The Icon and the Axe

Any chance that Russia might have had under Boris for peaceful evolution toward the form of limited monarchy prevalent in the countries he most admired, England and Denmark, was, however, a fleeting one at best. For he was soon overtaken with a series of crises even more profound than those broughT~en Russia by Ivan. In the last three years of Boris' reign, his realm was struck with a famine that may have killed as much as one third of his subjects and with a wild growth of brigandage and peasant unrest, At the same time his daughter's prospective Danish bridegroom suddenly died in Moscow, and all but two of his thirty selected student-leaders elected to remain in the West.95 -~* Death must have come almost as a relief to Boris in 1605; but it only intensified the suffering of a shaken nation which proved unable to unite behind a successor for fifteen years. This chaotic interregnum produced such a profound crisis in Muscovy that the name long given to it, "Time of Troubles," has become a general historical term for a period of decisive trial and partial disintegration that precedes and precipitates the building of great empires.96 This original "Time of Troubles" (Smutnoe vremia) was just such an ordeal for insular Muscovy. A rapid series of blows stunned it and then propelled it half-unwittingly into a three-cornered struggle with Poland and Sweden for control of Eastern Europe. As it summoned up the strength to defeat Poland in the First Northern War of 1654-67 and Sweden in the Second or Great Northern War of 1701-21, Russia was transformed into a continental empire and the dominant power in Eastern Europe.

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The Religious Wars

One of the great misfortunes of Russian history is that Russia entered the mainstream of European development at a time of unprece-

dented division and degradation in Western Christendom. Having missed, out on the more positive and creative stages of European culture-the rediscovery of classical logic in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, of classical beauty in the fourteenth and fifteenth, and the religious reforms of the sixteenth-Russia was suddenly drawn into the destructive final stages of the European religious wars in the early seventeenth.

By the late sixteenth century, the genuine concern for religious reform and renewal which had precipitated the many-sided debates between Protestant and Catholic Europe had been largely sublimated into a continent-wide civil war. All of Europe was succumbing to the dynamics of a "military revolution" that weighed down each state with vast, self-perpetuating armies subject to ever-tightening discipline, more deadly weapons, and more fluid tactics. By harnessing ideological propaganda and psychological warfare to military objectives and by silencing in the name of raison d'etat "the last remaining qualms as to the religious and ethical legitimacy of war,"97 Europe in the early seventeenth century was savoring its first anticipatory taste of total war. The religious wars were late in coming to Eastern Europe. But the form they assumed at the turn of the sixteenth century was that of a particularly bitter contest between Catholic -^LgS Poland and Lutheran Sweden. When both parties moved into Russia during/-%" the Time of Troubles, Orthodox Muscovy was also drawn in under conditions which permanently darkened the Russian image of the West.

Muscovy had been living in political uncertainty and ideological confusion ever since the late years of Ivan Jhe-Terribje's^ reign. Irjejiad done much to break the sense of continuity with _a sacred past and the internal solidarity^ between sovereign, church, and family on which Muscovite civilization was based. The early seventeenth century brought the deeper shock of military defeat aficT economic spoliation. Twice-in 1605 and 1616-the Poles overran and dominated Moscow; as late as 1618 they lay siege to it ancfneld lands far to the east. To combat the powerful Poles, Muscovy deepened its dependence on the Swedes, who in turn helped themselves to Novgorod and other Russian regions. To lessen dependence on the Swedes, Russia turned to the more distant "GerTnUfis7rp^articularly;the English and the Dufch7who extracted their reward in lucrative economic concessions.

The confrontation with Poland lepresented the first frontal conflict of *»*"

ideas with the West. This powerful Western neighbor represented almost the

* complete cultural antithesis of Muscovy. The Polish-Lithuanian union was a

\ loose republic rather than a monolithic autocracy. Its cosmopolitan popula-

i\ tion included not only Polish Catholics but Orthodox believers from

/ Moldavia and White Russia and large, self-contained communities of

Calvinists, Socinians, and Jews. In striking contrast to the mystical piety and