Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  IVAN IV

  Ivan often played ecclesiastical leaders off each other and even deposed disloyal hierarchs.

  CONTROVERSY OVER IVAN’S PERSONALITY AND HISTORICAL ROLE

  Ivan is credited with writing diplomatic letters to European monarchs, epistles to elite servitors and clerics, and a reply to a Protestant pastor. Dmitry Likhachev, J. L. I. Fennell, and other specialists describe Ivan as an erudite writer who developed a peculiar literary style through the use of different genres, specific syntax, irony, parody, and mockery of opponents. According to his writings, Ivan, traumatized by childhood memories of boyar arbitrariness, sought through terror to justify his autocratic rule and to prevent the boyars from regaining power. Edward Keenan argues that Ivan was illiterate, never wrote the works attributed to him, and was a puppet in the hands of influential boyar clans. The majority of experts do not share Keenan’s view. All information on the influence of particular individuals and clans on Ivan comes from biased sources and should be treated with caution.

  Nikolay Karamzin created an influential romantic image of an Ivan who first favored pious counselors but later became a tyrant. Many historians have explained Ivan’s erratic policy in psychological terms (Nikolay Kostomarov, Vasily Klyuchevsky); some have assumed a mental disorder (Pavel Kovalevsky, D. M. Glagolev, Richard Hellie, Robert Crummey). The autopsy performed on Ivan’s remains in 1963 suggests that Ivan might have suffered from a spinal disease, but it is unclear how the illness affected his behavior. The probability that Ivan was poisoned should be minimized. Other historians sought to rationalize Ivan’s behavior, presuming that he acted as a protector of state interests in a struggle with bo-yar hereditary privileges (Sergei Solovyov, Sergei Platonov). According to Platonov, Ivan was a national democratic leader whose policy relied on the nonaristocratic gentry. This concept was revived in Stalinist historiography, which implicitly paralleled Ivan and Stalin by praising the tsar for strengthening the centralized Russian state through harsh measures (Robert Vipper, Sergei Bakhrushin, Ivan Smirnov). Stepan Veselovsky and Vladimir Kobrin subjected Platonov’s concept to devastating criticism. Beginning in the 1960s, Soviet historians saw Ivan’s policy as a struggle against various elements of feudal fragmentation (Alexander Zimin, Kobrin, Ruslan Skrynnikov). The political liberalization of the late 1980s evoked totalitarian interpretations of Ivan’s rule (the later works of Kobrin and Skrynnikov). Boris Uspen-sky, Priscilla Hunt, and Andrei Yurganov explain Ivan’s behavior in terms of the cultural myths of the tsar’s power. See also: AUTOCRACY; BASIL III; GLINSKAYA, ELENA VASILYEVNA; KIEVAN RUS; KURBSKY, ANDREI MIKHAILOVICH; MAKARY, METROPOLITAN; MUSCOVY; OPRICHNINA; OTHRODOXY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bogatyrev, Sergei. (1995). “Grozny tsar ili groznoe vre-mya? Psikhologichesky obraz Ivana Groznogo v is-toriografii.” Russian History 22:285-308. Fennell. J.L.I. ed., tr. (1955). The Correspondence between Prince Kurbsky and Tsar Ivan IV of Russia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Fennell, John. (1987). “Ivan IV As a Writer.” Russian History 14:145-154. Kalugin, V.V. (1998). Andrey Kurbsky i Ivan Grozny. Teoreticheskie vzglyady i literaturnaya tekhnika drevnerusskogo pisatelya. Moscow: Yazyki russkoy kultury. Keenan, Edward L. (1971). The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha: The Seventeenth-Century Genesis of the “Correspondence” Attributed to Prince A. M. Kurbskii and Tsar Ivan IV, with an appendix by Daniel C. Waugh. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kliuchevsky, V.O. (1912). A History of Russia, tr. C. J. Hogarth, vol. 2. London: J. M. Dent and Sons. Hunt, Priscilla. (1993). “Ivan IV’s Personal Mythology of Kingship.” Slavic Review 52:769-809. Perrie, Maureen. (2001). The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia. Basingstoke, NY: Palgrave. Platonov, S.F. (1986). Ivan the Terrible, ed. and tr. Joseph L. Wieczynski, with “In Search of Ivan the Terrible” by Richard Hellie. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. Rowland, Daniel. (1995). “Ivan the Terrible As a Car-olingian Renaissance Prince.” In Kamen Kraeugln, Rhetoric of the Medieval Slavic World: Essays Presented to Edward Keenan on His Sixtieth Birthday by His Colleagues and Students. Harvard Ukrainian Studies, vol. 19, ed. Nancy Shields Kollmann; Donald Ostrowski; Andrei Pliguzov; and Daniel Rowland. Cambridge, MA: The Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University. Skrynnikov, Ruslan G. (1981). Ivan the Terrible, ed. and tr. Hugh F. Graham. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.

  SERGEI BOGATYREV

  691

  IVAN V

  IVAN V

  (1666-1696), Tsar Ivan Alexeyevich, third son of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich.

  Ivan V, who suffered from physical and perhaps mental impairments, ruled jointly with his younger brother Peter (the Great). There is no evidence that Ivan ever exercised power or made any independent decisions during his lifetime. Virtually nothing is known about his early life in the Kremlin Palace. He suddenly came into prominence in April 1682 with the death of his older brother, Tsar Fyodor (r. 1676-1682). Though the boyars and the church passed him over in favor of his half-brother Peter, the revolt of the musketeers compelled them to appoint Ivan as co-tsar and soon made possible the emergence of Ivan’s sister Sophia as regent of Russia. Despite having been often portrayed as merely the unhappy tool of Sophia and her Miloslavsky relatives against Peter and his family, the Naryshkins, it seems that Ivan’s household soon distanced itself from Sophia and in 1689 supported the coup d’etat that removed Sophia from the regency. In 1684 Sophia had Ivan married to Praskovya Saltykova, a young noblewoman from a clan Sophia believed to be friendly to her aims. Ultimately the Saltykovs supported Peter and became an important element in Peter’s court. Ivan and Praskovya’s daughter, Anna Ivanovna, ruled Russia from 1730 to 1740. See also: PETER I; SOPHIA; STRELTSY

  PAUL A. BUSHKOVITCH

  than its inadequacy. The emperor’s mother, the twenty-two year old regent, Anna Leopoldovna, became the target of gossip and scandal. In November/December 1741, on the eve of the departure of troops for war against Sweden, Peter I’s daughter Elizabeth seized her chance to overthrow Ivan, with the support of guard regiments and the French and Swedish ambassadors. Elizabeth’s proclamations emphasized the service she was doing Russia by bringing “German” rule to an end. Osterman and M?nnich were sentenced to death, then reprieved and banished to Siberia. The deposed imperial family was moved to the far north and the ex-emperor Ivan was imprisoned in Schl?ssel-burg fortress to prevent him from becoming a rallying point for opposition to the throne. His mental health was severely damaged by years of incarceration. In 1764 a supporter devised an ill-conceived plan to release him and restore him to the throne, which had been seized by Catherine II in 1762. The ex-emperor was killed by his guards, who were acting on orders from St. Petersburg to take extreme measures in the event of an escape attempt. See also: ELIZABETH; GERMANY, RELATIONS WITH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Anisimov, Evgeny. (1995). Empress Elizabeth: Her Reign and Her Russia, ed. and tr. John T. Alexander. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.

  LINDSEY HUGHES

  IVAN THE TERRIBLE See IVAN IV.

  IVAN VI

  (1740-1764), emperor of Russia, October 28, 1740 to December 6, 1741.

  Ivan was born in August 1740, the son of Duke Anton-Ulrich of Brunswick and Anna Leopoldovna (1718-1746), niece of the childless Empress Anna (reigned 1730-1740), who nominated Anna’s as yet unborn child as her heir. The infant Ivan succeeded Anna in October 1740, first with Ernst J. Biron, then with Anna Leopoldovna as regent. A cabinet equally composed of Russians and Germans was formed. Supported by the very capable B. C. M?nnich and Heinrich Osterman, the regime continued policies inaugurated during Empress Anna’s reign. It fell as a result of its vulnerability more

  IVASHKO, VLADIMIR ANTONOVICH

  (b. 1932), Ukrainian Communist Party leader.

  Vladimir Antonovich Ivashko was born in the Poltava region of Ukraine and made his career in politics. He graduated from the Kharkiv Mining Institute in 1956 and joined the Communist Party in 1960. In 1978 he was appointed secretary of the Kharkiv oblast (provin
cial) committee of the Party, and by 1986 he had been promoted to the Party secretariat. In 1987 Ivashko became the first secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk Party organization in Ukraine (a very significant power base of the Soviet Union, and the area in which Leonid Brezhnev had made his career). At the same time, he became the deputy party leader of the Communist Party of

  IZBA

  Ukraine (CPU) under Volodymyr Shcherbytsky (1918-1989). In early 1980, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Ivashko was sent temporarily to Kabul, where he played the role of advisor to Soviet puppet ruler Babrak Karmal. Subsequently, however, he remained in Ukraine. After the resignation of Shcherbytsky in September 1989, Ivashko was elected first secretary of the Central Committee (CC) of the CPU. During the summer of 1990, he resigned suddenly after Mikhail Gorbachev requested that he take up a newly created position in Moscow as deputy general secretary of the CC of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on July 11, 1990. At the Twenty-Eighth Party Congress of the same month, he defeated Yegor Ligachev in an election to take on this role. Analysts continue to debate Ivashko’s role in the failed putsch of August 1991 in Moscow, in which he appeared to have adopted a middle role between the plotters and Gorbachev. See also: UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Kuzio, Taras. (2000). Ukraine: Perestroika to Independence. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Solchanyk, Roman. (2001). Ukraine and Russia: The Post-Soviet Transition. Lanham, MD: Rowman amp; Little-field. Wilson, Andrew. (1997). Ukrainian Nationalism in the 1990s: A Minority Faith. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

  DAVID R. MARPLES

  IZBA

  Izba is the Russian word for “peasant hut.”

  The East Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian) izba remained fundamentally unchanged as the Slavs migrated into Ukraine sometime after 500 C.E., then moved north to Novgorod and the Finnish Gulf by the end of the ninth century, and finally migrated east into the Volga-Oka mesopotamia between 1000 and 1300. Primarily the Slavs settled in forested areas because predatory nomads kept them north of the steppes. In forested regions the izba typically was a log structure with a pitched, thatched roof. The dimensions of the huts depended on the height of the trees out of which they were constructed. In the few non-forested areas where East Slavs lived prior to the construction of fortified lines (especially the Belgorod Line in 1637-1653), which walled the steppe off from areas to the north of it, people inhabited houses constructed of staves, wattle, and mud. From time to time people also lived in semi-pit dwellings, dugouts in the ground covered over with branches and other materials to keep out the rain and snow.

  The interiors of the izba were fundamentally the same everywhere, though the precise layouts depended on locale. In the North and in central Russia, when one entered through the door, the stove (either immediately adjacent to the wall or with a space between the stove and the wall) was immediately to the right, and the stove’s orifice was facing the wall opposite the entrance. In southeastern Russia the stove was along the wall opposite the entrance, with the orifice facing the entrance. Other variations could be found in western and southwestern Russia. Because the fundamental problem of the izba was heating it, conservation of heat during the six months of the heating season (primarily October through March) was the major structural issue. There were several solutions. One was to chink the spaces between the logs with moss and mud. The second was the so-called “Russian stove,” typically a large, three-chambered object made of various combinations of stone, mud, brick, and cement. Its three chambers extracted most of the heat before it reached the smoke hole and radiated it out into the room. The third solution for saving heat was not to have any form of chimney (and only a few small windows), because typically eighty percent of the heat generated by a stove or an open hearth in the middle of the room will be lost if there is a chimney venting the stove or a hole in the roof to exhaust the smoke. Such a large percentage of heat is lost because of the requirement of a “draw” to pull the smoke upward and out of the izba.

  The consequences of this third form of izba heating were numerous. For one, there was soot scattered throughout the izba, typically with a line around the walls, about waist-high, marking where the bottom of the smoke typically was. The smoke had two basic harmful constituents: carbon monoxide gas and more than two hundred varieties of particulate matter. The harm this did to peasant health and the amount by which it reduced residents’ energy have not been calculated. Government officials beginning at least as early as the reign of Nicholas I were concerned about the health impact of the smoky hut, and by 1900 most were gone, though some lingered on into the 1930s. That

  IZVESTIYA

  peasants thereafter were able to afford the fuel to compensate for the heat lost through chimneys indicates that peasant incomes were rising.

  The other features of the izba were benches around the room, on which the peasants sat during the day and on which many of them slept at night. The most honored sleeping places were on top of the stove. These places were reserved for the old people, an especially relevant issue after the introduction of the household tax in 1678, which forced the creation of the extended Russian family household and increased the mean household size from four to ten. This packing of so many people into the izba must have increased the communication of diseases significantly, another consequence of the izba that remains to be calculated.

  The Russian word for “table” (stol) is old, going back to Common Slavic, whereas the word for chair (stul) only dates from the sixteenth century. These facts correspond with historians’ general understandings: most peasant izby had tables, but many probably did not have chairs. Ceilings were introduced in some huts around 1800, pushing the smoke all the way down to the floor. Before 1800 the huts all had pitched roofs and the smoke would rise up under the roof and fill the space from the underside of the roof down to where the smoke line was. With the introduction of the ceiling, that cavity was lost and the smoke went down to the floor. Goods were stored in trunks. See also: PEASANTRY; SERFDOM

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Hellie, Richard. (2001). “The Russian Smoky Hut and Its Probable Health Consequences.” Russian History 28(1-4):171-184.

  RICHARD HELLIE

  IZVESTIYA

  The newspaper Izvestiya was first published on February 28, 1917, by the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies formed during the February Revolution. The paper’s name in Russian means “Bulletin,” and it first appeared under the complete title “Bulletin of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.” Immediately upon seizing power in October 1917, the Bolsheviks appointed their own man, Yuri Steklov, editor-in-chief. In March 1918 the newspaper’s operations were transferred to Moscow along with the Bolshevik government. From an official standpoint the newspaper became the organ of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets-the leading organ of the Soviet government, as opposed to the Communist Party.

  For the first ten years of its existence, the paper relied heavily on the equipment and personnel from the prerevolutionary commercial press. In Petrograd, Izvestiya was first printed at the former printshop of the penny newspaper Copeck (Kopeyka), and until late 1926 many of its reporters were veterans of the old Russian Word (Russkoye slovo).

  Throughout the Soviet era Izvestiya, together with the big urban evening newspapers such as Evening Moscow (Vechernaya Moskva) was known as a less strident, less political organ than the official party papers such as Pravda. Particularly in the 1920s but also later, the paper carried miscellaneous news of cultural events, sports, natural disasters, and even crime. These topics were almost entirely missing from the major party organs by the late 1920s. In the late 1920s head editor Ivan Gronsky pioneered coverage of “man-against-nature” adventure stories such as the Soviet rescue of the crew of an Italian dirigible downed in the Arctic. Later dubbed “Soviet sensations” by journalists, such ideologically correct yet thrilling stories spread throughout the Soviet press in the 1930s.

  In part as a result of its le
ss political role in the Soviet press network, Josef Stalin and other Central Committee secretaries tended to be suspicious of Izvestiya. The editorial staff was subjected to a series of purges, beginning with the firing of “Trot-skyite” journalists in 1925, and continuing in 1926 with the firing of veteran non-Communist journalists from Russkoye slovo. In 1934 the Party Central Committee appointed Stalin’s former rightist political opponent Nikolai Bukharin to the head editorship. However in 1936 and 1937, Bukharin, former editor Gronsky, and many other senior editors were purged in the Great Terror. Bukharin was executed; Gronsky and others survived the Stalinist prison camps.

  During the Thaw of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the editor-in-chief of Izvestiya was Alexei Adzhubei, Nikita Khrushchev’s son-in-law, who used the paper to advocate de-Stalinization and Khrushchev’s reforms. Under Adzhubei, Izvestiya writers practiced a “journalism of the person,” which presented “heroes of daily life” and exposed

  IZYASLAV MSTISLAVICH

  the problems of ordinary Soviet subjects. Adzhubei was removed from the editorship in 1964 when Khrushchev fell, but Thomas Cox Wolfe has argued that the “journalism of the person” laid important ideological groundwork for Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reform program in the second half of the 1980s.

  After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Izvestiya made a successful transition to operation as a private corporation. See also: ADZHUBEI, ALEXEI IVANOVICH; JOURNALISM; UNIVERSITIES Yaroslavichey). In 1073, however, Izyaslav quarreled with his brothers. They drove him out of Kiev and forced him to flee once again to Boleslaw II of the Poles. Failing to obtain help there, he traveled to Western Europe, where he sought aid unsuccessfully from the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV and from Pope Gregory VII. He finally returned to Kiev after his brother Svyatoslav died there in 1076. His last sojourn in Kiev was also short: on October 3, 1078, he was killed in battle fighting his nephew Oleg, Svyatoslav’s son. See also: GRAND PRINCE; KIEVAN RUS; YAROSLAV VLADIMIROVICH