The Icon and the Axe

As in so much baroque art, the vista was based on illusion: on a nervous desire to see things that cannot be. The realities of the universal war in Eastern Europe were, if anything, even more harsh and terrible than in the Civil War in England or the Thirty Years' War in Germany. Historians of these eastern regions have never been able to settle on neutral descriptive labels for the periods of particular horror and devastation which successively visited their various peoples. Russians still speak in anguish and confusion of a "Time of Troubles"; Poles and Ukrainians of a "Deluge"; Eastern European Jews of "The Deep Mire"; and Swedes and Finns of "the great hate."6

Military blows from without were accompanied by political and economic contractions within as the tsars extended centralized bureaucratic power throughout their domain and imposed crushing burdens on the peasantry. After seeming to be at the height of their authority, the loose representative assemblies of Eastern Europe (the Russian zemsky sobor, the Swedish riksdag, the Polish sejm, the Jewish Council of the Four Lands, and the Prussian Stdnde)-all suddenly collapsed or lost effective power in the late seventeenth century. New quasi-military forms of discipline were imposed on the agrarian society of Eastern Europe, as "economic dualism" split early modern Europe into an increasingly entrepreneurial and dynamic West and an enserfed and static East.'

Nowhere were the convulsions more harrowing than in seventeenth-century Russia. Massive shifts in population and changes in the texture of society took place with bewildering speed.8 Thousands of foreigners flooded

into Russia; Russians themselves pushed on to the Pacific; cities staged flash rebellions; the peasantry exploded in violence; Cossack and mercenary soldiers drifted away from battle into disorganized raids and massacres. It seems not excessive to estimate that twice during the seventeenth century -in the early years of the Time of Troubles and of the First Northern War respectively--a third of the population of Great Russia perished from the interrelated ravages of war, plague, and famine.9 By the 1660's, an English doctor resident at the tsar's court wrote that the ratio of women to men was 10:1 in the region around Moscow; and Russian sources spoke of cannibalism at the front and wolves at the rear-4,000 of them allegedly invading Smolensk in the bitter winter of 1660.10

Unable to understand, let alone deal with, the changes taking place about them, Russians resorted to violence and clung desperately to forms and distinctions that had already lost their meaning. Russia's first printed law code, the Ulozhenie of 1649, was elaborately and rigidly hierarchical and gave legal sanction to violence by explicitly denying the peasantry any escape from their serfdom and by prescribing corporal-even capital- punishment for a wide variety of minor offenses. The knout alone is mentioned 141 times.11 The seventeenth century was a period when old answers were inadequate, but new ones had not yet been found to take their place. The inevitable waning of old Muscovy could well be described under the first three chapter headings of Johann Huizenga's classic Waning of the Middle Ages: "The Violent Tenor of Life," "Pessimism and the Ideal of the Sublime Life," and "The Hierarchical Conception of Society."

Nor did the West gain much in understanding despite the increasing numbers of its soldiers, doctors, and technicians in Moscow-and of Russian emissaries abroad. The latter insulted everyone by repeatedly demanding complete and exact recitation of the Tsar's lengthy title, while omnipresent and odoriferous bodyguards cut the leather out of palace chairs for shoes and left excremental deposits on walls and floors. Western visitors outdid one another with tales of Russian filth, servility, and disorder; and there were enough genuinely comic scenes to enshrine fatefully among Western observers an anecdotal rather than an analytic approach to Russia. A Dutch doctor who brought a flute and skeleton with him to Moscow was nearly lynched by a passing mob for attempting to conjure up the dead;12 and an English doctor was executed during the First Northern War when a mealtime request for Cream of Tartar was thought to indicate sympathy for the Crimean Tatars.13 Most Western writers continued to identify Russians with Tatars rather than other Slavs throughout the seventeenth century. Even in Slavic Prague, a book published in 1622 grouped Russia with Peru and Arabia in a list of particularly bizarre and exotic civilizations;14 and

the year before in relatively nearby and well-informed Uppsala a thesis was defended on the subject "Are the Russians Christians?"15