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was confiscated; the Government paid, but refused to accept, copper for silver; sixty soldiers could now be maintained for what it had cost before to maintain one. As a result, illicit mints were established all over the country. Prices inevitably rose; the Government forbade their augmentation; but here the autocrat was powerless. Hunger and misery ensued, and in 1662 the people of Moscow rose in despair and threatened the Tsar's life. Torturing and burning were the answer of Alexis, and thousands perished.

The strict Oriental seclusion of women of the upper classes has often +

been considered a consequence of Tartar rule, but it was rather due to Byzantine influence. Byzantine too was the custom of the bride-show. The most beautiful maidens of the land were assembled at Moscow and reviewed by the Tsar for the purpose of selecting his consort. In law and justice we can also see the action of ideas derived from the Eastern Empire. The early Code of Iaroslav reflects the primitive judicial institutions of the Slavonic tribes. The Code of Ivan the Great reflects a complete transformation. Homicide is punished by death, theft by scourging; torture is applied; corporal chastisements are prominent. This change was due not to Mongolia, but to Byzantium. After the conversion of Russia the influence of Constantinople was immense, exercised especially through the Church. Greek clergy went to Russia, bringing literature and ideas. They introduced the Roman principles of inheritance, by which a man's property went to his offspring, and we can trace the conflict between this principle and the Slavonic custom which devolved property not upon the son, but upon the eldest of the family. In criminal law, the clergy threw all their energy into abolishing the system of pecuniary composition and introducing penalties of death, mutilation, and scourging. The primitive system gradually gave way, but we find in Ivan's Code some survivals of old customs. It may be noted that the punishment which the Code (Ulozhenie) of Alexis ordained for taking snuff, amputation of the nose as the offending member, is characteristically Byzantine in spirit. It is to be remembered that the little literature which the Russians possessed came from Greek sources, and Byzantine influence has even been traced in the curious. Domo-stroi, a book on household management partly written by Silvester, the councillor of Ivan IV.

It cannot be proved that the machinery of central administration, the system of Prikazy, was due to influence from the same quarter. These bureaux, of which there were more than forty in all, and which were abolished by Peter, appear in the sixteenth century, but the date of their introduction is unknown. Like some of the palatine offices of the later Roman Empire they have the character of domestic rather than of state departments. The Prikaz for embassies dealt with foreign relations, but was of minor importance before the reign of Michael, and it was not till the reign of Alexis that, by the appointment of the able

516

Beginnings of Western influence

[1619-76

statesman Ordin-Nashchokin, with a special title, to the headship of this bureau, Russia had a regular Minister for foreign affairs.

Some of the Tsars (Ivan IV and Boris) had shown themselves personally less prejudiced against things foreign than the mass of their subjects. The horizon of Philaret had been enlarged by his enforced residence in Poland, and Michael is said to have been fond of Englishmen. Alexis broke some of the old traditions, and in his reign presages of future change may be discerned. These slight signs were mainly the consequence of the opening of Russia to foreign merchants, and of the German quarter in the capital; but this influence was augmented by the acquisition of Kieff, which through its long connexion with Poland was intellectually at a far higher level than Moscow. Two Kieff scholars (Slavinetski and Satanovski) were called to Moscow in 1650 to translate the Greek Bible into Russian. It was a west-Russian monk whom Alexis employed as tutor of his children, Simeon Sitianovich, known as Polotski, who knew Latin and Polish, and has been described as a walking encyclopaedia. He exposed the prevailing ignorance and preached the necessity of education. But more remarkable than he was the learned Servian, Iuri Krizhanich, an enthusiastic exponent of the idea of the solidarity of the Slavonic peoples, who set himself the task of furthering their progress by the improvement of their languages so as to render them as adequate as other European tongues to express general ideas, and sought to vindicate the Slavs against foreign calumny and scorn. But the importance of this pioneer of Panslavism lay not in his Slavophil programme, but in what he did by exhibiting the backwardness of Russia, making war upon its spirit of contempt for foreigners, and inculcating the need of enlightenment, in the book of Political Ideas which he dedicated to Alexis.

The new ideas, preached by strangers, did not pass by two leading men of the day who held the post of Foreign Minister. Ordin-Nashchokin was alive to the importance of a fuller knowledge of Europe, of acquiring books from abroad, and of developing commerce. Artemon Matvieeff, who succeeded him as chief of the foreign Prikaz, had married a Scotchwoman, and assimilated European ideas. His wife was not submitted to the seclusion of Russian ladies; occidental fashions were affected in his house and the conduct of his household. His adopted daughter Natalia Naryshkina became the Tsar's second wife (1672), and the mother of Peter the Great. She displayed the fruits of her bringing up by appearing publicly in her litter with the curtains raised. Her marriage led to the disgrace and exile of Matvieeff on the accession of Theodore (1676), whose mother's relatives, the Milaslovskis, were his enemies. It is characteristic that the charge alleged against him was

sorcery.

The Tsar Alexis was not a great statesman. Like Philip II of Spain, and Joseph II of Austria, he was diligent in attending to the

1645-82]

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details of public business. But he was susceptible of the influence of minds more powerful than his own, and he knew how to value and to choose Ministers of exceptional ability. During the first half of his reign, his chief guide was his capable kinsman Boris Morozoff, while in subsequent years he entrusted the helm, as we have seen, to the progressive statesmen Ordin-Nashchokin and Matvieeff, both of them new men who had risen from obscurity. His old-fashioned piety did not hinder him from supporting the reasonable reforms of Nikon, and his old-fashioned learning enabled him to sympathise with the efforts of those who desired to improve education. Kindly and sociable in disposition, he was open in his later years to the superficial influence of Western ideas; and their progress at his Court was particularly displayed in the performance of dramas with dancing and music, in the presence of himself and the Tsaritsa Natalia-spectacles which at the beginning of his reign he would unreservedly have condemned.

Thus, during the reigns of the first three Romanoffs (Michael, Alexis, and Theodore), access to Western ideas was within the reach of Russians, and this explains the fact that a Peter the Great could arise. The foreign merchants at Moscow, the foreign officers, Scotch and others, in the army, the political negotiations with foreign Courts (especially the French) interested in the Turkish and Polish questions, were insensibly preparing the way for Russia to turn her face in a new direction, though the country at large seemed still impregnably barricaded behind a Chinese wall of prejudice and conservatism. The abolition of the miestnichestvo, already noticed, in Theodore's reign was a not unimportant breach in the old order; and it was significant that Orthodoxy, feeling itself endangered by the presence of hereticsRomanists, Calvinists, Lutherans in the foreign quarter of Moscow, came to see that its best defence might be learning and education. It was the Tsar Theodore, pupil of Polotski, who, desiring as he said to imitate Solomon and the Greek Emperors in their love of learning, founded a Moscow Academy, at which Greek and Latin were to be taught as well as Slavonic, in the interests of the Church.

Theodore died in 1682, and his step-brother Peter, destined to regenerate Russia on lines which the later years of his father's reign had to some extent, though only faintly, indicated, was proclaimed Tsar.

CHAPTER XVII

PETER THE GREAT AND HIS PUPILS

(1689–1730)

THE reform period of Russian History began in the generation immediately preceding Peter the Great. His amiable and inquisitive father, Tsar Alexis, was peculiarly susceptible to new impressions. He also possessed, in a high degree, the royal gift of discerning genius, and the Patriarch Nikon, who renovated the Russian Church, and the enlightened boiars Athanasius Ordin-Nashchokin and Artemon Matvieeff, who first turned the Russian nation westwards, were the beloved friends and the directing counsellors of Alexis. Their great merit was to prepare a suitable atmosphere in Russia for the new ideas which were finding their way into the empire the reforms which, under Theodore III, Alexis' eldest son and immediate successor (1676–82), took root in the soil and became substantial facts. By far the most important of these reforms was the abolition, at the suggestion of another enlightened boiar, Prince Vasili Vasilevich Galitsin, of the ancient and mischievous abuse miestnichestvo, or "family precedence," described in the preceding chapter. By a single stroke of his pen the hopeless invalid Theodore III had, in 1681, removed an abuse which, for centuries, had appeared unas`sailable. He was, indeed, as thorough and devoted a reformer as a man who was obliged to issue his orders from his litter or his bedchamber could possibly be. The mere fact that, on his very deathbed, he could so easily remove so deep-lying and far-reaching an abuse, is a striking testimony to the steady, if silent, advance of liberal ideas in Muscovite society, even since the death of Alexis.

But a still more emphatic demonstration of the progress of the new ideas was the appearance in public, surrounded by her aunts and sisters, of the Tsarevna Sophia, acting as Regent for her little brothers, Ivan and Peter, on July 5, 1682 (O.S.), on the occasion of the revolt of the Strieltzy and their allies the Old Believers. Sophia, seated on the throne, not only confronted the schismatic rebels, but quelled their insolence and refuted their arguments. For the first time in Russian history, the women of Muscovy had boldly quitted the claustral seclusion of the

1682-9]

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terem (women's apartments), to preside over a public assembly. Sophia, like her brother Theodore, had had a relatively superior education, under the guidance of learned monks from Kieff. Even Theodore's great foundation, the Academy of Sciences in the Zaikonnospasky monastery, was intended to be as much a bulwark of Orthodoxy as a university. Thus the chief difference between the Theodorian and the Petrine reforms was that the former were primarily for the benefit of the Church, the latter for the benefit of the State. The government of Sophia (1682-9) began with a grievous blunder, the murder of Artemon Matvieeff, the chief Muscovite representative of Western culture in its practical form. Matvieeff had been banished from Moscow, in 1676, for advocating the election to the Tsardom of the healthy and vigorous Peter, then in his fourth year, instead of the sickly Theodore. Summoned back from exile, on the death of Theodore, in May, 1682, he found that Peter had been declared sole Tsar by his mother's family, but that a dangerous rebellion already threatened the young sovereign. In courageously attempting to quell this rebellion, Matvieeff was literally hacked to pieces by the Strieltzy as he clutched desperately at the sleeve of little Peter for protection.

This recollection never forsook Peter; and there is a pretty general agreement that the convulsions from which he suffered so much in later years must be partly attributed to the effect of this violent shock on the very impressionable child. From the day of his father's death to his tenth year, when he was first raised to the throne, Peter shared the miseries and the perils of the rest of his family. On the other hand, he had peculiar advantages. From his very cradle he must have been made acquainted with Western ideas, for his mother, the Tsaritsa Natalia, had been the favourite pupil of Matvieeff, though she does not seem to have been very intelligent. After the triumph of Sophia, Natalia was altogether excluded from the conduct of affairs, and lived for nine months out of the twelve at Preobrazhenskoe, on the outskirts of the capital. During this period Peter was rarely to be seen at Moscow, except when he and his semi-imbecile brother, Ivan V, had to undergo the ceremony of receiving foreign ambassadors at the Kremlin. The boy soon felt cramped and stifled in the dim and close semi-religious atmosphere of Natalia's terem, and escaped from it, as often as he could, into the dirty streets of Moscow. There was no one near him of sufficient character and authority to keep the passionate fiery nature within due bounds.

From his tenth to his seventeenth year, Peter amused himself in his own way at Preobrazhenskoe with his "blackguards," as Sophia dubbed the lads of the rougher lower classes whom he gathered around him. But it was not all amusement. Instinct was already teaching him his business. From the first, the lad took an extraordinary interest in the technical and mechanical arts, especially in their application to military science. From his twelfth year onwards he used to build wooden fortresses on