The Icon and the Axe

With the accession to the patriarchate of the energetic Joseph in 1642 (and of the pious Alexis to the throne in 1645) a large-scale program of religious instruction began. The central weapon in this campaign was the patriarchal printing press-the only one in Moscow-which turned out in the first seven years of Alexis' reign (the last seven of Joseph's patriarchate) nearly ten thousand copies of the basic alphabet book in three editions, eight printings of the book of hours, and nine of the psalter.22

The key figure in this printing program was Ivan Nasedka, a well-educated and widely traveled priest whose Deposition against the Lutherans, written in 1644, was influential in blocking the proposed marriage of Tsar Michael's daughter to the Danish crown prince.23 Nasedka, whose anxiety about the growth of Protestant influences in Russia dated from his first trip as informal emissary to Denmark in 1621, found ready support for his theological position from the pupils of Mogila, who had taken the lead in combating the drift toward Protestantism elsewhere in the Orthodox world.

Thus, in the mid-forties there began a steady and increasing flow of Ukrainian priests to Moscow. These priests brought with them an emotional opposition to Catholicism and a doctrinal antipathy to Protestantism. Before the end of Joseph's patriarchate in 1652, the Ukrainian priests trained by Mogila had set up in Moscow two centers of translation and theological instruction: that of Fedor Rtishchev in the Monastery of St. Andrew and that of Epiphanius Slavinetsky in the Monastery of the Miracles.24

The times, however, were hardly favorable for tranquil intellectual activity. In 1648 war and revolution broke out in the east with unprecedented fury. Anti-Polish and anti-Jewish violence in the Ukraine and White Russia was accompanied by an uprising in Moscow itself. The foreign quarter was sacked and leading government administrators literally torn to pieces. Like the plague epidemic that accompanied a second wave of bloodshed in 1653-4, urban violence spread contagiously from city to city. The restive commercial centers of Novgorod and Pskov predictably sought to canalize the general violence into specific demands for greater freedom from central control in the last wave of uprisings in 1650. Basically, however, it was a formless series of rebellions. Bewildered Western observers noted only the blood-lust of the mob combined with a certain hatred of foreigners and reverence for the Church. When one prisoner of the mob in

Kursk rebuked a hooded cleric who had joined his tormentors by crying "Off with your hood!" the horde screamed back with redoubled fury, "Off with your head!"25

The fear of a new "Time of Troubles" loomed up before the young Tsar. His own infant son had just died; he was afraid of a new Tatar invasion, and he initially hesitated to support the Cossack insurrectionists, apparently fearing that "the rebellion of the Cossacks and peasants of Russia might spill over into his own country, where sparks had already appeared from the fire sweeping over Poland."26 There was even a pretender waiting in the wings: a thief, arsonist, and sexual pervert, Timothy Ankudi-nov, who had attracted some interest in both Poland and Rome for his claim to be the son of Shuisky and true heir to the Russian throne.27

Faced with this threat of disintegration, Alexis rallied support by summoning one zemsky sobor of 1648-9 to draw up, approve, and print a uniform national law code, and another in 1650 to assure the pacification and reabsorption of rebellious Novgorod and Pskov. For all its deference to hierarchy and tradition, the law code of 1649 represented an important stage in the rationalization and secularization of Russian culture. The power of the annotated sovereign was fully invested in his appointed bureaucrats to punish "without any mercy" almost anyone challenging the "sovereign honor" of the "Muscovite state." The monasteries were hurt economically by the outlawing of any new tax-exempt pledging of wealth and property, and politically by the creation of a government bureau to administer their affairs.

The monopoly of Church Slavonic as the written language of Muscovite culture was also broken by the large-scale reprinting and dissemination of a law code written in a language close to the contemporary vernacular. This Ulozhenie remained the basic code of the land until 1833, and played a role in the development of the modern Russian language that has been compared with that of Luther's Bible in the making of modern German. Indeed, the language of the Ulozhenie was in some ways "closer to the contemporary Russian literary and conversational language than the language not only of Karamzin, but of Pushkin."28