Moskaus griechisches Jahrhundert: Russisch-griechische Beziehungen und metabyzantinischer Einfluss 1619–1694 (review)

This is a good, but, ultimately, frustratingly unsuccessful book. Ekkehard Kraft's main goal is to provide a synthetic overview of the period between 1619 and 1694, "Moscow's Greek century" of the book's title. He does a good job in this, in the end delivering a concise summary on the topic in a language which is presumably more accessible to a wider audience than either Russian or Greek. Kraft warns the reader at the outset not to expect any unearthing of new documents or revisionist conclusions based on archival research. Instead, by compiling this tour d'horizont, Kraft wishes to offer an alternative paradigm for understanding the Russian 17th century, an alternative to that which sees the period as "pre-Petrine," that is, as primarily the pre-history of Peter the Great's Westernization and modernization. This is an interesting and refreshing approach to take, but it ultimately stands or falls on closer inspection of the original sources. Kraft has not done that, hence the unsuccessful end-result of his efforts.

Some initial remarks on the significance of the topic are in order here. The 17th century was indeed the period of the greatest influence of the Greeks in Muscovy after a hiatus of about a century and a half. Indeed, the proclamation of the Union of Ferrara-Florence in 1439 and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 practically ushered in the autocephaly of the Russian Orthodox Church in the mid-1400s. Thereafter, Greco-Russian contacts were sporadic until 1589, when the establishment of the Patriarchate of Moscow marked a turn towards regularized relations. Still, only after the Time of Troubles (1598–1613) did contacts intensify, with both high- and low-ranking clerics flocking to Russia and involving themselves in the political, ecclesiastical, and cultural affairs of the Muscovite state. If one is to take the frequency of Greco-Russian contacts in the 17th century as an important criterion, then it was indeed "Moscow's Greek century."

As Kraft readily admits, he is hardly the first to turn to this topic. Nikolai Fedorovich Kapterev pioneered its treatment with his enormously influential studies on the Schism in the Russian Orthodox Church and, more cogently, on Russian relations with the Orthodox East, in general, and with the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, in particular.¹ Despite their obvious anti-Greek bias, Kapterev's monographs had a singular impact on all subsequent scholarship on these topics. Soviet scholarship, on the other hand, for its own ideological reasons paid no attention to the Greek influence, preferring instead to dwell upon the alleged "native" development of Russia. As for Western scholarship, the lack of linguistic skills (primarily, knowledge of Greek) and skewed or overtly biased ideas about Orthodoxy relegated the study of the problem to either Byzantinists (who had the skills) or theologians (who more often than not took confessional positions on the matter). Greek scholarship exhibited a surge of interest in the topic in the early 20th century. This, however, ebbed after the Revolution of 1917 (with the notable exception of the works of Anthony-Emil Tachiaos), when the study of things Russian was suspected as a potential indicator of pro-Soviet views. In short, scholarly interest in Russo-Greek contacts in the 17th century was minimal in the 20th century until the paleographic and prosopographical studies of Boris L'vovich Fonkich single-handedly reinvigorated the field, in the Soviet Union, in post-Soviet Russia,² and through his students in Greece. Kraft justifiably emphasizes Fonkich's contribution to the study of Greeks in Russia and uses the Russian paleographer's scholarship throughout his own work (12–18).

Kraft conceives his study as an answer to a desideratum expressed by the eminent Byzantinist Georg Ostrogorsky for a synthetic interpretation of Greek activities in Russia in the 17th century (10). As early as 1933, Ostrogorsky had called for an all-encompassing study that would...