Aleksei Mikhailovich and his entourage did not seem to mind that the citizens of Polatsk did not treat them as conationals. Ethnicity did not yet have the political significance that it would acquire in the age of national states. Muscovite thinking was monarchic, patrimonial, and increasingly confessional, but the Muscovite elites rarely thought of themselves in national terms, and to the extent that they did so, they did not include the Rus’ population of the Commonwealth in their nation. The Ruthenian (Ukrainian and Belarusian) elites, by contrast, did think in national terms, but at this time they did not imagine themselves as part of the Muscovite nation.
IT TOOK BOTH GROUPS SOME TIME TO ADJUST THEIR THINKING TO the new political reality and come to think of their lands and peoples not only as a realm ruled by the same sovereign, but also as one nation. Nothing promoted that process more than the fierce struggle for the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands that pitted Muscovy against its two regional rivals, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire.
Muscovy found it difficult to retain the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands captured in 1654–1655 in their entirety. According to the Truce of Andrusovo, signed in 1667 in a village near Smolensk after three years of negotiations, Muscovy lost eastern Belarus to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Chernihiv in northeastern Ukraine remained under Muscovite control, but indirectly—it was part of the Cossack Hetmanate, which accepted the suzerainty of the tsar. Muscovite suggestions that the Cossacks subordinate Chernihiv directly to them fell on deaf ears, as the Cossacks were now in charge of Ukraine on the left or eastern bank of the Dnieper River. The rest of Ukraine, including most of the Kyiv region, Volhynia, Podolia, and Galicia—all parts of what the Kyivans defined in political and ecclesiastical terms as Little Rus’—remained under Commonwealth rule.
Kyiv, the old capital of the Rus’ princes and the center of Rossia/Russia as imagined by Simeon Polotsky and his Kyivan professors and classmates, found itself in a precarious position. The city was located on the Right Bank of the Dnieper, and so the tsar and his advisers were prepared to give it up to ensure peace with Warsaw. According to the Truce of Andrusovo, Kyiv was to be handed over to the Poles two years after the signing. That never happened, despite the difficulty of defending the Kyivan “bridgehead” on the other side of the river. The handover was prevented, in part, by the lobbying efforts of the city’s Orthodox clergy, which wanted to maintain the tsar’s military protection against Kyiv’s enemies at all costs.
In 1674, faced with a possible Ottoman attack on the city, the Kyivan intellectuals recapitulated their arguments in favor of the city’s remaining under the tsar in a historical text titled Synopsis, or brief compendium of various chronicles about the origin of the Slavo-Rossian nation and the first princes of the divinely protected city of Kyiv and the life of the holy, pious grand prince of Kyiv and all Russia, the first autocrat Volodymyr, and about inheritors of his virtuous Rus’ domain, even unto our illustrious and virtuous sovereign, Tsar and Grand Prince Aleksei Mikhailovich, autocrat of all Great, Little, and White Russia.
The book was issued by the printshop of the Kyivan Cave Monastery and is usually attributed to the pen of Inokentii Gizel, the abbot—or, to give him his traditional Orthodox title, archimandrite—of the monastery. It represents a continuation of Kyivan chronicle writing and is preoccupied with questions of Kyivan history, the origins of the Rus’ church, and issues of nationhood. The Synopsis was received with great interest by readers in Kyiv and beyond. New editions were published in 1678 and 1680. Not surprisingly, the Synopsis presented a highly Kyiv-centric vision of Rus’ and its history. At its core was the presentation of Moscow as a second Kyiv—the city that had been crucial to the construction of the paradigm of Moscow as the Third Rome but remained in Constantinople’s shadow until the publication of the Synopsis. The Kyivan monks were now insisting on their city’s importance, stressing its centrality to Rus’ and Muscovite history.
Kyiv emerges from the pages of the Synopsis as the birthplace of the Russian dynasty, state, and church. No less important to the author of the Synopsis was the status of Kyiv as the birthplace of the “Rossian” nation. The section on the origins of Kyiv was titled “On the Most Renowned City of Kyiv, Supreme and Principal for the Whole Rossian Nation.” What was that nation? In the Synopsis, it was counted as one of the Slavic nations and identified as “Slavo-Rossian.” The Slavo-Rossian nation included those who were living in the territories of the medieval Kyivan state. This was a major departure from the established canon of Ukrainian chronicle writing, which had followed Polish historiography in distinguishing clearly between the two nations (narody) of Muscovy and Rus’.
The Synopsis became the first textbook of Russian history to be used in the eighteenth-century Russian Empire, and by the early nineteenth century sixteen reprints or new editions had appeared. As the numerous editions and reprints of the Synopsis educated the Muscovite public in the basics of its history, they prompted the Muscovites to think about themselves as a nation. That nation, however, was anything but purely Muscovite, as the history and nation of Muscovy described in the book were unimaginable without Kyiv and the lands then known as Little and White Rus’. The author(s) of the Synopsis encouraged readers to consider extending the tsar’s possessions not primarily as a dynastic realm or an Orthodox state but as a nation. This was a revolutionary idea.
Although the new concept of a Russian nation historically centered in Kyiv, and uniting the Muscovite subjects of the tsar with those who, until recently, had been subjects of the Commonwealth, was widely publicized by the Synopsis, the acceptance of that model was by no means a given. In Muscovy, that concept had to compete with the alternative vision of Russia advanced by the Old Believers—traditionalists who rejected the Kyivan innovations in the Muscovite Orthodox Church and rebelled against the tsar, who supported the innovations.
One of the leaders of the schism, Archpriest Avvakum, called on the tsar to maintain and strengthen his traditional Rus’ identity and use his native language: “After all, you are a Russian, not a Greek. Speak your native language; do not demean it in church, in your home, or in anything you say. God loves us no less than he loves the Greeks.” Avvakum protested even more strongly against elements of Catholic practice brought to Muscovy by Kyivan intellectuals such as Simeon of Polatsk, who settled in Moscow in 1664 and became one of Avvakum’s foremost opponents. “Oh, poor Rus’, why did you desire Latin customs and practices but come to despise and reject your true Christian law?” wrote Avvakum in one of his missives.
If Avvakum’s Russia rejected the tsar’s authority, that of Simeon of Polatsk embraced it. Along with religious innovations and new national thinking, the Kyivans brought to Moscow elements of Western secular culture, embodied in education, literature, theater, and visual representation. There would be no stronger supporter of these new elements of Russian identity than Peter I, the tsar known in Russian and Western historiography as Peter the Great.
ON JUNE 27, 1709, ON A FIELD NEAR THE CITY OF POLTAVA IN Cossack Ukraine, a Swedish army of 24,000, supported by close to 6,000 Cossacks and Polish cavalrymen, confronted a Russian army of 52,000 supported by more than 20,000 Cossacks and Kalmyk horsemen. The Russians were led into battle by the energetic Tsar Pëtr (Peter) Alekseevich, who became the sole ruler of Muscovy in 1696 after outliving his half-brother and co-ruler Ivan V, while the Swedes were under the command of their young but already battle-hardened King Charles XII. The outcome of the battle would decide the fate of the Great Northern War (1700–1721), in which Sweden and Russia fought each other as members of ever-shifting alliances for access to and supremacy over the Baltic region. It would also define the future of Russia as a nation and as an empire.
In 1700, the first year of the war, Charles confronted a Muscovite army of close to 40,000 with a Swedish corps numbering barely more than 10,000 troops near the town of Narva. He emerged victorious, losing fewer than 1,000 men to Muscovy’s 9,000 and taking more than 20,000 prison
ers. In the summer of 1708, after defeating his enemies in Central Europe, Charles turned eastward once again. He began his march from Saxony to Muscovy, but with winter fast approaching, and supplies running out even faster, he turned south toward Ukraine, where he hoped to find plenty of supplies as well as winter quarters. Both were promised him by Hetman Ivan Mazepa, until then a loyal ally of the tsar, who had joined Charles and his staff in October 1708 because of his dissatisfaction with Peter’s treatment of Cossack Ukraine. The rest of the Cossack army was supposed to follow him in a matter of weeks, if not days. But Peter sent troops to Ukraine, captured the Hetmanate’s capital of Baturyn, massacred its residents, and replaced Mazepa with a hetman loyal to himself.
Throughout the winter of 1708 and the spring of 1709, Charles and Peter and the two Ukrainian hetmans—the pro-Swedish Ivan Mazepa and the pro-Muscovite Ivan Skoropadsky—engaged in a war of manifestos intended to win over the Cossack army and the Ukrainian population at large. The war of manifestos revealed profound differences between the Russian and Ukrainian sides in definitions of values and presentation of goals. Tsar Peter presented Mazepa’s action as a vassal’s betrayal of his sovereign. Mazepa responded to the accusations of betrayal by pleading loyalty not to the tsar but to his homeland. As Mazepa defined it, the political conflict was a battle not between a suzerain and a vassal but between two nations. “Muscovy, that is, the Great Russian nation, has always been hateful to our Little Russian nation; in its malicious intentions it has long resolved to drive our nation to perdition,” wrote Mazepa. Another object of Mazepa’s loyalty was the “Little Russian fatherland.” Peter and his scribes never referred to Muscovy in such terms. It looked as if only the Little Russians had a nation and a fatherland, while the tsar and his people, including those whom Mazepa called the “Great Russian nation,” had none. That was about to change.
The change came with the Russian victory at Poltava in June 1709. This time the Russians had more than numbers in their favor. In the years preceding the showdown with Charles, Peter had built a much more professional army. It was well trained and fresh. The Swedes, for their part, were exhausted by the unusually cold winter they had spent in Ukraine, constantly harassed by pro-Muscovite Cossacks and peasants. Besides, Charles XII had been wounded during a reconnaissance mission a few days earlier and could not lead his regiments into battle. With a disorganized leadership, the Swedes lost their way and, eventually, the battle as well. Charles and Mazepa fled to the Ottoman dependency of Moldavia in the aftermath of the battle.
Peter would celebrate the Poltava victory more than once and devise elaborate commemoration ceremonies for those events. One of the first formal celebrations took place in Kyiv on July 24, 1709. There, in the ancient St. Sophia Cathedral, Peter was welcomed with a sermon delivered by the prefect of the Kyivan College, Teofan Prokopovych. Almost fifty years had passed since Simeon of Polatsk’s address to Tsar Aleksei in Polatsk. The message delivered in 1709 by another alumnus of the Kyivan College, Prokopovych, to Aleksei’s son Peter also included references to Russia and the Russian nation, but their meaning was much broader than Simeon’s. Prokopovych’s “Russia” referred to the tsar’s entire realm, “starting from our Dnieper River to the shores of the Euxine [Sea] in the south, eastward from there to the Caspian or Khvalinian Sea, even to the borders of the Persian kingdom, and from there to the farthest reaches of the Sino-Chinese Kingdom… and to the shores of the Arctic Ocean.”
Referring to the monarchy, state, and nation (narod), Prokopovych called all of them “Russian,” an “all-national” (obshchenarodnoe) name. He also spoke of “all-Russian” joy on the occasion of the Poltava victory. For Prokopovych, Russia was also a fatherland no longer limited to the Little Russian fatherland of Mazepa and of Peter’s pre-Poltava manifestos. More importantly, Prokopovych called Peter the father of that new fatherland. He had used the same appellation for Mazepa (father of the Little Russian fatherland) a few years earlier. According to Prokopovych’s sermon, Peter, the “Russian Samson” (not Simeon’s distant “Eastern Tsar”), had saved the Russian fatherland from mortal danger and now deserved gratitude for his achievement.
Peter doubtless appreciated what he heard. A few years later, he would invite Prokopovych to join him on a military campaign. By 1717, Prokopovych was already in St. Petersburg, delivering sermons to the tsar and becoming one of his main ideologues and promoters of Westernization. His influence at court eclipsed that of the other former Uniate adviser to the tsar, Simeon of Polatsk. Peter was a fast learner, and many of Prokopovych’s concepts and ideas were not entirely unfamiliar to him. Peter’s letters and decrees show an interesting transformation of his understanding of the term “fatherland” (otechestvo), which changed its meaning in the course of the first decades of the eighteenth century from the tsar’s patrimony to a patria common to all Muscovites.
In 1721, on the occasion of the Russian victory in the Great Northern War, the Senate and the Synod—consultative bodies created by Peter himself—bestowed on him the title of “All-Russian Emperor” and the appellations “the Great” and “Father of the Fatherland.” The “Tsar of All Russia” was now the “All-Russian Emperor.” The two other appellations, “Great” and “Father of the Fatherland,” were officially justified as having been merited by the tsar’s achievements. According to the document signed by the senators, “Your Majesty’s labors for the advancement of our fatherland and your subject all-Russian people are known to the whole world.” Peter responded with references to the nation and the common good. He declared: “One must labor for the general welfare and prosperity that God sets before our eyes, both internal and external, which will ease the people’s lot.”
Peter and his aides had clearly mastered the national discourse, with its emphasis on the fatherland, the nation, and the common good. Teofan Prokopovych, who was the first to introduce some of those notions to Russian officialdom, was not only present at the ceremonial conferral of the new titles on Peter, but also read out the text of the Nystad peace treaty with Sweden and delivered a sermon on that occasion. Another Kyivan cleric, Metropolitan Stefan Yavorsky, the interim head of the Moscow patriarchate, served the liturgy afterward. The Kyivans had successfully imparted their Western ideas to Peter and his court.
PETER DIED UNEXPECTEDLY IN 1725, HAVING ENDED THE LONG Northern War victoriously but scarcely begun the formation of the new imperial state and its nation-minded political elite. The court’s almost immediate reaction was to undo some of his most drastic reforms. In 1728, the advisers to Peter’s grandson, Peter II, decided to move the capital of the realm from St. Petersburg, the embodiment of Peter’s Western aspirations, where he had established it in 1712, back to Moscow. Around the same time, the office of hetman was restored in Ukraine. These were indications that the Russian elite wanted to go back to pre-Petrine times. But there was no turning back, especially when it came to Russia’s Western orientation. After the death of Peter’s grandson, Peter II, in 1730, with no male heir in sight, the courtiers placed their bets on Duchess Anna Ioannovna of Courland, a daughter of Peter I’s elder brother, Ivan. She was invited by the Supreme Privy Council, a consultative body to the tsars that was now in the business of choosing a new ruler, to assume the throne, but only on certain conditions.
Anna disappointed those who thought they could dictate conditions to the tsars. The authoritarian nature of the office was soon restored, as was the status of St. Petersburg as the imperial capital and the ruler’s fascination with European political and cultural models. In Russian historical memory, Anna’s ten-year rule (1730–1740) has been remembered as one dominated by foreign advisers, in particular Ernst Johann von Biren (Biron), who had been Anna’s lover and court favorite since her time in Courland. Legends about Biron and crimes committed by him and his family survived long after the end of Anna’s rule.
Anna’s rule produced a widespread sense of resentment and anti-Western feeling among the imperial elites. With Anna’s death and the ascension
to the Russian throne of Peter I’s daughter Elizabeth in 1741, the anti-Western attitude became a sea-change. Elizabeth was regarded and fashioned herself as a quintessentially Russian princess, and it was the “faithful sons of Russia,” the guards officers, who brought her to power as a true Russian princess. A clear indication of the change was the simple fact that while Elizabeth, like Anna, remained officially unmarried, her favorite and morganatic husband was not a “German” but a “Russian.” The son of a Ukrainian Cossack and, in the appellation of the time, a Little Russian, Oleksii Rozum made his way to St. Petersburg as a talented singer and became Elizabeth’s favorite courtier before her ascension to the throne. Once she took the throne, the former Cossack became a count, and later field marshal under the name Aleksei Razumovsky. Having little interest in affairs of state, Razumovsky, unlike Biron, kept a low profile: court regulars referred to him as the “night emperor.”
The rule of Elizabeth also witnessed a backlash against foreigners in the Russian service. What had begun as a trickle under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich became a flood during the rule of his son, Peter I, and continued under his successors. Resentment and distrust of foreigners in government were accompanied by an unprecedented growth of Russian national assertiveness. It was during Elizabeth’s rule that key discussions took place about the empire’s history and literary language—two major elements of all nation-building projects in early modern Europe. Peter’s all-Russian empire was about to acquire an all-Russian nation, all-Russian history, and all-Russian language—all during the age of Elizabeth.
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