Moderniser of Russia

Andrei Vinius, 1641-1716

K. Boterbloem

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137323675
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

This book investigates Russia's transformation into a European Power by way of the activities of the tsarist translator and official Andrei Vinius, who became an important advisor to Peter the Great. Vinius emerges as an influential conduit of Western culture and technology, who played a key role in transforming Muscovy into Russia.

1

The Disappearing Dutch and Russia’s Modernization

Historians agree that backward Muscovy, a country with a virtually natural economy where most people eked out an existence at subsistence level and with an utterly fragile military defense (as had been proven by the Polish occupation of Moscow from 1610 to 1612), became Russia, an expansionist European power and colonial empire (even if the standard of living remained low), under the rule of the first three generations of Romanov tsars (1613–1725). This resulted from a strenuous effort on the part of the Russian government during this (and subsequent) period(s). Russia’s rise is often contrasted to the the fate of Poland-Lithuania, which fell into a rapid decline by 1700 and had disappeared from the map of Europe a century later. Whether the goal of the Russian state’s prospering justified the means used to reach it remains an open question; in becoming a Great Power, the exploitation of the tsars’ subjects was extreme.

In ever more determined fashion, the tsars and their advisors pursued a policy of modernization under Mikhail (r. 1613–45; he coruled with his father Patriarch Filaret from 1619 to 1633), Aleksei (r. 1645–76), Fyodor III (r. 1676–82), and Sofia (r. 1682–89), culminating with Peter the Great’s reign (r. 1689–1725). It is true that Peter was the great reformer of the line, possibly a revolutionary enthroned, but Romanov Russia’s modernization began under Mikhail, and always involved the advice and aid of foreigners. Its focus was predominantly militarily, but it was not just (modern, military) technology that made Russia into the ranking Great Power of Christian Eastern Europe. From the days of Ivan III (r. 1462– 1505), her armed forces needed to be maintained on the basis of an agriculture struggling to yield a surplus and on the proceedings extracted from the trade in various scarce goods in high demand in Europe, such as animal pelts. And her military required a bureaucratic infrastructure to collect revenue to pay for its personnel, as well as for the costs deriving from its muster, training, and dispatch on campaigns from the Caucasus to Kyiv and Riga.

Andrei Vinius was a bureaucrat who helped to sustain this military, but in novel ways. He was a Russian with Western roots who was highly sensitive to the epochal changes developing capitalism triggered in Western Europe. He involved himself in importing foreign technology, adopted foreign (modern) innovations to Russian circumstances, introduced Western ways by sluicing ample information about them to the tsar, and facilitated the acceptance of the ever-increasing Western presence in Russia. It bears first of all investigation what this modernization meant in Vinius’s Russia, and what role Vinius played in this process.

Vinius concomitantly exemplifies a typical European seventeenth-century figure, a representative of an era of sustained contact and cultural exchange that went far beyond the chance meetings that characterized the first European attempts to explore a world beyond the narrow confines of Latin Christendom.¹ Before 1600, Columbus had accidently “discovered” the Americas, and Richard Chancellor had accidentally landed at the mouth of the northern Dvina in 1553. Flemish pioneers such as Filips Winterkoning, Jan van de Walle, and Olivier Brunel also were looking for China rather than Russia when they reached the White Sea in the late sixteenth century.² But as much as the Americas proved an unexpected opportunity for the Spaniards, so was Russia for the English or Dutch. The seventeenth century became one of “genuine communication” between northwestern Europe and this territory, remote and exotic prior to 1600.³ Or, as Timothy Brook says it most eloquently, after 1600, “people of different cultural origins … banded together to journey through a dim landscape toward the promise of a future that remain[ed] unrevealed.”⁴

* * *

Meanwhile, his Tsarist Majesty sent his chancellor Emel’ian Ukraintsev, previously envoy of his esteemed Tsarist Majesty in Holland, to our secretary [Geheim-schrijver] and several others from among the lord ambassador’s retinue who observed the ceremony from the other side of the river … accompanied by his Tsarist Majesty’s translator, Mr. Andreas Winius, to ask after their health and whether they had enjoyed a good journey. When this was translated by Mr. Winius, the translator [Abraham] van Asperen replied in the name of everyone that they prayed to God that He would keep his Tsarist Majesty healthy …⁵

Unfortunately, the Omnipotent did not answer the pious Dutchmen’s prayer in January 1676: Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich (1629–76), who seemed robust attending the Epiphany ceremony of consecrating the river Moskva’s water, was dead three weeks later. In contrast, Emel’ian Ignat’evich Ukraintsev (1641–1708) and Andrei Andreevich Vinius truly enjoyed a boisterous good health. Each was in the midst of a successful career in Muscovy’s central government that was to span half a century; it allowed them an extraordinary affluent life during which they eventually became in-laws.⁶ By the 1690s, they ranked among the leading bureaucrats of the tsarist empire, and proved instrumental in helping Aleksei’s son Peter the Great unleash his radical reforms. During his apprentice years (that came to a close with his return from Western Europe in 1698), Peter seems to have seen in these expert diplomats and government administrators the sort of model aides he needed to transform Russia.⁷

The long careers of Ukraintsev and Vinius show the influential role played in modernizing their country by these Russian chancellery bureaucrats, contemporaries of Patrick Gordon (1635–99), Nicolae Spafari-Milescu (1636–1708), Frans Timmerman (1644–1702), and François Lefort (1656–99), key expatriates equally instrumental in steering Peter to his embrace of Western-European ways.⁸ Vinius’s and Ukraintsev’s particularly crucial role between 1689 and the early 1700s suggests that in launching his great reforms Peter did not merely rely on those boon companions to whom he took a shine because of their attractive personalities (a topic to which we will return in a subsequent chapter).⁹ Indeed, the main catalyst for the early modernization of Russia, the Military Revolution, was as much as elsewhere underwritten by “bureaucratization,” and bureaucrats.¹⁰

Since at least the days of V.O. Kliuchevskii (1841–1911)’s lectures in Moscow, especially the Foreign-Office supervisors Afanasii Ordin-Nashchokin, Artamon Matveev, and Vasilii Golitsyn have been singled out as the leading forerunners of Peter in advancing this modernization offensive between 1667 and 1689. But they could not have used the Posol’skii prikaz (Foreign Office) as a conduit for the introduction of modern ideas and technology in Muscovy if it was not for the help and advice they received from career officials such as Vinius or Ukraintsev.¹¹ “Modernization” is a complex and much debated concept, but I will understand it here through Geraldine Phipps’ definition, which posits that the introduction of “technological, procedural, and practical innovations in important areas” of the economy, government, and military, led to “changes in significant areas of society, as in social and cultural mores, political and religious ideology and practices, law, language, and national character.” ¹² In addition, Phipps suggests, some of these innovations derived from adopting “directly foreign techniques, [producing] native versions of foreign models, and [creating] new national institutions and technology.”¹³ Virtually all these foreign novelties originated in Christian Europe west of Muscovy, and I will therefore use “modernization” interchangeably with “Westernization” in the following pages.

As a caveat, it should be stressed that this modernization was not a continuous, smooth process, and that, even if it profoundly affected the lives of Russia’s elite, it often altered very little in the lives of the peasantry, whether Slavonic and non-Slavonic, and whether Orthodox or not. In fact, it may have worsened their condition, to which I already referred in the introduction of this chapter. For most of them, some sort of bondage remained the norm until the nineteenth century. Almost until 1905, the Russian rulers found it difficult to boost this predominantly rural economy to higher production levels. Instead, they reverted to intensifying their extraction of the meager surplus generated by the tillers of the soil, an effort which Vinius pursued as well with some vigour late in life (see Chapter 9). Since serfdom was entrenched long before its definitive promulgation in the 1649 Law Code, the greatest change that confronted the Orthodox peasants during Vinius’s lifetime was that of the reforms of religious rituals introduced during the 1650s, which was confirmed in 1667. Those reforms, though, can only with difficulty be grouped under the rubric of “modernization.”

“Elite” is a vague term; perhaps “hegemonic class” in the Gramscian sense is a more illuminating term because it conveys better how the Russian court and aristocracy comprehensively dominated the country politically and economically.¹⁴ Despite Peter’s alleged support for a meritocracy, joining this elite remained a tall order for any commoner in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. This class was composed of both the upper nobility (the boyars) and the middling and lower nobles (the dvorianstvo), with a sprinkling of non-noble clergy and merchants added to it. Those commoners (among them many foreign mercenaries but also some government clerks are encountered) who did rise to the top were eventually bestowed with noble titles, either in haphazard manner before the introduction of the Table of Ranks in 1722, or by the formalized manner it mandated thereafter. Vinius himself provides an interesting instance of this pre-1722 ennoblement.

It may surprise today’s reader that someone from Vinius’s humble background (his grandfather first settled as a tailor in Amsterdam) aspired to be a member of this exclusive group rather than to exhibit egalitarian convictions, since Vinius appears so Dutch in his outlook (more about this in the next chapter). But the United Provinces, despite being a republic and its small hereditary aristocracy, was a country run by and for an upper crust that began to behave more and more as an upper class, once the most profound shocks of its revolt against Philip II (1527–98) had abated.¹⁵ It is not wholly coincidental that during the eighteenth century the Dutch patrician spoke his French as well as the Russian noble. Already in the seventeenth century, many among the elite in Holland acquired landed estates with their accompanying title, and tried to suppress as much as possible the humble station from which their fathers or grandfathers had risen.¹⁶ The contempt for the underclass was as profound in Holland as it was in Russia. From our perspective, it appears that the Republic’s laborers’ legal freedom was merely convenient to Dutch capitalists in their exploitation of them rather than born of a desire to grant them a human dignity to which all were entitled. Similarly, the unfree status of peasants suited Russia’s aristocrats best in her differently organized society and economy.

There were nonetheless some profound differences between the Republic and Russia, and one of them appears not to have been overcome until industrialization affected Russia in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Most of the (male) population of the Republic (and especially in the Western provinces of Holland and Zeeland as well as perhaps Friesland) seems to have been touched by the enterprising spirit that had made a few of them wealthy and powerful. The Russian serf, in contrast, seems much more passive and resigned to his fate. This contrast is perhaps, though, more apparent than real. Apart from the massive peasant rebellions (and other minor uprisings), the incidence of flight by Russian peasants to remote regions where no lord might find them was significant.¹⁷ Such flight bespeaks considerable enterprise, and such rebellions belie any passive resignation. Still, such actions appear to indicate human desperation; a modern spirit that one can better oneself in life given sustained effort was much more diffused across Dutch society than it was in Muscovy.¹⁸ Even Tsar Peter failed to understand that merely forcing the elite to become Westernized was insufficient if he wanted to truly modernize all of his subjects. In the Dutch Republic, the capitalist ethos trickled down, but in the Russian empire the modern mindset remained limited to its upper class.

But one cannot deny that Russia’s technological and military modernization at least allowed the tsars to maintain their state’s independence and expand its size. Andrei Vinius’s activities to help accomplish this feat are especially intriguing, inasmuch as they consistently show him to be someone wielding an unusual creative imagination for his time. His initiatives may have inspired some of Peter’s actions. Vinius was much more than a mere loyal and competent servant as were other top-level bureaucrats such as Ukraintsev, Nikita Zotov (1643–1717; the tsar’s sometime tutor and the chief of Peter’s mock court), or Prokopii Bogdanovich Voznitsyn (f. 1698; one of the leaders with Lefort of the Grand Embassy of 1697–98). Vinius developed several bold plans to modernize Russian society’s organization along Western-European lines long before the advent of Peter’s personal reign in 1689.¹⁹ He audaciously submitted them to Muscovy’s rulers, who before Peter’s time were reluctant to adopt such schemes (and perhaps taken aback by a subordinate chancellery clerk conjuring u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction
• 1. The Disappearing Dutch and Russia’s Modernization
• 2. The Young Vinius
• 3. At the Foreign Office
• 4. Intrepid Diplomat
• 5. The Miloslavskii Ascendancy: Medicine and Mail
• 6. Seeker in an Age of Transition
• 7. Peter’s Confidant
• 8. At the Siberian Desk
• 9. Fall, Flight, and Rehabilitation
• 10. Vinius’s Book Collection
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index