Ivan the Terrible (27 page)

As a result of Ivan's rejection of further talks, the Lithuanians very secretly began to prepare an alliance with the Crimea against Russia, to back up their forward policy in Livonia. The Russian hope of winning Poland–Lithuania over to a joint anti-Moslem crusade which Adashev and Viskovaty had been pursuing was now revealed as a total illusion: Poland–Lithuania would intervene in the Livonian conflict as the
protector of the Order, if it intervened at all, and as the enemy of Ivan, thus widening and prolonging the conflict. This was a crushing blow to Ivan. Behind the weak and disorganized Livonia now stood the powerful Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Denmark was beginning to put in her claims. In November 1559, Kettler, at the head of Livonian troops which had been reinforced during the truce with Russia, destroyed a Russian army near Dorpat, a defeat due entirely to the negligence of the Russian commanders, who were involved in a suit for precedence.
²²

A renewed threat by the Crimeans forced Ivan to send reinforcements to the south and to man the defensive line on the River Oka. In 1558–9 two Russian detachments were sent, one under Daniil Adashev, Aleksei's brother, and the other under Ivan's gentleman of the bedchamber, Ignatii Veshniakov, to build a fort on the Donets River as a base for an advance on Crimea to be led by Ivan himself. The idea of building ships on the Donets was launched at that time, but of course Ivan never went there, and the Russian armies served mainly to keep the Khan of Crimea busy at a time when the Sultan in Constantinople had refused to support his Crimean vassal, and when the Khanate was suffering badly from an epidemic of the plague (as was Pskov). Prince D. Vishnevetsky, the Lithuanian magnate, who was intermittently Ivan's ally, carried on operations on the lower Dnieper, and Russian forces which had sailed down the Dnieper under Daniil Adashev raided the coasts of Crimea. Ultimately the plan was to lure the Crimeans into a set battle in the open, but nothing came of it.

Meanwhile, Ivan's life was beginning to be overshadowed by a great personal anxiety. Never a considerate husband, though evidently very uxorious, he insisted on taking his wife and children, and other members of his family, with him wherever he went on his combined pilgrimages, hunting expeditions and military inspections. This had already led to the loss of his first-born son, Dmitri. After twelve years of marriage, Anastasia had by 1559 borne Ivan six children – three girls and three boys, of whom all the girls and one boy had died in infancy. Of her two surviving sons, Ivan, the eldest, seemed to be strong and healthy; but the signs of what may have been Down's syndrome were already apparent in the youngest, Fedor, born on 31 May 1557.

On 25 September 1559, in accordance with the tradition in the grand princely family, Ivan, who loved visiting monasteries, went to pray at the Trinity monastery with all his family – and to hunt – and returned at the end of the month to Moscow. At the beginning of October the Tsar set off again to Mozhaisk with all his family, including Anastasia, who was beginning to ail. It was here that the news reached him that the Livonian
Order had broken the truce and placed itself under the protection of the Commonwealth, and that the new Grand Master, Gotthard Kettler, with a Livonian force, had defeated the Russians outside Dorpat in November 1559. Reinforcements had to be sent immediately to Dorpat. The Tsar attempted at once to return to Moscow but found the roads completely impassable because of exceptional rain and flooding. The Tsaritsa's health grew steadily worse, but in spite of the weather he brought her back to Moscow, which they reached on 1 December. ‘How shall I recall the merciless journey to our ruling city with our ailing Tsaritsa Anastasia,’ wrote Ivan to Prince Kurbsky in 1564.
²³
From then on, she faded gradually away.

The rashness of Ivan's hope of winning over Lithuania to an anti-Moslem crusade was brutally revealed to him in that same autumn 1559 when Daniil Adashev delivered to Moscow dispatches addressed by the Lithuanians to the Khan of Crimea. The messages had been captured by a Russian detachment at a crossing point on the Dnieper. In these reports, King Sigismund Augustus notified the Khan that he was prepared to cooperate with him against the Tsar. Thus did Daniil, without knowing it, destroy the policy his brother Aleksei had allegedly been pursuing, with or without the Tsar's approval.
²⁴

The policy of attempting to secure an alliance with Poland–Lithuania in order to avoid a war on two fronts, the assumption that the Commonwealth was as concerned as Russia to put an end to the Crimean Khanate's raids on Christian lands, had ended in total failure. Aleksei Adashev may have sponsored it and had been in charge of implementing it. He is usually considered to have opposed the advance into Livonia, but there is really no evidence of his own personal opinion.
²⁵
If he was responsible for the armistice of May–November 1559, then Ivan may well have borne him a grudge, which was to grow and fester, for what was to prove a fatal mistake.

Yet again an embassy from Sigismund Augustus arrived in Moscow on 7 December 1559. Negotiations with Lithuania became more and more tense. At the Lithuanian envoys' audience with Ivan on 30 January 1560, Adashev was not present. The envoys asked for ‘private talks’ with the Russian negotiators, and with Adashev, which conveys the impression that they hoped to go behind Ivan's back on the assumption that they could speak to a so-called ‘peace party’. But attempts to speak with the envoys of the other party seem to have been a policy practised by both Russians and Lithuanians, for when Russian envoys were in Lithuania, they also asked to speak privately to Lithuanian officials or nobles, implying here too an attempt to separate the King from his
officials, to reach an agreement behind his back. So it may merely have been an old and accepted ploy, a way of saying what could not be said officially. Viskovaty, for instance, promptly repeated to Ivan all that was said to him. (Viskovaty is several times referred to by Russian historians as head of the Russian
razvedka
or security service, in fact a sort of Francis Walsingham, more it seems on the basis of how he behaved than of any evidence of the existence of such a service.)

Thus far the Russians had been successful in most of their military undertakings in Livonia proper, but according to some Russian historians the war divided the Russian aristocracy, who were not so much at loggerheads about the aims as about the timing of a campaign which was bound to lead to the involvement of major powers such as Sweden and, above all, Poland–Lithuania.
²⁶
Internal reform which had marked the years 1555–8 had been postponed or abandoned; Russia was not, in the sixteenth century – indeed was almost never – in a position to embark on major political or social reforms in time of war. As a result there had allegedly emerged a war party, that of the Tsar himself, and a peace party, that of Adashev (and of Sylvester, the only person ever actually mentioned by Ivan as having opposed the war) though possibly not of Viskovaty.
²⁷
The consequences of this division became evident in the crisis of the years 1559–64, and may have contributed to the eventual disgrace of Aleksei Adashev and of his brother Daniil, whose exploits against the Crimea were praised by Aleksei – who was at that time in charge of compiling the official Nikonovskaia Chronicle – as substantial victories. But the Tsar was not deceived. He wrote in 1564 to Prince Kurbsky, referring to Daniil's raids on the Crimean coasts in 1558–9, ‘What of your victory on the Dnieper and the Don? How much sore affliction and destruction was brought upon the Christians, while the enemy suffered not even the slightest discomfort?’
²⁸

The Lithuanian envoy urged Aleksei Adashev, when he spoke to him alone, to remind the Russian boyars to persuade the Tsar to make peace, on the Lithuanian terms. Ivan was so outraged that he sent them away without even a banquet, which was positively insulting.
²⁹
Still another Lithuanian envoy arrived in Moscow and on 23 January 1560 issued an ultimatum to Ivan to stop the war in Livonia, which, he asserted, belonged to the Grand Principality of Lithuania. In private talks with Adashev and Viskovaty he too endeavoured to give the impression that there was a disagreement between the Poles, the dominant party, and the Lithuanians, the former being anxious for war, while the Lithuanians were more amenable to negotiations. But this was merely a ploy to get Ivan to send an ‘embassy’ to Lithuania to conclude peace on Sigismund's
terms. When Adashev showed the Lithuanian envoy the charters setting out the tribute paid by Dorpat of old, he exclaimed that this was competely new to him.

On 30 January 1560, Ivan received the Lithuanian envoy in an audience at which Adashev was not present, and sent him away empty-handed, again not even inviting him to a meal; the envoy left on 2 February. In the same month an envoy also arrived from the Emperor Ferdinand, in the hope of mediating between the two parties, but the Russians stressed that there was no point in further talks, since the Lithuanians had already entered ‘our Livonian lands and occupied a number of towns’, to which the Lithuanians repeated that Livonia had always belonged to the Commonwealth, having been granted by the Holy Roman Emperor. The final breach occurred early in July 1560, when couriers were again exchanged between Russia and the Commonwealth. Discussions took place between Viskovaty and the Commonwealth envoy, but neither these attempts at peacemaking nor a renewed attempt by Sweden to mediate served any purpose.

The year 1560 is usually regarded as the year in which the so-called ‘Chosen Council’ fell from power and its principal members were disgraced by Ivan IV, reflecting a complete change of character in the Tsar himself and leading to a complete change of government. Clearly, by the early 1560s Ivan had decided that in order to pursue the policy on which he had determined, he must surround himself with new advisers. The first external sign of the new course was the dismissal of Aleksei Adashev from his post in the court in Moscow (whatever it was) and his appointment as third
voevoda
of the army in Livonia, serving under Prince I.F. Mstislavsky.

Ivan now determined to launch a stronger campaign. He appointed Prince A.M. Kurbsky as second
voyevoda
‘to stiffen the troops’, and a substantial force under Prince I.F. Mstislavsky advanced against the Livonian army, inflicting a major defeat on it in the battle of Ermes on 2 August 1560 and capturing Fellin, the great fortress of the Order, where the old Grand Master Wilhelm von Fürstenberg was still living. Fürstenberg was taken prisoner to Moscow, where he was held in reasonable conditions and eventually died. The Landmarschall Philip von Bell and three other high officers, perhaps because Adashev interceded for them, perhaps because Bell was rude to Ivan, were all executed.
³⁰

Adashev had never served as a
voevoda
on active service before, though he had taken a prominent part in the diplomacy of the campaign against Kazan'. He took part in the battle of Ermes and in the capture of the fortress of Fellin; Daniil Adashev, who was a professional soldier,
was also now sent to the army in Livonia, where he commanded the artillery.

The reason usually given for the fall of the so-called ‘government of Sylvester and Adashev’ is their disagreement with Ivan's policy of expansion at the expense of the disintegrating Livonian Order before the conquest of Kazan' had been properly consolidated as a base for further expansion against the Tatar Khanate of Crimea. This implied the turning away of Russia from expansion at the expense of the non-European world of Islam towards expansion in the Christian world of the West. The source for this explanation is the correspondence between Prince A.M. Kurbsky and the Tsar, begun by the former in 1564, and it is based on the assumption that Sylvester was in some way influential in the administration and that Aleksei Adashev had occupied a prominent post in the ‘government’ for a number of years and was a member of the so-called
Blizhniaia Duma
, or Privy Council carved out of the main Boyar Council, composed at times of over twenty members. According to S.O. Schmidt, in an article first published in 1954
³¹
describing Adashev's career, Adashev was appointed to a new
chelobitnaia izba
, or Chamber of Requests, in 1549, after the famous
Sobor primirenia
or ‘assembly of reconciliation’ which took place after the fire of 1547 and the elimination of the Glinsky princes from power (see Chapter IV).
³²

Ivan's attack on what he described as the partnership between Sylvester and Adashev dates from 1564; he accused them of ‘holding counsel in secret’, issuing orders without consulting him, giving worldly instead of spiritual advice, and ‘taking the splendour of our power from us’. He charged the two with distributing estates to their supporters, scattering them in the wind in an unbefitting manner; with ‘strengthening their position with friendships’ and acting in their interests with a total disregard for his authority and interests. Ivan was particularly angered at the fact that all this oppression from which he suffered was enforced in the name of God and religion.

For S.O. Schmidt, the social position of Adashev, halfway between the boyars and the service gentry, made him the ideal person to carry out, on behalf of the Tsar, the ‘policy of compromise’ between these two forces which, again according to Schmidt and many other Soviet historians, dominated the early 1550s. The possibility that the Tsar might simply have liked and trusted Adashev at that time cannot be considered seriously in Marxist historiography, since history is moved by social forces and not by people. On the other hand, in his letter to Kurbsky of 1564
³³
Ivan speaks with great contempt of Adashev's
origins, referring to him as ‘that dog Adashev who in my youth served only to walk in front and clear people out of my way’.
³⁴
Yet Adashev formed part of Ivan's escort drawn from members of the Privy Council on various journeys in 1553, after Ivan's illness, and in 1554; he was at the council meeting that took the decision concerning brigands in January 1555, and took part in the Tsar's march to Kolomna in summer 1555.
³⁵
But his official rank was still no higher than
okol'nichi
, to which he was raised in 1553.