Political Folkways and Praying for the Dead in Muscovy: Reconsidering Edward Keenan’s “Slight” Against the Church

Abstract

The nature of the Muscovite political system remains today a hotly debated issue, but it was not always so. The traditional view portrays the ruler as an autocrat—the outright owner of Muscovy’s land and people—who struggled against the aristocracy to build a centralized state. But there have also been those who questioned this patrimonial model, suggesting a more cooperative relationship between the ruler and his boyars and focusing more on the kinship ties that held the court together. With the publication in 1986 of Edward Keenan’s seminal article “Muscovite Political Folkways,” the debate gained new life. In this work, Keenan laid out a new paradigmatic approach to Russian history that emphasized consensus and marriage ties over class divisions and conflict among the members of the Muscovite court. For Keenan, the ruler was not an autocrat, but rather the hub of an oligarchical system where the court functioned as an extended family of interrelated clans, the dynasty merely being one of these clans. “Muscovite Political Folkways” was challenged on many grounds, including its dismissive treatment of the role the Orthodox Church played in the political culture of the court. This article re-examines Keenan’s “Folkways” and argues that many of the heretical ideas Keenan espoused are substantiated by documents generated by the Church for the purpose of commemorating the dead. Agreeing that “Folkways” perhaps gives short shrift to the role of the Church, this study nonetheless makes the case for the utility of Keenan’s model for understanding the way politics in Muscovy worked.