Paul Bushkovitch

The Epiphany Ceremony of the Russian Court in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

The 4 of January [sic], which was Twelftide with them, the Emperour [Ivan Groznyi] with his brother and all his nobles, all most richly apparelled with gold, pearls, precious stones and costly furres, with a crown upon his head of Tartarian fashion, went to the Church in procession with the Metropolitan [Makarii], and divers bishops and priests . .. then he came out of the church, and went with the procession upon the river, being all frozen, and there standing bareheaded, with all his nobles; there was a hole in the ice, and the Metropolitan hallowed the waters with great solemnitie and service, and did cast of the said water upon the Emperours sonne and the Nobilitie.

Taxation, Tax Farming, and Merchants in Sixteenth-Century Russia

The merchant is a shadowy if not invisible figure in the accounts of the political and economic life of the Russian state in the sixteenth century. Apart from a few exceptional cases, very little is known of his commercial dealings. 1-is political-administrative activities rarely appear in discussions of the reigns of Ivan the Terrible and his immediate successors. Because few sources survive that permit an investigation of the merchants place in the Russian economy, somne scholars have concluded that the part the merchant played was minor. Yet the sixteenth-centuiry Russian merchant was not an insignificant figure. Focusing onI the merchants administrative role can shed light on his importance, since a relatively large number of documents survive which illuminate two of his functions: first, his role in the collection of the tolls (tamga), a kind of sales tax theoretically imposed on every sale made in nmarketplaces; and, second, his role in the collection of tlhe revenue conming from the adcministration of the kabaki (state-run taverns) The revenue from these two sources was already large in the sixteenth century and it grew after 1600, so that from a financial point of view alone the administration of tolls and taverns merits serious investigation. In addition, this administrative system was the most importaint point of contact between the merchants and the state; hence, the political role of the merchants cannot be considered withouit reference to their administrative activity. Certain assumptions about the nature of sixteenth-century Russian society have caused scholars to ignore the merchants administrative role. A fundamnental preconception has been the view of Russia as an almost entirely agrarian society; indeed, some historians consider it virtually a natuiral economy. The adininistration of a tax that fell on colmmerce attracted little interest, and the tiaglo, the direct tax, was thought (without proof) to be the primary finanCial obligation of townsmen. As a result, the town itself has often been described as merely a collection of people bound together by the tiaglo rather than as a natural econotiic unit. Trhe repeated stress on the inmportance of the tiacglo in tlle towns is all the more remarkable in the face of data-made known over half a century ago-wwhich suggest the opposite. From tl-he beginning ot the seventeenth centuiry the governmnent collected virttually all of its revenue in the towns trorn toll and tavern collections. In 1614/15, the town of Nizhnii Novgorod paid the sum of 460 ruibles in direct taxes. in contrast to a toll collect.ion of 12,252 rubles and a taveri collection of 5,000 rubles (the latter from tax farmlers).2 It is clear, then,

A Concise History of Russia by Paul Bushkovitch

Accessible to students, tourists, and general readers alike, this book provides a broad overview of Russian history since the ninth century. Paul Bushkovitch emphasizes the enormous changes in the understanding of Russian history resulting from the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, new material has come to light on the history of the Soviet era, providing new conceptions of Russia’s pre-revolutionary past. The book traces not only the political history of Russia, but also developments in its literature, art, and science. Bushkovitch describes well-known cultural figures, such as Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Mendeleev in their institutional and historical contexts. Though the 1917 revolution, the resulting Soviet system, and the Cold War were a crucial part of Russian and world history, Bushkovitch presents earlier developments as more than just a prelude to Bolshevik power.

The vasiliologion of Nikolai Spafarii Milescu

The Romanian writer Nikolae Milescu (Nikolai Gavrilovich Spafarii) was the author of several books designed for the tsar and the Russian court in the 1670s. Working under the patronage of Tsar Alekseis favorite, Artamon Matveev, Spafarii composed an account of exemplary monarchs from the past called Vasiliologion. He presented ancient and Biblical monarchs as just and wise but also as great conquerors and builders of cities, even when they were pagans. His portrait of Russian monarchs was closer to traditional Orthodox conceptions, but still stressed military victory and building. Spafarii was one of the first writers in Russia to introduce the Aristotelian political terms, monarchy and aristocracy.

Zhitie mitropolita Filippa: Issledovanie i teksty [The Life of Metropolitan Filipp: A Study and Texts], and: Sviataia Rus': Agiografiia, istoriia, ierarkhiia [Holy Russia: Hagiography, History, Hierarchy] (review)

Imagine how the history of medieval England would appear if the texts with the life and martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket had never been published until the 21st century. We would not understand the relations of church and crown, the reign of King Henry II, or the meaning of the highly successful cult of St. Thomas centered on his shrine in Canterbury Cathedral. Exactly this situation has existed for the reign of Ivan IV the Terrible and 16thcentury Russia. In Ivan’s reign there were two crucial events in church–state relations, the Council of a Hundred Chapters in 1551 and the short metropolitanate of Filipp, 1566–69. The council’s results in the form of the Stoglav were published three times in the course of the 1860s, several times since then, were even translated into French, and have been the object of numerous studies. The life (zhitie) of Filipp, by contrast, was first published in 2000–4, but only from a small number of manuscripts. I. A. Lobakova now provides the scholar with the first publication of the crucial “Short Redaction” as well as the “Tulupov” and “Kolychev” redactions, based on all manuscripts known to her. She argues that the rare “Short Redaction” was composed in the Solovetskii Monastery in the 1590s on the basis of a roughly contemporary (hypothetical) archetype, which in turn also formed the basis of the widely copied “Tulupov Redaction” from the 1600s and another very rare “Kolychev Redaction” in the 1610s. In turn, these versions gave rise to other

State Power and Community in Early Modern Russia: The Case of Kozlov, 1635-1649, and: Liudi Sankt-Peterburgskogo ostrova petrovskogo vremeni [The People of St. Petersburg Island in the Petrine Era] (review)

Of all the major European countries Russia is perhaps most deficient in local history, whether of an antiquarian or a more scholarly type. In their infancy before the Revolution, local historical studies were cut off at the end of the 1920s and revived only with the political changes of the 1980s. Since then, numerous publications have appeared and begun to provide a more complex picture of the Russian state and society outside the capitals. The operations of the Russian state in the provinces have been the subject of great generalizations since the pioneering work of the 19th-century historians Boris Nikolaevich Chicherin, Aleksandr Sergeevich LappoDanilevskii, and others. Almost all of them relied primarily on sources that reflected legal norms and created all-embracing studies that treated local areas merely as cases. In contrast, Brian Davies analyzes a particular district, the southern steppe town of Kozlov (Michurinsk on today’s map) during a brief but important period of the 17th century. The years in question fall between the recovery from the Time of Troubles (1598–1613) and the mid-century riots and rebellions in the Russian towns and coincide with the extensive reinforcement of the southern frontier. Davies’s primary aim is to reconstruct the relations of the state, both central authorities and the local voevoda (military governor), to the population of the town and its district, primarily consisting of odnodvortsy who were expected to perform military service as the town’s garrison with the rank of deti boiarskie (the

The Romanov Transformation, 1613–1725

The great transformation of the Russian Army in the century between the Time of Troubles (1598–1613) and the death of Peter the Great in 1725 came about because of the changing international situation of Russia, the decades of state-building that culminated in Peter’s actions, and the Euro-peanization of Russian culture.

The Merchants of Moscow, 1580-1650.

This is a controversial study of Russian economic history before the reforms of Peter the Great. Professor Bushkovitch describes the trade of the Moscow merchants with Western Europe (principally England and Holland). Eastern Europe and the Near East, as well as their activities in industry and in government service. Using evidence from Moscow archives, he challenges the conventional view that Russias economic development lagged in this period because of the governments absolute control over and debiliatation of the merchant class. He concludes instead that this was an era of great prosperity and economic expansion for Russia, largely as a result of financial decisions made by a stable, prosperous and essentially autonomous merchant class. The book will be of interest to historians of this period, to students of Russia before Peter the Great and to economic historians generally.