California Slavic Studies, Volume V

By Nicholas V. Riasanovsky

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520326552

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CALIFORNIA SLAVIC STUDIES

CALIFORNIA SLAVIC STUDIES

Volume V

EDITORS

NICHOLAS V. RIASANOVSKY GLEB STRUVE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY • LOS ANGELES • LONDON 1970

California Slavic Studies Volume 5

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, LTD. LONDON, ENGLAND

ISBN: 0-520-09043-8

Library of Congress Catalog Card No.: 61-1041

© 1970 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS 1

CONTENTS 1

THE ORIGINS OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY

CZARTORYSKI’S SYSTEM FOR RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY, 1803 A Memorandum, Edited with Introduction and Analysis

AN AN GLO-RU SSI AN MEDLEY: WORONZOWS, PEMBROKES, NICOLAYS, AND OTHERS Unpublished Letters and Historical Notes

CENSORSHIP AND THE PEASANT

PORTRAIT OF GOGOL AS A WORD GLUTTON With Rabelais, Sterne, and Gertrude Stein as Background Figures207

SOME ASPECTS OF TOLSTOY’S INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT: TOLSTOY AND SCHOPENHAUER260

THE ORIGINS OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY

MOSCOW’S NEMECKAJA SLOBODA*

BY

SAMUEL H. BARON

A MAJOR AGENCY in the Westernization of Russia was seventeenth- century Moscow’s Nemeckaja Sloboda—literally, German suburb, but more accurately, West European suburb. It is best known as the scene of Peter I’s youthful adventures and inquiries that helped make him the greatest of the Westernizing Tsars. However, leading Russian historians have attributed to it a broader cultural significance. Klyuchevsky characterized the suburb as a little corner of Western Europe nestled at the eastern outskirts of Moscow, and went on to suggest the powerful impact it made on Muscovite society.1 According to Milyukov, this little European oasis planted in the cultural desert was destined to achieve the cultural conquest of Moscow.2

Soviet writers generally discount the significance of foreign influences on Russia’s historical development, and they have consequently disparaged the suburb’s importance. They ignore or minimize the professional and technical skills the foreigners brought to Muscovy, denigrate the moral and intellectual qualities of the suburb’s residents, and express doubt that substantial influence could have been exercised by so small a group.3 If these and similar arguments fail to persuade, another point made by several Soviet historians is not so easily dismissed. It cannot be denied that the suburb created in 1652 was not Moscow’s first foreign quarter—indeed it was officially named the Novaja (New) Nemeckaja Sloboda; and other foreign quarters existed in Moscow contemporaneously with it.⁴

There is need for a careful study of the ways and means, and the extent, of the Nemekaja Sloboda⁹s actual influence on seventeenth- century Muscovy. A satisfactory conclusion is unlikely to emerge, however, short of a general examination of the suburb—its origins and history, its social and ethnic composition, its internal organization and life, and its position vis-à-vis the Russian community. Although there is a good deal of data on the suburb scattered through the sources, regrettably, little has been written on the subject.4 This paper is an attempt to clarify one aspect of the problem: the origins of the Nemeckaja Sloboda.

A convenient starting point is the end of the Time of Troubles. In the climactic phase of this turbulent era, Russian national forces defeated Polish arms and thus saved the country from foreign domination. The Polish outrages inflicted in the course of the protracted conflict heightened Muscovite xenophobia. Yet the Troubles also disclosed grievous weaknesses which Moscow was powerless to correct by its effort alone. Having just thrown off the threat of a foreign yoke, Russia’s government was obliged to welcome into the country foreign merchants who could supply needed goods of all kinds; it was compelled to recruit foreign officers to help modernize its armed forces, skilled craftsmen willing to put their technical knowledge at the Tsar’s service, and other experts who might discover and bring into exploitation the country’s natural resources.5

Foreigners were of course not unknown in Muscovy prior to the accession of the Romanov dynasty. Considerable numbers of Livonian captives had been transported by Ivan the Terrible into the interior of the country, and many had been settled in Moscow. In the last half of the sixteenth century, several thousand foreign mercenaries served in the Tsar’s armed forces. Moreover, both Grozny and Godunov had encouraged trade with foreigners, and endeavored to attract foreign technicians into Russia. The results of these contacts and policies are difficult to gauge, but students of the subject agree that Muscovy was more profoundly affected by its relations with European peoples in the course of the seventeenth century.

The violence and disorder that marked the Time of Troubles destroyed the old foreign settlement in Moscow, and drastically reduced the number of foreigners—other than the interventionists—in the country. But with the cessation of hostilities, a renewed influx of foreigners began, and in the following decades their number in Muscovy sharply increased. The creation in 1627 of the Inozemskij Prikaz, a special chancellery to administer the affairs of the foreign military men, was indicative of the changing situation.6 Merchants of various countries vied with each other for trading privileges, and by the middle of the seventeenth century they had become a major factor in Russian commercial life.7 By then, too, foreigners were at work in a wide range of professions or crafts in Moscow. According to Olearius, there were then one thousand Westerners living in the capital.8 Their expanded number and especially their enlarged role in Russian affairs is reflected in a comparison of the law code of 1589, the Sudebnik, with the Ulozenie of 1649. Foreigners are mentioned in just one article of the Sudebnik but in more than forty of the Ulozenie.9

These large numbers of West Europeans came into Muscovy in the face of widespread suspicion and hostility toward foreigners. Russian exclu- sivist sentiment was neither racial not national in character but religious.10 Regarding themselves as true Christians, the Orthodox Muscovites were repelled by and fearful of contact with those whom they took to be heretics. Evidence exists of refusals of Russians to shake hands with foreigners, to take food with them, or to become apprenticed to them, and Western Christians were forbidden to enter Russian churches.11 If Russia’s governing class showed less overt antipathy to foreigners, nevertheless in certain ways it exemplified the same general attitude. Russians were strictly forbidden to go to Europe, Milyukov wrote, because they considered all relations with other peoples a sin and a defilement.12 When the Tsar received a foreign ambassador, he had nearby a ewer, basin, and towel, so that he could wash his hand after the envoy had kissed it.13

For certain limited purposes the government was compelled to promote communication with the heretics; but it was also bound to defend the national culture, permeated by Orthodoxy, against the danger of subversion or erosion. The ideal way was to absorb the foreigners by converting them to the Russian faith. Anyone so converted in effect became a Russian, and he was trusted to enter freely into communication with his coreligionists. More than a few foreigners were induced to embrace Orthodoxy by the considerable incentives—gifts, promotions in rank, and material compensation and support, which the government offered—but most did not.14 The unconverted, no matter how valuable the services they might render, remained an alien body and were bound to have an unsettling effect. This was especially true in Moscow where they were most numerous and apt to be long-time or even permanent residents.

In the decades following the Troubles, the foreigners in Moscow were free to reside wherever they pleased. Although they tended to settle in only a few of the city’s many quarters, their dwellings were mixed in among those of the Muscovites.15 In at least two neighborhoods, Protestant churches were built which became centers of the foreigners’ communal life. The West Europeans could mingle freely with Muscovites, as they generally affected Russian dress and learned the Russian tongue. Contacts were numerous and often close. Many foreigners employed Russian servants in their homes, and other Russians worked in foreign- directed factories, or were apprenticed to skilled foreign artisans. Foreign merchants not only traded with some of their Russian counterparts but they also engaged other Muscovites as salesmen and purchasing agents, warehousemen, carters, and janitors. Russian officers and rank-and-file soldiers were trained and commanded by foreign officers and served under them in time of war. Doctors and apothecaries, interpreters and translators had abundant relations with Russians at the court and in government offices.

Given the Russian Orthodox image of the West European, one may imagine the chagrin evoked among the Muscovites when the unclean ones and their churches were thrust into their midst. If it was distasteful to have the heretics among them, it was more repugnant yet to be subordinated to them as employees, apprentices, servants, or military inferiors. (This repugnance may have been offset by superior working conditions for employees and servants; at any rate, Russians willing to work for foreigners could be found.) Moreover, the foreigners were accorded special privileges. Though the Tsar’s subjects were forbidden to produce alcoholic beverages or to smoke tobacco, the foreigners were free of these restrictions.16 Foreigners received substantially higher pay than Russians who performed similar duties, for example, in the armed forces.17 A foreigner who acquired a house was not obliged, as a Moscow burgher would be, to pay taxes on it; and the removal of such a household from the tax rolls increased the burden on the other residents of the district, as the levy was imposed on the community rather than the individual. Foreign merchants offered such severe competition that they substantially reduced the Russians’ share of the market. Their success was due partly to their larger capital resources and more efficient methods of merchandising, but in addition, the customs duties on their goods were either modest or waived.18 Besides, the West European merchants were often unscrupulous, violating restrictions placed upon them and bribing officials in return for preferential treatment.19

Complaints against the foreigners and demands for curbs on their activities were not long in coming. In 1627, a merchants’ petition leveled a whole series of accusations against the foreign competitors: they avoided payment of duties, sold at retail, forestalled the supply of salt, and traded with each other—all in violation of Russia’s laws. In addition, they exported goods without the necessary permission and conspired among themselves to sell their wares dearly to the Russian merchants and to buy cheaply from them. Consequently the native merchants sustained serious losses, and so did the state treasury.

To repair the situation, the merchants called upon the government to prohibit the foreigners to trade within Russia, restricting them instead to Arkhangelsk.20 Other merchant petitions similar to the 1627 one were addressed to the Tsar in 1685, 1637, two in 1639, 1642, 1646, and 1648-1649. Yet all but the last appear to have achieved little or no result.21 Both the Tsar—some foreigners called him Russia’s first merchant—and influential landed magnates at court profited from the expansion of foreign trade. Some of the foreign merchants executed important commissions for the Tsar—the sale abroad of stocks of his goods, purchases of military and other equipment, the recruitment of officers and technicians, and occasionally they performed diplomatic missions. Even though the petitions emanated from the greater rather than the lesser Russian merchants, those in power gave them no real satisfaction, and the merchants were in no position to force compliance with their wishes.22

In the decades prior to 1648 the clergy, the most zealous guardians of the native culture, also registered their displeasure with the foreigners.

The Orthodox considered the foreigners to be improperly baptized and therefore not Christians at all.23 They did not observe Russian fasts and feasts; they did not render to ikons the respect that Russians considered due; and they differed with the Orthodox Church on many doctrinal points. The spectacle of these un-Christian elements mingling freely with their flocks, and exposing them to corruption, caused consternation among some of the clergy. Their sentiments were expressed verbally in anti-Protestant tracts written in the period, and imaginatively in pictures of the Last Judgment showing the Orthodox being directed to Heaven and those in foreign clothes to Hell.24

Now and again efforts were made to reduce contact with the foreigners. In 1628, for example, Patriarch Filaret banned the keeping of Orthodox servants in foreigners’ homes on the ground that the servants were forced to eat meat on fast days. When the foreigners complained of the hardships the ban imposed, however, many exceptions were allowed. Like the merchants, the clergy appeared to secure satisfaction on paper only.25

From another quarter, measures of a different kind were urged. In 1629, a petition from the heads of certain of Moscow’s cernye slobody (taxpaying districts) complained that many members of other social groups, among them foreigners, had acquired properties—which thus became tax-free—in the capital. The petitioners asked that they be removed to court-owned areas outside.26 The motives of the taxpayers were no doubt fiscal but it is evident that compliance with their wishes would have suited the church’s purposes as well. The foreigners who owned properties evidently were not disturbed at this time. However, a few years later, in 1636, the sale of houses to foreigners in Moscow’s Kitaigorod section was banned.27 The edict merely prevented further acquisitions of property and did not require the eviction of homeowners already there. Although documentary evidence is lacking, no doubt the claims of the church and Moscow’s taxpayers continued to be pressed in the following years.

In 1648 they scored a notable gain. Eleven parish clergymen submitted a petition charging the foreigners with erecting chapels near Orthodox churches, building homes without the Tsar’s permission, and keeping Orthodox servants whom they defiled in every way. The churchmen were concerned about the loss of revenues as well as the purity of their flocks, whose members were tempted to sell their homes to foreigners at the inflated prices they offered. In response, the Tsar ordered the destruction of the foreign churches, a step seemingly more drastic than the circumstances warranted. He also ordered that henceforth no houses were to be sold to foreigners in any part of the city.28 If the 1685 decree might have been shrugged off by the foreigners, few of whom lived in Kitaigorod, the 1648 decree could not but have appeared ominous. It was, indeed, a harbinger of the edict that created the Nemeckaja Sloboda nine years later.

Why the Tsar took such severe action after resisting anti-foreign maneuvers for so long is not entirely clear, but he may have wished to pacify an aroused clergy. The clerical establishment was irate over the marital politics of Tsar Mikhail, who was attempting to arrange a union between his daughter Irina and the Danish Prince Waldemar. In order to achieve a desirable dynastic connection the Tsar was ready (though only temporarily, as it turned out) to countenance the wedding, even though Waldemar refused to abandon his faith and embrace Orthodoxy. The prospect of such a marriage must have particularly outraged the newly installed Patriarch, Iosif, who was inclined to blame all the country’s ills on the foreigners.³⁰

As distinct from the somewhat obscure circumstances surrounding the events of 1648, the developments that culminated in the expulsion of the foreigners in 1652 are more intelligible. The decisive factor, as I see it, was the Moscow upheaval of 1648 and its repercussions. Though there are several excellent Soviet studies of the 1648 rising, they virtually ignore its impact on the foreigners.29 Beginning as a protest of the Moscow citizenry against exploitation by government officials, the 1648 insurrection incited other groups in Russian society to vent their grievances and to demand redress. When the streVcy, and the dvorjane who had come to Moscow for a muster, went into opposition, the Tsar’s government became incapable of resisting the demands of a population out of control. Its position was the more precarious in that groups which generally had acted independently of one another tended now to coalesce and support each other’s demands.

Prom the Zemskij Sobor assembled in 1648 at the demand of the insurgents came a merchant petition calling for the exclusion of the foreign merchants from trade within the country.30 At first glance it appears to be little more than a replay of earlier petitions. However, while the arguments are furnished by the Russian merchants, representatives of the middle ranks of the court hierarchy and of the provincial servitor class associated themselves with the merchants’ demands. Of 340 persons who participated in the sobor, 94 appear to have been representatives of townsmen and merchants, but a substantially larger number, 164, signed the petition.31 By assailing the foreign merchants as holders of tax-free properties in Moscow, the supporters of the petition also aligned themselves with the clergy and taxpaying townsmen. To secure at last the expulsion of their competitors, the Russian merchants were prepared to pay a price; they offered to buy the foreigners’ homes for cash at fair value, and also to discharge any outstanding Russian debts to the foreigners.32

The drumfire of agitation which continued in the following months was by no means confined to the foreign merchants. In October, 1648, the Patriarch and some of the boyars pressed for the exclusion of the foreign officers from Moscow.33 Such pressures did not stem only from the summit of Russian society. In November of the following year, the Swedish Resident Pommerening reported that two thousand of the dvorjane had refused to be commanded by Dutch or [other] foreign officers, whom they call unbaptized. In the interval between these events, rumors circulated that the foreign officers’ church, allegedly erected on the site of a Russian cemetery, was to be razed. The Patriarch’s aims were more comprehensive yet. A report of October, 1648, stated: he very much wants to exclude the foreigners entirely [from Moscow]. ³⁶ The anti-foreign temper of the years 1648-1650 caused Pommerening to fear for his life, and when he was relieved of his post, Moscow refused to receive another Swedish Resident.34

In the the short run, the demands of the anti-foreign movement went largely unsatisfied. If more than once the expulsion of the English and Dutch merchants appeared imminent,35 countervailing forces frustrated the Russian merchants’ wishes. More than the personal interests of the Tsar and some of the boyars was at stake. As the next few years would show, Russia still depended upon foreign countries for a major part of her military supplies.36 The Tsar would not risk having these sources cut off in order to appease the Russian merchants, but he did give them some satisfaction. Most dramatically, in June, 1649, the Tsar seized upon the beheading of King Charles as a pretext for the expulsion of the English merchants from Moscow to Arkhangelsk.37 However, the more powerful Dutch, who had bested the English in the struggle for the Russian trade, were not molested.38 And the further protection given Russia’s merchants in the next two decades was hardly sufficient to guarantee them a monopoly of internal, much less foreign, trade.

The drive against the foreign military men had even less success. The events of 1648 had assumed crisis proportions because the streVcy and the dvorjane had proved unreliable. By contrast, the foreign military elements were loyal to a man and provided the Kremlin with a shield against the popular turbulence.39 Such protection was not enough, of course, and the government was obliged to make concessions to some of the discontented groups. Nevertheless, Tsar Aleksey and his father-in- law Ilya Miloslavsky, who managed the Inozemskij Prikaz, wisely refused to divest themselves of a force of proven worth in a time of continuing unrest. Indeed, in the next year or so, while large numbers of sireVcy were being exiled, foreign officers led by the Dutch Colonel Bockehoffen were assigned to organize a palace lifeguard of several thousand men. Grumbling in the ranks, it is true, did force the foreigners to give officer training to some of the Russians.⁴³

Though the anti-foreign campaign of 1648-1649 fell short of its aims, it left its mark on the Ulozenie. The law code of 1649 reaffirmed the ban on Orthodox servants in foreigners’ homes, and on the purchase of additional homesteads bf foreigners, or the erection of non-Orthodox churches within the precincts of Moscow.40

Moreover, in my view, the implementation of Chapter XIX of the Ulozenie, though it was not aimed primarily at the foreigners, indirectly contributed to their subsequent expulsion.⁴⁵ Drawn up in response to government fiscal needs and pressures of taxpaying townsmen, this chapter prescribed a far-reaching reordering of land distribution and tax burdens in the towns. It decreed the transfer to the sovereign of all boyar and monastery landholdings, and the imposition of tjaglo on their formerly tax-exempt residents. The Prikaz Sysknykh Del, the Chancellery for Investigations, was assigned the task of implementing the new law, which it carried out in the period 1649-1652. In Moscow, over fourteen hundred households were affected.⁴⁶

The new arrangements left the foreigners in a privileged and anomalous position. They were allowed to continue in possession of their homes at a time when the Patriarch, the monasteries, and such powerful boyars as Ya. Cherkassky and N. I. Romanov were being deprived of lands and households. And they still escaped the tax burdens now extended to classes of urban dwellers who formerly evaded the levy. Their situation was the more anomalous in that they did not fit easily into any of Moscow’s numerous subdivisions, the suburbs, each of which comprised or tended to comprise persons engaged in a single occupation. The 1652 decision to set them apart in a distinct and religiously homogeneous community was consistent with the tendency of the Ulozenie to classify all people into well-defined and mutually exclusive groups. The religiously homogeneous Nemeckaja Sloboda was to be analogous to the occupationally homogeneous Russian suburbs.41

To take up another thread of the story, by the end of 1650 the flames of anti-foreign sentiment seemed to have died down, but embers of outrage remained. The Patriarch had not achieved his goal in respect to the foreigners, yet the church had not said its last word. We must recall that by the middle of the seventeenth century the religious reform movement under the aegis of the remarkable band of Zealots of Piety was reaching its zenith.42 Led by Tsar Aleksey’s confessor Stefan Vonifatyev, and supported by the Tsar himself, the reformers strove for a renewal of popular faith and dedication to a life of piety. If in some places they were stoned and abused for their pains, evidently they also had some success. In 1652, it was reported, Moscow’s citizenry observed the Lenten fast with a rigor not seen in fifty years.⁴⁹ In July of the same year the new Patriarch, Nikon, further elevated religious consciousness by bringing to Moscow with great pageantry and solemnity the relics of the martyred Metropolitan Philip. The saint’s remains were installed in the Kremlin’s Cathedral of the Assumption, where in the following weeks they were said to have miraculously cured numbers of blind, lame, deaf, and dumb people. Awed by these feats, Moscow’s population appears to have attained a state of religious exaltation.43 Heightened religious consciousness strengthened the clergy’s position and emboldened it to renew its campaign against the foreigners.

In March, a conclave of ecclesiastical authorities ruled that the ban on Russian servants in foreigners’ homes should henceforth be strictly enforced. Bands of streVcy abruptly entered and searched homes, and the Russians they found and carried off were subjected to corporal punishment. Petitions protesting the hardships the ban imposed were rebuffed, even though some of the foreigners agreed to observe the Orthodox fasts if they were permitted to retain their servants. The authorities advised that they needed only embrace the Orthodox faith to have their wish granted.44 Not just a flippant rejoinder, this was an authoritative disclosure of the policy evidently adopted in the spring of 1652 as the final solution of the foreigner problem. To intensify the pressure, it was announced that foreigners who held landed estates might be deprived of them if they refused to be rebaptized. A large number of the foreign officers, by way of counter-pressure, asked to be dismissed from the Tsar’s service, but others gave indications of yielding.45 Yonifatyev was sufficiently encouraged to promise, if he were given a free hand, that few foreigners would remain outside the Orthodox fold by September 1, the Russian New Year. 46 The movement of 1648-1649 to expel the foreigners having failed, in 1652 absorption was substituted for expulsion as the answer to the vexatious problem.

The drive instituted at the tag end of Patriarch Iosif’s tenure continued under his successor Nikon.47 Events at mid-year emphasized that the Moscow populace, if it did not grasp the objective and the niceties of clerical policy, amply shared the clergy’s anti-foreign sentiment. Only a few days before the martyred Philip’s remains were ushered in, a great fire consumed approximately a third of the dwellings in Moscow. Suspecting arson, the uneasy authorities instituted close surveillance over the city’s residents. Many arrests were made and several persons were tortured to death, but no foul play was discovered. The mood of the suffering and apprehensive populace bordered on hysteria. Popular religious exaltation and a semi-hysterical fear of the unknown blended into a psychological brew that boded ill for the strangers, though a pogrom did not materialize.

An old German officer found with a half-pound of gunpowder on his person was arrested, and then exiled to the frontier. The Swedish Resident’s home was threatened with demolition, compelling Rodes, Sweden’s agent in Moscow, to move elsewhere temporarily, and to ask for police protection. In the course of the fire a skull had been discovered in the home of Johann Deters, a foreign artist in the sovereign’s service. The horrified streVcy promptly concluded that he was a sorcerer and arrested him. To the accompaniment of a popular clamor, attempts were made to link him with the conflagration. When the artist’s foreign friends came to intercede for him, they were brusquely advised to keep out of the affair lest they too be charged along with Johann.48 Latent anti-foreign feeling blazed up in part as religious sensitization brought heightened awareness of the otherness of the West Europeans, in part because it was spurred on by the clergy’s example and exhortation.

We must now introduce Alexander Lesly, a Scottish colonel in the Tsar’s service, whose arrest and trial in 1652 partly preceded, partly accompanied, and surely conditioned the developments we have been describing. Lesly and his wife were brought from their estate to Moscow to answer charges that they had profaned the Orthodox religion. Their Russian servants accused Mrs. Lesly of having forced them to eat dog meat on fast days, of having cast an ikon into a glowing oven, and of other sacrilegious acts. The colonel and a foreign lieutenant were charged with having fired weapons at the cross atop the summit of a church. As conclusive proof was lacking, and as both the accused and some of Lesly’s servants denied the charges, several persons on each side were put to torture but none changed their testimony. Nevertheless, in due course, Lesly and his wife were found guilty. Yet the pair was freed and Lesly retained his rank. Although he was deprived of his estate, he was granted a monthly salary in its stead. Shortly afterwards— sometime between the end of April and the middle of September—Lesly and his wife consented to embrace the Orthodox faith.49

It is tempting to view the Lesly case as a show trial, a deliberate attempt to create an atmosphere in which the foreigner question could be dealt with once and for all. We shall probably never know whether or not the charges were true,50 but there can be no doubt that they were used as justification for the strident anti-foreigner crusade in 1652. The pressures generated were such that a good many other foreigners followed Lesly’s example and adopted the Russian faith.51 Still only a fraction of the city’s West European population took this course, and Yonifatyev’s promise had not been fulfilled as the Russian New Year began. The wager on absorption was failing, although the policy was not yet abandoned. Then an event occurred that the strong-willed Nikon seized upon to snatch at least a partial victory from the jaws of defeat.

During a religious procession around the end of September the Patriarch, while bestowing blessings on the people arrayed to either side of him, noticed some persons who failed to bow and make the sign of the cross. Upon learning that they were non-Russians, he indignantly exclaimed: It is not right that unworthy foreigners should thus receive a blessing not intended for them. Unwilling to let the matter end with that, he contrived to have an order published banning the wearing of Russian-style clothing by foreigners. Any foreigner found in violation of the edict was to be stripped naked by the strel'cy and thrown into prison.52 This new measure, which gave visual emphasis to what was conceived as a difference in essence between Western Christians and Orthodox Russians, was well calculated to prevent free, unobserved mingling. But the policy underlying the measure did not end here.

On October 4, 1652, the foreigners in Moscow were ordered to sell their houses within four weeks, and to move out of the city to a specially designated area where they alone were henceforth to reside.53 A few specially privileged individuals were excepted, but the anguished plaints of the others gained nothing more than a month’s extension of the terminal date. To make matters worse, though they had earlier been relocated outside the city wall, the Protestant churches were ordered dismantled. The foreigners were given to understand—but on this the authorities subsequently relented—that their churches would no longer be permitted. The pastors were allotted space for homesteads in the new foreign suburb, and those who wished to hear sermons might come to their homes. These measures broke the will of a number of the foreigners who until this time had resisted pressures to embrace Orthodoxy, but most stood firm.54

It should not be supposed that the creation of the Novaja Nemeckaja Sloboda was an unqualified triumph for the church party. The hierarchy’s program maximum had first aimed at the expulsion of the foreigners from the interior of the country and subsequently at their absorption into the Orthodox community. The loyalty of the foreigners to their several religions had thwarted the latter policy. Paced with this situation, the twenty-three-year-old Tsar Aleksey might have either dismissed the recalcitrant foreigners or withdrawn his support from the church party. In reality he could do neither. The young Tsar was fascinated by Western products, both the pleasure-giving and the more utilitarian kind. As for Western technicians, he seems to have entertained a naive and superstitious belief in their wonder-working powers.55 In 1652, even as the anti- foreign campaign was unfolding, he had sent a mission to the West in quest of a variety of goods and skilled artisans and professionals.56 Plainly, he did not consider it possible to dispense with the assistance of foreigners and foreign wares if his country were to develop its resources and to maintain itself in the hazardous international struggles it seemed impossible to avoid.

On the other hand, as a more than ordinarily pious ruler, and a young and relatively inexperienced one to boot, Aleksey deeply respected the authority and opinions of his confessor and Patriarch Nikon. He might withdraw his support from a church-promoted policy of absorption that had gone awry, but he could hardly ignore the deeply anti-foreign orientation of the hierarchy which enjoyed widespread support among his subjects. As expulsion was unacceptable and absorption had proved unworkable, his government devised a compromise settlement. With the establishment of the new foreign suburb, the Tsar was enabled to make use of the unconverted foreigners’ services still and yet to assuage to some extent the anti-foreign passions of the Orthodox clergy and people. The Nemeckaja Sbboda was created to reconcile the conflicting claims of raison d’état and the preservation of Muscovy’s traditional culture. It was to prove an unstable solution.

1 V. O. KljuSevskij, So6inenija (Moscow, 1957), III, 270.

2 P. Miljukov, Oterlci po istorii russkoj kultury, 3rd ed. (St. Petersburg, 1909), III, 104, 106. See also S. F. Platonov, Moskva i Zapad (Berlin, 1926), p. 108.

3 S. K. Bogojavlenskij, Moskovskaja nemeckaja sloboda, Izvestija Akademii Nauk SSSR. Serija istorii i filosofiii, 1947, No. 3. This is the most wide-ranging denial of the suburb’s influence, but some similar arguments are offered in the more balanced treatments of the two writers cited in the next note.

* A somewhat abbreviated version of this paper was read at the Far West Slavic Conference meeting at Vancouver, British Columbia, in May, 1968.

4 In addition to the already cited works of Bogojavlenskij, Zvjagincev, and Snegirev, attention is called