Orthodox Russia in Crisis Church and Nation in the Time of Troubles Isaiah Gruber NIU Press DeKalb Illinois © 2012 by Northern Illinois University Press Published by the Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois 60115 Manufactured in the United States using acid-free paper. All Rights Reserved Design by Shaun Allshouse Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gruber, Isaiah, 1977– Orthodox Russia in crisis : church and nation in the Time of Troubles / Isaiah Gruber. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-87580-446-0 (cloth: alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-1-60909-049-4 (electronic) 1. Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’—History—17th century. 2. Russia—History —Time of Troubles, 1598-1613. 3. Church and state—Russia—History—17th century. 4. Orthodox Eastern monasteries—Economic aspects—Russia—History— 17th century. 5. Russia—Church history—17th century. I. Title. BX490.G78 2012 281.9’47009032—dc23 2011036826 Maria Podkopaeva (b. 1981, Moscow), creator of V Smutnoe vremia (displayed both on the jacket and as Fig. 1 in this book), belongs to the contemporary Russian realist school of painting. She is a graduate of the historical studio of the Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. Her works are exhibited in museums and private collections in Russia, Germany, Montenegro, the United States, and elsewhere. Contents List of Illustrations and Tables Preface vii ix Introduction Troubles, Then and Now 3 1 Russia as “Israel” The Muscovite Church-State 23 2 Proit and Piety Russian Orthodox Monasteries as Economic Corporations 51 3 Vox Dei, Vox Populi, and Vox Feminae Delaying the Crisis of Legitimacy in 1598 75 4 In Hunger and Pain The Response of the Church to Famine and Civil Warfare 97 5 A House Divided Russian Orthodoxy under Vasilii IV and Dmitrii II 127 6 Death and Resurrection The Apex and End of the Smuta 152 7 In Retrospect Russian Orthodoxy in the Time of Troubles and Beyond Notes 199 Bibliography Index 279 235 180 Introduction Troubles, Then and Now Вскую г[оспод]и отстоя далече, презриши въ бл[а]го время въ печалехъ. (Why standest thou afarre off, O Lord? why hidest thou thy selfe in times of trouble?) —Psalm 9:22/10:1 in the Ostroh Bible (1581) and King James Version (1611)1 Our current situation today is not describable as anything but a “Time of Troubles.” —Major-General Aleksandr Vladimirov, Vice-President of the College of Military Experts of the Russian Federation, 20022 In the Muscovite year 7117 (1608–1609 CE), a provincial Russian Orthodox monk was startled by a vision of Moscow “cut up” by PolishLithuanian forces. To his great dismay he saw other parts of the Russian tsardom “in captivity and burned up.” A voice instructed him to warn the tsar of this impending disaster. He traveled to the capital and conveyed the message—but to no avail. Over the next couple of years, the vision’s horrors inexorably came true. Moscow fell to the invaders; many other towns and monasteries were looted, burned, and destroyed.3 In the middle of the bloody war, the Polish-Lithuanian commander JanPiotr Sapieha arrived with his troops at Rostov’s Borisogleb Monastery, where the prophetic elder lived. Several lords in the foreign army began to accuse the old monk, saying that he stubbornly refused to pray for the Polish-Lithuanian king and candidate to the Muscovite throne, instead remaining loyal to the embattled Russian tsar. The old man did not back down. At the risk of his life, he proclaimed: “I was born and christened in Russia, and I pray to God for a 4 ORTHODOX RUSSIA IN CRISIS Russian tsar!” Upon hearing this, Sapieha replied, “Great truth is in the father: [a man] receives the tsar of whichever land in which he lives.” The commander then listened humbly to the elder’s advice before inally exclaiming, “Forgive, father!” (Prosti, bat’ko!). After bowing in reverence, Sapieha left in peace, sending a gift of ive rubles and issuing orders not to despoil or damage the monastery in any way.4 So reads The Life of the Venerable Irinarkh, a text composed retrospectively by the monk’s disciple of thirty years, Aleksandr (also Aleksei).5 Written to glorify a potential saint, this biographical account reveals some key elements of the Russian mentality during the “Time of Troubles” (Smutnoe vremia). The experiences of Irinarkh (also Ilinarkh) demonstrate a strong association between Russian Orthodox piety and unshakable nationalism or patriotism. The tale furthermore promotes the spiritual superiority of the Russian national-religious ethos over its competitors, even those temporarily gaining the advantage of physical force. Texts such as this one reveal that the crucible of the Troubles forged a modern Russian identity, one rooted in a particular nationalist view of Orthodox Christianity. The story of this watershed period is not for the faint of heart, but it can hardly be surpassed for drama. The Time of Troubles at the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century Russia’s irst great Time of Troubles was a chaotic, violent, and tragic period of about ifteen years separating the two historical dynasties of Russian history. Moscow’s branch of the ancient Riurikid or Daniilovich dynasty of Kiev died out in 1598, but the Romanovs did not begin to rule until 1613. In the interim the country experienced famine, civil war, numerous pretenders to the throne, concomitant revolts and coups, foreign invasion, rampant banditry, and inally the total collapse of the state itself. When all seemed lost, a dying Church patriarch managed to smuggle letters out of his prison cell pleading for all Russians to unite, to rise up and defend Orthodoxy. Surprisingly, it worked. A militia and provisional government formed in Nizhnii Novgorod managed to attract enough allies to reunite the land and recapture Moscow. Instead of the extinction of Russia at the hands of its religious and political enemies, the Time of Troubles resulted in the coalescence of a “national ideology”6 and the setting of a trajectory toward Russia’s position as a great world power during the modern age. Introduction 5 Despite or perhaps because of its extraordinary drama and importance, the causes and nature of the Time of Troubles have remained mysterious for four hundred years. At the close of the nineteenth century, Sergei Platonov devoted well over a third of his magnum opus on the Troubles to pre-1598 history, that is, to attempting to decipher the earlier roots and preconditions of the crisis.7 In the early twenty-irst century Chester Dunning wrote a major new reinterpretation in which he stated: “It was so complex and sources about it are so fragmentary and contradictory that to this day the Time of Troubles deies simple recitation of its basic facts, let alone satisfactory explanations of its nature, causes, and signiicance.”8 Partly as a result, numerous alternate periodizations have been proposed, including: 1584–1613, 1598–1618, 1601– 1613, 1603–1613, 1603–1614, 1604–1613, 1604–1618, 1605–1612, and 1605–1613.9 The story of the Troubles begins sometime during the reign of Ivan IV Groznyi (1533–1584). His sobriquet has traditionally been translated as “the Terrible” or “the Dread” but almost certainly carried a positive connotation in sixteenth-century Muscovy. Ivan terriied his (non-Orthodox) enemies; this was a compliment of the irst order. In English, a combination of terriic and terrible, or awesome and awful, might convey something of the same meaning.10 In the 1550s, this fearsome Ivan conquered Kazan and Astrakhan, remnants of the mighty Mongol-Tatar empire founded by Chingis Khan in the thirteenth century. Muscovites referred to Kazan and Astrakhan as “tsardoms,” meaning khanates, or steppe empires. These impressive conquests greatly increased the power and prestige of their state and ruler. Russia began to expand into Siberia, with its seemingly endless territory and resources. The usual story, challenged by some historians,11 is that something changed after Ivan’s supposedly beloved irst wife Anastasia died in 1560. The tsar moved from wife to wife until his death, never satisied. His long, expensive, and futile Livonian War depressed both economy and society. In 1565, after abdicating or threatening to abdicate unless his demands were met, he set up the oprichnina, a large central region of the Russian state subject to his direct personal control. The oficials of this new domain, the oprichniki, murdered potential opponents and terrorized the population for several years until the experiment was abandoned. In 1575 Ivan appointed a Chingisid (Simeon Bekbulatovich) as tsar and again made some confusing, temporary moves toward possible abdication. In 1581, back on the throne again, he killed his own son and heir, Ivan Ivanovich, in a it of rage. 6 ORTHODOX RUSSIA IN CRISIS Historians have long debated whether Ivan IV’s violence stemmed from a deinite political purpose or from madness.12 In either case, it weakened Russian society. The oprichnina and then a severe and prolonged economic downturn in the last decades of the sixteenth century led to an astonishing depopulation of the central regions of the state. Laws binding people to their obligations, including the imposition of formal serfdom, failed to solve these problems and in fact exacerbated them. Disaffected peasants, soldiers, slaves, petty landowners, and others led to the southern borderlands, where they joined Cossack bands. Ivan’s son Fyodor, who ruled in name only, died in 1598 with no surviving issue. The late tsar’s powerful regent, Boris Godunov, now claimed to have been chosen or elected to the throne by “all the land.” According to contemporary witnesses, he was an intelligent and capable administrator. His rule seemed relatively secure until three consecutive years of crop failure and famine devastated the country in 1601–1603. According to some estimates, this horriic catastrophe wiped out an entire third of the Russian population. It also undermined Tsar Boris’s legitimacy in the eyes of survivors, many of whom considered the famine a sign of divine displeasure. Not for the irst time, rumors circulated that Boris had cleared his way to the throne by arranging the grisly and suspicious death of Tsarevich Dmitrii, Fyodor’s half-brother, back in 1591. In 1604 a man claiming to be this very Tsarevich Dmitrii gathered a small army in Poland-Lithuania and mounted a military and propaganda campaign to capture the Russian throne. According to his tale, he had miraculously escaped Boris’s evil plot against his life: another boy had been killed instead. Despite the best efforts of the government in Moscow to discredit him as a runaway monk by the name of Grishka Otrepiev, the “tsarevich” quickly garnered mass support, particularly in the southwestern border regions of the Russian state. In mid-April 1605, with all-out war raging between the two camps, Tsar Boris died, and the throne oficially passed to his young son Fyodor Borisovich. A large part of the new tsar’s army almost immediately defected to Dmitrii, sealing the fate of the Godunovs. In June 1605 conspirators brutally killed Fyodor II and his mother, while Dmitrii entered Moscow in triumph. The successful insurgent reigned for just under a year. In May 1606 he fell victim to a coup that coincided with the celebration of his wedding to Marina Mniszech, a Catholic and the daughter of his chief Polish backer. The lead conspirator, Vasilii Shuiskii, now ascended the throne. His four-year reign saw Russia degenerate into chaotic warfare, with numerous armies and gangs Introduction 7 constantly roaming throughout the country. Bloody civil war began again almost immediately upon his succession. In the summer of 1606, a commander named Ivan Bolotnikov led a rebel army from the south—claiming to act in the name of “Dmitrii,” who had supposedly escaped death by a miracle yet again. Support for the new insurrection came primarily from the same border regions that had supported the irst “Dmitrii.” Eventually an impersonator of the former tsar materialized to claim leadership of the movement. In 1608 he established a competing government in Tushino, just northwest of Moscow, and besieged the capital. Numerous towns and regions transferred their allegiance to this “second false Dmitrii,” and Marina Mniszech ostensibly veriied that he was indeed her husband. In effect, the country had now split into two: each half had its own tsar and its own patriarch. Meanwhile, repressive measures by both sides and endemic banditry continued to exacerbate the suffering of the population. Nor was this all. The rise and fall of the irst Dmitrii stimulated new claimants to the throne. These pretenders (samozvantsy) attracted their own armies, often from among the Cossacks, and set out to control as much territory as possible. By the end of the Troubles, ifteen or so of them had surfaced, including a “third false Dmitrii,” a vorenok or “Little Villain” (the infant son of Marina Mniszech); and a number of previously unknown “tsareviches” with names such as Ivan, Simeon, and Pyotr. As Platonov wrote: “Various bands of free Cossacks began to invent pretenders in great numbers. . . . A pretender was looked upon as the generally accepted method of mounting a revolutionary outbreak.”13 Many of these gangs brutally terrorized the countryside. Knowing of the chaos in Russia, multiple Polish-Lithuanian forces invaded and joined the fray. An army commanded by Jan-Piotr Sapieha besieged the famous Troitsa Sergiev Monastery, located about seventy kilometers (45 miles) northeast of Moscow, for nearly a year and a half in 1608–1610. In 1609 King Zygmunt (Sigismund) III personally embarked on a siege of Smolensk, which inally capitulated in 1611. Meanwhile, his commander (hetman) Stanislaw Zolkiewski gained control of Moscow itself in 1610. Swedish intervention forces also fought in numerous battles, originally on the side of Tsar Vasilii. In 1611 they occupied Novgorod and its surrounding region. By this time, both the Moscow and Tushino governments had collapsed. Oddly enough, the remnants of each camp had at different times offered the Russian throne to King Zygmunt’s son Wladyslaw. While negotiations on this score dragged on, the zealously Catholic king plotted to conquer Russia outright and incorporate it into his own domain. The Orthodox Patriarch 8 ORTHODOX RUSSIA IN CRISIS Hermogen (also Ermogen, Germogen), who had been a staunch supporter of the deposed Tsar Vasilii, understood the danger. From his monastery prison cell, he sent out letters rebuking the people for having betrayed the “true faith” and their oaths of loyalty. He warned that unless Russians repented of their sins and stopped destroying their own fatherland (ne svoe li otechestvo razoriaete?), the country would suffer the same fate as Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans.14 After a millennium and a half, the Jewish state still had not risen again from its destruction. These appeals had an effect. Rallying to the defense of Orthodoxy, a new militia government and army coalesced in Nizhnii Novgorod under the command of Kuzma Minin and Dmitrii Pozharskii. Patriarch Hermogen died of starvation and abuse in his prison cell, but the “national liberation” army marched on Moscow and defeated the Polish-Lithuanian garrison in late 1612. An “assembly of the land” then selected sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov as the “God-chosen” candidate to the throne. His accession in 1613 marked the founding of a dynasty that would persist until the revolutions of 1917. Naturally, it took some time to quiet the internal and external conlicts, but by about 1619 Russia had regained a more “normal” state of affairs.15 Legacy of the First Russian Time of Troubles It would be dificult to overestimate the signiicance, symbolic as well as practical, of the Time of Troubles (Smutnoe vremia). The painful memory of this period has never faded from the national consciousness and has in many ways deined it. In later periods, the Troubles frequently emerged as a paradigm for interpreting other extreme and prolonged crises. During one such turbulent period in the twentieth century, Mikhail Kovalenskii described the original Smutnoe vremia as an “unfathomable abyss” (bezdonnaia propast’) dividing two eras of Russian history.16 Earlier the famous imperial historian Vasilii Kliuchevskii had deined the Time of Troubles as the boundary between medieval and modern Russia.17 Numerous artistic, literary, and musical works also took their inspiration from the tumultuous drama of the early seventeenth century, thus reinforcing its symbolic power in the Russian mentality. The very phrase “Time of Troubles” seems to pulsate with biblical overtones. Ancient Hebrew poetry from the Psalms and Prophets spoke often of a “day of trouble” (yom tsara), a “time of trouble” (et tsara), and “times of trouble” (itot batsara).18 Yet Slavonic translations of the Bible, so important for Russian Introduction 9 civilization, translated these phrases instead by such expressions as den’ bedstviia (day of calamity) and vremia skorbi (time of sorrow). The Russian name for the Time of Troubles, Smutnoe vremia, arose from a different source. In fact, the meaning of “Smutnoe vremia” and the shorter “Smuta” (Troubles) cannot be translated precisely into English. A now outmoded convention labeled the period Russia’s “Epoch of Confusion.”19 Together, the two renditions give some sense of the Russian original. “Smuta” and related words derive from a Slavic root signifying the act of “shaking up” or “muddying” a liquid. One of the basic meanings of “smuta” was “disorder” or “muddle.” By extension, this word also signiied “agitation, disturbance, mutiny.” In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Muscovite government meant something very speciic when speaking of towns that had “become troubled” (smutilis’): that the subjects in question had rebelled against the tsar’s authority. “Smutnoe vremia” (Time of Troubles) thus denoted a period of rebellion or mutinousness, as well as of confusion and turmoil. “Disturbed time,” “rebellious age,” and “troubled era” are all rough approximations. The early seventeenth century was shaken up, agitated, confused, and mutinous. Such is the literal meaning of the Russian term.20 The historical Troubles came by their name quite naturally, as an originally descriptive term evolved into an appellation. A Russian survey book dating from 1612–1613 recorded several items of the following nature: “the village of Elizarovo, and in it was a temple [i.e., church] of Nikolai the Wonder-Worker, and that temple burned down in the smutnoe vremia . . . and altogether [there are] 31 empty peasant places [in the district], and these peasants ran away in the smutnoe vremia, when villains [vory] came up to Nizhnii [Novgorod].”21 Other contemporary sources featured variations on the same theme: smutnoe priskorbnoe vremia (disturbed, sorrowful time), smutnoe i bezgosudarnoe vremia (disturbed and sovereignless time), smutnye gody (disturbed years), and smutnye leta (disturbed years).22 Words such as gore (grief, woe) and beda (calamity, disaster) were also used to characterize the period, but they did not igure into its eventual title.23 In the mid-seventeenth century, Grigorii Kotoshikhin, a Russian civil servant who had defected to Sweden, wrote a well-known description of Muscovy. Near the beginning of his book, he briely alluded to “those troubled times” (te smutnye vremena) at the turn of the century. On this basis, historians have often mistakenly credited him with coining the name “Time of Troubles.”24 However, Kotoshikhin used the same description of “smutnoe vremia” (in the singular) to refer to the uprisings and crisis associated with a currency 10 ORTHODOX RUSSIA IN CRISIS devaluation in 1656–1663. Other seventeenth-century authors also applied “smutnoe vremia” to that situation and then to the major Cossack rebellion led by Stenka Razin in 1670–1671.25 Unlike many other aspects of the national history, the Time of Troubles remained common knowledge in Russia for centuries, gaining rather than losing exposure in modern times. Literature, art, ceremony, and folklore all preserved and elaborated the notion of a severe and prolonged general crisis aflicting the entire nation, accompanied by warfare, grave uncertainty, and the collapse of the state. One seventeenth-century bylina, or long narrative folk song, wailed: “And for what did the Lord God become enraged against us / That the Lord God sent us the seducer / And villain Grishka Otrepiev the Defrocked?”26 In 1771 the Imperial Theater in St. Petersburg debuted Aleksandr Sumarokov’s Dimitrii the Pretender: A Tragedy. Russia’s national poet, the unmatched Aleksandr Pushkin, also took up the theme of the “irst false Dmitrii,” writing the poignant drama Boris Godunov in 1825. He judged it his best work.27 A decade later, Mikhail Glinka composed his opera Ivan Susanin, also titled A Life for the Tsar, about the peasant hero credited with saving the life of Mikhail Romanov near the end of the Time of Troubles. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Modest Mussorgsky adapted Pushkin’s play into the famous opera Boris Godunov, and Aleksandr Ostrovskii wrote his play The Pretender Dmitrii and Vasilii Shuiskii. Painters such as Ernest Lessner, Sergei Ivanov, and Vasilii Savinskii depicted scenes from Bolotnikov’s revolt, the formation of the national militia, and other events of the Troubles. Since 1818 an impressive monument to Minin and Pozharskii, liberators of Moscow, has stood on Red Square in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral. In other words, the heyday of Russian imperial culture did not pass before embedding the Smuta deeply into the national psychology and mythology.28 As it came to be understood, the Time of Troubles had been not merely a historical event, but rather a unique historical phenomenon with special features not always shared by other periods of extreme turmoil and suffering. The nineteenth-century historian Ivan Zabelin wrote: “Smuta represents a highly distinctive phenomenon. . . . It is only a deep shock [glubokoe potriasenie], a great ‘reeling’ [velikoe ‘shatanie’] of the state itself.”29 Looking at the broad scope of Russian history, Zabelin considered extreme suffering among the people a very common phenomenon not suficient in itself to constitute a “Time of Troubles.” As E. V. Chistiakova explained at the close of the twentieth century, Smutnoe vremia stood as “a kind of symbol of breakdown, Introduction 11 of the struggle of all against all, of the complete decomposition of authority in a country placed at the brink of ruin.”30 Within historical literature, the Time of Troubles still igured as unquestionably “the stormiest epoch in the history of Russia” (samaia burnaia epokha v istorii Rossii) as late as 1911.31 For decades already, oficials of the tsar had been comparing their own rebellious age to the Smuta itself. Then in 1913, the Romanov dynasty’s elaborate tercentennial celebrations pushed the Troubles to the very forefront of public attention. The Romanovs had begun to rule at the close of the Troubles, and they intended to capitalize on this fact in order to restore their decaying power. Period reenactments, pilgrimages to famous sites, numerous plays and books all canonized Russia’s greatest moment, when unparalleled national heroism had conquered unimaginable national calamity.32 The last Romanovs had hoped to shore up their rule; instead, they ended up providing a model for its collapse. The First World War, the revolutions of 1917, and then the barbarous Civil War of 1917–1921 followed in brutal succession. Not surprisingly, many Russians both at home and in exile tried to make sense of the incredible turbulence and destruction by talking of a new “Time of Troubles.” A number of published works demonstrate that the Smuta gained widespread currency as a paradigm for interpreting the ongoing disintegration of the state.33 Seventy years of communism brought no shortage of troubles, but it was the collapse of the Soviet Union that most reminded its citizens of the Smuta. In the 1990s ethnic conlicts, extortion, banditry, murder, and exploitation illed the void left by an ineffective government. An endless stream of articles in the Russian press, as well as other literature, drew direct comparisons to the original Time of Troubles.34 For the third time Russia’s state had collapsed, producing misery and uncertainty. In 2002 Russian Orthodox Patriarch Aleksii II joined the chorus of voices when he declared: “Surely the Time of Troubles brings to mind our [own] days, when attempts are being undertaken anew to Catholicize our compatriots, having forgotten about the thousand-year history of Orthodoxy in Rus’.”35 In conjunction with the Orthodox Church, the government of the Russian Federation moved to refound the entire national mythos on themes from the Time of Troubles. In Soviet times the chief national holiday of November 7 commemorated the Bolshevik Revolution. In a feeble attempt to break with the past, President Boris Yeltsin simply renamed this the “Day of Accord and Reconciliation.” The spectacular Soviet holiday metamorphosed into a mere 12 ORTHODOX RUSSIA IN CRISIS day off from work, devoid of deeper signiicance and frequently ridiculed among the population. Then in 2005 Vladimir Putin moved the national holiday back a few days to November 4 and called it the “Day of National Unity.” Reminiscent of observances under the old Romanov dynasty, this new festival commemorated the “salvation of the Russian land” at the end of the Time of Troubles. On November 4, 1612, a united Russian militia had inally recaptured the capital city of Moscow from the hated Polish-Lithuanian occupiers. Russia and Orthodoxy were saved. At that time, Russians celebrated a miraculous victory and attributed it to the presumed eficacy of the Kazan ikon of the Mother of God. In Russian Orthodox tradition, November 4 (October 22 in Old Style) had been set apart for the commemoration of this particular image. In the twenty-irst century, then, Orthodox Russians simultaneously observe a state holiday and a Church festival, both of which recall the same momentous event of the Time of Troubles of the early seventeenth century. The renewed observances on November 4 have stimulated patriotism and national pride, but also xenophobia and national-religious extremism.36 To date, the disasters of the post-Soviet period have not engendered the same magnitude of horriic suffering and slaughter as experienced during the irst two Troubles. Still, the place of Smuta as a national rallying point continues to grow. The introduction of National Unity Day in 2005 featured the unveiling of a replica monument to Minin and Pozharskii in Nizhnii Novgorod. Artists of all styles, including Viktor Schupak, Pavel Ryzhenko, and Maria Podkopaeva, continue to ind expression of their contemporary sentiments via interpretations of Smutnoe vremia. In 2007, Vladimir Khotinenko’s blockbuster ilm 1612: Chronicles of the Time of Troubles gloriied a fantastic version of this history for a popular audience. Numerous new and reissued books on the period have surfaced to complement the media’s frequent allusions to the Troubles.37 Quadricentennial celebrations of the end of the Time of Troubles and the beginning of the Romanov dynasty are currently being planned for 2012–2013.38 What was this infamous Time of Troubles? Why has it become such a deining symbol for the current condition of Russia? What role did the Russian Orthodox Church play at the time? What, if anything, does that history tell us about the Church’s post-Soviet resurgence?39 These questions speak to the very heart of Russian national identity from the rise of Moscow during the twilight of the Middle Ages until today. Beyond question, the Troubles exerted a deep effect on the Russian psychology and left an indelible mark on the national consciousness. One may well imagine that tsar and Cossack, landowner and peasant, bureaucrat and revolutionary all paled at the sound of the words. Yet Introduction 13 1. Maria Podkopaeva, V Smutnoe vremia (In Troubled Times), 2008, oil on canvas. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. “Smutnoe vremia” clearly did not mean the same thing to everyone. For some, it denoted merely the rebelliousness of the lower classes, which had to be suppressed. For others, it conveyed some sense of the inexpressible suffering endured by the population. A few, especially during the second Time of Troubles, actually idealized the bloodbaths as a positive stage of “cleansing” and change. Nonetheless, the discordant voices all demonstrate that Russian identity cannot be separated from Smuta. The Time of Troubles left a legacy that continues to haunt Russia to this day. Historiography of the Time of Troubles and the Russian Orthodox Church Deeply engrained in the Russian consciousness, the Time of Troubles has produced a nearly unlimited low of historiography. For four centuries, scholars have attempted to uncover the causes of the period’s acute tensions and the true story of its tragedies. An equally large literature addresses the history of the Russian Orthodox Church, so important for all aspects of the Russian national experience. Nonetheless, their intersection—the history of the Russian Orthodox Church during the Time of Troubles—has never been studied thoroughly. The present book thus aims to remove a signiicant gap, to ill a critical void in the nation’s history. 14 ORTHODOX RUSSIA IN CRISIS Standard Russian interpretations of the Time of Troubles arose during the imperial period, when the writing of national history acquired greater signiicance. Vasilii Tatishchev (1686–1750) and Mikhail Shcherbatov (1733– 1790) both proposed that the mass uprisings of the period might have resulted from the imposition of serfdom at the end of the sixteenth century. The famous court historian of Alexander I, Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), emphasized foreign intervention and the loss of the tsar’s authority. In his view, Boris Godunov served as “a sensible and solicitous Tsar” and “one of the most judicious Sovereigns in the world.” At the same time this wise and legitimate ruler was a Russian Macbeth who had murdered to attain the throne. Karamzin assigned Tsar Boris much of the responsibility for the Troubles, remarking: “Was it not he . . . who more than all others furthered the disparaging of the throne, having mounted it as the murderer of a saint?” Karamzin followed seventeenth-century chroniclers in describing the “calamity” (bedstvie) that followed Boris’s death in 1605 as God’s just punishment of Russia.40 Karamzin’s volumes on the Time of Troubles were his last, coming at the end of his life. By that time his place as a monumental interpreter of the Russian tradition had been assured. Concerning the earlier volumes of his History of the Russian State, Pushkin wrote: “The appearance of this book (appropriately) caused a sensation. . . . Ancient Russia seemed to have been discovered by Karamzin like America was by Columbus.”41 It was essentially Karamzin’s version of events that Pushkin would eventually canonize in his classic drama Boris Godunov.42 A long line of historians and other authors have repeated Karamzin’s interpretations of numerous events, even when those interpretations stemmed from overly creative or fanciful utilization of the sources.43 The later nineteenth century saw unmatched development in Russian historiography generally, including scholarship on the Troubles. In his massive History of Russia from the Most Ancient Times, Sergei Soloviev (1820–1879) focused on the struggles between different groups within Russian society, particularly the Cossacks and the gentry. Nikolai Kostomarov (1817–1885) and Vasilii Kliuchevskii (1841–1911) each developed distinctive theories of how conlict among social classes had produced the Troubles. Kliuchevskii emphasized that the end of the old dynasty in 1598 had served as the catalyst or precondition for open struggle.44 The most renowned historian of the Time of Troubles, Sergei Platonov (1860–1933), created a synthetic model according to which the period consisted of three distinct phases: a dynastic crisis (1598–1606), a social struggle (1606– Introduction 15 1610), and a battle for national survival (1610–1613). Platonov wrote that “the top and bottom of Muscovite society lost the game, while the middle strata of society won it.” He also pointed to longer-term causes, reexamining the oprichnina of Ivan IV and the crises of the later sixteenth century. Platonov’s model remains inluential to this day; a leading American textbook has long considered it “authoritative.”45 The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 altered trends in Russian historiography, infusing Marxist-Leninist thought into all forms of scholarship. Mikhail Pokrovskii (1868–1932) gained control of the central archives, postsecondary education, and the historical establishment. He allegedly used his power to eliminate rivals and create a new Soviet version of Russian history. George Vernadsky even claimed: “By his orders, a series of outstanding Russian historians were tortured to death in prison and exile (Platonov, Liubavskii, Rozhdestvenskii, Vasenko, Zaozerskii).”46 Unsurprisingly, Pokrovskii’s own textbook on Russian history asserted that the Time of Troubles represented an example of Marxist class warfare. Moreover, the supposed heroes Hermogen, Minin, and Pozharskii had merely displayed “a special form of class selfpreservation.” In reality, Pokrovskii asserted, the patriarch had not even written the letters that circulated in his name.47 Subsequent Soviet historians, including Ivan Smirnov, Aleksandr Zimin, and Vadim Koretskii, followed Pokrovskii’s rejection of the term “Time of Troubles” and instead wrote about Russia’s “First Peasant War.” In their view, the Bolotnikov rebellion and other uprisings constituted a revolutionary movement against serfdom and the oppression of the upper classes. In a sense the older suggestions of Tatishchev and Shcherbatov had now been pressed into the service of modern ideological motives. This quasi-Marxist model dominated historiography within the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991; it still continues to inluence many academics.48 However, the post-Soviet period has seen the emergence of a new interpretation of the Time of Troubles as Russia’s “First Civil War.” Ruslan Skrynnikov and Aleksandr Stanislavskii used this term in an attempt to move away from the “peasant war” model. In 2001 the American scholar Chester Dunning produced the most comprehensive reevaluation of the period since Platonov’s classic work. In Russia’s First Civil War, Dunning argued that the uprisings of the period had numerous causes but were fueled primarily by a genuine belief in Dmitrii as the legitimate, divinely anointed tsar. In his view, popular support for Dmitrii (in whatever guise he might appear) cut right through social distinctions and “united diverse elements 16 ORTHODOX RUSSIA IN CRISIS of Russian society.” There was in fact no “social revolution” and no peasant rebellion against serfdom.49 The causes and consequences of the Time of Troubles are likely to remain controversial. Serfdom and economic depression no doubt played their role, as did the all-important question of the tsar’s legitimacy. The different schools of interpretation have resulted from emphasizing some one factor at the expense of another. Did rebels of the period actually believe they were supporting the legitimate, divinely authorized tsar—or did they use this rhetoric merely as a front for violently expressing their true grievances?50 The Troubles apparently included examples of both types of revolt, as well as many that combined these two justiications into one. The explosion of discontent into chaotic and nearly constant warfare at least tells us that masses of people chafed at the situation in Russia. But who deined the good of the society? What was right and what was wrong? Conjointly with the state, the Russian Orthodox Church held a monopoly on truth in Muscovite society. Ever since the Kievan adoption of Eastern Christianity in 988 or 989, the East Slavs had deined themselves in relationship to Orthodoxy. In Muscovy religion was inseparable from politics and provided the raison d’être and ideology of the state. Orthodoxy inluenced every aspect of life, from literature and art to territorial exploration and prison wardenry. Although the extent to which the common people understood and adopted Christian teachings remains debatable, Russia was nothing if not Orthodox. In his classic interpretation of Russian culture, James Billington chose “the icon and the axe” as the two quintessential symbols of peasant life.51 The axe, an everyday implement, cut the wood for the ikon, or holy painting, which symbolized Eastern Orthodox Christian civilization. The Time of Troubles occurred within this political and cultural setting, so any interpretation of the period must grapple with the role of the Russian Church and Orthodoxy to some extent. Tatishchev wrote of the competition between ecclesiastic and secular landowners for peasant laborers at the turn of the seventeenth century; some later historians followed him in pointing to the Church’s vast landholdings as an important factor in the crisis. Platonov began his classic work by describing the dominant role of the Solovetskii and other monasteries in the northern regions of the Russian state. Virtually all histories of the Troubles mention accusations of ecclesiastic speculation in foodstuffs during the Famine, Tsar Dmitrii’s alleged failure to observe Orthodox customs, famous battles at monasteries, and the inspirational letters of Patriarch Hermogen.52 In other words, standard histories of the period Introduction 17 mention the Church and Orthodoxy frequently but incidentally; none of them considers the history of the Russian Orthodox Church during the Time of Troubles as a topic for investigation in its own right. General histories of the Russian Orthodox Church also fail to present an adequate scholarly interpretation of its activity during the Troubles. The largest and best such works were written in the nineteenth century by Russian clerics and fervent Orthodox believers. These authors naturally adopted an almost invariably positive attitude toward the Church and tended to read the historical documents too uncritically. In addition, their primary interest lay in recounting the religious accomplishments of the Church’s top hierarchs and other famous igures. As the introduction to a recent edition of one such work stated, “The history of the Church is irst of all the history of the deeds and feats of the holy righteous men and zealous heroes.”53 By contrast, the enormous business activity of monasteries—which probably consumed a far greater amount of time and labor than working miracles, canonizing saints, or writing liturgies—generally merited little or no space. Several other histories of the Russian Orthodox Church either do not cover the Time of Troubles or contain at best a minimal amount of information.54 Metropolitan Makarii Bulgakov’s twelve-volume History of the Russian Church represents the premier example of this kind of ecclesiastic historiography. Makarii assigned two roles to the Church, civil (or political) and religious, and he intermingled them in his account. In both instances, however, “the Church” meant essentially the heads of the Church. Makarii’s chapter on the Time of Troubles was entitled “The First Three Patriarchs in Moscow and the Period Between Patriarchs” (Tri pervye patriarkha v Moskve i mezhdupatriarshestvo). Moreover, as a Church hierarch himself, Makarii occasionally included unlattering details but was inclined to justify the morally questionable actions of those he studied. For example, he conceded that Patriarch Iyov (also Iov, Iev, Job) may not have exercised impartiality in maneuvering behind the scenes to get Boris Godunov “elected” to the throne in 1598. Nonetheless, he argued that Iyov’s actions accorded with the “general consciousness”—thus failing to explain why such strenuous efforts were needed in the irst place, or why an apparent consensus would validate the patriarch’s actions, especially since at least some voiced agreement only “unwillingly.” Makarii further posited that Iyov could not have known about any “secret” wrongdoings, such as politically motivated murder, that Boris may have committed—thus belying the admittedly close association between the two men.55 18 ORTHODOX RUSSIA IN CRISIS Another creation of the mid-nineteenth century, Count Mikhail Tolstoi’s Stories from the History of the Russian Church, adopted a similar tone. Tolstoi did not achieve the same level of scholarship as Makarii; his work was derivative and intended for a general audience. The Stories consisted mainly of tidbits that would please an Orthodox Christian readership: religiously inspired acts of charity, the physical and spiritual expansion of Orthodoxy, the deeds of saints. Tolstoi structured his narrative around political events, blithely accepting the witness of oficial documents and earlier historians. Following Karamzin, he described Boris Godunov as a regicide who had nonetheless been legitimately selected by “all the land” to rule, and then proceeded to quote the tsar’s religiously laden interactions with Patriarch Iyov.56 More recent scholarship has furnished two additional categories of works related to the history of the Church during the Troubles. First, monographs and anthologies on religion in early modern Russia frequently cite the Time of Troubles as an enormously consequential moment in history, but with little or no consideration of the period itself. In his Religion and Society in Russia, Paul Bushkovitch termed the Time of Troubles a “watershed” separating two forms of Muscovite religiosity. Regardless, his presentation largely skipped the period per se, focusing instead on what came before and after. The same approach characterizes several other valuable collections of articles on Russian religion and culture.57 The complexity of the Smuta and of the Church itself appears to have deterred historians from tackling the question head on. The second group of recent works encompasses a number of articles produced by Russian scholars on speciic topics related to the Church during the Troubles. In general these have been highly specialized studies treating such problems as the religious symbolism of a particular ceremony or the religious question in the negotiations concerning Prince Wladyslaw’s candidacy for the Muscovite throne. Isolated chapters on the Time of Troubles in broader surveys also contribute much of interest but do not aspire to a complete history of the Church during the Troubles. The work of the Ukrainian scholar Vasilii Ulianovskii deserves special mention: his recent book Smutnoe vremia uniquely treats a range of questions regarding church-state relations in the years 1604–1606.58 In sum, an actual history of the Russian Orthodox Church during the Time of Troubles has, surprisingly, never been written.59 Histories of the Troubles include some mention of the Church; histories of the Church contain some discussion of the Troubles. A variety of other works have nibbled at the edges of the topic or contributed important pieces of the puzzle. The goal of this book Introduction 19 is to trace Russia’s most important institution throughout the period of the country’s greatest crisis. Such a task demands more than simply highlighting a few well-known events, which has often been done, or even examining selected problems in detail, which some scholars have done quite beneicially. The goal here is to paint a more comprehensive picture of the overall history of the Church during the Troubles, building upward from the details of surviving primary sources. Dificult Questions The history of the Russian Orthodox Church during the Time of Troubles alternately fascinates, stuns, alarms, and confuses. The irst problem faced by the researcher is the labyrinthine quandary of how to approach the primary sources. The documentary remnants of the early seventeenth century yield nothing like a solid, secure, straightforward foundation for writing a well-rounded history of the Church. They lie instead at the opposite end of the spectrum: highly fragmentary, mostly lacking, and often unreliable or contradictory to boot. The complicated and deicient nature of the sources necessarily affects the questions that can reasonably be asked and answered about the history of the Church during the Troubles. The researcher must proceed with caution and creativity, much like a canny detective sifting meager clues and mulling the minutest of details in order to arrive at the truth. Certainty cannot always be attained; often it is possible only to hypothesize about this history. The relative scarcity of sources has resulted partly from unfortunate events such as the great Moscow ire of 1626, which destroyed almost all the archives of the central government agencies (prikazy). As Konstantin Petrov remarked, “Documents of the sixteenth century and earlier that have been preserved until the present time represent, without exaggeration, only the pitiful remnants of the central departments’ extensive record-keeping.”60 The chaotic nature of the Time of Troubles also hindered the production and preservation of documents, meaning that sources for this period are further reduced. Extant archival documents for the ifteen years 1598–1613 are considerably less plentiful than for either 1583–1598 or 1613–1628.61 Documents concerning the history of the Church during the Troubles include the written records of government decrees, business transactions, usufructuary rights, property boundaries, tax exemptions, donations to monasteries, legal appeals, liturgical matters, letters, speeches, wills, and travels. These kinds of 20 ORTHODOX RUSSIA IN CRISIS sources deal with very speciic and usually economic matters—for example, the sale of a cow, a monastery’s ownership over some villages, the right to collect salt from a given mine, or the collection of dues from peasants. In total, the documents number one thousand or a little more. This sum should be placed in the context of a historical setting that included several thousand ecclesiastic institutions: hierarchical establishments from the patriarch on down, monasteries large and small, and local parishes. In other words, statistically we do not have even one document for every Church institution that existed during the Troubles. Moreover, the vast majority of extant documents concern only the ifteen or twenty largest institutions of the time (the patriarchate and major monasteries). Thousands of smaller monasteries and parishes are not mentioned at all in existing sources from the Time of Troubles.62 The translator G. Edward Orchard wrote, “The only bright spot in the almost unrelieved gloom [of the Time of Troubles] is in the realm of historical writing, in which the authors explored what lessons the dreadful events of past years held for Russia. . . . The accounts of foreigners who were present in Muscovy during these years admirably complement these annalistic writings.”63 The catastrophes of the Troubles did at least produce some extraordinarily colorful historical tales and stories, as well as biographical writings and even prophetic visions. Many of these texts represented signiicant innovations in the Russian historiographic tradition. Both Russians and foreigners—including Polish-Lithuanian commanders, French and German mercenary captains, and a Dutch merchant apprentice—felt compelled to record what they saw and heard during the tumultuous period. The historian must be grateful for these narratives, but their biases and frequent contradictions present another dificulty in deciphering history.64 The fact that perhaps ninety percent of archival documentation related to the Church during the Troubles concerns strictly economic matters means that this activity must be taken seriously. Although one might prefer a greater wealth of religious, literary, and cultural texts, honesty requires consideration of what exists rather than what one would like to exist. Yet the potential disappointment caused by this imbalance in the sources is offset by the discovery that ecclesiastic economic activity was an enormously important factor in the Troubles. Monasteries in particular contributed to the economic environment within which the Troubles occurred, and their trading pursuits inluenced business patterns all through the period. Ecclesiastic economic interests also dictated political expediencies. These issues must be investigated. At the same time, it is necessary to avoid too facile a conclusion that it was “all about money.” Introduction 21 Contemporary political documents were composed almost exclusively for propagandistic (i.e., publicity) purposes, a circumstance that forces reconsideration of the information they contain. All too often in historiography these documents have been cited as direct evidence of what happened during the Time of Troubles. In fact, however, they furnish highly selective or even distorted relections of actual history. The researcher must read these sources “against the grain,” wringing from them drops of evidence that actually run contrary to the original authorial or textual intention.65 The same principle applies to many narrative sources, which were often compiled retrospectively in later decades. During the Time of Troubles, the Russian Orthodox Church embraced both central and regional hierarchies, hundreds of monasteries and convents, thousands of churches or “temples,” and (theoretically at least) millions of faithful Orthodox Russians. Its purview touched on everything from prayers to agriculture, from commerce to scholarship, from music to warfare, and from missionary expeditions to prison management. The dificulty of covering so many realms of activity on the basis of very fragmentary sources likely represents the principal reason that no one has yet produced a complete study of the topic in four centuries, despite widespread recognition of its signiicance. The sources unfortunately do not permit us as panoramic a view as we would like. They do, however, offer some glimpses or clues into each sphere of life. It is therefore possible as well as necessary to write a history of the Church during the Troubles that goes beyond merely a description of the top hierarchs and their activity.66 The period of Smutnoe vremia lies on a fault line in Russian history. The next great event would be the Church Schism (Raskol) of the mid-seventeenth century. A well-known historian of that crisis, Pierre Pascal, remarked: “We must go to the Time of Troubles to discover the germ of the great rupture [of the Schism]. The material and moral catastrophe vividly felt by the entire nation engendered an appetite for reforms.”67 A more recent historian of the Raskol, Georg Michels, has written: “It is not surprising that the Russian Orthodox Church became a signiicant target of popular hostility during the second half of the seventeenth century. The church was then one of the most vigorous institutions of Muscovite power under the new Romanov dynasty, for it had emerged from the Time of Troubles with its power base intact.”68 What actually happened during the Time of Troubles to set the stage for the Schism and other socioreligious tensions in the second half of the seventeenth century? What precisely changed in the relationship between the Church and 22 ORTHODOX RUSSIA IN CRISIS its people? Did the national disaster of the Troubles alter Russian mentality and faith? Put simply, what makes the Time of Troubles a watershed for Russian religion, culture, and society? The sixteenth century represented the formative period of Russian national mentality, of a worldview that continues to inluence the country to this day. In the words of one historian, “‘Russian’ history (as opposed to ‘Rus’ history) really began in the sixteenth century.”69 Yet at the most critical moment, the Troubles diverted the new stream of Russian ideology into unforeseen channels, both oficial and popular. Ecclesiastic ideologues hastily improvised to maintain the government’s power in the midst of catastrophe; popular leaders and thinkers removed from the center of power appropriated select aspects of the new ideology for their own ends. When the dust settled, Russia had found a national identity that would both propel it into the modern age and also lay the seeds of unending conlict between elites and masses, and between conservatives and reformers. Pascal characterized his entire investigation as an answer to the simple question, “What [was] the Schism?” (qu’est-ce que le raskol?).70 Michels readdressed this same problem; his revised interpretation of history stemmed largely from a differing deinition of the Raskol.71 One may just as well ask, what was the Russian Orthodox Church during the Time of Troubles? The present study represents a reevaluation of the very meaning of the Russian Church and of Orthodoxy at this time in history. What was the Church’s real place and role in Russian society? What do the primary sources tell us about ecclesiastic decisions and actions during a period of crisis? And how did the Russian people view Orthodoxy? The Smuta hit the Russian nation with such force that its memory has remained vivid for centuries. Striking in its multivalence, the term became a symbol that still resonates strongly in the national culture today, much like the destruction of the Second Temple in Jewish memory. Yet extended periods of great suffering were not the only perceived links between Russians and Jews. The Time of Troubles took place at a time when, in the national-religious mindset, Russia was Israel, God’s chosen people. This crucial belief provides the starting point for understanding the dark abyss of the Troubles.