The Icon and the Axe

Along with their violence, these provincials brought the raw strength which transformed Muscovy into a great modern state. They also brought from their harsh environment a new religious intensity and a special reverence for the quality known as blagochestie. Usually translated as "piety," this term has a fuller, and thus more accurate, sound to the modem ear when translated as "ardent loyalty." Blago was the Church Slavonic word for "good," carrying with it the meaning of both "blessing" and "welfare"; chestie was the word for "honor," "respect," "directness," and "celebration." All of these many-shaded meanings entered into the ardent devotion of the average Muscovite. Blagochestie meant both faith and faithfulness, and the adjectival form was inseparably attached to the word "tsar" in Muscovy. Ivan's main accusation against Kurbsky was that, for the sake of "self-love and temporal glory," Kurbsky had "trampled down blagochestie"

and "cast blagochestie out of his soul."6 The chroniclers saw in the sufferings of the seventeenth century the vengeful hand of God calling his people to repentance. Like Old Testament prophets, Muscovite revivalists repeatedly called not just for belief in a dogma or membership in a church but for a life of renewed dedication. This was a society ruled by custom rather than calculation. As social and economic changes made life more complex, Muscovites increasingly sought refuge in the simple call for devotion to that which had been. If men did not cling to old forms, they tended to become uncritical imitators of foreign ways. There was no real middle ground between the calculating worldliness of khitrost' and the complete traditionalism of blagochestie.

Khitrost' was clearly the wave of the future; and its development, the legitimate preoccupation of military and political historians. Western measurement slowly imposed itself on the dreamlike imprecision of the Eastern Slavs. A gigantic, English-built clock was placed over the "gate of the Savior" {Spasskaia vorota) of the rebuilt Moscow Kremlin in 1625; and shortly thereafter weathervanes began to appear atop the crosses of Muscovite churches. Reasonably accurate military maps and plans were first drawn up in Muscovy in the course of preparing for the 1632-4 war with Poland; and the first large-scale native production of armaments began at about the same time within the rebuilt armory of the Kremlin and the new, Dutch-built foundry at Tula.7 Clearly, Russia was to be dependent for national greatness on "The Skill [Khitrost'] of Armed Men"-to cite the title of its first military manual of 1647. The reign of Peter the Great represents the culmination of the slow transformation of Russia through Northern European technology into a disciplined, secular state.

For the historian of culture, however, the real drama of the seventeenth century follows from the determination of many Russians to remain- through all the changes and challenges of the age-blagochestivye: ardently loyal to a sacred past. The heroism and the violence of their effort drove schism deep into Russian society and helped prevent Russia from harmoniously adjusting to modernization. The childhood of Russian culture had been too stern and the first contacts with the West too disturbing to permit the peaceful acceptance of the sophisticated adult world of Western liurope.

To seventeenth-century Russia the humiliation of the Time of Troubles demonstrated not the backwardness of its institutions but the jealousy of its God. The overt and massive Westernization of Boris Godunov and Dmitry was discarded and the belief in God's special concern for Russia intensified. While Western techniques continued to pour into Russia throughout the seventeenth century, Western ideas and beliefs were bitterly

resisted. Ordinary Russians saw Muscovy as the suffering servant of God and looked to the monasteries for the righteous remnant.

The historical writings of the early seventeenth century were filled with introspective lamentations and revivalist exhortations, which shattered the dignity of the chronicling tradition without pointing the way toward serious social analysis. Abraham Palitsyn of the Monastery of St. Sergius bemoaned the "senseless silence of all the world"8 in the face of Russian humiliation; Ivan Timofeev of Novgorod decried the tendency to "tear ourselves away from our bonds of love toward one another . . . some looking to the East, others to the West":9 and the semi-official "new chronicler" of the Romanovs bequeathed to Pushkin and Musorgsky their moralistic view that the troubles of Russia were divine retribution for Boris' alleged murder of the infant Dmitry.10