The conflict burst into warfare in 1471. Novgorod’s elite families were divided: some wanted to make the best deal possible with Ivan, who, they believed, would prevail eventually. Others, Boretskaia among them, argued that the city should call for help from the powerful Lithuanians. She sent her two sons, Dmitri and Fedor, and her grandson Vasili to the city assembly to argue that if the city chose a Lithuanian to be its prince, that man would bring with him an army formidable enough to defend Novgorod from Ivan. Boretskaia herself may have spoken at the meeting, although it was not customary for women to do so. “We are free people of Great Novgorod,” a chronicler records her as shouting, “and the Grand Prince of Muscovy has caused us many offenses and has perpetrated many injustices; but we will be with Kasimir, King of Poland and Grand Prince of Lithuania.”24
Although the assembly remained divided, Dmitri Boretskii and several other boyars took the field at the head of a Novgorod army. Moscow chronicles record that Ivan III’s mother Maria urged her son to accept the challenge. When the Muscovites won, Dmitri Boretskii was captured and executed, but neither the death of her son nor the failure of the Lithuanians to give the help they had promised weakened Boretskaia’s resolve. Nor did the fact that Ivan made a peace offer that would have preserved some of the city’s liberties. Boretskaia refused to submit even after many other Novgorod families had done so. Her son Fedor fought the grand prince again in 1476, lost, and was taken as a prisoner to Moscow. The next year Boretskaia was driven from her home by a fire that was probably intended either to kill her or to persuade her to submit. Now Ivan was finished with conciliation. He ordered the rebels to leave Novgorod forever. Boretskaia and her grandson were arrested and exiled permanently to Nizhni-Novgorod, a city far to the east of Moscow. Nizhni-Novgorod means “Lower Novgorod.” Perhaps this was Ivan’s idea of a parting shot. Boretskaia died there.25
Assertive noblewomen such as Boretskaia and Sophia Vitovtovna were empowered by gender ideals that prevailed in Rus society and across Europe. Each was a middle-aged, widowed mother when she assumed leadership; each acted in defense of and through her sons. Women were supposed to fight for their children; adult sons, as we have seen, were supposed to obey their mothers. Boretskaia and Sophia also drew authority from their social rank, for female members of elite families were powerful people entitled to command the obedience of everyone lower-ranking than they. Like Olga centuries before, Boretskaia and Sophia Vitovtovna were gritty matriarchs eager to wield their power. There were undoubtedly others whose names we do not know, peasants and princesses, who took maximum advantage of the authority and power that were apportioned to them by law, custom, and fate.
The presence of such exceptional women among the Rus testifies to the opportunities for female agency that existed within European patriarchy. Women, particularly high-born women, exercised authority within their families and communities. In Appanage times, that authority was enhanced by expanding property rights. It bears remembering, though, that the rich and powerful were a tiny minority of Rus society. Most women were peasants, who shared with their menfolk short lives of struggle with the natural environment and the increasing demands of the ruling class.
Conclusions
The history of women in Russia began when Rus adventurers and Slavic peasants created a confederation that proved strong enough to survive for two centuries. Those centuries saw the establishment of patterns in women’s lives that would outlast the confederation itself. Elite women managed households and played politics; merchants worked in family businesses; peasants farmed. Christianity slowly spread among them, remaking their understanding of the supernatural and fortifying the protections afforded them in law. The upheavals of Mongol conquest, plague, and political conflict cost many women their lives, without appreciably altering the gender values and norms that structured those lives.
The Rus lands were an unruly frontier by comparison with western and central Europe—that is, they were characterized by vast tracts of unsettled land, minimally defined boundaries, and decentralized politics. Despite the challenges of this world, Rus women lived lives very similar to those of women in English or Saxon lands, because European gender values and mores were as functional on the frontier as in more densely populated, closely governed areas. The similarities would persist in the Muscovite period, but the differences, shaped by the consolidation of monarchical power in Muscovy and by major political, economic, religious, and intellectual change to the west, would grow.
2
THE AGE OF THE DOMOSTROI
1462–1695
Ivan III, grandson of Sophia Vitovtovna, conqueror of Marfa Boretskaia, great prince of Moscow, referred to himself as “tsar” in correspondence with foreign governments. The term was an ancient one, created in the Balkans from the Latin word “Caesar.” By borrowing it, Ivan declared himself heir to Rome’s power. It was a ridiculous assertion, for Muscovy in the late 1400s was a small, weak kingdom far from the centers of European power. Ivan and his descendants acted on his aspirations by building a government more centralized and powerful than any of its Rus predecessors. They also greatly expanded the territory they governed and fostered trade and diplomatic relations with other European nations, thereby opening Muscovy to greater contact with the outside world. And they and their nobles reduced the peasantry to serfdom and brought tens of thousands of non-Muscovite women under Moscow’s rule.
For women, these centuries were a time of enduring gender ideals and wrenching disruptions. The ideals were set out most famously in The Domostroi, a compendium of advice on household management written by an anonymous government official or cleric in the mid-sixteenth century. The Domostroi described the elite family as a harmonious mini-kingdom, presided over by a benevolent, wise patriarch and his supportive, authoritative wife. The real lives of most women, princesses as well as peasants, were a good deal grittier than this, but none of the hardships called into question, so far as we can tell, women’s notions about themselves or the customs of their daily lives. So women of the peasantry farmed, women of the towns ran the family businesses or worked for the rich, and women of the nobility managed their households and advised their men. This stability in gender arrangements was characteristic of the rest of Europe in these centuries as well.
There were subtle changes afoot among the nobility that, by the end of the seventeenth century, portended far greater changes to come. Low-ranking military officers who lived in the countryside were frequently away on campaign, leaving their wives to take on greater responsibility for managing the estates. Richer women in the cities were doing similar work, but, unlike women in the countryside, they were spending most of their time sequestered within their households. High-ranking Muscovite families believed that decorum required that their women hide themselves from public view, and so the wives and daughters of tsars and boyars rode around Moscow in sealed sledges and sat behind screens in church. By the 1660s, some of the privileged, aware that elite women elsewhere in Europe were freer, began to question their seclusion. Their discontent affected Kremlin politics and may have fueled a schism in the Orthodox Church.
Politics