Ivan the Terrible (2 page)

By now Ivan had to be portrayed as a ‘state-building’ ruler, a farseeing, wise statesman, and a brilliant war leader and diplomat, regardless of the previous critical attitude of all historians towards all tsars, who were
ipso facto
negligible and negative factors in history. Ivan's executions had to be explained as rendered necessary to uproot treason, a justification of Stalin's own terror, and the identification of Stalin with Ivan was encouraged openly though at times the authors subverted it by using Aesopian language – possibly including Eisenstein himself.

The image of Ivan as a ‘progressive’ ruler, was useful also during the Second World War, and it lasted until the death of Stalin, when it was undermined by the rejection of ‘the cult of the individual’, opening the way for a far more wide ranging debate on what was the correct Marxist interpretation of the policies of Ivan. Pokrovsky and Veselovsky were both gradually rehabilitated, and the image of Stalin as Ivan Groznyi served only to discredit Stalin. Historians free of the ideological burden of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, though in many cases still wedded to Marxism, came forward, and made good use of the increasing number of sources which were being discovered and edited. There is now genuine debate between historians, in part fuelled by the availability in Russia of English originals or Russian translations of many works published by Western historians, and of free communication on the internet.

In this book I have drawn to a great extent on the great Russian stalwarts of the history of Ivan IV who published in the twentieth-century. Veselovsky and Sadikov go back to the 1940s. The doyen of Russian historians of Ivan IV was for many years, until his death in 1988, A.A. Zimin; his major work on the
oprichnina
appeared in 1964, and was reprinted after his death in 1988, edited by A.L. Khoroshkevich, in 2001. There are some changes, of fact and of emphasis, in this new edition which have been carefully pointed out and assessed in a review by S.N. Bogatyrev.
¹⁰
Others who have taken up the torch are S.O. Schmidt, N.E. Nosov, I.I. Smirnov, R.G. Skrynnikov,
B.V. Kobrin and many more all of whom have contributed to the pursuitof the elusive truth. I have relied very greatly on their work for factual information, reserving my right to differ on interpretations. I have also drawn upon the work of American and German scholars in this field and here acknowledge my debt to them.

The present book is not about Russia in the age of Ivan the Terrible. It is an attempt, on the evidence at present available, to understand and explain Ivan the man and the ruler, whose personal reign, lasting from 1547 to 1584, had such a devastating impact on his people and his expanding country. Any such attempt faces formidable difficulties. First of all the uneven nature of the surviving evidence, so much of which has been destroyed by fire. There is no written trace of Ivan's personal relationship with any of his seven wives or his children. There is no original written record of any letter, or order, given by the Tsar; there are a few records of private discussions in which he took part, but they are mostly with foreigners, such as the Englishmen Anthony Jenkinson or Sir Jerome Bowes, or the Austrians Count Cobenzl and Daniel Prinz von Buchau, or the Jesuit Antonio Possevino. There are no records of meetings of the Boyar Council, or of any other administrative body, though there are formal records of Ivan's participation in public assemblies and in occasional formal discussions such as the sessions of the joint meeting of the Boyar Council and the Church
Sobor
to discuss the major reform programme of the Church and of canon law, known as the
Stoglav
(Hundred Chapters) in 1551. Formal documents are thus usually very impersonal, when compared with the lively exchange of letters between kings and their counsellors in other countries.

There are however very many records, which have survived in a haphazard way, of the organization of military campaigns, the raising of revenue, the distribution of estates, the execution of alleged traitors, and the barbarities committed by and for the Tsar. More source material is continuously being discovered and put into circulation, so that there is a vast amount of material to read. The scholarship, the ingenuity and the assiduity in interpreting this source material displayed by Russian historians over many generations, can only arouse admiration. Nevertheless, the uneven nature of what has survived conduces to a great diversity in its interpretation, and leads the historian to hesitate between possibilities, forcing him or her to lay a number of suppositions before the reader, thus weighing the narrative down with analysis. Much of this discussion has been relegated to the footnotes, which in this case are of greater relevance to the general tenor of the narrative than is usually so. Moreover excessive reliance has had to be placed on foreign sources,
which have been discovered little by little. The accounts of the two Livonian nobles, Kruse and Taube, were already known at the end of the sixteenth century but were not translated into Russian until 1922.
¹¹
The account of the German Schlichting was only translated into Russian in 1934.
¹²

Foreign written sources have been supplemented by foreign prints and engravings, allegedly portraits of Ivan or illustrations of the atrocities committed by his troops. There is no authentic portrait of the Tsar in existence and all those reproduced in books about him are imaginary. The same applies to his father Vasily III. Portraits are printed allegedly of Ivan IV, but facing the other way they are used of the Jesuit Antonio Possevino.
¹³
The engravings of Russian atrocities are all imaginary. What they illustrate may well have happened, because warfare was terribly cruel everywhere at that time, and there is no doubt that Ivan was utterly ruthless towards his enemies, real or imagined. But pictures of atrocities can intensify the impact on the reader and leave a distorted picture on the mind. It is thus infinitely more difficult to study Russian sixteenth-century history than, say, that of Elizabethan England, where the correspondence between the Queen's advisers, Burleigh, Leicester and Walsingham, for instance, or between her enemies, has survived and enables the historian to associate personality with policy.

There has also been in the last thirty years a major assault, in the West, on one of the hitherto most important sources on which historians have depended, namely the correspondence between the Tsar and Prince Andrei Mikhailovich Kurbsky, and the
History of Ivan IV
, attributed to the latter. Professor Edward Keenan of Harvard University has argued at length that these two works are in fact forgeries, or ‘apocrypha’ as he prefers it, produced in the seventeenth century.
¹⁴
In addition Professor Keenan has argued that during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, as before and after, Russia was governed by an oligarchy, composed of members of aristocratic clans, closely interrelated by marriage; they governed in the name of the Tsar, who had no power and in the case of Ivan IV, was in fact illiterate. In addition an abyss separated the culture, such as it was, of the secular court society from that of church and monastic society. These latter arguments are expressed in an essay entitled ‘Muscovite Folkways’, originally drafted in 1976 as part of a Department of State contract, rewritten several times, and finally published in 1986, and ‘meant to stimulate and provoke rather than to convince’.
¹⁵
However, Keenan has recently reiterated his view that Ivan was illiterate.
¹⁶

This particular reader has not been convinced of the validity of any of these propositions. I am not qualified in linguistic and textual analysis. But as a practising historian I cannot accept the validity of Keenan's theories on historical grounds. There may be no evidence that Ivan was literate, but there is also no evidence that he was not. And there is no doubt that many boyars were literate – they had to be literate in order to negotiate treaties and truces.
¹⁷
I cannot accept either that Ivan was the illiterate tool of an oligarchy. It is really wildly improbable that the institution of the
oprichnina
in 1565, or the destruction of Novgorod and its inhabitants in 1570, were carried out merely on the initiative and authority of princes and boyars, and it certainly was not in their interests. Such policies would have to be imposed by someone with overwhelming authority. There is also too much similarity between the language of Ivan in his first letter to Kurbsky, of 1565, and the letters written to King Sigismund II, Augustus of Poland–Lithuania in 1567; these were ostensibly written by three great magnates in Russian service, and in fact by Ivan himself, and the texts have survived in the records of the Posol'sky Prikaz (Office of Foreign Affairs), and later in the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
¹⁸
It is in my view quite probable that Ivan had learnt to read (it is after all not so difficult); it is equally probable that he did not write himself but dictated his most important missives, as most rulers did. Daniel Prinz von Buchau, imperial envoy in 1575, states positively that it was beneath the dignity of boyars to write themselves.
¹⁹

The theory of the separation of the two cultures, religious and secular, is also unconvincing, when every line that was written in Russia as part of the formulation or implementation of policy by members of governing bodies is imbued with religious thought and feeling and couched in religious language. Even the lengthy disquisitions of ambassadors are replete with quotations from the Old and New Testaments. Priests were present at births, marriages, and deathbeds, they played a big part as confessors, and in pilgrimages to monasteries, often on foot, which were a frequent and normal part of life. They drew up wills. The Orthodox liturgy repeated familiar sounds to the faithful who probably knew much of it by heart. It is partly for this reason that I have included many quotations from writings attributed to Ivan, whether political or religious or, as so often, both. It is the way into his mind, the only way to understand his personality.

In the circumstances, I do not propose to attempt to refute Professor Keenan's theories, but will confine myself to referring the interested reader to the extensive literature covering the debate which he has launched.
²⁰

I have however adopted a few general principles of research and interpretation which I will state here. First of all, I have tried to write the history of Ivan IV, standing in Moscow and looking out over the walls of the Kremlin towards the rest of Europe, and not looking in – and down – into Russia, over its Western border, from outside. Adopting such an approach makes it easier to avoid supercilious judgments, to grasp what happened in Russia in Russian terms, to feel its full tragedy. This may explain why throughout I speak of Russia and not Muscovy. Ivan IV was
Tsar vseya Rusi
, of all Russia, and he considered himself to be the heir of Kievan Rus'. In the titulature of the Tsar, Vladimir came before Moscow. The emphasis on Moscow derives from the fact that it was the first big city which Westerners of all kinds came across, and by the time they became acquainted with Russia the history of Kievan Rus' was unknown to them, except of course to the Poles and Lithuanians. I do not believe one can read the present back into the past without distorting the past. Sixteenth-century Russians did not know that four centuries later the Ukraine would be an independent country with its capital in Kiev, nor that Russia would have conquered and then lost the Crimea.

At the same time I have pursued a comparative approach, for I think that many of the problems which faced Russia were of the same nature as those which France, Germany and, to a lesser degree, England had to contend with – though not necessarily at the same time as Russia. Both German emperors and French kings had had to struggle to have their authority accepted throughout their lands, a struggle in which Germany failed, and Russia had only partly succeeded by the sixteenth century. England had been forcibly unified under William the Conqueror, but it too had had to struggle to extend its borders to the coasts of the whole island, and to the whole archipelago, and was successful in Wales; partly so, for part of the time, in Scotland, and only partly so in Ireland.
²¹
The Trastámaras and the Habsburgs too had failed to unify the Iberian peninsula, where local
fueros
or constitutional rights survived, and the realm consisted of a union of crowns: it was a composite state.
²²
The extension of a central royal authority throughout the realm was only achieved by the Bourbon dynasty in the eighteenth century. The Habsburgs and their predecessors on the imperial throne had dismally failed to unify the German lands. Sweden broke away from Danish control and asserted its independence. These various polities which emerged over time in Europe and turned into nations, share many common problems and it is up to the historian to detect them in the various disguises which they assume because of cultural, religious,
geographical and political differences. England is an island and enjoys the blessings of the Gulf Stream; Russia has mainly infertile soil and an abominable climate; some European countries had been part of the Roman Empire of the West and formed a community which spoke Latin; others formed part of or were influenced by the Roman Empire of the East, practised their common Orthodox Christian religion, adopted much later, in the vernacular, and did not acquire a common language. But all these peoples have an underlying, common, Christian culture and shared political concepts, not always easy to detect, but which it is the duty of historians to seek out and define.

Finally I come to the question of the nature of evidence. Here I think that the advice given by Paul Bushkovitch in his ‘The Life of Saint Filipp’ is well worth following. He sets out a number of ‘rules of reading’, recommending them particularly for research into the study of Russian religion. The first and principal rule, which is most relevant to my research is:
‘A text is what it says it is about
. Thus the life of Saint Sergei of Radonezh is not about the development of national consciousness in Russia. It is about the life of a monastic saint. It is about monasticism.’ I have tried to follow this thoroughly sound recommendation. I can only hope that I will have satisfied my readers that I have done so.