When they were not denouncing folk religion, church leaders were tormented by a fear that they might inadvertently have strayed from the path of the true faith themselves. Their first contact with Orthodox clerics from Ukraine and White Russia gave Russia’s bishops an unwelcome glimpse of the differences that had evolved between their own religious practices and everyone else’s. Habits that had become traditional for Russians, including the way they crossed themselves, using two fingers rather than three, turned out to be corruptions of the true and apostolic ‘Greek’ religion. Mistakes had crept into their prized translations of the holy texts. Despite aspiring to the role of universal religious leader, Moscow discovered an embarrassing need for guidance (which explains what the patriarch of Antioch was doing in Moscow in 1655). When it joined the Muscovite state, the thriving city of Kiev added a new problem, because it boasted an impressive academy largely run by clerics. A province simply could not be allowed to rival Moscow in this way.
Among the priests who felt most keenly the desire to establish the pre-eminence and doctrinal perfection of Russia’s church was Moscow’s latest patriarch, Nikon. This man, perhaps the most ambitious ever to hold the office (although the competition could be close), was appointed in 1652. Well over six feet tall, he was as overbearing as he was intelligent. At first, Tsar Aleksei found welcome refuge in the man’s decisiveness. Nikon was a scholar, too, and his library of books was rumoured to be the finest in Russia. But the new head of Russia’s church also aspired to the authority enjoyed by an earlier priestly ‘great sovereign’: Filaret. At his enthronement, Nikon was said to have demanded that Tsar Aleksei ‘obey him in spiritual affairs’, which sounded almost like a bid for power. ‘All this,’ a foreign envoy noted eagerly, ‘was promised.’77
The patriarch used showmanship to overawe. He employed the nimblest-fingered nuns to create his regalia. On Easter Sunday in 1655, he appeared in garments sewn with gold and precious stones worth a staggering 30,000 rubles; ‘even Nikon finds some of his outfits too heavy’, Paul of Aleppo wrote.78 He also liked a good supporting cast, and often celebrated mass with seventy-five attendant priests. Like a pious tsar, and with similar funds, he founded a new monastery in the Valdai hills, near Novgorod, in 1653. Soon after, he commissioned a model of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the copy was used in the design of his New Jerusalem Monastery, begun in 1656 on land belonging to the village of Voskresenskoe, forty miles west of Moscow on the Istra river. As Paul of Aleppo put it, having got the measure of his man, the patriarch was a ‘great lover of buildings, monuments and collections’.79
But the Kremlin was the real base for Nikon’s court. Although the site was getting crowded, Aleksei gave him some land, to the north of the Dormition Cathedral, so that he could realize his project for a holy capital, a world centre of Orthodoxy, within the fortress walls. The sovereign also lent him funds to build himself a palace complex, including several audience halls and new churches, the most famous of which was dedicated to the Twelve Apostles. More than a million new bricks were duly baked, German architects secured, and as the work progressed, Nikon was allowed to conscript some of the tsar’s streltsy as labourers.80 Paul of Aleppo visited the complex as it was being completed in 1655. ‘It had seven halls,’ he wrote, ‘a bakehouse, and a large kitchen; so that the heat should ascend to the rooms above … On the top of it he has raised a divan, looking over the country, and thence has made a passage leading to the Empress’s palace, for the purposes of secret communication.’ There were other halls, one of which was so extensive that its tiled floor was ‘like a lake’, and every room was decorated in the richest style. In a word, the Syrian concluded, ‘these buildings are the object of wonder to everyone, for scarcely in the royal palaces is there anything to equal them.’81
When the din of the masons’ hammers finally stilled, the patriarch moved in. A man whose out-of-town estates included about 35,000 serfs could pay for any luxury. Nikon’s bakery supplied him with several varieties of bread and countless exquisite Russian pies, his brewery with kvass and beer. Meat was forbidden to any tonsured monk, but the patriarch’s ponds and storerooms gleamed with fish, and his cooks prepared them in astounding ways, mincing the flesh and shaping it into the forms of lambs or geese, piling it into rare sea-shells, stuffing the smaller fish into the greater, and serving all on plates of silver and gold.82 Fresh vegetables and fruit were grown on Nikon’s farmland just beyond the city walls, but he reserved a special garden in his Kremlin grounds for choicer, usually imported, plants, spending a hefty portion of the church’s funds on tulip bulbs.83 At night, after his many prayers, the supreme leader of the Russian faith padded over the furs on his chamber floor to sleep between goose-feather quilts. There were rumours that he was not always alone. They said he entertained pretty young nuns.84
Whatever his own indulgences, however, Nikon demanded strict religious discipline from everyone else (he even scolded Patriarch Macarius of Antioch for taking off some of his heavy vestments in a private room). The penalties he favoured for the punishment of other people’s moral lapses shocked his Syrian visitors. Almost every monastery they saw contained a prison, and these were full of monks who had been ‘found in states of intoxication’, many of whom were punished by being locked up and ‘galled with heavy chains and with logs of wood on their necks and legs’. The head of the Trinity-St Sergius Monastery, possibly Russia’s greatest, was sentenced to an exile grinding corn for the crime of taking bribes from the rich.85 To maintain the new rules, the patriarch set guards at all the monasteries, and it was believed that these ‘keep a strict watch by looking through the crevices of the doors; observing whether the inmates practise devotional humility, fasting, and prayer; or whether they get drunk and amuse themselves’.86 At the thought of surveillance like that, the noblewomen in the Kremlin’s more exclusive convent cells may well have paused between sips of their honeyed wine to suppress a shudder.
The next task was to sort out Russia’s religious practice. To get that right, Nikon summoned experts from Ukraine, White Russia and the Orthodox patriarchates of the Ottoman world, all of whom passed intense weeks at his palace. Fresh reforms streamed almost daily from its audience hall. Priests were to adopt new vestments, including Greek-style cowls and skullcaps. There were to be new service-books, and scholars from Ukraine and White Russia were to work on new translations of the complete Bible. The sign of the cross was no longer to be made with two fingers but the corrected, ‘Greek’, three. In the field of architecture, Nikon called for an end to towered churches (these had been introduced in the reign of Vasily III, and the most prominent example was no less than the main tower of St Basil’s). The patriarch’s edict specified cupolas, and even decreed their number: one, three, or five. Changes like this (to say nothing of reformed service-books and vestments) overturned centuries-old Russian practices, many of which had been debated and approved in the days of the last True Tsar, Ivan the Terrible. The so-called Old Believers’ subsequent attacks on the ‘new’ belief were based on that idea: only servants of the Antichrist, it was argued, would try to undermine historically sanctioned Russian liturgy and custom.87
Emotion, clearly, ran high in the world of faith. Nikon’s dogmatism made him many enemies, most famously a senior priest called Avvakum, who referred to Russia’s spiritual father as ‘the Great Deceiver and son of a whore’.88 The patriarch gave further offence by plundering several existing churches for the building-materials he needed for his projects at Valdai and Voskresenskoe. Personal issues – the jealousy of those he snubbed, the hatred provoked by his tyranny, resentment at the splendour of his earthly goods – deepened the rift within the church, beginning in the precincts of the Kremlin and spreading to the most remote provincial congregations. Once it had split, whatever the original reasons, the church could no longer sustain the fiction of its apostolic purity. And the dissident trend of Old Belief, which gathered pace in the 1660s, soon merged with a more general suspicion of government to
feed a small but stubborn national counter-culture.89
Within the Kremlin, meanwhile, another duel, this time between the rival courts of Nikon and Tsar Aleksei, was now set to define the future boundaries of all spiritual power. The patriarch and Aleksei had once been friends. The two men dined together frequently, Nikon was like an uncle to the royal children, and the stone passageway between the two great palaces was warmed by many heavy-treading feet. Aleksei was so pious, too, that some privately dubbed him ‘the young monk’. On each day during Lent, the greatest fast Russians observed, the tsar spent five or six hours in church and bent his body in prostration more than a thousand times.90 Priest though he was himself, Paul of Aleppo was exhausted, but ‘custom has made the [Russians] insensible of weariness. Our feeling was one of intense wonder and we never left the church but tottering on our legs after so much standing … We kept up appearances before them in spite of our inward rage and sufferings.’91 ‘Nightmarish religiosity’ was the phrase that sprang to one historian’s mind as he described Aleksei’s court.92
Helped by the fact of Aleksei’s own frequent absences at war, the relations between the two palaces remained cordial for several years. Inevitably, however, Nikon’s dictatorial manner eventually paved the way for his political fall. His plan was almost certainly to turn the Kremlin into an eastern version of the Vatican, an international centre of religious faith where church, not state, made the main rules.93 But Aleksei’s position was too powerful, and the traditions of his court too well entrenched. Though no-one knows the exact cause of his rift with Nikon, the latter’s refusal to appoint a bishop may have been involved. By 1658, the two men had stopped dining together. Aleksei also ordered that Nikon drop the title ‘great sovereign’. In reply, the patriarch preached a sermon in the Dormition Cathedral in which he denounced the tsar for disloyalty, and a few weeks later, in the summer of 1658, he quit his palace and the capital. Ever the showman, however, he did not resign as patriarch. Indeed, basing himself at his New Jerusalem Monastery on the Istra, he continued to issue edicts as the leader of the Russian church.94 He also allowed a corrosive rumour to circulate: it was said that he spent his days in heavy chains, punishing himself for abandoning his religious office because a feckless tsar refused to punish him in person.95
The battle of wills lasted for six more years. In the darkness before sunrise on 18 December 1664, however, a sledge from the countryside made its way towards the Kremlin bearing a heavily muffled passenger and a small group of attendants. Successive ranks of guards at the city’s gates failed to recognize the grand old priest, who then took full advantage of the drama of surprise. Splendid in his pearl-encrusted pectoral cross and vestments, Nikon burst into the Dormition Cathedral and took over the service, dominating the vaulted space as if he had never left.96 It was a challenge to both tsar and church, an assertion of the rebel’s right to choose the terms on which he would perform his duties. Aleksei responded by summoning a court to rule on Nikon’s future. The panel included boyars, members of the tsar’s council, sixty-five senior churchmen, and the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch (Macarius and Paul made the journey to Moscow for a second time), and it met in December 1666, gathering in the palace banqueting hall. The outcome was never in doubt, especially as the foreign visitors, who needed Moscow’s financial aid, would have known just what verdict they were meant to find. Nikon was declared guilty of leaving the Russian church ‘a widow’. Before beginning his life-long exile, the big man was taken to a cell in the Chudov Monastery, and there his beard was cut off, his shimmering vestments stripped from his back, and his pectoral cross finally lifted from his neck.97 His bid to turn his church into a kind of sovereign power had failed. The office of the patriarch itself would never quite recover from the blow, while the Kremlin – still a sacred site – passed decisively into the control of worldly masters.
* * *
The pace of further change was erratic, and the Kremlin continued to wear a mask of tradition, but by the 1660s the tsar’s inner court was growing splendid on the wealth of its expanding continental empire. Aleksei’s English physician, Samuel Collins, explained what he observed after his master’s return from a campaign that had taken him to Vilno:
Since his majesty has been in Poland, and seen the manner of the Princes houses there, and guessed the mode of their kings, his thoughts are advanced, and he begins to model his court and edifices more stately, to furnish his rooms with tapestry, and to contrive houses of pleasure abroad.98
Sure enough, in the late 1660s Aleksei ordered a major upgrade of the thirty-year-old Terem Palace, and especially of his own family’s rooms. European trifles such as chairs, cupboards and even beds were not traditional in Russia.99 Now everything was set to change. The private chambers were repainted, and where there had been flat religious scenes the walls now featured plants or planets in the sky. The current (short-lived) heir, also called Aleksei, was given an apartment decorated in imported blue and yellow silk and velvet. At the same time, tables and chairs, display cabinets and library shelves also entered royal inventories, though the tsar himself still slept ‘in his shirt and drawers, under a rich sable coverlid, and one Sheet under him’.100
The purchase of those cabinets attests that Aleksei had become a collector, and like many other wealthy Europeans of the age, his tastes inclined to the exotic. Foreign agents were given the task of sourcing his treasures from lists that he dictated to his secretaries, and soon their efforts had produced a company of several dozen liveried human dwarves. The Kremlin’s brand-new furniture was piled with tropical shells and fabulous tusks. The royal library began to feature a few books of European science, non-sacred volumes that stubborn followers of the Old Belief dismissed as ‘excrement’.101 Assisted by Samuel Collins, the tsar embarked on a series of scientific and alchemical experiments, to conduct which he imported a range of new devices – phials, metals, lenses and measuring instruments – from the German lands. These were exotica in their own right, and since they had no native Russian names, many were called by their original German ones, beginning a long tradition of importing German scientific terms into the Russian language.102
Collins was correct, however, to point out that Aleksei sought his real pleasures well beyond the stuffy confines of the Kremlin. Even after its refurbishment, the old fortress must have felt restrictive. In the 1660s, Aleksei abandoned plans to restore the interiors of several of its most important buildings, including the Faceted Palace, in favour of some projects of his own outside the walls.103 He had always loved falconry, and his estate at Izmailovo, about five miles to the north-east of the Kremlin, was first developed for the sport. It expanded in the 1660s to include a palace and churches, a model farm, and even a small zoo, for which the tsar imported lions, tigers, polar bears and a pair of American porcupines.104 The thick woods round another suburban palace, at nearby Preobrazhenskoe, also provided the tsar with sport and welcome fresh air. His most ambitious project, however, was a palace that he developed from yet another former hunting-lodge, at Kolomenskoe, to the south-west of the Kremlin on the Moscow river.
This new complex was conceived from the outset as a second, and more fashionable, royal court. The meadows by the river were a far cry from Versailles, whose transformation had begun in distant France, but the tsar’s new palace incorporated every luxury his architects could think of. The main structure, which was completed in 1667, was entirely built of wood, and it featured elaborately gabled and shingled roofs, ornate carved windows and massive external stairs. The throne room was magnificent, and in emulation of ancient Byzantium, it boasted a pair of mechanical lions. Constructed out of copper and clothed in sheepskin, they stood on either side of Aleksei’s royal seat, and at the touch of a hidden lever they rolled their eyes and roared, just as the original models had done.105
As the Kremlin’s spell began to break, the tsar was not alone in aspiring to newly designed quarters. By the 1660s, government officials were also chafing in their antiquated roo
ms. Petitioners still brought their papers to the square beneath the bell tower of Ivan the Great. At times of crisis, the crowds still flocked towards the Kremlin palace steps. But the number of court chancelleries had grown at an astounding pace since Mikhail Romanov’s accession, and his son had added more, many with ever-larger staffs.106 The buildings where they worked had not been restored adequately since the Time of Troubles, and by 1670 some of the prikazy were in a dangerous condition. Accordingly, Aleksei’s men laid plans to move both clerks and paperwork to more extensive sites in the White City and Kitai-gorod. The most ambitious of these relocations were delayed by cost, but moves on a smaller scale extended the visibility of government into the city.107 At the same time, expansion also paved the way for the kinds of reform that only a large civil service can achieve.
The geography of power, and the symbolic resonance of the Kremlin, was changing for another group as well. The boyars who quit the fortress in the 1660s did so largely under pressure from the tsar. Though some substantial Kremlin mansions had been kept by members of the influential clans for centuries, Aleksei made a point of reclaiming any that fell vacant. His court was swelling round him, he was uninhibited about appointing new men to the highest ranks, and soon there were so many freshly created nobles that the old walls could no longer have contained them all.108 The rest, now many scores of grand and titled men, colonized the streets of the White City, filling the district with mansions and palaces in the latest style and sweeping through it in a blaze of jewels to attend Kremlin events.
Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin Page 21
