Russia. A History

The Kazan conquest added ethnically and religiously diverse lands to Russia: the élite was Tatar and Muslim, descended from the Golden Horde, but it presided over a variety of peoples who followed animistic cults. They included Finno-Ugric speakers (the Mari or Cheremisy and the Mordva) and Turkic speakers (the Chuvash, said to descend from the Volga Bulgars who had controlled the Volga before the Mongol invasion). The Chuvash and Mordva by and large inhabited the high, right bank of the Volga; the Tatars and Mari, the lowland left bank between the Volga and Kama rivers which had been the heartland of the Kazan khanate. Although fur-trapping, bee-keeping, and trade all engaged the populace, this was also an area of settled agriculture from the twelfth century: the land here was thinly forested or steppe, and the soil was the famous ‘blackearth’ topsoil, a thick layer rich in humus and nutrients.

With Russian conquest the Tatar populace was forcibly removed from the city of Kazan and those dwellings and shops were awarded to artisans, peasants, and lesser military servitors imported from the centre. The lands surrounding Kazan were distributed as service landholdings; there were no free peasant communes here as in the north and little hereditary land (votchina

) save that granted to the newly founded archbishopric of Kazan (1555) and new monasteries. Christianization remained a minor goal for the Muscovite state here. Local élites were left relatively untouched as long as they remained loyal to the tsar; they collected the tribute (iasak

) and administered communities according to local traditions. Muscovite governors were instructed to govern fairly without coercion. Nevertheless Muscovy was challenged repeatedly by uprisings of Cheremisy, Tatars, and Mari in the 1550s and thereafter.

Culture and Mentality

So diverse a populace cannot be said to have possessed a single mentality. Certainly sources on this for the non-Christian subjects of the tsar are lacking. But since clichés abound about the Russian character even for the Muscovite period, it is worth assessing sixteenth-century Orthodox East Slavs’ attitudes towards the supernatural, community, and family, based on contemporary sources. (One should take with a grain of salt the reports of foreign travellers about popular culture since many were biased by Catholic and Protestant viewpoints, by a post-Reformation zeal for a more rational or more personal spirituality, or by a fascination with the ‘exotic’.)

Sixteenth-century Russians were nominally Orthodox Christian, but that statement is as misleading as saying that most Europeans before the Reformation were Catholic. Just as in pre-Reformation Europe, sixteenth-century Russian Orthodoxy combined Christian beliefs with practices drawn from the naturalist and animistic beliefs of the various Finno-Ugric peoples with whom the East Slavs came in contact. At the 1551 ‘Stoglav’ Church Council (called ‘Stoglav’ or ‘One Hundred chapters’ after the document it issued), the hierarchy identified a wide incidence of improper religious practices, but apparently lacked the resources to change them. Parish schools or seminaries were nonexistent, parish organization was weak, books, sermons, and learning were limited to ecclesiastical élites. The council had to content itself with establishing some mechanisms to supervise parish clergy but otherwise just exhort the faithful to avoid what it considered ‘pagan’ behaviour. By examining death rituals, marriage ceremonies, prayers, and a range of celebratory practices, one can discern a ‘popular culture’, that is, a range of beliefs and practices exhibited by the entire social range which was distinct from the prescriptions of the official Church. That culture featured a view of the world significantly different from the typical Christian one as Eve Levin points out. Rather than seeing the world as basically good, created by God and disrupted by the Devil, sixteenth-century Russians seem to have regarded it as a universe of powerful natural forces ‘neither good nor evil but wilful and arbitrary’. They identified these forces in Christian terms (the Devil) or terms drawn from Finno-Ugric beliefs (nezhit, a force of evil in nature; bears and foxes were equated with evil). They summoned supernatural forces to protect themselves, drawing both on Christian intercessors (Jesus, Mary, and others) and Finno-Ugric (appealing to the power of ritual sites like bathhouses or trees and herbs imbued with supernatural powers). These customs showed no social distinctions: even the tsar’s marriage ceremony shared folk customs associated with fertility; boyars are recorded consulting folk healers; wills with evocations of non-Christian attitudes stem from the landed class.