(RUSSIA, to 1700 -- continued)
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RUSSIA, to 1700 (4 of 4)
The time of troubles left much of Russia in ruins. The country was broke. Moscow and other towns had been destroyed by fire. Michael struggled in his first few years as ruler to restore order. In 1617, four years after Michael had become tsar, Sweden's king, Gustavus II, gave back territory around Novgorod in exchange of assurances from Moscow that it would not expand into the Baltic Sea. In 1618, Poland also signed a treaty with Moscow, recognized by both parties as a breathing spell in hostilities. The Poles still held that Vladislav was Moscow's legitimate monarch, and they still held the town of Smolensk.
In preparation for more war with Poland, Michael began to reconstruct his army, purchasing foreign mercenaries and covering his increased expenses with more taxation. With order re-established in much of Russia, merchants from various nations arrived, and custom duties on trade benefited the state treasury. Trade through the port of Archangel was to double in the coming half century.
King Sigismund died unexpectedly in April 1632, followed by political instability within Poland. Moscow was eager to seize the opportunity against Poland, and for Moscow its armament program became more urgent. Moscow purchased from the Dutch cannon and other military equipment.
Poland was a weak and divided land. It was half-Polish, and the other half were Lithuanians, Russians, Jews and Germans. The Polish king was elected by a council of nobility rather than a dynasty, and the king and his government had no power to tax. Nobles disliked the idea of paying taxes to the central government, and Poland's king did nothing that the nobility opposed. Poland's nobility were sovereign over vast territories and drew wealth from exporting grain and timber. Lacking unity, Poland had little success against Moscow. The war between Poland and Moscow fought in the years 1632-34 was concluded with Moscow failing to win back Smolensk. But Poland's new king, Valdislav IV, withdrew his claim to the throne in Moscow.
Meanwhile, Cossacks continued to defy Moscow's authority, and war against the Islamic Tatars continued. In 1637, Cossacks seized the Turkish fortress at Azov. In 1641 an Ottoman army and navy drove the Cossacks back. The Cossacks, in turn, offered Azov to Tsar Michael, but Michael believed that his kingdom was not in good enough shape economically to war against the Ottomans, and he declined. Against the Tatars, however, Moscow built an 800-mile wall, with moats and fortresses, along a line as far south as Belgorod. The Tatars were now blocked from making their raids, saving tens of thousands of Russians from slavery and inspiring a rush by Russians to settle on the fertile lands around the area of the Oka River.
A rush to occupy other lands was also in motion. It was during Michael's reign that the Russians expanded across the southern Ural Mountains and further into the southern steppe, in conflict there with Tatars and other nomads. In 1638 Russian pioneers reached the Pacific Ocean. In 1652, (after Michael's death in 1645) they occupied the area around Lake Baikal, just north of Mongolia, and they would occupy Kamchatka Peninsula in 1696. Siberia had been sparsely populated by native hunter-gatherers, who offered little resistance to the Russians. The Russians traded with these people (much as the French, and soon the British, were trading with natives in North America). The Russians made middlemen of themselves in the fur trade in addition to taking fur pelts of their own -- furs that were in demand in Europe and China. It was the opening of Siberia to Russian domination.
In 1645, Michael was succeeded by his sixteen-year-old son, Alexius, who was to rule for thirty-one years. In January 1648, Alexius married the daughter of the aristocratic Miloslavski family whose members became active in the tsar's government. In the summer of 1648, increased taxation, robbery and corruption under the Miloslavskies caused people in Moscow to rebel, and revolts spread to nearby towns and to Novgorod and Pskov. Facing insurrection and the need to curb the Miloslavskies, Alexius granted concessions to the nobles, and new laws were passed overriding the previous law that limited the hunting of a runaway to nine years. Now a noble was to hunt a runaway to the end of the runaway's life, and a noble could hold a peasant and his offspring to his land as long as he wished. Nobles were allowed to rule over their serfs as they saw fit. Military obligations by the nobility were relaxed, and the nobility were given the right to engage in urban trade and handicraft.
In 1652 a religious crisis erupted. The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Nikon, wished to return to what he thought had been its purity in previous times. Common people resisted changes in how they worshipped. They viewed Nikon an anti-Christ. Twenty thousand of them burned themselves to death, crossing themselves with two fingers rather than the three fingers that Nikon claimed was proper, and as they burned they sang "hallelujahs." In 1667 a Church council deposed and defrocked Nikon, who went into exile in a monastery.
Since the 1650s, Russia had been at war with Poland again, following a move by Ukrainians, who were Eastern Orthodox, submitting to the rule of Russia's Orthodox tsar rather than to Polish authority. The war was settled in the 1660s, with Tsar Alexius keeping the Ukraine and winning back Smolensk.
Then in 1670 came the Stenka revolt -- in the wake of the new and harsher laws against Russia's peasants. A commander of a band of Cossacks in the Don River region, Stephen Razin, began moving up the Volga River proclaiming freedom for common folks against tsarist officials and landlords. In town after town he was welcomed by common folks, and in town after town members of the upper classes were massacred. Razin's subordinates had similar successes in widespread areas in the hinterland. The rebel army reached Simbirsk and grew to some 200,000 men. Poor organization and discipline in the rebel army helped forces sent by Moscow to defeat them, forces that included several regiments trained in a Western military manner. Razin and some followers escaped to the Don River area, but in the spring of 1671 he was seized by rival Cossacks, handed over to tsarist officials and publicly executed. And several months later, Astrakhan, the last center of the rebellion, surrendered.
Russia had improved its military capability, its population had been recovering and its economy was progressing slowly. Trade was increasing. [note] In recent decades printing with movable type had been introduced. Russians had begun their own iron industry, and with it the beginning of Russian capitalism. But in Russia, British and Dutch entrepreneurs were still playing a leading role in mining and manufacturing, in areas such as light textiles and glassmaking. The Russians were without much of a merchant fleet of their own. Russia was still not developing a prosperous and influential middleclass. The Church was becoming increasingly annoyed by the growing number of foreigners, and, in Moscow, foreigners were obliged to live in a restricted area.
Under Alexius, Russia still lacked the success in agriculture that had allowed the Dutch to advance economically. Russia's economy was still largely subsistence agriculture: the growing of rye, wheat, oats and barley and millet, using wooden and metal plows, and growing vegetables on small plots. South of Moscow cattle and horses were bred. North of Moscow timber was harvested. And some people lived by hunting and fishing. The agricultural region in the middle of Russia had a short growing season. The soil was poor, and often it rained too much. There, grass barely sustained cattle through the winter. It took three seeds planted to produce one harvested plant, and the growers habitually practiced a downward genetic selection of their seeds, consuming their better seeds and planting their worst.
The Tsarina, Alexius' first wife, Mary Miloslavski, died in 1669 trying to bear her fourteenth child. Of the five sons she bore, two had survived. The eldest, Theodor, was not healthy. Alexius remarried in 1670, and in 1672 his wife, Natalya Naryshkina, bore him a son: Peter, the future Peter the Great. The messy succession that was common to monarchies was in the making.
In 1676 Alexius died. Theodor, at the age of twelve, inherited the throne as Theodor III. The Miloslavskies were pleased and eager to reestablish their power. Soon Theodor was married and under pressure by the Miloslavskies to produce an heir. The Miloslavskies were warned that the effort might be too much for him, and the warning appears to have been correct, for in 1682 at the age of twenty he died, without his wife bearing him a child. Theodor's brother, Ivan, now 16, was half-blind, had a speech impediment and was uninterested in ruling. Theodor's half-brother, Peter, was bright, healthy and aggressive. Peter's mother, Natalya, was named regent, and Peter was named tsar. The Miloslavski family staged a coup, and Peter witnessed the murder of members of his mother's family. A council of nobles, trying to settle matters, made Ivan and Peter co-tsars. Peter's mother was dismissed and the grown daughter of Alexius and Mary Miloslavski, Sophia, was made regent over the boys. She ruled with the support of the Miloslavski family and enjoyed the power, finding it superior at any rate to the usual isolation of royal daughters. The inevitable showdown between Peter and Sophia took place in 1694 when Peter reached the age of twenty-two. Peter won the men with arms to his side, luring and threatening holdouts. Sophia lost hope that she would be able to exercise the violence needed to combat her younger half-brother. Peter sent an embittered Sophia to a nunnery, and he executed some of her supporters on the charge of treason.
Peter had been interested in sailing and boats. He had spent much of his later teens learning boat building and sailing with Dutchmen by Lake Pleschev, eighty-five miles northeast of Moscow. He enjoyed being treated by the Dutch as a common apprentice. His mother, however, was annoyed by his interest in foreigners. She had arranged his marriage, but Peter was bored by his wife's conversation, still preferring his life with the Dutchmen at Lake Pleschev, and his wife joined his mother's dislike for those foreigners who were stealing her husband's attention. Peter was inquisitive and independent in his thinking. He was a skeptic and unimpressed by Church admonitions that foreigners were evil people.
Peter was aware of the superiority of Western Europe, and in 1697, at the age of twenty-five, he went abroad for eighteen months to learn and to experience life in the West. He went first to Amsterdam, then the wealthiest city in the world - its harbor packed with sailing ships. In Amsterdam he worked in a shipyard. He visited factories and mills, museums and botanical gardens. He walked the streets, seeing well-dressed and friendly people. He visited Amsterdam's open air market, where goods of all kinds were available. He visited people in their homes, met with architects, inventors and engineers, and he found himself interested in printing and the surgery of Fredrik Ruysch, who was preserving bodies with chemicals. With his Russian and Dutch companions he enjoyed Amsterdam's taverns. And he was impressed by what he saw of religious toleration. Then Peter went to England, second to the United Netherlands in wealth. He then went to Vienna and he returned home through Poland, arriving back in Moscow in 1698 eager to change Russia.
Books
The Origins of Capitalism in Russia: Industry and Progress in the 16th and 17th Centuries, by Joseph T Fuhrmann, 1972.
A History of Russia, by Nicholas V Riasanovsky, Third Edition, Oxford University Press, 1977.
The Economy and Material Culture of Russia, 1600-1725, by Richard Hellie, Chicago University Press, 1999.
Peter the Great, by Robert K Massie, Wing Books, 1980.
Copyright © 2001-2011 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.
