The Cost of the Revolution from Above
The upheaval Ivan IV carried out, like most revolutions, was not free of savagery. Anyone suspected of opposing it could be arrested and executed without mercy. A chronicle kept in a monastery that was probably hostile to the tsar lists 3,470 victims of his anger between 1560 and 1570, according to the book. Many are said to have died together with their wives or children. In one case a condemned man was put to death along with ten companions who had tried to help him.
Prince Vladimir and his mother were killed, although his children were spared and provided for. The tsar is said to have ordered monks to pray for the souls of those he had put to death. He presented the executions as a lawful punishment for treason, especially in wartime. One English witness even remarked that he wished his own country's unruly rebels could be made to do their duty to their rulers in the same way.
The Fall of Novgorod, 1570
Violence peaked at Novgorod. Not long before, Ivan had given its archbishop a large sum to rebuild churches and expected the local clergy to be well disposed toward him. Then word arrived that a document of doubtful authenticity had been found behind an icon of the Virgin in a Novgorod monastery. It claimed that Novgorod and Pskov were conspiring with Poland to overthrow the tsar.
On 2 January 1570 a strong force led by one of the oprichniki fell on the city, plundered its monasteries and arrested 500 monks and priests. When the tsar arrived on 6 January he ordered that clergy who would not pay a ransom of 50 rubles each be punished with great severity. The archbishop was stripped of his vestments and imprisoned.
According to the Third Novgorod Chronicle, a massacre of the townspeople then continued for five weeks, with as many as 500 people killed on some days. Official records counted 2,770 dead, and the tsar objected that the true number was only 1,505. Some merchants had strongly favored opening trade with the West and seemed implicated in the plot, so soldiers burned every shop in the city and the merchants' houses in the suburbs, and even wrecked farmhouses in nearby villages. Novgorod never again held its former place in Russian commerce. At Pskov, Ivan limited his men to plunder. He then returned to Moscow and celebrated his escape from a dangerous conspiracy with a royal masquerade.
Serfdom, Inflation and a Stalled Economy
In such turbulent years neither the economy nor culture could flourish. Trade moves in peace and stagnates in war. On the oprichnina's private estates, and later on others, peasants were tied by law to the land they farmed and treated as part of the means of production (1581). Serfdom, which did not exist in Russia in 1500, became the official law of landholding by 1600.
Taxation was ruinous and the currency collapsed. The book states that the ruble of 1500 was worth 94 times the ruble of 1600 and 24 times the ruble of 1910. Its author adds the ironic moral that saving money is the most futile thing a person can do.
Meanwhile large families and exhausted farmland made life hard for many Russians and pushed them to seek new land.
Across the Urals: The Conquest of Western Siberia
After crossing the Ural Mountains, these settlers met a Tatar khanate ruling a population of Bashkirs and Ostyaks. In the Cossacks' usage its capital was called Sibir. In 1581 Semyon Stroganov gathered a band of 600 Cossacks and sent them under Yermak Timofeyevich to conquer it. The Cossacks won, and western Siberia was added to an ever-growing Russia. Yermak, who had led a band of outlaws, was later counted among the saints by the Orthodox Church.
Church, Tsar and Metropolitan Philip
The Church remained the real ruler of Russia, because fear of God pervaded every corner of life while the tsar's own authority had limits. Strict religious rules bound even the tsar to certain rituals. Priests made sure, for example, that he washed his hands after receiving each ambassador from a non-Orthodox country. Any imitation of Roman Catholic worship was forbidden. Protestants, however, were left free to practice, since they were seen as fellow enemies of the pope. Like Henry VIII, Ivan prided himself on his theological learning. He once took part in a public debate in the Kremlin with a Lutheran theologian and, to his credit, conducted it more politely than the quarrels of German divinity students of the time. His next encounter with a churchman went less well.
In 1568, during Sunday services in the Dormition Cathedral, Philip, Metropolitan of Moscow, publicly refused to bless Ivan. The tsar asked three times without result. When Philip's attendants asked why, the metropolitan began listing the tsar's killings and crimes. Ivan shouted at him to be silent and give his blessing. Philip answered that his silence would stamp guilt on the tsar's soul and call down his death. Ivan lowered his head and left. For about a month afterward Philip remained, remarkably, unharmed.
Then one day an agent of the tsar entered the cathedral, seized the metropolitan and had him imprisoned in the city of Tver. How Philip's life ended is disputed. The account accepted by the Russian Church is that he was put to death by the tsar's men. He was canonized in 1652, and relics associated with him were venerated in the Dormition Cathedral until 1917.
Letters, Books and Printing
The Church still produced much of Russia's art and literature. Printing reached Russia in 1491 according to the book, but at the time only prayer books were printed. The leading scholar of the age was Metropolitan Makarios, who from 1529, with the help of several secretaries, began compiling a history of the nation's literature. The work ran to twelve thick volumes. It was entirely religious in character and was mostly a chronicle written by monks.
Sylvester, Ivan's confessor, is credited in the book with the famous Domostroi, a guide to housekeeping, manners and salvation. It contains stern advice on how a husband should treat his wife and very detailed rules of etiquette, down to how to spit and blow one's nose. Ivan himself was a gifted letter writer and counts among the authors of his age.
St Basil's Cathedral
The finest product of Russian art under Ivan was the Cathedral of St Basil the Blessed, which still stands beside the Kremlin on Red Square. After his victorious campaigns against Kazan and Astrakhan (1554), Ivan had a great church built and named it the Intercession of the Virgin, because he credited his victories to her protection. Later, seven wooden chapels were built around the stone central church, each dedicated to a saint on whose feast day one of his victories had fallen. Each is topped with a delicate, richly patterned small dome. All are onion-shaped, yet each is decorated differently. The last chapel, dedicated to Basil the Blessed, eventually gave its name to the whole enchanting complex.
A legend, of the kind that tends to grow around such buildings, said that Ivan punished the Italian architect so that he could never build a rival. The historical truth is that two Russian architects, Barma and Postnik, designed it and borrowed only some decorative details from the Italian Renaissance. Each year on Palm Sunday the state held a splendid procession to the church. Nobles and clergy walked together, and the Metropolitan of Moscow rode sideways on a horse fitted with long false ears to recall the donkey Christ rode into Jerusalem. The tsar himself led the horse on foot, humbly holding its bridle. Banners, crosses, icons and censers mingled, and children sent shouts of praise into the cold Russian sky.
A Family Tragedy and the Tsar's Death
By 1580 Ivan saw himself triumphant over all his enemies. He had outlived five wives and married a sixth, and he even considered taking another. He had four sons. The first died in childhood, the third, Fyodor, was feeble-minded, and the fourth, Dmitry, suffered from epilepsy.
In November 1580 the tsar quarreled with the wife of his second son, also named Ivan, over her dress, which he thought immodest. The quarrel ended with her losing her unborn child. When Prince Ivan reproached his father, the tsar, in a sudden fit of rage, struck him on the head with his royal staff, and the prince died of the blow. Overcome with remorse, the tsar fell into a state close to madness. He wailed day and night and offered his resignation every morning. By then, though, even the boyars preferred his rule to that of his heirs.
Ivan lived three more years. A nervous illness took hold of him, his body swelled and began to decay. On 18 March 1584, while playing chess with Boris Godunov, he died. A rumor spread that Godunov had poisoned him, and the stage was set for a great opera in the history of the tsars of Russia.
Judging Ivan IV
We should not see Ivan merely as a monster of cruelty. He was tall and strong, and apart from his broad, flat nose, he would have looked handsome and manly with his long mustache and thick, carrot-colored beard. His Russian epithet Grozny is mistranslated in other languages as "terrible". It really means "awe-inspiring" or "worthy of reverence", much as Roman emperors were called Augustus. Ivan III had borne the same epithet.
To modern readers, and even to his harsh contemporaries, Ivan seemed hateful, vindictive and merciless in judgment. Yet he lived in an age when the Inquisition stifled Spain, Servetus was burned for his beliefs, Henry VIII of England beheaded his enemies, Mary Stuart persecuted hers, and the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre raged in France. When Ivan heard of that massacre, which the pope greeted with approval, he accused the West of barbarism.
He had a fiery temper, inherited or shaped by his surroundings, and he lost control at the slightest provocation. A witness who knew him well said that over a trifle he would become so enraged that he foamed at the mouth like a horse. At other times he confessed his sins and mistakes, exaggerating them so much that the charges his enemies made sounded like weak copies of his own. He worked hard at learning and became one of the best-educated men in his country. He was witty and could laugh heartily, though his smile often revealed a sinister cunning.
Ivan paved his road to hell with good intentions. He defended the weak and poor against the strong and wealthy. He strengthened trade and the middle class as a check on rebellious landlords and aristocrats. He opened the exchange of goods and ideas with the West and equipped the Russian state with a new class of administrators and soldiers, who were not bound to the stagnant customs of the boyars. And he freed Russia from the Tatar yoke and made it a united, independent country. In the book's words, he was a savage who struggled savagely to become civilized.
He failed because he never mastered himself. In the heat of his revolution he forgot his old reform plans. He put the peasants under a heavier yoke than before, filled the roads meant for trade with soldiers and drove able men into the arms of his enemies. He split Russia into two hostile halves and finally dragged it into chaos. He gave his people a corrupting example of cruelty dressed in piety and of rage on the edge of madness. He killed his ablest son and left the throne to a successor whose weakness led to civil war.
On the whole, Ivan IV counts among the few prominent men of his age of whom it can be said that, had they never been born, both their countries and humanity would have been far better off.