Ivan the Terrible (38 page)

The shifting military situation in the Baltic in 1564 and 1565 and the failure of all compromise over the terms of an armistice between Russia and Poland led to the continuation of a war of which both sides were beginning to feel the strain in men and treasure. Ivan now thought up a new plan, namely to recreate the Livonian Order as a vassal state, under its old Grand Master, Wilhelm von Fürstenberg, who had remained in Russian captivity, but whom Ivan respected and had treated well. But Fürstenberg, loyal still to his German overlord, the Holy Roman Emperor, refused the gambit. Spring and summer 1564 saw reverses of the Russian armies in Livonia, notably at the battle of Ula in August, which Ivan regarded as a serious setback, further defections of Russians to Lithuania and clandestine discussions between the nobles in both countries, with or without Ivan's knowledge and approval. The impact of Kurbsky's defection on the Russian attitude in the negotiations with Lithuania must not be underestimated; it had a profound effect on Ivan's attitude to other Russian princes and boyars and increased his suspicions of their loyalty.
⁸

The increasing number of executions following on the introduction of the
oprichnina
led eventually to a collective remonstrance on the part of the boyars and princes, including, or possibly led by, the Metropolitan Afanasii, in the summer of 1565. ‘They told [Ivan] that no Christian ruler had the right to treat human beings like animals; instead he should fear the righteous dooms of God, who avenges the blood of innocents unto the third generation.’ This collective remonstrance must have made Ivan very angry seeing that he had become accustomed to complete submission to his ideas. He was in any case away from Moscow on a pilgrimage, and possibly inspecting his newly acquired confiscated estates from May until the end of July 1565,
⁹
and seems to have moderated his desire to make a clean sweep of his enemies for a few months. Among those who did suffer in early 1566 was Prince Vladimir of Staritsa.

Always deeply ambivalent towards his cousin, Ivan had already
removed all the members of Vladimir's retinue and replaced them by others; he now determined to change all his landholdings, including the principal centre Staritsa, from which he derived his name. These lands were replaced with scattered holdings elsewhere, thus cutting Vladimir's links with traditional supporters in a consolidated appanage. Whether the Tsar suspected his cousin of masterminding a new attempt to dethrone him can only be surmised, but he had certainly deprived him of the means to carry it out.
¹⁰

In April 1566, apparently on the intercession of boyars and service gentry in the
zemshchina
led by the boyar Ivan Fedorov, Prince Mikhail Vorotynsky was freed from his exile in the monastery of Beloozero and allowed to return to Moscow, subject to staggering sureties by five boyars who pledged their heads and fifteen thousand rubles. Much of his enormous estate was returned to him, and he was allowed to maintain his boyars and his military retinue, enabling him to live like an appanage prince.
¹¹

Though a substantial portion of his patrimonial estates was returned to Vorotynsky, it was still not enough to pay the debts caused by his exile without help from Ivan, which was forthcoming.
¹²
The way in which Ivan treated Vorotynsky suggests that the Tsar could not make up his mind whether he was an enemy or a friend, whether he needed him as a general or distrusted him as a traitor. Many of the boyars and service gentry exiled to Kazan' were now also allowed to return and received back some land in May 1566 subject also to sureties in which substantial sums of money were put up guaranteeing that the men involved would not flee to Lithuania, and would report any suspicious activities. The advantages of this procedure were that the victims could be allowed back to court, sometimes even to serve in the
oprichnina
.

The time spent in lengthy and fruitless negotiations for peace in 1565 and 1566 coincided with a degree of moderation in Ivan's attitude to the higher nobles and to his servants, though the reshuffling of estates in areas allocated to the
oprichnina
continued apace. During most of 1565 the Tsar did not live in Moscow, but in Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda, which he continued to fortify, and he also started building a fortress in distant Vologda (in
oprichnina
land), on the road to Kholmogory and the White Sea, a more secure refuge in the event of disturbances.

It was here in Vologda that the English Muscovy Company, founded in order to make use of the privileges for English trade granted by Ivan in 1555, had its main base. The Tsar granted the Company the right to trade anywhere in Russia without paying duties or other taxes, and a series of other rights to guarantee its safety and efficiency. The Company
was allowed to buy houses in Moscow, Vologda and Kholmogory and a warehouse on a suitable wharf. By 1589, the Company had five houses dotted about the north and it sent its own agents to Russia together with the necessary subordinate staff who often tried to make money trading on the side, and craftsmen and apprentices.
¹³
The chief agent sometimes acted as envoy for the English Crown; at other times the Queen sent an ambassador of her own.
¹⁴
Anthony Jenkinson, who was agent of the Company in 1557, secured the consent of Ivan to explore the possibilities of trade to the Caspian and beyond, and this led eventually to some trading expeditions to Persia. Jenkinson was able to bring back jewels and silks for Ivan which may have established a link between the two men, for Ivan always showed particular confidence in him, even liking for him, in years to come.
¹⁵

In spring 1565 a seven-year truce had been concluded between Russia and Sweden.
¹⁶
Meanwhile, relying on their alliance with the Crimean Tatars for peace on their southern boundaries, the Lithuanians had continued to harass the Russian forces on the borders around the Dvina and in Livonia. But in 1566 Lithuania was also faced with war with Sweden in Livonia. The Lithuanian need for Polish military help in the conflicts with both Russia and Sweden pointed to a possible future change in the dynastic constitutional structure uniting the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Principality of Lithuania about which there was much talk in Vilna. However, talks between Russia and the Commonwealth were soon underway again, because neither side saw a way out of the conflict. On 30 May 1566 a ‘grand’ Lithuanian embassy arrived in Moscow, led by a great magnate, Iuri Alexandrovicz Chodkewicz, brother of the Hetman of Lithuania, and composed of 7 nobles and 10 attendants together with an escort of 850 men, over 12,000 horses, and 56 senior tradesmen in charge of disposing advantageously of the goods the embassy had brought. They were lodged in the Lithuanian House (
Litovskii dvor
), and Ivan, who was at the Trinity monastery, returned on 6 June, when the embassy had settled in. They were given the usual state banquet by the Tsar.
¹⁷

The Lithuanian embassy was the end product of several meetings of the Lithuanian Sejm, in November 1565 in Vilna, and in April 1566 in Beresteisk, which had discussed at length the policy to be followed in the war with Russia in view of the financial exhaustion of the country. It is unlikely that Sigismund expected to achieve peace, in view of the probable rejection of the Lithuanian terms by Ivan, but he might achieve a lengthy truce. Formal talks with Russia began on 6 June, carried out on behalf of Ivan by Vasily Mikhailovich Iur'ev Zakhar'in,
¹⁸
a nephew
of Tsaritsa Anastasia whose daughter was married to Prince Mikhail Cherkassky, the brother of Tsaritsa Maria (a union of the families of the two Tsaritsas), Prince A. D. Viazemsky and a
duma
servitor, P. Zaitsev, (these last two would become prominent members of the
oprichnina
), I. M. Viskovaty, and a couple of
duma
secretaries.
¹⁹
The Lithuanians proposed to partition Livonia with the Russians, with both sides eventually joining to expel the Swedes from Estonia. The Tsar and his advisers took this as an indication of Lithuanian weakness and hoped to win recognition of the Russian right to the whole of Livonia including Riga, simply by ceding Courland, and Polotsk, and some territory around the city to Lithuania, a cession which was considered necessary to protect Polotsk from attack by Russia over the Western Dvina. But the Lithuanians were not prepared to cede control of the waterway of the Dvina and the port of Riga, vital for their economy, and had built a chain of fortified places in Lithuanian territory to defend it.
²⁰

A meeting of the Russian Boyar Council on 17 June listened to a report by the boyars charged with conducting the talks with Lithuania. Since neither side would give up the claim to Riga, the Council determined to abandon hope of signing a peace treaty in favour of a more limited truce.
²¹
A proposal that Ivan and Sigismund Augustus should meet in person was welcomed at first by Ivan but no agreement could be reached on matters of etiquette (who was to visit whom at a banquet).
²²
Ivan was now asking not only for Dorpat and Narva, but also for the island of Oesel, at present occupied by Denmark. No agreement on the terms of a truce had been reached by 25 June, and the talks, led by V.M. Iur'ev on the Russian side, were adjourned for ten days.
²³
At this point the historian Zimin adds: ‘it was in order to settle this most important question, that a meeting not just of the Boyar Council but of a
Zemskii sobor
was required, which gave a wider representation to the interests of the Russian ruling class.’
²⁴
The Assembly was to pronounce on two questions: should Russia agree to accept a frontier on the Dvina, as proposed by the Poles, and should Ivan surrender his claims in Livonia?
²⁵

A gathering of members of some of the various social groups in Russia took place on 28 June 1566, which is usually described by historians as a
Zemskii sobor
, or Assembly of the Land.
²⁶
According to Giles Fletcher, Elizabeth's ambassador to Tsar Fedor in 1588 to 1589, ‘Their highest Court of publike consultation for matter of State is called the
Zabore
, that is the Publike assembly.’
²⁷
The intervention of an institution in the negotiations for a truce raises in acute form the problem of what in fact this body was. It is interesting to observe that Karamzin, for instance, in
his
History of the Russian State
, which began publication in 1816 does not use the name
Zemskii sobor
; he writes:

Karamzin's description of the meetings and their eventual decisions implies that the various ranks of Russia were all summoned to join in a session of the Boyar Council,
²⁹
or to put it differently, the
Zemskii sobor
formed part of the Boyar Council. The name,
Zemskii sobor
, is an invention of the nineteenth century, at a time when Russians were beginning to write the history of their country and liberal revolutionary movements in many countries were attempting to introduce constitutions establishing representative institutions of many different kinds. These were based on the American and French revolutionary constitutions of 1787 and 1791 or their more recent exemplar, the Spanish constitution of 1812, with which Russian liberals were very familiar since it was one of the most powerful influences on the thought of the northern section of the Decembrist movement in 1825.
³⁰

Most Soviet historians simply assume that an Assembly of the Land existed in Russia and describe what they take to be its composition, but they rarely provide a rigorous scholarly analysis of its emergence, structure, the nature of representation and of the mandate of representatives, the electoral system, and the political powers (if any).
³¹
In Zimin's view the decision to call an assembly was expressed in the form of a
prigovor
or ruling by the Boyar Council (of which there is no evidence), and not in a summons by the Tsar.
³²
Whereas Skrynnikov, in telling the story of the armistice negotiations, briefly states: ‘On 25 June [1566] the talks were broken off, and three days later a special
Zemskii sobor
was called’.
³³
Both these historians assume that there was such an institution as a
Zemskii sobor
, which had met before and could be summoned again, and whose consent was advisable, even necessary, on whether to continue to fight to keep Ivan's conquered Livonian ancestral lands. But there was as yet no such institution: it was still in the womb of time.

To begin with, was the body which met to discuss policy in the 1566
Zemskii sobor
representative of estates at all?
³⁴
Three hundred and seventy-four people attended. No representative was elected or chosen by any form of electoral process.
³⁵
More to the point, did ‘estates’ exist in Russia? Society could of course be divided, as almost everywhere, into three categories: those who fought, those who prayed and those who laboured. But this was a sociological classification, not a political one.

Attempts to detect a Western-type feudalism in Russia associated with the name of the nineteenth-century historian, Pavlov Silvansky,
³⁶
failed, in large part because of two features of Russian social development. The first was the absence of a juridical culture in early modern Russia. None of the Russian social groups was legally defined, nor did it have any legal, let alone political corporate rights. The second feature was the broad division of the population into ‘service people’ and ‘taxable people’. Only in the old city republics of Novgorod and Pskov did some memory of a different form of government linger on (and perhaps in Smolensk).