2. The Westward Turn
Ihe rejection of both fundamentalists and theocrats meant the end of any serious efforts to maintain a civilization completely distinct from that of the West. The religious ideology of Muscovy was rejected as unworkable for a modern state, and the rigid barriers against Western influence which both Nikon and Awakum had sought to shore up were largely removed after 1667.
It was not yet clear how much and what kind of Western influence was to prevail in the ungainly new empire. Only gradually and fitfully was Russia able to fashion a creative culture and an administrative system which harmonized with those in the rest of Europe. The celebrated reforms of Peter the Great pointed the way to the future. But the fresh religious gropings that preceded these reforms and the exotic resistance movements that developed in reaction to them indicate that the triumph of secular modernization was far from complete.
New Religious Answers
The last quarter of the seventeenth century-from the death of Alexis to the assumption of real power by Peter the Great-was a kind of interregnum. The continued progression toward Western ways was dramatized by the emancipation of women from the terem (the special upstairs chamber to which they had previously been largely confined) under the regent Sophia, daughter of Alexis, who became the first woman to rule Russia. Her principal minister, V. V. Golitsyn, provided an important link between the Westernizing work of Alexis and that of Peter. Golitsyn helped reorganize the military establishment, abolish the antiquated system of social precedence (mestnichestvo), and modify many of the more cruel forms of legal investigation and punishment.
However, Golitsyn was more successful in changing old ways than in establishing anything in their place. He was eventually rejected and exiled -as were most other innovators of the period. Russia was not yet willing to commit itself to new ways of doing things. The continuing search for new answers was concentrated in the overgrown wooden metropolis of Moscow, where every shade of opinion was represented from the xenophobic fundamentalism of the streltsy quarter to the transplanted Germanic efficiency of the foreign suburb. The young Peter the Great derived many of his new ideas and tastes from a carefree boyhood spent largely in this Western enclave of Moscow. But the preoccupation of the uneasy ruling elite with combating religious-tinged rebellions against innovation-by Razin, So-lovetsk, and the streltsy--naturally conditioned them to look for religious answers of their own: for a viable religious alternative to that of Old Muscovy. Thus, although the ruling elite had nowhere to look for guidance after 1667 but to the West, it still looked for religious answers: solutions of the old sort from the new font of wisdom.
The late years of the seventeenth century saw the consideration in Moscow of four religious answers-all of them brought in from the outside. Only after rejecting these last efforts to find religious answers for Russia's problems did Russia turn to the West for the secular and political solutions of Peter the Great.
Each of the four religious answers proposed in Moscow represented an effort to come to grips with the reality of the schism and the irreversible changes in Russian life. None of these solutions was proposed by Great Russians steeped in the Muscovite ideology, like Nikon and Avvakum. Two of the solutions-those of the Latinizers and Grecophiles-were group movements sponsored by new elements within the Russian Orthodox Church anxious to give it solid new foundations. Two other, more radical proposals-direct conversion to Roman Catholicism and Protestant sectarianism-were offered from without by lonely prophets coming to Moscow from the West. This proliferation of conflicting solutions bears testimony to the state of confusion and uncertainty into which the schism had plunged Russian Christendom.
The Latinizing and Grecophile solutions arose because of the belated acceptance within the Russian Church of the need to develop a systematic educational system. Such a need had not been keenly felt by prophetic partisans of the Muscovite ideology. Neither Nikon nor Awakum had attached any importance to systematic education of the clergy, though both advocated careful study of the holy texts of which they approved. The question that divided the two parties in the post-1667 church was simply
whether Latin or Greek language and culture should dominate the religious education of the new polyglot hierarchy.
The continued influx of Ukrainian and White Russian priests and the banishment of the Grecophile Nikon gave a considerable initial advantage to the Latinizing party. Polotsky set up in Moscow during the 1660's an informal school for instructing state servants in Latin culture; and one of Polotsky's first students, Silvester Medvedev, became the champion of the Latinizing party in the 1670's. Medvedev was a widely traveled diplomat who had helped negotiate the treaty with Poland in 1667 and had taken monastic vows only in 1674. In 1677 he was given important new responsibilities in Moscow as chief corrector of books and head of the Zaikonospassky Monastery, which became the center of an expanding program of Latin instruction in the capital. In 1685 he petitioned the regent Sophia (who had also studied under Polotsky) for permission to convert his school into a semi-official academy.
Medvedev's efforts to extend his already great authority rendered him vulnerable to the savage intrigues that were characteristic of Moscow during this period of upheaval and suspicion. He met much of the same resistance that Nikon had encountered; but Medvedev lacked the personality, the patriarchal power, and the authority of Byzantine precedent to carry out his reforms. He was soon attacked by a rival faction supported by the Patriarch Joachim and by a rival Greek school attached to the Moscow Printing Office.
The Grecophile faction acquired new strength with the arrival from Constantinople in 1685 of two well-traveled and educated Greeks, the Likhudy brothers. They undermined Medvedev's position with doctrinal attacks and wrested away, for the use of their Greek school, stone buildings originally designed for Medvedev's Latin academy. Rapidly stripped of his various positions, Medvedev was soon arrested for alleged treason and, after two years of torture and mistreatment, burned for heresy in 1691. As in the Nikon-Avvakum controversy, however, the Medvedev-Likhudy affair resulted in mutual defeat rather than clear victory for either side. The Lik-hudies themselves soon became suspect as foreign intriguers, and their influence declined precipitously in the early 1690's.1
There were two important issues with long-term implications for Russian culture lying beneath the sordid external details of the controversy. Each side was vindicated on one issue: the Latinizers on that of the basic language and style of theological education and discourse, the Grecophiles on fundamental matters of dogma.
The Latin bias in theological education represented the final victory of the new clergy over the traditional Greek-oriented monastic establish-
ment of Muscovy. Henceforth, Russian theological education-almost the only form of education in eighteenth-century Russia-was far more Western in content than before. Latin replaced Greek forever as the main language of philosophic and scientific discourse; and Russia adopted through its church schools a more sympathetic attitude toward secular learning and scholastic theology than the more patristically inclined Grecophiles would have tolerated. It is not accidental that the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century saw a flood of learned treatises on the Russian Church by Western theologians, and that most of the important theological writing and teaching in the Russian Church during this period was the work of Russian priests originally trained in the Latin-speaking theological academies of Western Europe.2