Orthodox Russia in Crisis: Church and Nation in the Time of Troubles by Isaiah Gruber (review)

Isaiah Gruber's new book offers a lively account and an exciting analysis of Russia's "Time of Troubles," 1598-1613—a period of dynastic collapse, social upheaval, and foreign invasion.

The book is built in carefully planned layers. After a general stage-setting introduction, it opens with an exploration of the trope of Russia as "New Israel," or God's Chosen People, imbued with particular sanctity but also burdened with weighty responsibilities. Gruber notes that most, if not all, early-modern Christian states invoked New Israel imagery, but in Muscovy these ideas gained heightened trenchancy because of Russia's status as the sole surviving Orthodox state.

The second chapter switches gears, documenting the ups and downs (mostly ups) of monastic business ventures, especially the salt trade, the inflows and outflows of their accounts, and their favored position relative to the tsarist administration. This chapter, in combination with its sequel, chapter 4, will prove essential to the layered argument that Gruber builds. The bottom-line finding is that the monasteries and the patriarchate were widely, and accurately, viewed as in cahoots with the tsarist administration, cushioned from economic hardship by their great wealth and unsympathetic to the desperate plight of starving Muscovites. This reputation would contribute to the most important religious trend that Gruber highlights as the book progresses: the disintegration of any shared sense of Orthodox truth and the opening of a cacophonous space for conflicting and competing claims to representing divine will.

If the even-numbered chapters explore ecclesiastical wealth, political insider status, and lack of charitable activity, the odd numbered chapters follow the political ideologies and rhetorics of legitimation concocted by church leaders through the dizzying sequence of regime changes of the Troubles. When the ancient tsarist line died out with Ivan the Terrible's last son in 1598, the newly created patriarch, Iyov, manufactured what Gruber casts as a startlingly novel set of justifications for the elevation of Boris Godunov to the throne. Iyov experimented and tinkered, ultimately producing a game-changing set of criteria. Along with familiar elements of tsarist succession such as divine will and clerical affirmation, Gruber identifies the innovative introduction of legitimation through popular choice (vox populi) and the bestowal of the throne by a woman (vox feminina)— in this case, the widow of the late tsar and sister of Boris. These new elements of vox populi and vox feminina continued to surface alongside more traditional invocations of heredity and divine selection in the calisthenics of legitimation produced for each new aspirant to the throne. Although the vox populi idea may not have been quite as novel, nor as short lived, as Gruber asserts, the concept undoubtedly exerted exceptional force during the Troubles.

With the introduction of the vox populi as a manifestation of the will of God, Iyov and Godunov unintentionally let the genie out of the bottle, and the notion that the people might have an active role in determining the proper Orthodoxy and legitimate Orthodox tsar spread. With the sudden death of Godunov and the triumph of the First False Dmitrii in 1605, Iyov fell from power, to be replaced by a new patriarch more in line with the new tsar. The same pattern reproduced itself with each turnover: new ruler; new patriarch; new defense of Orthodoxy against the heretics and infidels of the previous regime. Discredited by their intimacy with fallen rulers and by their heartless enjoyment of wealth and power as the people around them starved, Orthodox leaders lost their position as arbiters of the faith in the eyes of the newly mobilized population. As religious leaders and their particular visions of Orthodoxy rose and toppled in rapid sequence, Gruber argues, any sense of a monolithic Orthodoxy shattered, and the definition of Truth was up for grabs, to be defined by the victors, or by the people. Moreover, tying the pieces of this...