General Patrick Ivanovich Gordon spent all of 1688 in the vicinity of Moscow, talking to people in high places, sometimes learning things he did not dare write even in his private diary. A great success, a senior commander in the armies of the two tsars, he still cringed at the viciousness and instability at the center of the Russian state. Gordon was a Scottish Catholic who had left home at the age of sixteen to seek his fortune and had fought successively in the armies of Sweden, Poland, and the Holy Roman Empire, usually under Scottish officers. As soon as he entered Russia to seek further service there, he regretted his decision, finding the towns dirty and the people “morose.” But he was informed that since he was a Catholic and had come from countries with which Russia was often at war, he would be taken for a spy and sent to Siberia if he tried to leave the country. He rose in the service of the tsars, distinguished himself in a campaign against the Ottomans, commanded the garrison of Kiev, served as the quartermaster of a bungled 1687 expedition against the Tatars, and in 1688 became colonel of a regiment. There were quite a few Scottish and German Catholic officers in Moscow. Occasionally they, or their sons, were allowed to leave the country. They kept in touch with relatives in their home countries and were reasonably well informed about events elsewhere in Europe; Gordon’s diary for 1688 mentions the arrest of the seven bishops in London, the invasion of England by William of Orange, the French conquest of Philippsburg on the Rhine, and the Hapsburg victories at Belgrade and in Bosnia.
Most seventeenth-century cities were dirty, disorderly, and dangerous. Moscow was one of the worst. With endless forests in all directions to supply logs, it is not surprising that most building was of wood; when painted and decorated with carvings, houses might occasionally remind the visitor of the larger and more comfortable wooden structures of a greater city far to the south, Istanbul. Tall, narrow Orthodox churches with their onion domes were everywhere. The summer days were very long, but then came winters of short days and deep cold, and springs when mud made the streets impassable.
Moscow’s politics were as messy as its streets, and here too the observer might be reminded of Istanbul. The Ottoman sultans depended for their large expeditionary forces on troops recruited by provincial commanders who drew revenue from lands that they did not own but that were assigned to them according to the numbers of soldiers they would provide. So did the Muscovite tsars. That was all very well for an annual campaign, but not for the year-round task of protecting the ruler and his court from their many internal enemies and maintaining a bit of order in the capital. For this, full-time professional soldiers were needed: Janissaries in Istanbul, the streltsy in Moscow. The soldiers around the court found that they had power over it, and they came to take part in every struggle for succession or control of the court. They passed their positions on to their sons and made use of their privileged status in the capital to open shops and make money in many unsoldierly ways.
But Moscow was much less open to foreigners than cosmopolitan Istanbul. The Russian city experienced nothing comparable to the new talent and new genes, slave bureaucrats and palace women, that constantly infused the Ottoman power structure. Moscow was not a crossroads of world trade and cultural exchange. Such foreigners as made their way there were confined to a ghettolike foreign settlement on the outskirts of the city. Foreigners who came to Russia in search of wealth or employment found that it was hard to get permission to leave again. In the middle of the city stood the imposing Kremlin palace-fortress, with its magnificent old churches. The tsars left the Kremlin only in rare and ceremonious procession.
In 1688 Russia had two tsars. Ivan, who lived in the Kremlin, was twenty-two years old, sickly, dim, scarcely able to stand on his own. Tsar Peter, Ivan’s half brother, just sixteen, lived most of the time at a country estate. He was lively, curious, outgoing, and big for his age; when he was eleven, the members of a Swedish embassy thought he was sixteen. He appeared at the Kremlin only for the necessary ceremonial functions. When Tsar Fedor died in 1682, the ambitious relatives of Peter’s mother had persuaded a council of dignitaries to bypass Ivan and place the obviously more promising Peter on the throne. Then Ivan’s maternal relatives had instigated a revolt of the streltsy, two of Peter’s maternal relatives had been cut to bits and trampled into the mud outside the Kremlin, and Ivan and Peter had been named cotsars. But the real power in the Kremlin was Ivan’s sister, Princess Sophia; Peter and his mother had no power and were lucky to be allowed to live quietly on a country estate.
Very lucky. In the Kremlin the tsar and his court spent their days in rigidly prescribed ceremonies. Ivan could not have learned or accomplished much even if he had been less constrained. But Peter made good use of his freedom. The foreign quarter was not far from his estate, and he used it to learn about foreign countries, their goods, their knowledge, even their crafts; he learned some carpentry and blacksmithing himself. Above all, he was fascinated by the arts of war. He led his group of young noble companions in drill and maneuvers. Being tsar, he could requisition weapons, even cannons if he wished, and direct his troops in building small-scale fortifications. His “forces” swelled and took in some nonnobles. Some of the foreign military officers helped with their training. Peter did not make himself colonel, but started out as an enthusiastic drummer boy and worked his way up—quite rapidly, to be sure. Soon he had three hundred young men under his command and then another three hundred at another estate—no match for the streltsy, but a most impressive indication of the young tsar’s drive to learn and improve, especially in military matters. The two regiments of three hundred each were the nuclei of the most famous of the Imperial Guard regiments down to 1917.
While Tsar Peter and his widowed mother were kept out of the way, Princess Sophia and her favorite, Prince Vasily Golitsyn, gave the country an effective government. A major military expedition against the Tatars of the Crimea in 1687, commanded by Golitsyn, accomplished nothing; Golitsyn was not a gifted commander, and the Russians had no idea how to deal with the mobile Tatar cavalry. In 1688 the Moscow rulers kept their armies at home. They were wary that French pressure in Germany might lead the Holy Roman Empire to make a separate peace with the Ottomans, freeing Ottoman and Tatar forces for use against Russia. Above all, the failure in 1687 had been embarrassing to a regime that had come to power in a bloody coup, that kept one anointed tsar in a marginal role, and in which Princess Sophia was coming closer and closer to claiming autocratic power for herself.
Early in 1688 General Gordon had some hope that there would be another expedition against the Tatars that year. He was especially frustrated by constant disorders among the Cossacks, Russians who had fled poverty and serfdom and lived under their own commanders on the vast open plains. The turmoil was aggravated at this time by the flight of many Cossacks to settlements along the Volga of Old Believers, dissenters from recent ceremonial reforms in the Russian Orthodox Church. He also noted that Moscow tended to encourage the independence of many Cossack leaders, not wanting to place too much trust in any supreme leader, and that probably worsened the turmoil. Moscow suffered no serious political disorders in 1688, but there were several major fires, one of which was said to have burned ten thousand houses. The government lent so much money to people who had to rebuild their houses that it could not pay Gordon and other officers. He must have known a great deal about the explosive political tensions at the center of the court, but he hardly ever confided this knowledge to his diary; there is one cryptic reference to “secret conjunctions."Tsar Peter was demanding more and more pipers and drummers from Gordon’s and other regiments.
Gordon does not tell us about some remarkable advances in the young tsar’s education in 1688. Peter requested a sextant from a diplomat returning from France and found a Dutch merchant, Frans Timmerman, who could show him how to use it. Then in June he and Timmerman happened to look in a storehouse at an imperial estate and found the keeled hull of a small Western-style ship. Peter was amazed to hear that such a ship could be sailed across and almost against the wind. Another Dutchman was found who managed to repair the hull, rig it, and demonstrate what it could do on a nearby river. Peter was even more entranced than he had been by drill and artillery. Soon he had established a little shipyard where several small ships were under construction, and he was working alongside the shipwrights to learn their craft. None of the ships was done before winter; but the work continued the next year, and Peter never lost his new fascination with ships and the sea. The boat he and Timmerman found has been preserved to our own day as the first seed of the Russian Navy.
In 1689 Golitsyn led another expedition against the Tatars, this time all the way to the Crimea, but turned back without a fight. On his return to Moscow he was received as a victor, but knowledge of the truth spread quickly. Princess Sophia seemed ready to take full power for herself. Some of Peter’s supporters forced his hand by waking him in the middle of the night and telling him that the streltsy were coming to seize him. He fled in a panic to a fortified monastery, where nobles and commanders began to join him. He summoned the foreign officers. Gordon went to consult with Golitsyn. Seeing Golitsyn hesitant and frightened, Gordon made up his mind for Peter, and the other foreign officers followed him. Golitsyn was exiled to the Arctic, Princess Sophia to a nearby monastery, and Tsar Ivan renounced all governing powers. Peter was fully in control. He spent the 1690s laying the groundwork for the great changes that were to follow. He went to Archangel on the Arctic and saw a real ocean for the first time. He led an amazing embassy to France, Holland, and England, where he worked in a Dutch shipyard, he met the Amsterdam statesman-savant Nicolaas Witsen, and his party wrecked John Evelyn’s country house. He also ruthlessly crushed a revolt of the streltsy. Neither Russia nor Europe was ever the same.
Tsar Peter’s empire confronted him with astonishingly varied challenges, at the greatest distances, sometimes in the most fearsome rigors of the Russian winter. Our one year provides examples, from its beginning and its end.
From January 25 to March 25, 1688, Fedor Alexseevich Golovin, ambassador of Tsars Peter and Ivan sent to negotiate a peace with the Qing (pronounced “ching") Empire, was besieged by Mongols in the Russian outpost at Selenginsk, just south and east of Lake Baikal. Eventually Cossack reinforcements arrived, and the Mongols were forced to withdraw, and none too soon; food had been running low, and the animals had been weakening. If conditions had been bad inside the log fort, they cannot have been comfortable inside the felt yurts of the besiegers. Their mounting of a siege in the dead of a Siberian winter suggests that the Mongols understood how much was at stake in Golovin’s embassy.
The greatest geopolitical transformation of the world of the seventeenth century was the explosive expansion of Russian trade and settlement across Siberia. Beginning with the raids of the Cossack adventurer Yermak in the 1580s, Russian parties using the great river systems reached the Pacific in 1639. A series of outpost forts became centers for buying furs from the local people or simply demanding them as yasak, tribute traditionally owed to the dominant local power. Small numbers of settlers, many of them outlaws and few of them literate, began to settle and farm near some of the forts. Especially promising areas for grain production were discovered in the 1640s, in the valley of the Amur River, on the present northeastern border of the People’s Republic of China and on the northern approaches to the homeland of the Manchu people, rulers of the Qing Empire. The Russians were pushed back from the Amur basin in the 1650s; but then the Qing relaxed their vigilance, and they came back. Not until 1683, after their conquest of Taiwan, did the Qing resume efforts to get them out, by diplomacy if possible, by war if necessary. The Russian outpost at Albazin was besieged in 1685; the Russians withdrew but soon returned, and after another siege in 1686 the Qing withdrew when they were informed that a Russian ambassador was coming to arrange a peaceful settlement.
Four hundred years earlier the Mongols had ruled Beijing and Nanjing, Kiev and Moscow, Isfahan and Baghdad. Pushed back to their homeland after the breakup of their vast empire, the Mongols still were feared because of the extraordinary mobility and fighting power of their cavalry. But the firearms of the sedentary empires were beginning to shift the military balance against them, and the Russian advance worked against them in a subtler way. It was not that the Russians were so strong or that the territories they occupied were so important to the Mongols. Rather, the Russian expansion put the Mongols in a difficult geopolitical position. Since the Qing and the Russians each feared an alliance of the Mongols with the other, both were predisposed to seek a peaceful settlement of their differences, despite their almost total ignorance of each other and the sensitive issues that divided them, especially the delineation of an Amur frontier. As long as the Russians and the Qing were at peace, neither had to fear a combination of the other’s wealth and firearms with the Mongol cavalry. Both could develop their edges of the Mongolian steppe in relative peace. The Mongols would be isolated, caught in a great vise between Russia and China.
At the end of 1687 both Golovin and the Kangxi emperor sent envoys to Urga, the most important political and religious center of the Mongols. The Qing envoy may have helped encourage the siege of Selenginsk, but it was in any case a particularly advanced and exposed Russian position much resented by the Mongols. The siege left Golovin even more ready to talk peace with the Qing, and an envoy arrived from Beijing with an agreement for a conference at Selenginsk. But then in 1688 the whole fabric of Mongol politics was transformed, leaving Selenginsk inaccessible to the Qing and the Qing court in its turn very much chastened and ready to make peace. Galdan, khan of the Dzungars, came out of western Mongolia to attack the Khalkhas, the closest allies of the Qing. The Khalkhas were driven far to the southeast; more than a hundred thousand sought refuge in Qing territory. Galdan was willing to ally with the Qing or with the Russians; but they wanted peace with each other, and neither wanted to encourage a vigorous new leader in Mongolia.
Ambassador Golovin finally met a Qing delegation in 1689 at Nerchinsk, east of Selenginsk. Having no language in common, the two delegations communicated by means of the Latin translations of two Jesuits from the Beijing mission and a Pole in the Russian delegation. In the famous Treaty of Nerchinsk, the Russians agreed to withdraw from the Amur Valley. The Mongolian frontier was not delineated, but arrangements were worked out for trade in Siberian furs for the Chinese market. The Russians could develop Siberia in peace, and Kangxi could turn his attention to the Dzungars. The emperor personally led an expedition in 1696 that crushed Galdan’s power in a battle near Urga, near present-day Ulan Bator, and the vise continued to tighten on the people of the steppe.
In the dark of the short days at the end of 1688 troops of the tsar waited until Lake Onega froze to a good depth. Then they advanced across the ice to the Paleostrovskii Monastery, which sat on an island in the lake. On November 23, in bitter cold and only about five hours of daylight, the attackers breached the walls of the monastery, which had been occupied by Old Believers. The defenders retreated to the upper chapel, pulled their ladders up, and set it afire. When the fire had burned itself out, the tsar’s troops surveyed the smoking ruins and withdrew across the ice; soon all was covered with fresh snow as the days grew even shorter. It was said that about fifteen hundred Old Believers had died.
The forests of northern Russia were formidable to seventeenth-century man. In the summer, boggy ground, swamps, and swarms of insects made travel difficult and miserable. It was easier to travel on skis, over the snow and frozen lakes, in the winter, but there were only a few hours of daylight, the cold was bitter, and a sudden storm when a traveler was far from shelter meant certain death. The beautiful and forbidding world of forests and lakes around Lakes Ladoga, Onega, and Vyg, between the Gulf of Finland and the White Sea, was one of the main theaters of the late-seventeenth-century confrontation between the Old Believers and the Russian state and state church, which they viewed as works of the devil, possibly already the rule of the Antichrist. The troubles had begun in the 1650s, when Nikon, patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, had decreed reforms to correct inconsistencies in the rituals of the church and to bring them into line with the practices of the Greek Orthodox churches. The most important of these changes was the requirement that the sign of the cross be made with three fingers instead of the traditional two. This was heresy for the devout Russian believer, for whom the communion of the faithful, the linking of God and man, was constantly re-created in the uncanny harmony of voices in the high, narrow nave of stone cathedral or wooden country church, in the icons glowing in the dim light, in every movement, every gesture of priest and worshiper. To change anything was to shatter this divine harmony. Moreover, since the fall of Rome and Constantinople, Russia was the Third Rome, the last home of true Christianity, and must not lose its true faith by trying to adjust to the practices of its debased contemporaries.
From the beginning those who rejected Nikon’s reforms saw in them signs that the "time of suffering” had come, that the apocalypse was at hand. In the Last Days the faithful must preserve the true teaching, flee the evil world, and dwell in the desert to purify themselves and await the end. These ideas and impulses are almost as old as Christianity, and in Russia there already was a long history of solitary saints who found their “deserts” in the great forests and who sometimes gathered loose communities of hermit-monks around themselves. In the late 1600s this religious flight often mixed with a secular one, as peasants fled the new laws that bound them to their villages as serfs.
The first armed resistance to the state by Old Believers ended in 1675–76, at a monastery on an island in the White Sea. In 1667 the state had demanded absolute submission and begun a siege that ended, over eight years later, in the dead of the near-Arctic winter, in the sack of the monastery and the slaughter of all but fourteen of the defenders. During the long siege the monks had grown more radical in their rejection of state authority, refusing to pray for the tsar, condemning him in “terrifying” language, perhaps taking in some survivors of a crushed rebellion. The local people had sympathized with them and smuggled food to them, and some of the monks had slipped away before the end to spread their teachings. Even more threatening was the revolt of the streltsy in Moscow in 1682, when Old Believers were found to be in league with the rebels, and an Old Believer spokesman insulted the princess regent Sophia in person. The revolt was suppressed, but the court, alarmed by this combination of military revolt and religious dissidence, turned to total suppression of the Old Believers.
The Old Believers had nothing to gain by attempting to conciliate a state that was determined to crush them. They already were withdrawing into remote areas and had shown their determination to resist when cornered. If their resistance was overwhelmed, then martyrdom would be theirs, a martyrdom surely preferable to living on into the terrors of the Last Days as the tsar-Antichrist gained power. From the 1660s on there had been scattered instances of Old Believer congregations committing suicide by setting afire their wooden churches and forts, abundantly supplied with firewood, tar, and straw. The greatest spiritual leader of the Old Believers, the archpriest Avvakum, was burned at the stake in 1682. From a tradition of asceticism, of long, difficult exercises in the mortification of the flesh and the purification of the soul, it was a short and to many an appealing step to the swift, spectacular, and total purification of the roaring fire. Early in 1687 hundreds of Old Believers took control of the Paleostrovskii Monastery on an island in Lake Onega. This was a clear provocation, an effort to speed up the inevitable confrontation with the Antichrist. Local troops responded quickly and soon had the Paleostrovskii under siege. On March 4, 1687, the Old Believers barricaded themselves into the upper level of their chapel with plenty of hay and straw, pulled the ladders up after themselves, and set the chapel on fire. The soldiers had orders to take prisoners if possible and frantically tried to chop or shoot their way in; but the flames spread too quickly, and more than two thousand Old Believers were burned to death. There was another self-immolation that same summer, near the White Sea, in which it was said that several thousand died. Then one of the leaders of the Paleostrovskii occupation who had slipped away before the end quietly gathered new followers from the Old Believer settlements hidden in the forests and on September 20, 1688, led them to reoccupy the Paleostrovskii. They had plenty of time to prepare their defenses while the unsettled late fall weather kept the attackers off the lake. But then the lake froze, and the imperial commanders were able to move their men and cannons across the ice and up to the walls of the monastery. The same drama was played out as in March 1687, with the addition of some unwilling martyrs, monks whom the Old Believers had captured as they took the monastery.