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3
Muscovite Russia, 1240-1613
Moscow itself is great: I take the whole town
to be greater than London
with the suburbs: but it is very rude, and stands without all order. Their
houses are all of timber, very dangerous for fire. There is a fair castle,
the walls whereof are brick, and very high: they say they are eighteen feet
thick. . . . The Emperor lies in the castle, wherein are nine fair Churches,
and therein are religious men. . . . The poor are very innumerable, and live
most miserably. . . . In my opinion, there are no such people under the sun
for their hardness of living.
Captain
Richard Chancellor, English explorer and trader, 1553
POLITICS AND EXPANSION
In
comparison with the major cities of Kievan and appanage Russia, Moscow
in the twelfth century was merely a small and obscure town. Moscow
was not even mentioned in the chronicles until 1147, when Iurii Dolgorukii,
prince of Novgorod,
reputedly established the town as a commercial and strategic center. The
evolution of Moscow
from a pro- vincial town to the capital of a unified, centralized state is
the result of several factors--the impact of Mongol conquest and rule,
favorable geographic location, and in part luck.
Moscow's
rise to preeminence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries involved
cultivating favor with the Golden Horde, the Mongol tribe that ruled Russia from Sarai, while struggling for
supremacy with the larger northern cities--most notably Tver and Novgorod. Daniel, the
youngest son of Aleksandr Nevskii, became the ruler of Moscow in 1263, and the city was granted
the status of a separate principality. Daniel enlarged Moscow
and expanded his authority along the length of the Moscow River.
After Daniel's death in 1303, his son Iurii Danilovich ( 1303- 1325) annexed
Mozhaisk in the east and contested with Prince Michael of Tver for control of
Vladimir and Novgorod.
The Golden Horde supported
Iurii in this struggle, granting him the title of Grand Prince and conferring
on him the right to extract tribute from all the northeastern towns. Iurii,
like his grandfather, Aleksandr Nevskii, owed his strong position in Novgorod to a businesslike
acceptance of Mongol suzerainty. The Mongols, in turn, supported Moscow in the struggle against its major Russian
rival--Tver--and against powerful Lithuania and the Teutonic Knights.
Novgorod's
elite also contributed to Moscow's
rise through their tendency to engage in self-destructive feuding. This
ancient city's institutions, as we saw in Chapter 2, embodied some partially
democratic ideas, most notably through the veche,
and a strong tradition of independence. Admirable as these traits might be
from a twentieth-century perspective, in the climate of intrigue and
factional struggle of the fourteenth century they combined to weaken Novgorod's chances for dominating post-Kievan Russia.
In the first century after
the Mongol invasion, Moscow
benefited greatly from its location. Shielded in the forested north, the city
avoided periodic Mongol raids that threatened southern Russian cities. Moscow's location at
the intersection of several major trade routes facilitated its development. Moscow also enjoyed
Mongol support against its powerful neighbors. After about 1350, however, Moscow had become
sufficiently powerful to challenge declining Mongol authority.
Late mediaeval Moscovy
Russia, Europe and the Near East (click on the map for better resolution)
Moscow's
power was greatly enhanced when the city assumed Kiev's former role as the center of Russian
Orthodoxy. The city of Vladimir
hosted the metropolitan, or head of the Orthodox Church, after 1300.
Metropolitan Peter ( 1308-1326) was not on the best terms with Prince Michael
of Tver, who had supported another candidate to lead the Or thodox Church.
Peter developed close ties with Prince Iurii of Moscow and, after his death in 1325, with
Prince Ivan I (Kalita, or "Moneybag"). When Peter died, he was
buried in Moscow; his successor, a Greek
bishop named Theognostus, assessed Tver's eroding position and decided to
shift his permanent residence to Moscow.
Theognostus ardently
supported Ivan's efforts to unify Russian lands under Moscow's control. Ivan deliberately
ingratiated himself with the Golden Horde by serving as an effective tax
collector. By collecting tribute from the other Russian princes he
strengthened his political position and amassed enough revenue to purchase a
number of appanages, substantially expanding the territory under Moscow's control.
By the middle of the
fourteenth century, Mongol power was declining, while that of Lithuania
to the west was growing under the Jagellonian dynasty. A crucial event marking Russia's
challenge to Mongol authority was the Battle of Kulikovo Field, in 1380.
Grand Prince Dmitrii Donskoi ( 1359-1389), aided by the farsighted
Metropolitan Alexis, unified Russia's
princes against the Lithuanian threat. Mongol unity had been undermined by
division into the khanates (roughly, principalities) of Kazan,
Astrakhan, and Crimea, and by the struggle
between Tokhtamysh (representing the Central Asian warlord Tamerlane) and
Mamai, Prince of the Horde, for control of Russia. Russia had
taken advantage of the opportunity this provided to challenge the Horde's
right to rule and collect tribute. In response, Mamai concluded an alliance
with Lithuania and engaged
the Russians in battle at Kulikovo, on the upper reaches of the Don River. Dmitrii, whose cause was reputedly endorsed
by the Abbot Sergius, moved before the Lithuanians could reach Mamai and
inflicted a surprising defeat on the Mongols.
The Battle
of Kulikovo
The Battle of Kulikovo Field
destroyed the myth of Mongol invincibility and strengthened Russia's national awakening. No
matter that Mamai would return to sack Moscow
a mere two years later. As the Mongol rulers continued to war among
themselves, the Golden Horde's control over Russia waned. Tamerlane (Timur
the Lame), a ruthless warrior from Central Asia, further eroded Mongol power
by destroying many of their largest cities and repeatedly defeating
Tokhtamysh, the Mongol chieftain who had himself beaten Mamai for supremacy.
Tamerlane's destructive campaign played a significant role in weakening the
Golden Horde. By the middle of the fifteenth century the once-powerful Mongol
empire had been reduced to a scattering of small khanates along the lower
Volga, in Kazan, Astrakhan,
and the Crimea.
Vasilii II ( 1425- 1462)
ruled Moscow
during a period of constant civil strife and repeated Tatar incursions. Lithuania threatened Moscow from the west, while in the east the
fragmentation of the Golden Horde enabled Vasilii II to consolidate his power
and eliminate virtually all the surviving Russian appanages by 1456. His
predecessor, Vasilii I ( 13891425), had taken advantage of Mongol disunity to
annex NizhniiNovgorod, several hundred miles east of Moscow. Vasilii II defeated his chief
rival, Dmitrii Shemiaka, in ancient Novgorod,
ensuring that city's subordination to Moscow's
authority. In 1452 Moscow
extended its rule over the Tatar khanate of Kasimov, and the same year ceased
paying tribute to the Golden Horde.
An event of equal
significance for Muscovite Russia was the fall of Constantinople
to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. As we have seen, Byzantium's
cultural, political, economic, and religious influence on Russia had
been enormous. However, Russia's
ties to Byzantium
had been eroded by the Mongol conquest and the growth of the northern trade
routes. Byzantine influence on Russia had peaked between the
eleventh and fourteenth centuries, and declined thereafter. Under threat from
the Muslim Turks, the Greek Orthodox Church at the 1439 Council of Florence
recognized the supremacy of the Roman pope, antagonizing Russia's
Orthodox hierarchy. This "betrayal" by the Greek church, and the
subsequent "punishment" in the form of Turkish conquest, convinced
many Russians that they were left as the sole defenders of true Christianity.
In the sixteenth century this conviction would find expression in the
doctrine of Moscow as the third and final Rome. These
developments enhanced Russia's
sense of its uniqueness and its isolation from the mainstream of European
culture, and contributed to Russian xenophobia.
Ivan III
Ivan III ( The Great, 1462- 1505)
continued the process of "gathering together" the Russian lands,
expanding and centralizing the Muscovite state and effectively ending the
appanage period. When Tver concluded an alliance with Lithuania in 1485, Ivan invaded the
principality and incorporated it into Muscovy.
Ivan attacked Tatar Kazan in the 1460s, incorporated Novgorod
under Moscow's
control in the 1470s, and invaded Tver in 1485.
Soldiers of Moscow (left) and Novgorod
(right) / Modern miniatures by Oleg Gubarev
Ivan III used the vast lands
acquired through his conquests as rewards, forming a centralized, loyal
contingent of army officers among the upper classes to whom he granted
estates. He deported Novgorod
landowners, redistributing their lands to his supporters on condition that
they serve in his military campaigns. This system, called pomest'e, assured the grand
prince of a loyal and dependent cavalry and curtailed the military resources
available to the remaining appanage princes.
Governing and defending an
enlarged Russia
required the creation of a small bureaucracy and more professional armed
forces. Ivan III appointed governors and district chiefs to administer Russia's new territories, arranging for them
to provide Moscow
with revenue, most of which went to support the army, through a system of
"feeding" (kormlenie). The feeding system both enhanced the
independent authority of regional governors and, since they were allowed to
keep a surplus of what they collected, also encouraged corruption. A national
law code enacted in 1497, the first Sudebnik,
standardized judicial authority,
restrained administrative abuses, limited peasant mobility, and helped in
tegrate an expansive Moscow.
Vasilii
III ( 1505- 1533) continued the process of consolidation, expansion, and
centralization pursued by his father. Pskov
was annexed in 1510 and its veche bell taken down; Riazan was
incorporated into the Muscovite empire in 1517. The owners of large estates
in these former appanages were deported, and their lands were redistributed
to Vasilii's servitors. Vasilii III was a strong ruler, yet he consulted
regularly with the boyars in the Duma.
Muscovite
Russia developed an imperial and national ideology, bolstered by Russian
Orthodoxy, during the reigns of Ivan III and Vasilii III. Both rulers
occasionally used the title tsar (or caesar), implying sovereign
authority and the rejection of subordination either to the Mongols or to Byzantium. With the
fall of Constantinople, the seat of Greek Orthodox Christianity, to the
Muslim Turks in 1453, Russians increasingly thought of Moscow as the last citadel of
"genuine" Christianity. A letter from Abbot Filofei to Vasilii III
in 1510 drew on biblical references to enunciate the doctrine of Moscow as the Third
Rome: "two Romes have fallen, the Third stands, and there shall be no
Fourth." This doctrine legitimized Russia's imperial expansion and
the divine right of Russian autocracy.
The concept of Russia's divine mission as the center
of Christianity and the role of the tsar as God's direct representative on
earth were further elaborated during the long reign of Ivan IV ( 1533- 1584),
who is better known in the West as Ivan the Terrible. Ivan IV, who succeeded
to the throne at age three, witnessed bitter factional fighting among the
boyar families before he formally assumed the crown in 1547. Terrified by a
massive fire that consumed much of Moscow
later that year, and convinced God was punishing him for his transgressions,
the young tsar formed a Chosen Council of nobles and church leaders to serve
as an advisory body. In order to enhance public support Ivan IV consulted openly
with Moscow's
elites, calling the first full zemskii
sobor ("assembly of
the land") in 1549. He issued a new law code ( Sudebnik) in 1550, to ensure
that the same laws were applied equally throughout the newly acquired
territories and to protect the lower gentry's interests against abuses by
regional governors. Ivan Sudebnik reflected the growing division of
Russian society according to rank and position.
Ivan
IV
Ivan IV also created a series
of central chanceries to run Moscow's
growing bureaucracy and to provide more efficient mobilization of resources
for war. Finally, in 1551 Ivan and the priest Sylvester, author of the Domostroi, a manual for governing upper-class
households, imposed a series of reforms on the Orthodox Church entitled the Stoglav (Hundred Chapters). The Stoglavsought to control the
Church's accumulation of wealth, criticized corrupt monastic practices,
proscribed a number of pastimes as indecent (including chess, playing the
trumpet, and enjoying pets), condemned shaving one's beard as a heretic
Catholic practice, and prescribed certain modifications in church rituals.
The Stoglav and Domostroi infused religious content into
virtually all aspects of sixteenthcentury Russian life by condemning secular
pursuits as frivolous or sinful.
The
central thrust of Ivan IV's rule was to consolidate and strengthen
centralized rule, which meant weakening the influence of the top boyar
families. Ivan was extremely suspicious of the boyars, in part due to his
experiences as a child and in part as a result of the unseemly political
maneuvering during his grave illness in 1553. Angered by Ivan's capricious
rule and dismayed by Russia's poor performance in the Livonian War of
1558-1582 (fought to expand Russia's territory westward and secure access to
the Baltic Sea), a number of the boyars had defected to Lithuania, Livonia,
or Poland. Among the disaffected boyars was Prince Andrei Kurbsky, a literate
man whose vitriolic correspondence with the tsar has given scholars a record
of the clash between Ivan IV and the upper classes.
Late
in 1564 Ivan IV took a calculated risk designed to enhance his power. Taking
a large retinue, he left Moscow
for a small settlement in the northeast, Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda, from which
he announced his intention to abdicate. Thrown into consternation, the tsar's
followers begged him to return to Moscow
and resume his office. Ivan IV agreed, but with certain conditions. Ivan
demanded complete autonomy, including freedom from the moral strictures of
the Church, to punish traitors as he saw fit.
To
carry out his revenge against the treacherous boyars, Ivan divided Russia into
two separate states. Within the oprichnina,
consisting of some two dozen cities, eighteen districts, and part of Moscow, the tsar
exercised total power. In the remainder of Russia, the zemshchina, direct rule
theoretically would be exercised by the boyar Duma. However, Ivan created a
loyal militia, the oprichniki,
to wage a form of civil war against nobles and property owners in the zemshchina. The fearsome oprichniki, some 6,000
strong, dressed in black and carried a dog's head and broom on their horses
to symbolize their mission of hunting down and sweeping away the tsar's
enemies. Ivan used the oprichniki to arrest, torture, imprison, and
execute any of the nobility, the clergy, their families, and supporters whom
he imagined posed a threat to his rule.
For seven years Ivan IV
carried on a vendetta against his own people. Early in 1570 Ivan led his oprichniki against the city of Novgorod, whose inhabitants once had the
temerity to call their town "Lord Novgorod the Great." Apparently
infuriated by the city's refusal to submit abjectly to his authority, Ivan
spent five weeks torturing, raping, and slaughtering his subjects. In all he
is estimated to have massacred between 15,000 and 60,000 people, or about
three-fourths of the population. After Novgorod,
Ivan set out to destroy the city of Pskov.
However, one of the so-called holy fools of Pskov, the monk Nicholas, threatened Ivan
the Terrible with heavenly destruction should he harm the city. Frightened,
Ivan withdrew to Moscow, and Pskov was spared. Two years later he
executed most of the leaders of the oprichniki,
bringing an end to this bloody period of Russian history.
Although Ivan IV adhered to
the rites of the Russian Orthodox Church and considered himself God's representative
on earth, by the time of the oprichnina he had rejected the Church's
traditional role as moral conscience of the tsar. Those religious authorities
who tried to remonstrate with the tsar--the Metropolitan Philip, for
example--were tortured, banished, or killed. The clergy had acted as a
restraining influence on the tsar during the early years of his reign; by the
latter part of his rule, however, he had terrified the Church hierarchy into
abjectly supporting his cruel tyranny. With the nobility and the clergy
completely broken, there were no checks on Ivan's despotic rule. All Russians
were the tsar's slaves.
From a modern Western
perspective it is difficult to imagine how a people would accept such a
cruel, debauched ruler as Ivan the Terrible. At one point he had a giant
skillet constructed in Red Square in which
his hapless enemies were roasted alive. Ivan also reveled in personally
torturing prisoners, often after attending mass or before retiring to one of
his wives or mistresses. Frequently, Ivan shared drunken orgies and torture
sessions with his older son, Ivan, in a type of medieval male bonding. The
two also enjoyed turning wild bears loose on unsuspecting Muscovite crowds
and watching the fun.
The Russian people were
terrified of their tsar, but few contemplated any sort of uprising against
him. Some, like Prince Kurbsky, condemned him from afar. The few who were
courageous enough to oppose his bloody methods and remain in Russia did
not generally survive. One must recognize that a dominant strain in Russian
Orthodoxy was the theme of achieving spiritual rewards through suffering. The
tsar, the earthly king, was no less justified in visiting calamities on his
people than was God the heavenly king. The decisions of both were likely a
just punishment for their transgressions, and in any case could not be
questioned or even understood by most Russians.
The last years of Ivan's
reign were marked by foreign policy adventures and domestic failures. In the
1550s Ivan's forces had subjugated the Tatars of the Kazan
and Astrakhan khanates, to the east and south,
ending the raids that had threatened Moscow
periodically. To celebrate his victory over the Kazan
khanate, Ivan commissioned the construction of the famous St. Basil's
Cathedral, in Moscow's Red
Square. Toward the end of Ivan's reign the Cossack Ermak
conquered the Kuchum khanate in western Siberia, the first step in an
extended process of expansion eastward to the Pacific Ocean and eventually
into North America.
Moscovy Russian
expansion under Ivan the Terrible
Ivan the Terrible's successes
in dealing with the Muslim Tatars in the east were more than offset by his
failures in the wars with his Christian neighbors to the west. In 1558 Ivan,
determined to expand Muscovy's frontiers to the Baltic Sea, and thereby
enhance Russian commerce, launched the war against Livonia
in what is now Latvia and Estonia. By
1560, the year his beloved first wife Anastasia died, Ivan's initial successes
were reversed with the entry of Lithuania,
Poland, and Sweden into the war against Russia. The
Livonian War dragged on for twenty five years, draining the Muscovite
treasury, dividing the court, and feeding Ivan's paranoia and his obsession
with traitors.
Ivan's cruelty and depravity
reached their apogee when, in a fit of rage, he struck and killed his eldest
son with the iron-tipped staff he always carried. This poignant moment,
captured in a famous painting by the nineteenth-century artist Ilya Repin,
signaled the close of Ivan's bloody regime. Following his death in 1584 his
son Feodor ascended the throne. However, Feodor was weak and incompetent, and
could not manage the legacy of war and internal
division bequeathed him by his father. Russia was soon immersed in the
chaos of dynastic struggle and civil war referred to as the "Time of
Troubles," which lasted until the establishment of the Romanov dynasty
in 1613.
Soldiers of Ivan
the Terrible
RELIGION AND CULTURE
Religion was by far the
dominant influence in medieval Russian culture. The Orthodox Church mobilized
Russian national identity, legitimized political authority, molded social
relations, dominated literature and architecture, and controlled a
significant share of the economy. At the beginning of the sixteenth century,
for example, the Church owned between one-quarter and one-third of Russia's
arable land.
Russian church architecture
had recovered by the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Vassilii
II and Ivan III undertook huge construction programs, using Italian and later
German and Dutch builders. The great Moscow Kremlin ("fortress")
was reconstructed in the fifteenth century; most of the cathedrals housed
within the Kremlin were built at this time. In 1552 Ivan IV had St. Basil's
Cathedral constructed on the edge of what is now Red Square, to commemorate
his victory over the Tatar khanate in Kazan.
Based on the pattern of Russian wooden churches, St. Basil's, the
quintessential backdrop for television reporting from Moscow, is a colorful group of nine
octagonal churches topped by golden cupolas and set on a single foundation.
 
In the fifteenth century
several sects and divisions appeared in Russian religious life. There were
the Judaizers, not really Jews but rather Russian Christians who rejected
parts of the New Testament and certain teachings of the Orthodox Church. The strigolniki (shaved ones) also denied the
authority of the Church, criticizing it as corrupt, and sought individual
salvation through Buddhist-like contemplation. As in the Europe
of that time, such heretics were not easily tolerated by the dominant church,
and were frequently burned at the stake.
 
Russian icons of the 15th century
A major schism of the late
fifteenth century within the Orthodox Church was between the so-called
possessors and non-possessors. The non-possessors, led by Nil Sorskii,
insisted that the Church should renounce worldly wealth, monks should adhere
to vows of poverty, and church and state should be separate. However, a
Church council of 1503 supported the possessors, led by Joseph of Volotsk,
who advocated a rich, powerful Church glorified by the splendor of icons,
extensive land holdings, and impressive ritual. The possessors stressed the
importance of a close, harmonic relationship between Church and ruler, which
strengthened the concept of the divine right of the tsar.
Literature and art
represented religious themes almost exclusively during this period, in
contrast to the secular intellectual currents developing in Europe.
Medieval Russian literature, according to historian Victor Terras, was a
vehicle of religious devotion, ritual, and edification, written by monks, for
monks, about monks. Hagiographies, or saints' lives, were one of the most
common forms of literature. The purpose of these stories was to glorify God
and His loyal servants, and not to present accurate biographies. Similarly,
Russian chronicles, another prominent genre, mixed history with political
propaganda and morality tales. Among the more important of these were the Life of St. Sergius of Radonezh by Epiphanius , the story of the
founder of the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery, and the Tale of the White Cowl of
Novgorod, which promoted the concept of Moscow as the Third Rome.
Religion was an important
influence in popular culture, although not through literature. Few Russians,
and virtually no members of the lower classes, knew how to read. Religious
icons and oral traditions substituted for the written word. Even modest
peasant huts (izby) reserved a corner for holy icons, which were
believed to protect the family from harm. However, peasants also preserved
some old Slavic pagan beliefs and customs, including offerings to the house
sprite (domovoi). They also retained certain marriage and funeral
practices dating from pre-Christian times. Popular entertainment included
Russian folk songs and folk tales, and the epic poems (byliny) that recounted
the exploits of heroes both ancient and contemporary.
ECONOMICS AND SOCIETY
The
Mongol invasion crushed the robust urban commercial life that had
characterized Kievan society. Many towns simply ceased to exist, others lost
much of their population, and Russians abandoned trade for a more insular,
self-sufficient agricultural life. Landowning became the major basis of
prosperity. Since the landlord's wealth depended on peasant labor, the
freedom of this class, some 70-80 percent of the population, to change their
place of residence was gradually curtailed. By the end of the fifteenth
century peasants were tied to the estate except for a two week period around St. George's Day,
November 26, when they could pack up and leave their masters. Ivan the
Terrible further curtailed the peasants' freedom of
movement. The institution of serfdom, tying peasants to the land permanently,
evolved gradually through the medieval period and was fully legalized by the
law code (Ulozhenie) of 1649 enacted under Tsar Alexis ( 1645- 1676).
The social classes of
medieval Russia
were not much different from those of Kievan Rus. At the top remained the
boyars, the handful of nobles who served as advisors to the grand prince.
Just below the boyars were the junior boyars (or boyars' children--boyarskie
deti) and the gentry. The higher clergy--the metropolitan, archbishops,
and influential priests and monks--were also part of the upper classes. Next
came merchants, followed by skilled urban artisans such as carpenters, boottnakers,
masons, and silversmiths.
Russian aristocratic woman
Most Westerners know about Russia's
Cossacks, who first appeared during this period, but few have an accurate
understanding of these colorful people. Cossacks were free peasants who
emerged in various frontier regions of Russia
and Ukraine, particularly Zaporozhe, Riazan, and
the Don region, during the mid-fifteenth century. At first resistant to Moscow's authority,
they gradually came to be loyal subjects of the tsar. Their lifestyle, based
on a steppe existence, was quite different from that of the forest-dwelling
Russians or Ukrainians. Cossacks lived by fishing, trapping, and plundering.
Largely Slavic, they also accepted Germans, Swedes, Tatars, Greeks, and other
adventurous types, as long as they were tough fighters and nominally
Christian. Although renowned for their horsemanship, the Cossacks were also
great sailors and fearsome pirates who periodically threatened trade on the Volga River
and the Black Sea.
Cossacks played a pivotal
role in medieval Russia,
as explorers and rebels. It was a Cossack, Ermak Timofeevich, who under
contract to the wealthy Stroganov family ventured across the Ural Mountains and attacked Khan Kuchum at his capital
of Sibir. By defeating the Siberian Tatars and their allies, various Siberian
tribes, Ermak opened the huge Siberian territory to Russian eastward
expansion. Although Ermak was eventually killed by the Tatars, other Cossacks
followed the massive Siberian rivers, reaching the Pacific
Ocean by the middle of the seventeenth century, in their search
for sable furs and walrus tusks. These intrepid explorers apparently crossed
the Bering Strait into Alaska
sometime before the eighteenth century.
Peasants, as noted above,
constituted the great majority of the population in medieval Russia. As a
whole, the peasants were illiterate, superstitious, and poor. They were
forced to work on the landlords' estates and were required to give their
master a large proportion of their produce or, in certain cases, payments in
cash. By the time of Ivan IV taxes on the peasantry, levied to pay for
frequent military campaigns, had become increasingly burdensome, leading many
to desert the estates and seek more favorable conditions in the south or
east.
At the lowest rung of the
social ladder were slaves, about 10 percent of the population. However,
Russian slavery, which continued into the eighteenth century, was quite
different from that in the United
States. First, there was no ethnic or
racial difference between slave and master. Second, slaves did not work in
agriculture, but were employed primarily as household servants. Third,
slavery was, as Richard Hellie has suggested, a form of social welfare for
medieval Russia.
Those free individuals who could not pay their debts or otherwise support
themselves might become slaves. The slave owners then assumed legal
obligations to clothe and feed their slaves and treat them humanely, and were
prohibited from freeing them during famines to avoid their obligations.
Finally, the male slaves who served as stewards for a rich household acquired
considerable authority and responsibility. These "elite" slaves
ranked above their ordinary counterparts in Muscovite society's hierarchy.
It is interesting to note
that while medieval Muscovy was far from a
tolerant society, the lines of division were based on class, gender, and
religion, not race or ethnicity. For example, the grand princes would often
recruit defeated Mongol princes for their court following a battle, provided
they converted to Orthodox Christianity. Ivan the Terrible took a Circassian
princess as his second wife, although she had to be baptized into the
Orthodox faith prior to the wedding. Church law, however, strictly prohibited
marrying across class lines; a free man who married a slave woman would
himself lose his freedom.
Medieval Russian society,
with its rigid hierarchy enforced by religious strictures, relegated women to
subordinate positions politically, economically, and socially. The Russian
Orthodox Church, like other Christian denominations, viewed women as
inherently sinful and a temptation to men, based on biblical teachings.
Accordingly, "good" women were quiet, submissive, and humble. Just
as men were supposed to be obedient to the tsar, women had to obey their
husbands in all matters. The Domostroi,
a set of rules for keeping a
well-ordered upper-class household published about 1556, instructs wives to
consult their husbands on every matter and to fulfill all their commands
diligently. If they dis obeyed, the wise husband would beat them
judiciously. However, the Domostroi also elaborates on the many
responsibilities of running a large household that rested with upper-class
women, including supervising the servants and raising the children.
To protect their status
within the patriarchal order, upper-class women in medieval Russia were
secluded in specific living quarters and prohibited from socializing with
men. They were also granted generous protections against any slights to their
honor. Women from the artisan, slave, or peasant classes had far fewer
restrictions on their social interactions. The economic demands on
lower-class families forced women to work alongside men in a variety of
occupations. Women were useful because they served important functions--they
worked, produced and raised children, and managed the household--not because
they were considered important in their own right. Nonetheless, even women of
lower social status were protected against rape, abuse, or insult by Russian
law of the time.
RUSSIA'S TIME OF TROUBLES (1584-1613)
When Ivan the Terrible died
in 1584 he left Muscovy with a mixed legacy.
Russia
was far larger and more powerful than at any time in the past; the Mongol
yoke had been broken, the state centralized, and all restraints on the tsar's
authority abolished. With the Turkish occupation of Constantinople, Moscow proclaimed
itself the center of Orthodox Christianity, the Third Rome. Western
influences in the form of traders and delegations from Germany, France,
and Britain, though not
always welcome, raised the level of technology in Russia, particularly in the
military sphere.
However, the protracted Livonian War, excessive
taxation, natural disasters, and Ivan's cruel exploitation of his own people
strained Russia
to the breaking point. The upper classes had suffered the loss of their
estates, exile, or worse during the oprichnina;
peasants had fled the central
provinces to avoid heavy taxes and further
restrictions on their freedom. After Ivan the Terrible died Russia was
once again consumed by dynastic struggles. The late tsar had killed his more
able son and heir Ivan Ivanovich in a fit of rage in 1581; hence it was the
weak and incompetent Feodor who ascended the throne in 1584. Within three
years, however, Boris Godunov, an astute and capable boyar, emerged as the
real power behind the throne. A younger son of Ivan IV, Dmitrii, died in 1591
under mysterious circumstances; unsubstantiated rumors suggested that Boris
Godunov was responsible. Feodor died in 1598 without an heir, and the
Riurikid dynasty finally came to an end.
In the chaos that followed, a zemskii sobor (assembly of the land) chose Boris
Godunov to succeed Feodor as tsar of Russia. Using a combination of
public works programs and state repression, Boris unsuccessfully sought to
stem Church and boyar opposition, peasant flight from the estates, and
Cossack rebellion. In the last years of Boris' reign a pretender to the
throne, a "false Dmitrii" claiming to be Ivan IV's son, organized
an opposition force of Poles, Ukrainians, and Cossacks. When Boris Godunov
died in 1605 the rebels took Moscow
and installed the pretender as Dmitrii I.
False Dmitrii and king Sigismund
III Vasa by Nikolai Nevrev (1874)
(Click here for more details)
Dmitrii's
Polish connections, particularly his marriage to the Catholic Marina Mniszech
and the presence of hundreds of Poles in Moscow, enraged Russians, and Dmitrii I was
murdered within a year. Prince Vasilii Shuiskii was installed as Vasilii IV (
1606- 1610), but he could not put an end to the civil strife and foreign
intervention that plagued Moscow.
Ivan Bolotnikov, a Don
Cossack, led a bloody uprising against the upper classes. Once this
revolt had been crushed a second False Dmitrii arose to challenge Vasilii IV,
and for two years Russia
endured another civil war. After years of turmoil, a large zemskii sobor convened in Moscow in 1613 to choose a new tsar. The
assembly selected Mikhail Romanov, a mere youth of sixteen but a member of
one of Moscow's
most distinguished families, as their sovereign. With the selection of Tsar
Mikhail, Russia's
Time of Troubles drew to a close. The Romanov dynasty would rule Russia
for the next three centuries, until its overthrow in the Revolution of 1917.
 
Mikhail Romanov (left)
and zemskii sobor of 1613 (right)
CHARLES E. ZIEGLER is Professor and Chair of the Political
Science Department at the University
of Louisville. He is
the author of Foreign Policy
and East Asia ( 1993), Environmental Policy in the USSR ( 1987), and dozens of scholarly
articles and book chapters.
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