title: Chapter 3 Redemption, Ritual and Exodus
abstract: Any consideration of liberation in the history of Muscovy cannot bypass the question of authority, the role of the tsars and the myths associated with them. Boris Uspensky and Victor Zhivov have forcefully argued that the rhetoric of the Church raised the sacred stature of the tsar just around the time of the conquest of Kazan, in the mid-sixteenth century. 1 This chapter will ask whether this was mere coincidence, or whether the sacralisation of the sovereign was linked to the ideas about the N