by James Millar
Joakim has attracted little scholarly attention. Discussions that relate to his patriarchate focus on the increasing influence of Ukrainian churchmen in Moscow, the struggle over the opening of an academy in Moscow, the Eucharistic controversy of the late 1680s, and the subordination of the Kievan church to the Russian patriarch. Until recently, the dominant theme in this literature was the growing tension in Moscow as Old Muscovite culture confronted Ukrainian Culture and as supporters of a Greek direction for the Russian Church came into conflict with those favoring an allegedly Latin direction. Joakim traditionally was placed on the side of the conservative, Old Muscovite, Greek faction opposed to a progressive, Ukrainian, Latin faction. An emerging body of related scholarship questions this binary analysis, suggesting the need for a more complex approach to the period and the man. See also: MEDVEDEV, SYLVESTER AGAFONIKOVICH; NIKON, PATRIARCH; PATRIARCHATE; PETER I; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; SOPHIA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Potter, Cathy Jean. (1993). “The Russian Church and the Politics of Reform in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century.” Ph.D. diss. Yale University, New Haven, CT. Vernadsky, George, ed. and tr. (1972). “Testament of Patriarch Ioakim.” In A Source Book for Russian History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
CATHY J. POTTER
JOB, PATRIARCH
(d. 1607), first patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Tonsured in the Staritsky Monastery around 1553, Job was appointed archimandrite by Tsar Ivan IV in 1569. In 1571 he was transferred to Moscow as prior of the Simonov Monastery, then as head of the Novospassky Monastery (1575-1580). Job was consecrated Bishop of Kolomensk in April 1581, Archbishop of Rostov in 1586, and Metropolitan of Moscow in December 1586. On January 26, 1589, he was raised to the position of Patriarch of All Russia by Patriarch Jeremiah of Constantinople.
Job’s consecration as Russia’s first patriarch was an event of national significance. The Russian Church had formerly been under the jurisdiction of Constantinople with the status of a metropoli-tanate, but by the sixteenth century many Russians believed that Moscow was the last bastion of true faith, a “Third Rome.” Hence the establishment of an autocephalous church was considered necessary for national prestige. During Russia’s civil war
JOSEPH OF VOLOTSK, ST.
in 1605, Job played a leading role by declaring the Pretender “False Dmitry” a heretic and calling on the people to swear allegiance to Tsar Boris Go-dunov and his son Fyodor. Consequently, when Dmitry became tsar in June 1605 Job was deposed and exiled to Staritsky monastery. He died in 1607.
Although sometimes criticized by contemporaries and historians for his support of the Go-dunovs, Job was known as a humble man of impeccable morals, learned for his times, who worked for the good of the church and the promotion of Orthodox Christianity. In 1652 Job was canonized as a saint by Patriarch Nikon, with the approval of Tsar Alexei Mikhaylovich. See also: DMITRY, FALSE; FYODOR IVANOVICH; GODUNOV, BORIS FYODOROVICH; IVAN IV; METROPOLITAN; NIKON, PATRIARCH; ORTHODOXY; PATRIARCHATE; SI-MONOV MONASTERY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dunning, Chester. (2001). Russia’s First Civil War. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Vernadsky, George. (1969). The Tsardom of Moscow 1547-1682. 2 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
DEBRA A. COULTER
JOSEPH OF VOLOTSK, ST.
(c. 1439-1515), coenobiarch and militant defender of Orthodoxy.
Of provincial servitor origin, Ivan Sanin became the monk Joseph (Iosif) around 1460 under the charismatic Pafnuty of Borovsk. Having a robust body, superb voice, powerful will, clear mind, excellent memory, and lucid pen, Joseph was forced by Ivan III to succeed as abbot in 1477. They soon quarreled over peasants, and in 1479 Joseph returned with six seasoned colleagues to Volotsk to start his own cloister under the protection of Ivan’s brother Boris. Joseph attracted additional talent and quickly developed his foundation into a center of learning rivaling its model, Kirillov-Beloozersk. Dionisy, the leading iconographer of the day, painted Iosif’s Dormition Church gratis.
Joseph joined Archbishop Gennady’s campaign against the Novgorod Heretics in the late 1480s. Masterminding the literary defense of Orthodoxy, Joseph personally persuaded Ivan III to sanction the synod (1504), which condemned a handful of dissidents to death and others to monastery prisons. The celebrated quarrel with Nil Sorsky’s disciple Vassian Pa-trikeyev and the “Kirillov and Trans-Volgan Elders” erupted soon after these executions, which, the latter argued, were not canonically justifiable.
In 1507, claiming oppression by his new local prince, Joseph placed his monastery under royal protection. He was then excommunicated by his new spiritual superior, Archbishop Serapion of Novgorod (r. 1505-1509), for failing to consult him. Basil III, Metropolitan Simon (r. 1495-1511), and the Moscow synod of bishops backed Joseph and deposed Serapion, but Joseph was tainted as the courtier of the grand prince and as a slanderer, while Vassian’s star rose. Nevertheless, the monastery continued to flourish. As Joseph physically weakened, he formally instituted the cogoverning council, which ensured continuity under his successors.
Joseph’s chief legacies were the Iosifov-Voloko-lamsk Monastery and his Enlightener (Prosvetitel) or Book Against the Novgorod Heretics. Under his leadership the cloister innovated and rationalized the lucrative commemoration services for the dead, patronized religious art, initiated one of the country’s great libraries and scriptoria, and became a quasi-academy, nurturing prelates for half a century. Among his disciples and collaborators were the outstanding ascetic Kassian Bosoi (d. 1531), who had taught Ivan III archery and lived to help baptize Ivan IV; a nephew, Dosifey Toporkov, who composed the Russian Chronograph in 1512; the book-copyist Nil Polev, who donated to Iosifov the earliest extant copies of both Nil Sorsky’s and Joseph’s writings; and Joseph’s enterprising successor, the future Metropolitan Daniel.
The Enlightener, produced before 1490 and revised through the year of Joseph’s death, was his most authoritative and copied work. It served simultaneously as the foundation of Orthodoxy for militant churchman and as a doctrinal and ethical handbook for laity and clergy. Its dramatic and distorted introductory “Account of the New Heresy of the Novgorod Heretics” sets the tone of diabolic Ju-daizers confronted by heroic defenders of the faith. The eleven polemical-didactic discourses that follow justify Orthodoxy’s Trinitarian and redemptive doctrines (1-4), the veneration of icons and other holy objects (5-7), the unfathomability of the Second Coming and the authority of Scripture
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and patristics (8-10), and monasticism (11). The standard concluding part, either appended epistles composed before the 1504 synod in the brief redaction, or the four or five extra discourses of the post-1511 extended redaction, defend the repression and execution of heretics. Joseph’s conscious rhetorical strategy of lumping all dissidence together allows him to impute to the heretics the objections by fellow Orthodox to inquisitorial measures. Among his notable assertions are that one should resist unto death the blasphemous commands of a tyrant; that killing a heretic by prayer or hands is equivalent; that one should entrap heretics with divinely wise tricks; and, most famous, that the Orthodox Tsar is like God in his authority.
Joseph’s extended, fourteenth-discourse and nine-tradition Monastic Rule, adumbrated in a brief, eleven-sermon redaction, was Russia’s most detailed and preaching work of its kind, but chiefly an in-house work for his cloister. The blueprint for the monastery’s success is contained in his polemical claim to represent native traditions and his insistence on attentiveness to rituals, modesty, temperance, total obedience, labor, responsibility of office, precise execution of commemorations, protection of community property, pastoral care, and the council’s authority. In addition, ten of his extant epistles defend the monastery’s property in concrete ways. Questionable sources from the 1540s and 1550s, connected with his followers’ struggles, also link him to the generic defense of monastic property, supposedly at a church council in 1503. He composed
a variety of other admonitions, including a call for price-fixing during a local famine.
Canonized in 1591, Joseph was venerated also by the Old Believers. The Russian Church today invokes him as the “Russian star,” but some observers since the 1860s have considered his ritualism and inquisitorial intolerance an unfortunate phenomenon and legacy. See also: BASIL III; CHURCH COUNCIL; DANIEL, METROPOLITAN; DIONISY; IVAN III; JUDAIZERS; ORTHODOXY; POSSESSORS AND NON-POSSESSORS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Goldfrank, David. (2000). The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volot-sky, rev. ed. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications. Luria, Jakov S. (1984). “Unresolved Issues in the History of the Ideological Movements of the Late Fifteenth Century.” In Medieval Slavic Culture, eds. Henrik Birnbaum and Michael S. Flier, vol. 1 of 2. California Slavic Studies 12:150-171.
DAVID M. GOLDFRANK
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Russian journalism, both under the tsars and since, has more often responded to state requirements than it has exemplified the freedom of the press. Moreover, not until a decade or so before the 1917 Revolution did a number of newspapers win mass readerships by lively and extensive daily reporting of domestic and foreign news.
Peter I (r. 1682-1725) started the first newspaper in a small format, the St. Petersburg Bulletin, and wrote for it himself to advance his reform program. Later in the eighteenth century journals appeared as outlets for literary and didactic works, but they could not escape the influence of the state. As part of her effort to enlighten Russia, Catherine II (r. 1762-1796) launched All Sorts of Things in 1769. This was a weekly publication modeled on English satirical journals. Nicholas Novikov, a dedicated Freemason, published his well-known Drone on the presses of the Academy of Sciences, providing outlet for pointedly critical comments about conditions in Russia, including serfdom, but he went too far, and the Empress closed down his publishing activities.
In the early, reformist years of the reign of Alexander I (1801-1825), a number of writers promoted constitutional ideas in periodicals controlled or subsidized by the government. Between 1804 and 1805, an education official named I. I. Mar-tynov edited one such newspaper, Northern Messenger, and promoted Western ideas. He portrayed Great Britain as an advanced and truly free society. Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin, the tsar’s unofficial historian, founded Messenger of Europe (1802-1820) to introduce Russian readers to European developments.
Among the reign’s new monthlies, those issued by the Ministries of War, Public Education, Justice, the Interior, and the Navy continued until the 1917 Revolution. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a newspaper in French. After the Napoleonic wars, Alexander I backed a small newspaper, Messenger of Zion, its main message being that the promoters of Western European EnlightJOURNALISM
A student browses through newspapers for sale at a St. Petersburg University kiosk, 1992. © STEVE RAYMER/CORBIS enment were plotting to subvert the Russian church and state.
The reign of Nicholas I (1825-1855) saw commercial successes by privately owned but pro-government periodicals. For example, the Library for Readers, founded by Alexander Filippovich Smirdin, reached a peak circulation of seven thousand subscribers in 1837. As the first of the so-called thick journals that dominated journalism for about three decades, each issue ran about three hundred pages and was divided into sections on Russian literature, foreign literature, science, art, and the like. Its size and content made it especially appealing in the countryside, where it provided a month’s reading for landlord families. Works by virtually all of Russia’s prominent writers appeared in serial form in such journals.
Smirdin also acquired Russia’s first popular, privately owned daily newspaper, Northern Bee, which was essentially a loyalist publication that had permission to publish both foreign and domestic political information. The Bee also had the exclusive right to publish news of the Crimean War, but only by excerpting it from the Ministry of War’s official newspaper, Russian War Veteran. During the war, the Bee achieved the unprecedented readership of ten thousand subscribers.
Another major development was the growing success in the 1840s of two privately owned journals, Notes of the Fatherland and The Contemporary. Each drew readers largely by publishing the literary reviews of a formidable critic, Vissarion Belin-sky, who managed to express his moral outrage at human wrongs, despite the efforts of censors. However, journalism turned from a literary emphasis to a more political one during the reign of the tsar-reformer Alexander II (r. 1855-1881), who emancipated some 50 million serfs and effected reforms in education, local government, the judiciary, and the military, and relaxed the practice of preliminary, or pre-publication, censorship. One of his first steps in this regard was, in 1857, to permit journalists to publicize the peasant emancipation question, a topic previously forbidden. The next was allowing journalists to comment on how best to reform the courts and local government.
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Journalists seized what was, on the whole, a genuine expansion of free speech about public affairs. They had as their ideal Alexander Herzen, the emigre whose banned words they read in The Bell, a Russian-language paper he produced in London and smuggled into Russia. By keeping informed on developments in Russia through correspondence and visitors, Herzen published authoritative information and liberal arguments, especially on the emancipation of the serfs, and influenced many who served under Alexander II. Meanwhile, Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, an erudite man who read several languages, became Russia’s leading political journalist through the pages of The Contemporary; and he, like Herzen, wove in relevant events from Western Europe to shape public and government opinion on reform issues. Another such journalist, Dmitry Pisarev, wrote many of his major pieces in prison, and published them in the other major radical journal within the Empire, Russian Word; however, he espoused the nihilist position of accepting nothing on faith but, rather, testing all accepted truths and practices by the critical tools of reason and science. In line with the view of a liberal censor at that time, Alexander Vasilevich Nikitenko, higher censorship officials suspended both journals for eight months in 1862 and later permanently closed them.
Through his new censorship statute of 1865, widely hailed as a reform, Alexander II unleashed a major expansion of the commercial daily press, which was concentrated in Moscow and the capital, St. Petersburg. During the last decade of the previous reign, only six new dailies (all in the special-interest category) had been allowed, but officials now approved sixty new dailies in the first decade under Alexander II, and many of these were granted permission to publish not just general news but also a political section. In 1862, private dailies received permission to sell space to advertisers, a right that allowed lower subscription fees. The new income source prompted the publisher of Son of the Fatherland to change it from a weekly to a daily, and it soon acquired twenty thousand subscribers, well over half of them in the provinces.
By Western standards, however, overall circulation levels remained modest, even as more and more newspapers became commercially successful in the 1860s. Andrei Alexandrovich Kraevsky’s moderate daily, Voice, saw profits grow as readers increased to ten thousand by the close of the 1860s. Moscow Bulletin, edited by Michael Katkov, who leased it in 1863 and changed it from a weekly to a daily, doubled its circulation to twelve thousand in two years’ time, in part because of its ardently nationalistic leaders, which were front-page opinion pieces modeled on French feuilletons and written by Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov, known as the editorial “thunderer.” Just as outspoken and popular were the leaders written in the capital for the daily, St. Petersburg Bulletin, by Alexei Sergeyevich Suvorin, who kept that conservative paper’s circulation high. Readers preferring nationalistic and slavophile journalism critical of the government bought Ivan Aksakov’s Day (1865-1866) and then his Moscow (1867-1869), its end coming when the State Council banned his daily and barred him from publishing, citing his unrelenting defiance of censorship law.
Another boon for newspapers under Alexander II was their
new right, granted in the early 1860s, to buy foreign news reports received in Russia by the Russian Telegraph Agency (RTA, run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), after such dispatches had been officially approved. In this period, too, publishers improved printing production by buying advanced equipment from Germany and elsewhere in Europe, including typesetting machines and rotary presses that that permitted press runs in the tens of thousands. Publishers also imported photographic and engraving tools that made possible the pictorial magazines and Sunday supplements.
Following the politically-motivated murder of Alexander II, his son and heir Alexander III (r. 1881-1894) gave governors full right to close publications judged to be inciting a condition of alarm in their provinces, without the approval of the courts. But there were still possibilities for critical journalists even at a time of conservative government policies. Nicholas K. Mikhailovsky, who espoused a radical populist viewpoint, published in Notes of the Fatherland until the government closed it in 1884. Most of the staff moved to Northern Messenger, which began publishing in 1885. After spending a period in exile, Mikhailovsky joined the Messenger staff and wrote later for two other populist journals, Russian Wealth and Russian Thought. He was one of the outstanding examples of the legal populist journalists and led the journalistic critique of the legal Marxists.
During the early years of Nicholas II (r. 1894-1917), some Russian journalists promoted anti-government political and social views in the papers printed abroad by such illegal political par710
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ties as the Social Democrats, the Socialist Revolutionaries, and the Union of Liberation. The Social Democrats, led by Vladimir Ilich Lenin, began Spark in 1902 in London, its declared purpose being to unseat the tsar and start a social revolution. Those who backed Spark in Russia had to accept Spark’s editorial board as their party’s leaders. When the various anti-autocracy factions cohered as legal parties in Russia following the Revolution of 1905, each published its own legal newspaper. The Men-sheviks launched Ray in 1912 and Lenin’s Bolsheviks started Pravda (Truth) in 1912, but the government closed the latter in 1914. (Pravda emerged again after the Revolution of 1917 as the main outlet for the views of the ruling Communist Party). Another type of journalism was that of Prince V. P. Meshchersky, editor of the St. Petersburg daily, The Citizen. Meshchersky accepted money from a secret government “reptile” fund. His publishing activities were completely venal, but both Alexander II and Nicholas II supported him because of his pro-autocracy, nationalistic views.