Ivan the Terrible (68 page)

Nevertheless, Ivan's coronation, his marriage, and his first steps in power and war reflected no outstanding abnormality, as against the general run of young European princes, the Valois princes in France, Edward VI of England, Don Carlos of Spain.
³⁶
Possibly in his attitude to the Moscow fire of 1547 Ivan may already have shown some of that apprehension which was to develop into attacks of outright panic. And already in the various campaigns against Kazan’ he showed his understanding of his dual role as Tsar and spiritual father in his concept of leadership in time of war. His first real breakdown came with the death of Anastasia in 1560. Many authors have stressed this caesura in Ivan's life, starting with Karamzin. It is already to be found in three early seventeenth-century writers, who are very critical of Ivan.
³⁷
Many historians have rejected what they consider to be Karamzin's romantic approach and preferred to see in Ivan a boor with no feelings, tied up in an arranged marriage. Yet there is no doubt that the thirteen years of Ivan's marriage to Anastasia were the most peaceful and harmonious in his life, and there is one touching phrase in a letter to Kurbsky of 1577, which suggests that she remained alive in his memory: ‘Why did you separate me from my wife?’, he wrote. ‘If only you had not taken from me my young bride (
iunitsy moeia
) then there would have been no sacrifices to Cronus.’
³⁸

It was after Anastasia's death that Ivan broke out into wild debauchery, and seems to have given way to homosexual leanings. His wife's death not only injured his happiness, it was an affront to his power. He had lost someone who belonged to him, whom he was used to (and Ivan was clearly uxorious as his later life showed), who formed part of his enclosed world. Her loss, though it was not sudden, undoubtedly unbalanced him, and aroused the incipient acute paranoia
which led him to see enemies everywhere and to blame them for poisoning his wife – and his next two wives as well. He may or may not have loved Anastasia, but he needed her love, and he may have felt bereft, as though he had lost his mother all over again. The external signs of increasing paranoia were the savage persecution of the Adashev clan, and the widening circle of the disgraced boyars.

Marriage with Maria Temriukovna in August 1561 may have calmed Ivan down for a while. Success with the conquest of Polotsk in 1563 was followed by the death of his brother Iuri, and not long after that of Metropolitan Makarii. This could well have led to a sense of increasing loneliness, with no one left with whom to share his childhood memories. Probably the most serious shock Ivan suffered, and it was a shock to his imperial pride, was the defection of Prince Kurbsky in April 1564. The nature of their relationship undoubtedly needs further study. Taking all their correspondence together, there are several occasions on both sides when a degree of emotion pierces through the anger. In Kurbsky one can detect the emotion of loyalty and allegiance betrayed; an underlying suggestion of friendship betrayed is particularly evident in Ivan's last letter to Kurbsky, when he justifies himself to the Prince for having opposed the efforts he attributed to him to place Vladimir of Staritsa on the throne in his stead. ‘Did I ascend the throne by robbery or armed force? … I was born to rule by the grace of God … I grew up upon the throne. And why should Prince Vladimir be lord?’ All this, argues Ivan, took place because Kurbsky was self-willed: ‘If only he had not sided against Ivan and with the priest [Sylvester]’. He ends up with a psychologically most revealing assertion: ‘You began to oppose me and betray me still more, and I therefore began to oppose you more harshly; I wanted to subdue you to my will – and you in recompense – how you defiled and outraged the sanctity of the Lord’,
³⁹
a reference to Kurbsky's campaigning on behalf of Stephen Bathory against Orthodox Russia. Ivan could not forgive Kurbsky for not having submitted to his will, for only the Tsar might have a will and a subject should submit to the death.

But the life of drink, debauchery, religion and sadism which Ivan embarked upon with the institution of the
oprichnina
, his withdrawal to the privacy of Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda and the repercussions of the execution or exile of many of his most prominent generals just when the war with Poland–Lithuania in Livonia had broken out, precipitated a fresh crisis.

In Ivan's first letter to Kurbsky, of July 1564, paranoia is already reinforced by megalomania, and Ivan reacted by setting up the
oprichnina
as a further guarantee of security. But it failed him, and left
him unprotected from his external enemies with the death, he believed by poisoning, of his second wife, Maria Temriukovna, in 1569. Whether her death affected him emotionally is hard to tell, but certainly the suspicion that she died by poison within his refuge at Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda must have caused him considerable dismay. In the meantime Ivan was overwhelmed by the news of the overthrow of Erik XIV in Sweden, a King with whom he had been negotiating what amounted to the kidnapping of Catherine Jagiellonka, the wife of Erik's brother John. The insult of the refusal of his offer of marriage by Catherine ten years before was still festering and could only be cured by some resounding revenge. Erik had been betrayed and imprisoned by his nobles, the kingdom handed over to his brother John. Was this not a foretaste of what Ivan could expect to happen between him and Vladimir of Staritsa? The attack on Novgorod and the execution of ‘traitors’ in Moscow may well have been a means of eliminating those who might treat him as Erik XIV had been treated. Then in autumn 1571 came the death by poisoning of his third wife Marfa Sobakina.
⁴⁰
She died not long after the fearsome Crimean raid on Moscow where so much of the city was destroyed. Was it in the context of her death that he wrote the ‘Kanon’ in the name of the holy fool, Parfenii, in which he appeals to the Archangel Michael to grant him a gentle death in his despair, and not to frighten him, to give him time to repent, and also appeals to the Holy Mother of God to intercede for him, and let him be taken to a place of peace?
⁴¹

But Ivan was becoming more and more unstable and it is at this stage that he finally lost all control and began to hit out savagely in every direction. Paranoia advances with age and he was now approaching forty. The death of his three wives was proof that he was not all-powerful, he could not even protect his own family, and this led him to lash out against all those who surrounded him, seeking both revenge and safety. Underlying signs of a severe personality disorder were emerging. Ivan recognized no limits on his power, not only in theory but in fact; he recognized no abstract moral standard by which his deeds could be measured. No one could oppose him. All he did was right and necessary because he did it, because he was like God.

Ivan could also at this time become sly, manoeuvring to catch potential enemies out, losing all sense of right and wrong provided he succeeded in obtaining convincing evidence of treason. It is at this stage that in his relations with foreign powers Ivan becomes more and more resentful of those who fail to address him as Tsar, and dwells more and more frequently on his descent from Prus, the brother of Augustus. This overweening belief that his power was from God is often attributed to
the education in ‘autocracy’ he allegedly received from Makarii, who certainly believed that Ivan ruled by God's grace. Yet the right to reward and to punish had been claimed already by Ivan III, and the theory behind his power, and that of Queen Elizabeth, was the same, for as she put it, ‘The Queen's Highness is the only supreme governor of this realm. … as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things … as temporal.’
⁴²
But Ivan had reached the stage when he had no sense of measure in the way he used power, which for him was not merely absolute but unlimited.

So Ivan became personally responsible for the death of Ivan Fedorov Cheliadnin, because he believed the latter had ‘wanted to be tsar’; and for the death of his cousin Vladimir of Staritsa, his wife and nine-year-old daughter, because he was his cousin and might be his heir even though Ivan Ivanovich was already fifteen years old, and for the thousands who died in Novgorod because of his fear of treason, however he defined it. What remains inexplicable is the dreadful scene in the Poganaia meadow on 25 July 1570. It was a theatrically staged play of horror and revenge, on people who until a few days before had been Ivan's closest collaborators, and who were not his rivals for power, but his loyal servants. They were suddenly and cruelly exterminated, notably Viskovaty and Funikov. At this time too Ivan turned on three of the early leaders of the
oprichnina
, Viazemsky and the two Basmanovs, and got rid of them.
⁴³

In his behaviour and in his letters to Kurbsky, Ivan shows a complete inability to see any point of view but his own, to feel any compassion for those he feels the need to destroy, and an incomprehensible indifference to wives and children. It has been suggested that this last attribute of his character was conditioned by the existing Russian tradition of regarding the clan or the
rod
as joined in a collective guilt for serious crimes such as treason. There was also perhaps another motive for the total extermination of a family, namely that its ability ever to act against the Tsar would be cut short. The same consideration applied to the refusal to let important nobles marry. But Ivan's ruthlessness went beyond these fairly common defences. He wished to ensure that there would be none left to pray for the dead.

Yet Ivan was completely inconsistent in his attitude and in his decisions. Several times I.F. Mstislavsky was compelled to procure huge financial sureties to guarantee his behaviour, but he married twice, had two sons, and outlived the Tsar. (He was of course not a Riurikovich.) While M.I. Vorotynsky, after a really distinguished military career, during which he was once in disgrace for a number of years, saved Moscow from the Tatars, and two years later died in agony, but left
more than one son.
⁴⁴
It is impossible to trace a consistent policy in the Tsar's attitude to his courtiers, other than the almost automatic appointment of relatives of his wives to posts at court, and their almost equally automatic disgrace or execution when the wife died or was repudiated. Historians have spent much time trying to trace factional struggles, but in the long run favourites came and went in total disregard of policies.

There is one factor that may have appeared to the Tsar as particularly threatening, and that is the existence of a solid wedge of aristocrats, mostly princes, closely interrelated by marriage, and also by the tightly knit network of suretyships, which stood up against him, and which he eventually relegated into the
zemshchina
. Marriage was certainly a close bond between clans, but suretyship represented an even closer network of relationships. The only thing that remains inexplicable is the lack of evidence that these financial bonds were ever called in by the Tsar.
⁴⁵
The system of
krugovaia poruka
protected the Tsar from the princes and the boyars, but it also protected the princes and boyars from the Tsar. The whole of society remained tied up in a cat's cradle of bonds.

Why did Ivan's courtiers tolerate such appalling treatment? Why did they not kill him? This question has been passed over by some historians who argue that Ivan was merely an illiterate figurehead, manipulated by powerful courtiers leading factional groups. Yet it does not seem probable that from the 1560s onwards, the powerful boyars in the
zemshchina
would have tolerated the savage repressions carried out by the
oprichniki
– the murders of Gorbaty-Shuisky, Ivan Fedorov, Vladimir of Staritsa, Metropolitan Filipp – if these were merely the result of the decisions of men acting in Ivan's name. Such horrors had to have behind them the authority of an anointed and charismatic ruler, and from what is known of Ivan's personality from many different sources, the Tsar was an imposing and dominant, even charismatic, figure, and his intellectual capacity was unaffected by his psychological disorder. The imperial envoy, Prinz von Buchau, and Possevino, for instance, are much more penetrating and less severe in their judgments of Ivan than the English Fletcher, a Puritan, who never saw the Tsar. Bowes, or Turberville, were typical English xenophobes, though Jenkinson and Horsey show more perceptiveness, but their reports are often discarded as uninteresting precisely because they are not so critical. They were more able to discriminate between what Ivan was and what he did.
⁴⁶

One historian has suggested that to Ivan's contemporaries, his tyranny and cruelty represented the torments of Hell associated with the Last Judgment. Hell was associated not only with fire but with water, the
bottom of a fiery lake or of an icy river. This explains the use of drowning as a method of execution and in this sense the Tsar's violence was understandable to the people who lived in the same religious framework

The confusion which still exists over the interpretation of Ivan's reign provides one of the most obvious examples of the nefarious influence of ideology over historical writing. The portrayal of Ivan's reign has been distorted almost from the very beginning, though one may fairly exclude Karamzin, the first professional Russian historian, who was also intellectually honest, if a romantic at heart. He saw Ivan IV first as the handsome young man with his loving and gentle wife, kept to the straight and narrow path by his upright friend Adashev, and by the stern priest Sylvester. But when his wife died, according to Karamzin, the Tsar gave way to the evil trends in his character and became a demon.

This was not a satisfactory explanation of the role of Ivan IV in Russian history for it failed to provide a political and moral justification for his cruelty by pointing to the positive benefit his policies brought to the land and the people. Hence theories had to be devised, according to the intellectual fashions current at the time, which made it possible to interpret events as having been planned with a view to well defined and positive outcomes. The latest of these fashions, which prevailed in the nineteenth century and throughout most of the twentieth, posited the existence of a powerful aristocracy in Russia, bound to oppose the development of tsarist absolutism in defence of its own power base. It was selfish and reactionary, placing its own interests before those of the ‘nation’. This theory led to the elaboration of a systematic interpretation of Russian history in which the reactionary princely/boyar aristocracy clung to its vast old ‘appanages’ with all their privileges, in opposition to the centralizing state and the progressive nobility or service gentry, which both supported and depended on the Crown, and was anxious to fulfil the national objectives of territorial expansion. The Tsar's despotism was necessary in order to achieve the victory of the state (under the Tsar) and the service gentry, over the boyars.