Such restrictions the Russians have neither admitted nor understood ; yet they are essential to the development of true civilisation : without them circumstances will arise under which the social state becomes more injurious than beneficial to mankind, and when the sophists would be right in sending man back again to the woods.
310
REASONS FOR
Nevertheless this doctrine, with whatever moderation it be propounded, passes for seditious in Petersburg;. The Russians of our times are therefore the worthy children of the subjects of Ivan IV. This is one of the reasons which induce me to present a short summary of his reign. The reader need not fear being wearied : never was there a stranger history. That madman may be said to have overstepped the limits of the sphere wherein the creature lias received from God, under the name of free will, íi permission to do evil; never has the arm of man stretched so far. The brutal ferocity of Ivan IV. would chill Tiberius, Nero, Caracalla, Louis XI., Peter the Cruel, Richard III., Henry VIII., and all other tyrants, ancient or modern, together with their most impartial judges, Tacitus at their head, with horror.
Before describing some of the details of his incredible excesses, I feel, therefore, the more called upon to assert my accuracy. I shall cite nothing from memory, for, in commencing this journey, I filled my carriage with the books that will aid my task ; and the principal source whence I have drawn is Karamsin, an author who cannot be objected to by the Russians, for he is reproached with having softened rather than exaggerated the facts unfavourable to the renown of his nation. A prudence so extreme as to approach to partiality is the fault of this author. Every Russian writer is a courtier: Karamsin was one. Of this I find the proof in a little pamphlet, published by another courtier, Prince Wiasemski, and describing the conflagration of the winter-palace at Petersburg—a description which forms one continued eulogy
CREDITING KARAMSIN.311
on the sovereign, who, on this occasion, deserved the praises addressed to him. The following passage occurs in the pamphlet:
" Which is the noble family in Eussia that has not some glorious association to claim with these walls ? Our fathers, our ancestors, all our political and warlike achievements, there received from the hands of the sovereign, and in the name of the country, the brilliant testimonies of their labours or their valour. There LomonoslofF and Dcrjavine struck their national lyre ; there Karamsin read the pages of his history before an august audience. That palace was the palladium, the monument of all our glories; it was the Kremlin of our modern history."
Credence may be therefore safely given to Karamsin when he recounts the enormities of the life of Ivan.
312
IVAN IV.
CHAP. XXVI.
HISTORY OF IVAN IV. COMMENCEMENT OF HIS REIGN. — EFFECTS
OF HIS TYRANNY. —ONE OF ITS CAUSES.— HIS MARRIAGES.HIS
CRUELTIES.FATE OF NOVGOROD ABDICATION. — THE SECRET
OF RUSSIAN SERVILITY. IVAN RESUMES HIS CROWN. THE
OPRITCHNINA.EXTRACTS FROM KARAMSIN. COWARDICE OF
IVAN. МВЬШ V CONQUERED. — FRIENDSHIP OF IVAN AND QUEEN-
ELIZABETH OF ENGLAND. — IVAN ASSUMES THE COWL. RELI
GIOUS RESIGNATION. THE ONLY INDEPENDENT CHURCH. —
NATIONAL AND UNIVERSAL RELIGION. EXTRACT FROM KA
RAMSIN.ANECDOTE OF GRAND DUKE CONSTANTINE. — CORRE
SPONDENCE OF IVAN WITH GRIASNOÏ.—LIVONIA CEDED. — MURDER
OF THE CZAREWITCH.DEATH OF IVAN.APPENDIX: A NEW
ORDER OF ARCHITECTURE. RUSSIAN EQUITY. SKETCH OF
IVAN III., BY KARAMSIN.RESEMBLANCE OF PETER THE GREAT
TO THE IVANS. ACCOUNT OF THE DEATH OF ALEXIS, SON OF
THE CZAR PETER, BY M. DE SÉ^GUR.
If the reader has not made a particular study of the annals of Ilussia, he will find it difficult to believe that the sketch he is about to read is authentic history.
But all this mass of abominations, attested by history though read as fable, is not the most astonishing subject for reflection which a review of the long reign of Ivan IV. suggests. A problem altogether in-solvable to the philosopher, an eternal subject for surprise and painful meditation, is the effect produced by that unparalleled tyranny on the nation that it decimated. It not only failed to alienate the people ;
ACCESSION OF IVAN IV.313
it served to attach them. This circumstance appears to me to throw a new light on the mysteries of the human heart.
Ivan IV. was yet a child when he ascended the throne in 1533 ; he was crowned, at the age of seventeen, the 16th of January, 1546; he died in his bed in the Kremlin, after a reign of fifty-one years, the 18th of January, 1584, at the age of fifty-four; and he was mourned by his whole people, not excepting the children of his victims. Whether the Muscovite mothers wept for him we may still be permitted to doubt, as the annalists are silent on that point. In a depraved state of society, women become less completely vitiated than men ; the latter alone participate in the acts of government; from whence it follows that the social prejudices of each age and nation take stronger hold upon them than upon their helpmates. However this may be, it is certain that the monstrous reign of Ivan so fascinated Russia as to cause it to see in the heaven-daring power of its princes an object of admiration : political obedience has become in the hearts of the Russians a religious sentiment. It is, I believe, only among this people that the spectacle of martyrs bowing in adoration before their executioners has been ever beheld. Did Rome fall at the feet of Tiberius and ]N"ero to supplicate them not to abdicate the absolute power, but to implore that they would continue to burn and pillage her, to wallow in her blood, and to dishonour her children? This was done in the middle of the reign of Ivan IV., at the moment when the exercise of his tyranny was most tremendous.
VOL. II.p
314COMMENCEMENT OF HIS EEIGN.
He wished to retire; bnt the Russians, gathering round their master, besought him to continue to rule them according to his humour. Thus justified, thus assured, the tyrant recommenced his career of murder. With him, to reign was to kill; and this simple constitution was confirmed by the unanimous assent of Russia, and by the tears and laments of the nation at the death of the tyrant! Ivan, when he decided, like Nero, to throw off the yoke of glory and virtue in order to reign purely by terror, did not confine himself to refinements of cruelty unknown either before or after him, he overwhelmed also with inveetives the pitiable objects of his fury; he was ingenious and comic in his atrocity; the horrible and the burlesque refreshed at one and the same time his equally satirical and pitiless bosom. He pierced the inner heart with his sarcastic words, at the same time that, with his own hands, he tore in pieces the body ; and, in the infernal deeds which he perpetrated upon hia fellow beings, whom his restless pride took for so many enemies, the refined cruelty of words surpassed the barbarity of corporeal inflictions, even though he adopted and improved upon every species of invention by which the intensity of bodily suffering could be prolonged; for his government was the reign of torture.
Ivan IV., like the son of Agrippina, began hia reign virtuously, and, which perhaps yet more commands the love of a vain ambitious nation, with conquest. The pious counsellors and prudent advisers to whom he at this period submitted, have rendered the commencement of his government one of the most brilliant and prosperous epochs in the Muscovite annals.
A CAUSE FOR HIS TYRANNY.315
But the opening scene was short, and the metamorphosis sudden, complete, and terrible.
Kazan, the formidable bulwark of Islamism in Asia, after a memorable siege, fell, in 1552, under the assaults of the youthful Czar. The energy which the prince there displayed appeared amazing even in the eyes of semi-barbarians. He laid out and prosecuted his plan of campaign with a sagaeity of mind and an obstinaey of courage which his oldest captains were at first incapable of duly appreciating, and, afterwards, of sufficiently admiring.
On his entrance in the career of arms, the audacity of his enterprises made all pr
udent courage appear pusillanimous; though we shall soon see him as cowardly, as ereeping, as he was at first fearless. In becoming cruel he became dastardly: it was with him as with nearly all monsters; cruelty had imbedded its principal root in fear. He remembered all his life how he had suffered in his infancy from the despotism of the boyards. Their dissensions had endangered his existence at the period when he had no power to defend it: it might be said that manhood brought hiin no other desire than that of avenging the imbecility of childhood. But if there is one trait profoundly moral in the terrific history of this man, it is that he lost his eourage in losing his virtue.
Is it true that God, when he made the human heart, said to it, " Thou shalt only be brave so long as thou art merciful" ?
If it were so, and if too many, too celebrated examples did not disprove the existence of so desirable a rule, faith might become too easy ; we should see God face to face in the destinies of his better crea-p 2
316CHANGE IN HIS CHARACTER.
tures, as we do see his power revealed in the life of an Ivan IV.; for, God be praised, that prince showed himself brave as a lion so long as he was generous, and dastardly as a slave when he became inhuman. This lesson, though it may be an exception in the annals of our race, is precious and consoling. I rejoice to extract it out of the depths of the horrible history of the fourth Ivan.
Owing to the energy of the young hero, whose plans were then blamed by his entire council, As-tradian underwent the fate of Kazan. Russia, delivered from the near vicinity of her ancient masters the Tartars, resounded with the shout of triumph ; but the inferior classes of her population, who knew not how to escape from one yoke without passing under another, began to idolise their youthful sovereign with the timid pride of the freedman.
The wearied Czar paused to repose in the midst of his glory : he tired of the benedictions poured upon his virtues; he bent beneath the weight of palms and laurels, and renounced for ever the pursuit of his holy career. But the folly was in his heart; it did not extend to his head. In the midst of the most irrational actions his language was full of sense, his letters of logic: their cutting style paints the malignity of his soul, but it does honour to the penetration and clearness of his understanding.
His ancient counsellors were the first to suffer. They appeared to him as traitors, or, which was the same thing in his eyes, as tutors: he therefore condemned them to exile and death ; and this sentence seemed equitable in the eyes of the nation. It was to the advice of these uncorruptible men that he
HIS MARRIAGES.317
owed much of his glory; he could not endure the weight of gratitude which was due to them, and, for fear of continuing ungrateful, he slew them. After this, a savage fury took possession of his mind; the ever-present memory of the dissensions and violence of the nobles who disputed among themselves the custody of his cradle, revealed to him everywhere traitors and conspirators.
Idolatry of self, applied in all its forms to the government of the state, was the only code of justice adopted by the Czar, and ratified by the assent of Russia. Notwithstanding his crimes, Ivan was the elect of the nation. Elsewhere he would have been regarded as a monster vomited forth by hell.
Tired of lying, he pushed the brutality of tyranny to the point of dispensing with dissimulation ■■— that precaution of common tyrants. He exhibited himself as shnply ferocious; and, that he might have no longer occasion to blush at the virtues of others, he abandoned the last of his former austere friends to the vengeance of more indulgent favourites.
There was then established between the Czar and his satellites an emulation in crime that makes one shudder: and (here God again reveals himself in this almost supernatural history) in the same manner that his moral life is divided into two periods, so also his person presents two different aspects; his countenance underwent a change; he was handsome in his early youth; he grew hideous when he became criminal.
He lost an accomplished wife, and took another as
sanguinaiy as himself; she also dying, he manned
ao·ain, to the great scandal of the Greek church,
which does not allow of tlnee nuptials. He married
p 3
318
HIS CRUELTIES.
in this manner, five, six, or seven times! The exact number of these unions is unknown. He repudiated, killed, or neglected all his wives; not one long resisted either his caresses or his fury : but, notwithstanding his avowed indifference to the objects of his past passion, he set about avenging their loss with a scrupulous rage, which, on each death of an empress, spread terror throughout the realm. Nevertheless, most frequently, the death whicli formed the pretext for so many executions had been caused or commanded by the Czar himself. His mournings were merely opportunities for shedding the blood and the tears of others. It was always said that the pious Czarina, the beautiful Czarina, the unfortunate Czarina, had been poisoned by the ministers or counsellors of the Czar, or by the boyards, of whom he wished to rid himself. It seems to have been in vain that he himself strove to throw off his mask : he continued to lie by habit, if not by necessity; such is the inseparable union of falsehood and tyranny.
The calumnies of Ivan IV. were always intimations of death. Whoever was touched by the venom of his words, fell: corpses were heaped up around him, yet death was the least of the evils with which he loaded the condemned. His profoundly skilful cruelty found out the art of making his victims Ì0n2; for the last stroke. Expert in giving torture, he amused himself with their agony; he protracted it with diabolical address, and in his cruel solicitude, he gently nursed their torments, and dreaded their death as much as they longed for it. Death was, in fact, the only good that he accorded his subjects.
It will be necessary, however, to enumerate, once
FATE OF NOVGOROD.
319
for all, a few of the refinements of cruelty invented by himself, and exercised upon the pretended criminals whom he would punish. He caused parts of their body to be boiled while the other parts were being bathed in ice-water. He had them flayed alive in his presence, and their quivering naked flesh lacerated with knives, all the while feasting his eyes with their blood and convulsions, and his ears with their screams. Sometimes he finished their torments by stabbing them with his own hand, but more often, reproaching himself with this act of clemency as a weakness, he contrived to leave uninjured the vitals as long as possible ; he operated on the members, but carefully, and without attacking the trunk, casting the living morsels one by one to starved wild beasts, who devoured them in the presence of the mutilated victims. The palpitating trunks were sustained with the utmost care and science, in order to prolong to the utmost these scenes, in which the Czar and the tigers vied with each other in ferocity.
The Great Novgorod may be selected as an example of the wholesale wrath of the monster. The entire city was accused of treason in favour of the Poles ; its real crime was, having long been independent and glorious. The air was tainted by the multitude of executions that took place within its blood-stained walls ; the waters of the Volkoff were corrupted by the bodies which lay unburied round the ramparts of the condemned city ; and, as if deaths by execution were not prompt enough for the will of the tyrant, a pestilential epidemic was created in order to aid the scaffold in destroying the population more speedily, and in glutting .the rage of the father— a title of affec-P 4
320
CRUELTIES OF IVAN.
tion which the Russians give to all their sovereigns
оо
indiscriminately.
Under this Czar, death became the slave of a man; it lost its terrors in proportion as life lost its pleasures. The pleasure of the prince was the despair of the people; his power was extermination, his life an inglorious Avar against beings deprived of defence, or even of will, and whom God had placed under his protection ; his law was a hatred of the human race, and his moving passion, fear.
When he revenged himself, he carried his justice to the last degree of
^relationship, exterminating entire families—young girls, old men, women with child, and unweaned infants. Nor did he confine himself to destroying merely a few families; he annihilated whole provinces, sparing nothing that had life, not even the animals; he poisoned the very fishes in the lakes and rivers; and — can it be believed? — he commanded the sons to become the executioners of the fathers!—and was obeyed !! Men, then, are capable of carrying the love of life to the point of killing those who gave it, rather than lose it themselves !
Using human bodies as clocks, Ivan invented poisons which operated at fixed intervals, so that he had the satisfaction of counting his hours and dividing his time by the deaths of his subjects — the most scrupulous precision presiding over this infernal amusement. He assisted himself at all the executions he commanded: the steam of blood intoxicated without satiating him ; he was never so happy as after having presided at the toi*ments of numerous victims. The monster, after having given so many
Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia Page 58
