The Icon and the Axe

the Time of Troubles came to be thought of as a period of suffering for the

sins of previous tsars and of foreboding for tsars yet to come. The name of

Marina Mnishek, Dmitry's Polish wife, became a synonym for "witch" and

"crow": the Polish mazurka-allegedly danced at their wedding reception

in the Kremlin-became a leitmotiv for "decadent foreigner" in Glinka's

Life for the Tsar and later musical compositions. The anti-Polish and anti-

"Catholic tone of almost all subsequent Russian writing about this period

faithfully reflects a central, fateful fact: that Muscovy achieved unity after

the~Tfoubles of the early seventeenth century primarily through xeno-

, phobia, particularly toward the Poles.

Operatic romanticism about the national levee en masse against the Polish invader has, however, too long obscured the fact that the price of Russian^ictory was increased dependence on Protestant Europe. The subtle stream "of Protestant influence flowed in from three different sources: beleaguered Protestants in nearby Catholic countries, militant Sweden, and the more distant and commercially oriented "Germans" (England, Holland, Denmark, Hamburg, and so on).

The diaspora of the once-flourishing Protestants of Poland (and of many in Hungary, Bohemia, and Transylvania) remains a relatively obscure chapter in the complex confessional politics of Eastern Europe. It is fairly clear that the Counter Reformation zeal of the Jesuits combined with princely fears of political disintegration and social change to permit an aggressive reassertion of Catholic power throughout East Central Europe in the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century. But it seems implausible to assume that these relatively extreme communities of Calvinists, Czech brethren, and Socinians simply vanished after military defeat and passively accepted Catholicism. To be sure, many regions were totally exhausted by the end of the fighting, and had no alternative to capitulation. But in eastern Poland, where Protestantism had some of its strongest supporters and the power of the Counter Reformation had come relatively late, the anti-Catholic cause was strengthened by the Orthodox community of White Russia ??????? proximity of Orthodox Muscovy. Forced Catholicization tended to make defensive allies of the large Protestant and Orthodox minorities under Polish rule. It seems probable that the Orthodox community

absorbed some of the personnel as well as the organizational and polemic techniques of the Protestants as they were hounded into oblivion.^Thus, when the anti-Catholic Orthodox clergy of White Russia and the Ukraine eventually turned to Muscovy for protection against the dnrushing Counter Reformation^ they~brought with them elements" of~a fading Polish Protestantism as well as a resurgent Slavic Orthodoxy.

The formation of the Uniat Church accelerated this chain of developments by securing the allegiance to Rome of most of the Orthodox hierarchy in the Polish kingdom. The union with Rome was not accepted so readily at the lower levels of the hierarchy or among local lay leaders anxious to maintain their historic liberties and autonomy. In organizing for their resistance to Catholicization, Orthodox communities leaned increasingly on regional brotherhoods, which took on a Protestant tinge. Their origins, though still obscure, appear to lie in contact with the neighboring Czech dissenters who had also helped steer Polish Protestants into the closely knit "brotherhood" form of organization.105 The initial strength of the Orthodox brotherhoods was concentrated in many of the same semi-independent cities in eastern Poland, where Polish Protestants had made their most spectacular gains a half century earlier. The anti-hierarchical bias, close communal discipline, and emphasis on a program of religious printing and education in the vernacular among the Orthodox brotherhoods are reminiscent of both Hussite and Calvinist practice.