She Ruled Tartaria for Seven Years — Then Her Brother Locked Her in a Convent and Renamed Her

1689 That's the number I want you to hold in your mind. Not a decade, not a reign, a single year. The year a woman who had governed an empire for seven years was removed from power not by a foreign army, not by a vote, not by a published act of deposition entered into any register that the surviving chancellery records of Muscovy will admit to having kept, but by a procedure that began with a letter, continued with the closing of a gate, and concluded, nine years later, with the assignment of a new name to a woman whose old name had already, by then, been quietly removed from the documents in which it ought to have continued to appear. I wasn't looking for Sophia Alexeyevna when I found the renaming. I was researching something else entirely — the architectural history of the Novodevichy Convent on the southwestern bend of the Moscow River, a narrow technical question about why a religious foundation of the early sixteenth century underwent a near-total reconstruction in the 1680s, financed by a regent, in a Baroque idiom that has no clear precedent in Muscovite ecclesiastical building. Then I found a footnote in a 1911 dissertation by a Russian art historian whose name I will come to in a moment, and the footnote referred, in passing, to the Smolensk Cathedral inside the convent walls as "the building she commissioned for herself, in the years before the building became the instrument of her erasure." The instrument of her erasure. Not the place of her exile. Not the site of her confinement. The instrument. I had read three biographies of this woman. None of them used that word.