Russia. A History

The Church in the sixteenth century railed against many of these practices, and had some success in asserting its presence and rituals at key moments such as death and marriage. It promoted a new vision of spirituality as well. Until the early 1500s, monasteries, monks, and an ascetic way of life had constituted the norm in church teaching about social and religious behaviour. But as monasteries became less exemplary with greater worldly success, the church hierarchy diversified the focus of spiritual life, offering saints’ cults, sermons, other moralistic writings and teachings, and more ritual experiences to appeal more broadly. As Paul Bushkovitch has noted, official spirituality in the sixteenth century emphasized the collective, public experience of the faith, not the more inner-directed, personal piety that developed among the élite in the next century.

Attitudes towards daily life in the élite can be gleaned from a handbook of household management (the Domostroi), which was most probably based on a foreign secular model, but edited in an Orthodox Christian vein in Muscovy in the mid-sixteenth century. The Domostroi

depicts the family as the structuring principle of the community and of the polity; the grand prince is portrayed as the head of the realm construed as a ‘household’, just as the father is the head of an extended household of wife, children, servants, and other dependents. Both patriarchs rule justly but firmly; each demands obedience and responds with just and fair treatment. Women and children are to behave and obey; physical force is recommended to fathers to keep them in line. But women also have remarkably broad latitude and responsibility. Offsetting its otherwise more typical Muscovite misogynistic views of women is the Domostroi’s parallel depiction of them as capable household managers, empowered in the domestic realm. Theirs is the primary responsibility for leading the family to salvation by the example of virtue and piety; theirs is the responsibility of making the household economy and servants productive by skilful management. Christian values such as charity to the poor and just treatment of dependents are balanced by a keen attention to sexual probity all of which values worked towards social stability as much as piety. The

Domostroi did not circulate widely in the sixteenth century, but to some extent it did reach the landed gentry.

One can hardly argue that Russians were particularly spiritual or ‘pagan’ in the sixteenth century. This was a typically eclectic premodern Christian community. And, significantly, the church’s de facto

tolerance of syncretism, paralleled by the state’s toleration of religious diversity (the Orthodox Church was specifically enjoined against aggressive missionary work in newly conquered areas such as Kazan and Siberia), helped ensure that the sixteenth century passed with remarkably little societal tension over matters of belief, a stark and oft-noted contrast to the turbulent sixteenth century of Reformation in Europe.

Administrative and Economic Strategies of Autocracy

A similar flexibility characterized the administrative, political, and fiscal strategies of the state: rather than trying to fit a uniform policy to lands of dazzling differences, the state modified policies to fit local needs, while never losing sight of its fundamental goals. Muscovite rulers were obsessed with the same issues as their European counterparts: bureaucracy, taxation, and the army. The goal has often been called ‘absolutism’, but the term is applicable only if it is redefined. Recent scholarship shows that in England and France as well as in Muscovy, ‘absolute’ authority was achieved by tolerating and co-opting traditional institutions and élites, rather than by replacing them with rational bureaucratic institutions. What resulted was not homogenization, ‘centralization’, or ‘autocracy’, but resource mobilization.