The Transfigured Kingdom

Sacred Parody and Charismatic Authority at the Court of Peter the Great

Ernest A. Zitser

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781501711091
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

In this richly comparative analysis of late Muscovite and early Imperial court culture, Ernest A. Zitser provides a corrective to the secular bias of the scholarly literature about the reforms of Peter the Great. Zitser demonstrates that the tsar's supposedly "secularizing" reforms rested on a fundamentally religious conception of his personal political mission. In particular, Zitser shows that the carnivalesque (and often obscene) activities of the so-called Most Comical All-Drunken Council served as a type of Baroque political sacrament—a monarchical rite of power that elevated the tsar's person above normal men, guaranteed his prerogative over church affairs, and bound the participants into a community of believers in his God-given authority ("charisma"). The author suggests that by implicating Peter's "royal priesthood" in taboo-breaking, libertine ceremonies, the organizers of such "sacred parodies" inducted select members of the Russian political elite into a new system of distinctions between nobility and baseness, sacrality and profanity, tradition and modernity.

Tracing the ways in which the tsar and his courtiers appropriated aspects of Muscovite and European traditions to suit their needs and aspirations, The Transfigured Kingdom offers one of the first discussions of the gendered nature of political power at the court of Russia's self-proclaimed "Father of the Fatherland" and reveals the role of symbolism, myth, and ritual in shaping political order in early modern Europe.

1 The Naryshkin Restoration

The discursive practices associated with the Transfigured Kingdom of Peter the Great can be traced back to the late seventeenth-century struggle for succession, an extremely volatile situation in which court factions vied to enthrone their own candidate and of which the young Peter Alekseevich was largely the unwitting beneficiary. The historical example of the Time of Troubles (smuta)—a period of foreign invasion and civil war that immediately preceded the “miraculous” restoration of royal rule through the divinely inspired election of the Romanov dynasty—informed the actions of nearly all the leading political actors during this period of instability.¹ Even the conspirators who organized the court coups of 1682 and 1689, who had less reason than anyone else to see their opportunistic political tactics as unconscious echoes of the events of a century ago, sought to take advantage of the historical paradigm according to which violence served as divine retribution for the sins of unruly subjects, wicked counselors, and heretical pretenders to the throne—the scapegoats of an original holy community of Russian Orthodox Christians.²

In this context, the question of who would inherit the throne of Moscow appeared much more than a family quarrel between the in-laws of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich. Or rather, the dispute between the Miloslavskiis, Aleksei’s in-laws by his first marriage, and the Naryshkins, his in-laws by his second marriage, replayed and served to symbolize the much larger generational, political, and religious conflicts taking place within the Muscovite elite as a whole.³ Both sides of the succession struggle understood that the resolution of the family quarrel involved taking a particular stance vis-à-vis the reformist legacy of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich. Whether this legacy was understood literally, as the real estate bequeathed by Russia’s royal father, or figuratively, as the grace bestowed by the divine Father, the post-Alekseevan succession necessarily touched upon the social and ideological bases of Romanov rule. In practice the struggle for the throne took the form of a dispute over which of Aleksei Mikhailovich’s children could oversee the “restoration” of his legacy. The men who organized the court coup that secured the succession for the Naryshkin line of the Russian royal family used a criminal investigation into the alleged conspiracy against Tsar Peter Alekseevich to present the overthrow of the regency of his half sister, Tsarevna Sof'ia Alekseevna, as the restoration of divinely ordained paternal order to a royal house disrupted by the topsy-turvy rule of a female usurper. By parodying what they described as the pompous and hypocritical conventions of the regent and her government, the supporters of the candidacy of Peter Alekseevich sought to impugn Sof'ia Alekseevna’s commitment to the program of imperial renovation and religious enlightenment begun under Aleksei Mikhailovich and to demonstrate their own candidate’s impeccable qualifications for the post.

In view of the highly charged figurative language used to legitimate (some would say sacralize) the new Muscovite ruling house from at least the middle of the seventeenth century,⁴ it is not surprising that the criteria by which one could distinguish which candidate was divinely chosen to rule and what constituted his or her “election” was articulated most clearly during the course of an ecclesiastical debate over the central mystery of the Christian faith, the Eucharist. This court-sponsored theological debate was the crucible in which the loose coalition that put the future Peter the Great on the Muscovite throne forged its own legitimation as well as a critique of the religious and foreign policies of its opponents in the succession struggle. Indeed, we can understand neither the rhetoric in which the leaders of the Naryshkin restoration justified the legitimacy of their coup nor the criteria by which they determined the charismatic status of their candidate for the Muscovite throne without analyzing the seemingly irrelevant and abstruse theological question of the exact moment during the Orthodox liturgy when the sacramental bread and wine is transformed into the mystical body and blood of the Saviour—the so-called moment of transubstantiation.

The Compromise of 1682

In April 1682, immediately after the unexpected death of Aleksei Mikhailovich’s hand-picked successor (his eldest son, Tsar Fedor), a cabal of conspirators led by the Naryshkin side of the royal family attempted to put Tsarevich Peter Alekseevich on the throne of Muscovy, ahead of his elder half brother, Ivan Alekseevich. On April 27 Patriarch Ioakim (Savelov) and the Naryshkins presented Tsarevich Peter Alekseevich as the next Orthodox tsar in front of a hastily convoked and largely ceremonial zemskii sobor (assembly of the land) consisting of royal courtiers, chancellery clerks, and Moscow merchants.⁵ However, this halfhearted attempt to invoke the waning tradition of popular acclamations (and thereby to forestall any possible questions about the legitimacy of the Naryshkin candidate) could not stifle the growing unrest among the rank-and-file members of the plebeian musketeer (strel'tsy) units garrisoned in and around Moscow or quell the increasingly persistent rumors that the elder (and hence more legitimate) “true” tsar had been murdered by a Naryshkin “usurper.”⁶ Indeed, despite the apparent pragmatism of the coup plotters, their concerted effort to bypass the mentally and physically handicapped Ivan in favor of his ten-year-old half brother, Peter, turned out to be a miserable failure. For many of the Naryshkin conspirators and their supporters, it also turned out to be fatal.

The timing of the urban uprising sparked by the machinations of Patriarch Ioakim and the Naryshkins—the uprising began on May 15, the same day as the murder of Tsarevich Dmitrii of Uglich, the grand prince whose suspicious death triggered the original Time of Troubles—demonstrates the degree to which the privileged military units of Moscow musketeers shared in the founding myths of the Romanov dynasty.⁷ Shrewdly exploiting the factional divisions within the ruling elite to press their claims against the Russian government, which was then pursuing a highly unpopular program of military reorganization—a program that prefigured the reforms eventually introduced during the reign of Peter the Great—several regiments of musketeers rose up against their noble commanders.⁸ Encouraged by the supporters of the still very much alive elder tsarevich, the mutinous troops invaded the inner sanctum of the Muscovite Kremlin, dispatched several of their most hated governors (as well as some innocent bystanders), and finally, after three days of terrible bloodshed, called for Ivan’s coronation alongside his younger half brother. In this way the lower-class rebels sought to sanction through religious ceremony what they had accomplished through force of arms. Usurping the electoral power so jealously guarded by the defenders of Russian monarchical absolutism, the rebels thus reenacted the original, founding moment of the covenant between the Romanov dynasty and its Orthodox subjects.

Frightened into submission, the Naryshkins acceded to the demands of their political rivals, the Miloslavskiis, and the latter’s (temporary) lower-class allies. In exchange for sparing their lives, the few surviving members of the Naryshkin clan were forced to retire from the arena of Muscovite politics, and the Russian Orthodox patriarch was forced to perform an unheard-of dual coronation.⁹ The ruling elite’s accession to this unprecedented coronation of both half brothers represented a pragmatic political expedient, which attempted to double the chances that at least one young Romanov tsar would live long enough to father a viable heir to the throne. Reason of state, however, was not a legitimate justification for the religious ceremony that was intended to invoke God’s grace upon the mortal body of his earthly representative—the man officially empowered to rule alone.¹⁰ Nor could this expedient political solution quell the self-righteous anger of the mutinous soldiers and rioters, many of whom pushed for a much more radical reconfiguration of the Russian body politic, a revision that drew at least some of its inspiration from the millenarian ideals of social justice advocated by the sectarian proponents of Old Belief—the growing if still inchoate movement of opposition against the liturgical reforms introduced during the reign of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich.¹¹ And it is precisely because of the threat that popular insurrection posed to both the natural and political bodies of the two young tsars that the entire court fled the turbulent politics of the Russian capital. Eventually the court took refuge behind the fortified walls of the Trinity–St. Sergius Monastery, from which it issued a decree calling up all the hereditary provincial servitors of Muscovy to come and save the two royal brothers from the “seditious” and “schismatic” politics of their own subjects.

The choice to retire behind the fortified walls of the Trinity Monastery complex was neither as arbitrary nor as purely pragmatic as it may seem. As the final resting place of the preeminent national saint—St. Sergius of Radonezh—this monastery had long been seen as the main bastion of defense against those infidels and heretics who would subvert the confessional purity of the Russian Orthodox realm and overthrow its divinely appointed rulers. Most recently the monastery had quite literally served as the bastion against the Catholic armies of the Polish-backed pretender to the Muscovite throne, who had succeeded in crowning himself as the tsar of Russia during the Time of Troubles.¹² Indeed, the Trinity monastery was one of the best-known historical sites in the Muscovite political imagination, a symbol of confessional purity and military might that could serve as a powerful focus for mobilizing public opinion in favor of anyone who sought refuge behind its walls.¹³ By making an unscheduled “pilgrimage” to the Trinity Monastery, the court of Moscow had thus won an important ideological battle against the mutineers and the Old Believers who had driven it from the capital during the new Time of Troubles.

The Royal Trinity

Despite such familiar historical parallels, however, the reassertion of Romanov rule after the 1682 uprising was anything but traditional. The court’s return to Moscow did not mean a return to the same kind of monarchical rule as had prevailed before the new Time of Troubles. If anything, it signaled the dispersal of royal charisma rather than its concentration in a single ruler. As a result of the political compromise hammered out between the feuding sides of the Russian royal family during the course of the Moscow uprising, Tsarevich Ivan Alekseevich had acceded to the throne alongside his half brother, while the Miloslavskiis and their supporters among the Muscovite political elite assumed control of what was, in essence, an informal regency council. In fact, for more than seven years (1682–89) one of Aleksei Mikhailovich’s daughters, Tsarevna Sof'ia Alekseevna, ruled in the name of the two tsars, neither of whom was deemed fit to rule by himself (Peter by reason of age, Ivan by reason of his health). Tsarevna Sof'ia assumed the responsibility of her deceased mother, Tsaritsa Maria Il'inichna Miloslavskaia, Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich’s first wife, despite the fact that Aleksei’s second wife (and the mother of the younger cotsar), Tsaritsa Natal'ia Kirillovna Naryshkina, was still very much alive. Sof'ia’s controversial role reflected the actual balance of power between the distaff sides of the royal house. It also demonstrated that even after his coronation, Peter remained a secondary figure in an inherently unstable political compromise brokered by the Russian Orthodox patriarch.

The unprecedented situation that prevailed after the 1682 Moscow uprising prompted Muscovite and Ruthenian (that is, Ukrainian and Belorussian Orthodox) panegyrists to create an innovative theology of rule based on their (often conflicting) interpretations of what we may call the Alekseevan heritage of religious enlightenment. For example, Sil'vestr (Medvedev), the abbot of the Moscow Zaikonospasskii Monastery and one of the earliest and most outspoken Russian advocates of the 1682 compromise, used the theological associations of the female regent’s Christian name, Sof'ia, to popularize the mystical trope of Holy Wisdom, the Divine Omniscience of the three hypostases of the Trinity, as the most important allegorical image of the entire regency.¹⁴ Like his more famous predecessor Simeon of Polotsk, the chief panegyrist at the court of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, Sil'vestr sought to use the biblical imagery associated with the cult of the “wise” ruler to draw an analogy between the microcosm of the Muscovite realm and the macrocosm of t...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Naryshkin Restoration
• 2. An Unconsecrated Company
• 3. Apostles and Apostates
• 4. Unholy Matrimony
• 5. Fathering the Fatherland
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1. Chronology
• Appendix 2. Members of the Unholy Council
• Bibliography