Good people of ancient Rus'

Charity- here is a word with a very controversial meaning and with a very simple sense. Many people interpret it differently, and everyone understands it the same way. Ask what it means to be kind to your neighbor, and you may get as many answers as you have. But put them right in front of an accident, in front of a suffering person with the question of what to do - and everyone will be ready to help in any way they can. The feeling of compassion is so simple and direct that one wants to help even when the sufferer does not ask for help, even when help is harmful and even dangerous to him, when he can abuse it. At leisure, one can reflect and argue about the terms of government loans to the needy, organization and comparative value state and public assistance, the attitude of both to private charity, the delivery of earnings to the needy, the demoralizing effect of gratuitous benefits. At leisure, when the trouble is over, and we will think about all this and argue. But when you see that a person is drowning, the first movement is to rush to his aid, without asking how and why he fell into the water and what moral impression our help will make on him.

When discussing the participation that the government, zemstvo and society can take in helping the people, it is necessary to distinguish between various elements and motives: economic policy, which takes measures to bring the labor and economy of the people out of unfavorable conditions, and the consequences of assistance, which may turn out to be unfavorable from the point of view of police and public discipline, and the possibility of all sorts of abuses. All these are considerations which are within the competence of the respective departments, but which need not be mixed with charity in the proper sense. Only such charity is open to us, private individuals, and it can be guided only by a moral impulse, a feeling of compassion for the suffering. If only to help him stay alive and well, and if he makes bad use of our help, it is his fault, which, after the need has passed, the authorities and influences to be corrected will take care to correct. This is how we understood private charity in the old days; so, no doubt, we also understand it, having inherited through historical education the good concepts and skills of antiquity.

Poverty of Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky.

From the Royal Chronicler

Over the course of centuries, under the leadership of the Church, ancient Russian society diligently learned to understand and fulfill the second of the two main commandments, which contain all the law and the prophets - the commandment to love one's neighbor. With social disorder, lack of security for the weak and protection for the offended, the practice of this commandment was directed mainly in one direction: love for one's neighbor was believed, first of all, in the feat of compassion for the suffering, personal alms were recognized as its first requirement. The idea of ​​this almsgiving relied on the basis of practical moralizing; the need for this feat was brought up by all the then means of spiritual and moral pedagogy.

To love your neighbor is, first of all, to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to visit the prisoner in prison. Humanity really means poverty. Charity was not so much an auxiliary means of public improvement, but a necessary condition for personal moral health: it was more needed by the poor-lover himself than by the beggar. healing power alms were supposed not so much to wipe away the tears of the suffering, giving him part of his property, but to, looking at his tears and suffering, to suffer with him, to experience that feeling called philanthropy.

The ancient Russian philanthropist, "lover of Christ", thought less about raising the level of social welfare with a good deed than about raising the level of his own spiritual perfection. When two ancient Russian hands met, one with a request for Christ's sake, the other with alms in the name of Christ, it was difficult to say which of them gave more alms to the other: the need of one and the help of the other merged in the interaction of the brotherly love of both. That is why Ancient Rus' understood and valued only personal, direct, charity, alms given from hand to hand, moreover, “otay”, secretly, not only from a prying eye, but also from its own “shui” (left hand. - Note. ed.).

The beggar was for the philanthropist the best pilgrimage, prayer intercessor, spiritual benefactor. “The holy alms enter into paradise,” they said in the old days, “the poor are fed by the rich, and the rich of the poor are saved by prayer.” The philanthropist needed to see with his own eyes the human need that he alleviated in order to receive spiritual benefit; the needy had to see his benefactor in order to know whom to pray for. The ancient Russian tsars, on the eve of big holidays, early in the morning, made secret exits to prisons and almshouses, where own hands they distributed alms to the prisoners and detainees, they also visited poor people who lived separately.

How difficult it is to study and treat diseases according to a drawing or a mannequin of a diseased organism, so seemed ineffective absentee alms. By virtue of the same view of the importance of charitable work, begging was considered in Ancient Rus' not an economic burden for the people, not an ulcer of public order, but one of the main means moral education people, which is a practical institution of public goodness attached to the Church. Just as a patient is needed in a clinic in order to learn how to treat diseases, so in ancient Russian society an orphaned and wretched person was needed in order to cultivate the ability and skill to love a person. Almsgiving was an additional act of church worship, a practical requirement of the rule that faith without works is dead. As a living instrument of spiritual salvation, the old Russian man needed a beggar at all important moments of his personal and family life especially in sad moments. From it, he created an ideal image, which he liked to wear in his thoughts, as the personification of his best feelings and thoughts. If by a miraculous act of legislation or economic progress and medical knowledge all the poor and miserable in Ancient Rus' suddenly disappeared, who knows, perhaps the ancient Russian merciful would feel some moral awkwardness, like a person left without a staff on which he used to rely; he would have a shortage in the supply of means for his spiritual dispensation.

It is difficult to say to what extent such a view of charity contributed to the improvement of the Old Russian community. No methods of sociological study can calculate how much good this daily, silent, thousand-armed charity poured into human relations, how much it taught people to love a person and weaned the poor from hating the rich. The significance of such personal almsgiving was revealed more clearly and more tangibly when the need for charitable assistance was caused not by the grief of individual unhappy lives, but by the people's physical disaster. The nature of our country has long been kind, but sometimes it has been the wayward mother of its people, who, perhaps, himself caused her waywardness by his inability to deal with her. Shortfalls and crop failures were not uncommon in Ancient Rus'. The lack of economic communication and administrative discipline turned local shortages of food into starvation disasters.

Such a disaster happened in early XVII c., under Tsar Boris. In 1601, as soon as the spring sowing was over, terrible rains poured down and poured all summer. Field work has stopped. The bread did not ripen, until August it was impossible to start harvesting, and on Assumption Day a hard frost unexpectedly hit and beat the unripe bread, which almost all remained in the field. People fed themselves on the remnants of old bread, and the next year they sowed the crops of the new crop, somehow harvested, with cold; but nothing came up, everything remained in the ground, and a three-year famine set in. The tsar did not spare the treasury, generously distributed alms in Moscow, undertook extensive construction in order to deliver earnings to those in need.

Having heard about this, the people poured into Moscow in droves from the lean provinces, which increased the need for the capital. Severe mortality began: only in three state-owned metropolitan skudels, where the tsar ordered to pick up homeless victims, in two years and four months they counted 127 thousand. But the trouble was largely artificial. There was enough bread left over from previous harvests. Later, when the impostors flooded Rus' with gangs of Poles and Cossacks, who, with their devastation, stopped sowing in vast areas, for many years this spare grain was enough not only for their own, but also for enemies. At the first sign of crop failure, grain speculation began to play out. The big landowners locked up their warehouses.

The buyers put everything into circulation: money, utensils, expensive clothes, in order to pick up the sold bread. Both of them did not let any grain on the market, waiting high prices, rejoicing, in the words of a contemporary, at the profits, "the end of things is not understanding, the troubles are woven together and the people are embarrassing." Grain prices were raised to a terrible height: a quarter of rye from the then 20 kopecks soon rose to 6 rubles, equal to our 60 rubles, that is, it rose in price by 30 times! The king took strict and decisive measures against evil, forbade distillation and brewing, ordered to look for buyers and beat them mercilessly with a whip in the markets, overwrite their stocks and sell them at retail a little, prescribed mandatory prices and punished with heavy fines those who concealed their stocks.

The surviving monument revealed to us one of the private charitable activities that at that time worked below, in the field, when the tsar was struggling with a national disaster above. At that time, a widow-landowner, the wife of a wealthy provincial nobleman, Ulyana Ustinovna Osorina, lived on her estate. She was a simple, ordinary, kind woman of Ancient Rus', modest, afraid of something to become higher than those around her. She differed from others only in that pity for the poor and wretched—the feeling with which a Russian woman is born into the world—was subtler and deeper in her, manifested itself more intensely than in many others, and, developing from continuous practice, gradually filled her whole being, became the main stimulus of her moral life by the momentary attraction of her ever-active heart.

Even before her marriage, living with her aunt after the death of her parents, she sheathed all the orphans and infirm widows in her village, and often the candle in her room did not go out until dawn. Upon her marriage, her mother-in-law entrusted her with housekeeping, and her daughter-in-law turned out to be a smart and efficient housewife. But the habitual thought of the poor and the wretched did not leave her amid domestic and family troubles. She deeply learned the Christian commandment of secret almsgiving. It used to be that her husband would be sent to the royal service somewhere in Astrakhan for two or three years.

She stayed at home and whiled away the lonely evenings, she sewed and spun. She sold her needlework and secretly distributed the proceeds to the beggars who came to her at night. Not considering herself entitled to take something from home stocks without asking her mother-in-law, she once even resorted to a little slyness for a charitable purpose, which it is permissible to tell about, because her respectful son did not hide it in his mother's biography. Ulyana was very moderate in her food, she only dined, did not have breakfast and did not have an afternoon snack, which greatly worried her mother-in-law, who was afraid for the health of her young daughter-in-law.

One of the frequent crop failures happened in Rus', and famine set in in the Murom region. Uliana intensified her usual secret almsgiving and, needing new funds, suddenly began to demand for herself full breakfasts and afternoon snacks, which, of course, were distributed to the starving. The mother-in-law remarked to her half-jokingly: “What has happened to you, my daughter? When there was plenty of bread, you used to not be called to either breakfast or afternoon tea, but now, when everyone has nothing to eat, what a desire for food fell on you. - “Until I had children,” the daughter-in-law answered, “food didn’t even come to my mind, but when the guys went to be born, I became emaciated and just can’t eat, not only during the day, but often at night I’m drawn to food ; only I am ashamed, mother, to ask you. The mother-in-law was satisfied with the explanation of her good liar and allowed her to take food as much as she liked, day and night.

This constantly aroused compassionate love for her neighbor, offended by life, helped Ulyana easily step over the most inveterate social prejudices of Ancient Rus'.

A deep legal and moral abyss lay between the ancient Russian master and his serf: the latter was for the former, according to the law, not a person, but a simple thing. Following the original native custom, and perhaps even Greco-Roman law, which did not criminalize the death of a slave from the beatings of the master, Russian legislation as early as the 14th century. proclaimed that if the master “sinned”, with an unsuccessful blow he killed his serf or serf, for this he would not be subjected to trial and responsibility. The Church long and in vain cried out against such an attitude towards serfs. Filling the yards of wealthy landowners by dozens, poorly dressed and always kept from hand to mouth, the servants made up a crowd of domestic beggars, more miserable compared to free public beggars. The ancient Russian church sermon pointed to them to the gentlemen as the closest object of their compassion, urging them to take care of their servants before holding out their hand with a charitable penny to a beggar standing on the church porch. There were many servants in Ulyana's estate. She fed and clothed her well, did not spoil her, but spared her, did not leave her idle, but gave everyone work according to her strength and did not demand personal services from her, she did everything for herself, did not even allow her to take off her shoes and give water to wash . At the same time, she did not allow herself to address the serfs with nicknames, with which soul-owning Rus', right up to February 19, 1861, shouted at her people: Vanka, Mashka, but she called each and every one by her real name. Who, what social theories taught her, a simple rural lady of the 16th century, to become in such a direct and deliberate relationship with the lower subservient brethren?

Righteous Juliana during the famine gives alms to the poor

She was already in old age when her last and most difficult charitable test befell her. The crafty demon, a good hater, who had long fussed around this annoying woman and was always put to shame by her, once out of anger threatened her: “Wait a minute! Will you feed strangers with me when I make you starve to death in your old age. Such a good-natured and pious combination explains in the biography the origin of the misfortune that befell the good woman. Having buried her husband, raised her sons and placed them in the royal service, she was already thinking about the eternal dispensation of her own soul, but she still smoldered before God with love for her neighbor, like a burning wax candle smoldering before the icon. Poverty did not allow her to be a thrifty mistress. She counted on household food only for a year, distributing the rest to those in need. The poor man was for her some kind of bottomless savings mug, where she, with insatiable hoarding, hid everything and hid all her savings and surpluses. Sometimes she didn’t have a penny left in her house from alms, and she borrowed money from her sons, with which she sewed winter clothes for the poor, and herself, already under 60 years old, went all winter without a fur coat.

The beginning of the terrible famine three years under Tsar Boris found her completely unprepared in the Nizhny Novgorod estate. She did not collect any grain from her fields, there were no stocks, almost all the cattle fell from lack of food. But she did not lose heart, but cheerfully set to work, sold the rest of the cattle, clothes, dishes, everything valuable in the house and bought bread with the proceeds, which she distributed to the hungry, did not let a single one who asked empty-handed and took special care of feeding her family. servants. Then many prudent gentlemen simply drove their serfs from the yards so as not to feed them, but did not give them vacation pay, so that later they could be returned to captivity. Abandoned to the mercy of fate in the midst of general panic, the serfs began to steal and rob.

Ulyana tried most of all to prevent her servants from doing this and kept them with her as much as she had strength. Finally, she reached the last stage of poverty, robbed herself clean, so that there was nothing to go to church. Having exhausted herself, having used up all the bread to the last grain, she announced to her serf household that she could no longer feed her, whoever wants, let her take her fortresses or vacation pay and go free with God. Some left her, and she saw them off with prayer and blessing; but others renounced their will, declared that they would not go, would rather die with their mistress than leave her. She sent her faithful servants through the forests and fields to collect tree bark and quinoa and began to bake bread from these surrogates, which she fed with children and serfs, even managed to share with the beggars, "because at that time there were no number of beggars", succinctly remarks her biographer.

The surrounding landowners reproachfully said to these beggars: “Why do you go to her? What to take from her? She herself is starving." “And we’ll say this,” the beggars said, “we went around a lot of villages where we were served real bread, and we didn’t eat it as much as we liked, like the bread of this widow - what do you call her?” Many beggars did not even know how to call her by name. Then the neighbors-landlords began to send to Ulyana for her outlandish bread: after tasting it, they found that the beggars were right, and with surprise they said among themselves: the masters of her serfs bake bread! With what love must a beggar be served a loaf of bread that is not irreproachable in chemically so that this slice becomes the subject of a poetic legend as soon as it was eaten! For two years she endured such poverty and did not grieve, did not grumble, did not give madness to God, did not become exhausted from poverty, on the contrary, she was cheerful as never before. Thus ends the biographer's account of his mother's last exploit. She died shortly after the end of the famine, at the beginning of 1604. The traditions of our past have not preserved for us a sublime and more touching example of charitable love for one's neighbor.

No one counted, no one historical monument he did not write down how many Ulyans were then in the Russian land, and how many hungry tears they wiped away with their kind hands. It must be assumed that there were enough of both, because the Russian land survived those terrible years, deceiving the expectations of its enemies. Here, private philanthropy went hand in hand with the efforts of the state authorities. But this is not always the case. Private philanthropy suffers from some disadvantages. Usually she provides occasional and fleeting help, and often not a real need. It is easily abused: evoked by one of the deepest and most uncalculative feelings that there is in the moral reserve of the human heart, it cannot follow its own effects. It is pure in its source, but easily corrupted in its course. Here it is against the will of benefactors and may deviate from the requirements of the public good and order.

Peter the Great, striving to set in motion the entire available labor force of his people, armed himself against idle begging fed by private alms. In 1705, he ordered clerks to be sent around Moscow with soldiers and bailiffs to catch wandering beggars and punish them, take their money away, not give them alms, but seize those who file and subject them to a fine; philanthropists had to deliver their alms to the almshouses that existed at the churches. Peter armed himself against private alms in the name of public charity, as an institution, as a system of charitable institutions. Public charity has its advantages: yielding to private alms in energy and quality of motives, in moral and educational action on both sides, it is more selective and more effective in its practical results, it provides more reliable assistance to the needy, gives him permanent shelter.

The idea of ​​public charity, of course, was aroused with particular force in times of national disasters, when the quantity of good is required before being asked about the quality of motives for good deeds. So it was in the Time of Troubles. In 1609 the second impostor besieged Moscow. The phenomena of Borisov's time were repeated. There was a terrible famine in the capital. The grain merchants staged a strike, began to buy supplies everywhere and did not let anything on the market, waiting for the greatest rise in prices. For a quarter of rye, they began to ask for 9 rubles of that time, that is, over 100 rubles. with our money. Tsar Vasily Shuisky ordered to sell bread at a specified price - the merchants did not obey. He put into effect the strictness of the laws - merchants stopped the risky delivery of the bread they bought from the provinces to the besieged capital. Moreover, opposition journalism poured out of Moscow streets and markets from thousands of mouths, they began to say that all troubles, and the enemy's sword, and hunger fall on the people because the tsar is unhappy. Then an unprecedented people's assembly was convened at the Moscow Assumption Cathedral. Patriarch Hermogenes delivered a powerful sermon on love and mercy; behind him the tsar himself delivered a speech, imploring the kulaks not to buy up grain, not to raise prices. But the struggle of both higher authorities, church and state, with popular psychology and political economy was unsuccessful. Then a bright thought, one of those that often come to the mind of good people, dawned on the tsar and the patriarch. The Old Russian monastery has always been a spare granary for the needy, for the wealth of the Church, as the pastors of our Church used to say, is the wealth of the poor.

Then lived at the Trinity Compound in Moscow, the cellar of the Trinity Sergius Monastery, Father Avraamy, who had significant stocks of bread. The tsar and the patriarch persuaded him to send several hundred quarters to the Moscow market for 2 rubles. for a quarter. It was more a psychological than a political-economic operation: the cellar threw only 200 measures of rye into the market of the crowded capital; but the goal was achieved. The merchants were frightened when a rumor spread that all the grain reserves of this rich monastery, which were considered inexhaustible, had gone to the market, and the price of bread had fallen to 2 rubles for a long time. After some time, Abraham repeated this operation with the same amount of bread and with the same success.

The 17th century had the sad advantage of hard experience to understand and appreciate the importance of the issue of public charity raised at the Stoglavy Council as a matter of legislation and administration, and to transfer it from the circle of action of personal moral feeling to the area of ​​public improvement. Severe trials led to the idea that government by timely measures can ease or avert the calamities of the needy masses, and even direct private philanthropy.

In 1654, the war with Poland for Little Russia began and continued under very unfavorable conditions. The epidemic devastated villages and villages and reduced grain production. The fall in the rate of credit copper money issued in 1656 with a nominal value of silver increased the high cost: the price of bread, which had doubled since the beginning of the war, rose to 30-40 rubles in other places by the beginning of the 1660s. for a quarter of rye with our money. In 1660, knowledgeable people from the Moscow merchants, who were called for a conference with the boyars on the reasons for the high cost and the means to eliminate it, among other things pointed out the extraordinary development of distillation and brewing, and proposed to stop the sale of wine in drinking establishments, close wineries, and also take measures against the buying up of grain and to prevent buyers and kulaks from entering grain markets before noon. Finally, to rewrite the stocks of grain prepared by the buyers, transport them to Moscow to the state account and sell them to poor people, and the buyers will be paid from the treasury at their price in money. As soon as the gravity of the situation forced us to think about the mechanism of national economic turnover, we immediately felt vividly what the state power could do to eliminate the confusion that arose in it.

In these hard years stood close to the king a man who good example showed how it is possible to combine private charity with public and build on a sense of personal compassion sustainable system charitable institutions.

It was F. M. Rtishchev, a close bed-keeper, as it were, chief chamberlain at the court of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, and then his butler, that is, the minister of the court. This man is one of the best memories bequeathed to us by ancient Russian antiquity. One of the first planters of scientific education in Moscow in the 17th century, he belonged to the great state minds of Alekseev's time, which was so abundant in great minds. He was also credited with the idea of ​​the aforementioned credit operation with copper money, which represented unprecedented news in the then financial policy, and it was not his fault if the experiment ended unsuccessfully. Much employed in the service, enjoying the full confidence of the king and queen and the great respect of the court society, the educator of Tsarevich Alexei, Rtishchev set the task of his private life to serve suffering and needy humanity. Helping one's neighbor was a constant need of his heart, and his view of himself and his neighbor imparted to this need the character of a responsible but unassuming moral duty.

Rtishchev belonged to those rare and somewhat strange people who have no pride at all, at least in the simple current sense of the word. Contrary to natural instincts and primordial human habits, in Christ's commandment to love your neighbor as yourself, he considered himself capable of fulfilling only the first part. He loved himself only for his neighbor, considering himself the least of his neighbors, about whom it is not a sin to think about only when there is no one else to think about. Totally evangelical right cheek which itself, without boasting and calculation, was substituted for the one who hit on the left, as if it were a demand physical law or secular decency, and not a feat of humility.

Andreevsky Monastery near Moscow, where a school was founded in 1647.

19th century lithograph from an old engraving

Rtishchev did not understand resentment, just as some do not know the taste in wine, not considering this as abstinence, but simply not understanding how it is possible to drink such an unpleasant and useless thing. He was the first to meet his offender with a request for forgiveness and reconciliation. From the height of his social position, he did not know how to slide an arrogant gaze over people's heads, stopping at them only to count them. A person was not only a counting unit for him, especially a poor and suffering person. The high position only expanded, how to say, the scope of his philanthropy, giving him the opportunity to see how many people live in the world who need help, and his compassionate feeling was not content with helping the first suffering he met. From the height of ancient Russian compassion for personal, specific grief, for this or that unfortunate person, Rtishchev knew how to rise to the ability to sympathize with human misfortune, as a common evil, and deal with it, as with his own personal disaster. Therefore, he wanted to turn random and intermittent calls for personal charity into a permanent public organization which would pick up the masses of the toiling and burdened, making it easier for them to bear the heavy duty of life.

Procession in Moscow in the 17th century

The impressions of the Polish war could only reinforce this idea. The tsar himself went on a campaign, and Rtishchev accompanied him as the head of his camp apartment. Being ex officio in the rear of the army, Rtishchev saw the horrors that the war leaves behind, and which the belligerents themselves usually do not notice - those who become their first victims. The rear of the army - ordeal and the best school of philanthropy: he will already relentlessly love a person who does not carry away hatred of people from the dressing line.

Rtishchev looked at the disgusting work of the war as at the harvest of his heart, as at a sadly plentiful charitable harvest. He suffered from his legs, and it was difficult for him to ride. On the way, he gathered in heaps of sick, wounded, beaten and devastated into his carriage, so that sometimes there was no place left for him, and, having mounted a horse, he trailed behind his impromptu field infirmary to the nearest town, where he immediately rented a house, where, himself groaning in pain, he dumped his groaning and groaning brethren, arranged for her maintenance and care for her, and even in some unknown way recruited medical staff, “naziratai and physicians to them and caregivers arranged, for their repose and healing from their estate, exhausting them,” how pretentious notes his biographer. So the chief chamberlain of his majesty's court turned by itself into a mourner of the Red Cross, which he also arranged at his own expense.

However, in this case he had a secret financial and cordial accomplice, which the same chatty biographer betrayed to history. In his silent pocket, Rtishchev carried a significant amount for the war, quietly slipped to him by Tsarina Marya Ilyinichnaya, and the biographer makes it clear with an indiscreet hint that before the campaign they agreed to accept even captured enemies in need of hospital care in the temporary military hospitals they had conceived. We must bow to the ground to the memory of these people who, by the silent exegesis of their deeds, teach us to understand the words of Christ: "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you." Similar cases were repeated in the Livonian campaign of the king, when in 1656 the war with Sweden began.

It can be assumed that the field observations and impressions did not remain without influence on the plan of public charity, drawn up in the mind of Rtishchev. This plan was designed for the most painful ulcers of the then Russian life. First of all, Crimean Tatars in the 16th and 17th centuries. made a profitable trade for themselves from robber attacks on the Russian land, where they took thousands and tens of thousands of prisoners, who were sold to Turkey and other countries. In order to save and return these prisoners home, the Moscow government arranged for their redemption at public expense, for which they introduced a special general tax, Polonian money. This ransom was called "general alms", in which everyone had to participate: both the king and all "Orthodox Christians", his subjects. By agreement with the robbers, the procedure for bringing in captive goods and the tariff at which it was redeemed were established, depending on the social status of the captives. Redemption rates in the time of Rtishchev were quite high: for the people who stood at the very bottom of the then society, peasants and serfs, about 250 rubles were assigned from the state. on our money per person; for people of the upper classes paid thousands. But state support for ransom was not enough.

Having seen enough of the suffering of prisoners during campaigns, Rtishchev entered into an agreement with a Greek merchant living in Russia, who, doing business with the Mohammedan East, redeemed many captive Christians at his own expense. To this good man, Rtishchev transferred a capital of 17 thousand rubles with our money, to which the Greek, who had taken over the ransom operation, added his contribution, and thus a kind of charitable company was formed to redeem Russian prisoners from the Tatars. But, true to his agreement with the tsarina, Rtishchev did not forget the foreigners whom he brought captive to Russia, and eased their plight with his intercession and alms.

Moscow unpaved street of the 17th century. she was very untidy: in the midst of the dirt, misfortune, idleness and vice sat, crawled and lay nearby; beggars and cripples screamed for alms to passers-by, drunks lay on the ground. Rtishchev made up a team of messengers who picked up these people from the streets to a special house arranged by him at his own expense, where the sick were treated, and the drunks were sobered up and then, having been provided with the necessary, they were released, replacing them with new patients. For the elderly, the blind and other cripples who suffered from incurable ailments, Rtishchev bought another house, spending his money on their maintenance. recent earnings. This house, under the name of the Hospital of Fyodor Rtishchev, existed even after his death, supported by voluntary donations.

So Rtishchev formed two types of charitable institutions: an outpatient shelter for those in need of temporary assistance and a permanent shelter - an almshouse for people whom philanthropy was supposed to take into its own hands until their death. But he listened to people's needs outside of Moscow, and here he continued the work of his predecessor, Ulyana Osorina: by the way, his mother's name was Ulyana. There was a famine in the Vologda region. The local archbishop helped the starving as much as he could. Rtishchev, having spent money on his Moscow establishments, sold all his extra clothes, all his extra household utensils, which he, a rich gentleman, had a lot of, and sent the proceeds to the Vologda ruler, who, adding to the donation and his small fraction, fed many poor people.

With careful and deeply compassionate attention, Rtishchev stopped before a new kind of people in need of compassionate attention, which in the time of Juliana was only in its infancy: in the 17th century. the serfdom of the peasants developed. The personal freedom of the peasants was one of those sacrifices which our state in the 17th century was forced to bring in the struggle for its integrity and external security. Biographer Rtishchev outlined his attitude to this new field of charity with only two or three features, but with features that touched to the depths of the soul.

Being a large landowner, he once had, in need of money, to sell his village of Ilyinskoye. Having bargained with the buyer, he himself voluntarily reduced the agreed price, but at the same time led the new owner to the image and made him swear that he would not increase the philanthropic duties that the peasants of the village were serving in favor of the former master - an unusual and slightly strange form of a verbal bill, taken on the conscience of the drawer. Supporting the inventory of his peasants with generous loans, he was most afraid of upsetting this economy with unbearable dues and corvée work, and frowned with displeasure every time he noticed an increase in the lord's income in the reports of the managers.

known to care old Russian man about the afterlife dispensation of one's soul with the help of contributions, posthumous prayer and commemoration. Rtishchev bequeathed his estates to his daughter and son-in-law, Prince Odoevsky. He ordered the heirs to release all his servants to freedom. Then the legislation had not yet developed a procedure for the dismissal of serfs with land by entire societies. “This is how you arrange my soul,” Rtishchev said before his death to his son-in-law and daughter, “in memory of me, be kind to my peasants, whom I strengthened for you, own them preferentially, do not demand from them work and dues beyond their strength-possibility, because they are our brothers; this is my last and greatest request to you.”

Rtishchev knew how to sympathize with the situation of entire societies or institutions, as one sympathizes with the grief of individuals. We all remember lovely story, read by us at school in the textbook. Near Arzamas, Rtishchev had land, for which private buyers gave him up to 17 thousand rubles for our money. But he knew that the Arzamas people desperately needed the land, and offered the city to buy it at least for a reduced price. But the urban society was so poor that they could not pay any decent price, and did not know what to do. Rtishchev gave him land.

Contemporaries who observed the court of Tsar Alexei, their own and others, left very little news about the minister of this court, Rtishchev. One foreign ambassador, who was then visiting Moscow, said of him that, barely 40 years old, he surpassed the prudence of many old people. Rtishchev did not move forward. He was one of those modest people who do not like to walk in the front ranks, but by staying behind and raising the lights high above their heads, they light the way for advanced people.

It was especially difficult to keep track of his charitable activities. But he was understood and remembered among the lower brethren, for whom he laid down his soul. His biographer, describing his death, conveys a very naive story, Rtishchev died in 1673, only 47 years old. Two days before his death, a 12-year-old girl who lived in his house, whom he cherished for her meek disposition, after praying, as was customary in this house, went to bed and, drowsing, sees: her sick owner is sitting, so cheerful and smart and he has a crown on his head. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a fine fellow, also smartly dressed, comes up to him and says: “Tsarevich Alexei is calling you.” And this prince, a pupil of Rtishchev, was then already dead. “Wait a little, you can’t do it yet,” the owner answered. The good guy left. Soon two others of the same kind came and again said: "Tsarevich Alexei is calling you." The owner got up and went, and two babies, his daughter and niece, clung to his legs, and did not want to leave him. He pushed them aside, saying, "Go away, or I'll take you with me." The owner came out of the ward, and then a ladder appeared in front of him from the earth to the very sky, and he climbed this ladder, and there a young man with golden wings appeared on the heights of heaven, extended his hand to the owner and grabbed him. In this dream of the girl, told in Rtishchev's girl's room, all the noble tears of poor people, wiped away by the owner, poured out. Much was said about his death itself. In the last moments, already fully prepared, he called the beggars into his bedroom to give them the last alms from his own hands, then lay down and forgot himself. Suddenly his fading eyes lit up, as if illuminated by some kind of vision, his face revived, and he smiled merrily: with such a look he froze. Suffer all your life, do good and die with a cheerful smile - a well-deserved end to such a life.

B. Kustodiev.Moscow school of the 17th century.1907

There is no news left about whether Rtishchev's attitude towards serfs found an echo in the landowning society; but him charity, apparently, did not remain without influence on the legislation. Good ideas, supported by good guides and examples, are easily clothed in the flesh and blood of a kind, in customs, laws, and institutions. The imprudent private charity of Ancient Rus' nourished the craft of begging, became a means of nourishing idleness, and itself often turned into a cold fulfillment of church decency, into distributing kopecks to those who ask instead of helping those in need. Merciful people like Juliania and Rtishchev restored the true Christian meaning of almsgiving, the source of which is a warm compassionate feeling, and the goal is the destruction of need, poverty, and suffering. In the same direction, after Rtishchev, legislation begins to operate.

Since the time of Alekseev's successor, there has been a long series of decrees against idle artisan begging and private manual alms. On the other hand, the state power lends a hand to the church for friendly work on the organization of charitable institutions. Under Tsar Fyodor Alekseevich, the Moscow beggars were sorted out: the truly helpless were ordered to be kept at public expense in a special shelter, and healthy lazy people were given work, perhaps in workers' houses conceived at the same time.

It was supposed to build two charitable institutions in Moscow, a hospital and an almshouse for the sick, the beggars, who were wandering and lying on the streets, so that they would not wander and wallow there: apparently, institutions similar to those built by Rtishchev were supposed. At the church council of 1681, the tsar proposed to the patriarch and bishops to arrange the same shelters for the poor in provincial towns and the council accepted the offer. So a private initiative of kind and influential person gave a direct or indirect impetus to the idea of ​​organizing a whole system of church-state charitable institutions. He not only revived, no doubt, the zeal of well-meaning givers for a good deed, but also suggested its very organization, the desirable and possible forms in which it was to be clothed.

After all, the memory of these kind people is dear to them, because their example in difficult times not only encourages them to act, but also teaches them how to act. Juliana and Rtishchev are examples of Russian charity. The same feeling suggested to them different methods of action, in accordance with the situation of each. One did more charitable work at home, in her close rural circle; the other operated mainly on the wide metropolitan square and street. For one, beneficence was an expression of personal pity; the other wanted to transform it into an organized public philanthropy. But, going in different ways, both went to the same goal: without losing sight of the moral and educational significance of charity, they looked at it as a continuous struggle with human need, the grief of a helpless neighbor. It was they and similar educators who carried this view through a number of centuries, and it still lives in our society, actively revealing itself whenever it is needed. How much Ulyan, imperceptibly and without noise, is now waging this struggle through the backwaters of areas stricken with want! There are, without a doubt, the Rtishchevs, and they will not be transferred. According to the covenant of their lives, they will act even when they themselves are forgotten. From their historical distance, they will not cease to shine, like beacons in the midst of the darkness of the night, illuminating our path and not needing their own light. And the covenant of their life is this: to live means to love your neighbor, that is, to help him live; nothing more means to live and nothing more to live for.