pre-Petrine Russia Research Articles

The Veneration of the Mother of God and Some Aspects of Naming Tradition in pre-Petrine Russia

The Veneration of the Mother of God and Some Aspects of Naming Tradition in pre-Petrine Russia

Источники по титульной геральдике Московского царства XVI – первой половины XVII в.

The article is devoted to the analysis of sources containing information on the land heraldry of the Tsardom of Moscovy, which reflected territorial title of the Russian rulers. The historiography usually mentions 5–6 artefacts and pictorial sources with images of such coats of arms. In fact, the complex of these sources can be significantly expanded. The author has managed to collect information about ten artefacts, two visual and four written sources, which allow to follow the evolution of the title heraldry in pre-Petrine Russia starting from the 16th century. Furthermore, two seals descriptions containing information about land coats of arms remain unpublished. The analysis of sources leads to the following conclusions. The beginning of the Russian title heraldry dates back to the reign of Ivan the Terrible. It was probably connected with refining of his territorial titles after the Livonian War. The Great Seal of Ivan the Terrible (late 1570s) has a set of title seals with images, most of them quite simple. These emblems reflect mainly natural or economic features of specific lands. Some emblems are purely symbolic, some borrow directly from Western European heraldry. These title emblems (called seals prior to the 18th century) continued up to the Romanovs’ reign. For instance, the front of the seal of Ivan the Terrible became a source for title emblems reproduced on the armor of Pseudo-Demetrius I, which was made by Western European masters. They probably took their cue from an imprint of the front side of the seal sent with the order. Emblems from the reverse side of the seal were not reproduced on the armor. Under Mikhail Fyodorovich (apparently, in late 1620s) the complex of title emblems underwent its first significant transformation. Some emblems continued to the end of the 16th century, some were formed anew. The new system of title emblems translated into a description of seals made after the Moscow fire of 1626. This document is also yet unpublished. The reform of the title seals may have been associated with making of a new complex of royal regalia in late 1620s. The new seals appeared in the composition of the cover for tsar’s saadak (quiver), which, apparently, was made at the same time.

Contemporary Russian Historiography on the Pre-Petrine Era: New Aspects

This review focuses on the most remarkable works in contemporary Russian historiography from recent decades on the pre-Petrine seventeenth century. Consciously ignoring the literature dedicated to diplomacy and war because of the sheer size of the available material, the author isolates questions connected with the socio-political and cultural development of the Muscovite state and society. In particular, she examines works looking at the intensity and direction of pre-Petrine Russia’s socio-cultural contacts with the West and the Orthodox East and the extent of their influence on the country’s historical development. Noting how the exhaustion of Marxist methodology (in its Soviet variant) has led contemporary Russian historiography to revive the opposition of the Slavophiles and Westernisers, the author nevertheless emphasises its new foundations, which are based on different methodological principles. There has been a shift of scholarly interest away from the ‘base’ to the ‘superstructure’ (to use the old Soviet terminology): now dominant is the attention placed on the discursive practices of the epoch and on the problems of intellectual history, the history of personhood, the network-actor interactions that created the fabric of social and cultural reality, and the increasing need to study the sources. The article’s main conclusion is that the varied (and sometimes mutually exclusive) interpretations of the meaning and significance of the cultural changes in the second half of the seventeenth century can scarcely be reduced to some generalising representation of the epoch. This will require the further accumulation and interpretation of empirical materials in the framework of new research paradigms. It is necessary to understand this period as part of an integral whole with the era of the Petrine reforms.

CAUSES OF REVOLUTION OF 1917 IN RUSSIA (SOCIAL-CULTURAL ASPECT)

This article attempts to establish the causes of the Revolution of 1917 in Russia and the civil war events that followed after. The authors focus on the fact that as the revolution itself, which took place in stages as a single process throughout 1917 and spanning several years of civil war, was extremely violent form. After these events the entire social-economic infrastructure of the country were settled and the population had a huge decline in their numbers. The authors believe that unprecedented the brutality of the events of 1917–1921 was due to the fact that Russian society had no common social-cultural basis for unity. The cultural rift largely occurred after Peter’s reforms, the result of which was the loss characteristic of prePetrine Russia conciliar forms of life. The events of 1917 and the ensuing absolutely logical way, a bloody civil war was largely determined by the absence in the Russian Empire, a single social-cultural grounds for interaction between different social layers. Society has divided into “us” and “them”. The result was a situation of unresolved conflict, ready at any moment to transform into a brutal war of all against all for the sake of mutual and total destruction. Clear differentiation and polarization of the opposing forces in 1917– 1921 years was due to the role of the so-called revolutionary intellectuals, which offered the lowest strata of the Russian society of ideological values, which was largely in tune with the sobornost’-traditionalist notions of the peasantry of ownership, authority, law and other social institutions.

Reconstructing the Late 16th-and 17th-Century Muscovite State Budget

Reconstructing the Late 16th-and 17th-Century Muscovite State Budget Dmitrii Liseitsev (bio) Translated by Richard Bland In recent decades, scholars have renewed their interest in the history of the 17th-century Muscovite state. The evolution of the Muscovite fiscal system (and the development of the Russian economy in general) in this period has, however, yet to attract sufficient attention from scholars. Admittedly, we have almost no information on the Russian budget in the 16th and 17th centuries that rests on a firm foundation of bureaucratic recordkeeping. As a result, works on the history of pre-Petrine Russia abound with fantastic figures, taken as a rule from narrative sources the accuracy of which has not been subjected to serious criticism. Such a deficit of research on the economic history of pre-Petrine Russia severely constricts our chances of analyzing historical trends in the 16th- and 17th-century Muscovite state. We are unable to assess not only the general tendency of state development but also the effectiveness of individual fiscal measures: for example, the significance of the imposition of extraordinary taxes in this or that period (such as interrogation [zaprosnye] and fifths [piatinnye] money, which S. B. Veselovskii wrote about more than a century ago).1 International comparisons are also difficult.2 It is characteristic that the author of the most recent survey of Russia as a military-fiscal state does not even attempt [End Page 5] to provide a quantitative or qualitative assessment of that state’s financial resources prior to 1680.3 It seems, therefore, that we must at least try to approximate the size of the Muscovite state budget in the late 16th and 17th centuries. This article undertakes such an attempt: to reconstruct the Russian government’s budget for this period. With this goal in mind, we must understand that in those centuries the very idea of a state budget did not exist. The term authentic to the period, the sovereign’s treasury (gosudareva kazna), corresponds to the modern idea of a state budget only in part, since the sovereign’s treasury, because of its specific material content, was in a sense a “virtual” idea. In the 16th and 17th centuries, neither a single fiscal system covering the whole state nor a single authority acting as the final destination of tax revenues existed. Monetary (and not just monetary) funds at the disposal of city authorities were dispersed among the central agencies of state administration—the chancelleries, of which there were about 30 in the mid-17th century (not counting small court service bureaus, which in fact did not enjoy complete autonomy or their own budgets). Many chancelleries had, in accordance with their functions, certain revenues set aside for them (individual territories or categories of taxable population from which a given chancellery collected this or that tax). In simplified form, the “state budget” of the Muscovite tsardom was the aggregate of its chancelleries’ budgets. The dispersal of the Muscovite state’s budget among its central agencies of administration complicates the modern scholar’s task, because the chancellery system was extremely flexible: throughout the system’s existence in the 16th–17th centuries some chancelleries were created, others abolished or combined. Simultaneously, territories or fees subordinate to chancelleries were changed. For example, in the mid-1660s the Ambassadorial Chancellery collected money intended to ransom captives, which, according to the undersecretary (pod´iachii) Grigorii Kotoshikhin, brought in 150,000 rubles per year.4 But when a special Captives Chancellery was established in 1667, ransom money ceased to be placed at the disposal of the diplomatic corps. Ten years later, the Captives Chancellery was abolished, and the Postal Chancellery took over the collection of ransom money. Altogether, this chancellery, which had collected about 50,000 rubles in the mid-1660s, according to Kotoshikhin, [End Page 6] increased its revenues in 1680 to 235,000 rubles—that is, by four to five times.5 As a result, the dynamics and changeability of the chancellery system make it impossible to extend conclusions based on documents of one period to the situation in other decades or the 17th century as a whole. I would also note that even aggregating the monetary revenues allotted to the...

Путешествие по Российским рекам: травелог нового времени

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of travelling by water in Russian culture. Modern literary and cultural studies usually describe travelling from the point of view of anthropology. However, the natural conditionality of travelling lies outside the scope of research. The purpose of the article is to prove that it is advisable to carry out comprehensive research of travelling through the close interdependence of its human and natural components.The nature-centred analysis of the phenomenon of travel has not become common practice among national scholars yet, and therefore the authors actualize the idea of nature-centrism (ecocentrism), established in world research practice, particularly in the western discourse of ecocriticism (works of L. Buell, Yu-Fu Tuan, F. Jameson, V. Plumwood). The key idea of the spatiotemporal concept is that space is the subject of the narrative and everyday human life, mental experience, cultural languages being conditioned to a greater extent by the category of space than the category of time. This approach makes it possible to consider space as a palimpsest of consecutive place experiences which seems productive for the analysis popularity of certain loci and itineraries with travellers.Limiting their research goals by the cultural approach, the authors demonstrate the effectiveness of the nature-centred analysis of travelogue discourse and present their own results of Tver water travelogue research. They analyze how travel is determined by the element chosen by the traveler as a means to travel and what the conditions of paths that are imposed by the elements of nature are. The stereotypes connected with the use of land and water as roads formed in traditional culture are compared with a new attitude to the natural conditions of travelling in the modern culture. The authors explore different genres of water travelogue –from luxurious to mass-cultural.The article presents observations related to water voyages around Tver region. The authors conclude that in pre-Petrine Russia, in the 16th–17th centuries, travelling diplomats were forced to choose river routes as comfortable overland roads did not exist at the time. In the 18th century, after the organization of artificial water systems, the travelers’ attitude to the water trips changed significantly. Water routes became an integral part of luxurious voyages, their indispensable component, a central part. By the end of the 18th century, private travellers had clearly realized the benefits of land transportation: it was more comfortable and faster. Since the mid-19th century land and water trips have counterbalanced each other to a certain degree, although their functions are different as can be seen in the travelogue. In overland journeys, the cognitive function comes to the foreground, and water voyages are made predominantly for recreational purposes. To a certain extent, this separation of functions between water and land trips remains.

Religious Toleration in Russian Thought, 1520-1825

Religious Toleration in Russian Thought, 1520-1825 G. M. Hamburg (bio) In his landmark essay On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill described religious freedom as the foundation of liberty of thought, opinion, and sentiment and as "practically inseparable" from freedom of speech and freedom of the press. He asserted, "No society in which these liberties are not, on the whole, respected is free, whatever may be its form of government."1 Like so many other 19th-century thinkers, Mill regarded religious freedom as the virtually exclusive product of Western civilization, even though he had the honesty to admit that intolerance "is so natural to mankind ... that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale. In the minds of almost all religious persons, even in the most tolerant countries, the duty of toleration is admitted with tacit reserves."2 Mill's position on the foundational importance of religious toleration to the wider practice of civil liberties deserves careful consideration, as does his caveat about the "tacit reserves" often attached to toleration. But Mill's assumption that religious toleration should be associated primarily with Western societies is almost certainly a major historical blunder. As Amartya Sen has contended in his essay The Argumentative Indian, religious toleration in South Asia has roots in the 3rd century BCE and took modern form in the 16th century under Emperor Akbar.3 Thus the South Asian record of tolerating, even celebrating, religious and intellectual diversity rivals or exceeds [End Page 515] that of the West. Moreover, no historian can be insensible to the fact that in 20th-century Europe, the supposed "home" of religious toleration, powerful political regimes committed themselves to the destruction of religious pluralism. Clearly, given the stakes for human liberty posed by religious toleration and the elementary misunderstandings surrounding the history of the phenomenon, it is urgent for scholars to analyze the development of toleration in Europe and elsewhere. This essay analyzes Russian thinking about religious toleration from the first quarter of the 16th century to 1825. The essay is divided into seven parts: a brief survey of recent historiography on religious toleration in early modern Europe; a short analysis of Russian terms connoting toleration; a multipart analysis of tolerationist thinking from the early 16th century to 1825; and an examination of the patterns of Russian tolerationist thinking with special reference to the European Enlightenment. The chief goal of the essay is to juxtapose Russian toleration, in theory and practice, with the early modern and modern record in Western Europe: in this context, the impact of the European Enlightenment on Russian toleration will receive special attention. Since this essay is a speculative piece designed to provoke informed discussion and further research, the reader should not expect monographic depth or strict proportionality in the treatment of subjects under scrutiny. At the outset, the reader should note that, in both Western Europe and Russia, the concept of religious toleration applied chiefly to groups rather than to individuals. It usually connoted freedom of religious practice for a religious minority or set of minorities, but not necessarily for all minorities in a polity. Toleration did not generally entail freedom of preaching to members of other denominations, particularly to members of the established Church, nor did it generally imply freedom of the press for the tolerated group. By definition, freedom of conscience denoted an individual right of religious belief and practice: it was therefore a more sweeping right than anything connected with toleration. In historical literature, religious toleration has sometimes been associated with the phenomenon of secularism, itself a multivalent concept. In certain contexts, the adjective secular has been used by historians to distinguish any political measures not directly bearing on religion: the trouble with this usage, especially for pre-Petrine Russia, is that the Russian worldview was thoroughly religious, so for a Muscovite to imagine an act of state devoid of religious significance was difficult. Sometimes it has been said that Peter the Great secularized Russia, this description usually meaning that Peter bureaucratically subordinated the Church to the state or that he confiscated monastic lands, [End...

Administrating a Right Life: Secular and Spiritual Guidance at Solovki Monastery in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

The spiritual and economic endeavors of Russian monasteries in the pre-modern period have often been studied as separate issues by scholars researching the internal life and/or impact of cloisters in a particular region. However, these two areas of monastic life worked not just in tandem, but were mutually supportive as can be observed in the responsibilities and duties of monastic leaders and officers. Solovki Monastery, with its extensive wealth and strong spiritual leadership in northern Russia, provides an excellent example for exploring the manner in which spiritual leadership and spiritual labor dovetailed with economic responsibilities and labors. A broad variety of economic records as well as pious literature and instructional texts provide evidence for the merged spiritual and temporal/economic roles of the leaders, cellarers, treasurers, bailiffs, and other individuals and groups that had designated duties or titles within the cloister. It can be observed that spiritual power and economic success were considered mutually reinforcing among the monks and the surrounding population of Solovki, and at other monasteries of pre-Petrine Russia.

Muscovy and Its Mythologies: Pre-Petrine History in the Past Decade

In their search for an authentic Russian identity that is not beholden to communism or to the the leaders in Moscow settled upon--the 17th century. The holiday of the Great October Socialist Revolution on 7 November has been replaced by the Day of National Unity on 4 November, commemorating the date in 1612 when the Polish army was expelled from Moscow. Vladimir Putin and his handlers, the modern Russian historian Elizabeth Wood has written, have gone to surprising lengths to marshal symbolism straight from the pages of (1) Why the 17th century? Most important, Putin and his circle tried to cast themselves as the leaders who brought to a close Russia's modern of Troubles. The Russia that emerged from political chaos, then and now, is presented as comfortable in its centralized, authoritarian government and proud of its Russianness. Vera Shevzov, also a historian of modern Russia, sees no coincidence in the timing of the new holiday, which coincides not only with Russia's victory over foreigners in the Time of Troubles but also with the celebration of the Kazan icon of the Mother of God--a cult that came to prominence in the 17th century. (2) The fascination with premodern Russia extends beyond the propagandizing of the current Russian government. Many of the new churches constructed in the past decade sport architectural features drawn from Muscovite models. Pseudo-17th-century lettering abounds on placards. (Genuine 17th-century lettering would be virtually indecipherable to contemporary Russians.) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The 17th century, then, has become Russia's new usable past. The contemporary official view draws upon the mythologization of the past constructed by historians of the late imperial period. Like their literary colleagues, they wrote their accounts of the past as political allegory. They desired Russia's greatness, and so they exalted the Romanov restoration. Yet, eager for progress, they bemoaned autocracy, enserfment, and the bureaucratization of the church and state, while focusing disproportionally on manifestations of consultative government (particularly the zemskii sobor) and economic and cultural ties with the West. The similarity to the agenda of the liberal intelligentsia should prompted greater skepticism on the part of later scholars. However, their vision of pre-Petrine Russia has continued to dominate in all but specialist literature in the West, and it has regained new ascendancy in post-Soviet Russia. (3) Soviet-era works rooted in the Marxist feudalism paradigm with its emphasis on social conflict and economic exploitation now languish in obscurity. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Behind this facade of a popularized usable past, specialists been rewriting pre-Petrine history. However, this process has occurred largely out of sight of the larger community of Russianists. Even though the major journals become welcoming to works on Slavic history in the past 15 years or so, much of the innovation has taken place at small conferences and in the publications that grown out of them. The success of the first such volume, Medieval Russian Culture (1984), inspired this approach to the dissemination of new scholarship. (4) Since the early 1990s, a substantial number of equally formative volumes has appeared, and more are in production. (5) These volumes often integrate the work of Anglophone, Russian, and European scholars and cross disciplines, including not only history but literary and cultural studies, linguistics and semiotics, archeology, art history, and music history. Some volumes, particularly--but not exclusively--those that concern Russian Orthodoxy, transcend traditional chronological divides, when a premodernist is one of the editors. (6) Comparison with Western Europe, once considered a daring departure from the principle of Muscovite distinctiveness, has now become commonplace. …

В “Области Кесаря”: Проблема Статуса и Структуры Грузинской Православной Церкви После Отмены Автокефалии (Первая Половина XIX Века)

SUMMARY: In his article Anton Rybakov explores the factors that made the Russian imperial authorities embark on the project of full integration of the Georgian Church into the imperial system of confessional governance of the Orthodox Church and laity. The author traces the history of the process of integration and how integration affected the structure and status of the Georgian Orthodox Church. In tracing this process the author seeks to situate it in the broader context of transformations of the Russian Orthodox Church and the secularization of public life in the Russian Empire of the eighteenth century, also taking into account the specifics of the Church’s development in pre-Petrine Russia. The article lays out the phases of Church reform in Georgia, from the abolition of the Catholicos-Patriarch through the completion of the structure of the Georgian Exarchate. Along with this process the paradigm of Church–society relations changed: from the traditional view of the Church’s this-worldly presence to the new view of locatedness of the Church in “the realm of Caesar.” The author contends that because of these processes the Georgian Church was completely assimilated into the imperial Orthodox Church in an administrative and cultural sense. At the same time, Rybakov points out that the centralizing trends in Russian imperial governance could coexist with the politics of difference within the centralized space of empire as it occurred in Western Georgia where the boundaries of postreform dioceses overlapped with the political, administrative, and ethnographic borders. Finally, the article surveys the impact of the Church reform on the development of borderland society, which included the breakup of the traditional link between the Church hierarchy and the social elite, the exclusion of the Church from the processes of modern Georgian nation-building, and the dramatic secularization of Georgian public life.

Forms of Patronage in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Russia: Prospects of Comparative Research in the European Context

The paper deals with informal relationships and forms of patronage in pre-Petrine Russia, a phenomenon that has so far been neglected by scholars. The agenda for this study was inspired by the extensive work on European patronage done by Wolfgang Reinhard, Sharon Kettering, Antoni Mączak, and other pioneers of that field of research. It is common among historians to regard early modern Muscovy as a highly centralized polity where only vertical relations, i.e. from the monarch down to his subjects, were possible. The author of the present article rejects this rigid view of Muscovite society as allegedly devoid of any horizontal ties. He maintains that Muscovites, just as their contemporaries in other countries, needed help and protection that the state could not give them. And as elsewhere, patronage networks can be detected on the basis of private correspondence and other unofficial texts. The 16th- and 17th-century private letters explored by the author provide some insights into every-day activities and communication in Russia before Peter the Great. The author focuses upon different aspects of patron-client relations in early modern Muscovy, including the language of patronage, as well as types and forms of this phenomenon as it evolved in the course of time. Comparing Muscovite patterns to their counterparts in other European countries, the author comes to the conclusion that patronage in the West and in the East of Europe had many features in common, although its Russian variant lacked some political functions (e.g. serving as means of integration of the realm) that were so important in other seventeenth-century polities (especially in France and in the Papal state).

From the Editors: Premodern Lessons for Modern Historians

From the EditorsPremodern Lessons for Modern Historians It is no secret that most Western historians of Russia study the period after 1700, indeed after the Great Reforms. Only a brave and resourceful minority focuses on the Muscovite era, and those who venture even farther back are truly few and far between. This is not healthy for our profession. The modernist bias harms efforts to conceptualize the wider sweep of Russian history in both teaching and research by granting unnaturally long life to questionable myths about the medieval and Muscovite legacy—hence, for example, the tendency to overrate the import of the idea of Moscow as the "Third Rome." It also hurts our students by leaving them, and us, at the mercy of antiquated scholarship. Before Chester S. L. Dunning's recent book,1 the standard text on the Time of Troubles was Platonov's, first published in 1923.2 Who today would teach the history of, say, the English Civil War from textbooks more than 80 years old? Some of the contributors to the present issue of Kritika show the modernists among us a further important reason why we would benefit from looking outside our own chronological bailiwick: the problem of what to do with sources. While source criticism has been with us at least since Ranke's day, several more recent developments have increased its significance: the broader definition of what constitutes a source that accompanied the emergence of social and cultural history; the closer attention to "texts" that followed the rise of "theory"; the Internet; and, in our field, the post-communist "archival revolution." The challenge many of us face in studying the more modern periods is how to sift through, and make sense of, an ever-expanding mass of [End Page 711] evidentiary material. Nor does it make life easier when editors (including this very column a few months ago) ask authors to provide more details about their archival sources even while publishers insist on tighter word limits for manuscripts.3 On the bright side, of course, the embarrassment of riches is such that well-crafted research projects are rarely threatened by a lack of sources; the challenge is instead to design projects that are broad enough to command interest but do not trigger a tsunami of unmanageable documentation. This rapport with the sources shapes our own perception of how we in the present relate to the past, and it is what we communicate to our readers and students as well. By contrast, as the contributors to this issue remind us, scholars of pre-Petrine Russia face a rather different situation. Edward L. Keenan and Norman Ingham offer conflicting reviews of Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Zimin's book disputing the authenticity of Slovo o Polku Igoreve [the Igor´ Tale], regarded by many as a foundational text of medieval Russian literature. Keenan, of course, has made something of a career out of challenging key pre-Petrine Russian sources with his own books on the Slovo and on the correspondence between Ivan the Terrible and Prince Andrei Kurbskii.4 The deeper Keenan and Ingham (and Zimin) burrow into the complexities and ambiguities of the Slovo's obscure history, the more they leave the non-medievalist reader with an uncomfortable sense of doubt about whether we can know much of anything at all about Kievan Rus´. Nor are things much better as late as the 16th century. In a review essay last year, Carolyn Pouncy noted that historians writing broad, synthetic texts about Ivan the Terrible and his era continue to read key sources as having unambiguous meanings that were first attributed to them in the 19th century, even though more recent studies have raised considerable doubts about the dating, authorship, and other essential aspects of these same texts. From this, she concluded, "As historians, we need to recognize that much of the received wisdom regarding pre-Petrine history is no more than someone's speculation, repeated until it has acquired the aura of truth."5 This phenomenon rarely occurs in the work of modernists, whom the abundance of documentation has accustomed to expecting that disputes about sources—for example, about the authenticity of Peter the Great's alleged testament—can...

Российская историческая мозаика. Сборник научных статей в честь Джона Кипа ред. по А. Л. Литвин (review)

553 Ab Imperio, 1/2004 Only some of these topics can be confined within the research interests of the scholar to whom they are ostensibly dedicated. For example, Christine Worobec’s excellent essay on East Slavic fertility rituals at the summer solstice is only tangentially related to Keep’s work on the politicization of the peasantry during the Russian revolutions. Similarly, Paul Dukes’ careful study of the diplomatic wrangling surrounding the 1922 Russo-Japanese Conference of Changchun contributes more to the memory of their mutual friend, George B. Tolmakoff, than to the discussion of the larger social and political issues confronted in Keep’s work on the Russian military. And it is surely mostly for reasons of chronology that a collection on Russian history begins with an essay on state-building and land-reform in seventeenth-century Sweden (Antti Kujala), an essay, furthermore, that makes no explicit mention of its undoubted significance to the historiographical issues surrounding the reforms of Peter the Great. That task is left to the editors of the festschrift and although their introduction does a good job of tying all of these varied pieces together and of drawing out their possible implications for scholars of Russia, it appears that the editorial choices that went into this collection reflect the overall goal of international inclusiveness rather than of topical relevance. Ernest A. ZITSER Российская историческая мо- заика. Сборник научных статей в честь Джона Кипа / Отв. ред. А. Л. Литвин. Казань, 2003. 294 с. (на рус. и англ. яз.). Библиография работ Дж. Кипа. ISBN 5-81850023 -3. The “mosaic” in the title of this festschrift honoring John L. H. Keep refers both to the diversity of that scholar’s interests in Russian history and to the eclecticism of the essays solicited by the editors of this collection . Like the multicolored and seemingly haphazard pieces of a mosaic, which can only be appreciated from a proper distance, the variegated individual contributions form a pattern that gives the reader an overall impression of the British historian, his scholarly work, and his professional contacts in the broader academic world. Indeed, under the capable editorship ofAlter Litvin, the book is as much a tribute to growing cooperation within the international community of historians of Russia as it is a monument to Keep’s collegiality and scholarly achievements. The contributors are as diverse as the topics of the essays collected, representing Keep’s colleagues, coworkers , and friends from Canada, the United States, Scotland, Israel, Switzerland, Finland, and Russia. 554 Рецензии/Reviews strength of local and religious solidarities and the relative weakness of ethnic identity should be of particular interest to the readers of this journal. The rest of the essays in this collection deal with the other great theme of Keep’s scholarly work: the rise, evolution, and decline of Russian social democracy. Israel Getzler ’s study of Georgii Plekhanov can very profitably be read together with I. Kh. Urilov’s survey of recent Russian historiography on the origins of Menshevism. Similarly, A. Sal’nikova’s essay on children’s reactions to the Sturm und Drang of 1917 offers a nice antipode to Alter Litvin’s piece on the politics of their grandchildren who are now debating whether or not to re-instate monuments to Feliks Dzerzhinskii toppled in 1991. This section is capped off by Carter Elwood’s re-assessment of newly released archival evidence about Inessa Armand’s illicit love affair with Lenin. Besides its indisputable scholarly interest, the essay by the prize-winning author of a biography of Armand constitutes a model of historical scholarship and careful reading, and is alone worth the trouble of ordering this volume for your local library. But the most interesting piece in this historical and historiographical mosaic is not the essay about Lenin’s sex life, but rather Keep’s autobiographical introduction, entitled “Notes on John.” Although The essays that deal with historical subjects close to Keep’s heart are perhaps the brightest spots of this pastiche. Besides the previously discussed essay on Swedish absolutism, the only piece to pay tribute to Keep’s studies on early modern Muscovy is that of Philip Longworth, whose short article offers a gloss on N. Novombergskii’s monumental study of lese-majeste (slovo i delo) cases in pre-Petrine Russia. Keep’s interest in Soviet historiography is represented by two essays, one of which deals...

Еврейство и Русь на rendez vous межэтнического политеизма: О некоторых примечательных казусах современной историографии еврейского вопроса (на материале раннесредневековой Руси)

SUMMARY: In the article Denis Eoffe posits the problem of studying “Russian-Jewish” contacts, which is immediately connected to the problem of the antiquity of the Jewish presence in Rus’. Eoffe criticizes the historiographic tradition which denies the existence of Jewish history in pre-Petrine Russia and offers an impressive review of the world historical, archeological, and philological literature dedicated to diverse aspects of that problem. Eoffe believes that the anti-Judaic polemical tradition in Rus’ had to have sources in immediate observations of and communication with real Jews. In this vein, he offers a detailed critique of A. I. Pereswetoff-Murath’ recent book “A Grin without a Cat. Adversus Judaeous’ Texts in the Literature of Medieval Russia 988-1504”. 2 vols. (Lund, 2002). Eoffe debates the author’s main thesis, which consists of a refutation of any imperative to study a real Jewish presence in Rus’ using analyses of the adversus Iudaeous texts. According to Eoffe, such an approach equals denying Jewish presence in Ancient Rus, as well as denying the need to study the role of Jews in ancient Russian cultural, political, and economic history. Eoffe also suggests a range of specific historiographical and methodological criticisms of Pereswetoff’s book. He specifically stresses that Pereswetoff-Murath “does not see any connection between Kievan Jewry of the 10–11 th centuries and the subsequent “Russian Jews”. Eoffe argues that this newest research in fact continues an old historiographic tradition, which turns ancient Russian Jewry into a “figure of silence” or even a “simulacrum of hatred”.

Scenarios of Power. Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy. Vol. 2: From Alexander II to the Abdication of Nicholas II by Richard S. s> Wortman (review)

REVIEWS I53 Wortman,Richard S. Scenarios ofPower. MythandCeremony inRussian Monarchy. Vol.2.- From Alexander II totheAbdication ofNicholas II. PrincetonUniversity Press, Princeton, NJ, 2000. xvii + 586 pp. Index. Notes. Illustrations. k38.oo. VOLUME Two of Richard Wortman's pioneering study of monarchical presentationsis even better than the first.It is remarkablehow little attention most twentieth-centuryhistorianspaid to the power scenariosof coronations, funerals, national anniversariesand royal visits, which, if mentioned at all, tended to be dismissedas 'mere' pomp and ceremony, icing on a cake made of institutions,ideology and theories of autocracy, reform and revolutionary movements. Volume two focuses on rulerscoping with the challenges of the modern age by takingadvantageof Russia'sbackwardness,notablyof the fact that ninety percent of the population were peasants. Alexander II, for example, raised on a diet of Official Nationality, favoured a sentimental discourse which presented reform from above as an expression of people's needs. His scenario 'sought to evoke love' (p. 26) through a new sort of sharing,caringimage, but also featuredmilitarydisplays,which presentedthe emperor as firmly in control, an illusion which was shattered by his assassinationin i 88I. The chapters on Alexander III are among the best in the book, supplementing the usual master narrativeof authoritarianclampdown by examining the elaboration of a myth of monarchy which entailed branding even Westernized moderates as 'bearers of foreign influence antagonisticto the national spirit'(p. I97). Alexander's 'peasant-like'appearance , complete with bushybeard, and grufftaciturnitysuitedhim for the role of epic folk hero (bogatyr'). He shared Pobedonostsev'sview that evil human nature needed strong authority, at the same time cultivating a moral bond with thepeople througha religiousscenario.Anniversariessuchasthebaptism of Rus' (i888) were lavishly marked, but celebrations for the twenty-fifth anniversaryof emancipation of the serfsin i886 were forbidden.Moscow and pre-Petrine Russia were exalted in an attempt to relocate the real Russian nation in 'a scene and a time of divinely and popularly sanctioned personal rule' (p. 34I). Nicholas II had a harder time honing his image. Not only did he lack his father's physical presence, but whereas Alexander III at least believed in a few 'trueRussians' around the throne, Nicholas trustedno one, either officialsor courtiers, outside the family and the narod. Competing for popular support involved marginalizing institutions, even the church, by claiming a 'direct though unspoken and invisible spiritual bond with the people' (p. 366). Wortman turns the old Soviet historiographyon its head by emphasizing not peasant revolt but popular acclaim, epitomized by the peculiar 'Russian Hoorah'. Thirteen-year old Nicholas wrote a composition describing how during his parents' visit to the Kremlin in i88I crowds raised 'a deafening "Hoorah" '(pp. 3I5- I6).A 'perfecthurricaneofsound'(p. 35I)accompanied his own coronationparadein I896 and the shoutsfromthepeasantdelegation which greeted him at Poltava in I909 led Stolypin to declare: 'This marks the end of the revolution' (p. 424). It would be easy to dismiss all this as I54 SEER, 8o, I, 2002 stage-managed, narodas expendable extras in plays always ending with rapturouscries reminiscent of the burnye aplodismenty recorded at Soviet Party Congresses.But evidence drawnfroma wide range of sources,includingeven cynical foreign observers, suggests that enthusiasm from below generally complemented the scenario from above. It was those who didn't get a part in the play who proved to be the problem. Wortman skilfullydemonstratesthe dynamics of self-delusion in, for example, the lavish ceremonies for the canonization of Serafimof Sarovin I903. God's apparentcuringof the sickin Sarov implied he would heal Russia, too, and scenes of popular devotion fuelled the royal couple's faith in the power of collective piety to defeat the subversiveactivities of 'aliens', especially in St Petersburg(which celebrated itsbicentenaryin the sameyear, but with lukewarmsupportfrom on high). In 1912 the unpleasantness of the Lena gold field massacre was offset by the Borodino jubilee celebrations, the joyous response' to which Moskovskie vedomosti hailed as 'dealing a final blow to the harmfullegend of the so-called revolutionarycharacterof Moscow' (p. 434). In retrospect, the dangers were all too clear. Richard Wortman quotes extensively from A. G. Elchaninov's Tsarstvovanie Gosudaria Imperatora Nikolaja Aleksandrovicha (I913), the first official biography of a living tsar, which propagated Nicholas's vision of himself on a mission ordained by God, devoted to...

The Church in the Russian Revolution: Arguments for and against Restoring the Patriarchate at the Church Council of 1917-1918

One of the most important events of the summer of 1917 was the opening of the All–Russian Council of the Orthodox church on 15 August in Moscow. In a dramatic opening ceremony, solemn processions from all the churches of Moscow converged on Red Square for the service led by Metropolitan Tikhon. The council had been convened by a 5 July order of the Holy Synod and its chief procurator, V. N. L'vov, with the concurrence of the Provisional Government. The calling of a church council–the first since Peter's establishment of the collegial system of administration–was a substantive change in church governance and also had a symbolic meaning. In pre-Petrine Russia, the councils not merely had played an ecclesiastical role but had formed an integral part of national government. (For example, Ivan IV and the church council had worked together to implement changes in the secular code of law as well as in spiritual and ecclesiastical matters.)

Literacy and Literacy Texts in Muscovy: A Reconsideration

For well over a century scholars with a variety of concerns have inquired into the level of literacy in pre-Petrine Russia with mixed success at best. The problem is well known: The array of sources upon which historians of other cultures typically rely to estimate levels of literacy–parish records, wills, service records, and tax lists–either do not exist for pre–Petrine Russia or do not provide the volume of data necessary for computing literacy in a statistically meaningful way.

Expansion and colonialism on the eastern frontier: views of Siberia and the Far East in pre-Petrine Russia

This essay is an examination of the nature of Russian colonial expansion into Siberia and the Far East in the seventeenth century. The argument is made that this expansion was essentially mercantile in nature, and occurred as a result of the quest for furs, which for the Muscovite state represented a reliable and highly lucrative source of revenue. Russian occupation of the Amur basin was additionally stimulated by the hope of establishing a food base for the fur trappers in the desolate regions to the north. The significance of all these regions for the government in Moscow, therefore, rested solely on their ability to supply a colonial commodity. Beyond this, they had no value, and the Russians were even willing in the case of the Far East to surrender territorial claims, if with this Chinese markets could be made more accessible for Russian furs. This interpretation counters both Western views of Russian expansion overall as an undifferentiated, indeed organic process, and some recent Soviet interpretations, which maintain that the Russians in this period had overriding territorial interests on the Amur lands.

Some perceptions of mental disorder in pre-Petrine Russia.

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Witchcraft and Medicine in Pre-Petrine Russia

Witchcraft and Medicine in Pre-Petrine Russia