Balancing Competing Agendas

Abstract

This article investigates how the first Siberian archbishop, Kiprian, successfully dealt with uncooperative local royal officials and unruly laymen refusing to submit to his ecclesiastical jurisdiction upon his arrival in Tobol’sk in 1621. Far away from the Muscovite capital and his adopted home, Novgorod the Great, where he had served as archimandrite of the Varlaam Khutynskii Monastery, Kiprian gently balanced central Muscovite influences on the nascent Orthodox religious culture in Siberia with spiritual symbols and rituals that he imported from Novgorod. Simultaneously, he promoted the creation of local religious traditions that emphasized the independent status of Siberia vis-à-vis the Muscovite realm. The seamless merging of these three aspects – Muscovite, Novgorodian, and Siberian – assured the tsar’s continued support for the Siberian archbishop and bolstered Kiprian’s spiritual authority in Siberia.