Russka: The Novel of Russia

  Indeed the campaign to the Tatar city out on the eastern reaches of the Volga had resembled, at times, a mighty pilgrimage. Not only were the icons carried before the troops, but Ivan’s own crucifix, containing a piece of the True Cross, was brought from Moscow; priests had sprinkled holy water all over the camp to drive away the bad weather that was hampering the siege. And Ivan’s prayers had indeed been answered. He had prayed so long in his tent that some had even said he was afraid to join his troops, but Boris could not believe that. Was it not at the very moment in the liturgy when the priest had exclaimed: ‘Your enemies shall bow down before you,’ that the Russian mines had exploded and breached the stout oaken walls of Tatar Kazan? And was it not the feast of the Protection of the Mother of God when this had occurred?

  He had never doubted the Tsar for a moment. Nor had he any doubt that Moscow was destined to lead the Christian world – she was the third Rome, until the end of days. God had given so many signs.

  Sixty years before – in the year, by the western count, 1492 – the Russians had assumed the world would end. Indeed, it is a historical fact that for the year 1493, or 7001 by the old Russian count, the Orthodox Church had not even troubled to calculate the date of Easter. When, therefore, the millennium failed to arrive, there was genuine and official astonishment. What could it mean?

  It meant, certain important churchmen decided, that a new age was beginning – an age which Moscow must surely be destined to lead. And so, in the reign of Ivan the Great and his successors, there began in the state of Muscovy the idea that Moscow was the third Rome.

  After all, the imperial city of Constantinople, the second Rome, had fallen to the Turks. St Sophia was now a mosque. Though the Russian Church had waited patiently for the Greek Patriarch to assume his former authority, he had continued to be no more than a puppet of the Turkish ruler; and as the years passed, it became clear that the Metropolitan in Moscow was, for all practical purposes, the true leader of Eastern Orthodoxy.

  An imperial destiny. The young Tsar’s grandfather, Ivan the Great, had married a princess of the old imperial family of Constantinople; from this date, the Russian royal family had proudly taken the double-headed eagle – the crest of the rulers of the fallen Roman city – as their own.

  Boris looked across with reverence at the tall figure by his side. The Tsar had fallen silent and seemed to be lost in thought again.

  Then he sighed.

  ‘Russia has a great destiny,’ he remarked sadly, ‘yet I have more to overcome within the borders of my land even than outside.’

  How Boris felt for him. He knew how the bold Shuisky princes – of more senior descent than Ivan from Alexander Nevsky – had humiliated him as a boy; he knew how they and others had tried to undo the work of the great House of Moscow and replace the Tsar’s rule with that of the magnates. He thought of how, when a terrible fire had swept through Moscow only five years before, the Moscow mob had blamed Ivan’s mother’s Polish family and dragged his uncle out of the Assumption Cathedral itself and butchered him. They had even, he remembered, threatened to kill Ivan too.

  Ivan’s enemies tried to block all he did; there were many, Boris had heard, who were even saying that the expedition to Kazan was a waste of money.

  And now the young Tsar was turning to him – to him, Boris Bobrov from a miserable little estate by Russka – he was turning to him by the dark waters of the Volga and saying quietly: ‘I need such men as you.’ A moment later he had gone and Boris, trying to see him, could only whisper fervently after him, into the shadows: ‘I am yours,’ to which he added that most awesome of all tides: ‘Gosuda’ – sovereign, lord of all.

  He had stayed there, trembling with excitement, as the faint dawn at last began to appear in the east.

  As the boats continued their journey up the great River Volga that day, Boris was still just as excited by late afternoon as he had been early that morning. What might the meeting with the young Tsar lead to? Was this a prelude to a step forward for his family?

  Boris, son of David, surnamed Bobrov. The custom of naming people had changed in recent generations. None, nowadays, but princes and the greatest boyars used the full form of patronymic, with its ending in – vich. Tsar Ivan, for instance, was Ivan Vasilevich but he, a humble noble, was only Boris Davidov, son of David – not Davidovich. To define his identity more precisely, however, a Russian might add to these two names a third – usually the name by which his grandfather was best known. Sometimes this was a baptismal name, like Ivan, so that the third name became Ivanova, shortened to Ivanov. Or it might be a nickname.

  It was in this way, during the sixteenth century, that family names began to appear, somewhat late, in Russia. For this third name was sometimes held over to later generations – though the practice was still at the individual’s choice, and a family, having chosen a surname, might easily alter it several times.

  Boris’s family were proud of their name. It was, they always insisted, Ivan the Great himself who had given Boris’s greatgrandfather the nickname ‘Bobr’, meaning beaver: though whether it was because he liked to wear a beaver coat, or that he was hardworking, or whether that awesome monarch decided this minor nobleman looked like a beaver, no one seemed to know. But Bobrov the family had decided to be called, and that was that. The Mighty Beaver, they called this ancestor respectfully. It was his father who had given the monastery at Russka its beautiful icon by Rublev, and the family saw to it, with progressively more modest donations, that both men were still remembered by the monks in their prayers.

  For the family of Bobrov had fallen from what they had been in former times. The decline had been gradual and was entirely typical of Russian noble families.

  In the first place, the estates had been divided many times over the generations, and the last three had failed to acquire new ones. The greatest blow had been when Boris’s grandfather, having become, like so many of his class, hopelessly in debt to the local monastery, had handed over to it the entire village of Russka, keeping for himself only the lands at Dirty Place. The family still had a house within the walls of Russka which the monastery let them have at a modest rent; and since Boris felt that the name of Dirty Place sounded undignified, he preferred to say that he came from Russka.

  One day, he hoped, I’ll build Dirty Place up into something and then perhaps I’ll change its name to Bobrov.

  But until that time it was just a shabby little hamlet and it was all he had.

  In some ways he was lucky. The estate at Dirty Place, though rather reduced by subdivision, was still on good soil and he was the sole heir. It was also a votchina – it belonged to him absolutely by inheritance. In the last half century, less and less land was being held as votchina, and more and more was being held, either by impoverished landowners or by new men, as pomestie – that is, on condition of service to the prince. And though in practice pomestie land often passed to the next generation of a family, it only did so at the prince’s pleasure. Even so, Boris’s income was hardly enough to pay for horses and armour and support him through the year. If the family was ever to recover its former state, he must gain the favour of the prince.

  The meeting with the Tsar had been the most important thing that had happened to him so far in his life. But even though the Tsar now knew his name, he must do more to attract his hero’s attention. The question was, what?

  In late afternoon, they passed an area on the left bank where the woods gave way to a long strip of steppe; and it was while they went by that Boris saw a motley collection of houses about a mile away. He gave a faint snort of disgust as, staring at them, he saw that they were moving.

  ‘Tatars,’ he murmured.

  The Tatars on Muscovy’s borders often lived in these strange, mobile houses – not so much caravans, like those used by the gypsies of western Europe, as wooden huts with small wheels underneath them. To the Tatars, the fixed abodes of the Russians, attracting rats and all kinds of vermin, were like pigsties. To Boris their mobil
e homes proved that they were shifting and untrustworthy.

  The sight of these vagrants made him think about the two he had captured. He looked down at them. They were a pair of stocky, flat-faced fellows with shaved heads; when they spoke, their voices were deep and loud.

  They bray like asses, he thought.

  And they were Moslems.

  Though the campaign had been a crusade, it was the Tsar’s policy that the Tatar populations he conquered should be converted to Christianity by persuasion, not by force. Indeed, to weaken their resistance, his emissaries were careful to point out to the Tatars that the empire of Muscovy already contained Moslem communities whom the Tsar allowed to worship in peace. But of course, if a Tatar wished to enter the Tsar’s personal service, he must be a Christian; for Ivan himself was strict and devout.

  If I am to impress the Tsar, Boris considered, I must show that I too am devout.

  The two Tatars would convert that night. And soon, he felt sure, he too would become one of the Tsar’s chosen few – his best men.

  The afternoon was overcast, but ahead of them a break in the grey clouds had allowed mighty shafts of sunlight to descend, which lit up an area of broken forest causing it to shine with an almost unnatural gleam. And to Boris, gazing eagerly towards the west, it seemed as though this sunlit patch of land, aspiring to escape from the endless, dull stasis of the plain, had gathered itself together in a pool of golden fire, and was being drawn up into the sky like a huge pillar of prayer.

  At dawn the next morning the two Tatars were baptized by one of the priests travelling with them. Following the Russian custom, they were fully immersed, three times, in the River Volga.

  The young Tsar could not have failed to notice it.

  Two days later, they arrived at the great frontier city of Nizhni Novgorod.

  It lay on a hill, frowning over the junction of the Volga and the Oka, the last eastern bastion of old Russia. Eastward from Nizhni Novgorod lay the huge forests where the Mordvinians dwelt. Westward lay the heart of Muscovy. The city’s high walls and its white churches stared out over the Eurasian plain as though to say: ‘Here is the land of the Holy Tsar – unshakeable.’

  At Nizhni Novgorod was the great Macarius Monastery, with its enormous fair. As he walked its streets, Boris smiled. It was good to be home.

  The returning army was popular at Nizhni Novgorod. The Tatars had so often disrupted their affairs in the past – and besides, Kazan was their rival in the trade with the east. The people showed their gratitude in every way.

  It was mid-afternoon, the end of the working day, when he met the girl. She was standing outside a long wooden building that contained a public bath house. She was typical of her kind. Whereas the women of the upper classes were kept in virtual seclusion and did not show their faces in public, the women of the people liked to make a display of themselves.

  Her face was painted white, her lips bright red. Her eyes were set wide apart and shaped like almonds. She was at least half Mordvinian, he supposed. Her eyebrows were painted black. She wore a long embroidered gown that must have been expensive, and from under which peeped two bright red shoes that tapped out a little rhythm on the ground, from time to time, to keep themselves occupied. On her head was a red velvet cap. Her eyes looked bored, because nothing was happening, but when she saw young Boris staring at her, they became first watchful, then faintly amused. As he walked up to her she smiled, and he saw that her teeth were black.

  It was done with mercury, this blackening of the teeth, and Boris had heard the custom was borrowed from the Tatars. The first time he had gone with one of these women, her black teeth had repelled him, but he had learned to get used to it.

  They stopped, briefly, at a little drinking booth where they were serving vodka. He liked this spirit that went down one so easily, even though at this time it was mainly used by the lower classes. It was not a Russian drink at all, but had started to enter Russia from the west through Poland in the last century. Indeed, its very name was only the mispronunciation by Russian merchants of the Latin name it bore: aqua vitae.

  They finished their drink. He felt a warm surge run through him as she took him to her lodgings.

  She proved to be warm, and surprisingly supple.

  Afterwards, when he had paid her, she asked him if he were married, and hearing he was about to be, laughed merrily.

  ‘Keep her locked up,’ she cried, ‘and never trust her.’ Then she moved lightly away, in her red shoes, humming to herself.

  It was with a shock, at that very moment, that Boris turned to see that a group of people had just come out of a church opposite. They were dressed in furs and did not seem anxious to attract particular attention, but Boris immediately recognized the tall young figure in their midst.

  He knew very well that Tsar Ivan could not even ride near a church without paying it a visit: obviously this had been another of his sessions of prayer. But had the devout sovereign seen him with the girl? He looked at him nervously.

  It was obvious that he had. His piercing eyes shot after the girl then bored into Boris. The youth held his breath.

  Then Ivan laughed – a sharp, rather nasal laugh – and his party moved rapidly away.

  Boris had no doubt he had been recognized: Ivan missed nothing. But had it altered the sovereign’s opinion of him – had it affected his prospects? There was no way of knowing.

  It was two days before the end of October when they entered the mighty city of Moscow.

  How thrilling the journey had been. They had come overland from Nizhni Novgorod, through the very heartland of Muscovy. First they had come to the ancient, high-walled city of Vladimir, where they learned that Tsar Ivan’s wife had just given him a son. Then, despite his eagerness to reach the capital, Ivan had taken a large party first to nearby Suzdal, and then across to the great Monastery of Trinity St Sergius, forty miles north of the capital, in order that he could give proper thanks to God at each place.

  And as he followed the Tsar to these fortress monasteries and powerful old cities, deep in the forest and meadowland of Russia, it seemed to Boris that he saw God’s purpose and the destiny of the young Tsar more clearly than ever before.

  Truly, he thought, the endless steppe will be conquered at last by Russia’s mighty heart.

  There was the lightest snow in the air that day, so thin and sparse that it hardly seemed to be falling at all, but danced in the air instead, brushing carelessly against the rooftops without settling and only dusting the ground.

  The city occupied a noble setting at the meeting of the Moskva and Yausa Rivers, with the long, low line of the Sparrow Hills behind. Boris still found its size overwhelming.

  Indeed, though Boris did not know it, Moscow was then one of the greatest cities in all Europe – as big as sprawling London or powerful Milan. Its suburbs stretched so far out into the surrounding villages that it was hard even to say where the city began. First one encountered great monasteries with walls like castles, then the outer suburbs with their mills, orchards and gardens. And then one came to the great earth rampart that enclosed the Earth Town, where the humble classes lived; then the masonry walls of the White Town, the middle-class quarters; and at last the kitaygorod, the rich quarter, beside the towering walls of the mighty Kremlin itself.

  Already, as they moved through the outer suburbs, there were crowds by the road. Everywhere, it seemed, bells were pealing through the snow. Huge shapes – walls, towers, the golden domes of the monasteries – loomed in the middle distance out of the grey haze of the snow-dusted sky.

  And then, as they finally approached the citadel – as though in welcome – the snow died away and there before them, glowing strangely under the lowering orange light of the snow clouds, lay the mighty city.

  Boris caught his breath at the sight. The cavalrymen in their pointed helmets or their tall, cylindrical fur hats rode so proudly towards the city gates; on each side of them marched the Tsar’s new crack infantry corps of musketeers ??
? the streltsy – and other halberdiers who, Boris could see, were already having trouble containing the thickening and enthusiastic crowd that was streaming out of the gates in Moscow’s mighty walls.

  How splendid, and how powerful. Great towers rose at intervals along the city walls – towers with high pyramidal roofs like pointed tents. And enclosed behind them lay the great sea of wooden houses, interrupted by stone towers and domes, that was the city.

  Moscow: city of the imperial Tsars. When they had crowned Ivan, they had put a cap of fur and gold upon his head and claimed it had belonged to Monomakh, greatest of princes in the days of the ancient Rus. But the autocrats of Moscow went far beyond anything that Monomakh would have dreamed of in the ancient days of Kiev. Each time a city fell, its princely family was broken and made servants of the state; and its leading boyars were resettled in other provinces. When the young Tsar’s grandfather had taken over Novgorod, he had even taken away the bell they used to summon the veche, in order to mark that the citizens’ ancient freedoms were gone for ever. The Moscow family had invented a genealogy which traced their ancestry to the great Roman emperor Augustus, at the time of Christ. In the Kremlin now, splendid cathedrals by Italian architects had appeared beside the onion domes and towers of its older churches and monasteries so that, here in the heart of this northern forest empire, one might, for an instant, think oneself before a Florentine palazzo.

  Moscow: city of Church and state. In the opinion of many churchmen, the state and religious authorities should rule together in perfect sympathy. This was the Byzantine ideal of the old Roman Empire of the east. And so it was in Moscow. Had not young Ivan already set out two great programmes of reforms, one for his administration and one for the Church? The young Tsar would not tolerate magnates who oppressed the people, nor clergy who were lax or immoral in their habits. Did not each great law code have a hundred chapters? For Ivan liked such mighty symmetry.