Ivan the Terrible (70 page)

Yet Ivan's diplomacy suffered from his growing megalomania, his contempt for rulers who were not hereditary (like the King of Sweden or the King of Denmark, or eventually Stephen Bathory) or for powers whose rulers were not ‘sovereign’ but were forced to listen to the wishes of their subjects, like Queen Elizabeth I. Similarly, he expected ‘great’ embassies to be sent to him; he must be sought after and did not take the initiative. This is most noteworthy in the negotiations over the succession to the Crown of Poland–Lithuania, which leave one with the impression that Ivan did not really want the crown for himself, foreseeing the difficulties he would experience in establishing his authority over a political system totally alien to him and divided in religion, and uncertain about winning it for his younger son. In general Russian diplomacy suffered from ignorance of the outer world and its ways, and of languages.

The combination of the despotism of the Tsar, the ravages of war, and the demoralization and havoc created by the
oprichnina
served also to delay and even prevent the opening up of Russia to the intellectual and spiritual movements which had been manifested in the
West, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter Reformation. The whole period from 1453 to 1598 is one of extreme fermentation of minds and spirits in Russia, which was far more profoundly affected by the fall of Constantinople than western Europe and by the ensuing advance of Ottoman power and Islam into the Danubian basin – even if this advance was compensated for by the conquest of Kazan’. It was an event with both spiritual and political consequences for a country only just emerging from the overlordship of the Golden Horde.

Meanwhile, diplomatic relations with the Holy Roman Empire and the principalities of the Danube basin, even if under Ottoman suzerainty, all brought Russia nearer to west European culture. Yet the long years of single-minded concentration on war for the Baltic – from 1558 to 1582 – accompanied by the terror, left Russia with neither the intellectual nor the spiritual energy to embark on a wide-ranging intellectual opening to western culture and technology. The moral and material resources available for cultural development were concentrated rather on advances within the range of traditional Orthodox culture. Russia did not link up at all with the European intellectual system; it remained outside the network of universities and schools, springing up in western Europe, and even in the New World, which were in any case based on Latin.

Neither the state, in the person of Ivan IV, nor the Church, whose international aura had been somewhat dimmed by the fall of its spiritual capital into non-Christian hands, and which clung still to the theory of the divine nature of the ruler, could tolerate the development of independent thought. Thus knowledge of the various theological currents which flourished under the name of the Protestant Reformation was very superficial. Russians met with Protestantism in England, Sweden, Livonia, and to some extent Poland–Lithuania, and with Catholicism in the Commonwealth, and the Church of Rome remained the ultimate political and religious rival.
¹⁸
Anglicanism was perceived as a variety of Lutheranism. Much has been made of the discussion between Jan Rokyta and Ivan IV on Lutheranism and between Possevino and the Tsar on Catholicism, but it is really time to recognize that neither of these debates was carried on at a particularly high intellectual level.
¹⁹

Paradoxically, the aspect of Renaissance culture which dominated the court of Ivan, sustained by Ivan's paranoia, was the world of the occult, based on alchemy, magic, witchcraft, and astrology, together with some aspects of the carnavalesque culture of misrule which existed in other
countries and which in Russia was the province of the
skomorokhi
, wandering entertainers who incurred the severest condemnation from the Orthodox Church. The
Litsevoi svod
or illuminated sixteenth-century Chronicle contains a version of the
Alexander Romance,
with a miniature of the wizard king of Egypt, Nectanebus and his magic wand, the real father of Alexander the Great by Olympias, and by implication, in the tale, an ancestor of Prus and the dynasty of Riurik.
²⁰

One of the intellectual and moral trends which had contributed massively to the cultural flavour of the Middle Ages in the West, the ideal of chivalry, was totally absent in Russia.
²¹
However meretricious much of this ideal may have been, against the background of the ruthless medieval wars and the Crusades, nevertheless the ideal flourished in court society and it contributed to a slow, European-wide process of civilization of manners and behaviour, and particularly to an increasing appreciation of the role of educated women in society. Paradoxically, however, a resemblance between the members of the
oprichnina
and the orders of chivalry has occasionally been detected.
²²
It is possible that the parallel is rather with the military orders of Spain, though who knows whether the Order of the Dragon, founded by Sigismund, King of Hungary, later the Emperor Sigismund, at the end of the fourteenth century, of which Vlad
epe
Dracul I became a member, was not the model.

The final blow which Ivan inflicted on his country was the destruction of the dynasty by the political murder of his cousin Vladimir and one of the latter's children, and the accidental killing of his childless eldest surviving son, at a time when dynastic continuity was a principal guarantee of prosperity and stability. The succession of Ivan's younger son, Fedor, postponed the disaster until the latter's childless death in 1598, when for the first time a tsar was elected. Ivan must have turned in his grave at the spectacle of an elected tsar on his throne.
²³
But however serious the crisis created by the arrival on the scene of the first False Dmitri, it would not have been so disastrous for Russia had Boris Godunov not died when he did, or had his capable son been a grown man, able to seize the reins of power.

There remains the problem of the significance of Ivan's reign for the spiritual and moral quality of the Russian people. At the beginning of his reign, the young Ivan seemed to display some of the inspiring qualities of the young warrior kings and princes of the West, Henry V, Jean sans Peur, Charles VIII, the young Henry VIII, an image which lasted until after the conquest of Kazan’. In the 1550s he showed some aspects of an astute and prudent ruler, in a period which saw the enactment of some
constructive measures. Then came the domestic tragedy of 1560, and what was probably the first of many severe bouts of paranoia, which completely overthrew the balance of the still young Tsar. The cruelty and sadism which were unleashed on the governing élite eventually spread in widening circles throughout the country in an orgy of debauchery, culminating in outbursts of torture and atrocities.
²⁴

The general obsession with Hell and the tortures of the damned in the Christian world of the West and the East at this time should not be forgotten. This is the age of Hieronymus Bosch, Botticelli's drawings illustrating Dante's
Inferno
and endless portrayals of the most ingenious and painful torments which can be devised by human imagination, painted on church walls and icons in both Orthodox and Catholic Europe. And these events are echoed in folk-tales with a superimposed grim humour.
²⁵
In addition to the torments of Hell, most countries, west or east, suffered from extremely cruel wars and punitive systems. The
chevauchées
of the Black Prince in France during the Hundred Years’ War, the raids of the
écorcheurs
in the service of Louis XI of France, the execution of prisoners in the Wars of the Roses, the horrors of Anglo-Scottish border warfare, or of the conquest of Ireland; and in a different field, the flames of the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions, the rule of the Duke of Alba in the Netherlands, the execution of Catholics and heretics in England, the burning of Savonarola, Miguel Servet and Giordano Bruno, the Massacre of St Bartholomew's Day, and the savage repression of the Pilgrimage of Grace under Henry VIII and of the Rising of the Northern Earls by Elizabeth I, all bear witness to an intensification of cruelty not perhaps unrelated to religious conflict, at a time when people believed they were fighting for their salvation.
²⁶

Such a moral climate was bound to lead to a festering and corrupt morass of fear and suspicion. Even without making use of the often partisan memoirs of the foreign writers on sixteenth-century Russia, merely confining oneself to the
Sinodiki
and the various Chronicles as sources,
²⁷
even those inured to the horrors of the twentieth century cannot but be appalled at the numbers of men, women and children (‘whose names were known only to God’) who were sacrificed to the demon of fear by the paranoid Tsar. The mentality of fear and suspicion that he deliberately cultivated both in the
zemshchina
and in the
oprichnina
, or
dvor
, contributed to the culture of denunciation implicit in the system of
krugovaya poruka
or collective suretyship.
²⁸
It conceals behind a dense shadow the nature of the policies pursued by the Tsar.

One should pause a moment to consider the effect of such a human haemorrhage on a society in which the élite was extremely closely interrelated by common descent from the dynastic founder, and by intermarriage.
²⁹
Men killed in battle or in the torture chamber, or executed, women dishonoured, many struck down without religious rites, left unburied, their bodies thrown to the dogs, children massacred we know not how – what hatreds must have consumed a society in which the executioners and the executed were bound so closely to one another and in which surviving depended on stepping on the bodies of one's friends and relatives. The lack of evidence about individuals renders it difficult to reconstruct personal relationships, but a few tentative suggestions may be made.

Take the case of Peter Basmanov, who fought gallantly for Boris Godunov until the Tsar died, in 1605. Either because of a precedence dispute, or because he had not forgiven the deaths of his father Fedor and his grandfather Aleksei at the hands of Maliuta Skuratov, Ivan's chief executioner, whose daughter Marfa was Boris Godunov's wife, Peter Basmanov now transferred his support from young Tsar Fedor Borisovich, and espoused the cause of the first false Dmitri.
³⁰
Similarly, Prince Ivan M. Vorotynsky, the son of Prince Mikhail Ivanovich, the victor over the 1572 Tatar attack on Moscow who was executed in 1573, may well have provided information to the
d'iak
Ivan Timofeev, who was close to the Vorotynsky clan, about the horrors of the destruction of Novgorod.
³¹
The violence which subsequently marked the Time of Troubles in the seventeenth century has its roots in the reign of Ivan IV.
³²
Not many people have expressed themselves so openly and so critically in the seventeenth century as Ivan Timofeev, but what he wrote is evidence that people knew and had not forgotten.

At this point one must come to grips with the roots of Ivan's cruelty and his ability to impose it on his people throughout a long reign. In the first place there is his justification for the emphasis on punishment in his conception of the role of a Tsar. Ivan has left plenty of material in letters, instructions, recorded speeches on which to base such an analysis, but it must be recognized that evidence of his thought and activity must always be slightly suspect. It is almost certain that he did not write his long tirades himself, but dictated them over time to clerks who remain unknown, and they have survived mainly in manuscript copies. In the case of the letters allegedly from the four boyars written in 1567 the scribes may well have been employees of the Office of Foreign Affairs.
³³
But nothing is known about Ivan's private secretariat, or scriptorium, except that it must have existed in view of the constant
activity in the organization and supervision of warfare, internal government, and foreign affairs, all of which were still conducted in his own
dvor
.
³⁴
There is enough similarity in the cast of mind, the expressions used, the choice of the lengthy quotations from the Bible and the Apocrypha, the
Velikii Chetii Minei
, and other religious sources such as the Pseudepigrapha, to convince the reader that we are not faced here with seventeenth-century forgeries. It is also impossible to find a convincing substitute for the Tsar, someone who could have been responsible behind the scenes for the letters from the four boyars of 1567, in which Ivan actually speaks of himself as ‘mentally deranged’, or the letter to the Lithuanian Prince A. Polubensky of 9 July 1577.
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