Nowhere were the convulsions more harrowing than in seventeenth-century Russia. Massive shifts in population and changes in the texture of society took place with bewildering speed.8 Thousands of foreigners flooded
into Russia; Russians themselves pushed on to the Pacific; cities staged flash rebellions; the peasantry exploded in violence; Cossack and mercenary soldiers drifted away from battle into disorganized raids and massacres. It seems not excessive to estimate that twice during the seventeenth century -in the early years of the Time of Troubles and of the First Northern War respectively--a third of the population of Great Russia perished from the interrelated ravages of war, plague, and famine.9 By the 1660's, an English doctor resident at the tsar's court wrote that the ratio of women to men was 10:1 in the region around Moscow; and Russian sources spoke of cannibalism at the front and wolves at the rear-4,000 of them allegedly invading Smolensk in the bitter winter of 1660.10
Unable to understand, let alone deal with, the changes taking place about them, Russians resorted to violence and clung desperately to forms and distinctions that had already lost their meaning. Russia's first printed law code, the Ulozhenie of 1649, was elaborately and rigidly hierarchical and gave legal sanction to violence by explicitly denying the peasantry any escape from their serfdom and by prescribing corporal-even capital- punishment for a wide variety of minor offenses. The knout alone is mentioned 141 times.11 The seventeenth century was a period when old answers were inadequate, but new ones had not yet been found to take their place. The inevitable waning of old Muscovy could well be described under the first three chapter headings of Johann Huizenga's classic Waning of the Middle Ages: "The Violent Tenor of Life," "Pessimism and the Ideal of the Sublime Life," and "The Hierarchical Conception of Society."
Nor did the West gain much in understanding despite the increasing numbers of its soldiers, doctors, and technicians in Moscow-and of Russian emissaries abroad. The latter insulted everyone by repeatedly demanding complete and exact recitation of the Tsar's lengthy title, while omnipresent and odoriferous bodyguards cut the leather out of palace chairs for shoes and left excremental deposits on walls and floors. Western visitors outdid one another with tales of Russian filth, servility, and disorder; and there were enough genuinely comic scenes to enshrine fatefully among Western observers an anecdotal rather than an analytic approach to Russia. A Dutch doctor who brought a flute and skeleton with him to Moscow was nearly lynched by a passing mob for attempting to conjure up the dead;12 and an English doctor was executed during the First Northern War when a mealtime request for Cream of Tartar was thought to indicate sympathy for the Crimean Tatars.13 Most Western writers continued to identify Russians with Tatars rather than other Slavs throughout the seventeenth century. Even in Slavic Prague, a book published in 1622 grouped Russia with Peru and Arabia in a list of particularly bizarre and exotic civilizations;14 and
the year before in relatively nearby and well-informed Uppsala a thesis was defended on the subject "Are the Russians Christians?"15
The irony, of course, is that Russia in the seventeenth century was far more intensely Christian than most of the increasingly secular West. Indeed, whatever the ultimate causes of the crisis that overtook Muscovy in this turbulent century, its outer form was religious. The raskol, or schism, which fatally divided and weakened Russian Orthodoxy under Tsar Alexis, had repercussions in every area of this organic religious civilization. The administrative consolidation and building of a new Western capital by Alexis' son, Peter the Great, did not bridge the ideological cleavages that the schism had opened in Russia, but only made them deeper and more complex. Religious dissent continued to haunt modern Russia.
i. The Split Within
Ihe decisive moment of the century-what Russians call the perelom (divide in the stairs, breaking point of a fever)-was the formal, ecclesiastical pronouncement of the schism in 1667. It represented a kind of coup d'eglise, which in religious Muscovy was as far-reaching in its implications as the Bolshevik coup d'etat exactly 250 years later in secularized St. Petersburg. The decisions of the Moscow Church Council of 1667, like those of the St. Petersburg Soviet in 1917, were a point of no return in Russian history. Even more than in 1917, the significance of 1667 was not fully appreciated at the time and was challenged from many different directions by various defenders of the old order. But change had taken place at the center of power, and the divided opposition was unable to prevent the arrival of a new age and new ideas.
The raskol (like the Revolution) came as the culmination and climax of nearly a century of bitter ideological controversy which involved politics and aesthetics as well as personal metaphysical beliefs. Seventeenth-century Muscovy was in many ways torn by a single, continuing struggle of "medieval and modern," "Muscovite and Western," forces. Such terms, however, apply better to the self-conscious and intellectualized conflicts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The issue in seventeenth-century Russia might be better described with two conflicting terms that recur in the chronicles and polemic literature of the time: khitrosf and blagochestie, These terms-like the controversies in which they were used-are difficult to translate into the Western idiom. Khitrosf is the Slavic word for cleverness and skill. Though derived from the Greek technikos, it acquired overtones of sophistication and even cunning in Muscovy. For the most part, this term was used to describe proficiency in those activities that lay outside religious ritual. "Cleverness from beyond the seas" (zamorskaia khitrost') came to be applied to the many unfamiliar new skills and techniques which foreigners brought with them in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.1 When Boris Godunov became Russia's first elected Tsar in 1598, he had to quiet popular misgivings about the procedure by publicly proclaiming that he had been chosen "in faith and truth without any kind of guile" {bezo vsiakie khitrosti).2 The revolt of the Old Believers was based on the belief that the Russian Church, like those in the West, was now seeking to know God only through "external guile" (yneshneiu khitrostiiu).s Subsequent Russian traditions of peasant revolt and populist reform were deeply infused with the primitive and anarchistic belief that even the use and exchange of money was a "deceitful mechanism" (khitraia mekhanika).4 The post-Stalinist generation of rebellious writers was also to cry out against the "deceitful (khitry) scalpel" of bureaucratic censors and "retouchers."5
In his famous troika passage Gogol insists that Russia be "not guileful" (ne khitry) but like a "straightforward muzhik from Yaroslavl." Precisely such types organized in Yaroslavl in 1612 the "council of all the land," which mobilized Russian resources for the final expulsion of the Poles from Moscow, and served as the model for the council which installed Michael Romanov as tsar in 1613. The primitive frontier forces that had descended on Moscow from the cities of the Volga brought with them a deep distrust of all "cleverness from beyond the seas." Brutal directness was characteristic of the military men who liberated Moscow and stayed on for the councils which acted as a kind of collective regent for the young tsar. Like Gogol's "straightforward muzhiks of Yaroslavl" who moved "not through the turn of a screw" but "with the clean stroke of axe and chisel," the provincial ruffians decapitated Polish prisoners in Red Square with scythes, and pulled out the ribs of suspected traitors with hot irons. The seal of Yaroslavl-a bear carrying an axe-seemed for awhile to have become a symbol of the new regime.