Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

Meanwhile, warfare was posing ever-changing technical and human demands. The extension of Muscovite territory was drawing in new peoples, with their own cultures, religions, and polities: Muscovy was becoming Russia. This process required adjustments which were sometimes destabilizing. In 1648, the Dnieper Cossacks rebelled against the Polish crown and appealed to the Tsar to come to their aid. Their Hetman (leader) promised him ‘eternal loyalty’ in return for receiving supplies and the confirmation of their privileges. With their aid, Muscovy occupied Kiev and the whole of eastern Ukraine. This was a great triumph, but one achieved on the basis of a misunderstanding. The Cossacks considered their promise conditional on Muscovy continuing to fulfil its side of the agreement. The Tsar, however, regarded them as a service nobility which had pledged him eternal loyalty and subjection. During the following decades, Ukraine gradually became an integral part of the empire, yet one whose elites never wholly lost their yearning for greater freedom.

In preparing for war, Muscovy had both weaknesses and strengths. It had to borrow the latest military techniques from abroad, hence often imported foreign officers and mercenaries. Muscovy’s authority structure was relatively simple, however: it had few of the privileged intermediary institutions which obstructed military–fiscal reform in many European countries. As a result, once military innovations had been absorbed, they could be disseminated and corresponding service obligations enforced with a minimum of friction. The accompanying cultural transformation took much longer, though.

Territorial expansion likewise entailed advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, Russia’s relatively simple personalized political structure often made it easy to incorporate a new ethos: its elites became part of the empire’s branch network, and continued often to exercise their power in much the same way as previously. On the other hand, sometimes Russia’s economy and culture was at a more primitive level than those of newly absorbed peoples, who therefore chafed at Russia’s dominance. More fundamentally, Russia’s Orthodox identity faced challenges coping with the new, sometimes hostile, religions being incorporated in the empire.

The church schism

The first crisis which posed such challenges was the schism of the mid-17th century. Many viewed the Time of Troubles as God’s punishment for the church’s sins, and so a movement had grown up to correct and coordinate the conduct of the liturgy and to purify the morals of clergy and believers. Like their counterparts in several European countries, both Catholic and Protestant, they aimed to tidy up church services and to purge religious life of folk practices. The Zealots of Piety, as they were known, objected to drinking, dancing, bear-baiting, and to the profane and sometimes obscene performances of the strolling players (skomorokhi). They became influential at the court of Tsar Aleksei (r. 1645–76), and one of their number, Metropolitan Nikon of Novgorod, was elected Patriarch in 1652.

Nikon’s reforming motives differed, however, from those of his colleagues. Whereas they were concerned entirely with the Muscovite church, he had a broader agenda. Encouraged by the recent annexation of the Ukrainian Hetmanate, he aimed to turn the Moscow Patriarchate into an ecumenical patriarchate, an Eastern Rome, dominant over both the Tsar and the other Orthodox churches. To render the Muscovite church worthy of its grandiose mission, however, he wanted to be sure that its practices accorded with the rites of the ancient ecumenical church. His contact with Greek and Ukrainian churchmen had alerted him to discrepancies between their texts and rituals and those of Muscovy. Assuming that the Muscovite versions were recent errors, he assembled variant texts and scholars, including some from Greece, Ukraine, and even Italy, to make corrections.

As a result of their studies, he ordered a slight amendment in the spelling of ‘Jesus’ and instructed congregations to make a number of liturgical changes, including reciting three Alleluias after the Psalms instead of two and making the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of two. None of these changes had any doctrinal significance, but for largely illiterate congregations, every detail of the liturgy was sacrosanct. Moreover, Nikon violated custom by imposing the changes without convening a church council to endorse them.