Vasily III and a Child on the Throne
Vasily III Ivanovich pursued the plan of Russian unity. He added Smolensk to his realm and subdued the principalities of Ryazan and Novgorod-Seversk. As one Russian chronicler put it: "When the proud republic of Pskov bowed to Vasily's rule (1510), only the children at their mothers' breasts could keep from weeping." Russia was now counted among Europe's strong states, and Vasily wrote on equal terms to Maximilian I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent and Pope Leo X. When a group of boyars wanted to limit his powers, Vasily put them in their place by addressing them as "peasants" with contempt and cutting off the head of one nobleman. Having no child by his wife, he divorced her and married a cultivated, distinguished woman, Elena Glinskaya. After Vasily III's death his wife acted as regent for their three-year-old son, Ivan IV Vasilievich. When the regent died, the boyars rose in revolt, and each of the opposing factions in turn seized the reins for a short time, throwing the cities into turmoil with harshness and injustice and spilling the blood of defenseless muzhiks (Russian peasants) in civil wars.
A Harsh Boyhood and Early Reform
In these struggles the young ruler of Russia was almost forgotten and sometimes lived deprived and isolated. Seeing nothing around him but violence and cruelty, he took them for the normal way of life, chose for himself the wildest kinds of sport, and by his teens had turned into a moody, suspicious boy. At thirteen he suddenly had Andrei Shuisky, head of a group of boyars, thrown to his dogs (1544) and took charge of the country. Three years later the metropolitans of Moscow placed the royal crown on his head and he became tsar of Russia. By his order a group of noble girls from across the country was then picked out and sent to him, and from among them he chose Anastasia Romanov as his wife; it was her family name that was given to the dynasty of tsars who succeeded him.
In 1550 Ivan convened the first national assembly of representatives from across the country, and before it he confessed the mistakes of his youth and promised to govern the people justly and fairly from then on. Perhaps following the reform movement that had arisen in Germany and Scandinavia, it was proposed in that assembly that Church property be seized for the state. The proposal was rejected, but on the same subject another measure passed, by which all the tax-exempt lands the young Ivan had granted to the Church were to be returned to the state, the gifts made to the Church in Ivan's childhood were to be treated as void, and monasteries were not to take possession of certain kinds of property without the tsar's consent. The discontented clergy calmed down somewhat when they saw Ivan choose the priest Sylvester as his spiritual guide and make him and Aleksei Adashev his two trusted ministers. With these two prudent helpers, at twenty-one Ivan IV was the capable ruler of a country stretching from Smolensk to the Ural mountains and from the Arctic Ocean to near the Caspian Sea.
Cossacks, Streltsy and the Fall of Kazan
Ivan's first concern was to strengthen his army and, by founding two new military bodies, create a force to resist the unruly nobles. These two bodies, which stood directly under his own supervision and command, were the Cossack cavalry and the streltsy infantry, equipped with the matchlock and flintlock muskets of the fifteenth century (the book's wording). The Cossacks were originally peasants whose local position in southern Russia, the zone between the Muslims and the people of Moscow, forced them to be ready for fighting at any moment, and at the same time gave them fair chances to attack and plunder the caravans carrying trade between north and south. The two major groups of Cossacks, the Don Cossacks in the southeast of Russia and the Zaporozhian Cossacks in the southwest, formed semi-independent republics and lived by a particular kind of democracy. The elder men of the families chose someone as executive officer of a council made up of representatives of all the people and called him their commander or leader. The land belonged to all the people, but parts of it were let to families for a limited time to farm. The different classes of people were equal before the law. The bold, agile Cossack riders were Ivan IV's most important support in war and peace.
Ivan's foreign policy was simple. He wished to extend Russian territory from the Baltic Sea to the Caspian Sea. The Tatars still held Kazan, Astrakhan and the Crimean peninsula and still demanded tribute from Moscow, though by now to no purpose. Ivan was sure that Russia's unity and security were impossible without capturing these khanates and gaining the whole course of the Volga to its mouth on the Caspian. In 1552 the young tsar besieged the gates of Kazan for fifty days with 150,000 men. Thirty thousand Muslim defenders held out with religious stubbornness and several times sallied out and attacked the besiegers bravely. When some of them fell into enemy hands and were hanged before the city wall, the defenders shot at them from inside the city, saying it was better for them to receive death from the pure hand of their fellow believers than from the unclean hand of Christians. After a month, when the besiegers had grown despondent, Ivan sent for a miraculous cross kept in Moscow. At the sight of the cross his men took heart and courage. In fact both sides had called on God to help and fight with them. A German engineer blew up the city walls, the Russians poured in, shouting "God is with us," and put to the sword all who were not fit to be enslaved or sold. It is said that Ivan wept with great tenderness for the defeated and said: "These are not Christians, but they are human beings." Ivan settled a number of Christians in the ruined, empty city. Russia honored him as the first Slav who had been able to capture one of the Tatar strongholds, and celebrated the victory as France had celebrated with pride and joy the driving back of the Muslims at Tours (732). In 1554 Ivan took Astrakhan and gained all the Volga in his grip. The Crimean peninsula stayed in Muslim hands until 1774 (the book's date), but now the Don Cossacks bowed only to Moscow's command.
The English Route and the Livonian War
After clearing the eastern frontier, Ivan turned his strength to the west. His long-held wish was to extend Russian trade from the west and north, along the great rivers, to the Baltic. He envied the progress of trade and industry in western Europe and waited for a chance to use any opening to bring Russia into step with the caravan of European progress. In 1553 Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor were commissioned by London merchants to find an arctic route to China around the Scandinavian peninsula. They set out from Harwich (the book's port) with three ships. In Lapland, in winter, the crews of two ships perished; but Chancellor reached Archangel. After a hundred difficulties and dangers he got to Moscow. Ivan IV signed treaties with him and soon afterward with Anthony Jenkinson, and by them gave the "Muscovy Company" special trading privileges.
But in Ivan's eyes these treaties opened no door to the west; they were worth no more than a small peephole. He tried to invite a number of German technical specialists to his country. In Lübeck 123 of them were gathered to be sent to Ivan's court, but Charles V did not let them go to Russia. The great river Western Dvina began in the heart of Russia and flowed into the Baltic near Riga. But unfortunately it passed through the hostile country of Livonia. The sources of the Dvina and the Volga were not far apart, and the two could be joined by canals. It seemed a plain destiny that this waterway should offset to some degree Russia's vast size in proportion to its harbors and coasts. So the Baltic would be linked with the Caspian and Black Seas; east and west would join, and in the exchange of goods and ideas the western world might get a chance to repay part of its cultural debt of earlier times to the east.
So in 1557 Ivan found a pretext for war and sent an army toward Livonia under Shah Ali, formerly the Tatar khan of Kazan. The Russian army made Livonia a ground for merciless raiding, burned houses and crops and carried men off into slavery (I leave out the book's description of atrocities against women). In 1558 another Russian army took Narva, only thirteen kilometers from the Baltic coast. Helpless Livonia turned to Poland. Denmark, Sweden, Germany and the other states of central Europe trembled at the possibility of a Slavic rush to the west and perhaps its advance to the Elbe, as had happened in the sixth century. Stephen Báthory roused the Poles against the Russians and with their help defeated the Russians at Polotsk (1582, the book's date). Ivan was forced to give up Livonia to Poland.
Boyar Plots and Kurbsky
Long before this hard defeat, Ivan's repeated and costly campaigns had thrown Russia into internal turmoil. The merchants, who by Ivan's reckoning should have prospered and expanded their business through the new trade routes, were disappointed by the losses and disorder the wars caused and gave up their activity. The nobles also opposed Ivan's campaigns, for they thought that this very threat made the Baltic countries join hands and enter the war with better arms against a Russia that in military and political organization still counted as a feudal state. In fact, before the Livonian war Ivan had realized that the boyars were seeking to overthrow his throne. In 1553, when he was gravely ill, he learned that a group of nobles had agreed that after his death they would depose his son Dmitry and put Prince Vladimir on the throne. He also found that Sylvester and Adashev, his closest advisers, had made common cause with the treacherous boyars. Despite this suspicion Ivan kept them in service for seven years, and then in 1560 dismissed them without harshness. Sylvester ended his life in a monastery, and Adashev died on one of the Livonian campaigns. Several boyars took refuge in Poland and rose against Russia. In 1564 Prince Andrei Kurbsky, Ivan's close friend and commander in chief, also joined the rebel exiles in Poland, on the pretext that the tsar meant to kill him.
From there Kurbsky sent Ivan an insulting message, which amounted to a declaration of war (the book's epithet for Ivan is garbled and I leave it out); the tsar replied with a long letter of protest, sixty-two pages, in language both eloquent and chaotic, impassioned and biblical in tone, describing one by one the boyars' intrigues to overthrow his kingship and, about his suspicion that those close to him were involved in a plot to poison his beloved wife Anastasia, he asked: "Why did you separate me from my wife? If you had not taken her from me, the boyars would never have been killed. In vain have I looked for someone who would have pity and compassion on me, for I never found such a person." (I omit one phrase of the book's quotation.) In his last days Kurbsky wrote his History of Ivan with a fault-finding, vindictive pen, and it is our most important source on Ivan the Terrible.
The Oprichnina
On 13 December 1564 Ivan left Moscow with his family, his icons and his treasury, accompanied by a body of royal guards, and went to his country seat at Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda. From there he sent two proclamations to Moscow. The first said that since the boyars, officials and church servants had plotted against him and the state of Russia, he was now, "with deep regret," abdicating the throne and would henceforth live in retreat; in the second he assured the people of Moscow that he loved them and that they could count on his lasting goodwill. In fact Ivan had always defended the interests and rights of the common people and the merchants against the nobility, and in this situation the middle and lower classes of Russia showed their gratitude to him by collective action. They raised the banner of revolt against nobles and clergy and, with threatening shouts, demanded that they send deputies of boyars and bishops to the tsar to ask him to return to his throne. This was done, and Ivan agreed to "take the reins again," but on conditions that he would announce later.
In February 1565 Ivan returned to Moscow and summoned the national assembly of clerical and boyar delegates. He then announced that he intended to execute the heads of the party opposed to the government and seize their property, and that for this purpose absolute authority must be granted him so that, without consulting the nobles or the assembly, he could do whatever he thought fit; he added that anyone who disobeyed his orders would perish. The deputies, fearful of another uprising of the people, bowed to the tsar and dispersed.
Ivan issued a decree by which Russia was divided into two parts. The first, called the Zemshchina ("the lands"), stayed under the boyars and their national council, the Duma, and was given internal powers, but in military and political affairs obeyed the tsar's command and paid an annual tribute to the tsar's treasury. The second, called the Oprichnina ("the chosen land"), was to be under the tsar's own command and included the capital and the lands and fiefs he assigned to the oprichniki ("the chosen class"). The oprichniki, chosen by the tsar, were charged with keeping order, administering the civil business of that half of the country and protecting it from the deceit and intrigue of foreigners; guarding the tsar's person and performing special military duties was also their task. This body of officers, at first only a thousand and at the end six thousand, was drawn mostly from the younger sons of nobles, who, having no land or property of their own, accepted service to him wholeheartedly in return for the fiefs Ivan gave them. Part of these estates belonged to the royal family and the greater part were lands the state had seized from rebel boyars. By the end of Ivan's reign the Oprichnina included nearly half of Russia's territory, most of Moscow and the most important trade routes.
This change was like the one Peter the Great brought about some fifty years later (the book's figure), in that in both cases a new class came to power and took political authority, and in addition Russian industry and trade prospered. It must be said that at a time when almost all military force was in the hands of the aristocracy, this success of the tsar, armed only with a body of his own guards and relying on the unreliable support of merchants and the masses, shows the height of his courage and ability. According to some of his contemporaries, Ivan, who was only thirty-five, aged twenty years in this critical period.
Ivan made the town of Aleksandrovskaya his permanent seat and turned it into a strong fortress. The strain of his struggle with the boyars, together with his defeat in the long wars with Livonia, led to a disorder of his nerves late in life, especially since from the start Ivan had not had a fully balanced mind. Ivan dressed his guards like monks in long black robes with wide sleeves and cowls, called himself abbot of their house, said Mass with them every day and prostrated himself before the church altar with such ardor that he often bruised his forehead. This conduct, together with the awe Ivan himself inspired, put a fear mixed with reverence into the Russian people, so that even the armed oprichniki seemed humble and small before him, and gradually people came to call them the "group of the far court" (courtiers, the book's gloss).