A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

by Bushkovitch, Paul

  Figure 4. The Moscow Kremlin in a Seventeenth Century Atlas. The drawing shows the towers with low roofs after the example of the Sforza Castle. The high-pointed roofs on the towers that are so familiar today were added in the 1670s.

  The earlier Kremlin of the fourteenth century had had white stone walls in the usual native style of Russian fortresses, and within the walls were wooden dwellings for princes and boyars as well as stone churches. Ivan did not want to modify the basic form of the churches. That form had a spiritual meaning that a Western plan could not have. Aristotele Fioravanti of Bologna solved the problem by building a new and larger Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin with Italian technique but Russian form. Then he and others, Marco Ruffo and Pietro Antonio Solari from Milan, Aloisio da Caresano, and others went to work on the walls. One of the builders wrote back to a brother in Milan that the prince of Moscow wanted a castle “like that of Milan” (referring to the Sforza castle), and that is more or less what the prince got. They also began a new palace in the north Italian style, parts of which still survive. Only the churches were built in the traditional Russian style, albeit by Italian builders, with the sole exception of the Annunciation Cathedral, the palace chapel. Today the Italian work is visible only in the walls and the “House of Facets,” one of the main audience chambers. The other fragments of the old palace and the Renaissance elements in the churches were heavily “russified” by later repairs. The seventeenth-century addition of pointed roofs to the towers along the wall effectively concealed the Milanese model, but in 1520 the palace and the walls must have looked very Italian indeed.

  The new Russia with its Italianate Kremlin may have taken its architecture, if only for a generation, from Italy, but it remained Orthodox in religion and its culture remained firmly religious. The context of Orthodoxy, however, had altered, for the emergence of the new state had come rapidly on the heels of a major change in the status of the Orthodox church, the establishment of autocephaly in 1448. The new situation of the church and of Russia required a new conception of Russia’s place in the divine plan of salvation, and as early as Ivan III’s “standing on the Ugra” of 1480 the church found the answer. Russia was to be understood as a “new Israel,” and the Russians were a new chosen people with their capital in Moscow, the new Jerusalem. Like the ancient Israelites, the Russians were the one people on earth chosen by God to receive the correct faith. Like ancient Israel, Russia was beset on all sides by unbelieving enemies, the Catholic Swedes and Poles to the west and the Muslim Tatars to the south and east. Critical to their survival, as for ancient Israel, were firm adherence to the correct faith in God and punctilious obedience to God’s commandments. Such faith and behavior would guarantee survival, for God would deliver their enemies into their hand, as he had done for King David. If they could remain faithful, they would avoid the fate of ancient Israel until Christ came again to earth.

  Holding to the correct faith in last years of the reign of Ivan III had become, however, a serious problem. For the first time since the conversion of Saint Vladimir in 988, the Russian church found itself confronting opponents from within and was beset by internal disputes over the system of belief. In Novgorod a small group of clergy began to question the Orthodox formulation of the notion of the divinity of Christ, the common forms of devotion involving icons, and monasticism as well. As they seem to have questioned the Christian notions of the Trinity, their opponents, mainly Saint Joseph of Volokolamsk, labeled them Judaizers, exaggerating their dissent and slandering them as enemies of Christianity. The group acquired some followers in Moscow, even among the officials of the Kremlin offices, before it was suppressed in 1503, and the leaders were burnt as heretics. These were the first such executions for heresy in Russian history. The church could find no defense of such actions in its traditions, and had to turn to the West, to a description of the Spanish inquisition taken from the words of the Imperial ambassador, to justify the executions.

  More widespread was the controversy over monastic life that arose at the same time and lasted for a generation. This dispute was far from an arcane debate among monks, for monasticism was still central to Orthodoxy as it emerged from the medieval period. The Kremlin itself included the monastery of the Miracle of Saint Michael the Archangel and the Convent of the Ascension, the activities of both of which formed integral parts of the life of the court. The city of Moscow had dozens of small monasteries within its walls, and several great ones just beyond them. Only a day’s journey north, Saint Sergii’s Trinity Monastery was the annual site of the pilgrimage of the whole court for the saint’s festival in September. Every Russian town of any consequence boasted one or two monasteries in or around it. For much of the first half of the sixteenth century Russian monks discussed the proper type of monastic life, some stressing individual asceticism and common life. Both styles were part of Orthodox tradition, exemplified in the work and teaching of Saint Joseph of Volokolamsk and Nil Sorskii. Eventually some of Nil’s posthumous followers came to question the very idea of monastic landholding as an obstacle to a holy life.

  This controversy was purely Russian, but the church was not entirely isolated from the world. Orthodox brethren still made up most of the population of the Balkans under Turkish rule, and the great monasteries on Mount Athos provided spiritual leadership. The most prolific writer on religious topics in early sixteenth-century Russia was actually a Greek named Michael Trivolis (1470–1556), in monastic life he took the name Maximos. Maksim the Greek, as he was known in Russia, had spent his youth in Venice and Florence, but ultimately came to reject the Renaissance secular culture for Orthodox monasticism. In this decision he imitated Savonarola, with whose teaching he was acquainted. In Russia he provided an encyclopedic collection of tracts and essays on topics from the errors of Islam to the correct stance on monastic landholding. His mild critique of that practice and other deviations from the then dominant notions among the higher clergy led to his condemnation and exile in the 1530s, but even in exile he remained a major figure in the church and ultimately the young Ivan IV ordered him released. His writings were widely copied and remained authoritative on many subjects for the ensuing century.

  Ivan III’s successor, Vasilii III (1505–1533), came to the throne not as the eldest son but as the result of Ivan’s decision to give it to him. He was the son of Ivan’s second wife, the Greek Sophia Paleologue, and Ivan chose him, after some hesitation, over his grandson by his first wife (his son by the first wife had died). Much of Vasilii’s effort was to go to maintaining and expanding Russia’s position in the world. The territorial rivalry with Poland-Lithuania ended in a war that was successful for Russia with the capture of Smolensk in 1514. Smolensk was the last ethnographically Russian land outside the rule of Moscow, and in addition its conquest provided the state with a major fortress far to the west of Moscow. Though the war ended only in a truce, it fixed the Russo-Polish boundary for a century. Relations with the Tatar khanates, in contrast, involved a bewildering chain of intrigue and counter-intrigue as well as endless Tatar raids for slaves and booty on the southern frontier. About this time Vasilii adopted the practice of mobilizing the army on that southern frontier every summer, whether a formal state of war existed or not, for there was no other way to prevent the annual raids that formed an important part of the nomadic economy.

  Vasilii’s greatest challenge, however, came not from the Tatars or Poland but from his own dynastic problems. For his first wife he had taken Solomoniia Saburova, not a foreign princess like his mother but the daughter of a prominent boyar. The marriage was successful in all but one crucial respect: no children were born. After much controversy and consultation with the church, he pressured Solomoniia into entering a convent and finally dissolved the marriage in 1525. Vasilii then married princess Elena Glinskaia, the daughter of a Lithuanian prince whose clan had taken refuge in Moscow after it had failed to successfully challenge its own soverereign. The Glinskiis had remained a powerful family in Russian exile, and claimed
descent from the Tatar emir Yedigei, a great warrior who had fought Tamerlane himself in the early fifteenth century. In 1530 Elena gave birth to a son Ivan, who would be known to history as Ivan the Terrible.

  IVAN THE TERRIBLE

  Like so many such epithets “Terrible (grozny)” was a product of later romanticism, not of the sixteenth century. Even Ivan’s most determined Russian opponents never used it, and indeed in the language of the time the Russian word grozny would have meant “awe-inspiring” (the English is a traditional mistranslation) and so it had mildly positive connotations. Be that as it may, Vasilii’s untimely death in 1533 put the child Ivan on the throne of the Grand Prince of Moscow and all Rus, a situation that required a regency consisting of his mother and several prominent boyars to run the country. The great boyar clans, the Glinskiis and Shuiskiis, Bel’skiis and Obolenskiis, competed for power at the court and did not hesitate to exile and execute the losers. The death of Ivan’s mother in 1538 spurred on the intrigues, and only the marriage and majority of the young prince imposed a certain calm on the political waters.

  Shortly after his marriage to Anastasiia, the daughter of the boyar Iurii Romanov-Koshkin, Ivan was crowned by Makarii, the head of the church as Metropolitan of Moscow, in 1547 in the Kremlin’s Dormition cathedral. Makarii crowned him not just Grand Prince, like his father, but also Tsar, a title derived ultimately from the name of Caesar. Tsar was the popular name among the Slavs for the Roman and Byzantine emperors, and thus conveyed a proclamation of equality in rank with those rulers as well as the Holy Roman Emperor in the West. Tsar was also the Russian word for title of the Khan of the Golden Horde and his successors in Kazan’ and Crimea as well as of the Ottoman Sultan. Most important, it was the title of David and Solomon in the Slavic Old Testament. In case anyone missed the point, Ivan had the walls of the audience chambers of the Kremlin palace decorated with Old Testament scenes. There the Old Testament kings (“tsars” to the Russians) surrounded Joshua’s conquest of the land of Canaan. Henceforth Russia’s rulers were tsars, the equals of the Western Emperor, the Sultan, and the Old Testament kings.

  Thus began a reign of unprecedented activity that lasted thirty-five years, full of drama and victory, bloodshed, and defeat. Untiring in pursuit of his goals, Ivan left his mark on generations to come. Within a short time of his coronation, he set out on the first of his great enterprises. In the years of the regency, Moscow’s influence in Kazan’ had slipped, permitting Kazan’ once again to fall to hostile khans. Ivan set off to end the threat by installing a pro-Moscow khan, but after repeated failures to take the city, he simply annexed it when it fell to the Russian army in 1552. Ivan was only twenty-two years old, and he did not stop there. His armies went on down the Volga to Astrakhan’ and seized it and its territory as well. These conquests presented the Russians with a new situation, for never before had any substantial non-Christian population existed within their borders. On the capture of Kazan, Ivan ordered the Tatars remaining in the city to move out beyond the fortress walls, subsequently building a cathedral and settling Russians in their place in the city. Some of the Tatar elite entered Russian service, most of whom eventually converted to Orthodoxy, but many more fled to Crimea. The tsar enrolled thousands of Tatars in his army with the status of military servants. Other lesser landholders, townspeople, and peasants as well as the other nationalities of the khanate, the Chuvash, Mari, and Udmurt peasants, now acquired a special status. In place of the usual Russian taxes they paid yasak, a sort of tribute, to the tsar. Beyond these measures, the Russians did nothing to further subjugate the Tatars and other Volga peoples. There was no attempt at mass conversion. Virtually all Tatars and Bashkirs remained Muslims, visiting their mosques for Friday prayers, sending young men to Samarkand and other Central Asian towns to acquire the knowledge to become imams, and reading the Koran and other religious literature as before. There was no equivalent to the expulsion of the Moors from Spain after the end of the Reconquista.

  With Astrakhan’ came control of the whole of the Volga basin and surrounding lands. By the 1560s the Russians had a fort on the Terek river at the foot of the Caucasus, looking up at the high mountains. Ivan established relations with the Circassian mountaineers of the Caucasus and the Circassians’ lesser dependents, the Chechens and other peoples. The conquest of the Volga, a response primarily to the local situation on the border with Kazan’, put Russia into a new geopolitical situation. Its control of the Volga for the first time in history cut off the western part of the Eurasian steppe from the main body to the east. Nomadic peoples continued to cross the Volga back and forth until the eighteenth century, but now they crossed under Russian control.

  In the course of the 1550s Ivan acquired experience and maturity. In 1553, to be sure, he suffered a grave illness and some of the boyars were unwilling to accept his son as the rightful heir. This crisis, however, passed and peace returned to the court. Ivan governed with the boyars and apparently under the influence of his spiritual father Silvestr, the priest of the palace church, the Annunciation Cathedral, and his favorite Aleksei Adashev, a man of low rank in the landholding class but capable and able to work with the great boyar clans. The tsar and his government seem to have worked together fairly harmoniously. Together they expanded the state apparatus in Moscow and the provinces and reorganized the army. Peace did not last long: in 1558 tsar Ivan began a war with the aim of the annexation of Livonia, a war that would continue after his death and have profound effects on Russia. Livonia in 1558 was a country in crisis, which was brought on by the Reformation and the end of the Livonian Order that had ruled since the thirteenth century. As the state dissolved, various groups of knights began to turn to neighboring powers for support: the first group turned to Poland. Ivan had long advanced claims to the area based on spurious dynastic arguments, and indeed he claimed Livonia as the territory of his ancestors, which it had never been. In the winter of 1558, he decided on a preemptive strike to counter possible Polish involvement. The Russian army moved into Livonia and quickly captured Dorpat (Tartu) and the important port of Narva just across the Russian border. These two towns, and particularly Narva, seem to have been Ivan’s primary goals. At the lowest ebb of his military fortunes in coming years, he offered to give up everything else if he could keep Narva.

  In the beginning, fortune favored the Russian armies, but their very success inevitably aroused the opposition of Poland-Lithuania. While the Russians were successful and English merchant ships began to come to Narva, Ivan cultivated the friendship of Queen Elizabeth of England, even proposing various marriage schemes. As the years wore on, however, Russia proved unable to sustain the necessary military effort. The Polish army defeated the Russians at several important battles, and to complicate matters, the nobles of northern Estonia turned to Sweden for help. The Swedish forces landed in Reval in 1561, turning the war into a three-way contest.

  In this situation the political harmony at the Russian court began to evaporate. It seems that Adashev and Silvestr had always harbored doubts about the Livonian enterprise, and with Russian defeats some of the boyars, the most important being Prince Andrei Kurbskii, went over to Poland. Ivan’s wife, Anastasiia, died in 1560, and Ivan chose for his second wife the daughter of the Circassian prince Temriuk, the new tsaritsa taking the name Maria in baptism. Metropolitan Makarii’s death in 1563 removed the last restraining influence over the tsar. Ivan grew suspicious of many of the great boyars, whom he suspected of disloyalty to his policies and perhaps even his person. He had several of them executed or exiled. Many of them, he would claim, had been reluctant to support his young son as heir to the throne during his illness in 1553. In December 1564, Ivan suddenly left the Kremlin, taking with him only his family, his immediate and trusted servants, and the treasury. First he went south to one of the small suburban palaces and then turned northeast, circling around the city and coming to stay at Aleksandrovo, a small town some hundred miles to the northeast of Moscow. There he stayed several weeks, remaini
ng out of all communication with the capital. He then sent a messenger to Moscow with an announcement that must have come to the population like a thunderbolt. The Tsar of all Russia announced that he was angry at the treason and misdeeds of the boyars and he abdicated the throne. Only the populace of Moscow was exempted from his suspicions: toward them he had no anger. After a few days, the people and the boyars, led by the church, sent a delegation out to Aleksandrovo, begging him to change his mind. Ivan consented and returned to Moscow.

  The winter journey to Aleksandrovo and back was the beginning of five years of bloodshed and upheaval, the period that marked Ivan for later generations as “the Terrible.” Sergei Eisenstein’s famous film of of 1944 about Ivan ended its first part precisely at this moment, the petition of the people at Alexandrovo. Eisenstein’s portrait was notably ambiguous and historians have never ceased to debate Ivan’s policies and personality. Some have even argued that he was paranoid, but there is too little evidence to analyze his personality. We know only what he did, not his inner thoughts and feelings.

  On his return from Alexandrovo, Ivan divided the country and the state into two parts, reserving the income and administration of the north, Novgorod, and much of central Russia to himself, as the “Oprichnina.”2 The Oprichnina was a separate realm within the state, with a separate boyar duma and Oprichnina army. The remainder of the country he left to the boyars and the old boyar duma. Partly a military measure, the Oprichnina served Ivan as a political base from which to strike at the boyars whom he considered unreliable. Executions followed gruesome torture, and whole communities, like the landholders of the Novgorod area, were sent into exile on the Volga frontier. Protestations from the church were to no avail, and in 1568 Ivan had Metropolitan Filipp deposed and soon afterwards killed. Compliant churchmen were appointed in his place and the places of his supporters. Eventually some of the leaders of the Oprichnina were themselves killed, and finally in 1570 Ivan executed nearly two thousand people in Novgorod, including nobles and townspeople. Then, as suddenly as he had begun, he terminated the whole policy in 1572, prohibiting even the use of the name Oprichnina.