VI.4. The Baltic experience of Governor General E.A. Golovina E.A. Golovin served as governor general in the Baltic region for less than three years: from May 1845 to February 1848. His appointment followed in the year of the highest approval of the Code of Local Legislation for the Baltic region,

Study of the Baltic Question in the 16th and 17th centuries (1544-1648).

Book review:

“As soon as the danger from Charles V had passed, Gustav's entire attention was turned to Denmark. The traditional enmity of the two peoples, no longer restrained by fear of external enemies, was not slow to manifest itself; and if under Gustav and Christian it did not turn into an open struggle, it was only because both states were tired and both Gustav and Christian, after long external and internal wars, turned their attention to internal transformations and reforms. Meanwhile, flammable material kept accumulating, and as soon as the young, energetic kings took the Scandinavian thrones, a clash between them became inevitable.”

Georgy Vasilyevich focused his efforts on unraveling the tangle of complex relationships that led during the indicated period to the hegemony of the Scandinavian states in the Baltic. Although the reign of Gustavus Adolphus, glorified by the Thirty Years' War, is given a significant place in Forsten's book, the brilliant era of the greatest Swedish monarch does not overshadow the researcher of previous times - Forsten was not afraid to take on the little-studied issue of the activities of the first sons of Vasa during the Livonian War, which was decisive for the region.

Capture of Polotsk by the troops of Stefan Batory. August 30, 1579. Engraving from the chronicle of A. Guagnini. 1580s

The latter is studied most fully in the first volume of The Baltic Question. This period is the rapid fall of the Hansa and the equally rapid rise of the neighboring states, the struggle for the legacy of a trade union that would give the winner a dominant position among the northern and eastern powers. According to Forsten, “the entire history of the northern states, Russia, Poland, Sweden and Denmark, as European states, coincides with the history of the Baltic issue in a new stage of its development; the foreign policy of all these states is their Baltic policy.”

The second part of the historian’s work is devoted to an analysis of the Baltic question from the end of the 16th century to the Peace of Westphalia, when its resolution was closely connected with the struggle of Catholic reaction against Protestantism; The establishment of Sigismund on the Swedish throne and the formation of the Swedish-Polish union changed the state of affairs throughout Northern Europe: war here became inevitable.

Forsten identified two factors that determined the further movement of events. The first—religion—was obvious and on everyone’s lips, seemingly the most important. The second is a commercial one, which few people fully understood back then. The interweaving of these interests, essentially diametrically opposed, revealed by the author in the course of the narrative, constitutes an extraordinary part of the interesting information collected by Forsten from various sources, but is far from complete: with equal curiosity, the historian examines the struggle of the peace party and war in the Scandinavian countries, the activities of outstanding personalities of the era , battles, negotiations, and much more.

Forsten's work is an invaluable source of information on the history of the Baltic issue, and in terms of scale and detail of coverage there are few competitors.

We have traced in general terms the history of the Little Russian Cossacks in connection with the destinies of Lithuanian Rus until the beginning of the 17th century, when an important turning point occurred in their position. We saw how the character of the Cossacks changed: bands of steppe industrialists singled out fighting squads from their midst that lived by raiding neighboring countries, and from these squads the government recruited border guards. All these categories of Cossacks equally looked to the steppe, searched for loot there, and with these searches, to a greater or lesser extent, contributed to the defense of the constantly threatened southeastern outskirts of the state. With the Union of Lublin, the Little Russian Cossacks turn their faces back to the state they had hitherto defended. The international position of Little Russia demoralized this rabble and wandering mass and prevented the emergence of civic feeling in it. The Cossacks are accustomed to looking at neighboring countries, Crimea, Turkey, Moldova, even Moscow, as an object of prey, as “Cossack bread”. They began to transfer this view to their state since the pan and gentry land ownership with their serfdom began to be established on its south-eastern outskirts. Then they saw in their state an enemy even worse than Crimea or Turkey, and from the end of the 16th century. began to attack him with redoubled fury. Thus, the Little Russian Cossacks were left without a fatherland and, therefore, without faith. Then the entire moral world of Eastern European man rested on these two inextricably linked foundations, on the fatherland and on the domestic god. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did not give the Cossack either one or the other. The idea that he was Orthodox was for the Cossack a vague memory of childhood or an abstract idea that did not commit him to anything and was not suitable for anything in Cossack life. During the wars, they treated the Russians and their churches no better than the Tatars, and worse than the Tatars. The Orthodox Russian Pan Adam Kisel, a government commissar for the Cossacks, who knew them well, wrote about them in 1636 that they were very fond of the Greek religion and its clergy, although in religious terms they were more similar to the Tatars than to Christians. The Cossack was left without any moral content. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth there was hardly another class that stood at a lower level of moral and civil development: unless the highest hierarchy of the Little Russian Church before the church union could compete with the Cossacks in their savagery. In its Ukraine, with its extremely slow thinking, it is not yet accustomed to seeing the fatherland. This was also hindered by the extremely mixed composition of the Cossacks. The five-hundred-strong registered detachment of Cossacks, recruited under Stefan Batory, included people from 74 cities and counties of Western Rus' and Lithuania, even as distant as Vilna, Polotsk, then from 7 Polish cities, Poznan, Krakow, etc., in addition , Muscovites from Ryazan and somewhere from the Volga, Moldovans and, in addition to everything, one Serb, a German and a Tatar from Crimea with an unbaptized name. What could unite this rabble? A lord sat on his neck, and a saber hung on his side: to beat and rob the lord and to trade the saber - the whole political worldview of the Cossack, the whole social science taught by the Sich, the Cossack Academy, the highest school of valor for every good Cossack and a den of riots, as the Poles called it. The Cossacks offered their military services for proper compensation to the German Emperor against the Turks, and to their Polish government against Moscow and Crimea, and to Moscow and Crimea against their Polish government. The early Cossack uprisings against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were of a purely social, democratic nature without any religious or national connotation. They, of course, began in Zaporozhye. But in the first of them, even the leader was a stranger, from an environment hostile to the Cossacks, a traitor to his fatherland and class, a shady nobleman from Podlyakhia, Kryshtof Kosinsky. He settled down with Zaporozhye, with a detachment of Cossacks he was hired into the royal service, and in 1591 only because that the mercenaries were not paid their salaries on time, he recruited Cossacks and all sorts of Cossack rabble and began to destroy and burn Ukrainian cities, towns, estates of the gentry and gentry, especially the richest landowners in Ukraine, the Ostrog princes. Prince K. Ostrozhsky beat him, took him prisoner, forgave him with his Zaporozhye comrades and forced them to swear an obligation to sit quietly on their doorsteps. But two months later, Kosinsky raised a new uprising, swore allegiance to the Moscow Tsar, boasted, with Turkish and Tatar help, of turning the whole of Ukraine upside down, slaughtering all the local gentry, besieged the city of Cherkasy, planning to slaughter all the inhabitants with the mayor of the city, thereby Prince. Vishnevetsky, who begged his mercy from Prince. Ostrozhsky, and finally laid down his head in battle with this headman. His work was continued by Loboda and Nalivaiko, who until 1595 ravaged the right bank of Ukraine. And circumstances imposed a religious-national banner on this corrupt saber without God and fatherland, destined for a high role in becoming a stronghold of Western Russian Orthodoxy.

This unexpected role was prepared for the Cossacks by another union, a church union, which took place 27 years after the political one. Let me recall in passing the main circumstances that led to this event. Catholic propaganda, renewed with the appearance of the Jesuits in Lithuania in 1569, soon broke Protestantism here and attacked Orthodoxy. She met strong resistance, first from the Orthodox magnates with Prince K. Ostrozhsky at their head, and then from the urban population, from the brotherhoods. But among the highest Orthodox hierarchy, demoralized, despised by its own and oppressed by Catholics, the old idea of ​​​​union with the Roman Church arose, and at the Brest Council in 1596, Russian church society split into two hostile parts - Orthodox and Uniate. The Orthodox community has ceased to be a legitimate church recognized by the state. With the death of two bishops who did not accept the union, the ordinary Orthodox clergy was to be left without bishops; The Russian philistinism was losing political support with the beginning of a wholesale transition of the Orthodox nobility to the union and Catholicism. The only force left that the clergy and philistines could grab hold of was the Cossacks with their reserve, the Russian peasantry. The interests of these four classes were different, but this difference was forgotten when meeting a common enemy. The church union did not unite these classes, but it gave a new impetus to their joint struggle and helped them understand each other better: it was easy for both the Cossack and the Khlop to explain that the church union was an alliance of the Lyash king, the lord, the priest and their common agent, the Jew, against the Russian God, whom every Russian is obliged to protect. To tell a persecuted peasant or a willful Cossack, who was thinking about a pogrom of the master on whose land they lived, that with this pogrom they would fight for the offended Russian god, meant to relieve and encourage their conscience, oppressed by the feeling stirring somewhere at the bottom of it that, after all, and pogrom is not a good deed. The first Cossack uprisings at the end of the 16th century, as we have seen, did not yet have that religious-national character. But from the beginning of the 17th century. The Cossacks are gradually being drawn into the Orthodox Church opposition. The Cossack hetman Sagaidachny, with the entire Zaporozhian army, joined the Kiev Orthodox brotherhood; in 1620, through the Patriarch of Jerusalem, he arbitrarily, without the permission of his government, restored the highest Orthodox hierarchy, which acted under Cossack protection. In 1625, the head of this newly installed hierarchy, the Metropolitan of Kiev, himself called upon the Zaporozhye Cossacks to protect the Orthodox Kievites, who drowned the Kyiv Voyt for oppressing the Orthodox.

So the Cossacks received a banner, the front side of which called for the fight for the faith and for the Russian people, and the back side - for the extermination or expulsion of the gentry and gentry from Ukraine. But this banner did not unite the entire Cossacks. Back in the 16th century. economic division began among him. The Cossacks, who huddled around the border towns and lived off latrines in the steppe, then began to settle on fishing grounds, establishing farmsteads and arable land. At the beginning of the 17th century. other border districts, like Kanevsky, were already filled with Cossack farms. Borrowing, as usually happens when empty lands are settled, became the basis of land ownership. From these settled Cossack landowners, the registered Cossacks were predominantly recruited, receiving a salary from the government. Over time, the registered ones were divided into territorial detachments, regiments, and cities, which served as the administrative centers of the districts where the Cossacks lived. The agreement of the Cossacks with the crown hetman Konetspolsky in 1625 established the registered Cossack army at 6 thousand people; it was then divided into six regiments (Belotserkovsky, Korsunsky, Kanevsky, Cherkasy, Chigirinsky and Pereyaslavsky); under B. Khmelnitsky there were already 16 regiments, and they numbered over 230 hundreds. The beginning of this regimental division dates back to the time of Hetman Sagaidachny (died in 1622), who was generally the organizer of the Little Russian Cossacks. The behavior of this hetman revealed the internal discord that lay hidden in the very makeup of the Cossacks. Sagaidachny wanted to sharply separate the registered Cossacks, as a privileged class, from the simple Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth peasants who became Cossacks, and they complained about him that under him it was difficult for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. A nobleman himself by origin, he transferred his noble concepts to the Cossacks. With this attitude, the struggle of the Cossacks with the Ukrainian gentry acquired a special character: its goal was not to cleanse Ukraine of the alien nobility, but to replace it with its own native privileged class; the registered Cossacks trained the future Cossack gentry. But the true strength of the Cossacks did not lie in the registry. The register, even consisting of 6 thousand, absorbed no more than a tenth of the people who considered themselves to be Cossacks and appropriated Cossack rights. These were generally poor, homeless people, golota, as they called him. A significant part of it lived in the pan and gentry estates and, as free Cossacks, did not want to bear the same duties as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth peasants. The Polish rulers and lords did not want to know the liberties of this people and tried to turn the freemen into the embassy. When the Polish government needed the military assistance of the Cossacks, it admitted everyone into the Cossack militia, registered and unregistered, but when the need passed, it crossed out, wrote out extra ones from the registry to return them to their previous state. These graduates, Threatened by cotton captivity, they gathered in their refuge Zaporozhye and led uprisings from there. This is how the Cossack revolts began, which have been going on since 1624 for 14 years under the leadership of Zhmail, Taras, Sulima, Pavlyuk, Ostranin and Guni. At the same time, the register either diverged into two sides, or the whole became for the Poles. All these uprisings were unsuccessful for the Cossacks and ended in 1638 with the loss of the most important rights of the Cossacks. The register was updated and placed under the command of the Polish gentry; the hetman's place was taken by a government commissar; settled Cossacks lost their ancestral lands; the unregistered ones were returned to the master's captivity. The free Cossacks were destroyed. Then, in the words of the Little Russian chronicler, all freedom was taken away from the Cossacks, heavy unprecedented taxes were imposed, churches and church services were sold to the Jews.

Poles and Russians, Russians and Jews, Catholics and Uniates, Uniates and Orthodox, brotherhoods and bishops, gentry and the Polish post, the Polish post and the Cossacks, the Cossacks and the philistines, the registered Cossacks and the free Golota, the city Cossacks and Zaporozhye, the Cossack elders and the Cossack mob, finally , the Cossack hetman and the Cossack foreman - all these social forces, colliding and confused in their relationships, were at odds with each other in pairs, and all these paired enmities, still hidden or already revealed, intertwined, pulled the life of Little Russia into such a complex knot that he could not untangle not a single statesman in Warsaw or Kyiv. The uprising of B. Khmelnitsky was an attempt to cut this knot with a Cossack saber. It is difficult to say whether Moscow foresaw this uprising and the need to intervene in it, willy-nilly. There they did not take their eyes off the Smolensk and Seversk lands even after the unsuccessful war of 1632-1634. they secretly prepared to correct the failure if necessary. Little Russia lay still far beyond the horizon of Moscow politics, and the memory of the Cherkassy Lisovsky and Sapieha was still quite fresh. True, they were sent from Kyiv to Moscow with statements of readiness to serve the Orthodox Moscow sovereign, even petitioning him to take Little Russia under their high hand, because they, the Orthodox Little Russian people, except the sovereign, had nowhere to go. In Moscow they cautiously answered that when the Poles cause oppression in the faith, then the sovereign will think about how to deliver the Orthodox faith from heretics. From the very beginning of the Khmelnitsky uprising, ambiguous relations were established between Moscow and Little Russia. Bogdan’s successes surpassed his thoughts: he did not at all think of breaking with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, he only wanted to intimidate the arrogant lords, and then after three victories almost all of Little Russia found itself in his hands. He himself admitted that he managed to do something he had never even thought of. He began to feel dizzy, especially at lunch. He already imagined the Ukrainian principality along the Vistula with Grand Duke Bogdan at its head; he called himself “a single Russian autocrat”, threatened to turn all the Poles upside down, drive all the gentry beyond the Vistula, etc. He was very annoyed with the Moscow Tsar for not helping him from the very beginning of the matter, for not immediately attacking Poland, and in irritation he said unkind things to the Moscow ambassadors and by the end of dinner he threatened to break Moscow and get to the one who sits in Moscow . Simple-minded boasting gave way to humiliated, but not simple-minded repentance. This variability of mood came not only from Bogdan’s temperament, but also from a sense of the lie of his position. He could not cope with Poland with Cossack forces alone, and the desired external help did not come from Moscow, and he had to stick to the Crimean Khan. After his first victories, he hinted at his readiness to serve the Moscow Tsar if he supported the Cossacks. But in Moscow they hesitated, waited, like people who do not have their own plan, but expect it from the course of events. They did not know how to deal with the rebellious hetman, whether to accept him under their authority or just support him from around the corner against the Poles. As a subject, Khmelnitsky was less convenient than as an unspoken ally: a subject must be protected, and an ally can be abandoned once he is no longer needed. Moreover, open intercession for the Cossacks involved them in the war with Poland and in the whole confusion of Little Russian relations. But remaining indifferent to the struggle meant handing over Orthodox Ukraine to the enemies and making Bogdan his enemy: he threatened, if he was not supported from Moscow, to attack it with the Crimean Tatars, or else, having fought with the Poles, make peace and turn against the Tsar with them . Soon after the Treaty of Zborov, realizing the inevitability of a new war with Poland, Bogdan expressed to the Tsar’s ambassador his desire, in case of failure, to move with the entire Zaporozhye army to Moscow limits. Only a year and a half later, when Khmelnitsky had already lost the second campaign against Poland and lost almost all the benefits won in the first, in Moscow, they finally recognized this idea of ​​​​Bogdan as the most convenient way out of the difficulty and offered the hetman with the entire Cossack army to move to the vast and abundant lands of the sovereign along the rivers Donets, Medveditsa and other pleasant places: this resettlement did not involve in a war with Poland, did not drive the Cossacks under the rule of the Turkish Sultan and gave Moscow good border guards from the steppe. But events did not follow the prudent pace of Moscow policy. Khmelnitsky was forced into a third war with Poland under unfavorable conditions and strenuously begged the Moscow Tsar to accept his citizenship, otherwise he would have to surrender under the long-proposed protection of the Turkish Sultan and the Crimean Khan. Finally, at the beginning of 1653, Moscow decided to accept Little Russia as citizenship and fight with Poland. But even here they delayed the matter for almost another year, only in the summer they announced their decision to Khmelnitsky, and in the fall they assembled a Zemsky Sobor to discuss the matter according to rank, then they waited until the hetman suffered a new setback at Zhvanets, again betrayed by his ally - the khan, and Only in January 1654 was the oath taken away from the Cossacks. After the capitulation near Smolensk in 1634, they waited 13 years for a favorable opportunity to wash away the shame. In 1648, the Little Russian Cossacks rose up. Poland found itself in a desperate situation; from Ukraine asked Moscow for help in order to do without the treacherous Tatars and take Ukraine under their power. Moscow did not move, fearing to disturb the peace with Poland, and for 6 years watched with motionless curiosity how the Khmelnitsky business, spoiled by the Tatars at Zborov and Berestechko, was declining, how Little Russia was devastated by the Tatar allies and brutally ferocious strife, and, finally, when the country no longer good for anything, she was taken under their high hand in order to transform the ruling Ukrainian classes from Polish rebels into embittered Moscow subjects. Things could only go this way if there was a mutual misunderstanding between the parties. Moscow wanted to take over the Ukrainian Cossacks, even without Cossack territory, and if with Ukrainian cities, then certainly under the condition that Moscow governors and clerks would sit there, and Bogdan Khmelnitsky hoped to become something like the Duke of Chigirinsky, ruling Little Russia under the distant suzerain supervision of the Moscow sovereign and with the assistance of the Cossack nobility, esauls, colonels and other elders. Not understanding each other and not trusting each other, both parties in mutual relations said something that was not what they thought and did what they did not want. Bogdan expected from Moscow an open break with Poland and a military attack on it from the east in order to liberate Little Russia and take it under its hand, and Moscow diplomacy, without breaking with Poland, with subtle calculation waited for the Cossacks to finish off the Poles with their victories and force them to retreat from the rebellious region, so that then legally, without violating the eternal peace with Poland, annex Little Rus' to Great Russia. Moscow’s response to Bogdan sounded like cruel mockery when, two months before the Zborov affair, which was to decide the fate of Poland and Little Russia, he lowly struck the king with his brow to “bless his army to attack” their common enemies, and in God’s hour he will go against them from Ukraine, praying to God so that a truthful and Orthodox sovereign would be king and autocrat over Ukraine. To this apparently sincere petition from Moscow they answered: the eternal peace with the Poles cannot be broken, but if the king liberates the hetman and the entire Zaporozhye army, then the sovereign will grant the hetman and the entire army, ordering them to accept it under his high hand. With such mutual misunderstanding and mistrust, both sides were painfully hurt by what they failed to notice in time. A brave Cossack saber and a resourceful diplomat, Bogdan had an ordinary political mind. He once, when tipsy, expressed the basis of his internal policy to the Polish commissars: “If the prince is guilty, cut his neck; If the Cossack is guilty, so will he - that’s the truth.” He looked at his uprising only as a struggle between the Cossacks and the nobility, who oppressed them as the last slaves, in his words, and admitted that he and his Cossacks hated the nobility and lords to death. But he did not eliminate or even weaken that fatal social discord, although he sensed it, which was lurking in the Cossack environment itself, started before him and sharply manifested itself immediately after him: this is the enmity of the Cossack elders with the ordinary Cossacks, “the city and the Zaporozhye rabble” , as they called it in Ukraine back then. This enmity caused endless unrest in Little Russia and led to the fact that the right bank of Ukraine fell to the Turks and turned into a desert. And Moscow received what it deserved for its subtle and careful diplomacy. There they looked at the annexation of Little Russia from a traditional political point of view, as a continuation of the territorial gathering of the Russian land, the separation of the vast Russian region from hostile Poland to the patrimony of the Moscow sovereigns, and after the conquest of Belarus and Lithuania in 1655 they hastened to add “all Greatness” to the royal title and Little and White Russia, the autocrat of Lithuania, Volyn and Podolsk." But there they poorly understood the internal social relations of Ukraine, and they were little concerned with them, as an unimportant matter, and the Moscow boyars were perplexed why the envoys of Hetman Vyhovsky spoke with such contempt about the Cossacks as drunkards and gamblers, and yet all the Cossacks themselves hetman is called Zaporozhye Army, and with curiosity they asked these envoys where the former hetmans lived, in Zaporozhye or in the cities, and from whom they were chosen, and from where Bogdan Khmelnytsky himself was chosen. Obviously, the Moscow government, having annexed Little Russia, saw itself in the relations there as in a dark forest. But the Little Russian question, so crookedly posed by both sides, complicated and spoiled Moscow’s foreign policy for several decades, tied it up in endless Little Russian squabbles, fragmented its forces in the fight against Poland, forced it to abandon Lithuania, and Belarus with Volyn and Podolia and barely made it possible to hold the left bank of Ukraine with Kiev on the other side of the Dnieper. After these losses, Moscow could repeat to itself the very words that B. Khmelnitsky once said, crying, in reproach for her failure to provide help on time: “That’s not what I wanted and that’s not the way things should be.”

The Little Russian issue, through its direct or indirect effects, has complicated Moscow's foreign policy. Tsar Alexei, having started a war with Poland for Little Russia in 1654, quickly conquered all of Belarus and a significant part of Lithuania with Vilna, Kovna and Grodna. While Moscow was taking the eastern regions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, it was attacked from the north by another enemy, the Swedish king Charles X, who just as quickly conquered all of Greater and Lesser Poland with Krakow and Warsaw, expelled King John Casimir from Poland and proclaimed himself Polish the king, finally, even wanted to take Lithuania away from Tsar Alexei. So two enemies, beating Poland from different sides, collided and quarreled over booty. Tsar Alexei remembered Tsar Ivan’s old thought about the Baltic coast, about Livonia, and the fight with Poland was interrupted in 1656 by the war with Sweden. So the forgotten question of extending the territory of the Moscow State to its natural border, to the Baltic coast, came to the fore again. The issue did not move one step towards a solution: it was not possible to take Riga, and soon the king stopped hostilities, and then made peace with Sweden (in Kardis, 1661), returning to her all his conquests. No matter how fruitless this war was and even harmful to Moscow in that it helped Poland recover from the Swedish pogrom, it nevertheless prevented two states from uniting under the rule of one king, although equally hostile to Moscow, but constantly weakening their strength by mutual hostility.

Already dying, Bogdan stood in the way of both friends and enemies, both states, the one to whom he had betrayed, and the one to whom he had sworn allegiance. Frightened by the rapprochement between Moscow and Poland, he entered into an agreement with the Swedish king Charles X and the Transylvanian prince Ragotsi, and the three of them drew up a plan for the division of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. A true representative of his Cossacks, accustomed to serve on all four sides, Bogdan was a servant or an ally, and sometimes a traitor to all neighboring rulers, and the King of Poland, and the Tsar of Moscow, and the Khan of the Crimea, and the Turkish Sultan, and the Moldavian ruler, and the Prince of Transylvania and ended with the plan to become a free appanage prince of Little Russia under the Polish-Swedish king, which Charles X wanted to be. These dying intrigues of Bogdan forced Tsar Alexei to somehow end the Swedish war. Little Russia also dragged Moscow into the first direct clash with Turkey. After the death of Bogdan, an open struggle between the Cossack elders and the mob began. His successor Vygovsky handed over to the king and, together with the Tatars near Konotop, destroyed the best army of Tsar Alexei (1659). Encouraged by this and freed from the Swedes with the help of Moscow, the Poles did not want to give her any of her conquests. The second war with Poland began, accompanied by two terrible failures for Moscow, the defeat of Prince Khovansky in Belarus and the capitulation of Sheremetev near Chudnov in Volyn as a result of Cossack treason. Lithuania and Belarus were lost. Vygovsky's successors, Bogdan's son Yuri and Teterya, changed. Ukraine was divided along the Dnieper into two hostile halves, the left Moscow and the right Polish. The king captured almost all of Little Russia. Both fighting sides reached extreme exhaustion: in Moscow there was nothing to pay the military people with and they issued copper money at the price of silver, which caused the Moscow riot of 1662; Greater Poland rebelled against the king under the leadership of Lubomirski. Moscow and Poland seemed ready to drink each other's last drops of blood. They were rescued by the enemy of both, Hetman Doroshenko, who succumbed to the Sultan from the right bank of Ukraine (1666). In view of the formidable common enemy, the Truce of Andrusovo in 1667 put an end to the war. Moscow retained the Smolensk and Seversk regions and the left half of Ukraine with Kiev, and became a widely extended front on the Dnieper from its headwaters to Zaporozhye, which, according to its historical nature, remained in an interim position, in the service of both states, Polish and Moscow. The new dynasty atone for its Stolbov, Deulin and Polyanovsky sins. The Andrusovo Treaty made a sharp change in Moscow's foreign policy. Instead of the cautiously short-sighted B.I. Morozov, its leader was the culprit of this agreement, A.L. Ordin-Nashchokin, who knew how to look ahead. He began to develop a new political combination. Poland no longer seemed dangerous. The centuries-old struggle with it stopped for a long time, for a whole century. The Little Russian issue was overshadowed by other tasks set by him. They were sent to Livonia, i.e. Sweden, and Turkey. To fight both, an alliance with Poland, threatened by both, was needed; She herself worked hard for this union. Ordin-Nashchokin developed the idea of ​​this union into a whole system. In a note submitted to the tsar even before the Treaty of Andrusovo, he proved the necessity of this union with three considerations: only this union will make it possible to patronize the Orthodox in Poland; only with a close alliance with Poland can the Cossacks be kept from an evil war with Great Russia at the instigation of the Khan and the Swede; finally, the Moldovans and Volokhs, now separated from Orthodox Rus' by hostile Poland, with our alliance with her will come to us and fall away from the Turks, and then from the Danube itself through the Dniester from all the Volokhs, from Podolia, Chervonnaya Rus, Volyn, Little and Great Rus' There will be a whole numerous Christian people, children of one mother, the Orthodox Church. The last consideration should have met with special sympathy from the tsar: the thought of Turkish Christians had long occupied Alexei. In 1656, on Easter, having received Christ in church with Greek merchants living in Moscow, he asked them if they wanted him to free them from Turkish captivity, and to their understandable answer he continued: “When you return to your country, ask your bishops , priests and monks to pray for me, and through their prayers my sword will cut the neck of my enemies.” Then, with copious tears, he said, turning to the boyars, that his heart lamented the enslavement of these poor people by the infidels, and God would exact from him on the day of judgment for the fact that, having the opportunity to free them, he neglected to do so, but he accepted the obligation to bring sacrifice your army, treasury, even your blood for their deliverance. This is what the Greek merchants themselves said. In the treaty of 1672, shortly before the Sultan’s invasion of Poland, the tsar undertook to help the king in the event of an attack by the Turks and to send to the Sultan and Khan to dissuade them from war with Poland. The types of unusual allies were far from the same: Poland was primarily concerned about its external security; for Moscow, this was also supplemented by the question of co-religionists, and, moreover, a double-sided question - about Turkish Christians on the Russian side and about Russian Mohammedans on the Turkish side. This is how religious relations crossed in the European East back in the 16th century. The Moscow Tsar Ivan, as you know, conquered two Mohammedan kingdoms, Kazan and Astrakhan. But the conquered Mohammedans turned with hope and prayer to their spiritual leader, the successor of the caliphs, the Turkish Sultan, calling on him to free them from the Christian yoke. In turn, under the hand of the Turkish Sultan, a large population lived on the Balkan Peninsula, of the same faith and tribe with the Russian people. It also turned with hope and prayer to the Moscow sovereign, the patron of the Orthodox East, calling on him to free Turkish Christians from the Mohammedan yoke. The idea of ​​fighting the Turks with the help of Moscow then began to spread rapidly among Balkan Christians. According to the agreement, Moscow ambassadors went to Constantinople to dissuade the Sultan from war with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. They brought significant news from Turkey. Driving through Moldavia and Wallachia, they heard the following rumors among the people: “If only God would give Christians even a small victory over the Turks, we would immediately begin to prey on the infidels.” But in Constantinople, the Moscow ambassadors were told that recently ambassadors from the Kazan and Astrakhan Tatars and from the Bashkirs came here, who asked the Sultan to accept the kingdoms of Kazan and Astrakhan as his citizenship, complaining that the Moscow people, hating their Basurman faith, beat many of them to death and are constantly being destroyed. The Sultan ordered the Tatars to be patient a little longer and provided the petitioners with robes.

So the Little Russian question pulled in its wake two others: the Baltic question - about the acquisition of the Baltic coast and the eastern one - about relations with Turkey because of the Balkan Christians. The last question was then hatched only in idea, in the benevolent thoughts of Tsar Alexei and Ordin-Nashchokin: at that time the Russian state was not yet able to take a direct practical approach to this issue, and for the Moscow government it was still reduced to the fight against the enemy standing on the way to Turkey , with Crimea. This Crimea was a thorn in the side of Moscow diplomacy and was an annoying element in every international combination. Already at the very beginning of Alexei’s reign, not yet having time to settle its latest scores with Poland, Moscow was inclining it towards an offensive alliance against the Crimea. When the Truce of Andrusovo under the Moscow Treaty of 1686 turned into eternal peace and the Muscovite state for the first time entered into the European coalition, into a quadruple alliance with Poland, the German Empire and Venice against Turkey, Moscow took upon itself in this enterprise the score it had most learned - the fight against the Tatars , attack on Crimea. So with every step the foreign policy of the Moscow state became more complicated. The government re-established or restored broken ties with a wide range of powers that it needed due to its relations with its closest hostile neighbors or which needed it due to their European relations. And the Moscow state then turned out to be useful in Europe. At the time of its extreme international humiliation, shortly after the Time of Troubles, it did not lose a certain diplomatic weight. International relations in the West were then developing quite favorably for him. There the Thirty Years' War began and relations between states lost stability; each was looking for external support, fearing loneliness. The Moscow state, for all its political impotence, was given strength by its geographical location and ecclesiastical significance. The French ambassador Kurmenen, the first ambassador from France to come to Moscow, not only out of French politeness, called Tsar Michael the leader of the eastern country and of the Greek faith. Moscow stood in the rear of all the states between the Baltic and Adriatic Seas, and when international relations became confused here and a struggle ensued that engulfed the entire continental West, each of these states took care to secure its rear from the east by concluding an alliance or suspending hostility with Moscow. That is why, from the very beginning of the activity of the new dynasty, the circle of external relations of the Moscow state gradually expanded even without efforts on the part of its government. It involves various political and economic combinations that were then emerging in Europe. England and Holland help Tsar Michael settle matters with Poland and Sweden, who are hostile to him, because Muscovy is a profitable market for them and a convenient transit route to the East, to Persia, even to India. The French king offers Michael an alliance also for the trade interests of France in the East, competing with the British and Dutch. The Sultan himself calls on Michael to fight Poland together, and the Swedish king Gustav Adolf, who robbed Moscow under the Treaty of Stolbovo, having common enemies with her in Poland and Austria, instills in Moscow diplomats the idea of ​​an anti-Catholic alliance, seduces them with the idea of ​​​​making their humiliated fatherland an organic and influential member of the European political world, calls the victorious Swedish army operating in Germany the advanced regiment fighting for the Moscow state, and is the first to establish a permanent resident in Moscow. The state of Tsar Michael was weaker than the state of Tsars Ivan and Fyodor, but was much less alone in Europe. This can be said to an even greater extent about the state of Tsar Alexei. The arrival of a foreign embassy then became a common occurrence in Moscow. Moscow ambassadors travel to all sorts of European courts, even Spanish and Tuscan ones. For the first time, Moscow diplomacy is entering such a wide field. On the other hand, sometimes losing and sometimes gaining on the western borders, the state continuously advanced to the East. Russian colonization, back in the 16th century. crossed the Urals, during the 17th century. goes far into the depths of Siberia and reaches the Chinese border, expanding Moscow territory by the middle of the 17th century. at least thousands for 70 square miles, if any geometric measure can be applied to the acquisitions there. These colonization successes in the East brought the Moscow state into conflict with China.

Thus, the external relations of the state became more complicated and difficult. They had a multifaceted effect on his inner life. The increasing frequency of wars made people feel more and more unsatisfactory in the domestic order and forced them to take a closer look at those of others. The increasing frequency of embassies multiplied cases for instructive observations. A closer acquaintance with the Western European world brought at least only the ruling spheres out of the circle of Moskvoretsky concepts enchanted by prejudices and loneliness. But most of all, wars and observations made one feel the scarcity of one’s material resources, the prehistoric lack of weapons and the low productivity of people’s labor, and the ineptitude of its profitable application. Each new war, each defeat brought new tasks and concerns to the government and new burdens to the people. The state's foreign policy forced increasing tension among the people's forces. A short list of the wars waged by the first three kings of the new dynasty is enough to get a sense of the extent of this tension. Under Tsar Michael, there were two wars with Poland and one with Sweden; all three ended unsuccessfully. Under Mikhailov's successor, there were again two wars with Poland for Little Russia and one with Sweden; two of them ended unsuccessfully again. Under Tsar Feodor there was a difficult war with Turkey, which began under his father in 1673 and ended with the useless Bakhchisarai truce in 1681: the western Dnieper Ukraine remained with the Turks. If you calculate the duration of all these wars, you will see that in some 70 years (1613-1682) there are up to 30 years of war, sometimes with several enemies at the same time.