Along with their violence, these provincials brought the raw strength which transformed Muscovy into a great modern state. They also brought from their harsh environment a new religious intensity and a special reverence for the quality known as blagochestie. Usually translated as "piety," this term has a fuller, and thus more accurate, sound to the modem ear when translated as "ardent loyalty." Blago was the Church Slavonic word for "good," carrying with it the meaning of both "blessing" and "welfare"; chestie was the word for "honor," "respect," "directness," and "celebration." All of these many-shaded meanings entered into the ardent devotion of the average Muscovite. Blagochestie meant both faith and faithfulness, and the adjectival form was inseparably attached to the word "tsar" in Muscovy. Ivan's main accusation against Kurbsky was that, for the sake of "self-love and temporal glory," Kurbsky had "trampled down blagochestie"
and "cast blagochestie out of his soul."6 The chroniclers saw in the sufferings of the seventeenth century the vengeful hand of God calling his people to repentance. Like Old Testament prophets, Muscovite revivalists repeatedly called not just for belief in a dogma or membership in a church but for a life of renewed dedication. This was a society ruled by custom rather than calculation. As social and economic changes made life more complex, Muscovites increasingly sought refuge in the simple call for devotion to that which had been. If men did not cling to old forms, they tended to become uncritical imitators of foreign ways. There was no real middle ground between the calculating worldliness of khitrost' and the complete traditionalism of blagochestie.
Khitrost' was clearly the wave of the future; and its development, the legitimate preoccupation of military and political historians. Western measurement slowly imposed itself on the dreamlike imprecision of the Eastern Slavs. A gigantic, English-built clock was placed over the "gate of the Savior" {Spasskaia vorota) of the rebuilt Moscow Kremlin in 1625; and shortly thereafter weathervanes began to appear atop the crosses of Muscovite churches. Reasonably accurate military maps and plans were first drawn up in Muscovy in the course of preparing for the 1632-4 war with Poland; and the first large-scale native production of armaments began at about the same time within the rebuilt armory of the Kremlin and the new, Dutch-built foundry at Tula.7 Clearly, Russia was to be dependent for national greatness on "The Skill [Khitrost'] of Armed Men"-to cite the title of its first military manual of 1647. The reign of Peter the Great represents the culmination of the slow transformation of Russia through Northern European technology into a disciplined, secular state.
For the historian of culture, however, the real drama of the seventeenth century follows from the determination of many Russians to remain- through all the changes and challenges of the age-blagochestivye: ardently loyal to a sacred past. The heroism and the violence of their effort drove schism deep into Russian society and helped prevent Russia from harmoniously adjusting to modernization. The childhood of Russian culture had been too stern and the first contacts with the West too disturbing to permit the peaceful acceptance of the sophisticated adult world of Western liurope.
To seventeenth-century Russia the humiliation of the Time of Troubles demonstrated not the backwardness of its institutions but the jealousy of its God. The overt and massive Westernization of Boris Godunov and Dmitry was discarded and the belief in God's special concern for Russia intensified. While Western techniques continued to pour into Russia throughout the seventeenth century, Western ideas and beliefs were bitterly
resisted. Ordinary Russians saw Muscovy as the suffering servant of God and looked to the monasteries for the righteous remnant.
The historical writings of the early seventeenth century were filled with introspective lamentations and revivalist exhortations, which shattered the dignity of the chronicling tradition without pointing the way toward serious social analysis. Abraham Palitsyn of the Monastery of St. Sergius bemoaned the "senseless silence of all the world"8 in the face of Russian humiliation; Ivan Timofeev of Novgorod decried the tendency to "tear ourselves away from our bonds of love toward one another . . . some looking to the East, others to the West":9 and the semi-official "new chronicler" of the Romanovs bequeathed to Pushkin and Musorgsky their moralistic view that the troubles of Russia were divine retribution for Boris' alleged murder of the infant Dmitry.10
The deliverance of Russia was uniformly seen as an act of God. The subsequent growth in Russian wealth provided new resources for discharging the debt Russians felt to God, but at the same time new temptations to turn away altogether. Ivan Khvorostinin, courtier of two tsars, became a convert to Socinianism, ceased to keep fasts or revere icons, and wrote elegant syllabic verse well before anyone else in Muscovy. Andrew Palitsyn, cousin of the monastic chronicler and governor of a newly colonized Siberian province, introduced smoking, studied sorcery, and preached the irrelevance of the clergy within his realm.11 Far more common, however, was the widespread reassertion of traditional faith which predominated in the early seventeenth century and caught the imagination of later Russian poets and historians. Even the tolerant, pre-Revolutionary historian who saw in Khvorostinin "the first swallow of a cultural springtime" felt obliged to add that, in general, "there was nothing principled or ideological (ideiny)" in the impulse to look West.12 The defenders of the old beliefs were nothing if not "principled and ideological," with their implausible but psychologically compelling loyalty to "true Tsars" and "old rituals." Paradoxical as it may seem, the determination of later radical intellectuals to take "principled and ideological" positions may originate in this early dedication of conservative anti-intellectuals to a very different set of principles.
The most dramatic event of the seventeenth century was not any direct confrontation of East and West, nor indeed the action of any tsar, reformer, or writer-though there were remarkable examples of each. The central event was rather the dramatic confrontation of two "straightforward muzhiks" from the upper Volga region: Patriarch Nikon and Archpriest Avvakum. These two rough-hewn priests were the key antagonists in the schism within the Russian Church. Each viewed himself as unalterably opposed to khitrost': to all forms of corruption, guile, and foreign innova-
tion. Each began his rise to fame through membership in a circle known as the "lovers of God" (Bogoliubtsy) and the "zealots of the old devotion" (revniteli drevnego blagochestiia). They fell from grace simultaneously in 1667, returning as prisoners to the frozen northlands whence they had come. Their disappearance was the decisive moment in the waning of Old Muscovy and marked the beginning of the slow and progressive banishment of the "old devotion" and the "love of God" from the new civilization of Imperial Russia.
To understand the rise and fall of these two powerful personalities one must consider first the general resurgence of religious concern in early-seventeenth-century Russia. Hand in hand with the political success of the new dynasty and the "formation of a national market" went the unifying power of a religious revival. At the center of it stood the monastic community, which-unlike merchants, boyars, and even tsars-had actually gained stature during the Time of Troubles. Almost alone of the major fortresses near Moscow, the Monastery of St. Sergius never fell to foreign hands. From behind its walls, moreover, came ringing appeals to rise up against the foreign invaders. The monastic community as a whole withheld from both Wladyslaw of Poland and Charles Philip of Sweden the aura of sanctification that would have been needed to sustain their claims to the Russian throne. All the surviving Russian contenders for power had fled to monasteries by the late years of the interregnum; and they were joined by increasing numbers of military deserters and dispossessed people seeking alms and shelter around these great national shrines.13 The two best and most famous short stories to appear in the primitive, moralistic literature of the seventeenth century (the tales of Savva Grudtsyn and Gore-/Aochastie) both end with the spiritual purgation of the hero and his entry into a monastery.14 A popular woodcut of the period shows a monk being crucified in monastic garb by figures representing the various evils of the day.15