Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  It has been argued that Ivan’s mental problems had roots in genetic and physical illness. His father, although himself the son of Ivan the Great, was a simpleton, his brother a deaf-mute, and most of his legitimate children died in infancy. Almost certainly Ivan the Terrible suffered from encephalitis, a disease with schizophrenia-like symptoms: aggressive behaviour, marked character change and rapid mood swings. On the other hand, for those who blame mental illness on nurture rather than nature Ivan the Terrible is a classic case study. Rarely can a child’s upbringing have foreshadowed so clearly the mania to come. His father died when Ivan was three, leaving the throne to Ivan and effective power to his mother, a foreigner with little love for Russia but greater love for various Russian men. His uncle Yuri challenged Ivan’s right to the throne and was thrown into a dungeon to starve. Ivan’s mother was poisoned five years later, and within a week the eight year old is said to have arranged for her lover to be arrested and beaten to death. After his mother’s murder Ivan escaped from the violent intrigues of the court into such hobbies as pulling the wings off birds and poking sticks in their eyes. With his deafmute brother, another Yuri, he wandered around his own palace often hungry and dressed in rags. From this he graduated to roaming the streets with a gang of friends, attacking passers-by. His speciality was inventing ever more ingenious ways of murdering young women, always raping them first. He retained his interest in animals, spending hours throwing cats and dogs from the castle walls.

  Power was exercised by ever-changing alliances of noble families. Rivalry between the Shuisky and the Belsky families escalated, and murders and beatings became common even inside the palace. When Ivan was nine the Shuiskys raided the palace, rounding up his confidants. They had the loyal Fyodor Mishurin skinned alive and left on display in a Moscow square. Finally at the age of thirteen, over Christmas in 1543, Ivan asserted himself. He ordered the arrest of Prince Andrew Shuisky and set the tone for his reign by having the prince thrown to a pack of ravenous hunting dogs.

  In 1547 Ivan was finally crowned Tsar of all the Russians, the first Muscovy grand duke to assume this title. He went about choosing a wife in a typically forthright manner: he held a beauty parade and chose Anastasia Romanovna. Many boyars resented the match because Anastasia’s Romanov family was untitled, although not to remain that way for long. Surprisingly the marriage seems to have been a happy one. Ivan called Anastasia his ‘little heifer’, and she bore him six children of whom only two survived infancy. She had a positive influence on him and they apparently enjoyed thirteen years of wedded bliss. During that period Ivan introduced government reforms, reducing the power of the boyars and thus the opportunities for corruption. He also reformed the Church and the army and set out on the first steps to creating a Russian empire. His forces conquered the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan and the Baltic cities of Narva and Polotsk. The first English traders started to appear in Russian markets.

  The birth of Russian imperialism was one of Ivan the Terrible’s most lasting contributions to history. The people of Muscovy and its predecessor states had been largely Russian or Russified Finns. For the first time Ivan turned their eyes outwards, and the ‘Russia’ he left behind had significant non-Russian populations. The way those populations were integrated, or largely not integrated, into the Russian state had ramifications right down to the present day.

  In 1553 one of the key events of the reign occurred. Ivan collapsed with what his courtiers imagined was a fatal fever. He demanded that the boyars swear an oath of allegiance to his baby son Dmitri, but most refused. Ivan recovered, but never forgave what he regarded as treachery.

  When Anastasia died seven years later Ivan relapsed violently into the ways of his youth. He launched an attack on the German knights to the west, and lost. In a fury he launched a reign of terror on his own people. Like Stalin centuries later he saw conspiracies on all sides. Almost certainly Anastasia died of natural causes, but Ivan was convinced the boyars had poisoned her and he had many tortured and executed. The boyars were demonised in his mind, just as the kulaks would be later in the mind of Joseph Stalin.

  Ivan’s behaviour became erratic in the extreme, his moods swinging from violence to repentance, blasphemy to prolonged prayer. Around Christmas 1564 he suddenly announced his intention to abdicate and left Moscow. The populace called for his return, which he eventually agreed to, but only after making clear that he expected absolute power. The tool he used to exercise this power was the oprichniki, the forerunner of secret police everywhere; dressed in black and riding black horses, they created a climate of terror across the empire. Ivan founded a pseudo-monastic order with himself as the ‘abbot’ and the oprichniki as ‘monks’, and performed black masses that were followed by orgies and torture. He organised rituals in which men’s ribs were torn out with red-hot tongs. Afterwards the tsar collapsed prostate on the altar, before rising to preach wild sermons of repentance to the drunken oprichniki. Sadism was routine. Sir Jerome Horsey, Elizabeth I’s ambassador to Ivan’s court, described how one prince who had displeased the tsar ‘was drawn upon a long sharp-made stake, which entered the lower part of his body and came out of his neck; upon which he languished a horrible pain for fifteen hours alive, and spoke to his mother, brought to behold that woeful sight. And she was given to 100 gunners, who defiled her to death, and the Emperor’s hungry hounds devoured her flesh and bones.’ Ivan decided that the citizens of Novgorod were insufficiently respectful, and proceeded to sack the city and massacre its citizens in an orgy of torture, rape and burning. The Volkhov river reportedly burst its banks because of the number of corpses, as men, women and children were tied to sleighs and plunged into the icy waters. The city’s archbishop was sewn into a bearskin and then hunted to death by a pack of hounds.

  Like Stalin, Ivan frequently turned on his closest advisors: his treasurer was boiled alive and a councillor was strung up, while the oprichniki took turns hacking pieces off his body.

  Ivan died in 1584, but long before then had clearly become totally insane. In 1572 he dismissed the oprichniki and abdicated in favour of an obscure Mongol general. After a year in which he regularly visited Moscow to bow before the new tsar, Ivan took the throne back. In 1581 he had a row with his son’s pregnant wife, beating her because she wasn’t dressed appropriately. His son sprang to her defence, whereupon Ivan hit him with his iron-tipped staff; after several days in a coma his son died. Ivan was consumed by grief and remorse, repeatedly smashing his head against his son’s coffin, just as he had smashed his head against the floor when his first wife Anastasia had died. Such behaviour did nothing to restore his sanity, which was in any case exacerbated by his addiction to mercury and his almost certain syphilis. It was not surprising that the tsar had succumbed to the deadly new disease that had been brought back to Europe by Columbus’s sailors, given Ivan’s legendary carnal appetite for both sexes. Ivan boasted of the thousands of virgins he had deflowered and bastards he had fathered. It is therefore ironic that, although at the end he had to be carried everywhere in a litter while his skin peeled, his hair fell out and his body stank, the symptom that history remembers is that ‘the Emperor began grievously to swell in his cods’.

  Attempts have been made to argue that Ivan’s terror was not unusual. One of the nearest comparisons occurred three hundred years earlier on the opposite side of Europe. Edward I of England was brought up a prisoner of over-powerful lords, and when his beloved wife died he went on a frenzy of territorial expansion in Wales and Scotland, unleashing a storm of massacre and terror upon Scottish cities like Berwick every bit as monstrous as Ivan’s assault on Novgorod. But Edward was already entwined by the principles of Magna Carta and the nascent stirrings of parliament. Another English example was a contemporary of Ivan’s; while Ivan was sewing Novgorod’s archbishop into a bearskin, Henry VIII was making the Abbot of Glastonbury ride naked through the streets before his execution. It is true that the violence and terror of Tudor England has largely been written out of histo
ry books, with the dissolution of the monasteries usually presented as nothing more than a few land transfers, but Ivan’s sadism was on an altogether different scale.

  Ivan’s lust for blood and land exceeded Henry VIII’s, as did his lust for women – although that comparison is closer. After Anastasia, Ivan married another noted beauty but soon tired of her. His third wife died two weeks after the wedding and his fourth he sent to a convent. His fifth marriage was also short lived. His sixth wife was found to have a lover: he was impaled below her window and she was sent to a convent. She was lucky: wife number seven was discovered not to be a virgin, and Ivan immediately had her drowned. His eighth wife managed to survive three years of marriage and thereby outlived him. Ivan cast his net wide when looking for a wife. In 1567, when he was faring badly in the Livonian Wars, Ivan approached the representative of the Muscovy Company, Anthony Jenkinson, to see if the English queen, Elizabeth I, would marry him and provide a refuge if he had to flee the country. She had other ideas.

  One area in which a comparison with England, and in particular with Henry VIII, is valid is the degree to which Ivan achieved a redistribution of wealth. Henry took away the wealth of the Church, Ivan the wealth of the boyars.

  The short period in which the oprichniki were active had a profound influence on the development of Russia, not only because of its terror but because of the economic transformation it created. Their primary targets were the old boyar families in the Muscovy heartland, whose land was seized; many of those not killed were deported to more remote regions. Many market towns that had previously been owned by boyars and run as their private property now became the tsar’s. From then on the great ‘landowners’ were not landowners at all; they rented their estates from the tsar in return for service and tax, and he could end their lease whenever he wished. The power of the boyars was destroyed, and in their place Ivan placed the dvoriane, the imperial bureaucrats who were sons and grandsons of royal servants and even slaves. The dvoriane were given enormous local power, which they exploited ruthlessly to enrich themselves, but Ivan made sure that the power they exercised never became a threat to him. None of the provincial governors was allowed to stay in post for more than two years, and one was the norm, while governors were never appointed to areas where they themselves held estates.

  Ivan IV gave Russia an imperial autocracy controlling every aspect of life. Nobody else had a shred of effective political or economic power. The empire Ivan bequeathed to his genetically challenged son Fyodor became one of the world’s most powerful.

  Russia after Ivan

  The death of Ivan IV released his people from a tyranny of insane terror. His reign might be expected to be held up as a warning. In fact the opposite has often been true. To many, from the ultra nationalist right to the Stalinist left, he has been a symbol of patriotism and devotion to the motherland. Even today a small but vociferous group within the Russian Orthodox Church argue for Ivan’s beatification. His Russian nomenclature, they would argue, more properly translates not as Terrible but as Awesome. In the language of the 2003 Iraq War, his proponents would argue that his leadership embodied not the ‘terror’ of Saddam Hussein but ‘the shock and awe’ of Bush II.

  With hindsight it is tempting to discern continuity in events across the centuries. The history of terror is an example. From the Mongols, through Ivan the Terrible to Lenin and Stalin, terror has been a repeating feature of Russian life. When developing their theories on the use of terror in such works as Lenin’s 1918 booklet Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade K. Kautsky and Trotsky’s 1920 eulogy to mass terror, Terrorism and Communism, the Bolsheviks were certainly drawing on the lessons of history. Stalin seems to have pictured himself quite consciously as inheriting the mantle of Ivan the Terrible. But it is wrong to think that governing through terror is characteristically Russian. For long periods after Ivan IV the Russian state continued without his kind of terror, and with less sadistic coercion. Terror may be a tool to which the ruling elite in Russia has repeatedly turned, but it cannot be said that the acceptance of terror is part of the collective Russian psyche. No people welcome the opportunity to live in a state of perpetual fear. What can more persuasively be argued to be particularly Russian is the acceptance of autocracy.

  The philosophical catchword of American history, the ideological concept that Americans believe underpins their whole political culture, is ‘democracy’. Russian history has a similar core value: ‘autocracy’. In many countries individuals yearn for the state to provide order and decisive government; in most countries the political elites yearn for absolute power. There is nothing particularly Russian about that. Indeed Russia has spawned numerous anarchist movements, demonstrating that autocracy was never universally accepted. As a sweeping generalisation, however, it is fair to assert that Russians have a greater desire for ‘strong leadership’ than, for example, Americans or Britons. Lord Acton’s dictum that ‘All power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely’ would be instinctively accepted by most Americans but would still provoke debate in Moscow or St Petersburg.

  The difference between autocracy and democracy is not that they have opposing aspirations but that they attach different priorities to those aspirations. Autocracy puts order above liberty, the nation above the citizen, collective security above individual freedom, responsibilities above rights. Democracy, at least in theory, does the opposite. Democracy is about citizens selecting their government from among themselves. It implies a theoretical equality between governed and governing; the governed are saying ‘we are worth the same as you’. In western eyes the concept of autocracy seems to imply a people saying ‘we value ourselves less than we value our rulers’, but this is a misunderstanding. Autocracy is based on the premise that everyone has rights and obligations but these rights vary according to one’s position in society. The autocrat rules as a father ruled the traditional family; it is his role to protect and provide, and in return receive respect and absolute obedience. Autocracy implies that all people are not equal; it does not imply that Russians attached no value to themselves. Ivan’s other legacy enhanced that self-valuation. The birth of empire allowed Russians, after centuries of Mongol rule, to once again feel superior to other peoples. And that superiority reinforced the autocracy because it was the autocrat who had made conquest possible.

  Russian imperialism was inextricably wedded to autocracy. In general American imperialism has been driven by individuals and corporations seeking land and wealth; the state intervened later to protect and legitimise their conquests. In Russia the state went first, conquering its way to empire. Of course there were exceptions, like the Russian pioneers in Siberia and Alaska and American military campaigns against the ‘Indians’ on the western frontier. But in general American imperial expansion has been characterised by Americans replacing or seeking to Americanise the natives of the lands they conquered. In contrast Russian imperialism has sought to rule and exploit the natives, but not necessarily to Russify them. As a consequence Russians (with the notable exception of the Bolsheviks) have no vision of themselves as the prototype for a global civilisation.

  Russians and Americans, like many if not most nationalities, tend to regard themselves as superior to other peoples. But Russians have never developed the equivalent of the innate American belief that deep down everyone else in the world really wants to be an American or, at least, would want to be so if only they could be educated to understand the virtues of the American way of life. Ivan the Terrible left a model of empire that had to be imposed rather than sold.

  Ivan the Terrible so dominated his age, murdering anyone who might pose a threat to his throne, that his death inevitably left a power vacuum. The consequence was a period known simply as the Time of Troubles, with warring factions at court and more importantly the ever-present threat of invasion. Unlike the Mongol invasion the next one was short-lived, but it too left an indelible mark on the Russian psyche. While the Swedes conquered Novgorod another enemy struck at the
heart of Muscovy. The Poles tried to take advantage of the divisions within the Russian nobility, and the centuries-long hatred of Catholic Poland was born. The Time of Troubles lasted just fifteen years, but the chaos and strife were burnt deeply into the Russian folk memory, especially when contrasted with the long and ‘stable’ rule of Ivan the Terrible. The creed of autocracy could have ended with Ivan’s death just as the creed of democracy in America could have been snuffed out by the reality of slavery. In neither case was the development of these values automatic; choices were made consciously as well as unconsciously. There were no democracies in the Time of Troubles but there were alternatives to autocracy. Next door, for example, Polish kings were elected; a protodemocracy had existed in Novgorod in living memory; and Kievan Rus itself was far from a pure autocracy. The concept of a hereditary monarchy providing strong and untrammelled leadership was adopted at the very time when it might be thought the hereditary principle was proving of absolutely no value. A mad tsar had ruled for nearly half a century to be followed by his mentally inadequate offspring, whose incapacity produced chaos and violence. And yet it was the near anarchy of the Time of Troubles that established in the collective consciousness the legitimacy, indeed necessity, of strong leadership, of autocracy.

  Just listing the key events illustrates the depths to which the newly reinvigorated Russian state rapidly sank:

  • Ivan was succeeded by his retarded son Fyodor I, who ‘ruled’ for fourteen years.

  • When Fyodor died the Time of Troubles really started. The throne was seized by Boris Godunov (a Russian Macbeth, one of the many minor characters in Russian history rescued centuries later from justified oblivion by writers, poets or musicians more interested in dramatic licence than historical fact).

  • Boris I was followed by his son Fyodor II, who was almost immediately murdered.