In a most remarkable passage he explained Kurbsky’s defense of Adashev and others according to a psychological interpretation of classical mythology:
Man made gods the advocates of his passions, so that sin might be reckoned not only irresponsible, but even divine, taking refuge in the objects of his worship as his apology. And there are countless foul Hellenic deeds, for their gods were worshipped by them according to their passions – fornication and rage, incontinence and the lusts of desire. And insofar as anyone was possessed by a passion, so did he choose for himself a god like unto it and he believed in him – as [for instance] Heracles for fornication, Cronus for hatred and enmity, Ares for rage and murder, Dionysus for shrieking and dancing – and other gods too, accordingly…. And thus do you, because you are a traitor, exalt treachery.35
Ivan threw down the ultimate challenge: “As judge between us you place Christ our God, and I do not shrink from this judgment. For there is nought hidden from the fire of the eyes of him, who knows all things secret and concealed.”
Ivan had idols of his own, of course, and aside from inadvertently confessing (at a later date) to his adoration of Cronus, he betrayed himself in a striking “Freudian” slip. Though he had psychologized Kurbsky, in one passage he identified the threefold nature of the soul (by convention, “thinking, feeling, and willing”) as “reason, anger, and lust.”
Dating his letter the fifth day of July, Ivan sent it by special passport in the care of Grigory Pleshcheyev, a confidential messenger, to Ozerische in Lithuania before the planned start of a summer campaign on July 22. Pleshcheyev waited there for Kurbsky’s reply, which was promptly composed and entitled “Short answer of Prince Andrey Kurbsky to the extremely bombastic epistle of the Grand Prince of Moscow.” It began:
I have received your grandiloquent and big-sounding screed, and I have understood it and realized that it was belched forth in untamable wrath with poisonous words, such as is unbecoming not only to a tsar who is so glorified, but even to a simple lowly soldier; and all the more so, [as] it was raked together from many sacred discourses with much fierceness, not in measured lines or verses, as is the custom for skilled and learned men…. Your epistle is prolix beyond measure, whole books being included and whole proverb collections and epistles! And there are passages about beds, and body-warmers, and countless other things – as it were the tales of crazy women – so barbarically written that even simple people and children would read it with astonishment and laughter, all the more so in a foreign land, where some are learned not only in grammar and rhetoric, but in dialectics and philosophy.36
Kurbsky, whose own fine style was conservative Church Slavonic, did not appreciate Ivan’s original literary gifts, but he did appreciate that Ivan had considerable literary pretensions, and thought he could hurt him most by putting them down. (At the same time he was so confident of Ivan’s learning that in the course of their continuing correspondence he sometimes broke off after beginning a quotation with, “for you know the rest by heart.”)
Finally, turning to politics, Kurbsky said: “I do not understand what you want from us…. Already you have killed… not only princes who trace their descent from great Vladimir, and robbed them as your predecessors never did, but… we have given you the shirts off our backs.”37
IN LATE SEPTEMBER 1564, Sigismund August tried to recapture Polotsk. Kurbsky served as commander of the advance guard and brought a cavalry detachment of 200 men equipped at his own expense into the field. Ivan rushed fresh units to the front, but in the process stripped his southern defenses – as the king had guessed he would. In a coordinated attack, Devlet Giray broke through the Oka line and rampaged across Ryazan. Effective resistance could not be mounted until Alexei Basmanov, turning his local estate into a command post, managed to raise a relief force to rout the Tatar squads. Yet the king inexplicably failed to exploit his advantage. Passive after a first assault, his army retreated from Polotsk on October 4, and toward the end of November the Muscovites, in a retaliatory strike, overran Ozerische.
Meanwhile, Ivan had been unable to quell the mounting domestic dissent. Dmitry Obolensky’s murder had temporarily galvanized the opposition, and despite contemporary complaints about the fawning clergy, a number of high officials, led by Metropolitan Afanasy himself, confronted the tsar. Afanasy, Markary’s protégé and originally an archpropagandist for the state, carefully framed his rebuke. Alluding to Ivan’s childhood sadism, he said: “No Christian Tsar has the right to treat human beings like animals”; and to his persecution of certain noble houses (the Obolenskys, for example, who continued to suffer), he reminded him of “the righteous dooms of God, Who avenges the blood of innocents into the third generation.”38
Ivan appeared to take this to heart. In mid-November of 1564, he spoke openly at court of abdicating in favor of his sons – while secretly conferring with advisers as to how to enforce his dictatorship by novel means. Those means were not anything the Duma could be expected to approve, short of institutional suicide. An Italian merchant who met him exactly at this time remembered Ivan walking with slow dignity, leaning on a crozierlike staff, escorted by four stout courtiers carrying large silver axes on their shoulders. In this sacerdotal pose there was but the subtlest hint of the sinister initiative about to plunge the state toward anarchy and dissolution.
* * *
* These details are translated from Kurbsky’s subsequent History of Ivan’s reign.
† Makary had written to Ivan at Kazan: “If the Tsar’s heart is in the hand of God, then is it fit for all to act and obey, with fear and trembling according to God’s will and the imperial command; for thus said the Apostle Peter: ‘Fear God and honor the Tsar’; and also because the Apostle said: ‘the Tsar bears the sword not in vain, but for vengeance unto evil-doers, and for the praise of the good!’ “ In closely repeating Makary, however, Ivan neglected the essential idea. (Italics mine.)
PART THREE
SCHISM
* * *
23
Satan’s Band
TO IMPRESS UPON the nation the extremity of his frustration and resentment, Ivan followed through with his threat. At the end of 1564, he abdicated, and did so too in a manner that was both theatrical and deliberately mystifying to all but his inner circle. Hundreds of sleds, assembled in Red Square, were loaded with treasures from the royal vaults, and with icons, relics, and other precious items from churches and monasteries about the capital. On Sunday, December 3, after attending service in the Cathedral of the Assumption, he departed for the village of Kolomenskoe south of Moscow with a substantial retinue, largely drawn from the Chosen Thousand.
From Kolomenskoe, where he celebrated the feast of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker, Ivan made his way to Trinity Monastery, where he remained for several days conspicuous in his devotions. On the 21st, he proceeded to Alexandrova Sloboda, a former hunting lodge and sometime summer residence sixty miles northeast of Moscow. The Sloboda was transformed into a fortified camp. Meanwhile, Moscow was gripped by alarm as the tsar had failed to designate anyone in his absence to a caretaker regime. “In doubt and despair,” we are told, state officials had “no idea of the road he would follow.”1
The road he followed led through abdication to a new tsardom. On January 3, 1565, a courier arrived with a letter addressed to the metropolitan and the Duma which gravely indicted the whole ecclesiastical and secular establishment for treason, embezzlement, neglect of military service, theft of the sovereign’s land during his minority, and other crimes. The Church was specifically faulted for interceding on behalf of the tsar’s enemies. “Wherefore the Tsar and Grand Prince, not wishing to endure these many acts of treachery, has abandoned the Tsardom with a heavy heart and now travels wheresoever God may lead him.”
Yet knowing full well that the people looked to him as their shield against the rapacity of the nobles, he sent another letter, too, by another messenger, which largely belied the poignant pathos of his complaint. Addressed to the merchants
and commoners, whom he exempted from his anger and disfavor, it was publicly declaimed to large crowds in Kremlin Square, and in whipping up anti-boyar sentiment reminded the populace of the oppression they had suffered under kormlenie. The crowd began to agitate and flow, like water coming to a boil.
To prevent an uprising, Pimen, archbishop of Novgorod, was dispatched at the head of a delegation to plead with Ivan for forgiveness, and to beg him to return to Moscow “to govern as he pleased, and to punish traitors at his discretion.”2
“We are but poor and inconsolable sheep,” Pimen told him. “We are now without a shepherd, and the wolves, our enemies, surround us…. In the past nations have been conquered and left without rulers; but that a mighty sovereign should abandon his loyal subjects and his tsardom – such things are unheard of, and not to be read in books. Let the Tsar proclaim the names of those whom he knows to be traitors, and let him punish them as he likes.”
This momentous concession struck at the very heart of the Orthodox Church, for it abolished what was most precious in its advisory role to the tsar: the voice of mercy. Metropolitan Afanasy would have nothing to do with it and adamantly remained in Moscow.
Ivan feigned resolve not to return. In a meandering accusation, he recalled anew the turmoil of his childhood, the humiliations to which he had been subjected, and the threat to his birthright by the boyar regimes. And some of these boyars, he pointed out, were still around. He also charged that Anastasia had been poisoned and that (but for the grace of God) he might have been murdered too.
Over the next four weeks, the terms of his resumption of the throne were negotiated in his camp. The decree that emerged openly transformed him into a despot. It allowed him absolute power over the life and property of any disobedient subject “without advice of council”; and gave him his own separate court and administration staffed from top to bottom by handpicked personnel. A part of Muscovy was also to be carved out for the tsar’s special jurisdiction, while the rest of the country was to remain under the former administration, Ivan presiding over all. To finance the new bureaucracy, he required an indemnity from the state of 100,000 rubles – an astronomical sum at the time.
Ivan’s abdication and re-enthronement as “free tsar” (in the Mongolian sense) took place when he was just thirty-five years old. But to “smash everything is something to grow gray over,”3 and the nervous strain of it had visibly ravaged his appearance. When he returned triumphant to the capital in mid-February, his eyes were glazed and most of his hair had fallen out.
In Ivan’s new tsardom, the nation-at-large was called the Zemshchina or “Land”; Ivan’s court and the territory it ruled, the Oprichnina or “widow’s portion” – that which a princess customarily received upon a sovereign’s decease. There was a measure of ironic self-pity in the term, connoting as it did defenselessness in bereavement. But in practice it was pitiless, and its might was absolute.
In the beginning the territory under Oprichnina jurisdiction comprised some twenty towns and their environs; eventually, by “a generall schisme and publike division of the realm,” about a third of the empire. Thus, wrote one dyak some years later, “in his hatred and wrath did he divide his single people into two halves. He split his entire realm as with an axe.”4
It took time for the Oprichnina to reveal itself, however, and to some degree it evolved or changed. Originally conceived as a kind of land reform to expedite the military service decree of 1556, with the new gentry servitors employed directly under the tsar himself in an expanded “court,” its correlative objective was apparently to undermine the hereditary aristocracy as the major political force in the state. In a sense it was probably meant to serve as a large-scale demonstration of the kind of Muscovy Ivan wanted to rule, and this is surely what he meant long afterward in his testament (of 1572) when he said that in the Oprichnina he had created the “pattern” for his sons.
However, its evolution hideously distorted its ends.
THE OPRICHNINA BECAME a state-within-a-state. It was an instrument of Ivan’s will which paralleled the traditional bureaucracy of the “Land” – with its own ministries, treasury, council and so forth – but which actually existed to implement (not check, balance, or modify by legalities or counsel) Ivan’s desires. Within it he need face no inconvenient lecturing from a hierarch on moral or Christian imperatives, or concern himself with the welfare of the Land, whose government he had theoretically left in capable hands. Who could accuse him of abandoning the realm? It continued as before, entrusted to two aristocrats in whom the tsar appeared to have complete faith: Ivan Belsky and Ivan Mstislavsky. “These two men and I,”5 he declared, “are the three pillars of Muscovy. The three of us hold all power.”
Belsky, a boyar since 1560 and a direct descendant of Gedymin, had held a number of high positions in military and civil service, and with Pimen and Mstislavsky had served as a chief negotiator in the delegation to Alexandrova Sloboda. Mstislavsky, whose illustrious pedigree has already been described, had been a boyar since 1549. One of the first to swear allegiance to the tsarevich in 1553, he had also wholeheartedly supported the Livonian War.
To staff his new court and administration and (as was soon apparent) to enforce the expropriation of land, Ivan assembled a sort of Praetorian Guard. Weirdly foreshadowing Hitler’s SS, these Oprichniki, as they were called, donned black uniforms, displayed enigmatic or morbid insignia, and regarded themselves as a new form of religious sect with their own rites and customs. Whereas the SS sported a death’s-head badge and a runic double-S flash, the Oprichniki rode on black horses and carried at their saddlebow a dog’s head and broom as symbols of their determination to guard, day and night, the safety of their master and to sweep away all his enemies. No social contacts between them and the rest of the population were tolerated. Anyone could enlist, regardless of race, religion, or social origin, so long as he was willing to pledge himself to complete obedience to the tsar, and to execute faithfully all his orders. Their oath was almost a transcription of Matthew 10:37: “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”
The “elect,” it seems, were being assembled. The Last or “Terrible” Judgment had begun.
Among the Oprichnina’s charter members were Alexei Basmanov, Mikhail Cherkassky, Afanasy Vyazemsky, and Peter Zaitsev – all, incidentally, aristocrats. Cherkassky, the Tatar chieftain, was the brother of Ivan’s second wife and himself married to a Zakharin. In 1563, he had served as one of the tsar’s sublieutenants on the Polotsk campaign, when Vyazemsky was transport commissioner. Vyazemsky had been a confidant of Ivan’s since 1560. In the Oprichnina, he scrutinized candidates for admission and presumably administered to the initiates their loyalty oath. Zaitsev’s early career anticipated his later notoriety. In January 1542, when in the ebb and flow of the boyar regimes the Shuyskys had made a comeback, he had assassinated the elder Prince Ivan Belsky in Beloozero. Subsequently elevated to boyar in 1550, he served briefly in Polotsk after its capture until his appointment to the Oprichnina Council in March 1565. Like Zaitsev, Basmanov was a seasoned veteran of Muscovite intrigue. However, he was also an outstanding general, belonged to a venerable branch of the House of Pleshcheyev (an old Muscovite boyar family, like the Zakharins), and had been a boyar since 1544. His son, Fyodor, was Ivan’s occasional homosexual paramour.
The first casualties to fall before Ivan’s unlimited right of execution were Prince Alexander Gorbaty, his adolescent son Peter, and the boyar Peter Golovin. Gorbaty, a Suzdal prince, hero of the Kazan campaign and afterward governor of Kazan, had been close to both Sylvester and Kurbsky. Golovin had been Kurbsky’s comrade-in-arms. Both were accused of “all kinds of evil things” against the tsar and his family – a charge that sufficed, in the dawning day of Ivan’s new reign, to destroy them. On the basis of similar evidence princes Dmitry and Ivan Kurakin were forcibly tonsured, and several other court officials deported to Kazan. Hencefor
th upon “the slightest suspicion, or on any pretext, men of the highest standing were arrested, deported, or put to death.”6 Often their friends and families shared their fate. Whereas denunciations for treason had formerly arisen mostly from quarrels among the aristocrats themselves (enabling Ivan to “make advantage of their malice and contentions”), the tsar, it was said, now “ennobled and countenanced all the rascalliest and desperatt souldiers he could pick out, to affront the chieff-nobilitie.”7
Oprichniki (Nikolai Nevrev, late 1890s)
Also known to have been executed at this time were Prince Simeon Lobanov-Rostovsky (a genuine traitor), Prince Andrey Rostovsky-Katyrev, and a saintly old cleric, Feodorit, apostle to the Lapps during Ivan’s minority. In 1557, Ivan had sent him to Constantinople to obtain the coveted decree recognizing his title as tsar. In reward, Ivan offered him money, a velvet-lined fur coat, and virtually any ecclesiastical office he might wish. Feodorit declined them all, but later interceded for Kurbsky – an act that clinched his fate.
From among the slain, martyrs began to emerge. One, a certain Gorbachev, followed his father to the block, and, taking his severed head into his hands, thanked God “for having considered them both worthy to die innocent.”8 Another, Dmitry Shevyev, “sang from memory all day long the canon to our Lord Jesus Christ and also the akathist hymn to the Blessed Mother of God,”9 as he was slowly impaled on a stake.
Fearful Majesty Page 25