The sixteenth century was a century of unbridled force and exuberant
intellectual activity. The Kremlin, recently erected beside the Moskva by
Italian architects, stood on the fringe of an intellectual world that was to
contain at one and the same time, Leonardo, Charles V, Luther, and Loyola,
unique personalities side by side with seething peasant revolts, mass movements
toward evangelical religion, and the first beginning of the national power
states. It was the beginning of the pan-European sphere, with its claim to
intellectual hegemony over a quarters of the world.
The whole Muscovite
outlook on life was quite remote from this new Western Europe, despite certain
superficial similarities between Ivan IV and Francis I of France. Ivan faced the
same problems with his nobility that Western rulers confronted. But there was no
ideological system in Russia and the social life seemed lifeless and immoveable.
The feudal lords, the smaller territorial princes, and their heirs had to be
overthrown. For the sake of national unity it had to be done by whatever means
might be necessary - in England, France or Russia.
Protestantism had
some effect on rebellious monks like Nil Sorsky and the anti-authoritarian
spirit of revolt among the peasants. But orthodox theocracy destroyed any
lasting influence of the Reformation in Russia. Ivan was at war with boyars and
bishops at home and with the Polish ''Latins'' in Lithuania. The age of the
Reformation and the peasant wars in Western Europe had given way to the
formation of national states, the Counter-Reformation and the baroque.
A. Ivan the Person
The eastern autocrat, with his craving for knowledge, played his part in
this development and moved with the times to some degree. From a boy eager for
knowledge, and a youthful reformer, he developed into a Renaissance tyrant. More
than that he became a man who, though he could not control his own nature,
nonetheless succeeded in developing his intellect himself and if he had only
been able to make a fresh start might have become a pupil of Western Europe. He
was more than despotic and innovative--he was an independent, self-reliant
personality, something new in Moscovy. Thus Ivan was the incarnation of the
Russian idea as it developed historically, transforming the limp and formless
body of Muscovite nationality into a concrete political structure. But, like so
many other tsars, he could not really move his people with him. So Russia of the
sixteenth century made little contribution to sixteenth century Europe.
Ivan IV is a sinister and arresting figure in the history of the Russian
Middle Ages. The surname of "Groznyi" (Dread or Terrible) by which he is known
is fully deserved. Boundless suspicion, insatiable cruelty, and extreme
depravity were perhaps his outstanding characteristics and became apparent while
he was still an adolescent. Intellectually Ivan was markedly above the level of
his contemporaries, and he ranks indeed as one of the most literate of the
Russian rulers. A devout churchman, Ivan scrupulously observed the complex
ritual of orthodox services and was active in Church affairs.
The family
affairs of Ivan were highly irregular. The exact number of his marriages is
uncertain but is usually given as from five to seven. His unfortunate spouses
either died--Ivan claimed that they were poisoned--or were forced to take the
veil. In 1581, in a fit of rage, Ivan murdered his son and heir, the tsarevich
Ivan. The tsar himself died three years later and, according to custom, on his
deathbed took monastic vows. All the ambiguity and contradictions of Ivan's
personality and reign are represented in his strangely innovative project known
as the "oprichnina."
B. The OPRICHNINA
In December 1564, in a dramatic move, the
tsar, accompanied by his family
and members of his household, left Moscow, ostensibly never to return. The royal
caravan, however, did not travel far and settled down in the nearby
Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda, which was to serve as Ivan's official residence until
the end of his reign. Shortly thereafter Ivan, in messages to the Muscovites,
announced his intention to abdicate. He bitterly attacked the boyars and the
clergy, whose failings had allegedly forced him to renounce his royal status,
but he exonerated the merchants, artisans, and the common people from all
responsibility.
The not-unexpected result of this curious maneuver was
the prayerful request of the Muscovites to Ivan to reconsider his decision and
to resume his duties on his own terms. This he agreed to do; the price was a
large indemnity to defray the cost of the royal flight, the surrender and
execution of the leading boyars, and the creation of the oprichnina, a royal
domain directly controlled by the tsar.
An ancient term, oprichnina
signifies an entailed domain and was used to describe the estate settled on the
widow of a sovereign prince. The choice of the term was presumably Ivan's own;
he liked to think of himself as an orphan or a widower. Under the new
dispensation the territory of the nation was split into two parts: zemshchina
and oprichnina. The former was administered by the traditional institutions,
from the boyar duma down; oprichnina, the personal domain of the tsar, had its
own administrative agencies independent of those of the zemshchina.
Oprichnina presumably had two main objectives: the first, of a passing
nature, was the extermination of treason; and the second, of lasting
significance, was the elimination of the political influence of the landed
aristocracy. In pursuit of the former goal the oprichniki were actually agents
of the security police. This function was emphasized by their appearance; the
emblem of their authority was a broom and a dog's head attached to their
saddles. The second objective--the destruction of the influence of the landed
aristocracy--was achieved by a mass transfer of the population , a familiar
policy used extensively by Vasili II, Ivan III and Vasili III. The territories
assigned to oprichnina, including streets in Moscow and other urban centers,
were cleared of property owners and occupants and settled by the oprichniki. The
dispossessed owners, among then many boyars and former princes, were given
estates in service tenure elsewhere, preferably in distant border regions. There
was nothing new in this policy except the scale on which it was implemented. The
resulting elimination of the influence of the landed aristocracy and the mass
transfer of land were the chief political, economic and social consequences of
the oprichnina.
There are a variety of opinions about the long-range
historical significance of this strange experiment of Ivan's. According to one
view, a blend of practical and economic factors and vague plans of a
totalitarian state are involved here. Ivan wanted to have an area immediately at
his disposal with all intermediate authorities removed. In other words, he may
have made a semi-conscious effort to eliminate the feudal structure, what there
was of it in Russia. He therefore had to make a clean sweep in order to create a
new state on a new social basis.
The oprichnina state was a form of
self-government. The crown created a monopoly of all the trade through the
oprichnina. The retail trade in liquor was controlled by the state. A new
bureaucracy and new state army was created. Newly conquered lands were annexed
to the oprichnina and not the zemshchina. There was an attempt to assimilate the
varied races and minorities in Russia. The Tartar element was absorbed. Ivan
seemed to be trying to create a Great Russian nationality, transcending loyalty
to Muscovy. New administrators replaced the boyars and usurped their functions
as local administrators.
The oprichnina delivered the final blow to the
appanage system. It opened Russia's windows to the East, particularly China and
India' It was also a social and political revolution, since Ivan and his
oprichniki made violent attacks on the monks and the church. The oprichniki
lived a raucous and pagan life of undisciplined exuberance and excess.
The oprichniki constituted a security police whose relentless aim was to
purge the land of treacherous elements. Ivan's victims suffered heartless
torture. Many were drowned or strangled or flogged to death; some were impaled,
others roasted on a spit, still others fried in large skillets. The entire city
of Novgorod was put to torture on the charge that its archbishop was planning to
hand over the city to the Lithuanians. Sixty thousand of its citizens were
butchered in a week-long orgy. But churchmen, boyars, and merchants whom Ivan
suspected of treason were not the only ones to suffer. His favorites, the
oprichniki leaders, died in an agonizing torture more fiendish than anything
they had devised for their victims.
Ivan gathered around him at the
Alexandrov Monastery, which became his headquarters and residence, a picked
bodyguard of three hundred oprichniks whom he clothed in monk's garb and whom he
commanded as abbot. His prodigious drinking bouts with his companions alternated
with courts of cruelty where he tried out new methods of torture against his
unfortunate victims. On occasion the tsar himself led the church service,
preaching temperance and virtuous living to his oprichnik-monks and offering
prayers for those he had condemned to death.
The name oprichnina
disappeared seven years after its adoption, and the expanding territory under
the new administration took on the name of ''court land'' or "domain land''. It
became a state within the state, complete with its own regularly constituted
organization and functioning under time- honored administrative forms, but under
completely new, unquestionably loyal officials, who owed their position, their
land, and their very lives to the service they rendered the tsar.
Here in
his ''domain'' where the tsar ruled without let or hindrance, Ivan executed or
tonsured or banished most of the old hereditary landowners and confiscated their
estates. He transplanted thousands of leading families from one district to
another in an obvious effort to destroy their influence, for he saw their power
as a threat to good government and even to national survival. A few old boyar
families voluntarily surrendered their lands and sought service in the new
order, but in each case they received in exchange for their ancestral holdings
distant new estates which they retained only under service tenure. The new
landowner-vassal relationship made the gentry in the domain land completely
subservient to the tsar.
The overall picture of Russia was one of
hopeless confusion. The oprichnina or domain affected only certain localities,
some of them sprinkled about over the land and surrounded by the old boyaral
estates which made up the zemshchina. Two of Novgorod's five districts were
domain or court land, the other three part of the zemshchina; some of the
streets of Moscow were in the oprichnina, the rest outside. In general, the
boyaral estates on the Lithuanian frontier and those lying to the east and south
near Tatar territory remained outside the new domain administration. Such
territories, however, suffered their own confusion and turmoil from the war with
Lithuania and the annual Tartar raids.
The consequences of the
oprichnina were revolutionary. Although Ivan did not destroy the aristocratic
element in Russia-- enough of it, survived to launch a civil war after his
death-- he so weakened and altered it that the aristocracy was never again the
same' In dispossessing tee old boyars who had held their land by hereditary
right, even when he merely transplanted them to some distant new estate which
they held by service tenure, he uprooted them, destroyed their old connections,
deprived them of their old adherents, and took away their local position of
respect which generations on the old estates had brought their families. No
longer was there any material or social basis for the haughty independence they
had once known. From that time forward they were ''service gentry'' whose
position and well-being depended upon their service to the state. But Ivan left
the task half finished to Peter the Great a century later.
The old
hereditary boyars were not the only ones to experience the rooting out of old
ties. When the new pomestchiks took over the estates confiscated from some
defiant old landowner, they received with it the peasants who had worked the
fields for centuries. Whatever rights the peasants had maintained under their
old masters melted away under the new, for the government tightened the curbs
upon the peasant's right to move in order to bind him firmly in the service of
the pomestchik, who required maintenance and support if he in turn were to
render his service obligation to the state. The system that the oprichnina
created was a two-storied house of service, or in fact slavery, with the
pomestchiks occupying the upper story and the peasants, rapidly becoming serfs,
occupying the lower.
Two years before his own death in 1584 Ivan
quarreled with his oldest son and in the heat of argument stabbed him to death.
He never overcame the grief his vicious temper had brought him. The murder
doomed the dynasty to extinction, for Ivan's sole remaining heir, his younger
son Fedor, was a simpleton whose marriage was barren.
The end of the
dynasty would bring turmoil. The chaos in which Ivan left the administration,
the bitterly resentment of the boyars who had survived his purges, the sense of
insecurity an. fright felt .y men of every class, the foreign enemies whose
hatred of Russia Ivan's campaigns of pillage, torture, and desolation had
sharpened--all compounded to leave the land weak and divided. For many years
there would be serious question whether the nation could survive. Although Ivan
Iv left the government of Russia, or Muscovy as the sixteenth century still
Called it, in turmoil if not in chaos, the framework of the central
administration remained essentially what it had been under Ivan III. The grand
prince, become a tsar at the coronation of Ivan the Terrible, was customarily
the oldest surviving son of the late ruler. The same dynasty--called variously
the line of Rurik or the line of Daniel or the line of Monomakh--had succeeded
in unbroken descent since the time of Daniel, the youngest son of Alexander
Nevsky.
Although Ivan Iv claimed to rule by divine right and fought
every check upon his authority, custom required the prince or tsar to seek the
advice of the boyar duma which met frequently, sometimes daily, with the tsar
presiding. The Sudebnik, the law code that Ivan IV issued in 1550, even required
the duma's approval of all important decisions. Laws or ukazes declared' in Duma
meetings began, '.The tsar has directed and the boyars have agreed..' There can
be no doubt of Ivan's ability to cow any who might oppose his will in the duma.
Yet it was, in part at least, to free himself from even this mild restraint that
the tsar convoked the Zemskii Sobor to still the voice of the boyars in a chorus
of commoners votes, and then organized the oprichnina to avoid meeting with the
duma altogether.
As the small principality of Moscow grew into the
Russian state and acquired enormous territory, the household officials who had
served the prince when his patrimony was hardly larger than a great landowners
estate could not handle the multiplicity of problems facing the nation-state.
New government bureaus called prizes were set up, each headed by an appointee of
the grand prince and staffed with a corps of clerks. Some of these bureaus dealt
with particular governmental functions, whereas others administered new lands
added by conquest.
One prikaz handled receipts and disbursements like
any treasury department in the West; another supervised embassies sent abroad
and foreign missions received in Moscow like any foreign ministry in western
Europe; still another dealt with military matters like any western war office.
Alongside these bureaus created on functional lines were other bureaus whose
responsibility it was to deal with all types of administrative matters in a
given territory, particularly in one recently acquired. A prikaz for Novgorod
governed that wide area after its absorption by Ivan III . When the principality
of Tver was added to Moscow there had to be a prikaz to administer it.
The conquest of Kazan added another to this growing list, and late in
the sixteenth century another prikaz, or bureau or colonial office, came into
existence to govern Siberia. There was no order and little logic in the way in
which these bureaus proliferated. A new function added or a new district
conquered seemed to dictate the creation of another prikaz. By the end of the
sixteenth century there were thirty such departments; by the time Peter the
Great a century later swept them away and set up a new administrative pattern
the number had doubled. Often their functions overlapped; several of them, for
example, gathered and spent revenue. *Despite some remarkable achievements, all
in all Ivan the Terrible set the stage for an era of unbelievable confusion and
disorder which has gone down in history as the Time of Trouble.
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