Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  Look at Paul himself writing about deeds: “Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound: That as sin reigneth unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord. What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid…. But I am afraid of talking too much, for fear of being judged with Judas for having told the secret to the foe.

  Ivan then turned to the worship of icons and saints:

  There is no salvation in another name, but in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. We do believe this, but only by His disciples and apostles and divine fathers are we led to it and instructed of the true road. And we pray to the most Holy, Immaculate, Ever Virgin Mary, who was worthy to serve such a mystery and to receive the flame of God in her womb.7

  We do not worship the apostles. That shall not be. For the Apostle himself says, writing: “I have planted, Apollos watered, but Christ gave the increase.”… Thus do we honor the divine apostles as students and messengers of the word of God and instructors and leaders of our salvation, and the fathers also in the same way as guides, and we revere the sainted martyrs.

  What is difficult in Scripture cannot be thought out on one’s own, as did your Luther and yourselves. But Paul preached by means of the Revelation of Jesus Christ and did not lay his own foundation, but that which was laid, which is Jesus Christ….

  The apostles, in going forth to preach, left seventy vicars in their place. Following them are the higher priests; from them come also the priests who are the teachers of men even until this day.… If Christians did not need that, the apostle would not have written about it. But who appointed you?

  You, having bypassed the priests, the teachers, the fathers and the apostles, corrupt the very convenant….

  As to the worshipping of idols, you have not distinguished between the holy and the abject. You have judged equal the icon of Christ and the idol of Apollo…. Where will you find now… the shedding of blood for divine icons as for idols? With idols nothing is accomplished. Concerning the icons of the Church a spiritual prayer is a sacrifice from the heart. Do not think that we idolize them; rather we worship honoring the source of the likeness; we honor neither the paint nor the board, but the image painted of Christ and the Mother of God and of all saints, raising the glory to the source…. When the divine Luke had painted the likeness of the Mother of God and brought it to her, she said, “My grace and strength shall be with you.” And this icon is, by the order of God, here in the ruling city of Moscow, preserving Christianity.

  Ivan concluded:

  I cannot look upon you otherwise than as a heretic, for all your teaching is corrupt as compared with the teaching of Christ…. You are not only a heretic, but also a servant of the Antichrist.… In the future you shall not preach in our country. And we will faithfully pray to our Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior of all, to preserve us, the Russian people, from the darkness of your unbelief.8

  Ivan’s brilliant tract, richly bound and filling eighty-four parchment pages, was solemnly handed to Rokyta in a jewel-studded box on June 18, shortly before the embassy returned to Poland. Whatever Rokyta may have thought of it, it was subsequently recognized by others as authoritative; and a quarter of a century later a Catholic king of Poland would rely more heavily on Ivan’s exposition for his Counterreformation propaganda than on all the treatises churned out by the learned Jesuits then crowding his court.

  UNFORTUNATELY, IVAN’S INTELLECTUAL accomplishments were destined to sing but a lofty descant to the terrible theme. Even as he expounded the theology of redemption with almost apostolic beauty, authority, and power, secret trials were about to create new martyrs of some of the worthiest remaining men in his realm. Having delayed the start of the executions until the Poles departed, with savage promptitude he made up for lost time.

  An inquest into Archbishop Pimen’s treason named three leading Oprichniki as accomplices – Alexei Basmanov, his son Fyodor, and Prince Afanasy Vyazemsky – together with several leading state secretaries including Ivan Viskovaty. If such a broad conspiracy could ever have been forged, Ivan probably would not have survived it. The Basmanovs were executed (according to Kurbsky, Fyodor was forced to cut off his father’s head); and Vyazemsky, caught hiding in the house of Ivan’s English court physician, Arnold Lindsay, was banished to Kazan.

  Viskovaty’s condemnation was a national tragedy, to be compared with the assassination of Philip. Though he had “never contradicted the tsar openly,” we are told, behind the scenes he had apparently been telling him “to think of God, not to shed so much innocent blood, and not to exterminate his nobility. He begged him,” wrote a contemporary, “to reflect on who would choose to live in his realm, to say nothing of fighting on his behalf, if he continued to destroy so many brave men. The Grand Prince replied: ‘I have not yet rooted all of you out because I have not really started, but I intend to make every effort to destroy you so completely that no memory of you will survive.’ ”9

  Let us remember Ivan Mikhaylovich Viskovaty.

  After retiring as head of the Foreign Ministry in August 1562, he had remained as a top aide to the tsar on foreign affairs, while his responsibilities expanded into other areas. On February 9, 1561, he had become pechatnik or chancellor, and soon thereafter also keeper of the great seal.

  The exceptional favor he was shown at court made such an impression on contemporaries that a half century later it was still remembered that he had “always been served at the tsar’s table.”10 One eyewitness, who had ample opportunity to observe the close relationship between the two men, wrote that “Ivan IV loved Viskovaty as he loved himself.” Baltazar Russow, the compiler of the Livonian Chronicle and a man “very hostile to the Russians,”11 testified: “Ivan Viskovaty was an excellent man. There was not one like him at that time in Moscow. All the foreign ambassadors were greatly amazed at his mind and diplomatic art.”12

  Though as late as July 12, Viskovaty’s loyalty had not been openly questioned, he proved vulnerable to lethal court intrigue, at a time when one’s fortunes at law could be called a horoscope of one’s impending fate. Shortly before his indictment he lost two beschestie suits, one to Prince Vasily Temkin-Rostovsky, a prominent member of the Oprichnina; the other to Vasily Shchelkalov, a fellow state secretary and clerk of the Duma.

  In the secret indictment Viskovaty was accused of having conspired to surrender Novgorod and Pskov to the Poles, and of clandestine contacts with the Turks to encourage their expedition against Astrakhan.

  On July 20, the tsar beheaded Viskovaty’s brother, Tretyak, ostensibly because he had impugned the memory of Vladimir Staritsky, now being rehabilitated so as to ennoble Ivan’s betrothal of Evfimia to Magnus. Yet it is unlikely his sentence would have been so grim had not his illustrious brother already been condemned.

  Ivan put theology behind him. Tretyak’s execution got his blood going, and that same evening he jumped up from dinner, shouted “Hoyda!” and ordered his bodyguard to the home of Peter Serebryany, a renowned Muscovite general, who was dragged out of his house and beheaded by Skuratov in the yard. The reasons are obscure, but Serebryany had two broad stripes against him: he had favored Staritsky in 1553 and he belonged to the House of Obolensky.

  Five days later, on the Orthodox “Feast of St. James the Apostle” (whose theology of good works Ivan had so recently extolled), a squad of Oprichniki cordoned off Red Square and hammered twenty heavy stakes into the ground. Transverse beams were fastened to them, and behind them copper cauldrons of iced and boiling water were hung in pairs.

  Ivan rode into the center of the square in full dress armor with breastplate and helmet, surrounded by heavily armed Oprichniki and 1500 mounted streltsy who silently took up their positions around the gibbets and fires. The people had scattered, but Ivan shouted to them not to be afraid, even as 300 torn and crippled prisoners were brought forth from the dungeons to hear their doom. Gradually, as his subjects reappeared, the tsar addressed them: “I punish only trai
tors. Is mine a righteous judgment?” The crowd shouted back: “Long live our glorious tsar! May his enemies perish!”

  Ivan resumed his place and, as he loved to do, divided the quick from the dead. To the reprieved he announced: “I have no further quarrel with you,”13 and let 184 of the prisoners go.

  Vasily Schchelkalov read out the names of the other 116 from a parchment scroll. Viskovaty was made to advance. For each charge pronounced against him Schchelkalov struck him with a whip. But the aged diplomat denied them all, asserting that he had faithfully served Russia and his sovereign throughout his long career. To Ivan’s chagrin, he resolutely refused to beg for mercy, and looking around him at the instruments of torture littering the square, exclaimed for all to hear: “A curse on you, you bloodsuckers! God will judge you too, in the next world, for the evil you have done.”14 Oprichniki rushed forward to gag him, and trussed him up to a transverse beam as Ivan declared, “Let whomever is most loyal kill him.”15 Skuratov at once cut off his nose, another Oprichnik one of his ears, and so on, limb by limb, until he expired.

  The next to die was Nikita Funikov, state treasurer since 1561. Though he had wavered during the succession crisis of 1553, since then his service had been exemplary. Schchelkalov read out similarly unsubstantiated charges, which Funikov likewise denied. Two Oprichniki took turns savagely dousing him with cold and boiling water “until his skin came off like an eel’s.”16

  The third victim was Grigory Shapkin, a dyak who had served under Viskovaty. With his wife and two children he was beheaded by Prince Vasily Temkin-Rostovsky, who “laid their decapitated bodies in a row at the tyrant’s feet.”17

  And so the slaughter continued, through the long hot summer afternoon, till all had perished; and to their sorry toll many others were destined to be added over the next several weeks.

  Nine months later, on April 6, 1571, Vasily Schchelkalov acquired Viskovaty’s entire estate, and his older brother, Andrey, became the new head of the Foreign Ministry and the Military Records Bureau. Of Andrey it was said that he was “a very sly man, intelligent and spiteful. He worked night and day like a mule, but always complained that he wanted to do more”18 – sufficient unto a clerk, perhaps, but hardly the man to fill Viskovaty’s shoes.

  Ironically, Viskovaty’s hideous dismemberment emerged some years later as a gruesome parable of Ivan’s just punishment of corrupt officials. In 1588, the new English ambassador to Moscow, Giles Fletcher the Elder, was told of an anonymous dyak who had accepted “a goose ready drest full of money”19 as a bribe. Apprehended, he was brought to “the marketplace in Mosko” where Ivan warned the onlookers that such men “would eate you up like bread” – obviously, an allusion to kormlenie. He asked his executioners “who could cut up a goose.” One cut off the man’s legs at the shins, another his arms at the elbows, as the tsar taunted the dyak with, “ That’s goose flesh. Is it good meate?” Finally, he ordered him beheaded, “that he might have the right fashion of a goose readie dressed.”

  Perhaps the tsar himself put this tale into circulation. If so, the ambassador was not deceived, for he remarked: “This might seeme to have been a tollerable piece of justice (as justice goeth in Russia) except his subtill end to cover his owne oppressions.”20

  Much like Henry VIII, in fact, Ivan was a skillful demagogue – affecting to side with the commons against the mighty, and prone to make “a publick example” of officials in order to “transfer the fault” of policy blunders or other unpopular actions. Having told the Turks that Viskovaty had masterminded his aggressive Crimean policy of a decade before, he offered his chancellor’s blood to christen the apology.

  Russia staggered under adversity. “God hath plagued it many ways,” wrote Jenkinson, “ffirste by ffamyne, that the people have been enforced to eate bread made of barke of trees, besydes many uncleane things,” such as pounded wood-pulp, snails, and moss.21 “One man killed another for a crust of bread,” remembered von Staden. “In the storehouses of the court, the Grand Prince had many thousand ricks of unthreshed grain, but would not sell them to his subjects; thus many died [unnecessarily] and were eaten by dogs.”22 It was even reported “for certeyn” that in some places people had “eatten one another,” which was true.23 In Novgorod the bodies of some victims of the Oprichnina were salted in barrels like pork.

  Famine was followed by plague† (apparently cholera), which in 1570 spread throughout the northwest from Novgorod to Moscow to Vologda. Thousands were thrown into common graves. As the government took the most draconian measures to contain it, “military checkpoints were set up on highways and all attempting to leave infected areas were seized and burned in large bonfires, along with their goods, horses and wagons.”24 Infected houses were promptly walled up, entombing the living with the dead. Even so, the pestilence continued so fiercely into 1571 that it is estimated to have killed one out of every fifty people in the land.

  Some Russians blamed it on an elephant given to the tsar “along with an Arab who looked after it.” The Arab died in Gorodets before he could be executed. His elephant, which stood in a shed with a palisade around it near his grave, was shot by an executioner sent from Moscow.

  In the end, “everyone wondered when he met an acquaintance.”25 Ivan holed up at Alexandrova Sloboda, and when von Staden arrived one day at the Oprichnina court in Moscow, “it was all quiet. A guard looked at me peevishly and asked, ‘What do you want? Is everything dying at your place, too?’ ”26

  * * *

  * The Hussites were followers of Jan Hus, a Czech admirer of Wycliffe.

  † The Black Death did not spare Russia entirely, however, as some have supposed. Thus, for example, this unmistakable description from the Novgorod Chronicle in 1417: “First of all it would hit one as with a lance, choking, then a swelling would appear, or spitting of blood with shivering, and then fire would bum in all the joints; and then the illness would overwhelm.”

  * * *

  33

  The “Evil Empire”

  WHILE IVAN’S SUBJECTS were being variously exterminated, his ambassador in England, Savin, was endeavoring to explain, excuse, and justify the infamous treatment Randolph had received at Moscow. Savin objected (fairly) that Randolph, like every other envoy Elizabeth had sent, “would not give aunswere of the secrite affaires”1 Ivan had raised but talked only of commerce. Ivan himself wrote to the queen (in an eloquent pronouncement worthy of the most enlightened monarch): “We know that merchant matters are to be heard, for that they are the stay of our princely treasures,” yet “princes affaires should be first ended and after that to seeke a gaine.”2 Nevertheless, he implied that Randolph had eventually been forthcoming, and that between them a tentative agreement had been reached, which Savin was now to conclude.

  Savin, in fact, had brought with him a unilaterally concocted treaty committing Elizabeth to an offensive and defensive alliance designed to draw her into the Livonian War. To the queen’s amazement, Savin demanded she “copy it out in Rousse worde for word,”3 confirm it by kissing the cross, and seal it with the great state seal of England. In addition she was expected to send Ivan “all things necessary for warre”; allow Russians complete freedom to come, go, or settle on English soil, with duty-free access to English merchandise; and pledge refuge for each other in their respective realms.4 Finally, Savin insisted that Jenkinson be upgraded to ambassador and sent back.

  Ivan’s insistence on a military alliance put Elizabeth in a difficult position. Protests against the shipment of arms to Russia had begun almost with the inauguration of the English trade. Both Poland and Sweden had issued warnings in 1555, and in 1558, Jenkinson’s companion, Thomas Alcock, traveling overland from Moscow, had been detained in Poland and interrogated about the export of technicians and war material. Alcock insisted that only one hundred shirts of chain mail had been sent, “such olde thinges newe scowred as no man in Englande woulde weare.”5