Cultural Tropes and Political Power in Early Modern Russia

Abstract

Cultural Tropes and Political Power in Early Modern Russia Carol B. Stevens Russell E. Martin, The Tsar’s Happy Occasion: Ritual and Dynasty in the Weddings of Russia’s Rulers, 1495–1745. xvii + 359 pp. Ithaca, NY: Northern Illinois University Press, 2021. ISBN-13 978-1501754845. $59.95. Daniel Rowland, God, Tsar, and People: The Political Culture of Early Modern Russia. 420 pp. Ithaca, NY: Northern Illinois University Press, 2020. ISBN-13 978-1501753725. $29.95. Political power, elite support for the throne, and political ideologies were not solely represented by institutional rules or developed in polemical texts anywhere in early modern Europe. The two books reviewed below discuss, in different ways, how the vast and “undergoverned” early modern Russian Empire mustered its cultural resources to project political power and promote diffuse, if widely shared, political ideals outside of institutions and polemical texts. Instead, the ruling dynasties used art, architecture, and symbolic ritual to reinforce their divine authority and promote the related goals of unity, security, and social stability. The results contribute in important ways not only to understanding the ideals projected, but also to ongoing discussion about the dating of important transformations (“modernization”) in Russian society of the early modern period. ________ God, Tsar, and People, Dan Rowland’s new book, traces the evolution of his ideas about the cultural representations of Russian rulership in a series of articles dating from his graduate school years through 2017. The articles focus on the ways in which Orthodox thought dominated ideas about advice to the [End Page 401] tsar, the role of religion in early modern rulership, as well as the importance of visual culture in icons, frescos, and architecture. Rowland has valiantly resisted the temptation to update his older articles in conformity with more recent discussions. Broadly, the book examines Muscovy’s understanding of divine rulership and its relationship to both institutionalized Orthodoxy and the secular political elite: What were the qualities of a good ruler? How were the most important characteristics of rule conveyed to the secular elite that surrounded the ruler? Throughout the book, there is an implicit (and sometimes explicit) comparison to West European political developments in which law, parliamentary and bureaucratic institutions, and written, disputed political ideologies were used to delimit the actions of a divinely anointed monarch. In Muscovy, Rowland argues, Russian rule was envisioned as entirely God-dependent, and thus no secular institutions could be brought to bear upon the tsar and his behavior. The fundamentals of good government were therefore dependent upon the pious nature of the ruler, who followed God’s will, and (as needed) the good and pious counsel offered by advisers. These advisers were overwhelmingly likely to be of the political elite. However, their role was not envisioned as dependent upon an identifiable, somewhat more formal role, such as membership in the Boyar Duma or in the Zemskii Sobor.1 Indeed, their advice was ideally more religiously moral than secularly political in tone. This describes a very different perspective on rulership from that espoused, for example, by those who envision embryonic democratic stirrings in the 16th- and 17th-century activities of the Zemskii Sobor, with representatives selected from different social groups; and it adds another layer of complexity to our understanding of the Boyar Duma as an arena for policy consultation and for the secular competition of powerful clans. Unsurprisingly, then, this view of rulership generated few discussions of political theory (as Western Europe would understand them) that would support or explicate this, or any other, interpretation. [End Page 402] Given this daunting lack of direct discussion, Rowland analyzes the metaphors of written culture, the visual culture of spaces frequented by the Muscovite “establishment,” and the behavior of the Orthodox Church to demonstrate how God-centered understandings of rulership were transmitted to the secular world in which Muscovy’s political elite largely lived. These were the means through which “the ruler persuaded his courtiers that they were an important part of God’s plan, that their work … was crucial to salvation history” (231). Such visual and written expressions are far from self-evident to the 21st-century reader. Rowland argues for the preeminence of the metaphor of Muscovy as the...