Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (28 page)

The most terrifying disaster was beyond human control, however. In 1654, Muscovy was struck by plague. Paul of Aleppo learned that nearly half a million had died, ‘making the majority of streets empty of inhabitants’. Dogs and pigs were still devouring human corpses by the time of his visit, and the churches were ‘destitute of clergy’. In Moscow itself, the city gates were ‘silent for want of troops to guard them’ and the streets ‘frightfully desolate’.
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The fear of infection was so great that the very doors and windows of Aleksei’s palace had been bricked up to keep the miasmas outside. But locks across the Kremlin gates could not shut out this foe, and death rates among its monks and other residents ranged from 80 to 95 per cent.
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The tsar, fortunately, was away from the city on campaign, and his family had escaped to safety, but by the time the plague had run its course, only fifteen servants remained in the palace. Aleksei’s own deputy, Mikhail Pronsky, had died in September 1654, shortly after writing a horror-filled report to his tsar.
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The catastrophe prompted several more reforms. At a practical level, new regulations were introduced to stop further burials in selected Moscow churchyards, including almost all those in the Kremlin (though not the Archangel Cathedral). The ban remains in force: from 1655 the Kremlin virtually ceased to be a burial-site.
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The tsar, meanwhile, indulged his hypochondria. Always entranced by herbs and alchemy of every kind, he sent his stewards to the borderlands to look for plague-remedies. In 1655, he approved a particularly extravagant order for three unicorn horns, two of the finest quality and one, for the women’s quarters, of slightly lower grade. The price of the larger specimens alone was 5,000 rubles (compare that with the 3,000 rubles that it had cost to build Patriarch Filaret’s lavish tower), but unicorn horn, as everyone knew, was a guaranteed remedy for plague. As the wild tribesmen of the south explained, you simply ground it into water several times a day.
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Alternatively, there was always rhubarb wine. That, too, was a Muscovite speciality, and the tsar was jealous of the plants that grew beneath the Kremlin walls in his apothecary’s garden.

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The plague was thought by some to prefigure God’s judgement on sinners; in this age of unrest, the fear of divine wrath was never far from people’s minds. And the seventeenth century turned out to be a particularly testing time for the Russian church itself. A crisis in the 1650s shook the foundations of Orthodox, semi-theocratic Moscow, and it also cut quite literally through the centre of the Kremlin. The effects would prove irreversible, and so it was especially ironic that their basic cause was the church’s obstinate refusal to countenance even the most benign of new ideas.

Since the time of its establishment in 1589, the Moscow Patriarchate had remained the only Orthodox seat of its kind outside Muslim control. Its leaders had been stubborn in their defence of the faith. With religious ferment spreading all across the Christian world, no border could stop all originality, but the Russian church put up a creditable fight. From Oxford and Bologna to Cracow, Europe’s universities glittered with philosophers, but the Muscovites who marvelled over Galloway’s clock and water-pumping system had no access to secular learning, and that was just the way the country’s one true intellectual class, its priests and monks, still wanted it. Even their reckoning of time set them apart. They counted their years from the original creation of the world. Galloway might have left Scotland in 1620, but when he reached Moscow, like Alice falling down her rabbit-hole, he would have found himself in 7128. Russian theologians and popular mystics were fascinated by numbers – many were expert in the numerological aspects of the Book of Revelation – but Europe’s rationalist mathematics seemed as threatening to them as black magic.

The effort to forestall polluting new ideas resulted in a chilly attitude to foreigners in the tsar’s pay. Though Orthodox visitors were relatively innocuous, the church suspected other Europeans of heresy (Filaret had always reserved an especially potent venom for Lutherans) and they were known to drink for pleasure, smoke tobacco, and even to eat meat in Lent. Some employed Russian labourers and house-servants, placing the children of Orthodoxy in positions of subservience and exposing them to all manner of unspeakable contamination. Throughout Mikhail Romanov’s reign, church leaders had condemned the easy contact between Russians and foreigners, but the profits involved (including those made by the tsar himself) were too attractive for legislators to resist. It was only in the wake of the 1648 uprising, when people started to question the foreign workers’ tax exemptions, that real restrictions were at last discussed.
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The church was quick to press its advantage. In 1652, the European residents of Moscow received an inconvenient new order. They were to quit their houses in the most expensive districts within four weeks, even if that meant selling them at knock-down prices. Henceforth, the government decreed, the ‘Germans’ were to live in a special new suburb beyond the Yauza river, a reservation where they could talk, smoke, shave, and even build their hateful churches without corrupting Russian souls.

The church’s hostility to outsiders, however, was partly a reflection of deeper fears about the behaviour of its own people. No monastery wall seemed high enough to prevent Russian monks from catching sight of the lewd behaviour of Christmas crowds, and some had glimpsed overtly sexual games played in the winter gloom. ‘Their dances’, wrote Adam Olearius, ‘include voluptuous movements of the body. They say that roving comedians bare their backsides, and I know not what else.’ The Christmas carnival itself, a special season of misrule at which young men wore animal masks, suggested worse depravity: ‘So given are they to the lusts of the flesh,’ Olearius continued, ‘that some are addicted to … sodomy; and not only with boys but also with horses.’
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Reformers were concerned as well as fascinated. In the early 1650s, they condemned almost everything from drunkenness to bagpipes, dancing, and the laxity of rural priests.
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Despite the rules, the revels continued unabated.

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.’
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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