The Icon and the Axe

Muscovite contact with the West changed decisively during Ivan IV's reign from indirect and episodic dealings with the Catholic "Latins" to \ a direct and sustained confrontation with the Protestant "Germans." It is doubly ironic that the pojjjLaf no return in opening up Russia to Western influenceioccurred under this mSst ostensibly xenophobic arid traditionalist of tsarst_and???? the "West" into7wnose hands he unconsciously committed Russia wasffiaUrf the" Protestant innoy||ors^vriom he professed to hate even moreJJmn_Cathorics. It was Ivan who suggested that Luther's name was related to the word liuty ("ferocious"); and that the Russian word for Prqjestant preacher (kaznodei) was really a form of koznodei ("intriguer").83

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i

tet it was Ivan who began the large-scale contacts with the NorW^European i Protestant nations, which profoundly influenced Russian thought from the \ mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century.

Eve!i~airTvah-?weprffie icons and banners of Muscovy past Kazan

down the Volga to the Caspian Sea in the early 1550's, he granted ex

tensive extra-territorial rights and economic concessions to England in the

White Sea port of Archangel far to the north. The English became Ivan's

most eager collaborator in opening up the lucrative Volga trade route to the

Orient. The Danes simultaneously jmpplied technologists ranging from key

artilbristsTrTT£ebattle_jo^^to appear in

Muscovy (wJia_^as_iiL4act a disguised Lutheranjnissionary). The best mercenaries for Ivan's ????? expanding army came largely from the Baltic German regions that were among the first to go over to Protestantism. Other Germans gained places in the new service nobility through

membership in the oprichnina; and the entire idea of a uniformed order of warrior-monks may well have been borrowed from the Teutonic and Livonian orders with which Muscovy had such long and intimate contact. In any event, Ivan's organization of this anti-traditional order of hooded vigilantes followed his turn from east to west, and coincided with his decision to increase the intensity of the Livonian War. Baltic G_exrnans_had_ already moved in large numbers to Muscovy during the early, victorious years of the war, as prisoners or as dispossessed men in search of employment. In the 1560's and 1570's begarrthe first systematic organization four miles southeast of Moscow of the foreign quarter--then called the "lower city ^mmuneT'but soon to be known as the "German suburb": nemetskaia sloboda7T^TFrmriemisy, which was applied to the new influx of foreigners, had been used as early as the tenth "century84 and carried the pejorative mein1ng~of "duinF ones." Although usage often varied in Muscovy, nemtsy became generally used as a blanket term for all the Germanic, Protestant peoples of Northern Europe-irishortTTor any Western European who was not a "Latin." Other "German" settlements soon appeared (often complete with "Saxon" or "officers' " churches) in key settlements along the fast-growing Volga trade route: Nizhny Novgorod, Vologda, and Kostroma. By the early 1590's, Western Protestants had settled as far east as Tobol'sk in Siberia, and the Orthodox Metropolitan of Kazan was complaining that Tatars as well as Russians were going over to Lutheranism.85

The pressures for conformity with local customs were, however, strong in Mus'coyy; and few enduring traces remained of these early Protestant penetrations. More important than direct conversions to foreign ways and beliefs- at the hands of assimilated Baltic and Saxon Germans was the increasing Russian dependence on the more distant "Germans" from EngTaHfl, Denmark, Holland, and the westerly German ports of Liibeck and Hamburg. By invading Livonia and involving Russia in a protracted struggle with neighboring Poland and Sweden, Ivan IV compelled Russia to look for allies on the other side of its immediate enemies; and these industrious and enterprising Protestant powers were able to provide trained personnel and military equipment in return for raw materials and rights for transit and trade. Although Russian alliances shifted frequently in line with the complex diplomacy of the age, friendship with these vigorous Protestant principalities of Northwest Europe remame3"~relativ©ly constant from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. This alignment was a function of the same "law of opposite boundaries" (Gesetz der Gegengrenzlichkeit) which had earlier caused Ivan III (and Ivan IV) to look with a friendly eye at the Holy Roman Empire for support against Poland-Lithuania, and was later to transfer Russian attention from the Germans to the French in the

mid-eighteenth century, when the Germans had xeplaced the Poles and Swedes as the principal rivals toTCussia in Eastern Europe.