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Great Russia, especially in the north and the Volga regions, that the Raskol chiefly spread. The schismatics lived in the past, considering the days before Nikon and before Peter as the ideal age of their country. They have been compared by a Russian novelist to Lot's wife, who, looking back, became an immovable pillar. "Yet," writes a German historian, "in this protest against the established Church and State, in the energy of the mystic apocalyptic symbolism with which the Raskolniki defend their doctrines, and in the material means which are at their disposal, lies a force which presents the greatest difficulties to the State and the official clergy. Here, at all events, in this stubborn opposition, the people show that it is not the indifferent herd of sheep for which it is generally taken." The people of the old faith represent the spirit of antagonism to progress and European culture. It is a passive spirit, though stiffnecked, but it is the more effective, in proportion as they are more industrious, thrifty, and sober than the Orthodox. The movement was too widely spread, and had its roots too deep in the national character and traditions, for the Church and State to check it. The schismatics were simply maintaining the prejudices which the Church had always displayed towards change, erudition, and the influence of foreign ideas-"abominable German customs." In one of the schismatic pamphlets which have been preserved it is stated that God forbade the imitation of foreign dress, since all illicit stitched garments are disgusting in His eyes. Tracts were published against "tobacco, that devilish herb, cursed and abhorred of God." It was believed that the Redeemer and His mother appeared to some Russian women, and warned them that, as soon as Christians began to "drink" tobacco, lightning and thunder, frost and ice would be their punishment. Nikon's reforms were declared an attempt to replace Greek orthodoxy by Latin heresy. One of his leading opponents asked despairingly, what would happen if east and west should mix. The fanatics deemed it a heinous crime that the children of the Tsar Alexis should be allowed to gain some knowledge of astronomy, philosophy, and medicine. One of them wrote an insulting open letter to the Tsar. “How dare you keep at your Court men who have the hardihood to measure with a yardrule the tails of the stars? You feed the foreigners too well, instead of bidding your folk cling to the old customs." The schismatics offered bitter resistance to the policy of Peter the Great; they looked on him as Antichrist, on Moscow as Babylon.

The extent of undeveloped territory in Russia, the immeasurable waste reaches on its periphery, north, east, and south-east, facilitated the expansion of the Raskol. The schismatics could flee from persecution into the impenetrable forests and boundless steppes, and find places beyond the supervision of the Government. In this way they helped in the work of colonisation, founding villages and monasteries, and reclaiming land. With a nomadic instinct they united the habits

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of industry, and the camps of rebels were transformed into settlements, where agriculture and trade throve. Here-and it was the case with Russian monasteries in general, notably that of Solovetski — fanaticism was joined with attention to material interests. In Nikon's time the Raskolniki were counted by hundreds of thousands, at the present time they perhaps exceed fifteen millions. But this does not mean merely the people of the old faith. The name Raskol was extended to all varieties of dissidents and sects who alike repudiated the State Church, so that the men of the old faith are only one of numerous groups, which, as dissent is always hydra-headed, soon sprang up within, as well as beside, the communities of the original dissidents.

The Raskol expressed a protest against change in general, and thus E had a much deeper significance than might seem to be involved in the religious questions which led to the schism. It uttered the suspicions aroused in the people by the far from enthusiastic willingness of the Tsar himself, and the more pronounced zeal of a few others, to learn something from peoples beyond the borders of their land. In tracing the influence of Western Europe upon Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there is danger of exaggeration.. The process does not resemble a development; Russia under Alexis was, as regards civilisation, the same at heart as under Ivan the Great. In manners and modes of thought there had been no general alteration among the higher classes. The description of Adam Olearius in the seventeeth century presents the same picture as the reports of the travellers of the sixteenth. Yet a Peter the Great and his reforms would have been inconceivable a hundred years earlier. The West had come to Russia; it began to come in the sixteenth century, it was there in the seventeenth. But the process was not an internal development, but rather like the laying of a mine, which did not outwardly affect the land till Peter had the courage to explode it. The decisive step had been the admission of foreigners to reside at Moscow; and thus Western ideas, although they made no way except with a few isolated individuals, were there, on the spot, in the foreign or "German" suburb of Moscow, waiting to be assimilated. The increasing intercourse, both commercial and political, of Russia with Western countries, and the grudging and restricted hospitality extended to resident strangers, which marked the period with which we are dealing, were an indispensable condition of Peter's work, of its conception as well as its execution.

The mental stagnation of Russia was due mainly to her isolation from Europe in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. We have already observed that this isolation was due partly to the displacement of the centre of power from Kieff to the forest of Suzdalia and the tributaries of the Volga, and partly to the Tartar conquest. Another co-operative event may be found in the dismemberment and decline of the Eastern Empire (after 1204), through constant intercourse with

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which the Russian State had been kept in touch with a higher civilisation. But how was it that in the sixteenth century Russia should have been so completely beyond the horizon of Western Europe that the books of Paolo Giovio and Herberstein created a sensation as if a new land had been discovered, seeing the position which it occupied in relation to Poland, Lithuania, and Livonia? How was it that information about the Muscovite realm did not filter through more freely? The answer is that it was the deliberate policy of the intermediate States, which were continually at war with Moscow and jeopardised by her ambition, to keep the Russians at as low a level of civilisation as possible, to hinder them from improving their army in accordance with West European ideas, to prevent them from competing in indus tries; and they did what they could to shut Russia away and check intercourse with the West. This policy began to break down in the sixteenth century, but it was still a maxim. In 1547 the In 1547 the young Tsar Ivan made arrangements for the importation of engineers, mechanics, artists, and physicians from Germany; but the scheme was frustrated through the machinations of Livonia. Some years later, when commercial relations were established between England and Moscow, the King of Poland, deeply alarmed, wrote to Elizabeth urging that such intercourse was dangerous, and protesting, "in the interests of Christianity," against giving Russia, "the enemy of all free nations," the chance of obtaining munitions of war and of becoming initiated in European politics.

The interest of the West in Russia, which began in the sixteenth century, was not at first for its own sake, but in order to find an overland route to the East and destroy the monopoly of the Indian trade which the Portuguese enjoyed through their discovery of the ocean route. This was the object of the visits of the Genoese Paolo Centurione, in the reign of Vasili. They led to no result except indirectly to the publication of Giovio's book on Muscovy. In this book (1525) the notion was entertained that China might be reached by way of the ice sea. But it was not through the direct influence of Giovio or of Herberstein's later work (1549) that in 1553 three ships sailed from London, under the command of Sir Hugh Willoughby, to discover the northern passage. After passing the North Cape the vessels were separated by a storm. Willoughby's and another reached the coast of Lapland, where the crews, inexperienced in the hardships of an arctic winter, succumbed to cold and hunger. The Edward Bonaventure, of which Richard Chancellor was captain, had better luck. Carried to the White Sea, he sailed to the mouth of the Dvina and met a friendly reception from the astonished inhabitants. The Englishmen who set out to find China had alighted by chance on Russia. It was a quite unexpected discovery to them that here was the Muscovite realm, and that Ivan, son of Vasili, was its ruler. Provided with horses, they

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Foreign accounts of Russia

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Ivan proved

travelled to Moscow and were received by the Tsar. readier than might have been expected to favour commercial relations with England, and sent Chancellor back with a letter to Edward VI professing willingness to open negotiations. "If you send one of your Majesty's counsel to treat with us, whereby your country's merchants may with all kinds of wares make their market in our dominions, they shall have a free mart." Thus an accident led to the establishment of the English "Muscovy Company," of which Sebastian Cabot was the first Governor. English enterprise did something almost immediately towards beginning the development of the natural resources of Russia, by establishing manufactories for boiling tar, burning potash, making ropes; and the privileges conceded by Ivan gave the Company an advantage over other countries for some years, though in the following century Dutch rivalry, which had already begun by 1583, was here as in other fields successful.

The series of Western accounts of Russia was continued in the seventeenth century. We have the book of a French officer, Margeret, who took service in the Russian army; the work of the Dutch merchant, Isaac Massa, who lived at Moscow in the disturbed years 1601-10; the great description of Adam Olearius, who was attached to an embassy sent to Russia and Persia by Duke Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp, at whose Court he was astronomer and librarian, in the reign of Michael; we have the account of Dr Samuel Collins, physician to Alexis; we have the more penetrating work of the Saxon, Laurence Rinhuber, who saw in Russia not merely a field for trade or for scientific investigation, but for a civilising mission. The Travels of Olearius (1464) present us with a full picture of the surface of Russian society, illustrated to the eye by views of towns and costumes, and even the inspection of these affords a vivid impression of the great gulf dividing the country from Western Europe. The invincible ignorance and incredibly rude manners of the higher classes and their cringing servility to the Tsar, the gross superstition and the shameless drunkenness (largely due to the conditions of the climate) which prevailed among all classes, the universal mendacity, the detestation of new ideas, were features which impressed all travellers, and their testimony is borne out by one of the exceptional Russians who had come to see their own society as others saw it. Kotoshikhin, who in the reign of Alexis fled to Sweden to escape from the hostility of powerful officials, embraced Protestantism and wrote a remarkable work contrasting Russia with Europe. The Russians, he says, are arrogant and incapable, because they get no education except in pride, shamelessness, and lying. They will not send their children abroad to learn, fearing that if they came to know the mode of life and the religion of other folks and the blessing of freedom, they would forget to return home. It was indeed one of the arcana imperii of the Tsars to hinder their subjects from travelling, lest they should behold the spectacle of

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Russia as described by foreigners

[1588-1646 liberty elsewhere; but the law against leaving the country was one which few desired to violate, since converse with heretics was held to be unedifying, and there was the risk of dying in an ungodly land, which seemed to an orthodox Muscovite a horrible fate. The Tsars themselves were saturated with arrogant self-satisfaction and contempt for the rest of the world. When they sent an embassy to a foreign Court, they deemed that they were conferring a favour on the sovereign to whom it was sent. They had no idea what disgust and amusement the appearance of the clownish boiars-destitute of rudimentary conceptions of decency but devoted to pedantic ceremonial, knowing no lanbut their own, sometimes unable to pay their wayguage excited in the European capitals. On the Emperor Alexis it seems to have dawned that his nobles were not heaven-sent diplomatists, and he often employed foreigners as ambassadors-a transition from the rude Muscovite envoys to the well-qualified native diplomatists of the eighteenth century.

A word must be said of the tyrannical means, and disastrous for national economy, to which rulers resorted for raising revenue. They are described by Elizabeth's ambassador, Giles Fletcher. Messengers, he says, are sent into the provinces where the special commodities of the land grow. "There they forestall and engross sometimes one whole commodity, sometimes two or more," taking them at low prices fixed by themselves and selling at an excessive rate to their own or foreign merchants. "If they refuse to buy them, then they force them unto it. The like is done when any commodity, thus engrossed by the Emperor and received into his treasury, happeneth to decay or mar by long lying, or some other casualty. Which is forced upon the merchants to be bought by them at the Emperor's price, whether they will or no. This last year 1589 was engrossed all the wax of the country, so that none might deal with that commodity but the Emperor only." The Tsars augmented their revenue by acting as publicans and encouraging their subjects in indulgence in strong liquor. "In every great town of his realm," says Fletcher, "the Emperor hath a cabák or drinking-house, where is sold aquavitae, mead, beer, &c. Out of these he receiveth rent that amounteth to a great sum of money. Some yield 800, some 1000, some 2000 or 3000 roubles a year." It may be noted that the total yearly revenue of the Tsar in the reign of Theodore Ivanovich, arising from indirect sources, custom duties and fines, as well as from the direct imposts, the corn-tax and the hearth-tax, including the products of the Imperial domains, amounted to 1,430,000 roubles.

The fiscal expedient of monopolies was not peculiar to Russia, but their excessive nature is remarkable. Similar excess marked the monetary policy of Alexis when he depreciated the coinage as a last resort in the financial difficulties in which the Polish war had involved him. No civilised ruler stepped further on this disastrous path. All silver money

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