Russia

B

1

The Expansion of Muscovy

Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, and the Russian Orthodox Church thereafter considered Moscow the “third Rome”, successor to Constantinople and the centre of Christian Orthodoxy. The title of the Metropolitan of Kiev was changed to “the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia”, and the Church came under the authority of the Grand Prince, further enhancing the power of Muscovy. The two-headed eagle of Byzantium was incorporated into the Muscovite arms and regarded as the symbol of Holy Russia. A large factor in this investiture of Moscow as a holy, imperial city was the marriage in 1472 of Grand Prince Ivan III Vasilyevich to Zoë (Sophia), niece of the last Byzantine emperor. The Grand Prince began to regard himself as the Tsar (derived from “caesar”), the autocratic sovereign, rather than the head of the nobility. He incorporated into Muscovy the states of Novgorod in 1478 and Tver in 1485. In 1480, taking advantage of strife among the Mongols which had divided the Golden Horde into several separate khanates, he refused to pay the annual tribute. The Mongols were too disorganized to enforce payment, and the date is regarded as the end of Tatar domination. Once free of Tatar rule, Ivan turned his attention to the western part of former Kievan Rus, then controlled by Lithuania and Poland. He invaded Lithuanian territory in 1492 and 1500; at the end of hostilities in 1503 Moscow controlled many of the borderlands. During his long reign (1462-1505) Ivan, who became known as “the Great” (Veliky), also rebuilt Moscow; the Uspensky (Assumption) and Blagoveshchensky (Annunciation) cathedrals in the Kremlin date from this period, as do the Granovitaya (Palace of Facets) and most of the Kremlin walls and towers. Ivan’s son and successor, Basil III Ivanovich (1505-1533), followed his father’s aggressive policy of expansion to the west; he annexed Pskov in 1510, captured Smolensk in 1514, and absorbed the nominally independent grand duchy of Ryazan in 1521. Russian policy thus became, externally, the continued territorial aggrandizement of Muscovy and, internally, the formalization of autocratic rule with concomitant social change.

Ivan IV Vasilyevich (1547-1584), called The Terrible or Awesome, became ruler in 1533 at the age of three, and during his long minority the state was continually torn by a struggle for dominance among the boyar, or noble, class. In 1547 Ivan assumed the throne and became the first Muscovite Grand Prince to be formally crowned as Tsar; in the same year he married Anastasia Romanovna, a member of the Romanov family. Ivan opposed the old nobility because of the strife that had disrupted his childhood, and in 1549 he called the first Zemsky Sobor, an irregular national assembly, representing all classes of Russian society except the peasants. His aim was to consolidate his autocratic position by weakening the power of the boyars and the Church. In December 1564, Ivan left Moscow and announced that he had abdicated; the following January he agreed to resume the throne after receiving absolute powers. Returning to Moscow, he seized half of Muscovy as his personal property. This territory, called the oprichnina, was a separate administrative unit ruled directly by the Tsar. Ivan distributed it among his supporters as rewards for military and personal service, thereby establishing a new service corps called oprichniki. In return for the land, the oprichniki acted as Ivan’s personal police force. When the boyars, resentful of their diminishing power, plotted against him, Ivan resorted to torture, exile, and execution to repress them.

In 1552 Muscovite armies conquered and annexed the Tatar kingdom of Kazan; Astrakhan, another Mongol stronghold, became a Russian territory in 1556. Ivan ordered the construction of St Basil’s Cathedral to commemorate these victories. The pacification of the southern and eastern frontiers opened the eastern territories to Russian colonization. Muscovy borderlands were increasingly settled by warlike mercenaries known as Cossacks, many of them runaway peasants. They were concentrated particularly in the Don River basin and around the lower Volga. Some Cossacks went farther north, and in 1581 a Cossack hetman (leader) Yermak Timofeyevich led an expedition east across the Ural Mountains for the Stroganov family, one of the wealthiest families in Russia, which had an exclusive licence to operate factories in the Urals and beyond. Ivan warned Yermak against stirring up the inhabitants of the area but forgave him when, between 1581 and 1583, he brought most of the Ob’ River basin under Russian rule, thus beginning the conquest of Siberia. It was Ivan who agreed to allow the Cossacks to keep runaway peasants, and to keep their landholdings and a semblance of political autonomy in return for them becoming his frontier guards, and agreeing “to do battle for the Crown” whenever required. Thus the Cossacks became free landholders who could, in a matter of hours, assemble themselves into fully armed cavalry units to fight the tsar’s enemies—at home or abroad. In the west, Ivan led his forces to the Baltic Sea and between 1558 and 1583 fought the Livonian War against Poland and Sweden for possession of the Baltic. As a result of his eventual defeat Russia lost her far northern territories and access to the Baltic. During his reign Ivan concluded several trade treaties with England. He also imported many foreign technical and professional experts, a practice continued throughout the history of the Russian monarchy. Although Ivan’s name is perpetuated as The Terrible for the savage cruelty and excesses of his later reign, he founded a strong Russian state and set the pattern for supreme tsarist rule.

Shortly before his death Ivan had killed his eldest son and heir (also Ivan) in a fit of rage. His next son, Fyodor I, was sickly and feeble-minded, and during his reign (1584-1598) he was dominated by his brother-in-law, the powerful boyar Boris Godunov, who had been elected Regent. Directed by Boris, the Russian state continued to increase in wealth and prestige. The discontent of the peasants was augmented in 1597, however, by a law binding the serfs to the soil and legalizing serfdom. In 1598, Fyodor died childless, ending the House of Rurik; Ivan’s third son, Dmitry Ivanovich, had died in suspicious circumstances in 1591. Boris was elected Tsar by a Zemsky Sobor (National Assembly). Although he ruled with ability, his hold on the throne was uneasy because of the widely held belief that he had murdered Dmitry. The mystery surrounding Dmitry’s death made possible the appearance of pretenders to his name and ranks, inaugurating a period of unrest and revolt that was known as the Smutnoye Vremya (Time of Troubles).

B

2

Time of Troubles

In 1604 a pretender to the throne calling himself Dmitry I, and known as the False Dmitry, gained Polish and Lithuanian support, as well as the backing of various discontented boyars. Three months after the death of Boris in 1605, Dmitry I entered Moscow at the head of a Polish army and was crowned Tsar; he was murdered the following year. The boyars then elevated Prince Basil Shuysky to the throne. This move was opposed by the Cossacks and rebellious peasants, who chafed under oppressive serf laws and feared the severity of boyar rule. They rose in southern Russia and joined a second pretender, Dmitry II, who was already advancing on Moscow. At the same time King Sigismund III of Poland, himself desirous of the Russian throne, invaded from the west, and Sweden, at the request of Basil, sent armed support for the boyar tsar. After a long period of fighting and intrigue Basil was deposed in 1610, and the throne was left vacant. Some boyars advanced the candidacy of Władisław, the son of Sigismund, and a Polish army entered Moscow, setting itself up as the Russian authority. The entire country then fell into a state of anarchy.

The situation was at last resolved by the initiative of Kuzma Minin, a Nizhniy Novgorod butcher, who succeeded in raising a national army in north-east Russia. Under Prince Dmitry Mikhailovich Pozharsky, who gained the help of some Cossacks, this army marched on Moscow and in 1612 expelled the Poles. In 1613 a Zemsky Sobor, representing the chief towns and the Church, elected Michael Fedorovich Romanov, member of an influential boyar family and great-nephew of Anastasia Romanovna, as Tsar. Michael thus founded the House of Romanov that would rule Russia for the next 300 years.

B

3

Romanov Rule

Although social discontent had been one of the primary characteristics of the period known as the Time of Troubles, no real reforms ensued. The greatest effects of the chaotic period were the irreparable ruin of the old boyar nobility and the rise in power of the small landed nobility.

Under the first two Romanovs, Michael Fedorovich (1613-1645) and his son, Alexis I (1645-1676), new laws gave the noble landlords more power over serfs. A law code (Ulozhenie) adopted in 1649 only increased the number of refugee serfs, many of whom fled to the Cossack settlements along the lower Volga, Dnepr, and Don rivers. In 1670, under the leadership of a Don Cossack hetman, Stenka (Stephen) Razin, a great agrarian revolt began in south-eastern Russia; it was quelled with great difficulty by the Tsar’s troops a year later. This first major peasant revolt set the pattern for later uprisings by the serfs, who directed their anger at the landed nobility who enslaved them, rather than at the Tsar.

Russia, meanwhile, was advancing to the status of a European power, and in the urban centres influences from western Europe were at last penetrating the isolation caused by the Mongol invasion. Reform in the traditional viewpoints and practices of Moscow was necessary to form a basis for cultural reconciliation with its former territories, regained against Poland and Lithuania. In 1654 the Cossacks of Ukraine, rebelling against Polish rule, offered their allegiance to Tsar Alexis. In the resulting war with Poland (1654-1667), Russia was victorious, regaining Smolensk (lost in 1611) as well as the eastern Ukraine, including Kiev. The reincorporation of Ukraine hastened reforms in the rituals of the Russian Church. Ukraine was a metropolitan district of the patriarchate of Constantinople and, in order to integrate western Russia with Moscow, the Ukrainian Church had to be induced to accept the Moscow patriarch. The Russian religious leader Nikon, who had become patriarch of Russia in 1652, introduced reforms into the Russian rituals that caused a great schism (1654) in the Orthodox Church, as many of the Russian clergy and laity refused to abandon their centuries-old rituals. At a Church council in 1667 the traditionalist dissenters, who were called the Old Believers, or Raskolniki, were declared schismatics. Thus, millions of Old Believers found themselves excluded from full participation in Russian life. Many were tortured or hanged; many more fled to the northern woods to escape persecution.

Alexis was succeeded by his eldest son, Fyodor III in 1676; during his short rule, Russia successfully fought its first war against the Ottoman Empire. On Fyodor’s death in 1682 there was a new struggle for the throne. His half-brother, Peter the Great, was named Tsar (Peter I), but Peter’s older half-sister, Sophia Alekseyevna, succeeded in having her own brother, the weak-minded Ivan V, declared Senior Co-Ruler, with herself as Regent. After an attempt to deprive Peter of his right to the throne and, this failing, to assassinate both him and his mother, Sophia was forced to resign all power in 1689.

C

The Russian Empire

The accession of Peter I to the tsardom in 1682 marked the beginning of a period during which Russia became a major European power. With an intense curiosity, he opened Russia to the West and became the first tsar to travel extensively outside the country, bringing back with him many new ideas.

C

1

Peter the Great

Peter was greatly attracted by the culture of Western Europe, particularly that of Prussia, and to the naval technology of England. In 1695 he initiated the construction of the Russian navy. The following year, the ships were used to great effect against the Turks in the Sea of Azov, at the mouth of the Don, giving Russia an outlet to the Black Sea. In 1697 Peter led a technical and diplomatic mission to England, France, and Germany; he was absent from Russia for 18 months, during which time he worked as a shipbuilder in the Netherlands. Peter attempted, by decrees and forced reforms, to transform the traditional society of Moscow into a Western one and to make Russia a major power in Europe. He decreed the reorganization of the Russian army and navy, government, and society along Western lines. By direct orders, he encouraged the development of Russian industry and trade, technical training, education, and the sciences, instituting the first census and state postal service. He also tolerated new religions, allowing the practices of Catholics, Lutherans, and Protestants, and expressed approval of Galileo’s then-heretical theories about the solar system. During his reign, Peter also began a series of great territorial acquisitions. His greatest military campaigns were in the west, and his principal conflict, the Great Northern War (1700-1721), was with the strongest Baltic power of the time, Sweden. Control of the Baltic Sea was necessary for the creation of a great navy and the expansion of Russian foreign trade. Peter’s forces were badly defeated by the Swedes at Narva (now in Estonia) in 1700. The Swedes, however, did not pursue the Russians, thus enabling Peter to reorganize his forces and attack Swedish bases in Livonia. In 1703 he began the construction, at the cost of many lives (100,000 workers died in the first year alone) and under difficult working conditions, of his new and resplendent capital city of St Petersburg. Built on marshland territory taken from Sweden, St Petersburg within a decade was a city of 35,000 stone buildings (builders of traditional Russian wooden buildings risked banishment), many designed by well-known foreign architects. In 1714 it became Russia’s capital, when the government moved there from Moscow. By the time of Peter’s death in 1725, the city had more than 75,000 inhabitants. During the next 150 years, especially during the reign of Catherine the Great, St Petersburg was the focus of Russia’s golden age, attracting writers, dancers, artists, composers, and scientists.

The Russian army crushed the Swedes at Poltava, in 1709, and Russia gained supremacy in the Baltic. By the terms of the Treaty of Nystad (August 30, 1721), Russia acquired Livonia, Estonia, Ingria, part of Karelia, and several Baltic islands. With Russian dominance in northern Europe, the Byzantine conception of the tsar was exchanged for the Latin conception and title of Emperor; when Peter was formally proclaimed Emperor in 1721, the Muscovite state became the Russian Empire.