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. Miloslavskii 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.