Chapter V: The Century After Ivan the Terrible (3)

The class of poor Cossacks, which was unceasingly recruited from fugitives, hated the Russian government and obtained the sympathy of the serfs who dared not break their chain. The condition of the latter was deplorable; at a time when the life of a freeman was held of small account, a slave was less than a beast of burden and certainly more miserable. The savagery of manners, the harshness of the masters, was equalled only by the ferocity of the laws. One example will be enough to show what the legislation of this epoch was like. The serf was responsible for his master’s debts. If the lord did not pay his creditors the serf was put in prison and daily beaten before the courts of justice until the debtor had paid or the creditors had abandoned their claims. In their wretchedness the serfs were witnesses of the liberty of the Cossacks, who spoke the same language as themselves and who had the same origin. We need not be astonished if, in their despair, they were disposed to accept as their liberators the Cossacks who came to pillage their masters. A slave rarely dares to conceive the idea of conquering his liberty; but he is always ready to aid the freeman who declares himself his protector. Thus it is to be noted that all the great insurrections of serfs which broke out in Russia were organised by Cossacks. The False Dmitri, Stenka Radzin, and Pugatchev furnish the proof of this.[b]

LAST YEARS OF MICHAEL

The peace with Poland being only for a stated term of years, Michael endeavoured, before its expiration, to have his troops placed in such a condition by foreign officers that he might be able to reconquer the countries ceded to the Poles. Nay, on the death of Sigismund, ere the armistice had expired, he began the attempt to recover these territories, under the idle pretext that he had concluded a peace with Sigismund and not with his successor. But the Russian commander, Michael Schein, the very same who had valiantly defended Smolensk with a small number of troops against the Poles, now lay two whole years indolently before that town, with an army of fifty thousand men and provided with good artillery, and at length retreated on capitulation, a retreat for which he and his friends were brought to answer with their heads. The Russian nation were so dissatisfied with this campaign, and the king of Sweden, whom Michael wanted to engage in an alliance with him against the Poles, showed so little inclination to comply, that the czar was fain to return to the former amicable relation with Poland. Peace was therefore again agreed on, and matters remained as they were before.

During his reign, which continued till 1645, Michael had employment enough in endeavouring to heal the wounds which the spirit of faction had inflicted on his country; to compose the disorders that had arisen; to restore the administration which had been so often disjointed and relaxed; to give new vigour and activity to the laws, disobeyed and inefficient during the general confusions; and to communicate fresh life to expiring commerce. It redounds greatly to his honour that he proceeded in all these respects with prudence and moderation, and brought the disorganised machine of government again into play. More than this, the restoration of the old order of things, was not to be expected of him. Much that he was unable to effect was accomplished by his son and successor, Alexis.

ALEXIS (1645-1676 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1645 A.D.]]

The administration, however, of the boyar Boris Morosov, to whom Michael at his death committed the education of Alexis, then in his sixteenth year, well-nigh destroyed the tranquillity which had so lately been restored. Morosov trod in the footsteps of Boris Godunov, put himself, as that favourite of the czar had done, into the highest posts, and thus acquired the most extensive authority in the state, turned out all that stood in his way, distributed offices and dignities as they fell vacant among his friends and creatures, and even became, like Boris, a near relation of the czar Alexis, by marrying a sister of the czaritza. Like his prototype, indeed, Morosov effected much good, particularly by making the army a main object of his concern, by strengthening the frontiers against Poland and Sweden, erecting manufactories for arms, taking a number of foreigners into pay for the better disciplining of the army, and diligently exercising the troops himself.

But these important services to the state could not render the people insensible to the numerous acts of injustice and oppression which were practised with impunity by the party protected by this minion of the czar. The most flagrant enormities were committed, more particularly in the administration of justice. The sentence of the judge was warped to either side by presents; witnesses were to be bought; several of the magistrates, however incredible it may seem, kept a number of scoundrels in readiness to corroborate or to oppugn, for a sum of money, whatever they were required to confirm or to deny. Such profligates were particularly employed in order to get rich persons into custody on charges of any species of delinquency sworn against them by false witnesses, to condemn them to death, and then to seize upon their property, as the accumulation of wealth seemed to be the general object of all men in office. From the same corrupt fountain flowed a multitude of monopolies and excessive taxes on the prime necessaries of life. The consequence of all this was the oppression of the people by privileged extortioners and murmurs against injustice and the exhorbitance of imposts. In addition to this, those grandees who had now the reins of government in their hands assumed a haughty, austere behaviour towards the subjects, whereas Michael and his father had been friendly and indulgent, and their gentleness communicated itself to all who at that time took part in the administration.

From these several causes arose discontents in the nation; such great men as were neglected and disappointed contributed what they could to fan these discontents, and to bring them to overt act. Moscow, the seat of the principal magistrate, who, himself in the highest degree unjust, connived at the iniquities of his subordinate judges, was the place where the people first applied for redress. They began by presenting petitions to the czar, implored the removal of these disorders, and exposed to him in plain terms the abuses committed by the favourite and his adherents. But these petitions were of no avail, as none of the courtiers would venture to put them into the hand of the czar, for fear of Morosov’s long arm. The populace therefore, once stopped the czar, as he was returning from church to his palace, calling aloud for righteous judges. Alexis promised them to make strict inquiry into their grievances, and to inflict punishment on the guilty; the people, however, had not patience to wait this tardy process, but proceeded to plunder the houses of such of the great as were most obnoxious to them. At length they were pacified only on condition that the authors of their oppressions should be brought to condign punishment. Not, however, till they had killed the principal magistrate, and other obnoxious persons, and forced from the czar the abolition of some of the new taxes and the death of another nefarious judge, could they be induced to spare the life of Morosov, though the czar himself entreated for him with tears. Thenceforth Morosov ceased to be the sole adviser of his sovereign, though he continued to enjoy his favour and affection.

Some time after these events, disturbances not less violent occurred in Pleskov and Novgorod, and were not quelled until much mischief had been done. The pacification of Novgorod was mainly due to the wisdom and intrepidity of the celebrated Nicon, who was afterwards patriarch.

While the nation was in this restless and angry mood, another false Dmitri thought to avail himself of an opportunity apparently so favourable to gather a party. He was the son of a draper in the Ukraine, and was prompted to his imposture by a Polish nobleman, named Danilovski. One day, when the young man was bathing, marks were observed on his back which were thought to resemble letters of some unknown tongue. Danilovski, hearing of this freak of nature, determined to build a plot upon it. He sent for the young man, and had the marks examined by a Greek pope whom he had suborned. The pope cried out, “A miracle!” and declared that the letters were Russian, and formed distinctly these words: Dmitri, son of the czar Dmitri. The public murder of Marina’s infant son was notorious; but that difficulty was met by the common device of an alleged change of children, and the Poles were invited to lend their aid to the true prince thus miraculously identified. They were willing enough to do so; but the trick was too stale to impose on the Russians. The impostor found no adherents among them; and after a wretched life of vagrancy and crime, he fell into the hands of Alexis, and was quartered alive.

Alexis soon had an opportunity to repay in a more substantial manner the ill will borne to him by the Poles, who had further offended him by rejecting him as a candidate for their throne, and electing John Casimir. The cruel oppressions exercised by the Poles upon the Cossacks of the Ukraine had roused the latter to revolt, and a furious war ensued, in which the enraged Cossacks avenged their wrongs in the most ruthless and indiscriminate manner. At last, after many vicissitudes, being deserted by their Tatar allies, the Cossacks appealed for aid to Alexis, offering to acknowledge him as their suzerain. With such auxiliaries the czar could now renew with better prospects the attempt made by his father to recover the territories wrested from Russia by her inveterate foe. He declared war against Poland; his conquests were rapid and numerous, and would probably have terminated in the complete subjugation of Poland, had he not been compelled to pause before the march of a still more successful invader of that country, Charles Gustavus, king of Sweden.

[Sidenote: [1658-1662 A.D.]]

Incensed at seeing his prey thus snatched from him when he had nearly hunted it down, Alexis fell upon the king of Sweden’s own dominions during his absence; but from this enterprise he reaped neither advantage nor credit; and he was glad to conclude, in 1658, a three years’ truce with Sweden, and subsequently a peace, which was an exact renewal of the Treaty of Stolbova in 1617. The war in Poland ended more honourably for Russia. An armistice for thirteen years, agreed upon at Andnissov, in Lithuania, and afterwards prolonged from time to time, was the forerunner of a complete pacification, which was brought to effect in 1686, and restored to the empire Smolensk, Severia, Tchernigov, and Kiev, that primeval principality of the Russian sovereigns. The king of Poland likewise relinquished to the czar the supremacy he had till then asserted over the Cossacks of the Ukraine.

Russia had as much need as Poland of repose; for the empire was suffering under an accumulation of evils--an exhausted treasury, commercial distress, pestilence and famine, all aggravated by the unwise means adopted to relieve them. To supply the place of the silver money, which had disappeared, copper of the same nominal value was coined and put in circulation. At first these tokens were received with confidence, and no inconvenience was experienced; but ere long the court itself destroyed that confidence by its audacious efforts to secure to itself all the sterling money, and leave only the new coin for the use of commerce. The cupidity displayed in transactions of this kind, especially by Ilia Miloslavski, the czar’s father-in-law, taught the public to dislike the copper coinage; it became immensely depreciated, and extreme general distress ensued. A rebellion broke out in consequence in Moscow (1662), and though it was speedily put down it was punished in the most atrocious manner in the persons of thousands of wretches whose misery had driven them to crime; whilst the authors of their woe escaped with impunity. The prisoners were hanged by hundreds, tortured, burned, mutilated, or thrown by night, with their hands bound, into the river. The number who suffered death in consequence of this arbitrary alteration of the currency was estimated at more than seven thousand; the tortured and maimed, at upwards of fifteen thousand.

[Sidenote: [1665-1671 A.D.]]

The conduct of the Don Cossacks was soon such as to make it questionable whether the acquisition of these new subjects was not rather a loss than a gain to the empire. At the end of the campaign of 1665 the Cossacks were refused permission to disband as usual and to return to their homes. They mutinied; and several of them were punished with death. Among those who were executed was an officer, whose brother, Stenka Radzin, had no difficulty in rousing his countrymen to revenge this violation of their privileges, and at the same time to gratify their insatiable appetite for havoc and plunder.

He began his depredations on the Volga by seizing a fleet of boats belonging to the czar, which was on its way to Astrakhan, massacring part of the crews, and pressing all the rest into his service. Having devastated the whole country of the Volga, he descended into the Caspian, and having swept its shores, returned to the Volga laden with booty. For three years this flagitious ruffian continued his murderous career, repeatedly defeating the forces sent against him. At last, having lost a great number of men in his piratical incursions into Persia, he was hemmed in by the troops of the governor of Astrakhan, and forced to sue for pardon. The imperial commander thought it more prudent to accept Radzin’s voluntary submission than to risk an engagement with desperate wretches whose numbers were still formidable. Radzin was taken to Astrakhan, and the voyevod went to Moscow, to learn the czar’s pleasure respecting him. Alexis honourably confirmed the promise made by his general in his name, and accepted Radzin’s oath of allegiance; but instead of dispersing the pardoned rebels over regions where they would have been useful to the empire, he had the imprudence to send them all back to the country of the Don, without despoiling them of their ill-gotten wealth, or taking any other security for their good behaviour.

The brigand was soon at his old work again on the Volga, murdering and torturing with more wanton ferocity than ever. To give to his enormities the colour of a war on behalf of an oppressed class, he proclaimed himself the enemy of the nobles and the restorer of the liberty of the people. As many of the Russians still adhered to the patriarch Nicon, who had been deposed and sent to a monastery, he spread it abroad that Nicon was with him; that the czar’s second son (who had died at Moscow, January 16th, 1670) was not dead, but had put himself under his protection; and that he had even been requested by the czar himself to come to Moscow, and rid him of those unpatriotic grandees by whom he was unhappily surrounded.

These artifices, together with the unlimited license to plunder which Radzin granted to everyone who joined his standard, operated so strongly that the rebel found himself, at length, at the head of two hundred thousand men. The czar’s soldiers murdered their officers, and went over to him; Astrakhan betrayed its governor, and received him; he was master of the whole country of the lower Volga; and on the upper course of the river, from Nijni-Novgorod to Kazan, the peasants rose to a man and murdered their lords. Had Stenka Radzin been anything better than a vulgar robber and cut-throat, he might have revolutionised Russia; but he was utterly without the qualities most requisite for success in such an enterprise. Disasters overtook him in the autumn of 1670: a division of his army was cut to pieces; twelve thousand of his followers were gibbeted on the high-road, and he himself was taken in the beginning of the following year, carried to Moscow, and executed.

(From the painting by Elias Repin)]

The Turks had by this time made war on Poland, and Alexis was bound by the Treaty of Andnissov, as well as by regard for the safety of his own dominions, to support the latter power. In 1671 the Turks made themselves masters of the important town of Kaminitz, and the Cossacks of the Ukraine, ever averse to subjection, could not tell whether they belonged to Turkey, Poland, or Russia. Sultan Muhammed IV, who had subdued and lately imposed a tribute on the Poles, insisted, with all the insolence of an Ottoman and of a conqueror, that the czar should evacuate his several possessions in the Ukraine, but received as haughty a denial. The sultan in his letter treated the sovereign of the Russias only as a Christian _gospodin_ (hospodar), and entitled himself Most Glorious Majesty, King of the World. The czar made answer that he was above submitting to a Mohammedan dog, but that his sabre was as good as the grand seignior’s scimitar.

[Sidenote: [1676 A.D.]]

Alexis sent ambassadors to the pope, and to almost all the great sovereigns in Europe, except France, which was allied to the Turks, in order to establish a league against the Porte. His ambassadors had no other success at Rome than not being obliged to kiss the pope’s toe; everywhere else they met with nothing but good wishes, the Christian princes being generally prevented by their quarrels and jarring interests from uniting against the common enemy of their religion. Alexis did not live to see the termination of the war with Turkey. His death happened in 1676, in his forty-eighth year, after a reign of thirty-one years.

FEODOR (1676-1682 A.D.)

Alexis was succeeded by his eldest son, Feodor, a youth in his nineteenth year, and of very feeble temperament. The most pressing task that devolved on him was the prosecution of the war with Turkey, which, as far as Russia was interested, had regard chiefly to the question whether the country of the Zaparogian Cossacks should be under the sovereignty of the czar or of the sultan. The contest was terminated, three years after Feodor’s accession, by a treaty which established his right over the disputed territory. Only one other memorable event distinguished his brief reign.

Nothing could equal the care with which the noble families kept the books of their pedigrees, in which were set down not only every one of their ancestors but also the posts and offices which each had held at court, in the army, or in the civil department. Had these genealogies and registers of descent been confined to the purpose of determining the ancestry and relationship of families no objection could be alleged against them. But these books of record were carried to the most absurd abuse, attended with a host of pernicious consequences. If a nobleman were appointed to a post in the army, or at court, or to some civil station, and it appeared that the person to whom he was now subordinate numbered fewer ancestors than he, it was with the utmost difficulty that he could be brought to accept of the office to which he was called. Nay, this folly was carried to still greater lengths: a man would even refuse to take upon him an employ, if thereby he would be subordinate to one whose ancestors had formerly stood in that position towards his own.

It is easy to imagine that a prejudice of this kind must have been productive of the most disagreeable effects, and that discontents, murmurs at slights and trifling neglects, disputes, quarrels, and disorders in the service must have been its natural attendants. It was, therefore, become indispensably necessary that a particular office should be instituted at court in which exact copies of the genealogical tables and service-registers of the noble families were deposited; and this office was incessantly employed in settling the numberless disputes that arose from this inveterate prejudice. Feodor, observing the pernicious effects of this fond conceit--that the father’s capacity must necessarily devolve on the son, and that consequently he ought to inherit his posts--wished to put a stop to it; and with the advice of his sagacious minister, Prince Vasili Galitzin, fell upon the following method. He caused it to be proclaimed that all the families should deliver into court faithful copies of their service-rolls, in order that they might be cleared of a number of errors that had crept into them. This delivery being made, he convoked the great men and the superior clergy before him. In the midst of these heads of the nobles, the patriarch concluded an animated harangue by inveighing against their prerogatives. “They are,” said he, “a bitter source of every kind of evil; they render abortive the most useful enterprises, in like manner as the tares stifle the good grain; they have introduced, even into the heart of families, dissensions, confusion, and hatred; but the pontiff comprehends the grand design of his czar. God alone can have inspired it!”

[Sidenote: [1682 A.D.]]

At these words, and by anticipation, all the grandees blindly hastened to express their approval; and, suddenly, Feodor, whom this generous unanimity seemed to enrapture, arose and proclaimed, in a simulated burst of holy enthusiasm, the abolition of all their hereditary pretensions--“To extinguish even the recollection of them,” said he, “let all the papers relative to those titles be instantly consumed!” And as the fire was ready, he ordered them to be thrown into the flames before the dismayed eyes of the nobles, who strove to conceal their anguish by dastardly acclamations. By way of conclusion to this singular ceremony, the patriarch pronounced an anathema against everyone who should presume to contravene this ordinance of the czar; and the justice of the sentence was ratified by the assembly in a general shout of “Amen!” It was by no means Feodor’s intention to efface nobility; and, accordingly, he ordered new books to be made, in which the noble families were inscribed; but thus was abolished that extremely pernicious custom which made it a disgrace to be under the orders of another if his ancestry did not reach so high, or even--in case of equal pedigree--if a forefather of the commander had once been subordinate in the service to the progenitor of him who was now to acknowledge him for his superior. Feodor died in February, 1682, after a reign of five years and a half, leaving no issue.[h]

FOOTNOTES

[37] There was no patriarch at that time.

[38] Established in 1560. The first book printed in Moscow, _The Evangelist_, appeared in the month of March, 1564.