Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  Except for a handful of cases it is impossible to know – or even to conjecture – what Ivan’s grudges were. By the late 1560s, he had clearly become obsessed with threats to his personal security. There was no consistent social profile to the victims or consistent criteria of selection for the Oprichnina other than Ivan’s favor. The social makeup of the Oprichnina, in fact, was almost identical to that of the country as a whole, and included scions of some of Russia’s most eminent aristocratic families. The purges had no discernible social goal. The issue was treason, most of it imaginary. Yet just as the thirst for blood grows with its satisfaction, so (contrariwise) “the more Ivan indulged in repression, the more alienated his subjects became, until he was finally confronted with a situation he was powerless to control.” If the original purpose of the Oprichnina troops had been to enforce the confiscation of estates, especially those of the nobility, such estates in the end comprised a relatively small proportion of what was expropriated. The majority of Ivan’s victims were not nobles at all, but ordinary gentry. Eventually Oprichniki executed one another. Thus “they prepared the whip and the birch with their own hands, and all those brightly painted devil-masks before which the spiritual and secular orders bowed down.”4

  Just as the lawless boyar regimes of Ivan’s minority had bred crime by example in the realm, so the conduct of Oprichniki fostered arbitrary and degraded behavior throughout Muscovite life. And this was destined to remain true for some time. “For as [the common people] are verie hardlie and cruellie dealte withall by their chiefe magistrates and other superiours, so are they as cruell one against an other, specially over their inferiours and such as are under them. So that the basest and wretchedest that stoupeth and croucheth like a dogge to the gentleman, and licketh up the dust that lieth at his feete, is an intollerable tyrant where he hath the advantage. By this meanes the whole countrie is filled with rapine and murder.”5 Though Chancellor had once noted Ivan’s reputation for settling controversies “with the utmost fairness and partiality,” by 1560, when Ivan refused to allow Sylvester and Adashev to defend themselves at their trial, official disregard of the law had already been given sanction. By 1568, Ivan’s own great Law Code had been openly pushed aside. “Fear not the law, fear the judge,” warned a contemporary Russian proverb; and once in prison even for a misdemeanor a man might languish “until his hair hung down to his navel.” Just about everyone in the system received kickbacks, from magistrate to bailiff, and it is said that a petitioner or litigant couldn’t even get into court without paying off the guard. In the government, too, nothing was accomplished without money changing hands. “One hand washes the other” became a common expression. A tenth of all emoluments was reputedly skimmed off the top.

  Moreover, Ivan explicitly prohibited Zemshchina courts from convicting Oprichniki of any crime! In the gleeful if understated recollection of one of his guards: “This caused the spirits of the Zemshchina to sink.”6 A longstanding if parenthetical anomaly of Muscovite law – trial by combat – became more prominent. Hired fighters abounded, yet no one was willing to risk his life in a losing cause. Those hired by Zemshchina litigants, having taken the field fully armed, would often just fall to the ground and exclaim, “I’m guilty.”

  A large number of Oprichniki were German and Tatar mercenaries. A perhaps not untypical example of those enrolled was Heinrich von Staden, a Westphalian who in his teens had been expelled from school for stabbing a fellow student with an awl. A few years later, when he left home, his family was so glad to be rid of him that one relative took a thorn bush to wipe out his tracks in the dust. At Riga he witnessed the execution of Count Johann von Artz, who for collaborating with the tsar was “torn to pieces with hot tongs.”7 This did not dissuade Staden from seeking service in Muscovy, where he had heard the mercenary pay was very good. And in the Oprichnina he made a great career.

  This is how he remembered one excursion:

  We came to a place with a church. My servants went inside and plundered it. Nearby was the estate of a prince in the Zemshchina. When his people saw [us], they fled. I shot one immediately and quickly went throught the gates as they threw stones at us from the upper floor. I ran up the stairs with an axe in my hand, and was met by a princess who wanted to throw herself at my feet. Seeing my angry face, she turned to go back into the room. I struck her in the back with the axe and she fell through the doorway. Then I sprang over her and greeted her ladies.8

  Even as the guard attracted criminals, criminals masqueraded as Oprichnik bands and molested with impunity whomever they encountered. In time, local action against them became hopeless, as the Zemshchina inhabitants lost the ability to distinguish between bandits and the tsar’s own men. Gangs of thugs rampaged over the countryside, sometimes organized on a paramilitary basis, and ambushed traveling merchants or raided farms at harvest time. Oprichniki also roamed as far north as the coast of the White Sea. Meanwhile, as the burdens of taxation and obligatory service inexorably grew, officials were helpless to check the flight of the peasantry into the wilds.

  What Pushkin once remarked about the reforms of Peter the Great could almost be applied to Ivan’s in reverse: “The later laws were created by a broad mind, full of wisdom and kindness. The earlier decrees were mostly self-willed and seemed to have been written with a knout.”9

  * * *

  28

  The Martyr’s Crown

  ASIDE FROM THE slow, dignified walk and pious eating habits Ivan habitually displayed for foreign visitors, what was his daily routine really like? Any answer to this must contain a large measure of conjecture, but as often as not, it seems he could be found at Alexandrova Sloboda, the “capital” of the Oprichnina kingdom, sixty miles northeast of Moscow. His compound there included an inner stone citadel, a terem palace, warehouses, barracks, ministries, dungeons, and a new masonry church dedicated to the Virgin, with a cross ostentatiously etched on every brick. Wooden causeways crisscrossed the central court over marshy ground, and the whole was encircled by ramparts and a moat. Various approaches were guarded by stone blockhouses, and two high watchtowers surveyed the surrounding countryside. Roadblocks and overlapping patrols enforced the tsar’s edict that no one was to enter or leave the town without his consent. At the main checkpoint, two miles to the south, identification passes were issued and verified. Beyond the town, the roads quickly vanished into dark forests.

  In this retreat, freed at last from all constraints, Ivan “let it all hang out.”

  In a profane parody of monastic life, he assumed the role of abbot over a community of Oprichniki brethren, with Vyazemsky cast in the role of cellarer, and Malyuta Skuratov (a rising favorite married to Vyazemsky’s sister) sacristan. The brethren went about in dark cassock habits and cowls of rough black serge, and divided their time between exhausting church services and atrocities.

  The monastic “rule” was strict. Everyone was awakened at three in the morning for matins, which lasted until dawn. During the service, Ivan sang, read, or prayed – sometimes with such fervor that he bruised his brow from beating it on the ground. Occasionally he would confer with his advisers and “often the bloodiest orders were dictated at matin song or during Mass,” which followed at eight. At ten the brethren gathered for their first repast of the day. During the meal, Ivan stood and read occasionally from the lives of the saints or some other edifying work. Leftovers were distributed in the marketplace to the poor. The remainder of the afternoon Ivan spent on affairs of state, or in the company of a favorite, or in hunting forays in the woods. Not infrequently, however (and he “was never so happy as then in countenance and speech”), he would descend into the dungeons to observe acts of torture. “Blood often splashes his face,” goes one eyewitness account, “but he does not mind; indeed he is delighted, and to indicate his joy he shouts, ‘Hoyda, Hoyda!’ ” – a Turkish word resembling “giddy-up” or “let’s go,” used by Tatar horsemen to urge on their steeds.1 Invigorated by such excursions, he occasionally convened the bret
hren for an orgy, though on most days he “liked to execute before the eight o’clock bell”2 which called the community to evening prayer. After vespers, three blind storytellers, reciting by turns, lulled him to sleep with their tales.

  Peter the Great in a later age, with comparatively harmless variations, mimicked Ivan’s confraternity in his Jolly Company and Drunken Synod, which had a “Prince-Pope, All Rowdiest and Most Mock Patriarch of Moscow,” with twelve cardinals, a suite of bishops, abbots, and abbesses, all bearing scandalous nicknames. Peter himself assumed the rank of archdeacon. Their first commandment was never to go to bed sober.

  Fortunately Peter, who often supposed himself to be following in Ivan’s footsteps, had other lights to guide him on his way.

  “The strict and orderly regulation of Ivan’s ecclesiastical-torture chamber,” one historian has pointed out, “destroys the common notion that his religiosity was a state of radical vacillation between sin and repentance.” On the contrary, within his daily routine Ivan was evidently able to “combine without strain atrocity with religious piety,” and through a rigid attachment to ritual externals, without regard for their inner meaning, confuse customs with dogmas of the faith. This last was a Josephian legacy. Moreover, the beauty of the liturgy evoked “a sense of excitement in Ivan which incited in him a craving for the shedding of human blood, just as the excitement of voluptuousness incited him in the same direction.” By a law of progression, “the passions thus excited and the sensations they dulled united in a cry for constantly stronger and more startling effects.”

  Ivan’s theatrical executions and other histrionic behavior may be linked to this, along with the pious ferocity with which he beat his forehead on the ground, “causing his brow to be full of boines and swellings, sometimes to be black and blew, and often to bleed.” Perhaps to prove the Roman imperial blood in him, he also showed an increasing tendency to cast some executions as large-scale sporting events. Thus, for example, though reputedly kind to the poor (maintaining, it is said, some 200 paupers at his own expense), he one day decided to separate out the counterfeit mendicants from those in genuine need. Proclamation was made that all “beggars and cripples should resortt to receav the Emperors great almes” at his Sloboda, and “owt of som thowsands that came,” one contemporary records, “700 of the most villest and counterfeit wear all knockt in the head and cast into the great lake, for the fish to receav their doll therof: the rest most febliest wear disperst to monnestaries and hospitalls to be relieved.”3

  On another occasion, we are told, Ivan herded seven “rebellious bigg fatt friers” into a high-walled amphitheater, and having furnished them with spears, led each one, trembling, out into the center of the ring to face by turns seven “great wild, fierce and hungrie beares, lett lose, rainginge and roaringe up against the walls with open mouthes.” The first bear, “scenting the frier by his garments, made more mad with the crie and shouting of the people, runs fearsly at him, catches and crushes his head, bodie, bowells, leggs and arms, as a cate doth a mous, tears [him] in peces and devours him for his prey.”4 And so on with the others, till all the brethren were dead.

  INTO IVAN’S ARBITRARY world, Metropolitan Philip intervened. He admonished the tsar in private, paraphrasing Basil (Agapetus): “If you are high in rank, then in body you are just like any other man, for though you may be honored with God’s image, you are still God’s ‘subject.’ He who truly can be called a ruler, rules himself; he is not controlled by passions but is victorious over passions through love.”5 Ivan was not accustomed to hearing the second half of this text, and Philip’s erudite insistence on remembering it in full was not welcome. As a result the tsar “kept away from the hierarch and avoided encounters with him. In the admonitions of the metropolitan, he seemed to hear the hateful voice of the seditious boyars.”6

  Metropolitan Philip Denounces Ivan IV (Yakov Turlygin, late 1800s)

  Then, on March 22, 1568, Philip publicly upbraided the tsar in the Cathedral of the Assumption. As the metropolitan was celebrating the Eucharist, Ivan and a troop of Oprichniki entered the cathedral in their black robes with high hoods over their heads “like Chaldean boors.”7 Three times the tsar approached Philip to receive his blessing, but the hierarch refused to acknowledge him. Certain boyars in the congregation exclaimed: “Holy Metropolitan!” but Philip said: “I do not recognize the Orthodox tsar in this strange dress.” Fear swept the cathedral. “We are offering here the pure bloodless sacrifice for the salvation of men,”8 the metropolitan continued. “But outside this holy temple the blood of the innocent is being shed, and there is no mercy in Russia for the righteous.” Looking directly at Ivan, he added: “Have you forgotten, O Tsar, that you too are dust and will need forgiveness of your sins?” Ivan responded: “It would be better for you to be in accord with us,”9 to which Philip replied: “Where is my faith if I am silent?” Ivan struck his iron-tipped staff against the rostrum: “We shall see what your strength is.”10 Philip, who knew full well what the tsar could do, showed what his faith was: “I too am but a passing stranger on this earth. But I must tell you the truth, even if I have to die for it. I am not grieving for the innocent among your victims – they are God’s martyrs. I am grieving for your soul.” Ivan exclaimed: “In the past I was humble before you. Now you shall come to know me!”11 And on the following day, he began to execute members of Philip’s staff.

  Following Afanasy’s example, Philip moved out of the metropolitan’s residence in the Kremlin to the Monastery of St. Nicholas the Elder. But he refused to resign his office. Ivan withdrew to Alexandrova Sloboda to prepare a case against him, and sent an investigative commission to the Solovetsky Monastery to corroborate charges of alleged misconduct during Philip’s tenure as abbot. But the testimony extracted (through bribery and threats) was “so suspect that Bishop Pafnuty of Suzdal, its most influential member, refused to sign the report. Pafnuty’s opposition threatened to abort Philip’s trial, leaving the outcome in the hands of the boyar council, many of whose members sympathized with the metropolitan.”12

  In mid-June, the Oprichnina launched a punitive campaign against the Kolomna estates of Chelyadnin. The guardsmen set fire to villages and churches and amused themselves by stripping women and girls naked and compelling them to catch chickens in the field. The tsar himself went to one of Chelyadnin’s holdings near Tver, “slew his retainers, herded the rest of his servants and domestics into a hut full of gunpowder, and blew them up.”13 Between March and July, some 300 of Chelyadnin’s servants were killed. This whole operation was directed by Malyuta (“Stumpy”) Skuratov, captain of Ivan’s personal bodyguard and soon to preside over the Oprichnina’s investigative arm. His chief assistant was Vasily (“Murky”) Gryaznoy,* a former kennelman.

  Toward the end of July, Philip and Ivan clashed publicly again. On the 28th, the metropolitan was celebrating a service at the Novodevichy Monastery outside Moscow, and as he led a procession around the walls, the tsar and a band of Oprichniki suddenly appeared. Philip noticed that one of them (according to Islamic custom) was standing with his cap on. “Sovereign Tsar,” said Philip, “are the Orthodox to uphold Islamic law?” The tsar responded: “How so?” Philip answered: “There he is, one of your own guards, the one who looks like Satan.” Ivan looked back, but the man had already removed his cap.14

  In early September, there were mass executions. Some 450 nobles and their servitors, including several of Philip’s relations, were killed. Many had been on Staritsky’s conspiracy list. Others had simply been close to Chelyadnin, and they included outstanding members of the military high command, such as the officers in charge of Narva, Svyazhsk, and Kazan. If Kurbsky’s charge in 1564 that Ivan was killing off his best generals (as Stalin would do in the 1930s) had at the time been overstated, it was certainly true by 1568.

  On the 11th, Chelyadnin himself was summoned to the Kremlin’s Golden Chamber where Ivan arrayed him in royal robes and placed him on the throne. Prostrating himself in mock humility, the tsar
said: “You have what you wanted. Enjoy it.” Then: “What I have given, I can also take away,” and (it is claimed) seizing a knife stabbed him in the chest.15 Afterward, Ivan’s myrmidons threw the body into a ditch.

  Chelyadnin’s fate cowed all vestigial boyar opposition, and despite the tainted evidence of the investigative commission, the Duma agreed to try Philip on a range of charges from administrative corruption to sorcery. The chief witnesses against him were Paisy, Philip’s successor as abbot, and certain elders whom he had repeatedly reprimanded for allowing the monastery’s reservoir and dam to fall into disrepair. Their testimony came as no surprise. In January 1568, in answer to his chiding, they had sent him a shipment of rotten fish. Surely they would not have dared to do so if Philip’s impending fall had not already been widely assumed. Another cleric with a grudge was the Archpriest Evstafy, Ivan’s current confessor, whom Philip had reproached for his lack of spiritual counsel to the tsar. And then of course there was Archbishop Pimen, who hoped at last to be made metropolitan once Philip was out of the way.

  As a clergyman, incidentally, Pimen was only interested in strictly liturgical questions; for example, what one was supposed to do if a priest collapsed in the middle of Communion.

  Meanwhile, Ivan did everything he could to intimidate Philip before his arraignment, and on the eve of his trial decapitated his cousin, Mikhail Kolychev, and sent him the head sewn up in a leather bag.