most worldly confidants. One year later, Moscow was sacked and burned by a sudden Tatar invasion. In 1575, Ivan-the first man ever to be crowned tsar in Russia-retired to Alexandrovsk and abdicated tKeTitle in favor of a converted Tatar khan. Though he soon resumed his rule, he used the imperial title much less after this strange episode/
Ivan's denigration of princely authority provided a shock that terror by
itself could not have produced on the toughened Muscovite mentality? The
. .image of the tsar as_Jeader-ofChristian empire, which IvanJn^donejio .-«-MtaucTTtoTmcourage, was severely damaged. The divinized prince-the focal point of all loyalties and 'national' sentiment in this paternalistic society- had renounced his divinity. The image was impaired not so much by the fact that Ivan was a murderer many tinies~Qyef''as by the identity of two of his victims. In murdering Metropolitan Philip of Moscow in 1568, Ivan sought primarily to rid himself of a leading member of a boyar family suspected of disloyalty. But by murdering a revered First Prelate of the Church, Ivan
passed on to Philip something of the halo of Russia's first national saints, Boris and Gleb, who had voluntarily accepted a guiltless death in order to redeem the Russian people from their sin. Philip's remains were venerated in the distant monastery of Solovetsk, which began to rival St. Sergius at nearby Zagorsk as a center for pilgrimage. The close ties between the great monasteries and the grand dukes of Muscovy were beginning to loosen.
An even more serious shock to the Muscovite ideology was Ivan^ '^ murder of his son, heir, and namesake: Ivan, the tsarevich. The Tsar's claim to absolute kingship was based on an unbroken succession from the distant 1 apostolic and imperial past. Having spelled this genealogy out more fully 1 and fancifully than ever before, Ivan now broke the sacred chain with his 1 own hands. In so doing he lost some of the aura of a God-chosen Christian warrior andjQld Testament king, which had surrounded him since his* victory at Kazan.
The martyred Philip and Ivan became new heroes of Russian folklore; and the Tsar's enemies thus became in many eyes the true servants of 'holy Russia.' In the religious crisis of the seventeenth century both contending factions traced their ancestry to Philip: Patriarch Nikon, who theatrically transplanted his remains to Moscow, and the Old Believers, who revered him as a saint. In the political crises of the seventeenth century the idea was born that Ivan the_ Isareyich had survived after all, that there still existed a 'true tsar' with unbroken links to apostolic times. Ivan himself had helped launch the legend by donating the unprecedented sum of five thousand rubles to the Monastery of St. Sergius to subsidize memorial services for his son.92
The struggle between the two became one of the most recurrent of all themesjn the popirlur songs of early modern Russia.93 The most dramatic of all nineteenth-century Russian historical paintings is probably Repin's crimson-soaked canvas of Ivan's murder of his son, and Dostoevsky entitled the key chapter in The Possessed, his prophetic novel of revolution, 'Ivan the Tsarevich.'
Ivan the Terrible was succeeded by a feeble-minded son Fedor, whose , death in 1598 (following the mysterious murder of Ivan's only other son, the young prince Dmitry, in 1591) brought to an end the old line of imperial -V* successionTThe'accession to the throne of the regent Boris Godunov represented a further affront to'the Muscovite mentality7Boris, who had a non-boyar, partly Tatar genealogy, was elected amidst venal political controversy by 'a zemsky sobor, and with the connivance of the Patriarch of Russia (whose position had been created only recently, in 1589, and by the somewhat suspect authority of foreign Orthodox leaders). Kurbsky's anti-autocratic insistence that the Tsar seek council 'from men of all the
people' was seemingly gratified by the official proclamation that Boris was chosen by representatives of 'all the popular multitude.'94
Once in power, Boris became an active and systematic Westernizer. He encoufagecHEe European practice of shaving. Economic contacts were greatly expanded at terms favorable to foreign entrepreneurs; thirty selected future leaders of Russia were sent abroad to study; important positions were assigned to foreigners; imperial protection was afforded the foreign community; Lutheran churches were tolerated not only in Moscow but as far afield as Nizhny Novgorod; and the crown prince of Denmark was brought to Moscow to marry Boris' daughter Xenia, after an unsuccessful bid by a rival ^Swedish prince.
Any chance that Russia might have had under Boris for peaceful evolution toward the form of limited monarchy prevalent in the countries he most admired, England and Denmark, was, however, a fleeting one at best. For he was soon overtaken with a series of crises even more profound than those broughT~en Russia by Ivan. In the last three years of Boris' reign, his realm was struck with a famine that may have killed as much as one third of his subjects and with a wild growth of brigandage and peasant unrest, At the same time his daughter's prospective Danish bridegroom suddenly died in Moscow, and all but two of his thirty selected student-leaders elected to remain in the West.95 -~* Death must have come almost as a relief to Boris in 1605; but it only intensified the suffering of a shaken nation which proved unable to unite behind a successor for fifteen years. This chaotic interregnum produced such a profound crisis in Muscovy that the name long given to it, 'Time of Troubles,' has become a general historical term for a period of decisive trial and partial disintegration that precedes and precipitates the building of great empires.96 This original 'Time of Troubles' (Smutnoe vremia) was just such an ordeal for insular Muscovy. A rapid series of blows stunned it and then propelled it half-unwittingly into a three-cornered struggle with Poland and Sweden for control of Eastern Europe. As it summoned up the strength to defeat Poland in the First Northern War of 1654-67 and Sweden in the Second or Great Northern War of 1701-21, Russia was transformed into a continental empire and the dominant power in Eastern Europe.
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The Religious Wars
One of the great misfortunes of Russian history is that Russia entered the mainstream of European development at a time of unprece-
dented division and degradation in Western Christendom. Having missed, out on the more positive and creative stages of European culture-the rediscovery of classical logic in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, of classical beauty in the fourteenth and fifteenth, and the religious reforms of the sixteenth-Russia was suddenly drawn into the destructive final stages of the European religious wars in the early seventeenth.
By the late sixteenth century, the genuine concern for religious reform and renewal which had precipitated the many-sided debates between Protestant and Catholic Europe had been largely sublimated into a continent-wide civil war. All of Europe was succumbing to the dynamics of a 'military revolution' that weighed down each state with vast, self-perpetuating armies subject to ever-tightening discipline, more deadly weapons, and more fluid tactics. By harnessing ideological propaganda and psychological warfare to military objectives and by silencing in the name of raison d'etat 'the last remaining qualms as to the religious and ethical legitimacy of war,'97 Europe in the early seventeenth century was savoring its first anticipatory taste of total war. The religious wars were late in coming to Eastern Europe. But the form they assumed at the turn of the sixteenth century was that of a particularly bitter contest between Catholic -^LgS Poland and Lutheran Sweden. When both parties moved into Russia during/-%' the Time of Troubles, Orthodox Muscovy was also drawn in under conditions which permanently darkened the Russian image of the West.
Muscovy had been living in political uncertainty and ideological confusion ever since the late years of Ivan Jhe-Terribje's^ reign. Irjejiad done much to break the sense of continuity with _a sacred past and the internal
