The Icon and the Axe

For the second half of his reign, Muscovy was indeed a realm of fear, terrorized by the oprichnina, the hooded order of vigilantes which was then often designated by the Tatar-derived word for military district, t'ma, which was also the Russian word for darkness. The coming of this "darkness" to Russia and the flight of Kurbsky coincided with the fateful turn of Ivan's military interests from east to west. The unsuccessful twenty-five-year Li-vonian War that Ivan launched in 1558 was probably more responsible than any sudden madness or change of character in Ivan for the crisis of his last years. By moving for the Baltic, Ivan involved the pretentious Muscovite civilization in military and ideological conflict with the West, and in costly campaigns which shattered economic and political stability, and ultimately

led to the building of a new, Western type of capital on the shores of the Baltic The dramatic confrontation of the closely knit rehglous civilization of Muslovy with the diffuse and worldly West produced chaos and conflict that laLd from Ivan to Peter the Great and subsequently left its im-print on Russian culture.

2. The Coming of the West

Pew problems have disturbed Russians more than the nature of their relationship to the West. Concern abouMhisjguestion did not bej^jither_ in the salons of the imperial periodor in the mists of Slavic antiquity, but inMuscgvylrom thejfifteenthto theearlylSventeenth?????. This account win attempt to suggest both that there was an over-all psychological significance "forlvluscovy in the rediscoveryjjf thejfest during this eariy_mocie_rn period, and that there were a number of different "Wests" with which im-^ portant, contact was successively established. A consideration of how the West came to Russia may throw some light not only on Russian but on general European history.

The general psychological problem posed by confrontation with the West was in many ways more important than any particular political or economic problem. It was rather like the trauma of adolescence. Muscovy had become a kind of raw jouth: too big to remain in childhooTTlsur-roundings yet unable to adjust to the complex world outsideT Propelled by the very momentum of growth, Muscovy suddenly found itself thrust into a world it was hot equipped to understand. WesterrEui"ope~ifrthe fifteenth century was far more aggressive and articulate than it had been in Kievan times, and Russia far more self-conscious and provincial. The Muscovite reaction of irritability and self-assertion was in many ways that of a typical adolescent; the Western attitude of patronizing contempt, that of the unsympathetic adult. Unable to gain understanding either from others or from its own resources, Muscovy prolonged its sullen adolescence for more than a century. The conflicts that convulsed~Russia throughout the seventeenth century^ wjrejpart of~an awkward, compulsive search for identity in an essentially European world. The Russian response to the inescapable challenge of Western Europe was split-almost schizophrenic-and this division has to some extent lasted down to the present.

Novgorod

Much of the complex modern Russian feeling about the West begins with the conquest and humiliation of Novgorod by Moscow in the late fifteenth century. The destruction of the city's traditions and repopulation of most of its people shattered the most important natural link with the We^UoJ^e survivedJni theRussian north jsince ?????? times. At the same time, the absorption of Novgorod brought into Muscovy new ecclesiastical apologists for autocracy who had come to rely partly on Western Catholic ideas and techniques in an effort to combat the growth of Western secularism in that city. Here we see the faint beginnings of the psychologically disturbing pattern whereby even the xenophobic party is forced to rely on one 'IWest" in order to combat another. The ever more shrill and apocalyptical Muscovite insistence on the uniqueness and destiny of Russia thus flows to some extent from the psychological need to disguise from oneself the increasingly derivative and dependent nature of Russian culture.

Other contacts with the West besides those in Novgorod had, of course, survived the fall of Kiev, and might have helped make the rediscovery of the West less upsetting. Travelers to the Orient during the Mongol period like Marco Polo and the Franciscan missionaries to China passed through southern Russia; western Russian cities, such as Smolensk and Chernigov, remained channels of cultural and economic contact; and even in Great Russia, Western influence can be detected in the ecclesiastical art of Vladimir and Suzdal.1 The division between East and West was, moreover, far from precise. Techniques and ideas filtering in from Paleologian Byzantium and from the more advanced Southern and Western Slavs were often similar to those of the early Italian Renaissance with which these "Eastern" regions were in such intimate contact.2