However, the Church, which had originally been established by secular authority and had long been the staunch supporter and protector of Russia’s secular rulers, constituted a major obstacle to Ivan’s plans. It was absorbing too many resources, in that its landed property comprised a major, if not the largest, proportion of Russia’s total cultivated surface, and its wealth had been extended by legislation of 1550 which the twenty-year-old Ivan did not want but could not at that time resist. By mid-1563 his relations with the Metropolitan, Makarii, had reached breaking point, and when Makarii left Moscow for a monastery it was taken as a sign that he disapproved of the Tsar. The Tsar, however, was soon to show that he, too, could exert moral pressure in a similar time-honoured way. The Metropolitan had support among the elite, and even some of Ivan’s closest advisers, including his former friend Prince Andrei Kurbskii and Boyar Mikhail Repnin, who had invested Ivan with his crown at the coronation ceremony.
The Tsar’s attempt to restrict the Church’s wealth and to challenge its property rights breached precedent, but it should not be supposed that even the Metropolitan’s opposition was founded solely on moral, still less legal or constitutional, grounds. Protecting property was a major concern of both clerics and laity, and it should be borne in mind that an alternative model of government, which respected traditional rights and especially property, was evident in neighbouring Poland-Lithuania. Kurbskii himself was of Lithuanian descent (his family, like many others, espoused Russia because it defended the Orthodox religion against the inroads of the Catholic Church), and now that Poland was wooing his like he soon availed himself of its protection, fearing for his life in Russia.
The murder of Ivan’s opponents and suspected opponents had begun in 1563. Its purpose was to secure the throne from challenge, but opposition persisted and the Church still tried to restrain the Tsar. The pressure was maintained even after the death of Metropolitan Makarii, in December 1563, and then, a year after Makarii’s death, Ivan himself played the moral blackmail card. In December 1564 he swept out of the Kremlin together with his family and a strong force of armed retainers. He went briefly to Kolomenskoe, a short distance downstream from Moscow, where he celebrated Christmas, and then moved on to the suburb of Alexandrova. He had taken with him his entire treasury and many of the most precious icons and liturgical objects from the Kremlin churches. It was as if he were trying to strip the Metropolitan and other prelates who were opposing him of their legitimacy. In turning his back on Moscow, Ivan was metaphorically shaking the dust off his feet, as the Apostle Matthew and Saint Paul had done. Interpreting the symbolism of the occasion, Professor Floria explains that ‘In effect the Tsar was giving the ruling elite an ultimatum: either they must abandon their traditional ways which obstructed the Tsar’s freedom of action, or else they would have to go to war against their legitimate ruler — a war in which the Tsar could call on the armed service gentry and would enjoy the support of the population of Moscow.’ 23
Ivan timed his move shrewdly. Servicemen, who now fulfilled civil as well as military functions, could not function without the Tsar’s authority, so there was a danger that the administration of the realm might suffer a progressive collapse. 24 Those opposed to him did not relish a fight at a time when the country was engaged in war on two fronts and the Tsar was so evidently popular. Besides, state and Church were supposed to work in symphony, and the evident breakdown in their relationship redounded as much to the Metropolitan’s discredit as to the Tsar’s — even more so in the mind of the people. A vast crowd of concerned Muscovites followed Ivan to Kolomenskoe. Before long a delegation of top-level clergy and members of the Tsar’s own council 25 of top administrators and advisers made their way to Alexandrova to beg him put his anger aside and rule as he wished. In effect Ivan was given carte blanche to punish those who disobeyed him and anyone he considered a traitor - without the formality of a trial. Boyars Mikhail Repnin and Iurii Kashin were soon numbered among the victims; Kurbskii had fled.
The purge was not the whim of a half-crazed paranoiac, which is the line of one popular genre of literature about Ivan. His plan was to eliminate opposition to his exercise of autocracy, which he deemed essential if Russia were to fulfil its imperial potential. 26 He justified this in a letter to the defector Kurbskii, who had upbraided him for abusing his authority. In it he accused Kurbskii of calumny and of advocating ‘the rule of servants over the heads of their masters [whereas he, Ivan, was trying] zealously to lead people to the truth … so that they may know the one true God … and … cease from internecine strife … which causes kingdoms to crumble … If a tsar’s subjects do not obey him they will forever be at war with one another.’ 27This was written in the same spirit as Thomas Hobbes was to write Leviathan a century later. What Ivan was advocating was closely related to what came to be known in western Europe as absolutism.
Ivan’s method, however, was not simply to appropriate the estates of the wealthy hereditary aristocracy and deprive the aristocrats of influence, as some popular histories have suggested. The aristocracy was to remain wealthy and powerful. Rather, he wanted to disperse its landholdings, to render the aristocrats incapable of mobilizing a power base against their ruler, which they could have done if their estates had remained concentrated. It was, in fact, a safeguard for the state and for good order. In neighbouring Poland-Lithuania, by contrast, the magnates were in fact able to mobilize against the king, and this ability was soon to be transformed into a legal right to rebel — a tradition which was to render the country ungovernable.
The reign of terror had the effect of transforming the old hereditary aristocracy — the princes descended through so many genealogical lines from Riuruk and the so-called ‘non-titled’ aristocrats, scions of those families who had distinguished themselves through service to ruling grand princes through the generations - into a service aristocracy. From now on Russian noblemen, high as well as low, needed the tsar’s approval, or at least his toleration, and it became the convention for younger aristocrats to serve at court and seek the ruling tsar’s patronage. 28 In order to assuage the feelings of the old nobility and to encourage the new service class, a new practice called mestnichestvo was tolerated by the state. According to this, appointments to commands were allotted partly on the basis of the family’s past association with those commands, so that they tended henceforth to be perpetuated in particular families. But the noble class, which in any case had no autonomous corporate tradition, became the servants of the tsar. The revolution was not accomplished overnight. But Ivan succeeded in establishing the principle, and it is curious that the devices used by Louis XIV to counter localism at his grand court at Versailles had been initiated over a century earlier at the other end of Europe
Ivan ensured that Russia would be able to administer an empire. However, he used draconian means. The image of his black-cowled oprich-niki sweeping through a locality in an orgy of killing — and there were such occasions — draws attention to the purpose of that singular institution the oprichnina. On the one hand it was an instrument of permanent purge, a means of maintaining tension and fear of the Tsar; on the other hand it was a means of overcoming the convention which regarded all Church endowments as sacrosanct and hence untouchable by the secular power. Given the practice of pious (and increasingly prosperous) Russians making over large gifts to monasteries for the salvation of their souls, huge resources were going to the Church which might otherwise have produced revenue for the Tsar. The government’s concern about this had been evident as early as 1551, when a general review of all charters granting property to monasteries had been carried out. 29 However, no way had been found to obviate the problem by legal means. In England the problem had been solved by the dissolution of the monasteries, but in Holy Mother Russia such a Protestant solution was unthinkable.
However, one school of thought considers the oprichnina itself to have been modelled on a monastic order, with a rule laid down by the Tsar himself. Funded initially by a huge allocation
of 100,000 rubles from state funds, it eventually came to absorb the revenues of a large part of his realm. Its assets enjoyed the same protection as did the Church’s property, and were subject to no taxes. All other property continued to be administered by the normal agencies and was taxed to provide income for the state, but Ivan’s ‘separate realm’ was his own, untrammelled by any institution, including his own bureaucracy The foundation of the oprichnina proved to be the first of several attempts by Russia’s rulers to bypass normal channels and find a more direct, efficient instrument of asserting their will. From this perspective the black-cowled oprichniki were merely the first of the state’s special agents.
The oprichniki themselves included many leading members of the old elite, and they were organized as a quasi-monastic community. The Tsar was its abbot; its headquarters was the surburb of Alexandrova, to which Ivan had moved in 1564 shortly before founding the order, and its rule derived in part from that of the Basilian Order and was influenced, apparently, by the Dominicans (whose coat of arms also features a dog). Curiously enough, the unicorn adopted for the oprichnina’s coat of arms was also the symbol of the Jesuits. 30 Ivan was nothing if not eclectic.
The ruthless depredations of the oprichniki are proverbial. In effect they represented government by terror; and all the while the ruinous war for Livonia continued. Ivan invoked the people in support of his purpose, and in 1566 the first representative ‘Assembly of the Land’ (Zemskii Sobor) endorsed the continuance of his policy The only opposition came from the Church. That same year Metropolitan Afanasii resigned after an incumbency of only two years. His successor was sacked after only two days, and his successor, Filipp, was deposed two years later by a synod at the Tsar’s insistence (and was murdered within months by a leading oprichnik). Filipp’s successor, Pimen, was himself to be deposed in 1570. The times were fraught, the struggle desperate.
By the Union of Lublin of 1569, Lithuania formally merged with Catholic Poland. Lithuanian noblemen were now eligible for the same legal and political privileges as their Polish counterparts, provided they were, or became, practising Catholics. From that point on the Orthodox elite of Lithuania began to desert to Catholicism in increasing numbers. The same year King Erik XIV of Sweden was deposed in a coup, altering the political balance in the Baltic region, and the citadel of Izborsk fell. The fact that Izborsk was well defended, and the force that captured it small, suggested treason. Rumour reached the Tsar that Archbishop Pimen of Novgorod was preparing to hand Novgorod and Pskov to the Polish king, and that all sectors of the Novgorod population were involved in the plot. If true, it would not have been surprising. Novgorod had been squeezed very hard for taxes in recent years; Muscovite officials had replaced local men, and so many peasants had fled that there was a labour shortage too.
Once again, then, a tsar’s fears of holding the line in the west centred on Novgorod, and so in 1570 the oprichniki descended on the city, sacked it, and butchered as many as 30,000 of its inhabitants. A huge number of hereditary estates were taken over, the surviving owners being banished to other parts of Russia and the land which was once theirs redistributed to state servitors. 31 Two years later, however, in the autumn of 1572, the Tsar abolished the oprichnina. It may have served its original purpose, but as a seven-year experiment in government by tension it had been an expensive disappointment. An experiment bred of desperate impatience, designed to strengthen the state, turned out to have wasted its resources and dissipated its strength. Its assets were returned whence they had come. The revolution, if revolution it was, was over.
The Livonian war was now directed against Sweden as well as the Knights, while the Crimean Tatars remained a perennial menace in the south. Indeed, on one occasion they were more than a threat. In 1571 their army had looted Moscow and burned it, though it had failed to take the Kremlin. The strains on Ivan and Russia were severe. Yet there were successes too. In the summer of 1572 another onslaught by the Crimean Tatars was broken at Molodi; in 1573 the Swedish fort of Pajda in Livonia was captured, and a faction of Poland’s nobility even canvassed the name of Ivan’s son, Fedor, as a candidate to Poland’s throne. But not until 1577 could the necessary resources be gathered for yet another major offensive in Livonia. By September of the same year the region was all in Ivan’s possession except for the port cities of Riga and Tallin which he desired so much.
Then the tide turned. In 1578 Russian forces were defeated at Wenden, and other Livonian towns were lost. A new king of Poland, the able Hungarian strategist Stefan Bathory, was sweeping all before him. Then Ivan’s former ally King Magnus of Denmark deserted the cause and in 1579 the city of Polotsk was lost. Ivan had been driven back almost to the point where he had started. Within months he was suing for peace, prepared to surrender everything that he had gained at so much cost in the north-west.
To what extent internal strife had contributed to the reversal of fortune it is difficult to say. Ivan’s purges were over. There had been nine terrible bouts of executions. Indeed, they had become an almost routine mark of that period of Ivan’s reign. He expressed indignation at the massacres in France to his ally the Emperor Maximilian II, but he himself was no gentler than the King of France. Some of his most successful generals were among his victims. So was the keeper of his Great Seal, the brilliant diplomat Ivan Mikhailovich Viskovatii. Nevertheless Viskovatii bequeathed a legacy that was to be of lasting value to the Russian state.
The work of establishing protocol for dealings with foreign countries, already begun, had been extended under Viskovatii’s supervision, at a time when the European diplomatic system was still in process of formation. And he had also established a practice for keeping records in a systematic way 32Every embassy, of whatever rank, sent to another country (as yet no state maintained permanent missions in other capitals) was equipped with detailed instructions about what to say and even in what circumstances to say it. It was also given specific questions to ask, and lists of matters it should seek intelligence about. As a result, a large database was built up on all previous dealings with a country and of accurate intelligence about its geography, resources, society and mores. Russian diplomats may have taken protocol and recordkeeping to tedious lengths, but the tradition carried with it some inestimable advantages. Russian decision-takers tended to be better informed than their rivals, and, though their representatives abroad often seemed slow and their method cumbersome by contrast to their often more brilliant opposite numbers, they were more careful, painstaking, professional.
This was a less glorious achievement than the capture of Kazan and Siberia, perhaps, but none the less significant. Advantage was also gained from Ivan’s massacres, for they had helped to complete the revolution in landholding begun by the Tsar’s predecessors. Henceforth the entire elite of Russia served the tsar, and knew that their privileges and their advancement depended on him alone. Although his reign coincided with a demographic upswing, it also saw a major haemorrhage of the kind of talent and expertise which is of value in building empires, and the massacres left a blot on his reputation. They stirred deep resentments at the time. Yet they may also have added to the Tsar’s popularity as the supporter of the common man (a reputation which the Tsar’s own court may have helped to create by spreading positive rumours about him). History’s verdict on Ivan has not yet been agreed.
Among the victims of Ivan’s executioners was his personal physician and astrologer the Cambridge-educated Dr Elisei Bomel. The learned Bomel may have borne some responsibility for the increasingly uncontrollable fits of rage that Ivan suffered from in later life. An autopsy on Ivan’s remains has revealed that he suffered from the acutely painful condition known as ankylosing spondylitis — that is, his spine was locked in a stooping position. Inhalation of mercury vapour was evidently prescribed to excess in order to help him with the pain, and scholars have recently suggested that, over the years, this medication resulted in neurological damage which produced insomnia and contributed to his rage attacks. 33 It was i
n one of these bouts in 1581 that he unintentionally killed his son Ivan, who was being groomed to succeed him. But for that, the succession crisis, and the political desta-bilization, which followed Ivan’s death on 18 March 1584 might well have been avoided.
Meanwhile, the strains and costs of Ivan’s wars of imperial expansion and the internal upheaval he created in his attempts to pay for his campaigns contributed to an economic crisis which struck Russia in the latter part of the sixteenth century. As a result, many urban settlements were abandoned by their inhabitants, who fled to the countryside, and there was a large-scale movement of population from central and north-western Russia to the south and south-east. 34 The effect was not only to diminish tax revenues but also to pauperize many servicemen who depended on their peasants for their income. The government tried to combat this trend by restricting the right of peasants to move except during a brief period after the autumn harvest, and by allowing their lords to pursue and reclaim those who flitted. This was the beginning of the oppressive system known as serfdom.
At the root of the problem was the fact that the Russian state could not accumulate sufficient specie to issue good coin in sufficient quantity to pay its servicemen in cash. It therefore had to supply them with land in lieu. But the land was useless without labour, and small landlords, such as the holders of service estates, were not able to attract labour in competition with the great landowners, who could afford to offer peasants better terms of tenure. So the state had to intervene to save the servitors from their predicament at the expense of the peasants’ freedom. Serfdom did not yet exist formally as an institution, but from Ivan’s reign it became progressively inevitable.
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