Ivan the Terrible (33 page)

The reproaches directed at Kurbsky are interspersed with long digressions comparing Kurbsky's conduct with that of specific biblical or historical figures or reflections on the exercise of political power: ‘Let us now consider this – who is vainglorious? Am I, in that I order my servants (
raby
) who are subjected to me by God, to carry out my wishes? Or are you, in that you reject my dominion, established at God's behest, and your yoke of servitude, and like masters order me to do your will?’
²⁷

The ‘masters’ were of course the priest Sylvester and Aleksei Adashev. ‘Now at this time, that cur, Aleksei, your chief, who was in our court, and I don't know by what means got himself promoted from usher’ was raised, writes Ivan, ‘from a dungheap to serve with magnates’. And Sylvester too was chosen to care for Ivan's spiritual welfare, but he ‘trampled his priestly vows underfoot … and all that appertains to service with the angels at the altar’, though he seemed to have begun in a righteous manner. Yet when Ivan ‘saw in the holy Scriptures that it is right to submit to good preceptors’ … he obeyed Sylvester willingly, but through ignorance, for the sake of spiritual counsel. But Sylvester was carried away by power like Eli the priest.
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And this ‘ignoramus’ of a priest, joined with Aleksei Adashev in friendship and together they imposed their rule on Ivan, met in secret to plot against him, ‘deeming Ivan incapable of judgment’ and ‘taking the splendour of our power from us’. Ivan then accuses Sylvester of distributing lands and villages, scattering them in the wind in an unbefitting manner, appointing his and Adashev's supporters to important positions, even taking from the Tsar the power to decide on the rank of his boyars:
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Ivan's accumulated hatred of Sylvester is manifest, together with his distrust of nameless boyars, and particularly of ‘that dog’, Adashev. It
was Sylvester who had advised that Ivan should be lord only in words, and that Kurbsky and the priest should rule. Yet God had made Moses the ruler and Aaron the priest, and when Aaron tried to rule, he led the people away from God. Then came Joshua son of Nun, and the judges held sway until the time of Eli the priest, when disaster struck, and all Israel was conquered. ‘Do you not see’, wrote Ivan, ‘how priestly power is incompatible with tsarist authority?’
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It was Sylvester, too, who was responsible for the fact that the struggle to pacify conquered Kazan' lasted seven years. And it was Sylvester who secretly supported the idea of raising Vladimir of Staritsa to the throne. Finally Sylvester, together with Adashev, ‘stirred up great hatred against our Tsaritsa Anastasia and likened her to all the impious Tsaritsas; as for our children, they were not even able to call them to mind’.
³²

Then, modulating to a new key, Ivan accused Kurbsky of failing in his military duties, seeking financial advantages, and running away from the fighting, indeed deserting. There are hints of a sense of guilt at his own military failure in Ivan's accusations, a failure which is also implicit in a letter from Sylvester to Prince Alexander Gorbaty-Shuisky written in spring 1553, after Ivan's near fatal illness. In this letter the priest praises Gorbaty-Shuisky for manifesting more courage than Ivan in the battle for Kazan', in which the latter ‘showed himself fearful of the foe’. Indeed, Ivan had spent much time in prayer before the first attack which took place without him.
³³
Ivan also referred to the ‘well wishers’ named by Kurbsky, who, ‘having placed me like a prisoner on a ship … conveyed me with very few people through the godless and most unbelieving land’ where he could easily have lost his life. This is probably the incident Ivan refers to a few pages later, in this same letter, when Russian stores were lost in a storm on the Volga and, according to Ivan, Kurbsky wanted to return home, after only three days.
³⁴

There is again a curious touch of familiarity in Ivan's attitude to Kurbsky, which suggests that they had once been on close terms. It is not unrelated to the Tsar's resentment at the Prince's alleged treatment of Anastasia. He makes an odd reference to ‘one single little word’, presumably uttered by Anastasia, which made her ‘rank as worthless’ in the eyes of the boyars, and enabled them to prevent her from going on the pilgrimages which might have saved her life. There is a somewhat confused acccount of an incident which evidently occurred between the Tsar and the
voevoda
in which Kurbsky, together with two other boyars, gave judgment against Ivan, in some dispute over land, in which Ivan was concerned, perhaps on behalf of his son. In a second, later, letter to Kurbsky, written in 1577, the Tsar bitterly returns to this
incident: ‘with what insult to me did you arbitrate between Sitsky and Prozorovsky! And how you examined me as though I were a villain’. It is certainly strange for a subject to decide against the interests of his all-powerful lord in a matter of property.

In a later letter, written in 1577, Ivan brought up another grievance: Kurbsky had evidently bought some trifling presents (‘all kinds of adornments’) for the daughters of Prince Kurliatev, ‘but for my daughters, a curse for the peace of their souls. But enough of that. It is not possible to enumerate all the evils you have inflicted on me.’
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In another context Ivan argued that if he had committed ‘small sins’ it was because ‘… there is no man without sin only God alone’; and if his false friends had misled him, and he had been lax in his religious observances, and had indulged in ‘games’ – this was merely indulgence in human weakness on his part.

In other ways one senses that Ivan had been familiar with the life and movements of Kurbsky in the past. In a reference later in the same letter of 1564 to Kurbsky's opposition to the war in Livonia and his evident reluctance to depart for the front there, Ivan writes that he had to send more than seven messengers after the Prince who took to the field grudgingly, and who at that time was ‘in our patrimony of Pskov for your own needs and not because we sent you there’, as indeed Kurbsky was, trying to borrow money from the monks of the Pskov Pechersky monastery. And how Sylvester and Adashev, ‘and all of you’, had opposed waging this war, and given the Livonians a year's truce in which to prepare themselves for a fresh campaign.
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But Ivan emphasized that he had done Sylvester no harm – nor had he harmed his son, the
d'iak
Anfim (which was true). But as for the laymen, Ivan punished them according to their guilt. Kurbsky, however, Ivan argued, was forsworn, and for the sake of the delights of this world he had betrayed Orthodox Christianity and his lord, like Judas, for the sake of gold, betrayed Christ. He denied that executions had taken place in churches; all the treacheries he had suffered from were known to the whole world, even the barbarian peoples, and there were eyewitnesses, traders and ambassadors who came to Russia. In Ivan's conception of the world, it was for Kurbsky to sacrifice his life, and accept death for himself and his family because of his oath of allegiance,
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in the service of the Tsar, and this alone could ensure him a holy death.

Ivan accused Kurbsky of inciting foreign peoples against him – with some justification in the case of Poland–Lithuania. Ivan then makes a somewhat unusual comparison between Kurbsky's ‘martyrs’ and Antenor and Aeneas, the ‘traitors’ of Troy.
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‘To turn light unto
darkness I do not endeavour, and that which is bitter I do not call sweet. Is this then light or darkness for servants to rule?’ With these words Ivan approaches the kernel of his political conflict with Kurbsky, namely his demand to rule unquestioned and unopposed over all his servants, whereas Kurbsky praises the rule of servants over their masters. ‘If a Tsar's subjects do not obey him’, writes Ivan, ‘then never will they cease from internecine strife. The habit of seizing things for oneself is indeed evil! … hitherto Russian lords (
obladateli
) were questioned by no man, they were free to reward and punish their subjects, and they did not litigate with them before any judge.’
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Ivan does not claim that Russian
samoderzhavye
or sovereignty is something new which dates from his coronation as Tsar.
⁴⁰
He begins in the name of the Holy Trinity to trace the story of the emergence of the Orthodox Christian realm of Russia owing to divine intervention:

The term
samoderzhavsto
is used here to describe the origin and nature of God-given power, not the way in which it is used.
⁴¹
All kings by the grace of God were only too well aware of the moral and physical limits on their capacity to enforce their will. What Ivan is stating categorically is that Russia was a ‘sovereign’ kingdom (an ‘autocracy’) as far back as the conversion of Vladimir to Christianity, that is to say an independent polity, recognizing no overlord, and ruled by a Tsar with absolute authority over his subjects.

Moreover Ivan was a sovereign by birth, he had not conquered his kingdom, or taken it by rape, he had inherited it, and was thus born to rule. (He did not regard Elizabeth I of England as being a ‘sovereign born’, for she did not inherit her power, but was raised to the throne by the English ‘estates’, or, in Ivan's words, ‘The English people expelled king Philip of Spain from the kingdom and made you queen.’
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) His own power was justified by St Paul: ‘for there is no power ordained that is not of God. Whosoever resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God.’ As for the Russian sovereigns, they themselves from the beginning have ruled all their dominions, and not the boyars and not the magnates; whereas Kurbsky would only approve if it were rule by
‘a certain priest’. There is nothing in these statements of Ivan's to differentiate the
nature
of sovereign power in Russia from that theoretically exercised by his contemporaries Francis I of France or Henry VIII of England, though its
extent
was different: the latter might have to pay more attention to institutional limitations. The right to reward his servants and to punish them (by death if he felt so inclined) was fully used by Henry VIII.
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But in all these kingdoms, the ability to enforce a decision lagged well behind the consciousness of the right to make it. And even the right to make a decision could be limited by moral considerations, for the Tsar was responsible before God for the spiritual welfare of his subjects, and his right to decide could be lost if he acted like a tyrant. Even Joseph of Volokolamsk had stated that this was so,
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and the East Roman deacon, Agapetus, had set out the principle that rewarding and punishing should be carried out in accordance with the laws of God. Though the Tsar's power was unlimited, because no one could set limits to it, yet the Tsar himself had to submit to the law.

The same principles were to be found in the
Secretum secretorum
, the mirror of princes, of Middle Eastern origin, well known throughout Europe, of which a Russian version existed, translated from the Hebrew. It was presented as the philosopher Aristotle giving advice to Alexander the Great, and among other axioms it warned Alexander not to give priority to mortal things over the eternal, and to subordinate his rulership to the law, for thus he would be worthy of ruling. ‘And he who subordinates the law to his rulership (
tsarstvo
) kills the law.’
⁴⁵

‘How pray can a man be called sovereign if he himself does not rule?’ was Ivan's refrain.
⁴⁶
Still obsessed by the encroaching sway of Sylvester, Ivan declaimed against priestly intrusion: ‘And is this befitting for a tsar: when he is struck on the cheek, for him to turn the other cheek? Is this the supreme commandment?’ Referring to the internecine warfare of Russia's princely past he laments, ‘Woe unto the house over which a woman ruleth; see you then that the rule of many is like unto the folly of women, for even if men are strong and brave if they are not under one authority they will behave like foolish women.’
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But what did
samoderzhavstvo
mean to Ivan as he settled himself more comfortably on his throne? Did he begin to think not just of absolute power, but of unlimited power (
neogranichennaia
) which was not merely God-given but God-like power? The formula: ‘I am free to reward and free to punish’ was not invented by him, and evidently reflected a well-established approach used and accepted by many of the Russian appanage princes before him. But he went beyond this
affirmation because of his psychological need to have his way at once and without meeting any obstacle, whether verbal or physical, whether moral or spiritual. His right to inflict disgrace (
opala
) was unconditional, independent of any judicial procedure. In contrast with Kurbsky's insistence on ‘free will’ and freely given service, Ivan did not believe that man was free, not even in Paradise. Had not God forbidden him to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?

Much has been written about the nature of Russian absolute government, ever since the imperial ambassador, Sigismund von Herberstein coined his famous formula: in Russia, ‘the will of the lord is the will of God’ and the powers of the Russian sovereign over his people are greater than in any other country. Herberstein was a very perceptive and knowledgeable German, but his remarks should not be taken in isolation, without reference to any other contemporary polity, nor to possible bias in his sources. He did not, for instance, care for Vasily III. There were periods in most medieval societies when royal authority was greater or smaller, exercised with more or less brutality, and Herberstein's remark should be checked against the facts rather than accepted as establishing the facts.
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