Andrei Postnikov, Protopope of the Annunciation Cathedral: Biography in a Conflict Dimension

This article examines the biography of Andrei Savvinovich Postnikov, the tsar’s confessor and protopope of the Annunciation Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin. For several years, Postnikov conflicted with Patriarch Joachim. The aim of the work is to demonstrate, taking into consideration newly discovered archival information, that this confrontation can be put into a broader sociocultural context than just the personal hostility of the two clerics, as was previously believed. The source base of the study is diverse and includes, among others, the Palace Ranks, files and orderly notes of the Prikaz of Secret Affairs, the inventory of the Annunciation Cathedral, the condemnation of the protopope, documents of the Apothecary Order and a charter of the Patriarchal Rank Prikaz from the National Library of France. The main results of the study are related to the discovery of contacts between the tsar’s confessor either with foreigners (doctors) or with secular persons, advocates of borrowing Western practices (A. S. Matveyev) and their promotion. It also demonstrates Andrei Savvinovich’s interest in translated European works on geography and history (The Chronicle of the Whole World by M. Bielski, Mercator’s Cosmographia and several volumes of Atlas Maior by J. Blaeu), which luxuriant copies protopope Andrei ordered for his library. It is established that the tsar’s confessor entered into confrontation with Patriarch Pitirim before the conflict with Joachim. The latter was one of the irreconcilable opponents of everything European. In this regard, it is concluded that the emergence of a conflict between the patriarch and protopope Andrei is quite natural: in addition to personal grievances, they were people with completely opposite views on Western innovations. Enjoying the special patronage of the sovereign and Tsarina Natalia Kirillovna, supporting A. S. Matveyev, the protopope essentially expressed the interests of the secular authorities in these matters. This inevitably led to the emergence of antagonists in the form of the guardian patriarchs Pitirim and Joachim. The clash with the latter ended for Andrei Savvinovich in a long exile, which turned out to be longer than previously thought, by at least six years.