Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/71

 year 1439. The first complete Russian Bible (the work of the aforesaid Gennadii) was in part translated from the Vulgate. When Kiev and south-western Russia were annexed by Lithuania nd Poland, the Polonisation of Russian territory led to a partial, and to a considerable extent forcible, union of the churches, the union of Brest (Brest-Litovsk), effected in the year 1596. The Jesuits summoned to Poland and Lithuania to counteract Protestantism, had likewise a certain influence upon Moscow. Polish Catholic scholasticism exercised a civilising pressure upon the Russians under the rule of Lithuania and Poland. They experienced a spiritual awakening, and their Orthodox brotherhoods founded a number of comparatively flourishing schools in Ostrog and elsewhere. In Kiev, also under Polish auspices, there was founded in the year 1615 the religious academy which was to serve Russian Orthodoxy with the aid of Catholic and Jesuit scholasticism. In 1685 pupils and teachers from the Kievic academy established in Moscow a daughter institution, the Slav-Greek-Latin academy, which at first bore the tautological name of Hellenic-Greek academy because the instruction given there was Greek, not Latin merely. According to the plans of the tsar Theodore Aleksěevič, the school was to strengthen and diffuse Orthodoxy, and it did to some extent succeed in these aims, but with the help of the Latin tongue and of Roman scholasticism.

With the utmost of her energies and with all possible severity, though not always with success, Moscow endeavoured to resist the Roman Catholic tendencies of the Kievic scholastics, among whom Medvěděv was the most notable. Turning away from Catholicism, Moscow tended towards Protestantism.

The Czech reformation, Hussitism, and still more the Moravian Brotherhood, secured adherents in Poland and Lithuania. In addition, the German reformation began to make headway in Lithuania as early as the year 1538. From Lithuania and Poland Protestantism and the Germans penetrated the very heart of Russia. Yet stronger and more persistent was the influence exercised by Protestantism from Sweden and the Baltic provinces.

Under Michael Theodorovič (1613–1645) numerous foreigners resided in all the larger Russian towns. In Moscow towards close of the seventeenth century, there came into existence a populous and practically independent German suburb (sloboda). The influence of these foreigners, most of whom