Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  At about this time, Prince Dmitry Obolensky (the scion of a venerable house) reproached Fyodor Basmanov (the son of Alexei Basmanov, one of Ivan’s generals) for his homosexual relationship with the tsar. Fyodor “went in tears”8 to Ivan about it, and shortly thereafter Obolensky was invited to a banquet where Ivan pressed him, in a friendly manner, to down a carafe of wine – “to show how he valued the tsar’s health.”9 He drank what he could, but not enough. Ivan helpfully suggested he descend to the wine cellar to select a vintage of his choice. By prearrangement, assassins lay in wait among the casks.

  In more edifying diversions, so the Chronicles recount, he once got his Privy Council drunk as scribes secretly recorded the jokes, songs, obscenities, and other things they said. The next morning he showed them copies and “the modest men marvelled”10 at what they read. Nor could Ivan refrain from occasionally unmasking flunkies for what they were. After two members of the Russian nobility, Osip Shcherbatov and Yury Boryatynsky, were obtained from Poland in a prisoner exchange, Ivan threw a banquet for them, gave them gifts, drank their health, and asked them about the situation in Poland. Shcherbatov replied honestly, but Boryatynsky, “who wanted to be considered an expert on Polish affairs, made all sorts of reckless allegations”11 – for example, that “the Polish king was timid, and so fearful of the power of the Prince of Muscovy that he did not know which way to turn.” After the banquet, Ivan went up to Boryatynsky and said, “Come now, tell me again how much the Polish king is afraid of me.” As Boryatynsky began to repeat himself, Ivan shouted, “Liar!” and beat him to his knees.

  IVAN WAS RIGHT. The king was not afraid. He was waiting. And beyond the issues of autocracy versus privilege, or the tsar’s alarming personal behavior, the prospect of fighting a large-scale and protracted war in the west, while having to contend with the Tatar threat from the south, more objectively animated the conflict between the tsar and an increasingly broad cross-section of the establishment. For though in his struggle for Livonia Ivan may have had history on his side, insofar as he anticipated the Baltic Wars of Peter the Great, that did not make his policy wise, or the time of its prosecution right. The war was a tremendous gamble, technologically feasible as a limited, but not unlimited, war. On the one hand, despite continuing Western attempts at embargo, Russia had considerable armament expertise, the latest weaponry and equipment, first-rate cannon foundries in Moscow, and natural resources that were enviable. Copper and tin had to be imported, but in northern Russia, iron was mined, refined, smelted, and forged, and as the war continued, production increased, with English metallurgists helping industrialists like the Stroganovs to locate new deposits of the ore. Saltpeter was produced in quantities sufficient for export beyond domestic needs, and it is worth observing (in an age that continues to be obsessed by the idea of Russia’s perennial technological dependence on the West) that the development of advanced weaponry was probably indigenous. The Russian musket, though crude, was unique; and the largest bombard of the sixteenth century was the “Great Mortar of Moscow” which had a 36-inch bore, weighed over 14,000 pounds, and could fire a stone projectile weighing a ton. In the Kazan campaign, Ivan had proven his familiarity with time-honored military technology like siege towers and sapping, in combination with up-to-date methods of trench warfare and the use of explosives. Moreover, he had stockpiled his cannon and munitions as assiduously as any Renaissance king. In his principal arsenal, the great “artillerie house at Musko,”12 one contemporary beheld “all sorts of great ordnance,” and declared: “No prince of Christendom hath better store.”

  All of Ivan’s cannon, incidentally, were embossed with double-headed eagles and bore proper names. When any were captured, he “immediately ordered new ones cast with the same names and symbols, to show that fate could take nothing from him that he could not replace.”13

  Nevertheless, the character of the Muscovite army reflected priorities other than the arms race. At least until 1558, the principal enemy had been the Tatar, against whom heavy artillery was virtually useless. The large cannon was a siege weapon. Only one Tatar city had ever been near enough to bombard, and that was Kazan. But mobile steppe warfare was a continuous reality, and even after the development of field artillery, which the Russians were not slow to acquire, the bows and sabers of the cavalry militia decided the outcome in the feathergrass and plains.

  Ivan’s military expenditures took this into account, as did those of Sigismund August, who also had to face the Tatars in the Ukraine.

  Western Europe had nothing like the Tatars with which to deal. Nor, for that matter, did the Turks, whose military machine was the most sophisticated and modern in the world. What the Turks and the West had in common was a numerical and strategic emphasis on the new infantry, equipped with handguns and pikes. The opposite was true in the army of Ivan IV, where the ratio of cavalry to infantry was never less than three to one. Though his standing force of streltsy or musketeers grew from 3000 to about 10,000 during his reign, it was impossible for him to simultaneously maintain a massive cavalry militia along the steppe frontier, and a modern infantry army on the Western front.

  By and large Ivan tried to make up the difference with mercenaries. On the eve of his invasion of Livonia it was noted that he “retaineth and well rewardeth all strangers that come to serve him, and especially men of warre.”14 Eventually he acquired entire regiments of Scandinavians, Germans, and Scots. Together with the Tatars, they comprised perhaps a fifth of his total force.

  DOUBTS ABOUT THE wisdom of the Livonian War (which now included war with Lithuania) had not perished with Adashev, Sylvester, and others, and by the end of 1563 both the Church hierarchy and the Duma had broken with Ivan on his conduct of both foreign and domestic affairs. Ivan surmised treason, especially after the two staggering defeats at Chasniki and Orsha, which seemed to suggest that the Lithuanians had been tipped off in advance.

  It may have been so. The recent executions and repression had confused and demoralized officials of the army and administration, and Lithuania, the perennial sanctuary of the disaffected nobility, began to beckon with open arms. Among the first to defect was Andrey Kurbsky, a great prince and boyar of the Yaroslavl line who had been loyal to Ivan in the succession crisis of 1553 and had accompanied him that summer on his ill-fated pilgrimage to the monasteries of the north. A probable member of the Chosen Council circle, he had also been Ivan’s sometime intimate companion, for it is apparent from their subsequent correspondence that they had discussed everything together from women to theology.

  A scholarly intellectual (like Ivan) with a particular feeling for Church literature, Kurbsky had made his mark as a soldier, both as a hero of the Kazan campaign and in the Livonian War. His service record was second to none. He had been gravely wounded twice (in 1552 and 1554) fighting the Kazanians and Cheremis; in 1556 had directed the mobilizations at Kaluga and Kashira on the southern frontier; and in January 1558 had commanded the rear guard in the invasion of Livonia. That summer, together with Daniel Adashev, he also led the vanguard in the siege of Neuhausen, which fell on June 30, after three weeks. In the winter of 1558-1559, he was back at Kaluga; and in the spring of 1560 at Dorpat, where Ivan had sent him “to put fresh heart into my troops.”15 From Dorpat he went to Veliky Luki, early in 1562, to help prepare for a sweep into Lithuania, and in June carried out a successful raid on Vitebsk. In August, however, he was defeated in the Battle of Nevel, where, according to a Polish chronicler, a large division under his command was pathetically routed by a much smaller force. Nevertheless, in the campaign of 1562-1563 against Polotsk, Kurbsky commanded the rear guard. In March 1563, however, the tsar shook up his military high command and Kurbsky was abruptly “banished” to Dorpat as “governor,” an assignment indicating disgrace. We know its meaning in part because Mikhail Morozov, Kurbsky’s successor there, was revealingly taunted by another emigre: “Your governorship is no better than my monkhood was [after I was forcibly tonsured]. You were governor for five years in Smole
nsk, and now your Sovereign has presented you with Dorpat. And your wife and child have been taken hostage, and you have no salary, but must survive on loans.”16 During his brief tenure there Kurbsky too survived on loans, probably obtained through his friend, the Elder Vassian Muromtsev, of the Pskov-Pechery Monastery. At this time he wrote several letters to Muromtsev condemning the new corruption at court and, as he put it, the “threatened thunderings from Babylon” (meaning Moscow) against him, which Muromtsev understood to mean “the evil plans of the Grand Duke to kill him.”17 After the failure of the Artz plan (which he had negotiated), Kurbsky knew his fate was sealed, for his name was omitted altogether from the new list of military appointments. Secretly, he opened negotiations with King Sigismund, and waited for his safe-conduct to arrive.

  On April 30, 1564, it came. With twelve others he fled across the border to the Lithuanian outpost of Wolmar, where he was met by at least three other prominent émigrés: Artemy, the former “heretical” abbot of Trinity Monastery who had escaped from prison a few years before and in exile had proved a rock of the Orthodox faith; and two former artillery captains, Timofey Teterin and Mark Sarykhozin. From Wolmar he rode to Vilna, where Sigismund welcomed him with open arms. To show what other defectors could hope for, the king immediately enriched him with several large estates.

  Meanwhile, at Wolmar, Kurbsky had dashed off a letter to the tsar accusing him of murdering his best generals (“the commanders given to you by God”18), of witch-hunting (“falsely accusing the Orthodox of treachery and magic”), of torturing his subjects with “red-hot pincers, needles driven under the nails,”* white-hot pans and stoves, and of profaning his holy Orthodox churches with the blood of martyrs. He reminded Ivan, too, that he had sacrificed his entire youth to his service – “in far-distant towns have I stood in arms against your foes, suffered many wants and illnesses and wounds, and little have I seen my parents, and my wife have I not known” – yet had been marked for destruction. In closing, he appealed for the intercession of the Virgin, the Saints, and the elect, including his own sainted ancestor and paternal grandfather to the ninth degree, Prince Fyodor Rostislavich, “whose corpse remains imperishable, emits sweet odours, and pours forth miraculous healing streams, as you, O tsar, know well.”19

  There is a legend that Kurbsky entrusted this fierce indictment to his faithful servant Vaska Shibanov. Shibanov delivered it to the tsar, who at once transfixed his foot with the iron tip of his staff, and leaning on it ordered him to read the letter aloud. In fact, Shibanov had been caught at the border and executed; but the legend accords with the ferocity of Ivan’s reaction and the reputation he had begun to acquire.

  Stunned, Ivan drafted a remarkable 28,000-word rebuttal that included a defense of autocracy and intimate revelations about the unhappiness of his childhood. In passing, he displayed an extraordinary command of Biblical and patristic quotation worthy of his mentor, the bibliophile Makary, but mingled them in an eccentric way with learned allusions to Greek mythology and other material in a tumult of impressions, images, and ideas. Although his method was to “prove through Scripture, so that the quoted Scripture stood in the forefront,”20 the mélange was delivered in a highly distinctive style – witty, sarcastic, sometimes rambling and self-consciously rhetorical, yet also marked by daring paradoxes and connections, combining “the lofty language of the liturgy with the coarse but succulent diction of the streets.”21 Nothing quite like it had ever been seen in Russian literature before.

  “Your epistle has been received and clearly understood,” Ivan began after an invocation to the tsardom. “You have put adder’s poison under your lips. You thought your epistle was filled with honey, yet is it found to be bittterer than wormwood, according to the prophet who says: ‘Their words were softer than oil, yet were they drawn swords.’ ”22

  He compared Kurbsky to Judas, denied he had planned to kill him, disparaged him as a general, ridiculed his swarthy “Ethiopian face” with its “pale blue eyes”23 (Aristotle in the Secreta Secretorum had warned Alexander to beware of advisers with pale blue eyes), and called him a “stinking hound.”24 Quoting St. Paul (“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power ordained that is not of God…. Whosoever, therefore, resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God,”) to prove Kurbsky’s sacred obligation to serve him, he implied that even if he were a tyrant, it had been a sin for Kurbsky to rebel. In obvious retaliation for the condemnation of Anastasia for “one little word,”25 he now claimed that because of “one small angry word” (i.e., “treason”), Kurbsky had destroyed not only his own soul but retroactively those of his forefathers. This was mestnichestvo with a vengeance.

  Though Ivan was prepared to acknowledge his own fallibility – “I am only human; for there is no man without sin, only God alone”26 – his need for self-justification was greater that his impulse toward repentance, and he surged forward into a Biblical portrait of the true autocrat that rendered his formulaic humility meaningless.

  Is this then “contrary to reason” – to live according to [the demands of] the present day? Recall to memory Constantine, mighty even amongst the tsars; how he killed his son, begotten by him, for the sake of his kingdom. And how much blood was spilt by your forefather, Prince Fyodor, in Smolensk at Easter time! Many other things too you will find in the reigns of the tsars. And what about David, the elect of God? When he was refused entrance to Jerusalem, he ordered the slaying of the inhabitants, of the halt and the blind. And [therefore] is it ever befitting for tsars to be perspicacious, now most gentle, now fierce; mercy and gentleness for the good; for the evil, fierceness and torment. If a tsar is not like this then he is no tsar. For he “is not a terror to good works, but to evil.” Would thou be not afraid of the power? Do that which is good. But of that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain.27

  One is hard put to discover in this passage any distinction between the tsar and God Himself.† With considerably more discretion, Ivan proceeded to develop a lesson on the different responsibilities of priestly and royal power:

  Who placed you as a judge or as one in authority over me? Or will you answer for my soul on the day of the Last Judgment? In the words of the apostle Paul: “How shall they believe without a preacher, and how shall they preach, except they be sent?” Now, you will never find a kingdom which does not fall to ruin when ruled by priests…. Thus the Greeks destroyed their kingdom and became tributaries of the Turks. Do you counsel us to this destruction? Did God, having led Israel out of captivity, appoint a priest to have command over men, or numerous governors? Nay, he made Moses alone lord over them, like a tsar; and he forbade him perform priestly offices, but bade his brother Aaron fulfill them, though forbidding Aaron to assume [administrative] authority over the people; but when Aaron did assume [it], then did he lead the people away from God as well. Take heed of this, that it is not befitting for priests to assume the authority of tsars.28

  So much for Sylvester. Ivan continued:

  It is one thing to save one’s own soul, but it is another to have the care of many souls and bodies: it is one thing to abide in fasting; it is another to live together in communal life. Spiritual authority is one thing – the rule of a tsar is another. To abide in fasting is like being a lamb which offers resistance to nought…. But in the communal life, even if one has renounced the world, one still has regulations and cares, and punishments too. If one does not heed this, the communal life will be destroyed. Spiritual authority, because of the blessed power within it, calls for a mighty suppression of glory, honor, adornment, supremacy, and other such things unbefitting for monks; but the rule of a tsar, because of the folly of wicked and cunning men, [calls for] fear and bridling and extreme suppression. Consider then the difference.… Is it befitting for a tsar when he is struck on the cheek to turn the other? Is this the supreme commandment? How shall a tsar without honor rule his kingdom? Yet to turn the other cheek is befitting for a priest.29

  And h
e reminded Kurbsky that in contravention of Biblical wisdom “the intention” of the Chosen Council had been “ that I be sovereign in name, but co-reign with the priest.”

  Ivan excoriated the pretensions of the nobility with equal finality. “The beginning of our Autocracy is of St. Vladimir,” he wrote. “We were born and nurtured in the office of Tsar, and do possess it, and have not ravished what is not our own. From the first the Russian Autocrats have been lords of their own dominions, and not the boyar aristocrats…. Hitherto the Russian masters were questioned by no man, but were free to reward and punish their subjects; and they did not litigate with them before any judge.”30 According to this revised standard version of Russian history, present as well as past, the true autocrat was not only independent of any overlord, but of any institutional restraint – free to choose his own advisers and elevate whomever he pleased, without having to account for his actions to either the Duma or the Church.

  From such autocratic heights Ivan plunged into a review of his childhood privations and constraints, recalling the boyar rule of his minority (“was that sweet?”31) and his subsequent domination by “that cur” Adashev, whom he had “raised from the gutter,”32 and by Sylvester, whom he had taken into his service “for the sake of spiritual counsel and the salvation of my soul.” But the priest had “trampled his own vows under foot” and like Eli the Priest had been “carried away by power…. And so Sylvester joined Alexei in friendship and they began to hold counsel in secret and without our knowledge, deeming us incapable of judgment.”33 Even after his coronation, he said, he was treated as a child, supervised as to his bedtime, his footwear, clothes, and so forth, by the “Council of Dogs.” Passing over in silence such early achievements as the Law Code and the conquest of Kazan, he condemned Adashev and Sylvester for having opposed the Livonian War “on every possible occasion,” and for accepting “the cunning [truce] suggestion of the Danish king” which had given the enemy “a year to prepare themselves.”34 Meanwhile, the boyars, affecting submission, had returned to their “cunning ways.”