Contenu du sommaire : L'Europe orientale, 1650-1730

The nobility's real estate market in the Lutsk district, Volhynia voivodeship, between 1566 and1599The article, which contributes to the history of the nobility's landed property, analyzes the voivodeship of Volhynia's territorial and manorial court registers dating from the second half of the sixteenth century. It identifies various types of transactions —sale, mortgage, lease, exchange, and donation— which redistributed landed property among members of the nobility in the Lutsk district (powiat). The study shows that towards the end of the sixteenth century, the princes' share remained practically unchanged —accounting for 38% of the nobility's landed property— while lords (pany), who benefited the most from the concentration of land, owned 52% of the total area, and the landed gentry (ziemianie) only 10%.

Descriptions of Russo-Lithuanian wars (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) in primary sources and modern historiography. When some historians describe wars, they tend to create most impressing and emotional pictures, particularly when focusing on disasters inflicted to civilians. More often than not, they simply reproduce the contents of their sources, and arouse feelings of anger, indignation, and immense grief. These descriptions are undoubtedly based on real events. But can we relay information provided by sources of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as factual and then proceed to build up historiographic concepts? Authors of chronicles and annals, serving officers, memoirists of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL), Poland, and Russia wrote within definite state-political systems and ethical representations, and one of their main concerns was to charge the opponents with transgression of Christian ethics. Many of their invectives were taken at face value in modern Central and East European historiographies and used in political strife in the late 1980s and during the 1990s. This approach seemed all the more justified as the number of accessible sources was increasing. But, paradoxically, the increase in the quantity of sources does not always make it more difficult to manipulate them to support a particular viewpoint. Modern Belarusian historiography was especially vulnerable in that respect. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it had to discard a deep-rooted, complacent version of the historical Belarus-Russia relationship. This was achieved, in specialized as well as popular historical writings, by asserting that Russia waged not simply aggressive wars against the GDL, but wars aiming at destruction. The data on wartime disasters derived from sources were interpreted in terms of the modern theory of total war and supported by uncritical quotations. But contemporary history has come back at Belarusian historiography with a vengeance. The new, authoritarian political trend has drastically changed the situation: much of what has been written in the 1990s has been subjected to not too mild, practically official and administrative, critics. It seems only fair to note that this was triggered in the first place by uncritical use of historical sources.

Cadastral books as a historical source: a new way of using the geographical information they provide.
The article introduces an unconventional method for analyzing geographical data applicable to the study of historical sources containing systematically recurring place names. Establishing the geographical location of these toponyms not only allows the researcher to connect different elements of the text under study, but also to reveal spatial relationships which shed light on the composition and structure of the document under study. Geographical information is all the more precious as subsequent content changes have no effect on it. The author demonstrates his point with four cases drawn from his and N.V. Piotukh's research on late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century cadastral books of the Dereva piatina on the Novgorod land.

Russian authorities and subjects seen by the clergy in the XVII-th and XVIII-th centuries
The article studies the changes in the perception of confession that took place in Russia between the late sixteenth century and the first half of the eighteenth. The author studies the Russian penitential books written at the time. In one of them, dated around 1623, the list of questions was addressed to Russian tsars. A great number of these questions are reminiscent of the events of the Time of Troubles. Another example is a list created in the mid-eighteenth century for commoners. Its compiler not only recommends penances for certain sins, but criminal punishments as well: beheading, cutting off the hand or other parts of the body, flogging, etc. This shows that in the eighteenth-century, the confessional took on the functions of criminal justice. The author compares these with other lists and traces the changes which took place in Russian society and the Russian people's mentality during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

“Improper language” and seventeenth-century Russian popular vision of politics and society
The article analyzes reports on “improper language,” that is, language deemed offensive toward the tsar, and in some cases, criminal. Careful study of these reports allows us to rethink our perception of seventeenth-century ordinary Russian citizens' political representations. These documents are doubly interesting: first, by their sheer number, as hundreds of them are housed in Muscovite and regional archives; second, they directly reflect popular sentiment in so far as they are not connected to government ideology or official rhetoric. The author focuses on three hitherto unstudied aspects of seventeenth-century popular representations that these reports shed light upon: (1) the way in which ordinary Russians perceived the different social groups and estates (sosloviia); (2) their vision of the clergy and the Church; and (3) seventeenth-century “public opinion” (political rumors and remarks).

Publication of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century sources in Post-Soviet Ukraine
The article studies the changes that took place in Ukrainian study and publication of historical sources between 1991 and 2005. The author points to both positive developments —as for instance the creation in the Academy of the Institute for Ukrainian Archeography and History of Sources— and negative ones, such as the Institute's slowdown in research and publication during the socio-economic crisis of the 1990s, scattering of scholarly interest on too large a number of publications, obvious lack of interest for sources from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries —which had essentially been ignored by Soviet archeography. The author notes that the transformation of the dominant historical paradigm brought about new research priorities in the study of the Late Middle Ages and modern era: socio-economic questions, once the focus of Marxist historiography, were relegated to the background in favor of documentary sources relating to the Church, the elites, genealogy, Judaism, and Oriental Studies. The history of cossacks was in great favor and produced important publications of sources (archives of the Dnieper Sech, Universals issued by Ukrainian hetmans, and cossack chronicles).

Honor and bail
The article considers social practices that were introduced in order to prevent and secure protection from deceit. Medieval Russia's oaths of fealty, which belonged to these practices, were followed by judicial penalty and bail in case of infringement. These practices were common, and the "word-of-honor" and personal honor practices, which came into life around the mid eighteenth century as the result of long socio-cultural changes, turned deceit not only into an act punishable by law, but a morally reprehensible one as well.

Opposition to imperial power in Old Russia's political theory and its literary models
Why are medieval Russia's important political texts written in moralizing terms? Why do so many of them seem fragmentary, unfinished, to us? Why is it impossible to find in the political thought of the Russian Empire essential ideas that existed in almost all European monarchies? This situation is sometimes explained by the backwardness of Russian society. The author offers a different explanation: the difference between Russian and Western political thoughts is due to the fact that they sprang from different, though related, sources. While the origin of Western political thought was Aristotle's theory of polis, Russian doctrine about monarchy comes from the later Hellenistic tradition, transmitted through the theology of the Eastern Church. The fragmentary style of Russian political thinkers was, the author suggests, a deliberate rhetorical device. This rhetorical strategy and its related special form of quotation (called here “global quotation”) were meant to imitate the founding texts of Oriental Fathers. Analysis of the right to resist royal power leads to the conclusion that in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, some Russian political thinkers, and even what we might call “political leaders,” perceived the literary examples of spiritual confrontation between the tyrant and the Christian hero, as described in the works of Saint John Chrysostom and other early Christian writers, as the archetypical way of dealing with an unrighteous monarch. This implies that the right to resist the tyrant was interpreted as the believer's individual obligation rather than the prerogative of political groups. The author does not deny cases of collective resistance, but points out that only a certain type of individual and non-violent resistance was legitimated by Russian political thought.

The Russian ruling élite in the political crisis of 1730This article studies the Russian ruling elite's social characteristics and self-identification between the late seventeenth century and the first third of the eighteenth. How did the participants of the 1730 political crisis perceive the structure of society? How did they define their “self-identity”? Analysis of the way in which they viewed their own social group shows that the composition of the gentry did not conform to the official Table of Ranks and reveals a parallel unofficial structure which the aristocracy tried to fix legislatively through bills proposed by verkhovniki (members of the Supreme Privy Council). This informal structure consists of three groups: the aristocracy (famil´nye, i.e., representatives of the old Muscovite elite who had kept key posts in government), the middle nobility (dobroe shliakhetstvo, successors of the Muscovite and provincial nobilities), and the petty nobility (podloe shliakhetstvo, the poor nobility dependent on the autocrat and the patronage of famil´nye). In fact, this informal structure was more real for the people of the first half of the eighteenth century than the formalized system of ranks, which had not yet made its way into mentalities.

The foundation of the Siberian archbishopric forms the backdrop of a discussion of S.
U. Shakhovskoi's Divine Wisdom service, employing postmodern legal philosophy to discuss how he addresses structural uncertainty in court, the aporia of justice. He expounds the limitations of the ruler as finite human being facing the infinite and immediate demands of justice: its procedural aspect appears as an image of the path; its urgent aspect is addressed by the idea that Wisdom aids the ruler, but remains a mystery. Shakhovskoi's views contrast with Ivan IV's, who believed in his direct access as tsar to Divine Wisdom, repudiating his boyars' ‘wise' advice in favour of populism and violent purification. Social practices gave meaning to representations of Wisdom in multiple ways. In Siberia, cossacks deposed voevodas who refused to listen and submit to common aims. The first archbishop institutionalised these interpretations, thereby popularising Wisdom. Using the image of the path, representations of Wisdom referred to the spatial dimension of justice in an expanding empire, postponing the tsar's final discretion.

Pseudo historical legends of the medieval West in Russia between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The paper studies specific revisions of a Western pseudo historical text from the thirteenth-century carried out by Russian literati between the late fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. In an analysis of the case of Guido delle Colonne's well-known “Historia destructionis Troiae,” a rhetorically elaborated Latin text written in the moralizing tradition of the Middle Ages, the author discusses problems related to the Russian literary sphere's adaptation of this text, starting with the first translation of Guido's “Historia” into Russian (late fifteenth or early sixteenth century) to its last (so called “printed”) version, which became very popular in the eighteenth century. The Russian public's misunderstanding of the basic elements of Guido's narration (rhetorical, moralistic and didactic devices) forms the basis of this discussion on differences between Russian and Western bookish traditions.

John Hebdon in Moscow (1677-1678)British envoy John Hebdon Jr.'s mission in Russia primarily consisted in obtaining that the Russian government return trade privileges taken away from the English Muscovy company after the execution of King Charles I. This question was a stumbling block in English-Russian relations throughout the second half of the seventeenth century. Hebdon's request was formally denied, but he preferred staying in Russia. The diplomat's stay in Moscow, which lasted nearly a year, was quite eventful. Hebdon was involved in numerous conflicts with Russians and foreigners while dealing in political intrigues and defending his trade interests. A tragic incident took place in the Novaia nemetskaia sloboda when members of the diplomat's retinue attacked a musketeer patrol (streltsy), killed one of its members, and captured its commanding official. Detailed analysis of this event allows us to suppose that Hebdon sought to protect his Russian agent, who had been accidentally arrested by streltsy, and preferred scandal to the disclosure of his clandestine activities.

Correspondence between an Englishman and a Russian regarding religion (1686-1687)The author explores the “Russian archive” of an English merchant, Roman Vilimovich, who lived, ran his business and studied Russian in Pskov in the 1680s. The Englishman's papers (now part of a convolute in the British Library) provide rare evidence of informal contacts between Russians and foreigners on the eve of the Petrine reforms. The most thrilling part is the correspondence between Roman Vilimovich and a certain Piotr Ignat´evich. The former had probably come to Pskov from Narva's then thriving English colony. The latter was a Pskovian townsman (posadskii chelovek) who taught Roman Vilimovich Russian and temporarily hosted him. In their letters the two men discussed a wide variety of topics, from minutiae of everyday life to religious issues. The most striking fact is that they found common ground in the sensitive area of faith. The Englishman shows a great deal of interest in Eastern Orthodox tradition and rites, while the Russian trustingly shares his knowledge and provides religious literature, some copies of which are included in the “archive”. Both men agree on the fundamental idea that “Christians were born into this world from the same Father” (as Roman Vilimovich puts it, echoing Piotr Ignat´evich's words) and should love each other. The very possibility of such a dialogue in Muscovite Russia shatters the stereotype of mutual mistrust and dislike between Russians and West-European visitors. It is significant that the two men should avoid such issues as icons, saints, and ritualistic differences so as to leave the path of conflict and seek shared values. Examples of relationships between a native Russian and a visitor from Western Europe are rare, but they do exist – which means that the Petrine reforms enjoyed “grassroots support” not only among the boyar elite but also in certain circles of the urban middle class. The author suggests that this dialogue was greatly encouraged by the multicultural, rather open-minded environment of the Russian border market town.

This article reexamines the political and cultural background to the 1654 Pereiaslav Agreement placing Bogdan Khmel´nyts kyi's Hetmanate under the protection of Muscovite Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich—an action that had significant unforeseen consequences for the political development of Ukraine and that continues to generate controversy today. It argues that the adoption of the Pereiaslav Agreement had much less to do with discourse about the historical religious-political kinship of Ukrainians and Muscovites and the original unity of Rus´ (this discourse had only recently begun and had not yet achieved much coherence or credence) than with military considerations, specifically, Tsar Aleksei's interest in securing Ukrainian cossack participation in his campaign in Belarus´ and Lithuania. It also argues that neither side came to Pereiaslav with a firm and concrete idea as to how protectorate would redefine the respective sovereignties of Muscovy and the Hetmanate, for the available historical models of protectorate derived from conditions Khmel´nyt´ski could not arrange given his strategic position at the time and which Muscovite tsars had no precedent for accepting.

Lithuanian nobility's and magnates' dealings with the Russian Empire (1700-1730)After the end of the Great Northern War, the gentry and magnates of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania started to perceive Russia differently. The reason was that the internal political situation had changed: opposition to the king, mainly led by Lithuanian magnates, had gained sway and relied on Russia's support for thwarting Augustus II's attempts at bolstering royal power. This was particularly true of opposition leaders Luwig Pociej and Stanisław Denhoff, who hoped to regain the command of foreign-trained troops that the king had taken away from them. The Sapiehas were particularly successful in that respect, having integrated into the Russian elite thanks to Aleksandr Menshikov's help. In St. Petersburg, Jan Kazimierz Sapieha actively looked for foreign support against Augustus II, but nonetheless continued to support Stanisław Leszczyński against the Russian court's hostility. He was forced to leave the Russian capital because of the Golitsyns' hostility and the changes that occurred at the court, and turned to France instead for support. Former Sapieha partisan Krzysztof Urbanowicz then became the new intermediary between the Lithuanian gentry and the Russian ruling élite. Urbanowicz preferred staying in St. Petersburg and serving Russia's interests, and eventually severed his ties with Leszczyński's Lithuanian partisans. From then on, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania's antimonarchic opposition no longer relied on Russia's, but on France's support.

Petro Doroshenko's Turkish policy
The article is devoted to the inventory and description of unpublished documents relative to the relationships between the Ottoman Empire, Ukraine, and Muscovy at the time when Petro Doroshenko was Cossack hetman (1666-1676). These documents are part of Woiciech Bobowski's (Ali Ufki bey's) archives, housed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Khovanshchina and Muscovite Russia's financial crisis
This article is based chiefly on reports detailing the 1682 Strel´tsy uprising (also called Khovanshchina in historical works) written by Swedish commissioner in Moscow Christopher Koch (or Von Kochen). These little-exploited reports provide elements of answer to three questions. The first question, which has been debated for some time, concerns the nature of the uprising: was it caused by the rivalry between two opposing factions or by spontaneous popular riots? Von Kochen's reports tend to support the first hypothesis. The second question has to do with Muscovy's financial situation: Von Kochen's reports provide hitherto unknown information as to the fact that the insurgents found an empty treasury. The financial crisis can thus be said to have preceded the uprising and hampered its repression. Last, Von Kochen's reports allow us to reconstruct Old Believers' activities during the summer of 1682 in more detail—activities which became an integral part of the general movement.

The “Book of Degrees” and the Russian dynastic crisis of the turn of the seventeenth century
Compiled in the 1560s, the Book of Degrees [Stepennaia kniga], was already obsolete by the end of the sixteenth century. In the next century, it was used as a source in only a limited number of historical and hagiographical works composed by clerics. From the 1630s onward, several attempts were made to update the text of the Book of Degrees and connect the Romanov dynasty with the Moscow Rurikids. The most successful were Sergii Shelonin's and Tikhon Makarievskii's writings. The History of tsars and grand princes of the Rus´ land, compiled in 1667 by Secretary F.A. Griboedov, is a special case: materials taken from the Book of Degrees are arranged in a different perspective. All in all, the influence of the Book of Degrees on Russian seventeenth-century historiography is questionable, and, at best, limited and spotty.

The student of the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) repeatedly encounters the following well-known statement in documents, “We do not break old custom, neither do we introduce novelties.” This course of action, which prohibited breach of tradition as well as promulgation of new laws, has been called “Lithuanian conservatism.” However, these statements coexist alongside an extremely active reform policy. How can this apparent contradiction be explained? Historiography has not solved the problem thus far. The present article attempts to so by analyzing the interaction between custom (starina) and innovation (novina) in legal documents of the GDL.A comparison of the privileges granted to the Kiev region and Samogitia with the First Lithuanian Statute allows us to contend that facts belie the so-called Lithuanian “conservatism.” Every rewriting of the privileges brought about the introduction of new clauses tending generally to expand the nobility's privileges and superseding the old legislation. Tradition both concealed and guaranteed subsequent reforms.

This study of the recruitment of top-ranking officers at the court of Peter the Great is achieved through analysis of rank assignment dynamics and the way in which the highest government bodies became institutionalized. The author takes into consideration the linguistic aspects and reliability of the court's records, which entails analysis of communications between the élite and the supreme power, and reconstruction of the mechanisms at play in individual appointments and daily control of service personnel. The article relies on two hitherto ignored or neglected representative source corpora. The first consists of late seventeenth-century boiarskie povestki, notifications to attend sessions of the tsar's council (boiarskaia duma) addressed to the hundred or so officials occupying the seven highest ranks; the second corpus consists of boiarskie spiski, annual boyar lists, dating from the years 1690-1714. These rolls constitute an extensive and detailed serial source allowing the historian to reconstruct individual careers and infer what the typical career path of the leading élite was. The combination of source study and prosopography allows the author to conclude that older control methods were in use until the promulgation of the Table of Ranks in 1722, that is, much later than generally thought by historians.

The greatest number of people arrested as “spies” during the Great Terror is represented by Polish and Japanese “spies” followed by German ones. There is a reason for this. During the 1920s and 1930s (and even during WWII when, after Pearl Harbor, Poland and Japan were technically at war), Polish and Japanese intelligence services collaborated closely against the Soviet Union. Of course the Soviet Union knew of this and infiltrated the Japanese and Polish services (the extent is naturally not easy to determine). Still Polish-Japanese undercover work was serious enough to concern Stalin deeply. Iagoda, a past master of counterintelligence, carried out “Trest”-like operations in the Far East, right up until the Great Terror, i.e., until he was replaced by Ezhov. Ezhov attacked Iagoda's operations and decimated his foreign intelligence cadres. This is little known background to the Great Terror. It is not that there were many spies (in fact there were not many) or that the Great Terror struck actual “spies” (probably very few if any), but the fact of the matter was that the Great Terror took place against the backdrop of fierce international intelligence battles. German connections are sometimes mentioned, but Polish-Japanese connections are not, even though they appear to have been more important than the German ones. This partially explains the greater number of people executed as Polish and Japanese spies.

The facts and figures presented here result from an in-depth analysis of a large corpus of both published and unpublished source materials. They allow us to trace the evolution of the Russian army and navy command during the first quarter of the eighteenth century. European specialists — who accounted for 68 to 76 percent of high command in 1708 and 1709 — had a decisive influence on the modernization of Peter the Great's military at the time of the Great Northern War. In the following years, however, the transmission of experience to officers and generals of Russian origin led to a gradual reduction in the number of foreigners, although the latter did not entirely disappear — in 1725, they made up 36 percent of commanding officers. Appended is an exhaustive list of high commanding officers (203 in all, ranking from the first to the fifth echelons of the Table of Ranks).