for Cream of Tartar was thought to indicate sympathy for the Crimean Tatars.13 Most Western writers continued to identify Russians with Tatars rather than other Slavs throughout the seventeenth century. Even in Slavic Prague, a book published in 1622 grouped Russia with Peru and Arabia in a list of particularly bizarre and exotic civilizations;14 and
the year before in relatively nearby and well-informed Uppsala a thesis was defended on the subject 'Are the Russians Christians?'15
The irony, of course, is that Russia in the seventeenth century was far more intensely Christian than most of the increasingly secular West. Indeed, whatever the ultimate causes of the crisis that overtook Muscovy in this turbulent century, its outer form was religious. The raskol, or schism, which fatally divided and weakened Russian Orthodoxy under Tsar Alexis, had repercussions in every area of this organic religious civilization. The administrative consolidation and building of a new Western capital by Alexis' son, Peter the Great, did not bridge the ideological cleavages that the schism had opened in Russia, but only made them deeper and more complex. Religious dissent continued to haunt modern Russia.
i. The Split Within
Ihe decisive moment of the century-what Russians call the perelom (divide in the stairs, breaking point of a fever)-was the formal, ecclesiastical pronouncement of the schism in 1667. It represented a kind of coup d'eglise, which in religious Muscovy was as far-reaching in its implications as the Bolshevik coup d'etat exactly 250 years later in secularized St. Petersburg. The decisions of the Moscow Church Council of 1667, like those of the St. Petersburg Soviet in 1917, were a point of no return in Russian history. Even more than in 1917, the significance of 1667 was not fully appreciated at the time and was challenged from many different directions by various defenders of the old order. But change had taken place at the center of power, and the divided opposition was unable to prevent the arrival of a new age and new ideas.
The raskol (like the Revolution) came as the culmination and climax of nearly a century of bitter ideological controversy which involved politics and aesthetics as well as personal metaphysical beliefs. Seventeenth-century Muscovy was in many ways torn by a single, continuing struggle of 'medieval and modern,' 'Muscovite and Western,' forces. Such terms, however, apply better to the self-conscious and intellectualized conflicts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The issue in seventeenth-century Russia might be better described with two conflicting terms that recur in the chronicles and polemic literature of the time: khitrosf and blagochestie, These terms-like the controversies in which they were used-are difficult to translate into the Western idiom. Khitrosf is the Slavic word for cleverness and skill. Though derived from the Greek technikos, it acquired overtones of sophistication and even cunning in Muscovy. For the most part, this term was used to describe proficiency in those activities that lay outside religious ritual. 'Cleverness from beyond the seas' (zamorskaia khitrost') came to be applied to the many unfamiliar new skills and techniques which foreigners brought with them in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.1 When Boris Godunov became Russia's first elected Tsar in 1598, he had to quiet popular misgivings about the procedure by publicly proclaiming that he had been chosen 'in faith and truth without any kind of guile' {bezo vsiakie khitrosti).2 The revolt of the Old Believers was based on the belief that the Russian Church, like those in the West, was now seeking to know God only through 'external guile' (yneshneiu khitrostiiu).s Subsequent Russian traditions of peasant revolt and populist reform were deeply infused with the primitive and anarchistic belief that even the use and exchange of money was a 'deceitful mechanism' (khitraia mekhanika).4 The post-Stalinist generation of rebellious writers was also to cry out against the 'deceitful (khitry) scalpel' of bureaucratic censors and 'retouchers.'5
In his famous troika passage Gogol insists that Russia be 'not guileful' (ne khitry) but like a 'straightforward muzhik from Yaroslavl.' Precisely such types organized in Yaroslavl in 1612 the 'council of all the land,' which mobilized Russian resources for the final expulsion of the Poles from Moscow, and served as the model for the council which installed Michael Romanov as tsar in 1613. The primitive frontier forces that had descended on Moscow from the cities of the Volga brought with them a deep distrust of all 'cleverness from beyond the seas.' Brutal directness was characteristic of the military men who liberated Moscow and stayed on for the councils which acted as a kind of collective regent for the young tsar. Like Gogol's 'straightforward muzhiks of Yaroslavl' who moved 'not through the turn of a screw' but 'with the clean stroke of axe and chisel,' the provincial ruffians decapitated Polish prisoners in Red Square with scythes, and pulled out the ribs of suspected traitors with hot irons. The seal of Yaroslavl-a bear carrying an axe-seemed for awhile to have become a symbol of the new regime.
Along with their violence, these provincials brought the raw strength which transformed Muscovy into a great modern state. They also brought from their harsh environment a new religious intensity and a special reverence for the quality known as blagochestie. Usually translated as 'piety,' this term has a fuller, and thus more accurate, sound to the modem ear when translated as 'ardent loyalty.' Blago was the Church Slavonic word for 'good,' carrying with it the meaning of both 'blessing' and 'welfare'; chestie was the word for 'honor,' 'respect,' 'directness,' and 'celebration.' All of these many-shaded meanings entered into the ardent devotion of the average Muscovite. Blagochestie meant both faith and faithfulness, and the adjectival form was inseparably attached to the word 'tsar' in Muscovy. Ivan's main accusation against Kurbsky was that, for the sake of 'self-love and temporal glory,' Kurbsky had 'trampled down blagochestie'
and 'cast blagochestie out of his soul.'6 The chroniclers saw in the sufferings of the seventeenth century the vengeful hand of God calling his people to repentance. Like Old Testament prophets, Muscovite revivalists repeatedly called not just for belief in a dogma or membership in a church but for a life of renewed dedication. This was a society ruled by custom rather than calculation. As social and economic changes made life more complex, Muscovites increasingly sought refuge in the simple call for devotion to that which had been. If men did not cling to old forms, they tended to become uncritical imitators of foreign ways. There was no real middle ground between the calculating worldliness of khitrost' and the complete traditionalism of blagochestie.
Khitrost' was clearly the wave of the future; and its development, the legitimate preoccupation of military and political historians. Western measurement slowly imposed itself on the dreamlike imprecision of the Eastern Slavs. A gigantic, English-built clock was placed over the 'gate of the Savior' {Spasskaia vorota) of the rebuilt Moscow Kremlin in 1625; and shortly thereafter weathervanes began to appear atop the crosses of Muscovite churches. Reasonably accurate military maps and plans were first drawn up in Muscovy in the course of preparing for the 1632-4 war with Poland; and the first large-scale native production of armaments began at about the same time within the rebuilt armory of the Kremlin and the new, Dutch-built foundry at Tula.7 Clearly, Russia was to be dependent for national greatness on 'The Skill [Khitrost'] of Armed Men'-to cite the title of its first military manual of 1647. The reign of Peter the Great represents the culmination of the slow transformation of Russia through Northern European technology into a disciplined, secular state.
For the historian of culture, however, the real drama of the seventeenth century follows from the determination of many Russians to remain- through all the changes and challenges of the age-blagochestivye: ardently loyal to a sacred past. The heroism and the violence of their effort drove schism deep into Russian society and helped prevent Russia from harmoniously adjusting to modernization. The childhood of Russian culture had been too stern and the first contacts with the West too disturbing to permit the peaceful acceptance of the sophisticated adult world of Western liurope.
To seventeenth-century Russia the humiliation of the Time of Troubles demonstrated not the backwardness of its institutions but the jealousy of its God. The overt and massive Westernization of Boris Godunov and Dmitry was discarded and the belief in God's special concern for Russia intensified. While Western techniques continued to pour into Russia throughout the seventeenth century, Western ideas and beliefs were bitterly
