queer masculinities

7
Can We ‘Queer’ Early Modern
Russia?
Dan Healey
Can we ‘queer’ early modern Russia? 1 To historians of Russia, the question
is a jarring one. It contains two problematic notions for
Russianists. To begin with the more familiar one, we must consider
what sort of ‘early modern’ Russia existed, and whether its characteristics
can easily be equated with those of Western Europe. This discussion
would compare and contrast European historical conditions with
the political, social, economic and cultural development of Muscovy
(the principality centered on Moscow which came to dominate the
eastern Slavs in the fourteenth century). Under many rubrics this discussion
would suggest that Russia’s situation was different. Muscovy
was a sprawling territory on the border zone between the European
and the Asian worlds, and in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it
was subject to Mongol domination. The Muscovite prince (tsar of
Russia from the accession of Ivan IV, The Terrible, in 1533) claimed to
be an autocrat, and his noble servitors spoke of themselves as ‘slaves.’
The peasants were subject to a serfdom that increased, not lessened, its
grip during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was not abolished
until 1861. Orthodoxy made Russia different, too. Using vernacular
and looking to Byzantium for inspiration, Russian Orthodoxy
denied Roman claims to lead Christianity. Until the seventeenth
century Russia skirted the intellectual ferment of the Western
Renaissance. Russia’s ‘early modernity’ looked very different from that
of European societies on the Atlantic coastline. These are issues that
have received much airing in English-language historiography about
Russia. 2 Classical historiography in Russian does not employ the label
‘early modern’ at all. 3 For the purposes of this essay, the temporal
limits of early modern Russia are taken to be from about the midfifteenth
to the early eighteenth centuries, or from the reign of Ivan III
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