Russia (15 page)

In 1514 Vasilii captured the important city of Smolensk to the west. Only a few years before, he had abolished Pskov’s former liberties. It was by then safe for him to do so. He had made peace with both Lithuania and Livonia in 1509. Until that point he could not afford to antagonize Pskov, which was so important for mobilizing troops on the western frontier, by threatening what remained of its autonomy. But once he no longer needed to placate it, its offending institutions were eliminated.
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Having strengthened Muscovy’s position in the west, he then turned to the south. In 1523 he tried and failed to take the Tatar city of Kazan, but then found an inventive way of bypassing it and achieving a large part of his purpose by building a fort near by. He called it Vasilievskaia, after himself. The project was expensive, but soon repaid the investment, for not only did Vasilievskaia threaten Kazan, it sheltered a fair which succeeding in stealing most of the trade of the nomadic Nogai Tatars, which had formerly gone to Kazan.
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Meanwhile he cultivated relations with Europe’s great powers, especially the Emperor. In 1514 Vasily’s diplomats scored a triumph: their master was actually referred to as
‘Keyser’
in the German version of an agreement, and
‘imperator’
in the Latin: Vasilii had achieved recognition as a ruler of equal rank to the Emperor Maximilian.
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This triumph was also somewhat ironic, because (as has been noted before) though Muscovy had an emperor it was not yet an empire. Apart from tribesmen incapable of making a state of their own, Vasilii ruled over virtually none but Russians. In any case Maximilian soon came to a
rap-prochement with Poland and his officials reverted to their former manner of addressing the Grand Prince. Nevertheless the idea had been aired. The Emperors embassy to Moscow of 1517 - led by Sigismund von Herberstein, a Slovene nobleman who was to write one of the earliest published accounts of Russia - did not refer to an imperial title. However, Vasilii had allowed a resumption of relations with Constantinople, broken off after the Council of Florence, and the Greeks were always ready to point to a continuity between their imperial heritage and that of Vasilii, whose mother, after all, had been a Palaeologue.

In 1518 Vasilii received a large delegation from the patriarch of Constantinople, which included an interpreter called Maxim, a learned scholar who was to remain in Muscovy. And that same year an emissary, Nicholas Schonberg, arrived from Pope Leo X in the hope of negotiating a five-year truce between Muscovy and Poland, a united front against the Turk, and a union of the Muscovite Church with Rome. And once again the matter of the Constantinople inheritance was raised.

The monk Filofei, otherwise known as Philotheus of Pskov, developed the idea of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’ in a letter to Vasilii III around 1523. This germ of an idea was to be developed into the Legend of the White Cowl. The cowl, the headdress worn by a patriarch, symbolizing the purity of faith that, according to the story, had once characterized St Peter, had moved from Rome to Constantinople (the Second Rome), which, as events had proved, was unworthy of the honour. For this reason it had now migrated to the ‘Third Rome’, Moscow. It has been argued that the purpose of the myth was to promote Moscow as the chief centre of the Orthodox world rather than support its pretensions to empire.
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Nevertheless, it was to provide the state with a religious justification for uniting not just the Russians but all Orthodox Christians, whether in Russia, Ukraine, the Balkans or the Levant.

Year after year passed, and still Grand Princess Solomonia did not bear a child. For twenty years her husband, Vasilii, showed patience, but he also took precautions. He forbade his younger brothers from marrying until he had an heir. Eventually, in 1525, he dispatched Solomonia to a nunnery and obtained permission from the Church to remarry. Then, immediately after his second marriage, to Elena Glinskaia, Vasilii did something strangely untraditional. He shaved off his beard. His appearance clean-shaven shocked many Russians, and not surprisingly. They believed that a man was made in God’s image, and that his beard was an integral part of him. A clean-shaven
man was a heretic or, worse, a Latin, someone who had betrayed his heritage. Indeed, one of the most intense expressions of hatred by one Russian for another was to try to cut off his beard, for to lose one’s beard was tantamount to losing one’s place in the world to come.
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Vasilii’s gesture, however, suggests that he believed he must have the appearance of a Roman emperor if he were to realize his imperial ambitions.

Religious conservatism, which harked back to the Great Schism of the Christian Church in the twelfth century, implied cultural isolation. It was not compatible with the social and technological advances of the Renaissance age. The issue of beards, which symbolized the tension between the modernizers and traditionalists, was not to be resolved for almost two centuries, and even then the tension did not entirely disappear. The problem touched on identity, patriotism and, ultimately, the nature of Russian nationalism. Russians knew who they were: Christians. Every peasant defined himself as such. And their idea was quite compatible with the centralized state that Ivan III had created. But if the cosy womb of Orthodoxy were to be breached, its customs and values challenged, what would a Russian be? And if it were not and Russians were trapped in the past and the isolationism that that implied, how could Russia become an empire?

O
N
16
JANUARY
1547, at a glittering ceremony in the Kremlin’s Cathedral of the Assumption, the sixteen-year-old son of Vasilii III was solemnly invested with a bejewelled cross and collar, with the cap of Vladimir Monomakh, which had been brought from Constantinople, and with a cloak of imperial purple. In this way young Ivan IV became the first tsar, as well as autocrat, of Russia. The long-sought imperial title had finally been approved by the supreme head of the Orthodox Christian Church, the Patriarch of Constantinople, who for Russians was the only legitimate ecclesiastical authority. It may seem ironic that Ivan, who was to parade his piety as a most Christian monarch, should have received his imperial dignity from a subject of the Muslim Ottoman sultan. But the title was to be justified by temporal events.

As the investiture ceremony made clear, more than titles were involved -more even than demonstrations of legitimacy - for the ceremony linked Ivan’s Russia with the Roman Empire. The country’s new imperial status was proclaimed in the blessing: ‘Grant [Ivan] long life … Seat him on the throne of righteousness … [and] bring all the barbarian peoples under his power.’
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The reign of Ivan IV is one of the great climacterics of history. It marks the emergence of an imperial power in fact as well as aspiration, and Ivan justified Russia’s use of the double-headed eagle by ordering expansionist drives southwards into the Caucasus, and westward to the Baltic, launching a third, into Siberia, for good measure. The new imperial status was also supported by a fresh, and violent, effort to make government autocratic in practice as well as in theory, by the emergence of a colonial administrative system, and by the systemization of Russia’s foreign relations.

The hectic period saw a series of other innovations and changes. The first printing press was set up in Moscow; the laws were to some extent reformed and an attempt was made to codify them; new technology was applied to both the army and its armament; and the revolution was capped by institutional developments of lasting importance: the establishment of a
system of granting landed estates on condition of service to the state, and of modern, absolutist, practices of government. It is curious, however, that Ivan — who is associated with Russia’s emergence as a great European power - should also be held responsible for its subsequent collapse, and doubly paradoxical that historians should claim that his own actions both undermined the empire he had created and helped to ensure its longer-term recovery However, the crucial changes of his tumultuous reign can hardly be understood without reference to the man himself in all his eccentric brilliance.

Ivan’s image is clouded by controversy He is both an object of hate and a folk hero. Since his own time he has been regarded as an ogre in the West, but his epithet ‘the Terrible’ is a misleading translation of the Russian
Groznyi,
‘the Dread’— bestowed by his propagandists for his punishing of wrongdoers — and he is still revered by many of his own people as a truly Christian ruler. One of his successors was to find it necessary to atone posthumously for Ivan’s sins; yet his image was to be resurrected as a morale-booster when Russia was beleaguered during the Second World War.

Furthermore, Ivan’s reputation has been shaped to suit political interests abroad as well as in Russia. Germans, frightened by Ivan’s drive towards the Baltic, used their new printing presses to blacken his image with sensational reports of his atrocities. More than sixty German news-sheets recording Ivan’s outrages, real and alleged, both in Russia and abroad, appeared between 1560 and 1580 alone. They included hair-raising stories of how the Russians not only butchered their enemies, severed people’s limbs, and led thousands away in chains, captive, but also spitted and roasted young girls, impaled babies, and burned old people in their houses. Atrocities
were
committed - though they were not the monopoly of one side — but exaggerated and invented tales about the Russians were disseminated in a deliberate attempt to enlist the sympathy of the German-speaking world and the help of the Habsburg Emperor. The Polish government and Counter-Reformation publicists added their voices to the anti-Ivan chorus (although the papacy, still hoping to bring the Orthodox Churches within its fold, and interested in Russia as a possible route to China, held its fire). So the notion was propagated that Russians were savage heretics and their tsar a classic tyrant. It was the foundation of a tradition which was to inspire President Reagan’s definition of the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’.
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During the Cold War, Western propaganda presented Ivan as the precursor of Stalin: a paranoid imperialist, and creator of a reign of terror. But
we should not judge him before the accretions of myth, both for and against him, have been stripped from his image. Nor should he be judged outside the context of his own turbulent and violent times. Ivan was a Renaissance prince and an Orthodox Christian in that confusing and pitiless age of Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation whose attendant wars were also to draw in the Christian Orthodox world to which Ivan and his people belonged. The invention of printing sharpened polemic, and the military revolution forced all monarchs who took their responsibilities seriously to take draconian measures to modernize their realms. Ivan was indeed responsible for terrible massacres, as were his contemporaries. Pizarro and the Spanish conquistadores did not shrink from killing; Lorenzo de’ Medici was ruthless in dispatching his political rivals; Louis XI of France sanctioned the St Bartholomew’s Day massacres; Queen Mary of England condoned the burning of the Oxford martyrs. The blood these rulers shed was as much a measure of the forces they were pitted against as of any sadistic impulses they may have had. Ivan was no less cruel than his peers, but that did not make him an Asiatic despot.

All this said, Ivan presents as a quirky figure. He married seven times -once more than Henry VIII — regardless of the canons of his Church, which permitted no more than three marriages. He quit his own capital in an apparent huff when thwarted, engaged personally in a theological disputation with a Jesuit sent to him by the Pope, had the Metropolitan of the Russian Church done to death, and killed his own eldest son in a fit of rage. In search of the real Ivan, his remains have been disinterred and subjected to scientific tests; there have even been attempts to psychoanalyse him in retrospect. Yet the controversy remains. Was he hero or devil, paranoiac, sadist, or just and concerned ruler? Contemporary historians are divided on the question.
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To get the measure of this man who was both maker and breaker of an empire, we need first to consider his formation and then follow his career as empire-builder in the context that shaped his actions.

Ivan was born in 1530, and succeeded to the throne in 1533, on the death of his father, Vasilii III. A council of regents ruled Russia in his name until he came of age. But the government was unstable, and the period stormy. When his mother, Elena Glinskaia, the central figure of the government, died, allegedly of poison, in 1538, Prince Vasilii Shuiskii took her place; and when Shuiskii died shortly afterwards his brother Ivan took over — only to be was ousted by a rival, Ivan Belskii, who was soon deposed in his turn and executed. Meanwhile successive heads of the Russian Church were
ousted and replaced. This traumatizing phase of political instability came to an end when members of Ivan’s mother’s family staged a coup in his favour in 1543. The occasion was his thirteenth birthday, which marked the coming of age for sons of emperors in the Byzantine Empire, and, according to the Nikon Chronicle, Ivan himself gave the order. So the presiding regent, Prince Andrei Shuiskii, was seized and handed over to the palace kennel-men, ‘and the dog-keepers took him and killed him … And from that time the boyars began to fear the sovereign.’
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Thus Ivan’s early years were marked by political instability, and possibly personal insecurity too (as Sergei Eisenstein, the famous Soviet film-maker, suggests in his classic but unfinished film treatment of Ivan). It is also said that he grew up wild and violent, but the source was a close friend who became a bitter enemy and cannot be trusted.
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Nor was it as easy for the young ruler to establish his authority as the chronicle makes out. However, we can infer from his own writings and contemporary accounts that Ivan had received an excellent education for his time and station. He was both highly literate and musical, interested in the outside world, and, as befitted a monarch, both a keen huntsman and dutiful in matters of religion. He received instruction from senior officials concerned with legal administration, military and foreign affairs, and, of course, the Church, so that he was well apprised of Muscovite policies and statecraft and knew something about the lands beyond his frontiers.

Crowned at his own instance in January 1547, the sixteen-year-old tsar was also seized of new ideas. If he did not actually read Machiavelli, evidence suggests that he was acquainted with many of the Italian’s precepts. A German immigrant, Hans Schlitte, fired his interest in German science, and he seized eagerly on information about new technology. The Tsar sent Schlitte back to Germany with commissions to recruit doctors, artisans, and experts in explosives and other Western arts. A Dutchman called Akema and a citizen of Hamburg called Marselius were soon to found a firearms manufactory at Tula, which was to be developed into the centre of Russia’s arms industry. In 1550 Ivan founded a corps of musketeers
(streltsy)
- six companies of them in the first instance. His other acts suggest that he was intent on shoring up his legitimacy and on acting as a new broom (a symbol he adopted later for his most notorious institution, the
oprichnina)
in reforming the administration. In his first months as tsar no fewer than thirty-nine new saints were canonized, including many of his ancestors in the House of Riurik - enlargers
of
the state of Muscovy, and protectors of the Orthodox Church. Not only did these canonizations proclaim the values of the new regime, they invested it with an aura of sanctity.

Others of Ivan’s immediate concerns were to extend and enforce the law, to root out corruption, and to stamp out the factionalism which had marred his boyhood. Above all, he wanted to enforce obedience. In 1550 a new law book was issued. Besides repeating previous legislation, this co-ordinated the operations of central and local government, laid down rules for due process, and required court decisions to be recorded. Ivan’s first months in power were also marked by the expansion of the ministerial council, which reflected the use of patronage to bolster his authority. However, critical decisions were pondered by a kitchen cabinet of close advisers - the ‘Chosen Council’ — among them a learned monk called Silvestr, who did duty in one of the Kremlin churches; a foreign-policy specialist, Daniil Adashev; and a military specialist from the western provinces, Prince Andrei Kurbskii. It was with this group that in 1551 Ivan decided to mount his first great campaign the following year - against Kazan.

The Khanate of Kazan occupied a strategic location adjoining Muscovy’s southern frontier, and Moscow had interfered in its affairs for decades past. However, the influence exerted was only intermittently effective. Control over Kazan needed to be secured. A phase of political instability there encouraged Ivan and his advisers to launch a major campaign to seize the city.
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Kazan was defended by walls the height of three grown men and more, and by 30,000 Tatars. But young Ivan brought 150,000 troops to the scene, as well as siege equipment, explosive devices, and a train of 150 guns. A siege began on 23 August 1552.

The preparations had been thorough, and steps were taken to maintain the troops’ morale. Immense drums were pounded by a battery of drummers to give the Russians encouragement; shawms and trumpets brayed in alarming unison to inspire the Tatar defenders with dread. Standards bearing images of Christ or of warlike saints like Demetrius and George, or pious slogans prophesying victory, waved and billowed over the serried regiments, demonstrating the Russians’ view that their army was the visible army of Christ and its every campaign a holy mission. For them, as for the Byzantines, every war they fought was a crusade, and every enemy — Polish, Swedish or Livonian as well as Tatar — was heathen or heretical.
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Tsar Ivan himself presided over the siege in style. As the Englishman Richard Chancellor, who came to Russia soon afterwards noted, ‘his Pavillion [i.e. tent] is covered eyther with Cloth of Gold or Silver, and so set with stones that it is wonderfull to see it. I have seene the Kings Majesties of England and the French Kings pavilions, which are fayre, yet not like unto his.’
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But, unlike Henry VIII’s meeting with Francis I on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, this was no meeting between equals. Forty days
after the siege began, explosives breached the walls, the Russian troops stormed in and after a bloody fight secured the city

Kazan did not become a client state of any kind. That approach had been tried and had failed. Nor was it accorded any autonomy or separate administration to suit the ethnic and religious preferences of its conquered population. (However, some members of the Tatar elite threw in their hand with Russia and were soon employed in fighting Ivan’s wars on other fronts.)
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Kazan simply became a Russian province, administered by a Russian governor responsible for both civil and military affairs, and by a supporting staff of government clerks and servicemen. Russians were soon being encouraged to settle there. Before long, thanks to this and outward Tatar migration, the population of the city itself was soon overwhelmingly Russian. Kazan became an archdiocese, and its energetic archbishop was soon administering big church-building and missionary programmes.
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