The Shuyskys, on the other hand, belonged to the house of Rurik, and were competitive with the ruling branch. Like all the Moscow grand princes, they were descended from Alexander Nevsky, and in fact belonged to the senior line. In Novgorod especially, where a Shuysky had been a popular governor during the last days of independence, the family enjoyed an anti-monarchist appeal. Their principal objective was “to strengthen the role of the appanage princely families in the government” and to somehow diminish the monarchy’s power in favor of local autonomy.
Their paterfamilias was Vasily Shuysky, widely known as the “hangman of Smolensk,” and the man who had acted with such dispatch in removing Ovchina from the scene.*
Yet once a political distinction is made between the two factions, it is necessary to deny it. For in the seesaw conflict between them, enmity, not principle, ruled. And this was understood by contemporaries. One wrote: “The hostility was based on personal gain and family advancement; each sought his own interests, and not those of the sovereign or the land.”10 In their mutual scramble for advantage, they promoted their allies and relations into the hierarchy of the government, and almost from the beginning “began to quarrel over control of the state apparatus and to reward themselves and their followers with state lands.”
The Belskys moved expeditiously to surround little Ivan with their own. He was now old enough to express opinions, or feelings, which had to be taken into account even if they lacked the power of law. Metropolitan Daniel and Fyodor Mishurin (the state secretary to whom Vasily III had entrusted the drafting of his will), and Mikhail Tuchkov, a powerful noble, among others threw in their lot with the Belskys; but the Shuyskys rallied to block several key appointments. On February 2, 1539, Daniel was defrocked and deported to the Monastery of Volokolamsk, where he had to sign a confession of incompetence. Tuchkov was banished, Ivan Belsky was remanded to a tower dungeon, while the lowborn Mishurin, who had dared to oppose a prince of the House of Rurik, was skinned alive and exposed on a block.
Ivan had looked upon Mishurin as one of his protectors. He didn’t favor the Shuyskys, and would bitterly recall how they had “arbitrarily attached themselves to his person and ‘acted like tsars.’”11
As the Shuyskys took the helm, a succession of purges bred confusion and strife. As above, so below, where the lawlessness spread. Armed gangs of slaves from Tver, Yaroslavl, and elsewhere roamed the streets of Moscow, while in the countryside bandit chieftains divided up districts for plunder like warlords.
The Italian architect, Peter Friazin – who had married a Russian, converted to the Orthodox faith, and enjoyed a handsome estate – fled across the border from Sebezh into Livonia where he told the bishop of Dorpat: “The present ruler is a child. The boyars do as they please, behave unconscionably, and are at each other’s throats. There is no order in the land. The state barely exists.”12
Andrey Staritsky’s prophetic proclamation – “the boyars rule” – had come true.
In bidding for popular support, both the Shuyskys and the Belskys undertook grassroots “reforms.” The public was in a law-and-order frenzy, and in pandering to it both formulated experimental charters aimed at transferring certain criminal procedures from state-appointed governors to locally elected judges, to be assisted by district elders. Whereas a governor could initiate legal action only on a complaint, the newly established guba (police unit) chief was empowered to torture, punish, and even execute without trial. Though local officials were warned to “refrain from acts of private vengeance and never to harass or punish innocent persons,”13 an exhortation to refrain cannot enforce restraint, as the prohibition against bribery among governors had shown. Abuses were rampant, but the experiment spread. Perhaps no charter was more pernicious than the one issued to the inhabitants of Galich:
You are to establish a system of watchmen – a decurion for every ten houses; a fiftyman for every fifty, and a hundredman for every hundred. Whenever a traveller puts up at your domicile or enters it to buy salt or sell wares, you must inform the decurion of his presence. The decurion will inform the fiftyman, who will inform the hundredman. All these officials will examine and register such individuals. If an unknown person appears, who is evasive and refuses to give his name, they will apprehend and bring him before the town prefects and cooperate in an investigation to determine his identity. If you determine he is a respectable man you may register and release him. You and the town prefects are to torture severely any such persons found to be criminals. A representative of the crown, constables and leading citizens are to be present when torture is applied.14
Despite the last provision, such legislation transformed the legal process into an inquisition. It meant that anyone reputed to be disreputable could be arrested, tried on the basis of hearsay, tortured upon protest of his innocence and, since torture was almost bound to produce a confession to crimes real or imagined, arrest seldom led to anything but a pitiable end.
VASILY SHUYSKY DIED peacefully in his sleep, succeeded by his younger brother, Ivan, as clan-head; and in 1540, the Shuyskys chose the progressive-minded abbot of Trinity Monastery, Joasaf, to replace Daniel in the metropolitanate.
But however the Shuyskys thought Joasaf might serve them, he was not their pawn. In July he exercised his sacred right of intercession and “acting in the name of the grand prince”15 succeeded in freeing Ivan Belsky from prison. Belsky’s comeback was swift. Enlisting the support of the old Moscow boyar elite, “members of the state apparatus who detested the Shuysky oligarchy,” and Joasaf himself, he re-emerged as acting head of state. Immediately he moved to broaden his base by restoring Evfrosinia Staritsky and her son, Vladimir, to their appanage domains.
As the power struggle continued, the Tatars took advantage of a breakdown in frontier defense. In 1539 and 1540, Kazanians ravaged the countryside about Kostroma and Murom, and “blood flowed like water.” The undefended populace hid in forests and caves, and where once there had been farms, wild bushes grew. Many monasteries were reduced to dust. “The infidels lived and slept in the churches,” wrote a chronicler, “drank from the sacred vessels, mutilated the gilt and silver frames of the icons, put burning coals in the boots of the monks, and defiled young nuns. Whomever they did not abduct, they blinded, or dismembered. I write, not from rumors, but of what I have seen and will never forget.”16
As the people bled for the motherland, it was not the government in Moscow but political turmoil within Kazan itself which came to the rescue. In revolt against their khan (a Crimean puppet who had been enriching his bodyguard at the expense of local grandees and surreptitiously conveying the state treasury out of the country), Kazanian dissidents solicited Moscow’s support. In response the boyars momentarily closed ranks and, preparing to intervene, mobilized troops at Kolomna, to the south, and under Ivan Shuysky at Vladimir on the eastern frontier.
The Crimean khan hurriedly brought his army north and on July 28, 1541, approached the Oka River defense line where, to his surprise, he encountered the Russians massed on the opposite bank. The two sides exchanged fire but the Russians refused to yield. The angry khan summoned his advisers to his tent: “You told me the Russians were unprepared. I’ve never seen so many soldiers in one place before.”17 They reminded him that when Tamerlane had invaded Russia with a mighty army he had been able to take only the fortress of Elets. This inspired the khan to emulate the legendary warrior and devastate one town in retreat. He chose Pronsk, which lay along his route. “We shall take it and treat it as Tamerlane once treated Elets, so no one can say the khan has utterly failed.”18
The Tatars approached Pronsk on August 3, but its defenders proved exceedingly valiant, as both women and children labored with the men on the walls. In a race against time, the khan hammered together some siege towers, but on the following day Russian cavalry appeared on the horizon and he was obliged to abandon the effort in disgrace.
Back in Moscow, however, the government again came apart. On the pretext of preparing to meet a
new Tatar offensive from Kazan, Ivan Shuysky kept his regiments together in Vladimir through the fall of 1541, while secretly negotiating with anti-Belsky elements, including gentry militia in Novgorod. By Christmas his troops had been transformed into a rebel army. On the night of January 3, 1542, the gates of the capital were opened by his adherents and his forces were able to surprise and overwhelm the Kremlin watch. Belsky was seized at his residence and Metropolitan Joasaf was chased through the corridors of the palace to the bedroom of little Ivan himself, who awoke at six in the morning to find the hierarch trembling in terror by his bed. Not even this sanctuary was respected. Accounts of what followed diverge: either Joasaf was discovered, abused, and humiliated in Ivan’s presence before being deposed and exiled to the White Lake Monastery, or he fled on through a secret exit, made it safely to Trinity Monastery north of Moscow, and was there saved by the abbot and a conscience-stricken rebel, Prince Dmitry Paletsky.
Belsky, exiled to the north, was murdered in May, and many of his appointees were deported to Tver and Yaroslavl, both Shuysky strongholds.
Like his elder brother before him, Ivan Shuysky now died peacefully in his sleep, to be succeeded by his cousin, Andrey. Vaguely implicated in Prince Yury’s attempted coup nine years before, Andrey was otherwise notorious for his corrupt tenure as governor in Pskov, where he had accepted bribes, imposed disproportionately high fines for every offense, compelled artisans to perform services for him without compensation, and used slander rather than honest complaint to instigate lawsuits against the well-to-do. What could be expected of such a man as head of state? His first move was unquestionably a shrewd one – but ultimately his greatest mistake.
On March 2, 1542, he summoned Novgorod’s Archbishop Makary to Moscow to replace Joasaf as primate of the Church.
Makary’s elevation had broad appeal and the Shuyskys expected to profit by it. At one time or another, he had enjoyed the confidence and trust not only of Vasily III and Elena, but their interim successors, and had also managed, though an authoritarian pro-Muscovite, to be popular with the people of Novgorod. In short, each interest group or faction thought to discover in him their champion. But though unquestionably wily, elusive, and tough, he did not appear so. He displayed a “Christ-like tranquillity and gentleness,”19 accepted his new appointment with genuine reluctance and, already sixty years old, seemed unlikely to attempt a strong or independent role.
Yet Makary was destined to survive another twenty years, and without faltering to pursue a mighty agenda of his own. It was Makary more than any other who would put an end to the boyar regimes, “retrieve the reins of the autocracy for Ivan,” restore the dynasty to the helm, and “shape the official political and cultural world view of the Muscovite state.” 20 Both within Russian history and without, he must be counted one of the most remarkable men of the sixteenth century.
Oddly enough, few early biographical details – and apparently not even his full name – have survived.
Born of service gentry stock in 1481 or 1482, Makary had spent his novitiate at the Pafnuty Monastery at Borovsk, forty miles southwest of Moscow, and subsequently served as archimandrite of the Luzhetsky Monastery outside Mozhaisk, where he had access to a substantial library that fostered literary ambitions that would later come to the fore. In 1526, he evidently supported Vasily in his divorce, and in reward was appointed archbishop of Novgorod.
The post, if lofty, was a treacherous one. Novgorod’s turbulent politics, continuing (if submerged) separatist tradition, variety of intellectual life, and strategic position on the western rim of the Muscovite state, had all proved too much for Makary’s three immediate predecessors. Moreover, when he arrived in March 1526 the city was in the grip of an economic depression.
But Makary brought with him the favor of the grand prince, state subsidies, and renewal. Interest rates dropped along with the price of bread, and he embarked on a great building program that included a new and more formidable city wall, a new highway, a mill, and a bridge across the Volkhov River, and some thirty churches, half of them of stone. At the same time, he “ruthlessly purged nests of critics from his see,” and forcibly converted non-Christians within his diocese. Priests were sent to outlying areas to stamp out paganism among the Lapps, Finns, and Chuds, and in 1534, he starved 149 Tatars to death in prison because they refused to convert.
In monastic life he was a vigorous advocate of the cenobitic rule. Before his time, we are told, “monks lived a communal life only in large monasteries; elsewhere each monk sat alone in his cell overwhelmed by the sorrows of the world.”21 Makary emphasized community, and in a letter on the subject to Vasily III in 1526-1527 not incidentally also revealed his ardent and unequivocal belief in the monarchy: “Sire, thou art appointed Autocrat and Sovereign of all Rus, by the right hand of God on high; God selected thee to reign in his place on earth and elevated and placed [thee] on his throne, entrusting to thee the grace and the life of all Orthodoxy.”22 Had Andrey Shuysky stumbled upon this letter in the Kremlin archives, he might not have been so eager to call Makary to the capital.
BELSKY’S MURDER HAD temporarily left the Shuysky faction without a formidable rival, but others were being created through the favor of the grand prince. Ivan was almost thirteen (two years short of the legal age of manhood), and the attachments he was beginning to form were not merely emotional ones. He began to make judgments (political and otherwise) about those around him, and the conscious favors he bestowed began to represent extensions of his power.
Mikhail Vorontsov, whom Vasily had kissed and forgiven the night he died, had a brother, Fyodor, to whom Ivan had begun to turn for advice. Vorontsov was a leader of the old Muscovite gentry and therefore epitomized the element standing in Shuysky’s way. Andrey took note of his ascendance and determined to remove him from the scene. Instead of going about it the politic way, that is, by intrigue, he showed absolute arrogance and haste, and on September 9, 1543, as Grand Prince Ivan, Metropolitan Makary, and Vorontsov were conferring together in the palace refectory, burst in with some of his adherents and began to beat Vorontsov up. As they tried to drag him into another room to kill him, Makary successfully intervened, but not before Vorontsov was battered senseless and Foma Golovin, one of Shuysky’s band, had trampled upon and torn Makary’s robe.
Three months later, on December 29, Ivan stepped out of the shadows of his long minority and had Andrey Shuysky thrown to the dogs.23
* * *
* After the Muscovite defeat at the battle of Orsha two decades before, he had hanged all of the city’s pro-Lithuanian nobles from the walls.
* * *
4
The Education of a Tsar
THE CHILD, IT is said, is father to the man. However much this maxim may be subject to debate, it is probably as good as any in exploring the character of the youth about to ascend the throne.
Much about Ivan’s upbringing is profoundly obscure, except that it was continually beset by catastrophe. His father died when he was three; his mother by poison when he was eight; his nurse, Agrafena, was abruptly deported; and in the repeated defeat of his affections, everyone to whom he subsequently drew close was wrenched away from him by envious magnates. No sense of security could grow in him; what grew was a certain hopelessness that it could ever be achieved. As one boyar faction after another toppled from power, his life had never been out of danger, and rebels had not hesitated even to invade his room. It has been said – and surely it is true – that long before he was Ivan the Terrible, he was Ivan the Terrified.
Until the age of eight, most of his time had been spent in the terem wing of the Kremlin Palace, among Elena’s ladies-in-waiting and the clicking looms of their embroidery establishment on the second floor.
After his mother’s assassination, and the deportation of his governess to Kargopol, Ivan’s immediate family consisted only of his deaf-mute brother, Yury, his maternal grandmother, Anna, and his two maternal uncles, Mikhail* and Yury Glinsky. Apparently they were for
cibly prevented from forming a tightly knit family, and his intimate isolation as an orphan found scant relief. A quarter century later he would still bitterly remember how no one had bothered to give him “any loving care,” how his mother’s personal belongings had been rifled, and family treasures pilfered by boyars who stamped them with their own family seals to disguise the theft. He remembered, too, how one day when he and his brother Yury were playing in their father’s bedroom on a rug, Ivan Shuysky had presumed to put his feet up on a chair and “leaning with his elbows on our father’s bed, he did not even incline his head toward us, either as a parent or a master.”1 Aside from the insult to his father’s memory, what a difference a mere nod might have made! And “all my subjects did they make as servants unto themselves; and set up their own servants as grandees.”2
Ivan lived among strangers in a divided world. Officially, as the grand prince, “he played the leading role in the splendor of the court and church ceremonies, solemnly sat on the throne when receiving foreign ambassadors, and was outwardly accorded respect and adulation.”3 But away from the spotlight, as he later claimed, he was neglected, inadequately clothed and fed, subjected to numerous other indignities and sometimes treated “like a beggar.”4 He would never forget the humiliations he endured. In his letters and orations he repeatedly dramatized them, and the more exaggerated the idea of his own kingship became, the more outrageous in retrospect the transgressions seemed. Not only, he wrote, “was my will not my own,” but “everything I experienced was unbefitting my tender years.”5
Yet the accident of royal birth had ensured that even had Ivan’s parents survived, his playtime and domestic habits would have been abnormally circumscribed by royal chores. Sixteenth-century princes led precocious lives. Crowned grand prince at the age of three, Ivan ever since had been obliged to sit still for hours trussed up in little uniforms of stiff imperial brocade, and to move in a world minutely organized within the stifling protocol of a Byzantine court. Affectionate or protective parents, moreover, do not guarantee a happy adult, and the material privations Ivan later alleged must surely be taken in part as external correlatives for his emotional states. In any case, as Aristotle remarked, “men do not become tyrants to keep out the cold.”
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