The appearance as well as the manners of Moscow began to change. Golitsyn was interested in architecture, and the number of devastating fires in Moscow cleared wide areas for him to exercise his influence. In the autumn of 1688, the Treasury was temporarily unable to pay the salaries of foreign officers, for every rouble had been advanced in loans to help citizens rebuild houses destroyed by flames. To combat fire, a decree ordered that wooden roofs be covered with earth to reduce burnable surface. Golitsyn urged Muscovites to build of stone, and during his administration all new public buildings and a bridge across the Moscow River were erected of stone.
But Kremlin theatricals, Polish gloves and even new stone buildings in Moscow did not mean a real reform of Russian society. As the years, went by, the regime increasingly was forced to content itself with keeping order at home, and Golitsyn's larger dreams remained unrealized. The army seemed to improve under the leadership of foreign officers, but it was to fail miserably when put to the test of war. The colonization of distant Siberian provinces was halted as all the state's military resources were thrown into war against the Tatars. Russia's trade remained in foreign hands, and amelioration of the lot of the serfs was never mentioned outside Golitsyn's elegant salon. "Peopling the deserts, enriching the beggars, turning savages into men and cowards into heroes" remained the stuff of fantasy.
The one great achievement of the regency lay in the realm of foreign policy. From the beginning, Sophia and Golitsyn had resolved on a policy of peace with all of Russia's neighbors. Large pieces of formerly Russian territory were still in foreign hands: The Swedes held the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland, the Poles occupied White Russia and Lithuania. But Sophia and Golitsyn decided not to contest these conquests. Thus, as soon as her government was firmly established, Sophia sent embassies to Stockholm, Warsaw, Copenhagen and Vienna, declaring Russia's willingness to accept the status quo by confirming all existing treaties.
In Stockholm, King Charles XI was pleased to hear that Tsars Ivan and Peter would make no attempt to recover the Russian Baltic provinces surrendered to Sweden in 1661 by Tsar Alexis in the Treaty of Kardis. In Warsaw, Sophia's embassy confronted a more complicated situation. Poles and Russians were traditional enemies. For two centuries they had warred, with Poland generally having the upper hand. Polish armies had penetrated deep into Russia, Polish troops had occupied the Kremlin, a Polish tsar had even been placed on the Russian throne. The most recent war had ended, after twelve years of fighting, with a truce signed in 1667. By its terms, Tsar Alexis established Russia's western frontier at Smolensk and won title to all the Ukraine east of the Dnieper River. He was also permitted to keep, for two years only, the ancient city of Kiev; at the end of two years, it was to be returned to Poland.
It was a promise impossible to keep. Years passed, the truce was maintained, but Alexis and, after him, his son Fedor found themselves unable to give up Kiev. Kiev meant too much: it was one of the oldest of Russian cities, it was the capital of the Ukraine, it was; Orthodox. To surrender it back to Catholic Poland was difficult, painful and, finally, unthinkable. Therefore, in negotiations Moscow hedged, argued and delayed, while the Poles stubbornly refused to give up their claim. It was here that matters stood when Sophia's peace proposals arrived.
In the meantime, however, a new crisis had arisen to confront the Poles. Poland and Austria were at war with the Ottoman Empire. In 1683, the year after Peter's accession, the Ottoman tide reached its high-water mark in Europe as Turkish armies besieged Vienna. It was the King of Poland, Jan Sobieski, who led the Christian armies to victory under the city's walls. The Turks retreated down the Danube, but the war continued, and both Poland and Austria were eager for Russian help. In 1685, the Poles were severely defeated by the Turks, and the following spring a splendid Polish embassy with 1,000 men and 1,500 horses arrived in Moscow to seek a Russo-Polish alliance. Golitsyn received them royally; they were escorted through the streets by special detachments of Streltsy and feasted by the highest Russian nobility. After prolonged negotiations, both sides achieved their objectives. Both sides also paid a heavy price.
Poland formally ceded Kiev to Russia, giving up forever her claim to the great city. For Russia, for Sophia, for Golitsyn, this was the greatest triumph of the Tsarevna's regency. The Russian negotiators, led by Golitsyn, were lavishly rewarded with praise, gifts, serfs and estates; the two Tsars themselves handed them goblets from which to drink. In Warsaw, King Jan Sobieski was desolate at losing Kiev; when he agreed to the treaty, tears flowed from his eyes. Nevertheless, Russia paid for this triumph: Sophia had agreed to declare war on the Ottoman Empire and launch an attack on the Sultan's vassal, the Khan of the Crimea. For the first time in Russian history, Muscovy would join a coalition of European powers in fighting a common enemy.*
War with the Turks meant an abrupt change in Russian foreign policy. Up to this time, there had never been hostilities between
*It is important to note that this first Russian war with Turkey was not inspired by either of the objectives generally attributed to Russian aggression in this area. It was not motivated by a drive for a warm-water port, and it was not a holy crusade to free Constantinople from the infidels. Rather, it was a war that Russia entered unwillingly as an unwelcome obligation of a treaty with Poland. In fact, Russia first attacked Turkey not to acquire Constantinople, but to gain unimpeachable title to Kiev.
One consequence of Sophia's decision to make war in the south still affects the modern world. Remote in time though it may seem, her decision to attack the Tatars had an important bearing on, and even helped to originate, the Far Eastern boundary dispute between the Soviet Union and China. Having decided to make a maximum effort against the Tatars, Sophia and Golitsyn suspended all other Russian territorial ambitions. The momentum of the advance to the Pacific was abruptly halted. By the mid-seventeenth century, Russian soldiers traders, hunters and pioneers had reached and conquered the basin of the Amur River, which makes a vast looping circle around the territory now known as Manchuria. For years, under increasing Chinese pressure, frontier soldiers had been sending desperate appeals to Moscow for reinforcements. But Sophia, reducing her commitments, sent not reinforcements, but a diplomatic mission headed by Fedor Golovin to work out a peace with the Manchu Dynasty. The negotiations took place in the Russian frontier post of Nerchinsk on the upper Amur River. Golovin was at a disadvantage; not only had Sophia ordered him to make peace, but the Chinese brought up a large fleet of heavily armed junks and surrounded the fort with 17,000 soldiers. In the end, Golovin signed a paper which gave the whole of the Amur basin to China.
Subsequently, the Russians claimed that the treaty had been based not on justice, but on the presence of so much menacing Chinese military force. In 1858 and 1860, the tables were turned, and Russia took back 380,000 square miles of territory from an impotent China. Not all Russians approved this claim. After all, the Treaty of Nerchinsk had been honored for 180 years; all that time, the territory had been Chinese. But Tsar Nicholas I approved, proclaiming, "Where the Russian flag has once been hoisted, it must never be lowered."
This is the essence of the Soviet-Chinese dispute: The Russians argue that the vast region was taken from them unfairly during Sophia's regency and that, as Izvestia put it in 1972, "this provided the grounds for Russian diplomacy in the mid-nineteenth century to review the treaty by peaceful means and to establish the final Russian-Chinese border in the Far East." In reply, the Chinese argue that the Treaty of Nerchinsk was the legitimate treaty and that the Russians simply stole the territory from them in the nineteenth century. Today, the territory is Russian. But on Chinese maps it is Chinese. Today, along the Amur River, several million Russian and Chinese soldiers face each other across this disputed border.