Can We ‘Queer’ Early Modern Russia?

Abstract

Can we ‘queer’ early modern Russia?1 To historians of Russia, the question is a jarring one. It contains two problematic notions for Russianists. To begin with the more familiar one, we must consider what sort of ‘early modern’ Russia existed, and whether its characteristics can easily be equated with those of Western Europe. This discussion would compare and contrast European historical conditions with the political, social, economic and cultural development of Muscovy (the principality centered on Moscow which came to dominate the eastern Slavs in the fourteenth century). Under many rubrics this discussion would suggest that Russia’s situation was different. Muscovy was a sprawling territory on the border zone between the European and the Asian worlds, and in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it was subject to Mongol domination. The Muscovite prince (tsar of Russia from the accession of Ivan IV, The Terrible, in 1533) claimed to be an autocrat, and his noble servitors spoke of themselves as ‘slaves.’ The peasants were subject to a serfdom that increased, not lessened, its grip during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was not abolished until 1861. Orthodoxy made Russia different, too. Using vernacular and looking to Byzantium for inspiration, Russian Orthodoxy denied Roman claims to lead Christianity.