Apart from any plot to drive him from the throne, the treachery Ivan feared most was collaboration with neighbouring powers, and notably with the recently united state of Poland-Lithuania.102 At stake, perhaps, was his chance of establishing a port for Russia on the Baltic Sea, to gain which he seemed determined to fight a coalition of regional rivals, including Sweden. One problem with this plan was that the preparations drained Ivan’s exchequer, and more cash would be needed by the day if he unleashed the northern war. As townsmen and peasants struggled with grievous rates of tax, no attention was given to the vulnerable border to the south, and the risk to this increased considerably when the Crimean khan, Devlet-Girey, began to build an alliance of his own with the Ottoman sultan. The country was in mortal danger from a combination of internal misery, economic ruin and military threat. As if to aggravate these problems, Ivan’s public life was also coloured by personal tragedy. In 1569, his second wife, Mariya, died, and her loss seems to have tipped him into even deeper hell.
The impact of his rage, whatever its source, was shattering. That winter, Ivan and his black-clad host made a progress north through Tver and Torzhok towards Novgorod. In Tver, which was accused of negotiating with the Lithuanians (and which had also given shelter in the past to the metropolitan, Filipp), Ivan’s oprichniki ran riot, torturing and killing hundreds of citizens and throwing the mutilated bodies into the Volga. Among the torments that Tverites endured were prolonged sessions of pravezh, the painful and humiliating beating on the shins, or a further horrifying refinement that involved hacking the victim’s legs off at the knee. Pravezh had always been a punishment for debt, and this savage version was designed to symbolize a profound indebtedness, material and in terms of loyalty to Ivan, on the part of the entire city.103
Novgorod’s fate was even more extreme. Despite the pleas of its loyal archbishop, Pimen, the city was sacked, its coffers and stores were looted and several thousand of its people were put to death, sometimes after the kinds of torture – physical mutilation, scalding, simulated drowning, impalement – in which Ivan took such delight. ‘Every day,’ noted von Staden, ‘the Grand Prince could be found in the torture-chamber in person.’104 The miserable survivors, a fraction of the city’s former strength, were abandoned to midwinter ice, disputing scraps of carrion and rags.105 Novgorod’s wealth, rebuilt in the decades since Ivan III had plundered it, now disappeared south a second time; even the altar-doors of its eleventh-century Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom were dragged away to adorn one of the two churches that Ivan was building at Alexandrovskaya sloboda ‘in expiation for his sins’.106
The tsar’s attention then turned back to the capital. In July 1570, several hundred former nobles and court servants were brought to the gallows in Moscow, many of them accused of collaboration with Archbishop Pimen. The spectacle was organized on a piece of ground beyond the city walls where public executions had been held for centuries; perhaps the idea was to draw the largest possible crowd.107 Attendance was not really optional, however, and Ivan urged the people to draw close and watch. He even asked the crowd whether some traitors should be killed, goading them to collude as if he were a dictator from a much later age. The people, gripped by panic, naturally urged him on. As the knives glinted and the entrails spilled, the scene was like another icon, though this time the subject was the Last Judgement. Among the victims were the heads of several prikazy, including Ivan Viskovatyi. The official who had managed Ivan’s diplomacy was strung up on one of the temporary scaffolds and hacked to pieces, dying only when an oprichnik cut off his genitals.108 The families, as ever, were deemed to share a traitor’s guilt. Over the next two or three weeks, the wives and children of the most distinguished of them were publicly drowned in the Moscow river.109
* * *
Ivan’s most bloodthirsty campaigns were launched from Alexandrovskaya sloboda. The palace there suited the tsar; it was old, it was solid, and its ghosts were all of his own making. In 1571, a bride show was organized in it for him to select his third wife (she died soon after the wedding). Ivan even received some foreign diplomats at the provincial court. But Moscow’s fortress was too valuable to abandon, and certainly too important to leave for others to annex. The Kremlin’s grand spaces were practical: when Ivan needed to summon an assembly of his notable subjects (zemskii sobor) in 1566, a strategem to gain support for his intended northern war, for instance, there was no other place in Moscow with the room to host it.110 The splendid Golden Palace was still the best venue in which to receive foreign embassies, too, and Ivan needed to impress potential friends abroad. The Kremlin as a whole was a sacred site, the only place where sovereignty was linked to God as well as to dynastic history. In 1575 Ivan used it to install a new ruler for the zemshchina, a Tatar prince from the dynasty of Chinghis Khan called Simeon Bekhbulatovich. According to at least one witness, this nobleman’s brief reign (Ivan demoted him in 1576) began with a desultory coronation in the Dormition Cathedral.111
Useful though the Kremlin was, however, the tsar vacillated over the question of establishing a residence for himself inside the fort. He had to weigh the need to keep control of its labyrinthine palaces against his horror of historic ghosts and real conspirators. At one point, he lived in a modest four-room wooden building on the site of his first wife’s lodging near the Cathedral of the Saviour in the Forest.112 But he also toyed with several possibilities in Moscow itself, and his most extravagant venture involved an entirely new palace. It stood at the notional boundary of his divided state, on land that he claimed for the oprichnina. But it was close to the Kremlin – a ‘gunshot’s distance’ in Heinrich von Staden’s words – and in its brief heyday it must have dominated the marshy bank of the Neglinnaya.
Ivan requisitioned the site in 1566, evicting the existing owners and taking advantage of another fire, which conveniently cleared much of the land. In January 1567, he moved in, accompanied by his aides, his spies, minstrels, doctors, astrologers and the entire oprichnina court. The new headquarters was defended by walls of stone and brick, and its gates, covered with lead and carved with two stone lions with mirrors for eyes, could be sealed at any time with two massive oak logs. A double-headed eagle, fashioned from wood and painted black, spread sinister wings above this gate, and there were more on the roofs of the palace buildings. Every entrance and passageway was watched, but Ivan’s personal lodgings were designed so that he could not be observed. There were three regal buildings inside the walls, but Ivan’s own preference was for an austere ‘cottage’ in a corner of the compound. His luxuries were few, although he did have a personal scaffold from which to mount and dismount his horse. It was a sensible concession to the pain that wracked his spine, as was the thick white sand that was spread over every courtyard, probably to counteract the damp.113 In the 1930s, when teams of engineers were digging the first tunnels of Moscow’s underground metro near the Lenin Library, this sand, like a flaxen thread within the claggy soil of the Mokhovaya, was the only trace they could find of Ivan’s once-infamous palace.114
The end came in the spring of 1571. Russia’s division, its people’s suffering, and the decimation of its military class all pointed to catastrophe. To add to the misery, a series of poor harvests led to famine in the winter of 1569–70, and hunger left the people without strength. The ravaged Novgorod region, where decomposing bodies still blocked the rivers, had already suffered from outbreaks of plague, but in 1570 the scourge spread southwards, and mass deaths occurred in at least twenty-eight cities.115 According to Heinrich von Staden, a special pit had to be dug outside Moscow to hold its piles of dead.116 Russia was sinking, and the following spring, in May 1571, the Crimean khan, Devlet-Girey, seized the chance to attack. Many of the Russian troops who were supposed to block his way deserted to the Tatars, and Ivan himself fled to safety (by this time he had begun to explore the possibility of permanent asylum in England), leaving the khan’s route open to Moscow.
The citizens armed for battle, but in place of the expected
siege they faced a more familiar enemy. For the second time in Ivan’s reign, the capital was engulfed in flames, this time deliberately kindled by Devlet-Girey’s army. Heinrich von Staden reported that it took just six hours to reduce Moscow to ash, while ‘not three hundred persons capable of bearing arms remained alive’. Even the massive bells that hung in Ivan’s oprichnina palace melted and cracked, and falling masonry killed many who had managed to escape the fire. As the flames swept on, Ivan’s English lions were burned alive in their enclosure, and at least twenty-five human Englishmen, builders and craftsmen in the tsar’s service, perished with them in the blaze. Many Kremlin buildings, including almost all the wooden offices, were swallowed up. ‘In a word,’ von Staden concluded, ‘there is not a man in Moscow who can imagine Moscow’s misery at this time.’117 Although the Kremlin walls endured, the ruins of Ivan’s oprichnina palace were abandoned to the wild dogs.
As he crossed the Oka river for a second time in July 1572, Devlet-Girey must have expected easy victory. But Russia, almost perversely, refused to abandon its tsar. An army composed largely of regular troops (incompetently backed by the oprichniki), pushed the Crimean horsemen back, and Moscow was spared new calamity. This miracle was Ivan’s cue to change direction once again. He dissolved the oprichnina in the late summer of 1572, accompanying the reform with the usual round of executions. Several days’ ride to the south of Moscow, meanwhile, a hard-pressed band of engineers began to fortify the borderlands that had just given such easy passage to the Tatar host.
* * *
The Kremlin still provided Ivan with a dazzling throne. Behind the safety of its walls, the tsar’s treasury continued to amaze (he had a weakness for rubies and sapphires), his splendour to impress. According to a German visitor of 1576, Ivan’s crown and mantle were more sumptuous than the regalia of any rival European prince, and outshone treasures he had seen in the Spain of Philip II and Italy’s Medici courts. Ivan also wielded a jewelled staff, a cruel-looking object reputedly fashioned from the horn of a unicorn.118 Like the crown itself, this was a symbol of the royal authority of which the tsar remained so jealous. ‘The deference universally accorded the Prince is something the mind can scarcely comprehend,’ commented a Jesuit envoy called Antonio Possevino. ‘Even if the Muscovites do not really believe it, they incessantly declare that they owe their lives, their health, and all their worldly possessions to him … Even when beaten to the point of death they will sometimes say the Prince has done them a favour by chastising them.’119
At least the nation had a tsar. Indeed, it also had a healthy heir, which mattered because Ivan had worked as hard as any of his recent ancestors to score the hard black line of primogeniture into the Muscovite rule-books. The succession that descended from Daniil, Moscow’s first prince, had been singled out, at least in Moscow, as the true and sacred continuation of the Riurikids of Kiev, and some at least of Ivan’s cruelty arose from his obsession with protecting its future. After the death of his first son, he had shown a conspicuous concern for the second, his namesake. As his father, Vasily III, had done for him, he had even commissioned a miniature ceremonial helmet for the boy in token of his ruling destiny.120 Another son, Fedor, was born in 1557, but Ivan was careful to ensure that the lad (who was in any case slow-witted and physically fragile) made no claim to his elder brother’s crown.
With the succession guaranteed, Ivan’s search for wives in his mature years had nothing to do with producing sons. Like Henry VIII, however, he remained unlucky when it came to marriage, and also like the English king he forced the leaders of his church to bless a long succession of new brides. His luck in that respect ran out in 1572, for though he had managed to get his third marriage annulled on the grounds that it had not (allegedly) been consummated, the Orthodox Church would not condone a fourth union. The last three of Ivan’s numerous marriages were never recognized in canon law, which meant, in theory, that any children would be illegitimate. For years the issue was a legal nicety, however, and few would have dared to speak of it. There were no new male offspring in any case, or not at least until the very end. In 1582, and in a new set of dynastic circumstances, Ivan’s final wife, Mariya Nagaya, produced a son. As a bastard, the child, Dmitry, was not eligible to succeed, but he was robust and sharp-witted, a worthy royal heir.
Just before Dmitry’s birth, however, the story of the sacred house of the Daniilovich princes took an unexpected turn. Antonio Possevino, who visited Moscow at the beginning of 1582, heard his account from local witnesses, including one of the interpreters who worked at court. The background was Ivan’s alleged impatience with his eldest son, Tsarevich Ivan, now twenty-seven years old and keen to make an impact of his own. Among the young man’s many grievances (so the story went) was the tsar’s repeated interference in his married life.121 A first wife, Alexandra Saburova, chosen at a bride show in 1570, had failed to produce children, and the tsarevich was encouraged (or forced) to abandon her. A second princess, Praskovya Petrovna-Solovaya, followed her into the Pokrovsky Convent soon after.122 In 1581, however, the young prince Ivan and his third bride, Elena Sheremeteva, at last conceived a child. Like pregnant women anywhere, Elena found the infant’s bulk uncomfortable, and though it was November she did not always wear the three layers of robes that were required for women of her rank. This might not have been a problem, but the couple were staying with Ivan at Alexandrovskaya sloboda. ‘It chanced,’ Possevino reported, ‘that the Grand Prince [i.e. the tsar] came upon her resting on a bench. She immediately rose, but he flew into a rage, boxed her ears, and hit her with the staff he was carrying. The following night she was delivered of a stillborn child.’
As Possevino’s informant affirmed, the tsarevich was furious. It will always be unclear exactly what happened, but Ivan must have raised the fateful staff a second time, for he managed to deal his son an even more savage, and fatal, blow. As blood poured from the young man’s temple, the tsar struggled to grasp what he had done. A few short seconds of real time had stopped the course of Moscow’s destiny; no helmet would protect this precious skull again. Five days later, young Ivan was dead. The body was laid out at Alexandrovskaya sloboda, but only Moscow and its Kremlin were worthy to be the prince’s resting-place. At the funeral, Ivan the Terrible followed his son’s bier into the Kremlin’s Archangel Cathedral on foot, tearing his clothes and forsaking, for that day and many after, his jewels, rings and crown. He remained in the Kremlin palace throughout the months to come. ‘Each night,’ according to Possevino’s informant, ‘grief (or madness) would drive the Prince from his bed, to scratch the walls of his chamber with his nails and utter piercing sighs.’123 Two years later, as Ivan lay on his deathbed, stinking acridly and covered in maggots, he prepared to face the Judgement that he had been tempting all his life. This tsar had reinforced the Muscovite royal line as no predecessor had ever done. Now he had destroyed it.
4
Kremlenagrad
The Muscovites may well have learned the art of drawing maps in the fifteenth century, when all those self-assured Italians were in the Kremlin.1 The case is difficult to prove, especially since all the evidence has burned. But there are several maps of Moscow from the 1600s, and one of the most beautiful is called Kremlenagrad.2 The copy that exists today, drawn by the Dutch East India Company’s cartographer Joan Blaeu, was published in Amsterdam after 1662, but it is based on a much older drawing, and shows the Kremlin as it was around 1604. Blaeu’s version has west, not north, at the top, but otherwise it is a model of clarity. As you unfold the Lilliputian panorama, you are drawn in and involved at once. The buildings are represented by little pictures, and every roof looks as if it would be warm and watertight.3 The walls – and there are lots of them – trace reassuringly retentive lines with never an impaled head in view. This is the Kremlin at its flawless best; there must be children somewhere who could build it with a kit.
A map can say a lot about its creator’s idea of the world. Joan Blaeu was very good at making sense of plac
es he had never seen. He also took great pains, with his town maps, to make sure that he got the buildings right. When he began to draw the Kremlin, he called on plenty of the tricks he had already learned in forty years of map-making. The walls are presented accurately, but they also look very like the ones that snake around his lovely map of Delft, a masterpiece he had completed just three years before. In both maps, too, the rivers are the same contented blue. Despite that wishful Dutch precision, however, Blaeu’s map has a great deal to teach us. The original he copied must have been unusually good. Clearly, someone with a trained eye and a sharp pencil had been working in the Kremlin at the turn of the seventeenth century, for the placing of the buildings that Blaeu copied is almost always accurate, as are the basic architectural details. The result is so faithful to its source that even now, scholars who spend their lives among the Kremlin archives can use it when (as they nearly always do) they draw a blank among the more authentic papers there.
Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin Page 13
