CHAPTER XVI.

RUSSIA. (1462-1682.)

IT is the purpose of this chapter to trace in brief outline the history of the Muscovite State during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to sketch the political and social circumstances of the Russia which Peter the Great reshaped, and to indicate the preparatory conditions without which his radical changes would not have been feasible. It is an error to suppose that the history of contemporary Russia can be understood by a survey which begins with Peter the Great. His reign marks the opening of a new era. But the abiding features which have differentiated Russia from the other States of Europe, some of the deeper tendencies of her domestic government as well as of her external policy, the spirit of her institutions as well as the direction of her expansion, were imposed upon her at a much earlier time.

Asiatic rule exercised a certain influence on Russian civilisation-an influence which has sometimes been exaggerated-but its main importance lies in the fact that it contributed indirectly and unintentionally to the aggrandisement of the princes of Moscow. The aim of these princes was to gather all the Russian territories under their rule and make Moscow the capital, her prince the monarch, of Russia. In their struggles for this end, steadily pursued and finally achieved, their success at decisive moments was constantly due to their skill or fortune in gaining the support of their Tartar suzerains.

This shifting of the centre of political gravity from Kieff far northeastward to Moscow, was to impose a new rôle upon Russia and give the decisive direction to her history. It brought into play geographical influences to which her fortune and her misfortunes may be imputed. If the centre had remained at Kieff, there would not have been the same stringent necessity for the efforts of indefinite expansion ; there need have been no divorce or protracted alienation from the rest of Europe ; and there might have been no defeat of the growth of constitutional freedom. But for a State centred at Moscow endless expansion, ultimately into northern Asia, was an unavoidable consequence of its geographical situation in a land where there were no natural frontiers. Its great distance from the borders of the nearest western States was, as much as the circumstance of Tartar supremacy, a cause of the long isolation of Russia in regard to western Europe. And its origin as a military colony, insulated amidst an alien population, determined from the first the military character and spirit of its government. In other Slavonic States there was no tendency to absolutism ; the spirit was rather republican. But at Moscow circumstances imposed a military organisation which fostered the power of the princes. And, as Moscow extended its rule over other Russian principalities and towns, this principle was ruthlessly applied. When Pskoff and Novgorod, and other cities, in which there had been a constitutional civic development, were brought under Muscovite sway, the civic element had to make way for a military organisation. The geographical position of Moscow determined the current of Russian history.

A military monarch would have seen in the condition of the Tartars an opportunity for a decisive struggle. If the great Mongol conqueror Timur postponed the fall of the Eastern Empire by the blow which he dealt to the Ottoman Turks, it may be said that he hastened the rise of Russia by his destruction of the empire of the Tartar khans. On the ruins ofthat empire several smaller States arose, Kazan, Astrakhan, the Crimea, all of them weak through mutual dissensions. The general policy of Ivan was to foment the divisions, to refuse tribute, but occasionally to send presents, and to remain on the defensive. Cultivating the friendship of the Khans of Crimea he bided his time for attacking the Tsar of Kazan, whose dominion corresponded to the old realm of Black Bulgaria. In 1487 he captured Kazan and its ruler, but he refrained from annexing it; taking himself the title "Prince of Bulgaria," he gave the throne to a nephew of the Khan of Crimea. The reign of Ivan marks the final emancipation of Russia from Asiatic lordship ; the Tartars were still troublesome and dangerous neighbours, they were no longer in any form masters. The annexation of Kazan was effected by his grandson Ivan IV (1552) ; that of Astrakhan followed (1554) ; Crimea was to pass under Ottoman sovereignty before it was finally won for Russia in the reign of Catharine II.

The occupations of Novgorod and Pskoff, beyond their importance as steps in unification, have a high significance as marking the elimination of a social element which might have modified the development of autocracy. The absence of free cities, which played so beneficent a part in the evolution of western countries, is a fact of fatal import in Russian history.

The acquisitions of ChernigofF and Smolensk have a different significance, involving the relations of Moscow to its western rival, the double State of Lithuania and Poland. The national unity of the Lithuanian tribes had been brought about in the thirteenth century, and in the fourteenth heathen Lithuania became a great political power under the able leadership of Gedimin, who not only maintained a successful struggle in the north against the German Knights of Livonia, but created an extensive State by conquering Russian territory. It extended far southward, including even Kieff; and Vilna, Gedimin's capital, was the political peer of Moscow. Western Russia was grouped round Vilna, eastern round Moscow, and the question was whether the separation would be permanent or either would annex the other. The situation was complicated by the hostility of Poland, which was endangered by the southward expansion of Lithuania ; and a new turn was given to the course of events, when on the death of a king of Poland without male children (1386) the Poles terminated the strife by marrying his daughter to the Lithuanian prince Jagello. This was the origin of the Lithuanian dynasty of Poland, the line of Jagello, which was extinguished towards the close of the sixteenth century. Jagello adopted Christianity in the Roman form, and converted his heathen fellow-countrymen by compulsion ; but he offended them by transferring his residence from Vilna to the Polish capital Cracow. The union was purely personal ; it was very soon interrupted ; and during the following century the two States were sometimes under the same rule, at others under different princes. From 1501 they were united, but the union remained personal ; the Grand Principality of Lithuania was distinct from the kingdom of Poland. At last in 1569 they were more closely and permanently joined together by the Union of Lublin, of which more will be said.

Muscovy ; for it appealed to religious sentiment ; it meant the winning back into the sphere of the Orthodox Church regions which had fallen under the pernicious influence of a heretical State. Nowhere more conspicuously than in this field of his work did Ivan display his consummate, unscrupulous dexterity. He defeated Lithuania all along the line, and yet avoided all but a very brief war till the later years of his reign. Here his friends, the Tartars of Crimea, did him good service. They invaded Lithuania and held it in check, while Ivan was dealing with the hostile Tartars in the east ; and, when the Lithuanian war came, the friendly khan kept the hostile khans in check. On the other hand, Ivan pursued his end with eminent success by his intrigues with the vassal or " serving " princes, who under the lordship of Lithuania governed the lands which it was his object to acquire. The condition on which these princes held their possessions was that they submitted to the Great Prince in all matters of foreign policy, while in return he protected and maintained them in their principalities. If the Lithuanian Prince failed to observe his part of the obligation, the vassals considered themselves free to attach themselves to another protector. Here was the place where the diplomatist of Moscow could insert a lever. The princes were always at feud among themselves ; and, by intervening at opportune moments and promising support to one or to another, Ivan succeeded in inducing prince after prince to accept his protection and in detaching district after district from the sway of Lithuania. Two stages in his westward advance may be marked. After a short war the river Desna was fixed as the boundary (1484), and peace sealed by the marriage of the Great Prince Alexander with Ivan's daughter. But the use of this alliance was in Ivan's design to supply new handles against his rival, in the shape of complaints that, contrary to express stipulation, attempts were being made to tamper with his daughter's faith. A new war broke out; the most important of the vassals, including the Prince of Cher-nigoff, deserted to Ivan ; and Lithuania was only rescued from hopeless defeat by the aid of the Knights of Livonia. A precarious peace was procured in 1503 which fixed the boundary at the river Sozh. The struggle continued under Ivan's successor Vasili, whose principal achievement was the capture of Smolensk where the artillery which Ivan had introduced in Russia played a decisive part. < At Vasili's death the Muscovite empire reached from ChernigofF to the White Sea, from the borders of Livonia to the river Kama.

The most memorable result of this monarch's relations with the outside world was his marriage with a lady of the Imperial family of the Palaiologoi. Zoe (called Sophia after her marriage) was a niece of Constantine Palaiologos, the last Roman Emperor. Her father Thomas, driven from Greece, had betaken himself to Rome where he died, and the Popes acted as guardians of his children. The idea of uniting Sophia to the Great Prince of Moscow seems to have been first suggested by Cardinal Bessarion, one of the most zealous promoters of the transitory union of the Greek and Latin Churches at the Council of Florence. It was gladly accepted by the Pope. Two objects of the papal policy, then and for a long time to come, were the reunion of the Churches and the expulsion of the Turks from Europe. The suggested marriage seemed to offer the chance not only of compassing the desired reunion of the Greek Church with Rome, through a princess who at Rome had come under Latin influence, but also of stimulating the ruler of Moscow to join in a crusade against the Muslims. Ivan accepted the proposal, though without the smallest intention of gratifying the desire of Rome. For the present, an attack on Turkey lay entirely outside the range of policy of a cautious Muscovite sovereign. But a marriage with a princess of the Imperial House of Constantinople seemed calculated to augment the Great Prince's prestige. This, and this alone, was Ivan's motive ; this, and this alone, was the result of the alliance.

The growth of autocracy was favoured by the Tartar sway, which contributed to the decline of the veche or parliament. The election of the prince was one of the chief functions of the veche, and when the Tartar overlords took the appointments into their own hands its decline began. It is significant that the States in which the veche survived, Novgorod and Pskoff, were geographically furthest removed from Tartar control. But it was more important that the princes of the new States in central Russia, like Moscow, were soon able to dispense with a parliament, because they did not need the people for military service. Territorial conquest enabled them to allot land in return for military service, and thus they had a regular army at their disposal, without calling upon the host of freemen to follow them. The Russian army consisted of cavalry, but by the middle of the sixteenth century Moscow had also a body of infantry, the strleltsy (arquebusiers).

The one institution which might have seemed likely to exercise some control on the monarchy was the Church. Its possessions and privileges had been left intact by the policy of the Tartar khans, and in the days when Russia was a complex of numerous separate States it was the representative and mouthpiece of Russian unity, though it never sought to incite resistance to the Tartar rule. Its independence was largely secured by the fact that the Metropolitan owed ecclesiastical allegiance to a power outside Russia, the Patriarch of Constantinople. It was an important step in the upward rise of Moscow when, in the first half of the fourteenth century, the Metropolitan established his residence there. The Metropolitan always supported the unification of the land and the abolition of the independent principalities. The breach of the Russian with the Greek Church in the fifteenth century, in consequence of the efforts at reunion with Rome, reacted upon the position of the Metropolitans, who had no longer a support in the Patriarch, and led to the dependence of the Church on the secular power. The line between Church and State affairs tended to become obliterated ; ecclesiastical matters were discussed at the Councils of the monarch ; ecclesiastics were summoned to attend, and thus became enrolled in the common "service" of the State; the Church became part of the machine, just as religion had been a State department in the Eastern Empire.

The economic trouble was far more deeply seated and serious than the political; but it was the political problem which absorbed Ivan's attention, though his solution of it involved important consequences for the other also.

At a Council held in 1550 the young Tsar gave open expression to his hostile feelings towards the boiars, whose régime during his minority had been injurious to himself and calamitous for the State. In the same year he took the first step in a course of policy which was directed towards breaking down the influence of the great nobles. A thousand " boiar children " (this was the technical name for a class among the men of service who did not belong to the boiars, but were of noble descent) were brought from different parts of Russia to the central regions around Moscow, where fiefs were provided for them, and, along with the ancient aristocratic families of the province, they were constituted in three grades as a nobility of service. The aim was to level down the old nobility by merging it in a new ; but Ivan did not venture to abolish the principle of Precedence.

For some years Ivan allowed himself to be guided by the counsels of two favourites, the monk Silvester and Alexis Adasheff, whom he deemed independent of the influence of the boiars. But these advisers lost his intimate confidence in 1553 ; he suspected that their sympathies were with the boiars and adverse to his own political designs ; and the evidence of Prince Kurbski, who was a violent exponent of the aristocratic opposition to the Tsar, shows that he was right. Some years later they were disgraced. Their influence may have postponed the struggle which began after their fall ; but historians have ascribed to them an exaggerated significance, and somewhat naïvely glorified them as good geniuses of Ivan, whose natural wickedness burst out when their salutary restraint was removed.

Ivan at last invented a curious solution of the political problem, and proceeded to carry his design into execution in 1564. His solution was the notorious Opriclmina. Few people of the time understood his idea ; he carefully abstained from explaining it; he invested it with such mystery that it seemed incomprehensible ; and he carried it out with such a grotesque mise en scène that history has till recently regarded it as the wild caprice of an irresponsible madman on the throne. But, whatever judgment may be passed on its wisdom, the Oprichnina must be taken seriously, as a deliberate and carefully thought-out means of adapting the administration to the pretensions of autocracy.

The execution of this policy, involving ubiquitous, rapid, and violent changes of ownership, caused a general upturning of society, enormously increasing the confusion and complication of the already complicated and confused relations between proprietors and peasants. Estates with their inhabitants flew from hand to hand, as has been said, "almost with the velocity of bills in a modern exchange." The peasants replied by flight to the hardships which were entailed upon them. The massive confiscations, violent and sudden, were alone sufficient to create consternation and alarm ; but the administration of the Oprichnina was marked by such terrorism and savage cruelty, and rendered so infamous by the Tsar's debauches in his den of horrors at Alexandroff, that these accidental accompaniments disguised its deeper significance from contemporaries and made it appear as a measure of police rather than as an instrument of political reform.

The Duma always referred foreign questions to the Tsar, and we find the boiars of both spheres consulting together and deciding unanimously on a Lithuanian question. In 1572 the Oprichnina ceased to bear this distinct name, and became simply the Court. Nor can any significance be ascribed to the temporary elevation of Simeon Bekbulatovich, a member of the princely House of the Tartars of Kazan, who was proclaimed Great Prince of Moscow and Tsar of all the Russias in 1575. Ivan's motive in exhibiting this comedy, which lasted for a few months, is mysterious, if it was more than a caprice : Simeon was a mere puppet ; he had no real authority.

The temporary dual system may appear a roundabout and clumsy way for accomplishing the Tsar's aims ; but it is intelligible as a compromise. It was his intention to 'preserve to the Duma its administrative functions, while he required a perfectly free hand to make and mar without its advice or interference. His plan secured both these ends. By severing himself from the Moscow Council and dividing the administration territorially he was able without constant friction and fear of treachery to carry out his revolutionary policy. When the political power of the old noble families was annihilated and their estates in the central provinces were converted into fiefs held on conditions of service, the use of the double system was over.

Another Sobor was summoned in 1566 for the special purpose of considering the relations of Russia with Poland. Besides boiars, functionaries of various grades, and ecclesiastics, there attended a number of merchants of Moscow and Smolensk, evidently invited on account of their special knowledge relating to the commerce between the two countries. There was no popular representation, and this Sobor has not more claim than the first to constitutional significance.

Kettler, having in vain sought active help from Poland and the Empire, transferred to Poland the rights of his Order in Livonia and resigned himself to the possession of the duchy of Courland for him and his heirs (1561). But the Russian occupation of Livonia was premature. For the next twenty years there was almost unbroken war with Poland, and, as Sweden and Denmark were interested, the course of events was complicated by a succession of political combinations among the four Powers. It was varied by the candidature of the Tsar for the Polish throne, first on the death of Sigismund Augustus (1572), when Henry of Valois was elected, and again, after his abdication, in 1575, when Stephen Bâthory. the Vowod of Transylvania, supported with arms by the Sultan, won the crown. It is said that Ivan was favoured by the lesser nobility, but he threw away whatever chances he had by his want of deference towards the Diet. In the Hungarian, Stephen Bâthory, Poland had gained an ambitious master, Russia a formidable foe. He created a powerful army and undid all that Ivan had done. But Livonia was only a minor question in the greater issue involving the very existence of Poland, which, if it was not to be crushed ultimately between German advance on the west and the power of Moscow on the east, must extend over Russia its sway, along with its civilisation and religion. The absence of geographical boundaries rendered the dilemma inexorable : either Russia or Poland must disappear as an independent State. Internal and external circumstances combined to postpone the final solution ; but Stephen Bâthory had grasped the truth and logically prepared to conquer Muscovy. He besieged and failed to take PskofF, but he would not have ceased from his enterprise if Rome had not intervened. The Tsar had sought the mediation of Gregory XIII, and the treaty which was concluded in 1582 through the negotiations of the Jesuit Possevino surrendered Livonia to Poland. The Russians had not yet the strength to grasp either the Baltic or the Black Sea.

Of their two chieftains one had been condemned to death ; the other was Ermak Timotheevich, who showed that he had the qualities of a conquistador. He defeated the Khan, captured Sibir, and carried his arms beyond the Tobol between the rivers Irtysh and Ob. If Ermak had failed, no responsibility would have fallen upon Russia ; but Ivan was not slow to reap the fruits of his success. He sent officers to take formal possession of the new acquisitions and recognised the adventurer's services by gifts. Ermak perished almost immediately after this (1584), in a night surprise, it was said, and when trying to swim the Irtysh in a coat of mail which was one of the Tsar's gifts. This Russian Cortes was raised by the people and the Church to the rank of a hero and almost of a saint. But though he helped effectively the eastern advance of Russia at a critical moment, the real task of subjugating Siberia was accomplished by the long and quiet toil of the peaceful colonists who carried on the work of the Stroganoffs.

The death of Ivan the Terrible (1584) delivered Russia from a nightmare of tyranny, but opened a period of unrest and civil strife which lasted for thirty years. The social and political discords threatened the realm with a struggle which could only be averted by a strong tyrant or by an able statesman armed with all the authority of legitimacy. But Ivan left no successor like to or better than himself. He had two sons by his first wife, Anastasia Romanova (from whose brother the present dynasty is descended). The eldest son Ivan was slain by his father's hand in a fit of fury (1582), a tragedy which produced a deep effect on the popular imagination, echoed in the popular lays. The second son Theodore was a weakling. By the latest of his other wives (he had no fewer than seven, though some were not recognised by the Church), Maria Nagaia, he had a son Uimitri who was an infant at the time of his death. The throne passed at once to Theodore, whose feeble intellect was unable to cope with, or even realise, the difficult problems of government and organisation which demanded the ruler's care, while his delicate constitution suggested disturbing uncertainties as to the continuation of the dynasty. He proved in fact the last of his line ; but it may almost be said that the dynastic crisis began at his accession. The peculiar way in which the course of this important period of Russian history shaped itself was due to the circumstance that the catastrophe of the old dynasty coincided with a crisis of general social disorganisation. The unrest (smuta) which ushered out bhe old dynasty and ushered in the rule of the Romanoffs is marked by three stages, which have been designated as dynastic, social, and national. The first is a struggle for the throne among various claimants representing different interests ; the second, a civil war between social classes complicated by the intervention of foreign Powers ; the third, a national struggle with foreigners, issuing in the organisation of a new national Government.

The talents of Boris were confessed by his foes. Personally amiable, he was thoroughly honest and earnest in his purpose to govern well. Foreigners testify to a marked improvement during his régime; the country breathed again after the wars and atrocities of the Terrible. But he was faced by social problems, too complicated and radical to be solved by the alleviations to which he resorted, and which only postponed the civil struggle to which the profound antagonisms within the social organism pointed as inevitable. He could not conciliate the conflicting interests of the richer landed proprietors, the ecclesiastical owners, the middle and small classes of fiefholders, the free peasant proprietors, the vagrants who lived like Cossacks in the southern provinces. The general note of his policy was to favour the middle class. He inherited and continued Ivan's policy of depressing the old nobility and raising new men like himself to power and influence. He consulted the interests of the general mass of the men of service, and sacrificed to them the interests of the peasants. What the men of service wanted was to have not only a secure hold on their land, but also a guarantee that they should have men to till it. Accordingly his regency was marked by the formal introduction of serfdom (1597). To support and strengthen the middle class-this was his policy as Regent and afterwards a& Tsar.

The struggle in which Boris was the leading actor had hitherto been purely dynastic ; it did not touch the nobles as a class, only particular families were involved ; and it did not directly affect the rest of society. With the rise of the famous Pretender, who impersonated the murdered Tsarevich Dimitri, the question at issue was still dynastic, but the interest in it spread to society at large, and soon created a movement in which the succession to the throne became secondary. The deeper rifts in the community widened into chasms, which threatened to engulf the State.

King Sigismund was disposed to espouse his cause. It is not probable that the King was really convinced at any moment that the Pretender was the Tsarevich, but if Russia could be brought to accept him as such, the interests of Poland might be as well promoted as if he were genuine. The forcible policy of Stephen Bâthory had been abandoned under Sigismund, who sought to bring his eastern neighbours under Polish influence by compassing a close union in commerce and religion. He found Boris resolutely determined (as Ivan IV had been, when similarly approached by Possevino) not to open any door to Latin propaganda in Russia. The result of his efforts was the conclusion of a truce for twenty years (1602). In the face of this treaty it seemed difficult to support in arms the rival of Boris. The two Great Chancellors of Poland and Lithuania were opposed to the idea; the nation was disinclined for a new war ; and the Diet rejected the proposal to assist the Pretender. But the King succumbed to the temptation. He hoped to recover some of the territories which had been wrested from Lithuania, and to obtain Russian help for executing his cherished plan, the conquest of Sweden, his father's kingdom. He entered into a secret engagement with the Pretender, who readily promised what was asked ; and on his part, although he could give no open or official help, he connived at the recruiting of Polish volunteers. Both the King and the Roman Church saw in DimitrPs enterprise a great chance for bringing about an ecclesiastical union. The Jesuits and the papal Nuncio Rangoni threw themselves enthusiastically into his cause, and played an important part in these events.

The Pretender's reign at Moscow endured for a year and displayed his incapacity to control a most difficult situation. Surrounded by a circle of foreigners, Poles and Jesuits, who claimed that he owed everything to them, he soon alienated the sympathies of Moscow. He sought to base his power on the support of those families of the nobility which had been kept under by Boris. For instance he recalled the Romanoffs. Feeling that by this policy he was rousing the dissatisfaction of the old princely families, he recalled the Shuiskis, who as soon as they returned began to contrive his overthrow, in conjunction with the Galitsins. The Tsar was also suspected of heresy by the ecclesiastics, though he concealed his conversion ; and when he celebrated his marriage with Marina, and Moscow was filled with Polish visitors who permitted themselves every licence, the bigotry of the Moscow populace was thoroughly aroused. The blow was struck a few days later ; the Pretender was done to death (May, 1606); and Vasili Shuiski, who had been prominent in organising the plot, was elected Tsar. This reaction represents the last short-lived triumph of that princely class against which the Oprich-nina was directed ; the " aristocratic " principle was for a few years in the ascendant ; and the new Tsar issued a manifesto which meant, not a limitation of his own Imperial prerogative in favour of the boiars, but his intention to return to the old administrative system of the days before the Oprwhnina.

Wladislaw of Poland as Tsar, with the condition that, while there was to be a close military union between the two countries, Russia was to be autonomous and its orthodoxy inviolable. This agreement reflects the policy and interests of those groups of the upper class which were opposed to the reaction of the boiar princes. The Tushinite leader entered into relations with the inhabitants of Moscow, proposing peace and the overthrow of Vasili. The army of the north, which had lost its leader by the death of Skopin, took no part in these events, and Shuiski and his party were overthrown (July, 1610) by the Moscow populace.

With the fall of the reactionary government the last stage of the domestic strife begins. It seemed as if the direction of affairs was now to be under the control of a foreign Power. The next three years (1610-2) are marked by attempts, both open and secret, finally successful, to restore order and create a permanent government. The first experiment, after a temporary administration by seven boiars, was the acceptance of Prince Wladislaw, who was elected to the throne by a Sobor under boiar influence-"the last political act in the history of Moscow boiardom"; but when it became clear that his sovereignty was a mask for a military dictatorship, exercised by his father, Moscow attempted to substitute a national government. In the struggle with Sigismund which ensued, the Patriarch Hermogenes played an important part. To him the national and religious feelings of the Muscovite turned as to a sort of guardian. He stubbornly refused to recognise the foreign Tsar; he circulated letters denouncing Sigismund ; and, when some of them fell into the hands of the Poles, he was kept under surveillance. But his letters bore fruit, especially at Riazan and Nizhni-Novgorod. An anti-Polish movement was organised by Prokopi LiapunofF; a national host was formed ; and a new alliance was cemented between the middle classes and those who had been the adherents of the Robber. This unnatural union with the "Robbers'" and the Cossacks, intent on rapine, was a policy doomed to failure. In the mixed army which besieged Moscow in 1611 there was neither unity nor discipline ; the Cossacks plundered the land at will ; and the attempt to organise an effective government was futile. The death of Liapunoff was followed by open discord ; the rest of the army left the Cossacks and "Robbers'" alone in the camp and went their ways. This ended the second attempt to create order; and the prospect seemed gloomier than ever. The control had passed to the Poles, on the one hand, threatening political servitude, and to the Cossacks and rural proletariate, on the other, threatening a social subversion. Sweden, too, alarmed by the election of Wladislaw, had appeared on the scene and occupied Novgorod the Great, putting forward on her side the candidature of a Swedish prince.

A national Sobor met at Moscow in January, 1613, to elect a new Tsar. The Shuiskis, Galitsins, and the princely Houses, even the deliverer Pozharski, had no influence at this election, and the choice fell on Michael Romanoff, son of Philaret, the first Tsar of the dynasty which reigns to-day.

The political influence of the middle classes was felt throughout the reign of the first Romanoff, and for a time under his successor. It was expressed by frequent meetings of the consultative assemblies, which had been introduced by Ivan IV and since his reign had fulfilled the important duty of electing Tsars. The significance of these Sobors, as we have already observed, is political rather than constitutional. They hardly give the reign of Michael the claim of being a "parliamentary epoch " ; but they served as a check on the acquisition of excessive influence by the nobles. We find the Sobor giving assent to taxation, nominating a Patriarch, deliberating on the question of goin» to war with Poland. In 1642 it was summoned to consider whether AzoflF, which had been captured by the Cossacks, should be retained by Russia. This Sobor consisted of the Council of nobles, the higher clergy, and 195 representatives of other classes. Through it public opinion influenced the Tsar's decision. The statements of the lesser nobility, the merchants, and the delegates from the rural districts, as to the widespread misery and exhaustion from which the country was suffering through taxation, military service, and the exactions of governors, convinced the Tsar that a war with Turkey was impossible ; and the Cossacks were bidden to abandon AzofF. In the reign of Alexis a Sobor was summoned (1648) for the preparation of a new law Code. This Code (Ulozhenie) and the work of this Sobor represented another success for those classes which had raised the Romanoffs to power. They were dissatisfied with their economical conditions ; wars, taxes, the competition of foreign commerce pressed heavily upon them ; and so far as the Ulozhenie was not mere codification, it attempted to satisfy their needs, by sharpening the laws on serfdom, by restricting the acquisition of lands by the Church, and by enactments against foreign trade. Again in 1653 a Sobor was consulted on the question of war with Poland. This was the last, and it was seemingly due to the influence of the Patriarch Nikon, of whom more will presently be said, that the institution disappeared.

Hopeless of carrying on the contest alone, he now turned to the Power which seemed the natural protector of the Orthodox and sent an embassy to the Tsar (1652). Alexis called a Sobor to discover whether the realm was prepared to resume the strife with Poland ; the assembly declared for war ; and a commission was sent to receive oaths of allegiance from the Hetman and the Little Russians (1653). This war, in which Moscow won the stake, was waged by the Tsar with a measure of humanity and moderation which it was unusual for a Muscovite army to practise, and was attended with a success which would almost certainly have led to the annexation of White Russia, if another Power had not intervened. Charles X of Sweden came down from the north, seized Posen, Warsaw, and Cracow, and entered into relations with Chmielnicki, whose real desire was not subjection to Russia, but independent sovereignty. In the situation thus created Alexis saw that his only course was to come to terms with Poland, and make common cause against the Swede. In this enterprise he was successful ; he conquered a great part of Livonia, though only for a brief term. The Peace of Kardis (1661) restored to Sweden the Livoniaii fortresses which the Russians had occupied ; but the danger of a Swedish Poland was averted for the time. The Poles, however, having driven out the Swedes, refused to execute their treaty with Alexis, and war was renewed. It lingered on till 1667, when the Treaty of Andrusovo restored to the Tsar Smolensk and the other places which had been ceded in 1634, and also gave him Little Russia up to the Dnieper, along with the sacred city of Kieff.

Bakchi-serai (1680) with the Sultan and the Crimean Khan, whereby the Ukraine and Zaporogia were left to Russia.

The reign of Alexis was agitated by ecclesiastical dissensions, a struggle between the Tsar and the head of the Church, and a struggle within the Church itself. The Patriarchate of Moscow had been founded in 1589 with the consent of the Patriarchs of the East, and it had not failed to add to the prestige of Russia, especially in those countries which belonged to the Greek confession. We saw the part which Hermogenes played at a critical juncture, but the dignity of the office was considerably enhanced when Philaret filled it and helped his son to govern the realm. But the Patriarchs were generally the creatures of the Tsars. The history of the Patriarchate embraces little more than a century, for it was abolished by Peter the Great ; and of the ten who discharged its duties in that period only two were men of great prominence and ability, Philaret and Nikon. The power and influence which were associated with the office in the hands of Philaret endangered the principle laid down by Ivan the Terrible, that it is the business of monks to hold their tongues, inasmuch as Church and State are separate spheres. The conflict of Alexis with Nikon showed that the dyarchy of Michael and Philaret could not be repeated.

Great Russia, especially in the north and the Volga regions, that the Raskol chiefly spread. The schismatics lived in the past, considering the days before Nikon and before Peter as the ideal age of their country. They have been compared by a Russian novelist to Lot's wife, who, looking back, became an immovable pillar. " Yet," writes a German historian, "in this protest against the established Church and State, in the energy of the mystic apocalyptic symbolism with which the Baskolniki defend their doctrines, and in the material means which are at their disposal, lies a force which presents the greatest difficulties to the State and the official clergy. Here, at all events, in this stubborn opposition, the people show that it is not the indifferent herd of sheep for which it is generally taken." The people of the old faith represent the spirit of antagonism to progress and European culture. It is a passive spirit, though stiffhecked, but it is the more effective, in proportion as they are more industrious, thrifty, and sober than the Orthodox. The movement was too widely spread, and had its roots too deep in the national character and traditions, for the Church and State to check it. The schismatics were simply maintaining the prejudices which the Church had always displayed towards change, erudition, and the influence of foreign ideas-" abominable German customs." In one of the schismatic pamphlets which have been preserved it is stated that God forbade the imitation of foreign dress, since all illicit stitched garments are disgusting in His eyes. Tracts were published against " tobacco, that devilish herb, cursed and abhorred of God." It was believed that the Redeemer and His mother appeared to some Russian women, and warned them that, as soon as Christians began to " drink " tobacco, lightning and thunder, frost and ice would be their punishment. Nikon's reforms were declared an attempt to replace Greek orthodoxy by Latin heresy. One of his leading opponents asked despairingly, what would happen if east and west should mix. The fanatics deemed it a heinous crime that the children of the Tsar Alexis should be allowed to gain some knowledge of astronomy, philosophy, and medicine. One of them wrote an insulting open letter to the Tsar. " How dare you keep at your Court men who have the hardihood to measure with a yard-rule the tails of the stars ? You feed the foreigners too well, instead of bidding your folk cling to the old customs." The schismatics offered bitter resistance to the policy of Peter the Great ; they looked on him as Antichrist, on Moscow as Babylon.

The RasMl expressed a protest against change in general, and thus had a much deeper significance than might seem to be involved in the religious questions which led to the schism. It uttered the suspicions aroused in the people by the far from enthusiastic willingness of the Tsar himself, and the more pronounced zeal of a few others, to learn something from peoples beyond the borders of their land. In tracing the influence of Western Europe upon Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there is danger of exaggeration. The process does not resemble a development ; Russia under Alexis was, as regards civilisation, the same at heart as under Ivan the Great, In manners and modes of thought there had been no general alteration among the higher classes. The description of Adam Olearius in the seventeenth century presents the same picture as the reports of the travellers of the sixteenth. Yet a Peter the Great and his reforms would have been inconceivable a hundred years earlier. The West had come to Russia ; it began to come in the sixteenth century, it was there in the seventeenth. But the process was not an internal development, but rather like the laying of a mine, which did not outwardly afl'ect the land till Peter had the courage to explode it. The decisive step had been the admission of foreigners to reside at Moscow ; and thus Western ideas, although they made no way except with a few isolated individuals, were there, on the spot, in the foreign or " German " suburb of Moscow, waiting to be assimilated. The increasing intercourse, both commercial and political, of Russia with Western countries, and the grudging and restricted hospitality extended to resident strangers, which marked the period with which we are dealing, were an indispensable condition of Peter's work, of its conception as well as its execution.

A word must be said of the tyrannical means, and disastrous for national economy, to which rulers resorted for raising revenue. They are described by Elizabeth's ambassador, Giles Fletcher. Messengers, he says, are sent into the provinces where the special commodities of the land grow. " There they forestall and engross sometimes one whole commodity, sometimes two or more," taking them at low prices fixed by themselves and selling at an excessive rate to their own or foreign merchants. " If they refuse to buy them, then they force them unto it. The like is done when any commodity, thus engrossed by the Emperor and received into his treasury, happeneth to decay or mar by long lying, or some other casualty. Which is forced upon the merchants to be bought by them at the Emperor's price, whether they will or no. This last year 1589 was engrossed all the wax of the country, so that none might deal with that commodity but the Emperor only." The Tsars augmented their revenue by acting as publicans and encouraging their subjects in indulgence in strong liquor. "In every great town of his realm," says Fletcher, "the Emperor hath a cabak or drinking-house, where is sold aquavitae, mead, beer, &c. Out of these he receiveth rent that amounteth to a great sum of money. Some yield 800, some 1000, some 2000 or 8000 roubles a year." It may be noted that the total yearly revenue of the Tsar in the reign of Theodore Ivanovich, arising from indirect sources, custom duties and fines, as well as from the direct imposts, the corn-tax and the hearth-tax, including the products of the Imperial domains, amounted to 1,430,000 roubles.

The strict Oriental seclusion of women of the upper classes has often been considered a consequence of Tartar rule, but it was rather due to Byzantine influence. Byzantine too was the custom of the bride-show. The most beautiful maidens of the land were assembled at Moscow and reviewed by the Tsar for the purpose of selecting his consort. In law and justice we can also see the action of ideas derived from the Eastern Empire. The early Code of laroslav reflects the primitive judicial institutions of the Slavonic tribes. The Code of Ivan the Great reflects a complete transformation. Homicide is punished by death, theft by scourging ; torture is applied ; corporal chastisements are prominent. This change was due not to Mongolia, but to Byzantium. After the conversion of Russia the influence of Constantinople was immense, exercised especially through the Church. Greek clergy went to Russia, bringing literature and ideas. They introduced the Roman principles of inheritance, by which a man's property went to his offspring, and we can trace the conflict between this principle and the Slavonic custom which devolved property not upon the son, but upon the eldest of the family. In criminal law, the clergy threw all their energy into abolishing the system of pecuniary composition and introducing penalties of death, mutilation, and scourging. The primitive system gradually gave way, but we find in Ivan's Code some survivals of old customs. It may be noted that the punishment which the Code ( Ulozhenle) of Alexis ordained for taking snuff, amputation of the nose as the offending member, is characteristically Byzantine in spirit. It is to be remembered that the little literature which the Russians possessed came from Greek sources, and Byzantine influence has even been traced in the curious Domo-stroi, a book on household management partly written by Silvester, the councillor of Ivan IV.

Some of the Tsars (Ivan IV and Boris) had shown themselves personally less prejudiced against things foreign than the mass of their subjects. The horizon of Philaret had been enlarged by his enforced residence in Poland, and Michael is said to have been fond of Englishmen. Alexis broke some of the old traditions, and in his reign presages of future change may be discerned. These slight signs were mainly the consequence of the opening of Russia to foreign merchants, and of the German quarter in the capital ; but this influence was augmented by the acquisition of Kieff, which through its long connexion with Poland was intellectually at a far higher level than Moscow. Two Kieff scholars (Slavinetski and Satanovski) were called to Moscow in 1650 to translate the Greek Bible into Russian. It was a west-Russian monk whom Alexis employed as tutor of his children, Simeon Sitianovich, known as Polotski, who knew Latin and Polish, and has been described as a walking encyclopaedia. He exposed the prevailing ignorance and preached the necessity of education. But more remarkable than he was the learned Servian, luri Krizhanich, an enthusiastic exponent of the idea of the solidarity of the Slavonic peoples, who set himself the task of furthering their progress by the improvement of their languages so as to render them as adequate as other European tongues to express general ideas, and sought to vindicate the Slavs against foreign calumny and scorn. But the importance of this pioneer of Panslavism lay not in his Slavophil programme, but in what he did by exhibiting the backwardness of Russia, making war upon its spirib of contempt for foreigners, and inculcating the need of enlightenment, in the book of Political Ideas which he dedicated to Alexis.

The new ideas, preached by strangers, did not pass by two leading men of the day who held the post of Foreign Minister. Ordin-Nashchokin was alive to the importance of a fuller knowledge of Europe, of acquiring books from abroad, and of developing commerce. Artemon Matvieeff, who succeeded him as chief of the foreign Prikaz, had married a Scotchwoman, and assimilated European ideas. His wife was not submitted to the seclusion of Russian ladies; occidental fashions were affected in his house and the conduct of his household. His adopted daughter Natalia Naryshkina became the Tsar's second wife (1672), and the mother of Peter the Great. She displayed the fruits of her bringing up by appearing publicly in her litter with the curtains raised. Her marriage led to the disgrace and exile of Matvieeff on the accession of Theodore (1676), whose mother's relatives, the Milaslovskis, were his enemies. It is characteristic that the charge alleged against him was sorcery.

Thus, during the reigns of the first three Romanoff's (Michael, Alexis, and Theodore), access to Western ideas was within the reach of Russians, and this explains the fact that a Peter the Great could arise. The foreign merchants at Moscow, the foreign officers, Scotch and others, in the army, the political negotiations with foreign Courts (especially the French) interested in the Turkish and Polish questions, were insensibly preparing the way for Russia to turn her face in a new direction, though the country at large seemed still impregnably barricaded behind a Chinese wall of prejudice and conservatism. The abolition of the miestnichestvo, aheady noticed, in Theodore's reign was a not unimportant breach in the old order ; and it was significant that Orthodoxy, feeling itself endangered by the presence of heretics- Romanists, Calvinists, Lutherans-in the foreign quarter of Moscow, came to see that its best defence might be learning and education. It was the Tsar Theodore, pupil of Polotski, who, desiring as he said to imitate Solomon and the Greek Emperors in their love of learning, founded a Moscow Academy, at which Greek and Latin were to be taught as well as Slavonic, in the interests of the Church.

Theodore died in 1682, and his step-brother Peter, destined to regenerate Russia on lines which the later years of his father's reign had to some extent, though only faintly, indicated, was proclaimed Tsar.