At Michael’s death in 1645 the boyars and clergy quickly acclaimed his eldest son Aleksei as his successor. Again the tsar was young, only sixteen years old, as he was born in 1629. The constellation of boyars around him at court determined the course of events for the first decade or so. Tsar Aleksei soon married Mariia, the daughter of Ilya Miloslavskii, an ally of the young tsar’s tutor, the powerful boyar Boris Morozov. Morozov in turn married Mariia’s sister, consolidating his position at court and his influence over the young tsar. Morozov’s taxation schemes, which involved substituting a high tax on salt for the usual sales taxes, soon created a crisis. In July 1648, the Muscovites rioted, killed several prominent boyars and officials, and demanded Morozov’s head. Aleksei was able to save him, and the unrest subsided. Part of the resulting compromise was a new Assembly of the Land – this one to confirm a new law code, and in 1649 the printing presses issued Russia’s first compilation of laws, the Conciliar Code of 1649. Morozov returned to the court, but it was Ilya Miloslavskii, Aleksei’s father-in-law, a man whom the tsar feared rather than loved, who held sway. Soon Miloslavskii had a rival in Patriarch Nikon, who ascended the patriarchal throne in 1652. Nikon would set in motion changes in the church that ultimately led to a schism, but his political role outside of the church was no less important. For Russia was already faced with a new crisis, and this time it was a foreign crisis.
Russia was not alone in defending its southern frontier with bands of Cossacks. Poland-Lithuania as well maintained such a force of irregular troops on the Dniepr river facing the Crimeans. The Cossacks settled beyond the frontier in the islands below the rapids (Zaporozh’e). These Cossacks were largely Ukrainian peasants in origin and thus Orthodox in religion. They had come to the border much like Russian Cossacks fleeing serfdom at home, but in this case they fled religious oppression as well, for the usually tolerant Poland did not extend this favor to the Orthodox. The surrender of the Orthodox hierarchy in Poland-Lithuania to Rome in 1596 formed a new Catholic Uniate church on the basis of the previous Orthodox church. The king declared Orthodoxy illegal, confiscated Orthodox church buildings and property, and handed them over to the Uniates. In 1632 a new King of Poland partially reversed his father’s policy and declared a compromise, allowing an Orthodox metropolitanate in Kiev and Orthodox worship in some areas. The compromise was not enough, for the enserfed Ukrainian peasants saw religious as well as social oppressors in their mainly Polish masters. Then in the winter of 1648 the Ukrainian Cossacks elected a new hetman, or commander, without the king’s approval. The new hetman, a minor nobleman named Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi, and his Cossack host began to move northwest out of Zaporozh’e, proclaiming relief from religious and other oppression. The hastily gathered Polish army was utterly annihilated and the Ukrainian lands exploded in revolt; peasants and Cossacks alike murdered and expelled the Polish gentry, the Uniates, and the Jews.
Khmel’nyts’kyi could defeat the king’s army in the field, but he knew that soon he would need allies. At first he allied with Crimea, but this alliance was difficult to maintain as the interests of the two parties differed greatly. The hetman turned to Tsar Aleksei, begging him to support his Orthodox brethren. This message was not welcome news in Moscow. The Ukrainian Cossack emissaries arrived soon after the 1648 riot in Moscow, and neither Aleksei nor the boyars had any desire to support peasant rebels in neighboring countries. Besides, Tsar Michael (in his last years) and his son Aleksei had been trying to come to an agreement with Poland to form an alliance against the Crimeans. Aleksei hesitated for five years, offering vague promises to the Cossacks and sending peace feelers to the king of Poland. In the spring of 1653, the hetman sent yet another embassy to Moscow and offered Aleksei overlordship of the Ukrainian Cossack host. This time the tsar agreed, apparently at the prompting of Patriarch Nikon. Shortly afterward in January 1654, an embassy from the tsar signed an agreement at Pereiaslav in the Ukraine with the hetman to take the Cossacks and their land “under his high hand” while affirming their newly-won autonomy, now within Russia. The agreement also committed Russia to war with Poland, a war that fundamentally reshaped the balance of power in Eastern Europe.
The war was to last for thirteen years, until 1667. Aleksei had a new army, for he had hired western officers to form regiments of Russian soldiers on European lines. In the first years of the war the Russian army quickly recaptured Smolensk and went all the way to Wilno. After considerable back-and-forth, and Khmel’nyts’kyi’s death in 1656, Russia and Poland signed a treaty in 1667. Poland regained most of its territory, but the treaty was nevertheless a distinct Russian victory: Smolensk remained Russian and the Ukraine east of the Dniepr with the city of Kiev continued to form an autonomous hetmanate under the tsar. Though even the Russians did not yet realize this, Poland’s time as the great power of Eastern Europe was over, for the Cossack revolt and the war had done too much damage to the social and political fabric of the Polish-Lithuanian state. Its economy and population stagnated for the next hundred years, leaving the field to Russia.
Russia had not escaped entirely unscathed. The war had led to an adulteration of the silver currency with copper coins that moved the people of Moscow to riot in the “copper revolt” of 1662. The tsar had to call out the new-style infantry regiments officered by foreign mercenaries to restore order. Far more serious was the ferment on the Don that broke out as the great Cossack revolt of Stenka Razin in 1670. Similar in some respects to the Ukrainian revolt, the Russian events lacked the religious and ethnic element; indeed, many of the native peoples of the southern border joined Razin. The Russian Cossacks were also more plebeian than the Ukrainian, who included minor gentry among their leaders. They struck terror into the tsar’s court, capturing Astrakhan’ and other Volga towns with the slaughter of nobles and officials alike. Tsar Aleksei’s armies finally defeated and captured Razin in 1671 and brought him to Moscow, where he was executed. As the revolt showed, expansion into the southern steppe added enormously to Russia’s territory, its agricultural potential, its population, and its power, but it also added to the tensions in Russian society.
The southern steppe and its peoples were only one part of the larger complex of territories and peoples that made Russia an increasingly multi-national society. The territory lost to Sweden in 1619 meant the loss of some smaller Finnish groups, the Ingrians and part of the Karelians who had inhabited part of the Novgorod lands from the beginning of recorded history. Swedish attempts to force the Orthodox Karelians into the Lutheran faith and the arrival of Swedish landlords in villages of free peasants brought a sizeable migration across the Russian border into the lands around Lake Onega and even south towards Tver’. Lesser Finno-Ugrian peoples continued to populate parts of the Russian north, but until 1654 the largest of the non-Russian peoples included the Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvash and other Volga peoples brought under Russian rule in the sixteenth century. They continued to live under a separate status as payers of yasak rather than the usual Russian taxes. This separate status continued after the establishment of serfdom, with the paradoxical result that the Tatar peasantry was not enserfed. The Russian authorities continued to accept but not encourage Islam, and they staged no organized attempts at conversion. Conflicts were over land, as Russian peasants settled more and more among them, primarily among the Bashkirs, who mounted several small rebellions. Farther south the arrival in the 1630s of the Kalmuks, a Mongolian Buddhist people fleeing internal strife in their homeland, disrupted the relations among the nomads just beyond Russia’s border. As Buddhists the new arrivals had poor relations with the Crimean and other Muslim peoples in the area. The Kalmuks formed important allies for the Russian tsar, accepting his general overlordship and providing him troops in foreign wars and internal disturbances. The Circassians were loyal as well, siding with the tsar against Razin’s rebels.