Israel and driven to death the generals given to you by God?'99 Far from aligning himself with the Poles and Lithuanians, Kurbsky considers his foreign residence as temporary and seeks to justify himself in terms of Ivan's favorite Old Testament figures: 'Consider, ? Tsar, how
even David was compelled by Saul's persecution to wage war on the land of Israel together with a pagan king.'100 But eloquent pleadings from abroad only served to convince the leader in the Kremlin that his former lieutenant was secretly unsure of his position. Ivan's campaign of vilification -like those of his great admirer, Stalin- served the purpose of hardening his own convictions and warning potential defectors in his realm.
If Kurbsky as the defender of traditional boyar rights found himself unconsciously accepting the pretentious claims of the Muscovite ideology, defenders of independence for the church hierarchy and the city communities went ever further. Metropolitan Philip argued for an independent church establishment using a Byzantine text, which undermined his position by including the classic argument for unrestricted imperial power.101 The Discourse of Valaam, written by monks from the ancient monastery in Lake Ladoga to advocate some return to the old town assembly principle in Muscovy, argued at the same time for an increase in imperial power and the recognition of its absolute and divinely ordained nature.102 Thus, for all the discontent with Ivan's rule, there was never any effective program for opposing him. Generally ignorant of any but Byzantine political teachings, the anguished pamphleteers of the day included in their programs for reform Byzantine texts advocating unlimited power for the Tsar-often 'to an even greater extent than did the apologists and theoreticians of the Muscovite imperial claims.'103 Perhaps the leading apologist for Ivan's rule was the widely traveled and essentially secular figure of Ivan Peresvetov, who argued on grounds of expediency that
A Tsar that is meek and humble in his reign will see his realm em-poverished and his glory diminished. A Tsar that is feared and wise [grozen i mudr] will see his realm enlarged and his name praised in all the corners of the earth. … A realm without dread [bez grozy] is like a horse beneath a Tsar without a bridle.104
For the second half of his reign, Muscovy was indeed a realm of fear, terrorized by the oprichnina, the hooded order of vigilantes which was then often designated by the Tatar-derived word for military district, t'ma, which was also the Russian word for darkness. The coming of this 'darkness' to Russia and the flight of Kurbsky coincided with the fateful turn of Ivan's military interests from east to west. The unsuccessful twenty-five-year Li-vonian War that Ivan launched in 1558 was probably more responsible than any sudden madness or change of character in Ivan for the crisis of his last years. By moving for the Baltic, Ivan involved the pretentious Muscovite civilization in military and ideological conflict with the West, and in costly campaigns which shattered economic and political stability, and ultimately
led to the building of a new, Western type of capital on the shores of the Baltic The dramatic confrontation of the closely knit rehglous civilization of Muslovy with the diffuse and worldly West produced chaos and conflict that laLd from Ivan to Peter the Great and subsequently left its im-print on Russian culture.
2. The Coming of the West
Pew problems have disturbed Russians more than the nature of their relationship to the West. Concern abouMhisjguestion did not bej^jither_ in the salons of the imperial periodor in the mists of Slavic antiquity, but inMuscgvylrom thejfifteenthto theearlylSventeenth?????. This account win attempt to suggest both that there was an over-all psychological significance 'forlvluscovy in the rediscoveryjjf thejfest during this eariy_mocie_rn period, and that there were a number of different 'Wests' with which im-^ portant, contact was successively established. A consideration of how the West came to Russia may throw some light not only on Russian but on general European history.
The general psychological problem posed by confrontation with the West was in many ways more important than any particular political or economic problem. It was rather like the trauma of adolescence. Muscovy had become a kind of raw jouth: too big to remain in childhooTTlsur-roundings yet unable to adjust to the complex world outsideT Propelled by the very momentum of growth, Muscovy suddenly found itself thrust into a world it was hot equipped to understand. WesterrEui'ope~ifrthe fifteenth century was far more aggressive and articulate than it had been in Kievan times, and Russia far more self-conscious and provincial. The Muscovite reaction of irritability and self-assertion was in many ways that of a typical adolescent; the Western attitude of patronizing contempt, that of the unsympathetic adult. Unable to gain understanding either from others or from its own resources, Muscovy prolonged its sullen adolescence for more than a century. The conflicts that convulsed~Russia throughout the seventeenth century^ wjrejpart of~an awkward, compulsive search for identity in an essentially European world. The Russian response to the inescapable challenge of Western Europe was split-almost schizophrenic-and this division has to some extent lasted down to the present.
Novgorod
Much of the complex modern Russian feeling about the West begins with the conquest and humiliation of Novgorod by Moscow in the late fifteenth century. The destruction of the city's traditions and repopulation of most of its people shattered the most important natural link with the We^UoJ^e survivedJni theRussian north jsince ?????? times. At the same time, the absorption of Novgorod brought into Muscovy new ecclesiastical apologists for autocracy who had come to rely partly on Western Catholic ideas and techniques in an effort to combat the growth of Western secularism in that city. Here we see the faint beginnings of the psychologically disturbing pattern whereby even the xenophobic party is forced to rely on one 'IWest' in order to combat another. The ever more shrill and apocalyptical Muscovite insistence on the uniqueness and destiny of Russia thus flows to some extent from the psychological need to disguise from oneself the increasingly derivative and dependent nature of Russian culture.
Other contacts with the West besides those in Novgorod had, of course, survived the fall of Kiev, and might have helped make the rediscovery of the West less upsetting. Travelers to the Orient during the Mongol period like Marco Polo and the Franciscan missionaries to China passed through southern Russia; western Russian cities, such as Smolensk and Chernigov, remained channels of cultural and economic contact; and even in Great Russia, Western influence can be detected in the ecclesiastical art of Vladimir and Suzdal.1 The division between East and West was, moreover, far from precise. Techniques and ideas filtering in from Paleologian Byzantium and from the more advanced Southern and Western Slavs were often similar to those of the early Italian Renaissance with which these 'Eastern' regions were in such intimate contact.2
Nevej^ielejs1jthergjEas_a decisive cultural_and political break between Latin^Europe_and the Orthodox Eastern Slavs in the thirteenth and fpur-teenth_c_ejitori?s._Catholic^Europe concentrated jts interest on the Western SlavSj^and^splayed more interest in the Mongol and Chinese empires to the ejis^jthjinjn^Great Russia. Muscovy, in turn, became preoccupied with the geopolitics of the Eurasian steppe, and lost sight of the Latin West except as a harassing force that had occupied Constantinople and encouraged Teutonic forays against Russia.
Great Novgorod,' as it was called, was the 'father,' just as Kiev was the 'mother,' of Russian cities.3 The peaceful coexistence of Eastern and Western culture within this proud and wealthy metropolis is dramatized by one of its most famous and imposing landmarks: the twelfth-century bronze doors of the Santa Sophia cathedral. One door came from Byzantium, the other from Magdeburg; one from the seat of Eastern empire, the other from the North German city that had received the model charter of urban self-government from the Western Empire.4 Novgorod had older traditions of independence and more extensive economic holdings than Magdeburg or any other Baltic German city. But Novgorod faced in the rising grand dukes of Muscovy a far more ambitious central power than the Holy Roman Emperors had become by the fifteenth century.
The cultural split betweenjvloscow andJ4oygorod was far more formidable than the geographical divide which
