Ivan the Terrible (32 page)

If Ivan had been pondering on his future, so had one of his leading generals, Prince Andrei Mikhailovich Kurbsky. He had not been prominent in government or administration but on the battlefield. The Prince was only some two years older than Ivan and could therefore converse with him without overawing the younger man as would Sylvester, and he seems to have shared Ivan's interest in religious and political ideas. He was a man of some culture, who could read and write in Russian and Slavonic and in his mature years he seems to have been familiar with Latin and Greek.
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He was on close terms with Maksim Grek and many other churchmen. He quoted extensively from the Bible and the Church Fathers in his writings
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and was a devout member of the
Orthodox Church. One of his ancestors, Prince Fedor Rostislavich, had been canonized in 1463, and Kurbsky prided himself on the fact that his family descended from a son of Vladimir Monomakh older than the ancestor of the princes of Moscow.
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There was moreover a distant connection between Kurbsky and the family of the Tsaritsa Anastasia.
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In 1549 Kurbsky was given the court appointment of
stol'nik
(literally, tableman, at that time one of the young men engaged for instance in serving at the vast state banquets); he was then active in the various campaigns against Kazan' with increasing distinction and was seriously wounded in late 1552. During Ivan's nearly fatal illness, in 1553, Kurbsky did not incur the suspicion of siding with Vladimir of Staritsa
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and, together with Adashev, accompanied Ivan after his recovery on a pilgrimage to the Trinity monastery and to the St Cyril monastery, thus confirming that he was in favour and in the immediate circle of the Tsar.
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From September 1553 Kurbsky was again on active service in the pacification of Kazan', and from March 1554 he appears to have been unemployed. He was raised to the rank of boyar in 1556, at the age of twenty-eight, and returned again to active service in highly responsible posts against an expected Tatar attack, before being sent in 1557 to the Livonian theatre of war. Once again he was dispatched, in January 1558, this time to Kaluga, against a Tatar threat, where he was appointed second in command under Shigali on a murderous raid through Livonia, and where Ivan himself visited the army in August 1559. In spring 1560 he was sent back to Dorpat in Livonia for as Ivan wrote to him: ‘I am forced by the actions of my military commanders either to lead my forces myself against the Livonians or to send you, my dearly loved one, so that with the help of God you may put fresh heart into my troops.’
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Kurbsky was again active in Velikie Luki, one of the bases for the conquest of Polotsk, where he was second in command of the rearguard, but he was evidently blamed by Ivan as one of the
voevody
guilty of the failure of the Russian forces at the battle of Nevl' in August 1562. In 1563 he was relegated as commander in Dorpat and left there for more than a year in what was clearly some form of disgrace.

In the early 1560s Kurbsky had been watching with mounting indignation the arbitrariness, illegality and cruelty of Ivan's persecution of the boyars, service gentry and often the common people among their retainers.
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He had many friends among the supporters of Adashev who were being systematically destroyed. He had visited the Pskov Pechersky monastery earlier, he had even borrowed money from the monks, and was on close terms with a number of them. His view of what was
happening in Russia is expressed in a letter to the Elder Vassian Muromtsev of the monastery, probably written between December 1563 and April 1564:

Kurbsky goes on, in another letter to Vassian, to lament the failure of the ecclesiastics to defend the people against their ruler: ‘Where are the prophets who exposed the “unjust rulers”? Where is St John Chrysostom who accused the Tsaritsa of love of gold? … Where are the patriarch and the Saints? In truth there is no one to intercede for us …’, and he attacks the nobles and the monks who do nothing to defend the Christian folk but are ‘choked with their property and their great wealth’.
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In a more wide-ranging description of the state of Russia Kurbsky bewails the poor state of the armed forces, deprived of horses and weapons, but also of spiritual food, and of the peasants, forced to sell their children into servitude, and the enormous burden of taxation on the merchants and the poor, who do what he, Kurbsky was about to do, namely ‘disappear beyond the frontiers of their native land’.

Sitting in Dorpat, and short of money, Kurbsky may well have been approached by, or himself have initiated, contacts with Lithuanian emissaries, to prepare for his reception in Lithuania. He would need money, land and position and therefore he attempted to negotiate terms with King Sigismund beforehand. Russian and Soviet historians differ greatly in their accounts of the reasons for Kurbsky's ultimate decision to flee, but nearly all concur in speaking of him as a traitor, and some even call him an apostate, which he was not. Their standpoint seems greatly to depend on when they wrote, and whether they were strongly patriotic in their views. Traitor to Ivan Kurbsky certainly was, though by the sixteenth century the concept of treason had been somewhat eroded and treachery to a person was already not the same as treason to one's country.

What finally induced Kurbsky to make his bid for freedom at a particular time is not known. There is a story that in 1563 he had heard that Ivan was to disgrace him, and as he could not bear a shameful execution after all his long service, he asked his wife what she would prefer: should he die or should they separate forever? His wife refused to contemplate his death, whereupon, with bitter tears, he said goodbye to her and to his son, and on 30 April 1564 he climbed over the walls of the citadel of Dorpat to join the twelve service gentry companions who were fleeing with him. He did not see his wife and nine-year-old son again. Together with his mother they perished in prison later that year.
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This suggests that the decision to leave, though probably long prepared, was taken suddenly, and Kurbsky successfully made his way, without being intercepted, to the Livonian-held fort of Gel'met, which suggests that he had accomplices. He left his books and his other belongings behind in Dorpat, but took away twelve trunks of goods of various kinds, loaded onto at least three horses. He had tried again, and failed, to borrow money from the monks at the Pskov Pechersky monastery. But when he appeared before the Livonians in Gel'met, he had 300 Polish zlotys, 30 ducats, 500 German thalers and 44 Moscow rubles in his bag, a very large sum for the time, most of it in foreign currency and probably received from Sigismund, and also his sapphire seal ring.
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He had received at some date letters and a safe conduct from Sigismund Augustus, but to what must have been his rage and dismay, they did not serve him. On arrival at Gel'met, held by Livonians, he was detained, his gold was stolen and he was transferred under arrest to the castle of Armus. There the Livonian noble servitors stripped him of his fox fur hat and confiscated his horses, and he was not given the promised support until some time after he arrived at Wolmar which was in Polish-Lithuanian hands. In July Sigismund granted him lands in Lithuania and Volhynia, and eventually also the castle of Kowel that had belonged to his mother Bona Sforza.

Ivan later charged Kurbsky with fleeing merely out of ‘fear just of an angry word from the Tsar’,
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but in a letter to his envoys in Lithuania the Tsar stated that he had had the intention of punishing the prince as a traitor and accused him of plotting against the Tsaritsa Anastasia and his children. Punishment in this context meant death and though later Ivan withdrew his remarks, and said he meant only to deprive Kurbsky of his honours, his positions and his lands, Kurbsky had from the start assumed the worst.
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On a different level, Ivan argued that Kurbsky should have been willing to take on the burden of the Tsar's guilt and be
sacrificed for him, just as the Tsar took on his shoulders the guilt of the Russian people, including of course Kurbsky's.

From Wolmar Kurbsky wrote a letter to the Tsar, which is one long accusation couched in language such as had never been used to the god-given ruler before. In some 1,500 burning words, in high rhetorical style, designed to be declaimed aloud, and permeated with biblical terms and images, Kurbsky accused Ivan of having abandoned his role as the most illustrious personification of the Orthodox faith: ‘If you have understanding, may you understand this with your leprous conscience – such a conscience as may not be found even among the godless peoples. … Wherefore O Tsar have you destroyed the strong in Israel, and subjected to various forms of death the
voevody
given to you by God?’
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He goes on to accuse the Tsar of spilling the blood of his nobles on the threshold of churches, of using unheard of torments and persecutions and death against those who have served him, accusing them falsely of treachery and magic.
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He reminds Ivan of all the services he has performed for him:

and Kurbsky calls on Christ, who sits on the throne of the cherubim at the right hand of the Almighty, to be the judge ‘between you and me’.

Thus Ivan stands accused and brought down to the level of a common man, who now proceeds to list the injuries he personally has received from the Tsar, the lies that have been told of him: ‘I have been driven from the land of God without guilt.’ Kurbsky excoriates Ivan's misuse of the ‘Angelic Form’, namely the monk's robes, ‘when he flies into a rage … and forces people to accept the monastic tonsure together with their wives and little children, and condemns them to everlasting imprisonment in strong monasteries, making the holy places fortresses of hell, with the approbation of certain accursed and cunning monks’.
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Ivan, he declares is surrounded by liars and flatterers, who urge him on to ‘aphrodisiacal deeds’, to act more viciously than the priests of Cronus, and he warns Ivan that he has heard from sacred writings that ‘a destroyer will be sent by the devil against the human race, a destroyer
conceived in fornication, the Antichrist’.
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This was the kind of language which must have made Ivan furious.

Kurbsky's letter was to be conveyed to the Tsar personally by his courier, Vasily Shibanov, but the latter was seized on the way, in Dorpat, and taken to Moscow. Shibanov proved a very loyal servant, and did not betray his master; he only indicated where Kurbsky had concealed some papers which he did intend in fact for Ivan. Shibanov was tortured and finally delivered over to a painful execution.
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Ivan received Kurbsky's missive in May 1564. He spent the next two months visiting monasteries and the lands he had just confiscated from the Prince of Staritsa. But he was also obviously meditating his reply to Kurbsky, for it is dated 5 July 1564, and takes up eighty-six printed pages – ‘your grandiloquent and big-sounding screed’ – as Kurbsky called it. It must have taken a long time to put it into writing with a quill pen, and one may assume therefore that Ivan dictated it at intervals during the preceding weeks. Its composition also required constant reference to the Old and New Testaments and the Church Fathers, on whom Ivan drew extensively, as well as the History of the Destruction of Troy and various other religious and secular works.

Ivan played on every rhetorical string in this remarkable document which was evidently meant to be widely read. He was proud, indignant, angry, mocking, contemptuous, condescending, reproachful, forgiving by turns; he called up historical parallels from the Bible, the gods of Olympus, the Roman Empire of the West and the East Roman Empire. He meandered, covering the same events in various ways and in a more or less angry frame of mind. To bring some order into this chaos it is advisable to break down his letter into its major component themes, which are often repeated and do not appear in chronological order. Broadly speaking Ivan covers his childhood, his relationship with Prince Kurbsky, the tyranny of Sylvester and Adashev, and the plotting and treachery of the boyars in supporting Vladimir of Staritsa and destroying Anastasia. He also discusses the nature of his powers as Tsar. But he begins with the most damning accusation against Kurbsky that he could call upon, that the Prince was a renegade, a
krestoprestupnik
, or breaker of his oath on the cross – a particularly heinous offence in Russia – the next step being apostasy.

The pages dealing with his childhood supply the only existing evidence on the years between 1533 and 1547, which are alleged to have marked Ivan's character so deeply, because of the neglect he suffered and the disrespect, even insolence, with which he – the Grand Prince – was treated by the boyars, particularly after the death of his mother in
1538.
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Unfortunately for the historian it is difficult to swallow his portrayal whole, since he was undoubtedly capable of distortion, invention, misunderstanding and deliberate lies. His account of his childhood is in fact the least verifiable of the autobiographical portions of his letter, because it cannot be checked against any other source.
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