Ab Imperio

Chapter 6 of the history course A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia is titled “The Seventeenth Century: Alternative Scenarios, Troubled Times.” The seventeenth century had played such a decisive role in the formation of the social order that we call “modernity” that the chapter had to be divided into two parts. Indeed, the rise of the Counterreformation, the devastating Thirty Years War, and the English Revolution signaled the arrival of a new type of social imagination that gradually formed the concepts of the regular (“modern”) state, national sovereignty, and centrally standardized religious rituals and practices.

Part 2 of the chapter deals with the Tsardom of Muscovy. It starts with the profound political crisis of the beginning of the century, known as the Time of Troubles. By deconstructing the historical canonical master narrative of the crisis, the chapter argues that the crisis closely mirrored the ideological and political crisis of western European polities of the time. But in the absence of any developed public sphere, the clash of ideas took the material form of pseudo-civil war, as political leaders and political actions substituted for elaborated rhetorical arguments and ideological statements. The rapid exploration and colonization of Siberia demonstrated the benefits of the underdeveloped sphere of public discourses for the spread of political authority to new territories: unlike the European overseas colonizers, even if no more humane, Muscovite colonists did not rely on abstract maps of cultural differences and hierarchies. Thus, political and economic domination was dissociated from cultural domination, and frequent interpersonal violence rarely intensified to the level of mass-scale genocides structured by abstract social categories. This was one reason explaining the rise of Muscovy as the leading regional power by the end of the century, at the expense of its former nemeses, Rzech Pospolita and Crimea. The schism in the Russian Orthodox Church in the second half of the century was triggered by an effort to standardize its rituals and teaching all over the country, with the two sides disagreeing only on the normative content to be recognized as a standard. This dramatic episode suggests that Muscovy was ready for the idea of a modern social organization but only lacked a modern political language (different from the confessional idiom) to implement this idea in practice.