Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  Ivan began to eat, stood up and shouted “Hoyda!” and at once his myrmidons appeared. They arrested the archbishop and began to ransack the palace. Evstafy, the tsar’s confessor (whose piety Philip had presumed to doubt), headed for St. Sophia Cathedral, where he carried off sacred vessels and chasubles and authorized irremediable damage to the ancient Korsun gate of miraculous icons, which was wrenched from the altar. The famed bronze church doors were also ripped from their hinges, and the bronze cathedral bell cut from its tower. Meanwhile, twenty-seven local monasteries were systematically stripped.

  Some 400 prominent citizens – boyars, courtiers, abbots, officials, and merchants – were hauled off to Gorodishche for trial. The method of investigation was torture; the invariable verdict, death. Ivan built a kind of hill-slide down to the Volkhov River, bound his torn and broken victims to sleds, and sped them precipitously into the icy water, where Oprichniki armed with pikes and axes moved about in boats hacking and stabbing at anyone who tried to swim. Others were hanged, beheaded, impaled, or thrown off the Volkhov Bridge.

  The Gorodishche massacres continued for five weeks, and ended with a general pillage of Novgorod. Many Oprichniki made their fortunes in a night. Von Staden, who had joined the campaign with one horse and two servants, returned to his manor with forty-nine horses – twenty-two of them harnessed to sleds laden with goods. What was not expropriated was vandalized or destroyed.

  At length, on February 13, Ivan condescended to pardon all who remained alive. He summoned about sixty elders to Gorodishche, spoke to them “with mildness,” we are told, and gazed upon them “with kind and merciful eyes.”5 With the cruelest irony, he asked them to pray that heaven might grant him a long and happy reign.

  Pimen was publicly humiliated. Borrowing a page from Gennady’s treatment of the Novgorod heretics three-quarters of a century before (which he had obviously studied in Joseph Sanin’s account), Ivan sat the archbishop backward on a mare, thrust bagpipes and a zither into his hands, and taunted him with names. This thoroughly believable incident is confirmed by two sources, yet (in what would seem oddly contradictory behavior in any other monarch) he also rebuked Metropolitan Kirill, Philip’s successor, for having prematurely declared Pimen stripped of his rank. Ivan wrote to his over-zealous lackey: “Archbishop Pimen may not perform any services, but his style and dignity are not to be removed until he has been judged and sentenced by the Church Council!” When the council met in July, its deliberations were brief. Pimen was defrocked and confined to the Nikolsky Monastery outside Tula south of Moscow, where he died in the following year.

  THE SCALE OF Ivan’s atrocity has been the subject of much debate, and estimates vary widely as to the total number slain. The Chronicles say 60,000: “And every day perhaps a thousand; occasionally fifteen hundred, and if perchance only five or six hundred people… the day in question was considered an easy day, one deserving of thanks.”6 But the entire city population cannot have been that large. Another contemporary conjectured 2770 prominent citizens “not counting humbler folk”; a third, 27,000 in all. The second figure more or less agrees with a meticulous sifting of the primary documents by the renowned Soviet historian Ruslan Skrynnikov, who based his calculations on the tsar’s subsequently compiled Synodical or memorial list of the dead. Ivan had an extraordinary memory, but the Synodical is known to be incomplete and deliberately omitted those he refused to “forgive.” Such anonymous “humbler folk” as Oprichniki did away with in back alleys were also obviously not included in the list.

  The controversy, however, is frivolous, because it obscures the overall scope of the crime. Aside from those killed on the spot, countless others eventually perished because they had been deprived of their livelihoods, loved ones, winter stores of grain, parts of their bodies, their sanity itself. Moreover, the calamity was followed directly by famine, and famine by epidemics. Death in Novgorod forged a chain, begun by the tsar’s atrocities; and link by link it made up an awesome sum.

  FROM NOVGOROD, IVAN marched on Pskov, where news of what had been happening had long since reached the inhabitants. On February 17, he pitched his camp at the monastery of St. Nicholas on the city’s outskirts; and it is said that, as he listened to all the churchbells pealing through the winter night, “his heart was softened and he came to himself,”7 and ordered his soldiers to “blunt their swords with stones.”8 In truth, most of the Pskovians he meant to kill had already been executed on the road to Novgorod.

  Ivan entered Pskov from the north, through the Varlaamsky Gate. In a gesture of submission, the people had placed tables spread with bread and salt in front of their dwellings and knelt in the snow before their offerings as Ivan drove through the city in a sleigh. He attended Mass in Holy Trinity Cathedral and prayed at length at the tomb of Saint Vsevolod, a twelfth-century prince and local hero whose mighty sword, inscribed with the words “I surrender my honor to no one,” hung nearby. Ivan appeared to stare at it. Emerging from the cathedral he executed forty officials and had several clergymen burned at the stake. Some ransacking of churches and prosperous establishments began. But then, abruptly, it stopped – due, we are told, to the intercession of one Nikolay, a “holy fool.”

  Nikolay existed. “I saw this imposter or magician,” wrote an Englishman, “a fowll creature, went naked both in winter and sommer; he indured both extreme frost and heat; did many streinge things thorow magical illusions of the Divill; much followed, feared and reverenced, bothe of prince and people.”9 If so, then we must give the devil his due.

  At the time Ivan came to Pskov, Nikolay enjoyed a considerable reputation as a fortuneteller and lived in a soiled and disheveled little house aswarm with pets. Ivan went to see him, ostensibly for his blessing, but probably to learn what his future might hold. As he approached the dwelling, a voice boomed out through the window: “Ivashka! Ivashka!* How much longer will you continue to shed innocent blood? Enough. Go home! Or a great misfortune will befall you!” Ivan pushed through the door to confront the speaker, who promptly thrust into his hands a slab of raw meat. Flabbergasted, Ivan exclaimed, “I am a Christian. I do not eat meat during Lent.” Nikolay inquired politely, “How about Christian blood?” Then he called him “the Emperour bloudsuccer” and warned him he would be struck down by a thunderbolt “if he or any of his army in Pskov did touch a hair in displeasur of the least childs head.”10 Suddenly the sky grew overcast, thunder rumbled from afar, and Ivan’s heart changed out of fear.

  Though usually dismissed as an apocryphal tale, Nikolay’s intercession was remarked upon alike by both the Chronicles and Western contemporaries. Indeed, it was so sensational that it could not long continue to be linked to a secondary saint. Within a few years it belonged to Vasily (Basil) the Blessed, a Holy Fool of more historic standing, and the scene was transferred to Novgorod. As the story goes, Vasily invited Ivan to dinner in a cave beneath the Volkhov Bridge. He set up a little table, and dished up meat and blood. Ivan had a vision of the souls of innocent martyrs rising toward heaven, came to his senses, and commanded the executions to stop. As he did so, the terrible offerings on his plate were transformed into watermelon and wine.

  Vasily, in fact, had died several years before, and in 1558 had been canonized. Soon thereafter, the Moscow cathedral commemorating the conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan had been popularly named after him, with an additional chapel added to house his tomb. Thus, the very church Makary had built to exalt the tsardom was dedicated by the people to the conscience which it lacked.

  In an act of national contrition, moreover, Metropolitan Philip would be canonized in the following century.

  THERE IS A postscript to this story deserving a place beside the miracle tales.

  Among the clerics to meet Ivan at the Varlaamsky Gate had been Vassian Muromtsev, Kurbsky’s correspondent, and Abbot Kornily of the Pskov-Pechery Monastery. Both were subsequently executed.

  Kornily’s fate was particularly anomalous.

  A protégé of Makary, who had appointe
d him abbot at the age of twenty-eight, he had (so far as we know) firmly believed in the autocracy, and in the course of his tenure as abbot, had transformed his monastery into a first-class frontier fortress by building two stone churches and a massive, encompassing stone wall with seven towers. Included in the fortifications was the powerful Church of Saint Nicholas the Miracle Worker, which had a subterranean arsenal, gunloops on the walls, and commanded the open triangle of ground between the first and second gates. A wooden statue of Nicholas, nicknamed “the Warrior,” depicted the saint with a sword.

  A veritable paradigm of the Russian Church Militant, Kornily’s monastery had also been associated with the “miraculous” victories at Narva and Fellin early in the Livonian War. Yet, in front of one of the gates, Ivan struck him down. He struck him down and then, the story goes, seized with remorse, took the body into his arms and carried it “with tears of repentance”11 along an unpaved path known afterward as the “path of Blood” to a church within the grounds.

  That path, deliberately left unchanged for generations, was still to be seen as late as 1938.

  * * *

  * A familiar form of Ivan.

  * * *

  32

  Faith and Works

  BACK AT ALEXANDROVA Sloboda, an unrepentant tsar sequestered his plunder in fireproof storehouses, and to commemorate his campaign against the two cities erected two new stone churches. For one of them he cut the bronze doors of St. Sophia down to size.

  On May 4, he returned to Moscow to attend to urgent activity on the diplomatic front. As always, Ivan continued to give his attention to a broad range of affairs. He courted an armistice with Poland (to which Sigismund August was amenable to gain time to consolidate the new union of his kingdom) and the normalization of relations with Turkey so as to free his forces for an attack against the Swedes. When Swedish envoys arrived in Russia in January, they were interned in Murom. Two months later, a large and impressive Polish embassy arrived with a suite of 700 for negotiations that culminated on June 22 in a three-year truce.

  The linchpin of Moscow’s new policy was the idea of establishing a vassal kingdom in Livonia under Denmark’s Duke Magnus, who remained barricaded on the island of Oesel. Ivan had had his eye on Magnus for a long time. He knew of his dependent condition and frustrated envy of his brother, King Frederick, who in exchange for Holstein had misled him into hoping for a large Livonian dominion of his own. Even on Oesel he was under the continuous surveillance of one of Frederick’s generals. Ivan offered to make his dreams come true. Through Johann Taube and Elert Kruse, two Livonian noblemen captured early in the war who became Ivan’s ambassadors without portfolio, he invited Magnus to Moscow to be proclaimed “King of Livonia.”

  Magnus came, signed a treaty that “guaranteed” the Livonians freedom of religion, with all their hereditary rights and customs, privileges, and laws, and promised them duty-free trade with Muscovy, in return for their submission. He was betrothed to Princess Evfimia, eldest daughter of the late Vladimir Staritsky, and in return for his new title and the privilege of marrying Ivan’s niece, was expected to take Reval – the key to securing Estonia. (In all this Ivan was but vaguely following Sigismund’s example, who had recently secured Courland through Kettler, his vassal duke.) On June 25 – three days after the armistice with Poland was signed – Magnus set out for Reval at the head of a Russian army.

  Ivan needed Magnus, however, far more than Sigismund had ever needed Kettler. Fear of living under Russian rule had grown since the beginning of the war, and information about the Oprichnina was getting out. In territory under Russian occupation, a brutal policy of reprisal had recently taken hold, while elsewhere anti-Russian propaganda was having its effect. All nations, of course, try to dehumanize the image of their opponents in war, and just as the “wilde” Irish was every Elizabethan’s ethnic prototype of the savage (“they never leave a man for dead until they have slit open his belly to remove his heart”1), so reports now swept through Europe that the Muscovite-Tatar hordes in Livonia were “eating Livonian children,” “not even sparing the child in its mother’s womb.”2 “O the lamentable owtcries and cruell slaughters,” went another report, “drowninge and burninge, ravizinge of weomen and mayeds, strippinge them naked without mercie or regard of the frossen weather, tyenge and byndinge them by three and by fower at the their horses taiells, dragginge them som alive som dead, all bloudying the wayes and streates… into Russia.”3 Ivan’s Tatar entourage was invariably singled out as evidence of his savagery, and one delegate to the Polish Diet concluded that “except for his outward form” Ivan had “nothing in common with the human race.”

  Nevertheless, the new Polish embassy clearly assumed that Ivan might turn out to be a broadminded Christian. And this had produced a curious sideshow.

  As it happened, the chief envoy, Jan Krotowski, was an evangelical Hussite* who belonged to a Protestant religious community known as the Bohemian Brethren. Along with other Protestant sects, the Brethren enjoyed within Catholic Poland considerable political clout, and in his eagerness to promote friendship between the two powers, Krotowski hoped Ivan might allow the Brethren freedom to evangelize in Moscow. He may even have hoped to convert the tsar himself, and to this end had brought with him Jan Rokyta, one of the leading Hussite preachers of the day.

  They had reason to be encouraged. Protestants were tolerated in Russia more than Catholics, and were widely scattered through the realm. In provinces bordering on Sweden and Livonia, a current of Lutheran missionary feeling was indulged for political reasons, while the Anglican English were a substantial presence in the Russian North. At the beginning of the Livonian War, Ivan had also rounded up Protestant Livonian talent (merchants, architects, wheelwrights, gunsmiths, and so forth), deporting many of the artisans into the Russian interior. In 1565, a second wave of deportations from Narva, Dorpat, and other towns gave rise to Protestant communities on the fast-growing Volga trade route, at Vologda, Kostroma, and Nizhny Novgorod. At this time, too, the nucleus of the so-called “German suburb” southeast of Moscow was formed, where parishioners were allowed two churches, one Lutheran, the other Calvinist.

  On the other hand, Ivan was profoundly repelled by the anti-authoritarian strain in Reformation theology and the factionalism it seemed to spawn was absolutely contrary to the dogmatic unity coveted by the Russian Orthodox Church. What he was willing to tolerate in his policy was very different from what he was prepared to proclaim. Therefore, when he accepted Rokyta’s invitation to a public debate, he was bound to speak as the “Orthodox Tsar.”

  The “debate” took place on May 10, 1570, before a large audience in the Kremlin Palace. Ivan sat on an elevated throne and confronted the Hussite preacher, who stood on a carpeted dais. The tsar made a brief, vigorous statement in which he denounced Protestantism in general as “depraved, and clearly contrary to the teaching of Christ and the Church.” He then put several questions to the preacher regarding the Brethren’s doctrine. Rokyta kept his exposition brisk and, as he no doubt supposed, innocuously simple and direct. Avoiding criticism of Orthodox beliefs, he leveled his indictment at the Roman Catholic Church. Ivan heard him patiently, praised his eloquence, invited him to summarize their exchange in writing, and promised a detailed written reply.

  Rokyta, however, had not acquitted himself well. Despite his fifteen years’ experience as cosenior spokesman for his church (including a dispute with an anti-Trinitarian in the presence of Sigismund August in 1564), his vague and uncontroversial approach, weakly supported by scriptural quotation, had failed to say anything definite about the Incarnation, the Resurrection, or the Trinity. Ivan’s written reply, though occasionally rhetorical and vain, was apostolic in form, designed to admonish and instruct. Rokyta had set little boats upon the water; Ivan, with a tidal wave of Biblical and patristic quotation, swept them all away.

  Of the ten questions Ivan had asked, two were paramount: “What is the foundation of your faith – how can man be justified?”
and “Why do you not have icons?” – the first going to the heart of Christianity itself; the second, to the heart of the Russian Orthodox Church. To the first Rokyta had replied:

  Foremost, everyone has to consider himself a sinner before God, deserving condemnation for the sin of the first parents in Paradise, because of whom everyone is born into this world already in sin and under the wrath of God. And no one can free himself from that sin and satisfy God simply with his deeds and merits…. Through them [human deeds] no man has ever been justified before God, but only through faith in Christ Himself, for all holy Scriptures testify that the forgiveness of sins and the gift of eternal life after death are granted only in Christ’s name.4

  And to the second:

  Through His Prophets God has strictly forbidden man to make and worship images, and St. John says at the end of his First Epistle: “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.” Against this command of the Lord we do not dare to venture to put images of God and the saints in the church, for we know that God has always punished [man] severely for it…. The saints, while living in the world, did not allow themselves to be praised, as Peter said to Cornelius: “Get up for I am a man.” (Acts 10:26)... To every saint a special field is attributed, as if God Almighty neither could nor wanted to do it satisfactorily Himself.5

  Ivan’s complex rejoinder, stamped by his neurotic personality, yet illuminated by an uncorrupted intelligence and literary gift, deserves to be quoted at length:

  I did not want to answer you, because you inquire for inquiry’s sake and not for the sake of faith. For we are taught by Our Lord Jesus Christ, “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine.” The saving word is often cause of ruin. For that reason I wanted to keep silent. [But] I will tell you a little, so that you do not think me ignorant. You have written that no one can save himself in any way by good deeds, and you have referred to the epistles to the Romans and the Galatians…. Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which appear. Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous. By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he would thereafter receive for inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. Through faith also Sarah herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered of a child when she was past age. By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter; choosing rather to suffer with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season; esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt: for he had respect unto the recompense of the reward. By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king; for he endured, as seeing him who is invisible. [Yet] it is said in the general epistle of James: “What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful; what doth it profit? Even so faith, if it hath no works, is dead, being alone. Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble. Was not Abraham our father justified by his works, when he offered Isaac his son upon the altar? Seest thou how faith wrought with his works, and by works was faith made perfect?… By works a man is justified, and not by faith only. Do you think there was a difference of meaning between those Apostles when they wrote, Paul about faith, James about action? No, there was great agreement. One was asserting deeds, the other strengthening faith, and both acted for the same good, for the salvation of men through faith and deeds….6