Sysoevich's Kremlin in Rostov was the headquarters for a metropolitan who controlled the rich and powerful Yaroslavl-Kostroma region of the upper Volga, where the most lavish churches of the century were built. The elaborate frescoes of the 1670's and 1680's that filled every nook and arcade of the new churches in this diocese represented a final effort of Muscovy to produce an all-encompassing hieroglyphic encyclopedia of the faith. But the intrusion of secular subject matter-a harvest scene, women looking in a mirror, a nude being seduced by a devil- destroyed the spiritual integrity of these vast new compositions.141 In Yaroslavl and Rostov as elsewhere in late- seventeenth-century Russia, scenes of Christ's passion and crucifixion borrowed from the West began crowding out the more exalted images of transfiguration and resurrection that had traditionally dominated the iconography of the Savior in the East. Christ no longer seemed altogether comfortable on His throne at the center of the new icon screens in the cathedrals of Yaroslavl.142 There was no longer any sanctuary, no place for God to be present on earth, behind the icon screens of the Old Believer temples that were springing up in the nearby woods along the Volga. But there was still the hope that God's presence might be maintained within the great Kremlin of the metropolitan at Rostov; and the legend had begun that 'one must see Rostov the great before dying.'
Many of its churches rose up directly and majestically over the walls
of the Kremlin. Within them, classical columns framed the approach to the royal doors and a throne behind the altar provided the metropolitan with a suitably Nikonian place of authority. The main church of the Savior on the Walls must have been the scene of marvelous singing in view of its unparalleled acoustics and a choir area nearly as big as the nave. Even today its bells are among the most sonorous in Russia. Faithful to both the xenophobia and the love of pictorial beauty of Old Muscovy, the Last Judgment scene on the west wall of the Church of the Savior is a magnificent monolith that depicts an unprecedented three rows of foreigners among the ranks of the condemned.143
But history was about to condemn this mighty monument of Muscovy rather than the foreigners in its frescoes. In 1691, the year of Metropolitan Ion's death, young Tsar Peter began the humiliation of Rostov, making the first of many forced exactions from its rich store of silver. He was soon to complete the process of subordinating the church by abolishing the patriarchate and establishing a state-controlled synod as its ruling body. There were to be no more 'Great Sovereigns' from the clergy like Philaret and Nikon, no more Great Rostovs in the world of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great-and the Great Revolution.
2. The Westward Turn
Ihe rejection of both fundamentalists and theocrats meant the end of any serious efforts to maintain a civilization completely distinct from that of the West. The religious ideology of Muscovy was rejected as unworkable for a modern state, and the rigid barriers against Western influence which both Nikon and Awakum had sought to shore up were largely removed after 1667.
It was not yet clear how much and what kind of Western influence was to prevail in the ungainly new empire. Only gradually and fitfully was Russia able to fashion a creative culture and an administrative system which harmonized with those in the rest of Europe. The celebrated reforms of Peter the Great pointed the way to the future. But the fresh religious gropings that preceded these reforms and the exotic resistance movements that developed in reaction to them indicate that the triumph of secular modernization was far from complete.
New Religious Answers
The last quarter of the seventeenth century-from the death of Alexis to the assumption of real power by Peter the Great-was a kind of interregnum. The continued progression toward Western ways was dramatized by the emancipation of women from the terem (the special upstairs chamber to which they had previously been largely confined) under the regent Sophia, daughter of Alexis, who became the first woman to rule Russia. Her principal minister, V. V. Golitsyn, provided an important link between the Westernizing work of Alexis and that of Peter. Golitsyn helped reorganize the military establishment, abolish the antiquated system of social precedence (mestnichestvo), and modify many of the more cruel forms of legal investigation and punishment.
However, Golitsyn was more successful in changing old ways than in establishing anything in their place. He was eventually rejected and exiled -as were most other innovators of the period. Russia was not yet willing to commit itself to new ways of doing things. The continuing search for new answers was concentrated in the overgrown wooden metropolis of Moscow, where every shade of opinion was represented from the xenophobic fundamentalism of the streltsy quarter to the transplanted Germanic efficiency of the foreign suburb. The young Peter the Great derived many of his new ideas and tastes from a carefree boyhood spent largely in this Western enclave of Moscow. But the preoccupation of the uneasy ruling elite with combating religious-tinged rebellions against innovation-by Razin, So-lovetsk, and the streltsy--naturally conditioned them to look for religious answers of their own: for a viable religious alternative to that of Old Muscovy. Thus, although the ruling elite had nowhere to look for guidance after 1667 but to the West, it still looked for religious answers: solutions of the old sort from the new font of wisdom.
The late years of the seventeenth century saw the consideration in Moscow of four religious answers-all of them brought in from the outside. Only after rejecting these last efforts to find religious answers for Russia's problems did Russia turn to the West for the secular and political solutions of Peter the Great.
Each of the four religious answers proposed in Moscow represented an effort to come to grips with the reality of the schism and the irreversible changes in Russian life. None of these solutions was proposed by Great Russians steeped in the Muscovite ideology, like Nikon and Avvakum. Two of the solutions-those of the Latinizers and Grecophiles-were group movements sponsored by new elements within the Russian Orthodox Church anxious to give it solid new foundations. Two other, more radical proposals-direct conversion to Roman Catholicism and Protestant sectarianism-were offered from without by lonely prophets coming to Moscow from the West. This proliferation of conflicting solutions bears testimony to the state of confusion and uncertainty into which the schism had plunged Russian Christendom.
The Latinizing and Grecophile solutions arose because of the belated acceptance within the Russian Church of the need to develop a systematic educational system. Such a need had not been keenly felt by prophetic partisans of the Muscovite ideology. Neither Nikon nor Awakum had attached any importance to systematic education of the clergy, though both advocated careful study of the holy texts of which they approved. The question that divided the two parties in the post-1667 church was simply
whether Latin or Greek language and culture should dominate the religious education of the new polyglot hierarchy.
The continued influx of Ukrainian and White Russian priests and the banishment of the Grecophile Nikon gave a considerable initial advantage to the Latinizing party. Polotsky set up in Moscow during the 1660's an informal school for instructing state servants in Latin culture; and one of Polotsky's first students, Silvester Medvedev, became the champion of the Latinizing party in the 1670's. Medvedev was a widely traveled diplomat who had helped negotiate the treaty with Poland in 1667 and had taken monastic vows only in 1674. In 1677 he was given important new responsibilities in Moscow as chief corrector of books and head of the Zaikonospassky Monastery, which became the center of an expanding program of Latin instruction in the capital. In 1685 he petitioned the regent Sophia (who had also studied under Polotsky) for permission to convert his school into a semi-official academy.
Medvedev's efforts to extend his already great authority rendered him vulnerable to the savage intrigues that were characteristic of Moscow during this period of upheaval and suspicion. He met much of the same resistance
