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."
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.
Source: Melvin C. Wren, The Course of Russian History
(London: Macmillan, 1968)