Morozov soon persuaded Nikon to see the war to save the Orthodox Cossacks as part of his reform programme. The Patriarch duly ‘declared the undertaking to be a holy enterprise and the tsar as the protector and saviour of all the persecuted brethren of the old Greek religion, comparing him with the Kings David, Josiah, and Constantine the Great, who wanted to defend’ their faith. ‘This made quite an impression upon ordinary people,’ wrote Peter Loofeldt, ‘making them much more willing to become involved in attacking Poland again. So now preparations for the war began in earnest.‘69
Events in the Commonwealth encouraged Russian belligerence. The first ever use of a Liberum Veto in the Sejm of 1652, which brought about the dissolution of the Diet before it had voted the taxes necessary for a new campaign, encouraged several cities in Lithuania to defy the central government and attempt to ally with Khmelnytsky; but then the following year, although resistance continued in Lithuania, the Sejm voted funds to invade Ukraine. These developments led the tsar to send two diplomatic delegations westward: one went to Warsaw to demand the return of Smolensk and other territories ceded at Polianovka which, as Alexei had anticipated, the Sejm rejected; the other went to Ukraine with an offer of Russian protection, provided that Khmelnytsky ended his alliance with the Tatars. Again as Alexei had anticipated, the Hetman accepted. The tsar now invited the Zemskii Sobor's advice, and in October 1653 the assembly voted unanimously to declare war on the Commonwealth and to place Ukraine under Russian protection.
Because of the long distance and the dangerous conditions, the tsar's envoys only reached Khmelnytsky at his camp in Pereiaslav in January 1654 – but, as it happened, their timing could scarcely have been better. Military success by Commonwealth forces the previous year had convinced Khmelnytsky that he could not succeed alone, and as soon as the Russians arrived he summoned all his lieutenants and declared that ‘We now see that we can no longer live without a ruler’. He therefore asked his followers to choose between four candidates: the sultan, the Crimean khan, the Polish king and the tsar. Unanimously they chose their co-religionist Alexei and the tsar's officials spent the next few days administering oaths of loyalty. They also invested Khmelnytsky as Hetman in the tsar's name; promised that Russian troops would arrive to strengthen defences against the Poles; and agreed that the number of registered Cossacks should be 60,000. In addition, they confirmed all the concessions made by John Casimir at Zboriv. Cossack envoys accompanied the tsar's officials back to Moscow, where in March they formally accepted the terms of what became known as the ‘Union of Pereiaslav’.70
The continuing unrest in Lithuania had convinced Morozov and Alexei that they should launch a pre-emptive invasion of the Grand Duchy, and in May 1654 the tsar led an enormous army, numbering perhaps 100,000 troops and including all the New Formation Regiments equipped with the latest Western weapons, towards Smolensk. While Khmelnytsky tied down the main Polish army, John Casimir's Orthodox subjects welcomed their co-religionists: several towns in Lithuania changed hands with scarcely a struggle. In July the Russians reached Smolensk and re-entered the siegeworks abandoned 20 years earlier. After three months, the city surrendered to the tsar.
According to Peter Loofeldt, ‘the Russians almost remained stationary’ after the recapture of Smolensk ‘and could have been induced to [make] peace’. But another exercise of a Liberum Veto dissolved the Sejm before it had voted any taxes and, since ‘the Poles could offer little opposition’, Alexei decided to ‘continue the war with great earnestness’. The tsar once again led his forces in person and, according to Loofeldt,
Took one fortified place after another and did not want to give them up again, especially because for the most part the general population in these places belonged to the Orthodox religion and firmly regarded the tsar as their protector. Also since the Russians had set foot so deep into the country, they could not abandon it easily or with honour. For these reasons, the tsar allowed the war to proceed, sending in greater reinforcements.71
In July 1655, Alexei captured Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, and proclaimed himself its Grand Duke.
The tsar's rapid and complete success alarmed Sweden. Realizing that if he remained neutral, Russia would occupy the entire Commonwealth, King Charles X Gustav (r. 1654–60) and his council debated whether they should help the Poles resist another Russian onslaught, or attack and secure some territory for themselves before the Commonwealth collapsed.72 They decided on the latter and in July 1655, just as Alexei entered Vilnius, Charles invaded Poland. He entered Warsaw in September and Kraków in October. John Casimir fled the country, while most of his magnates accepted Swedish authority. It was the most complete and rapid state breakdown seen in Europe during the entire early modern period.
‘Potop’ and ‘ruina’
Sweden's spectacular military success rested on slender foundations. Charles X commanded only 36,000 troops – far too few to hold down the vast tracts of the Commonwealth that now lay at his feet. Moreover, the king lacked a clear plan for exploiting his sudden triumph. He failed to convene the Sejm, as he had promised; he failed to restrain his Lutheran troops from assaulting and even murdering Catholic clerics, or from looting Catholic church property; he failed to uphold the privileges of the Polish nobles (for example, their exemption from billeting); and he failed to arrange adequate supplies for his troops, so that they levied contributions from the towns and countryside they occupied. Before long, such ineptitude and brutality alienated large segments of the Polish population and local resistance began.
Tsar Alexei had no intention of sharing any of his gains with Sweden, and in May 1656 he declared war on King Charles and laid siege to the heavily fortified Swedish outpost of Riga; but although he ruled the largest state in the world, Alexei could not mobilize sufficient resources to prevail in two wars at the same time. In order to concentrate on his new war with Sweden, the tsar concluded an armistice with the exiled John Casimir, who swiftly regained Warsaw.
The Russian volte-face infuriated Khmelnytsky, who still regarded the Commonwealth as the Cossacks’ greatest enemy. He therefore refused to follow the orders received from Moscow and break with Sweden: instead he tried to build an anti-Polish coalition (going so far as to propose an alliance to Oliver Cromwell), but many Cossacks defied Khmelnytsky and continued to obey the tsar. The Hetman’s death in 1657 did not end this division: most Cossacks on the west bank of the Dnieper continued to favour Poland, whereas those on the east bank mostly favoured Russia. These developments plunged the entire region into a period of bloody anarchy that Ukrainian historians eloquently call Ruina, and Polish writers, with equal eloquence, call Potop: ‘the deluge’.73
Three factors prolonged the conflict. First, geography confined hostilities to largely predictable locations. In particular, the impenetrable forests forced both troops and supplies to use the rivers, where they could be more easily intercepted, while huge marshlands provided refuge to defeated units and allowed them to regroup for attacks on enemy lines of communication, reducing the chances of a knock-out blow. Second, the Russian army pursued a policy of deliberate brutality that eventually proved counter-productive. In 1654 Alexei instructed his generals ‘to present the inhabitants of Belorussian towns with written surrender requests, but if they spurned them, to burn alive Poles or Belorussians subsequently captured who would not convert to Orthodoxy’.74 The following year, when troops under the tsar's personal command took Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, they started fires that raged for 17 days and killed perhaps 8,000 people. Throughout the annexed areas, Russian troops persecuted Catholics, Jews and especially members of the Uniate Church (page 154 above). Third, natural disasters intensified the devastation caused by the war. Plague epidemics struck Poland twice in the 1650s and the Little Ice Age produced more long, cold winters and disastrous harvests – including the landmark winter of 1657–8 when the Baltic froze hard enough to allow the Swedish army to march from Jutland to Copenhagen (see chapter 8 below). In central Poland, the thaw
began only in early April and (according to a courtier) ‘no one can remember such a long winter’.75
Eventually, the protagonists became too exhausted to continue fighting: Alexei concluded an armistice with Sweden at the end of 1658, and a peace three years later that sacrificed all his gains. It is hard to disagree with the lapidary verdict of Brian Davies: ‘Nothing had been gained from the war with Sweden’.76 The Commonwealth, too, concluded peace with Sweden in 1660 but for another six years continued its campaigns against the tsar and his Ukrainian allies.
During ‘The Deluge’, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth encountered all of the ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ – pestilence, war, famine and death – with catastrophic consequences. In ‘Great Poland’, the western flank of the Commonwealth, fought over and occupied by the Swedes, the number of taxable households fell from 612,554 in the census of 1629 to 305,585 in the census of 1661. Warsaw, occupied by hostile troops between 1655 and 1657, saw its population decline from around 30,000 to barely 6,000. Almost two-thirds of its buildings lay in ruins. Further east, urban tax registers in present-day Belarus (the area invaded by the Russian army) showed catastrophic falls between 1648 and 1667: Pinsk declined from almost 1,000 households to under 300; Mogilev from over 2,300 to under 600; Vitebsk from almost 1,000 to just 56. Thousands perished in sieges; tens of thousands became the victims of persecution like the Jews of Ukraine, slaughtered by Cossacks who saw them as oppressors, or those of Mogilev, slaughtered by Russian troops who feared they might side with an advancing Polish army. In all, the population of the Commonwealth fell by at least one-third.77
The population of Russia also plummeted during the 1650s and 1660s through a lethal combination of climatic change, war and plague. Tree-ring, pollen and peat-bed data show that the springs, autumns and winters between 1650 and 1680 were the coldest recorded in Russia during the past 500 years. Repeatedly, crops either failed or produced little food.78 Probably, as in other parts of Europe, many men who could not find enough to eat at home joined the army, where most of them perished. In 1678, a decade after peace returned to Russia, a detailed census of one community in Karelia, in the far north, revealed that 1,000 of its young men perished in the war – almost 400 of them killed in action – leaving half the households with only young sons.79 Since Alexei's campaigns involved up to 100,000 troops, communities elsewhere presumably suffered similarly high casualties.
An epidemic of bubonic plague in 1654–7 also caused widespread depopulation. An official survey found that the epidemic had killed four-fifths of the monks and three-quarters of the nuns living in convents within the Kremlin, as well as half the officials in the Foreign Ministry and nine-tenths of those in the Revenue Ministry. A Polish visitor to Russia in 1656 described the ‘terrible and considerable devastation’ in graphic terms:
There is a lawless desert in the towns and villages and especially in the capital itself. The Muscovite wages war on the Commonwealth, and the Lord wages war on him in the form of a terrible plague. Food is expensive, especially bread; with the men away at war, the fields are not sown; and famine is to be expected in Moscow. The people are strongly opposed to going to war; they have to be driven to it by force, leaving few people in Moscow.80
Alexei's wars also created a fiscal disaster. A recent study by Richard Hellie, an eminent historian of imperial Russia, concluded that ‘the real cost of the Muscovite military establishment in the mid-1650s must have been at least three million rubles a year’, over one million of which went on the New Formation Regiments. In all, Hellie suggested, ‘above one-eighth of Muscovy's productive resources went just to pay for the army’.81 Building the Belgorod and Simbirsk Lines absorbed perhaps as much again.
The tsar therefore introduced desperate expedients to balance his budget, including currency debasement. The Imperial Mint began to issue copper coins as well as silver, but in 1662, desperate for funds to defeat Poland, the tsar decreed that taxes could only be paid in silver. The exchange rate between the two currencies now shot up from parity to 1:15, and producers refused to accept copper coins for their goods, including grain, creating a famine in Moscow. As in 1648, thousands of citizens and soldiers in the city now gathered to petition the tsar to hand over the ministers whom they blamed for their plight, while rioters looted and burned some of the offenders’ houses. This time, however, the tsar used his foreign troops to restore order, executing some 400 protestors out of hand and imprisoning hundreds more (some of them boys as young as 12). After being branded on the cheek for future identification, the tsar sent some 2,000 rioters and their families into permanent exile in Siberia and the lower Volga. Yet they did not suffer in vain: the following year, the tsar recalled all copper money and prices quickly fell to their earlier levels.82
John Casimir threw away the golden opportunity presented by these disorders by over-reaching himself (just as Alexei had done by attacking Sweden). He demanded that the Sejm elect his successor during the own lifetime, but supporters of the electoral principle repeatedly used the Liberum Veto, forcing the king to dissolve the Diets four times in 1665 and 1666. This starved the government of resources for the war against Russia, provoked an aristocratic rebellion that created new devastation, and encouraged the Cossack leaders to seek Ottoman support once more. With Russia and the Commonwealth both paralyzed, the representatives of John Casimir signed a truce at Andrusovo (a village near Smolensk) in February 1667 that not only ceded Alexei's conquests (Smolensk and the lands along the upper Dnieper) but also agreed to partition Ukraine, transferring to the tsar Kiev and all lands east of the Dnieper.
Foreign diplomats quickly saw the significance of these concessions. ‘You see in what a state Poland finds itself,’ wrote the French ambassador, ‘without help, without compassion from its friends because of its bad conduct; and thus must throw itself into the arms of the Muscovites or perish’. His English colleague agreed: ‘Ukraine was, in a manner, lost to Poland and with it the safety of Poland’.83 An Ottoman invasion in 1672 proved this: no longer able to resist, the Commonwealth swiftly made humiliating concessions (see chapter 7 below). But ‘the Muscovites’, too, still faced many problems.
Russia's Religious Schism
Before Tsar Alexei left Moscow on campaign in 1654 he conferred the title ‘Great Sovereign’ on Nikon, which allowed the Patriarch to sign decrees in the tsar's name during his absence. Nikon now oversaw the printing of three separate editions of a new liturgy that incorporated numerous innovations, and at a Church Council in 1656 he enjoined the exclusive use of the new ritual and denounced as heretics all who objected. Although the changes were small, they could not be ignored. Above all, demanding that priests and congregations henceforth make the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of two, as Nikon required, affected the most common visible symbol in Orthodox worship.
The Old Believers (as Nikon's critics came to be known) argued that the true Christian faith was timeless and not subject to change: to add or subtract anything was to destroy the truth. They also argued that the Russian Church alone had (in the words of Avraamii, a ‘holy fool’: one of the earliest and most articulate Old Believers) preserved the ‘true Orthodox faith, handed down by the holy Apostles, confirmed at the seven ecumenical councils and sealed with the blood of the holy martyrs’. Heresy, he added, ‘comes in by a single letter of the alphabet’.84 It followed that, if Russia alone had preserved the true faith, every divergent belief or practice must be heretical. Unlike Nikon, the Old Believers despised the numerous Greek Orthodox prelates who visited Moscow to raise money for their beleaguered churches (and found that a declaration in favour of Nikon's liturgy helped their cause), because they all lived under Ottoman rule – a clear sign of divine disfavour. They also dismissed the new liturgies produced by the Moscow printers because they were based on texts printed in Venice, at the heart of Latin Christendom.
In Russia, as elsewhere in Europe, lay people tended to see strict observance of traditional church practices as their p
athway to salvation – especially after the Great Plague of 1654–7, which intensified devotion to the local icons and liturgical practices that had ‘saved’ a family or a community. Many people later recalled that ‘the plague had led them to change their way of life’: all over Russia, ordinary people began to participate in commemorative religious processions, to worship at votive chapels dedicated to plague victims, to construct special churches in a single day, and to discover new relics – all to exalt their devotion to ‘Mother Russia’. They also fasted, self-flagellated and prayed more than ever before.85
Imposing religious uniformity throughout the largest state in the world presented unique challenges. It was easy for discontented clergy, whether Old Believers or not, to turn popular insecurities into intransigence – and imperial Russia had no shortage of discontented clergy. Many lived in the small religious communities and hermitages that abounded in remote areas; others were itinerant priests, monks and nuns who wandered the country, many of them defrocked for resisting authority. In addition, every parish had its own service book (usually manuscript), and it took time for the new printed texts to reach outlying areas; moreover, since individual copies were expensive, many parishes remained without one. Nevertheless, two more church councils in 1666–7, presided over by Alexei in person and attended by all Russian and many foreign bishops, repeated the injunction to use only the new liturgy and anathematized as ‘heretics and recalcitrants’ all who refused to conform (anathemas that remained in force until the 1970s). Most critics of the reform now recanted, but a handful remained obdurate. Some, like the ‘Holy Fool’ Avraamii, died at the stake in Moscow as a heretic; others went into exile in the far north (where the tsar's servants put many to death as well); but, as long as they lived, these and other Old Believers tirelessly gathered and copied ancient church texts and wrote martyrologies of the fallen.
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