and fundamentalist adherence to established forms of worship. The mutual destruction of the theocrats led by Nikon and the fundamentalists led by the Archpriest Avvakum (1621-82); condemnation of both by the Church Council of 1667; points of similarity with the earlier conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism in the West, which also led to the exhaustion of both religious approaches and the triumph of the new secular state.
The advent of Western-type drama, painting, music, and philosophy during the later years of Alexis' reign. Efforts to find religious answers from the West, especially during the regency of Sophia (1682-9); the beginnings of the flagellant, sectarian tradition. The consolidation of a Westernized, secular state under Peter the Great (1682- 1725), particularly after his first visit to Western Europe in 1697-8. The foundation of St. Petersburg in 1703; the Dutch-type naval base on the Baltic which became an enduring symbol of the geometric uniformities, Westward- looking vistas, and underlying cruelty and artificiality of rule by the Romanov dynasty. The found-
ing of the Academy of Sciences in 1726, and the discovery of the human body in portraiture and ballet. Various attempts in the eighteenth century to defend and reassert the old Muscovite order amidst the general trend toward centralized and secularized aristocratic rule; the communalism of the Old Believers; recurrent, Cossack-led peasant rebellions; and the monastic revival by the 'elders' of the late eighteenth century.
The price of Russian involvement in Europe was participation in the almost continuous fighting out of which emerged the new monarchical absolutism of the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century. Russian involvement was part of a deeper interrelationship that was developing between Eastern and Western Europe. Gustavus Adolphus, who made Sweden a model for much of Europe, sensed the interconnection in the late 1620's, explaining-even before his alliance with Russia-that 'all European wars are being interwoven into one knot, are becoming one universal war.'1
Universal war seems, indeed, a good designation for a combat which moved rapidly from super-celestial ideals to subterranean behavior, and swept back and forth across the continent with a certain rhythm and logic of its own. The Catholic-Protestant war between Swedes and Poles at the beginning of the century abated just as the conflict spread West via Imperial Bohemia in 1618. Then, in 1648, the very year that the complex and savage Thirty Years' War drew to a close in Western Europe, fighting erupted again in the east with the greatest single massacre of Jews prior to Hitler.2 For most of the next seventy-five years Eastern Europe was a battlefield. Veterans of the Thirty Years' War and English Civil War hired on as mercenaries for the highest bidder, bringing with them plague, disease, bayonets, and the resigned belief that 'the very state of mankind is nothing else but status belli.'* Gradually, though by no means decisively, Russia emerged victorious in fighting that was animated by the passion for total victory (and the unwillingness to grant more than a temporary truce) previously confined to frontier warfare between Moslems and Christians.'1 Confessional lines disintegrated altogether in the fighting of the 1650's and 1660's. Russians fought Russians and used Scottish Catholic royalists to humiliate the Catholic king of Poland. Simultaneously, Catholic France fought Catholic Spain; Lutheran Denmark, Lutheran Sweden; Protestant Holland, Protestant England. As exhaustion set in and fighting spread out to such distant places as New York, Brazil, and Indonesia, forces of stabilization ????? to bring order back to continental Europe. By the end of the
War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, and of the Great Northern War in 1721, Europe was relatively secure. The Turks had been contained, and peace attained under monarchs uniformly dedicated to maintaining a monopoly of power at home and a balance of power abroad.
It is a final irony that the Swedes, who initially encouraged the Russians to enter 'the universal war,' were defeated by the same Russians in the last great battle of the war, at Poltava, in 1709. This effort of Charles XII to defeat a vastly superior Russian force in the distant Ukraine and to conspire with the even more remote Cossacks and Turks seems strangely in keeping with the heroic unreality of the age. The strategic vistas of the 'universal war' in Eastern Europe were animated throughout by a kind of baroque splendor and thirst for the infinite: from Possevino's vision of a renewed Catholicism moving through Russia to India and linking up with a Jesuit-controlled China to the fantastic Russo-Saxon project late in the century for an alliance between Moscow and Abyssinia to join with Persia for a crusade against the Turks and then, presumably, with Protestant Europe to vanquish Rome.5
As in so much baroque art, the vista was based on illusion: on a nervous desire to see things that cannot be. The realities of the universal war in Eastern Europe were, if anything, even more harsh and terrible than in the Civil War in England or the Thirty Years' War in Germany. Historians of these eastern regions have never been able to settle on neutral descriptive labels for the periods of particular horror and devastation which successively visited their various peoples. Russians still speak in anguish and confusion of a 'Time of Troubles'; Poles and Ukrainians of a 'Deluge'; Eastern European Jews of 'The Deep Mire'; and Swedes and Finns of 'the great hate.'6
Military blows from without were accompanied by political and economic contractions within as the tsars extended centralized bureaucratic power throughout their domain and imposed crushing burdens on the peasantry. After seeming to be at the height of their authority, the loose representative assemblies of Eastern Europe (the Russian zemsky sobor, the Swedish riksdag, the Polish sejm, the Jewish Council of the Four Lands, and the Prussian Stdnde)-all suddenly collapsed or lost effective power in the late seventeenth century. New quasi-military forms of discipline were imposed on the agrarian society of Eastern Europe, as 'economic dualism' split early modern Europe into an increasingly entrepreneurial and dynamic West and an enserfed and static East.'
Nowhere were the convulsions more harrowing than in seventeenth-century Russia. Massive shifts in population and changes in the texture of society took place with bewildering speed.8 Thousands of foreigners flooded
into Russia; Russians themselves pushed on to the Pacific; cities staged flash rebellions; the peasantry exploded in violence; Cossack and mercenary soldiers drifted away from battle into disorganized raids and massacres. It seems not excessive to estimate that twice during the seventeenth century -in the early years of the Time of Troubles and of the First Northern War respectively--a third of the population of Great Russia perished from the interrelated ravages of war, plague, and famine.9 By the 1660's, an English doctor resident at the tsar's court wrote that the ratio of women to men was 10:1 in the region around Moscow; and Russian sources spoke of cannibalism at the front and wolves at the rear-4,000 of them allegedly invading Smolensk in the bitter winter of 1660.10
Unable to understand, let alone deal with, the changes taking place about them, Russians resorted to violence and clung desperately to forms and distinctions that had already lost their meaning. Russia's first printed law code, the Ulozhenie of 1649, was elaborately and rigidly hierarchical and gave legal sanction to violence by explicitly denying the peasantry any escape from their serfdom and by prescribing corporal-even capital- punishment for a wide variety of minor offenses. The knout alone is mentioned 141 times.11 The seventeenth century was a period when old answers were inadequate, but new ones had not yet been found to take their place. The inevitable waning of old Muscovy could well be described under the first three chapter headings of Johann Huizenga's classic Waning of the Middle Ages: 'The Violent Tenor of Life,' 'Pessimism and the Ideal of the Sublime Life,' and 'The Hierarchical Conception of Society.'
Nor did the West gain much in understanding despite the increasing numbers of its soldiers, doctors, and technicians in Moscow-and of Russian emissaries abroad. The latter insulted everyone by repeatedly demanding complete and exact recitation of the Tsar's lengthy title, while omnipresent and odoriferous bodyguards cut the leather out of palace chairs for shoes and left excremental deposits on walls and floors. Western visitors outdid one another with tales of Russian filth, servility, and disorder; and there were enough genuinely comic scenes to enshrine fatefully among Western observers an anecdotal rather than an analytic approach to Russia. A Dutch doctor who brought a flute and skeleton with him to Moscow was nearly lynched by a passing mob for attempting to conjure up the dead;12 and an English doctor was executed during the First Northern War when a mealtime request
