The Icon and the Axe

The Swedish presence began to be felt in the 1590's with the Swedish sack and occupation of the northernmost Russian monastery, at Petsamo on the Arctic Ocean,115 and the movement of Swedish colonists and evangelists into the region of Lake Ladoga. The real influx began, however, with the Swedish efforts to curb the Polish advance into Russia during the Time of Troubles. Sigismund's Protestant uncle, Charles IX of Sweden, launched a campaign to stiffen the resistance of the new tsar Shuisky to Catholic Poland in the name of "all Christianity."116 In 1607 Charles sent the Russians the first treatise to appear in Russia on the burgeoning new European art of war;117 and „in the following year addressed the first of three unprecedented propaganda appeals directly to "all ranks of Russia" to rise up against "the Polish and Lithuanian dogs."118 In the ensuing months, the Swedes began a large-scale intervention that extended from Novgorod through Yaroslavl and involved the occupation of the venerable Orthodox monastery of Valaam on islands within Lake Ladoga and the issuance of anti-Catholic propaganda to the Solovetsk monastery and other centers in

the Russian north.',

?

.-? The Swedes were, indeed, the unsung heroes of the liberation of Mos-

^*l5ow from Polish occupation. Intervention against Poland in 1609 was followed by the dispatch to Muscovy of money and of a Dutch-trained general in the Swedish service, Christernus Some, who helped organize the army of Skopin-Shuisky for the critical campaigns of 1609-10, which expelled Sigismund from without and suppressed Cossack insurrection within.119 The non-noble militia of Minin and Pozharsky which drove the aristocratic Polish legions from Moscow for the second and final time in 1612-13 was in some respects a rudimentary version of the revolutionary new citizen type of army with which the Swedes were shortly to crush the aristocratic Hapsburg armies in the Thirty Years' War. At the high point of the Polish penetration in 1612, a zemsky sobor convened at Yaroslavl entered into negotia-

tions with Sweden for the Swedish crown prince to take over the vacant throne of Russia.120 At the same time, the English extended Russia an offer of protectorate status.121 The Dutch, who rivaled and soon supplanted'the English as" the main foreign commercial power in Russia, helped launch the first organ of systematic news dissemination inside Russia in 1621, the hand-written kuranty, and provided much of the material and personnel for the rapidly growing Russian army.122 Twice-in 1621-2 and 1643-5- the Danes nearly succeeded in foreclosing royal marriages with the insecure new house of Romanov.123

,4 The extent of Swedish influence in the early years of the Romanov

y'dynasty is still insufficiently appreciated. Not only did Sweden take away Russia's limited access to the eastern Baltic by the terms of the Treaty of Stolbovo in 1617, but Swedish hegemony was gradually extended down the coast beyond Riga and Swedish trading prerogatives maintained in Novgorod and other important Russian commercial centers. The Swedes were granted fishing rights on the White Lake, deep inside Russia, by the Monastery of St. Cyril in 1621, and there was considerable intercourse between Sweden and Solovetsk on the White Sea until a general crackdown

ion relationsjvith Lutherans was decreed in 1629 by_the_ Metropolitan of

V Novgorod^ for the entirety of northern Russia.

The reason for his concern was the energetic proselyting that was being conducted by the Swedes, who had founded a Slavic printing press in Stockholm in 1625. Orthodox priests living under Swedish rule were required to attend a Lutheran service at least once a month, and a Lutheran catechism was printed ??Russian in 1625 in the first of two editions. Another catechism was later printed in a Cyrillic version of the Finnish language for evarfgelizing the Finns and Karelians. In 1631 the energetic new governor general of Livonia, Johannes Skytte, founded a school on the future site of St. Petersburg that included the Russian language in its curriculum. In 1632 a Lutheran University was founded at Tartu (Dorpat, Derpt, Yur'ev) in Esthonia, in the place of a former Jesuit academy.124 In 1640 a higher academy was founded in Turku (Abo), the chief port and capital of Swedish Finland (whose name may derive from the Russian "trade," torg). During 1633-4 a Lutheran over-consistory was established in Livonia with six under-consistories and a substantial program of public instruction. The. university at Tartu and the academy at Kiev-both founded in 1632 by non-Russians with an essentially Latin curriculum- wereTin a sense, the first Russian institutions of higher education, founded more than a century before the University of Moscow in 1755. The conquest of Kiev from the Poles in 1667 and Tartu from the Swedes m 1704 were, thus, events of cultural as well as political importance.