents. As they grew in numbers they also disagreed among themselves on many issues, some condemning the mass suicides, others not. The more radical groups formed entire dissident churches with no priests or bishops and held simple services led only by an “instructor.” Some Old Believer communities resembled Orthodox monasteries; others were indistinguishable in all but ritual from their Orthodox neighbors. All the Old Believers rejected the authority of church and state, some proclaiming that the Romanov dynasty was the visible Antichrist. Pacific rather than rebellious, the Old Belief nevertheless struck fear into the hearts of tsars and bishops alike for the next two hundred years. An undeniably native tradition of dissent and resistance had been born.
The council of 1666–1667 had restored order in the church everywhere but in the remote wilderness where the Old Believers took refuge. At the court in Moscow the changes in religious practice deepened and spread, bringing with them new cultural forms. In 1664 a new figure appeared at court, the Kiev-trained Belorussian monk Simeon Polotskii. Simeon very quickly won the favor of the tsar and many boyars, and Aleksei appointed him tutor to the heir to the throne, Tsarevich Aleksei. When the boy died in 1669 Simeon remained an important figure, preaching in and around the court, writing celebratory verse for court occasions as well as panegyrics and consolatory verse for great boyars. He ran a school where the children of clergy and officials studied Latin and Church Slavic and learned to write and preach by the rules of classical rhetoric. Simeon’s work was symptomatic of the cultural shift in the Russian elite. Starting in the 1660s or 1670s a few boyars began to have their sons taught Polish and Latin and books no longer exclusively religious, began to circulate among the small court elite, the officials, and a few of the Moscow clergy. Books of physical and political geography, sacred history as understood in the West, and other tracts brought new vocabulary and new concepts to Russia, even if they lacked the intellectual apparatus that brought them forth in Europe. The readers of these texts among the clergy cultivated the styles of writing that were fashionable in Warsaw and Kiev – panegyric and religious verse, sermons, and other forms. The sermons, especially the printed sermons of Simeon Polotskii, began to find an audience outside of Moscow and the court elite. In the last years of the reign of Tsar Aleksei, the tsar and his favorite and foreign minister, Artamon Matveev, sponsored a court theater which presented examples of Baroque drama in Russian. The playwright was the Lutheran pastor Johann Gregory from the German Suburb and the boy actors were only the pupils from his school, but the texts were in Russian and the performances even included ballet interludes. Tsar Aleksei’s interests extended beyond theater, for he asked the Danish ambassador for a telescope, or as the tsar put it, “a tube of the invention of Tycho Brahe.” The theater ceased after Tsar Aleksei’s death, but his son and successor Fyodor (1676–1682) provided Simeon Polotskii with ample support, even allowing him to set up his own printing press where he printed his sermons and his rhymed Psalter.
By the 1680s the new cultural forms were well ensconced. Patriarch Ioakim (1675–1690) sponsored in 1685 the establishment of the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy, the first more or less European school in Russia. Ioakim had very definite views of the West, as he was a firm opponent of Catholicism and the Protestant churches. Part of his reason for supporting the school was to combat what he saw as Catholic tendencies among the Russian and Ukrainian followers of Simeon Polotskii in Moscow. To teach and manage the school he appointed two Greeks, the brothers Sophronios and Ioannikios Likhudes, who taught what they had learned in Italy and the Greek schools of the Ottoman lands – that is to say, the European Jesuit curriculum founded on philology and the explication of Aristotle. The Greeks brought Western culture to Russia as much as did the Ukrainians.
All these innovations in culture and religion were the work of the court and ecclesiastical elite, and only slowly spread to the rest of the population and the provinces. The new culture does not seem to have been the work of any one faction or group, rather it was common to the elite as a whole, though more prominent in the lives of some individuals than others. Religion and culture failed to produce discord in the court, but other factors made it the scene of great political drama. The relative harmony of the decades after the Time of Troubles began to come apart by 1671.
In the early years of the reign of Tsar Aleksei the dominant figures at court were his erstwhile tutor and brother-in-law Boris Morozov, his father-in-law Ilya Miloslavskii, and in 1652–1658 Patriarch Nikon. Morozov’s death in 1661 left Miloslavskii the single dominant figure, but as Aleksei grew and matured he relied less on his father-in-law, whose behavior was often abrasive. Miloslavsk
ii died in 1668, after Aleksei had signed the peace with Poland against the wishes of many of the boyars. He appointed the architect of that peace, Afanasii Ordin-Nashchokin, to head the Ambassadorial Office. Ordin-Nashchokin, a provincial nobleman who knew foreign languages and had the tsar’s favor, received boyar rank. He and the tsar both shared the aim of turning the peace with Poland into real cooperation against the Ottomans. Some such alliance was all the more necessary since the establishment of Russian overlordship in the Ukraine and the Russian garrison in Kiev put Russia in a new position in Eastern Europe, now facing Crimea across the steppe. The country faced the full might of the Turks, and the tsar and his minister wanted Polish allies, something upon which the boyars looked with suspicion. Unfortunately Ordin-Nashchokin’s arrogant manner of implementation of the policy of reconciliation with Poland in the Ukraine led to rebellions and Ordin-Nashchokin fell from favor. In 1670 Tsar Aleksei found a new head for the Ambassadorial Office who understood the need for alliances against the Turks but who also got along well with the Ukrainians. He chose the musketeer Colonel Artamon Matveev, several times a successful emissary to the Cossacks and now the tsar’s new favorite.
The need for a new man to direct foreign policy came at the same time that a major dynastic issue arose. In 1669 the heir to the throne, Tsarevich Aleksei Alekseevich, died, an event followed swiftly by the death of his mother Mariia. The second son was Fyodor (born 1661), a capable and intelligent boy but extremely sickly. The third surviving son Ivan (born 1666) was both physically and (it seems) mentally handicapped. In addition, Aleksei had already lost several children, mostly boys, and without a new wife he could not be sure of the succession. The new wife, whom Aleksei married in 1671, was to be Natalia Naryshkina, the daughter of a colonel of one of the musketeer regiments. The Naryshkins were clients of Aleksei’s new favorite, Artamon Matveev, with whom they had served in Moscow and other places. Natalia bore the tsar a son on May 30, 1672, and baptized him Peter. Peter was a healthy boy, and Matveev had now another reason to enjoy the tsar’s favor and maintain allies in the tsaritsa’s family.
Matveev was not only in favor through his connections with the Naryshkins. He managed the complicated relations with the Ukrainian Cossacks, Poland, and Russia’s other neighbors, and appointed his clients to almost all the major offices of the Russian state. He faithfully executed the tsar’s wishes, if disagreeing with him on occasion, and arguing his and the tsar’s views in the duma. Aleksei did not give him a monopoly of power: the palace administration and the tsar’s household remained under the aegis of Bogdan Khitrovo, the tsar’s other major favorite in his later years, though Khitrovo seems to have avoided major political issues. In the words of the Danish ambassador, Matveev was Russia’s “kinglet.” Such a rise to power could not fail to provoke the jealousy of the boyars, but as long as the tsar lived, Matveev remained supreme. Then, in January 1676, Tsar Aleksei died suddenly at the age of forty-seven.
The accession of Tsar Fyodor, only fifteen years old and sickly, put power back into the hands of the senior boyars. Within weeks they ousted Matveev’s clients from the main offices and engineered the exile of Matveev himself. Prince Dolgorukii and Ivan Miloslavskii, the cousin of the tsar on his mother’s side, were the most influential, and behind the scenes Tsarevna Irina, the young tsar’s aunt, was the most powerful of all. As Matveev slowly moved toward Siberian exile, his enemies lodged a charge of sorcery against him. The accusation was a wild combination of dramatic charges from former servants that came down to his reading of a book borrowed from the Apothecary’s Office, probably containing chapters on medicinal astrology. Then some of Tsaritsa Natalia’s Naryshkin brothers were accused of attempting to kill the tsar several years before during a session of archery practice. Gruesome torture of the Naryshkin servants and clients yielded extensive testimony but confirmed nothing substantial. At the widowed Tsaritsa Natalia’s intervention Tsarevna Irina put a halt to the proceedings. Matveev went back to an even more remote exile and several of the Naryshkins were exiled to their estates. For the next few years Matveev’s enemies at court reigned supreme, forming a sort of boyar regency over the young tsar. Tsaritsa Natalia remained in the background, raising her son and looking to the future.
Fyodor was physically weak but surprisingly strong-willed. On Irina’s death in 1680 he married for the first time and began to emancipate himself from the tutelage of the boyars. His new wife even appeared in Polish dress, and Fyodor’s health seemed to revive. When she died during childbirth a year later, all seemed to be lost, but instead Fyodor moved on, reforming court dress and then at the end of 1681 moving to reform the army and abolish the precedence system that in theory had ruled the court, administration, and army for two centuries. He had his own favorites and relied in his military reforms on Prince V. V. Golitsyn, one of Russia’s greatest aristocrats. Fyodor allowed Matveev to return to his estates near Moscow and lifted the exile of the Naryshkins. In February he married Marfa Apraksina, a young girl from provincial gentry, a marriage that brought to the court her younger borothers Petr and Fyodor, still boys now on the way to greater things. The tsar’s health worsened and on April 2, 1682, he died, plunging Russia into a crisis.
The crisis again arose from the problem of succession. Fyodor had no children, and his eldest brother, Ivan, was fifteen years old, but weak and unhealthy. None of the boyars seem to have considered him fit to rule, nor did Patriarch Ioakim. The alternative was Peter, then nine years old. The choice of Peter would mean that the Miloslavskii clan, the maternal relatives of Ivan, would lose their chance for power, for Peter’s mother was a Naryshkin and an ally of Matveev, who had recently returned from bitter exile.
The death of Tsar Fyodor coincided with murmurs of discontent among the musketeers – the soldiers who guarded the Kremlin and had provided the core of the infantry army before the advent of European style regiments. Their discontent was aimed at the oppressive practices of their colonels, but someone convinced them that their real enemy was the Naryshkins and Matveev. The musketeers stormed into the Kremlin and demanded that their enemies be turned over to them. Terrified, the boyars advised surrender, and Matveev was hurled from the stairs onto the upturned pikes of the musketeers. Several of the Naryshkins were hunted down and killed, though Natalia was able to save her father and eldest brother. The soldiers rampaged through the city, killing two of the Princes Dolgorukii and others who were suspected of favoring Peter and his family. After a few days the clergy and boyars met together and proclaimed Ivan and Peter co-tsars. The disturbances ceased, but two new stars had risen on the horizon, Prince Ivan Khovanskii and Tsarevna Sofia.
Khovanskii made himself the darling of the soldiers, and for a tense summer he seemed to be poised to assert supreme power behind the façade of the two boy tsars. Khovanskii, however, was outmaneuvered, and it was Sofia, Ivan’s sister and Peter’s half-sister, who assumed power. In September, when the musketeers had quieted down, she had Khovanskii arrested and executed, and for the next seven years she ruled as regent of Russia. Her favorite and, effectively, her prime minister was Prince V. V. Golitsyn, who had recently come to prominence under Tsar Fyodor.
From the very beginning Sofia presided over a court riven by faction. Early on she managed to sideline her Miloslavskii relatives and rule with Golitsyn alone, though in the mind of Peter, then and later, it was the Miloslavskii clan that was his and his mother’s enemy. For Natalia did not cease to aspire to claim full power for her son. As he grew up, she acquired allies among the boyars, Prince Boris Golitsyn (the cousin of V. V. Golitsyn) and the more exotic Prince Mikhail Alegukovich Cherkasskii, a boyar but by origin a Circassian from the north Caucasus serving the Russian tsars. Relations were tense, and Cherkasskii even brought out a knife during a dispute with V. V. Golitsyn – in the yard of the Trinity Monastery no less.
Peter was still too young to participate in the intrigues and the arguments, and he spent these years outside of Moscow at Preobrazhenskoe, a village to the eas
t of Moscow where his father had built a small wooden house for the summer. There Peter began to “play” soldiers, forming his servants and courtiers into European style infantry regiments and having them drilled by European officers. Peter was fascinated by artillery and he learned how to use it in these years as well. Soon he had a trained force of several hundred men, his own personal regiment. Even more significant was his encounter with boats.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 10