Ivan the Terrible (69 page)

This historical interpretation current in the period from 1940 to the 1970s, under the overall supervision of Stalin,
¹
has come under attack in subsequent years,
²
largely because the evidence to sustain it was lacking, and with the slackening of central party control over the intellectual life of the USSR there could be occasional divergences from the historical party line.
³
Indeed, a closer study of the source material led historians to conclude that there was no evidence for this supposed ‘struggle’ between aristocrats and service gentry over policy, for concealed centripetal forces were acting in a way independent of their presumed class interests. Both aristocrats (princes and boyars) and service gentry accepted the unification of the land under the sole government of the Tsar, and the merging of service tenure and allodial property in land which was taking place and in which they all saw some advantages. Some Riurikid princes, who had survived in sufficiently strong clans might still hanker after their old appanage status, but the pervasive systems of partible inheritance, and suretyship and collective responsibility acted as a barrier against any private initiatives, in an increasingly complex polity, and the monopoly of lucrative service drew the aristocracy and service gentry together.
⁴

At a deeper level it has been suggested that though Russian political culture placed no institutional limits on the Tsar's power, it did place intangible and ill-defined moral and religious limits on his exercise of his power, which both he and the people understood. This explains how Iosif of Volokolamsk could at the same time stress the prerogatives of the Tsar, and call on the people to refuse their allegiance to an unrighteous Tsar, a Tsar
muchitel'
or tormentor.
⁵
There is in fact no incompatibility between a strong ruler and limitations on power, for if he is strong the ruler will know how to manipulate power and make use of the ‘constitution’ to the full. D. Rowland sums up the political culture in Russia as one in which the Tsar's prime duty is to carry out God's will, as the mediator between God and his people, and make himself responsible for their salvation. If he does not fulfil this duty his people have the right to withdraw their allegiance. There are no limits on the Tsar's right to punish the wicked in pursuance of their salvation. The ruler entrusted with the power to punish needs
groza
, the ability to inspire awe and fear, by the exercise of cruelty if need be.
⁶

On the other hand government proceeds by consensus and not by the formation of factions based on support for particular policies favouring different groups or classes. Allegiance is not affected by policies so much as by faith that the Tsar is the true shepherd of the people.

It is also the case that we tend to exaggerate the executive power
available to an absolute monarch in medieval times. Kings could be absolute in the sense of
solutus a legibus
, not bound by the laws, which they, or their predecessors, had in any case made. But the power of the executive was very weak compared with what it is today, and the reach of the government in a country as vast as Russia made the exercise of close control of individual activity impossible in the age of the horse.

Throughout his reign Ivan pursued a number of policies with more or less success. One of them was the aim of reducing the powers and holdings of appanage princes, a policy which had already been energetically followed by Vasily III. It was also becoming evident that the tradition of consensus between the Crown and the aristocracy survived, with the aim of achieving a greater integration of disparate principalities and societies which had so much in common. There is no doubt that though his attacks were unsystematic and fuelled by personal hatred and distrust of individual princes and boyars, Ivan reduced the capacity of the remaining wealthy Riurikid princes to present any challenge to his hold on the throne and to act together against him. Though his first target seems to have been the princes, yet he also bridled the wealthy non-princely boyars, and by introducing a perpetual reshuffle of lands, to and from the
oprichnina
, he prevented the establishment of local links between the aristocracy and a possible military following. There were not very many candidates, for the great Gediminovich families did not present a serious challenge and could be allowed greater freedom. But the russified descendants of the Lithuanian Patrikeevs, and the Obolenskys, Shuiskys and particularly Vorotynskys and of course Ivan's cousin Vladimir of Staritsa were hamstrung or destroyed.

By centralization, or unification as it is preferable to call it, Ivan was clearly not aiming at a centralized administration, controlled by a central government and a central bureaucracy, because a literate substructure did not exist, nor the necessary legal knowledge to create it. It meant above all the extension to all parts of the realm of the recognition of one single supreme, ultimate, lawful authority manifesting itself in many ways and delegating the administration of justice, revenue raising and defence to paid or unpaid partners at many social levels, often by means of the system of suretyship. Ivan IV was more successful than many of his contemporaries in Europe in achieving this unified authority.
⁷
In Russia there was one law (the
sudebnik
of 1550), one currency, one religion, one set of weights and measures, one language, and a unified army command. There were still of course
terrae irredentae
, the lands of Kievan Rus’ under Polish-Lithuanian rule, and Russia was beginning to absorb lands inhabited by members of other
races and religions, though not to an extent which altered the basic composition of the nation.

During the thirty-four years after his coronation Ivan enormously extended the territory ruled over by Russia by the conquest of Kazan’ and Astrakhan’ and by pushing forward the settled and defended territory in the south. Advance into Siberia from the northeast of Russia, in pursuit of furs and salt, had been a private venture of the Stroganov family but as they extended their trading expeditions into the lands of the Ob’ river basin they needed their own armed force and recruited a Cossack, Yermak, part soldier part brigand, to lead it. Starting out in 1582, as a private adventurer Yermak (like so many of the Spanish conquistadores) was at first successful but then lost his life in a counterattack from the Khanate of Siberia. The Russian state then took over the enterprise and, from then on, Russia advanced steadily into western Siberia.

During some twenty-seven years of almost continuous warfare in Ivan's reign, the armed forces were modernized and their supply improved regardless of cost and of the strain placed on the population. Most striking was the proliferation of fortified towns and fortresses, often manned by Cossack hosts, forming carefully planned and laid out defence lines which after 1571 guarded the heartland of Russia against the devastating Crimean slave raids.
⁸

Entirely negative, however, was the impact of Ivan's economic policy designed to extract as much money as possible from the people, largely the peasants, to pay for his wars, for the
oprichnina
, for his extension of the defence lines in the south. The non-military contributions had risen in value from 2.16 roubles to 6 roubles per annum between 1505 and 1584; the military obligations rose in value in the same period from 3.07 to 38.45 roubles per annum, per
sokha
in both cases.
⁹

The economic crisis which bedevilled the last years of Ivan's reign affected agriculture and trade equally. The contrast between the flourishing state of central and north west Russia at the beginning of his reign and the appalling desolation in the 1580s is well known. Hugh Chancellor, on his first visit, described the country between Iaroslavl’ and Moscow as ‘well replenished with small villages which are so well filled with people that it is wonder to see them. The ground is well stored with corn … you shall meet in a morning seven or eight hundred sleds coming or going thither [to Moscow]’,
¹⁰
and all foreigners comment on the incredible cheapness and abundance of food in the country. War, casualties, plagues and famine, Crimean raids, taxation, the extension of the
pomest'ie
system which deprived the peasants of land, change in the
method of payment of
pomeshchiki
from central state payments to individual exploitation of the land, the obligation to bring an armed and mounted
kholop
to battle as a military slave, and the depredations of the
oprichnina
in the ensuing twenty-five years, had depopulated the country, which became so impoverished that it could provide neither the manpower nor the money for the continuation of the war in Livonia. The figures are staggering: around Pskov, over 85 per cent of the homesteads were deserted in 1585, around Novgorod figures rose to 97 per cent. In the area around the Oka river deserted holdings numbered up to 95 per cent. Monastery lands suffered just as much as
pomest'ia
or allodial lands. Little by little the population had fled, to the valley of the northern Dvina, east to the wilds of Siberia, south to the
dikoe pole
or wild field, the steppe lands which separated Russia from Crimean territory.
¹¹
Many were lost to the new defence establishments in the south, others could now flee over the Volga or to Siberia. The impossibility of maintaining the cultivation of the
pomest'ia
by the cavalry force, as peasant labour disapppeared, led inevitably to the increasingly frequent suspension of the peasants’ right of departure and the approach of enserfment.

The capriciousness and cruelty of Ivan's rule, coupled with the destructiveness of the whole idea of the
oprichnina
, served only to delay the evolution of the concept of the state, of the separation of Tsarist power and property from public power and property, and of the development of independent state institutions. As long as Ivan incarnated the state in his own person, independent political or social institutions could not exist.
¹²
In this respect the absolute power exercised by tsars differed from the absolute powers of western rulers, in that in Catholic Europe, the monarch was bound by laws which regulated his sphere of action, and that therefore institutions with an independent existence could take root.
¹³

This explains why a body like an assembly of the land failed to acquire consistency in Russia as the collective voice of the people, let alone as an institution representing different social layers – which it would be misleading to call classes. Russian historians have contributed to the confusion about the existence of Russian political institutions in the sixteenth century because they use words which do not designate accurately the social formations they attempt to describe. Contemporary historians, notably Skrynnikov, often speak of the existence of ‘noble corporations’ (
korporatsii
) in sixteenth-century Russia, a formula which conveys the impression of an association given coherence in action by legally defined structures and powers. No such bodies existed in Russia,
hence they could not be represented by political institutions. The Assembly of the Land remained an
ad hoc
, non-elected group, until Russian society was faced with the inescapable dilemma of the end of the dynasty, in 1598, and had to improvise a political procedure to give legitimacy to the succession to the Crown by borrowing from the well attested practices of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Holy Roman Empire.
¹⁴
It proved stable enough, in the conditions of the Time of Troubles, to provide a precedent for future political action with the Assembly of 1613. Similarly, the idea of a boyar
duma
as a representative body, as part of a ‘legislature’ (there are many references to it as a ‘parliament’ by contemporary English visitors to Russia and present-day Russian historians) is quite erroneous, for the Tsar's Council comprised members of more than one ‘estate’ and its function was not to represent the interests of a social estate, but to advise the Tsar.

The reign of Ivan typifies a period of political experimentation in Russia, with the Tsar trying at the beginning to find means of carrying on a dialogue with his people, experimenting with the convocation of different types of
ad hoc
meetings, some of them deriving from church councils, some of them going back to the tradition of the
veche
. Some administrative and judicial tasks were delegated to the members of the provincial élite. This period of experimentation ended in the despotism of the
oprichnina
, while the boyars and the service gentry made use of the opening provided by Ivan in 1566 to establish their own dialogue with the Tsar, but were unable to give it permanence. Ivan's reign thus hindered the development of political institutions in Russia and retarded their growth. The government was not separated from the court, nor was the state separated from the ruler, the
gosudarstvo
from the
gosudar'
.

Finally, it can be argued that Ivan's way of conducting foreign policy delayed the acceptance of Russia into the European states’ system on equal terms. The rejection of Renaissance and Reformation culture and thought, and of any attempt to master Latin or European languages outside the confines of the
prikazy
or government offices, left Russia dependent on foreign intermediaries for the conduct of foreign affairs. The drive of the English members of the Russia Company supplemented the linguistic weakness of Russia in dealings with England. Both Jenkinson and Horsey seem to have acquired a working knowledge of Russian. Many of the more humble members of the English colony undoubtedly did so. The availability of German translators also facilitated relations with the Holy Roman Empire, but otherwise it
seems that the diplomatic relations of Russia in the reign of Ivan developed by fits and starts. Contacts with the East and the Tatar world, the Ottoman Empire, and the Balkans survived as leftovers from the days of the Eastern Roman Empire. But the war for the Baltic opened up a new sphere of diplomatic activity for Russia in the West in which Tsarist diplomacy was often out of its depth through ignorance of the human and historical geography of Europe, and of the diplomatic forms of the Latin world, insofar as they had crystallized at that time. Central to Ivan's conduct of foreign policy was the demand for the recognition of his title as Tsar, not as a step in the
translatio imperii
,
¹⁵
a policy which really played very little part in Ivan's conception of his imperial role, which was limited and oriented towards the West, towards equality of status with the Holy Roman Empire, and did not imply ruling over other nations.
¹⁶
The increasing insistence on his descent from Prus, the mythical brother of the Emperor Augustus, served to give added length to past Russian history, and is linked to his claim to equality with the Holy Roman Emperor. His pride in his alleged descent from
nemtsy
is designed to underscore his claim to Livonia as part of his ancestral heritage, as a descendant of Riurik, descended in turn from Prus, not to argue that he is a foreigner in Russia.
Nemets
(dumb) does not necessarily mean German.
Nemtsy
from Portugal discovered America. Ivan's concept of ‘empire’ is not that of ruling over other nations, but is dynastic, based on descent.
¹⁷