CHAPTER XXIX
The Unification of Russia
1300–1584

I. THE PEOPLE

IN 1300 Russia did not exist. The north belonged for the most part to three self-governed city-states: Novgorod, Viatka, Pskov. The western and southern provinces were dependencies of Lithuania. In the east the principalities of Moscow, Ryazan, Suzday, Nijni Novgorod, and Tver all claimed individual sovereignty, and were united only in common subjection to the Golden Horde.

The Horde took its noun from Turkish ordu, camp, and its adjective from the domed tent, covered with cloth of gold, that had served as headquarters for Batu the Splendid, grandson of Ghengis Khan. Having conquered southern Russia and western Asia, these marauding Asiatics built their capital at Sarai on a branch of the lower Volga, and there received annual tribute from the Russian princes. The Horde was partly agricultural, partly nomad pastoral. The ruling families were Mongol, the rest were mostly Turks. The name Tatar came to the Horde from the Ta-ta tribes of the Gobi, who in the ninth century had started the Mongol avalanche toward the West. The chief results from the long subjection of Russia to the Horde were social: the autocracy of the Moscow dukes, the servile loyalty of the people to their princes, the low status of woman, the military, financial, and judicial organization of the Muscovite government on Tatar lines. The Tatar domination deferred for two centuries the attempt of Russia to become a European Occidental state.

The Russian people faced the most arduous conditions with silent stoicism, except that amid their tribulations they found the courage to sing. Their enemies called them coarse, cruel, dishonest, cunning, and violent;¹ doubtless toil and trouble and a trying climate toughened them; but their patience, good humor, friendliness, and hospitality redeemed them—so much so that they were inclined to believe themselves, more humano, the salt of the earth. They were beaten into civilization by barbarous laws and frightful penalties; so, we are told, a wife who murdered her husband was buried alive up to the neck, sorcerers were burned alive in an iron cage, and counterfeiters had liquid metal poured down their throats.² Like any people fighting cold, the Russians drank alcohol abundantly, sometimes to drunken stupor; even their food was seasoned to warm them. They enjoyed hot baths, and bathed more frequently than most Europeans. Religion bade women hide their tempting forms and hair, and branded them as Satan’s chosen instrument; yet they were equal with men before the law, and often joined in public pastimes or the dance—which was forbidden as a sin. The Russian Church preached a strict morality, and prohibited conjugal relations during Lent; presumably the severity of the code was a counterpoise to the tendency of the people to indulge excessively in almost the only pleasure left to them. Marriages were arranged by the parents, and came early; girls of twelve, boys of fourteen, were considered nubile. Wedding ceremonies were complex, with ancient symbolism and festivities; through all these the bride was required to keep a modest silence; her revenge was deferred. On the morrow she was expected to show to her husband’s mother the evidence that he had married a virgin. Usually the women of the household remained in an upper apartment or terem, away from the men; and the authority of the father was as absolute in the family as that of the czar in the state.

Piety sublimated poverty into a preparation for paradise. Every house of any size had a room decorated with icons as a place of frequent prayer. A proper visitor, before saluting his hosts, saluted the icons first. Good women carried rosaries wherever they went. Prayers were recited as magic incantations; so, said the Domostroi—a famous manual of the sixteenth century—a certain prayer repeated 600 times a day for three years would cause the incarnation, in the re-petitioner, of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.³ But there were many beautiful features in this superstitious religion. On Easter morning people greeted one another with the joyful words, “Christ is risen.” In this hope death was in some measure eased; facing it, a decent man would pay his debts, relieve his debtors, free one or more of his bondmen, leave alms to the poor and the Church, and breathe his last in confident expectation of eternal life.

The Russian Church stimulated this piety with architecture, murals, icons, powerful sermons, hypnotic ceremonies, and massive choral song that seemed to rise from the most mystical depths of the soul or the stomach. The Church was a vital organ of the state, and her services in teaching letters and morality, disciplining character, and buttressing social order were lavishly rewarded. Monasteries were numerous and immense. The Troitsa-Sergievskaya Lavra—the Monastery of the Trinity founded by St. Sergius in 1335—had amassed by 1600 such extensive lands that over 100,000 peasants were needed for their cultivation. In return the monasteries distributed charity on a Russian scale; some fed 400 people daily; in a famine year the monastery at Volokolamsk fed 7,000 in one day. Monks took a vow of chastity, but priests were obliged to marry. These “papas” were mostly illiterate, but that was not held against them by the people. The metropolitans of Moscow were in many cases the ablest, as well as the most learned, men of their generation, risking their silver to preserve the state, and guiding the princes toward national unity. St. Alexis was the virtual ruler of Russia during his tenure of the Muscovite see (1354–70). With all her faults—which may have been dictated by her tasks—the Russian Church in this formative age served as the supreme civilizing agent among a people brutalized by the hardships of life and the predatory nature of man.

In 1448 the Russian Church, repudiating the merger of Greek with Roman Christianity at the Council of Florence, declared her independence of the Byzantine patriarch; and when, five years later, Constantinople fell to the Turks, Moscow became the metropolis of the Orthodox faith. “Know now,” wrote a fervent monk to a Grand Prince of Moscow about 1505, “that the sovereignty of all Christendom has been united in thine own. For the two Romes have fallen, but the third doth endure. A fourth there shall never be, for thy Christian empire shall last forever.” ⁴

The Church was almost the sole patron of letters and the arts, and therefore their dictator. The best literature was unwritten. The songs of the people, passing from mouth to mouth, from generation to generation, celebrated their loves, weddings, sorrows, seasons, holydays, or deaths; and there were popular lays of cherished saints, ancient heroes, and legendary exploits, like those of Sadko the merchant of Novgorod. Blind men or cripples went from village to village singing such songs and lays and sacred chants. Written literature was nearly all monastic, and served religion.

It was the monks who now brought icon painting to a finished art. Upon a small panel of wood, sometimes covered with cloth, they applied a glutinous coat; on this they drew their design; within this they laid their colors in tempera; they covered the painting with varnish, and enclosed it in a metal frame. The subjects were determined by ecclesiastical authority; the figures and features were derived from Byzantine models, and went back in continuous evolution through the mosaics of Constantinople to the paintings of Hellenistic Alexandria. The best icons from this age are the anonymous Christ Enthroned in the Cathedral of the Assumption in Moscow; the Entry of Christ into Jerusalem, from the school of Novgorod; and The Holy Trinity of the monk Andrei Rubliov in the Monastery of the Trinity. Rubliov and his teacher, Theophanes the Greek, painted frescoes, half Byzantine and half Byzantine El Greco, in Vladimir, Moscow, and Novgorod, but time has had its way with them.

Every ruler signalized his splendor, and eased his conscience, by building or endowing a church or a monastery. Forms and motives from Armenia, Persia, India, Tibet, Mongolia, Italy, and Scandinavia joined with the predominant Byzantine heritage to mold Russian church architecture, with its picturesque multiplicity of units, its central gilded dome, its bulbous cupolas admirably designed to shed rain and snow. After the fall of Constantinople and the expulsion of the Tatars the dependence of Russia upon Byzantine and Oriental art subsided, and influences from the West entered to modify the Slavic style. In 1472 Ivan III, hoping thereby to inherit the rights and titles of the Byzantine emperors, married Zoë Palaeologus, niece of the last ruler of the Eastern Empire. She had been brought up in Rome, and had imbibed something of the early Renaissance. She brought Greek scholars with her, and acquainted Ivan with Italian art. It may have been at her suggestion that he sent the first Russian mission to the West (1474), with instructions to secure Italian artists for Moscow. Ridolfo Fieravante of Bologna, called Aristotle because of the range of his abilities, accepted the invitation; and further Russian forays netted Pietro Solario, Alevisio Novi, and several other artists. It was these Italians who, with Russian aides and labor, rebuilt the Kremlin.

Yuri Dolgoruki had founded Moscow (1156) by raising a wall around his villa, which was strategically situated at the confluence of two rivers; this fortress (kreml) was the first form of the Kremlin. In time the enclosure was enlarged, and churches and palaces rose within a massive wall of oak. Ivan III set himself to transform the entire ensemble. It was apparently Fieravante who (1475–79) reconstructed, in the Kremlin, the old Cathedral of the Assumption (Uspenskiy Sobor), where future czars were to be crowned; the design remained Byzantine, with Italian decoration. Architects from Pskov added, in the enclosure, the little Cathedral of the Annunciation (Blagovyeschenskiy Sobor, 1484–89); and, again in the Kremlin, Alevisio raised the Cathedral of the Archangel (1505–09). Solario and others rewalled the circuit in pink brick (1485–1508), in the style of the Castello Sforzesco at Milan.⁵ It was from this many-templed center of Russia, this overpowering union and concentration of secular and ecclesiastical authority, that the grand princes and the metropolitans of Moscow spread their rule over nobles, merchants, and peasants, and laid in blood and bones and piety the foundations of one of the mightiest empires in history.

II. THE PRINCES OF MOSCOW

Moscow remained an obscure village until Daniel Alexandrovitch, toward the end of the thirteenth century, extended its hinterland and made it a minor principality. Historical hindsight⁶ attributes Moscow’s growth to its position on the navigable Moscow River, which was connected by short overland portage with the Volga on the east and the Oka, Don, and Dnieper on the south and west. Yuri Danielovitch—son of Daniel—Prince of Moscow, coveted the neighboring principality of Suzdal, with its relatively rich capital, Vladimir; Michael, Prince of Tver, coveted the same; Moscow and Tver fought for the prize; Moscow won; Michael was killed and canonized; Moscow grew. Yuri’s brother and successor, Ivan I, took the double title of Grand Prince of Moscow and Grand Duke of Vladimir.

As collector of Russian tribute for the Tatar khan, Ivan I exacted more than he remitted, and prospered wickedly. His rapacity won him the nickname Kalita, Moneybag, but he gave the principalities thirteen years’ respite from Tatar raids. He died as a tonsured monk, censered with the odor of sanctity (1341). His son Simeon the Proud inherited his flair for taxgathering. Claiming authority over every province, he called himself Grand Prince of All the Russias, which did not prevent his dying of the plague (1353). Ivan II was a gentle and peaceable ruler, under whom Russia fell into fratricidal war. His son Dmitri had all requisite martial qualities; he defeated every rival, and defied the khan. In 1380 Khan Mamai assembled a horde of Tatars, Genoese mercenaries, and other flotsam, and advanced toward Moscow. Dmitri and his Russian allies met the horde at Kulikovo, near the Don, defeated it (1380), and won the cognomen Donskoi. Two years later the Tatars attacked again, with 100,000 men. The Russians, deceived and exhausted by victory, failed to raise a comparable force; the Tatars captured Moscow, massacred 24,000 of the population, and burned the city to the ground. Dmitri’s son Vasili I made peace with the Tatars, annexed Nijni Novgorod, and compelled Novgorod and Viatka to accept him as their overlord.

The Grand Princes of Moscow adopted the Tatar technique of despotism, perhaps as the alternative to an illiterate chaos. Under an autocracy of violence and craft a bureaucracy on Byzantine lines administered the government, subject to a Council of Boyars advising and serving the prince. The boyars were at once the leaders of the army, the governing lords of their localities, the organizers, protectors, and exploiters of the semifree peasants who tilled the land. Adventurous colonists migrated to unsettled regions, drained the swamps, fertilized the soil by burning the woods and brush, exhausted it with improvident tillage, and moved on again, until they reached the White Sea and the Urals, and seeped into Siberia. In the endless plains towns were many but small; houses were of wood and mud, calculated to burn down within twenty years at most. Roads were unpaved, and were least agonizing in winter, when they were covered with snow packed by sleds and patient boots. Merchants preferred rivers to roads, and by water or ice carried on a plodding trade between north and south, with Byzantium, Islam, and the Hanse. Probably it was this spreading commerce that overcame the individualism of the princes and compelled the unification of Russia. Vasili II (1425–62), called Tëmny, the Blind, because his foes gouged out his eyes (1446), brought all rebels to obedience with torture, mutilation, and the knout, and left to his son a Russia sufficiently strong to end the ignominy of Tatar rule.

Ivan III became “the Great” because he accomplished this task, and made Russia one. He was built to need: unscrupulous, subtle, calculating, tenacious, cruel, guiding his armies to distant victories from his seat in the Kremlin; punishing disobedience or incompetence savagely, whipping, torturing, mutilating even the boyars, beheading a doctor for failing to cure his son, and so sternly dominating his entourage that women fainted at his glance. Russia called him the Terrible until it met his grandson.

The easiest of his conquests was Novgorod. He looked with hungry anticipation upon that thriving taxable mart, and the merchants of Moscow urged him to destroy their competitors in the north.⁷ The Grand Prince controlled the plains between Moscow and Novgorod; there the mercantile republic bought its food and sold its goods; Ivan had only to close that granary and market to Novgorod’s trade, and the city-state must go bankrupt or yield. After eight years of alternating war and truce, the republic surrendered its autonomy (1478). Seven thousand of its leading inhabitants were transplanted to Suzdal, the Hanse was expelled, the merchants of Moscow inherited the markets, their Prince the revenues, of Novgorod.

Absorbing the colonies of the dead republic, Ivan extended his rule to Finland, the Arctic, and the Urals. Pskov submitted in time to preserve its republican forms under the sovereignty of the Grand Prince. Tver sought preservation by allying itself with Lithuania; Ivan marched in person against the city, and took it without a blow. Rostov and Iaroslavl followed. When Ivan’s brothers died he refused to let their appanages descend to their heirs; he added their territories to his own. One brother, Andrei, flirted with Lithuania; Ivan captured and imprisoned him; Andrei died in jail; Ivan wept, but confiscated Andrei’s lands. La politique nía pas d’entrailles.

Liberation from the Tatars seemed impossible and proved easy. The remnants of the Mongol-Turkish invaders had settled down in three rival groups centering at Sarai, Kazan, and in the Crimea. Ivan played one against another until he was assured that they would not unite against him. In 1480 he refused tribute. Khan Akhmet led a great army up the Volga to the banks of the Oka and Ugra south of Moscow; Ivan led 150,000 men to the opposite banks. For months the hostile hosts faced each other without giving battle; Ivan hesitated to risk his throne and life on one throw, the Tatars feared his improved artillery. When the rivers froze and no longer protected the armies from each other, Ivan ordered a retreat. Instead of pursuing, the Tatars too retreated, all the way to Sarai (1480). It was an immense and ridiculous victory. From that time no tribute was paid by Moscow to the Horde; the Grand Prince called himself autocrat (Samoderzhets), meaning that he paid tribute to none. The rival khans were maneuvered into mutual war; Akhmet was defeated and slain; the Golden Horde of Sarai melted away.

Lithuania remained. Neither the Grand Prince nor the metropolitan of Moscow could suffer peace so long as the Ukraine and Kiev and western Russia were under a power perpetually threatening Moscow, and inviting Orthodox Christians into Latin Christianity. An alleged Polish plot to assassinate Ivan gave him a casus belli and let loose a holy war for the redemption of the seduced provinces (1492). Many Lithuanian princes, uneasy under the Polish-Roman-Catholic union, opened their gates to Ivan’s troops. Alexander, Great Prince of Lithuania, made a stand at Vedrosha, and lost (1500). Pope Alexander VI arranged a six-year truce; meanwhile Moscow kept the region it had won—west to the river Sozh, including Chernigov and reaching almost to Smolensk. Ivan III, now sixty-three, left the redemption of the remainder to his heirs.

His reign of forty-three years was as important as any in the history of Russia before the twentieth century. Whether inspired by lust for wealth and power, or by a conviction that the security and prosperity of the Russians required the unification of Russia, Ivan III achieved for his country what Louis XI was doing for France, Henry VII for England, Ferdinand and Isabella for Spain, Alexander VI for the Papal States; the simultaneity of these events revealed the progress of nationalism and monarchy, dooming the supernational power of the papacy. The boyars lost their independence, the principalities sent tribute to Moscow, Ivan took the title “Sovereign of All the Russias.” Possibly at the behest of his Greek wife he assumed also the Roman-Greek title of czar (Caesar), adopted the Imperial double eagle as the national emblem, and claimed inheritance to all the political and religious authority of defunct Byzantium. Byzantine theories and ceremonies of government, and of the Church as an organ of the state, followed Byzantine Christianity, the Byzantine Greek alphabet, and Byzantine art forms, into Russia; and so far as Byzantium had been Orientalized by its proximity to Asia, so Russia, already oriented by Tatar rule, became in many ways an Oriental monarchy, alien and unintelligible to the West.

III. IVAN THE TERRIBLE: 1533–84

Vasili III Ivanovitch (1505–33) continued the integration of Russia. He brought Smolensk within his realm, and compelled the principalities of Ryazan and Novgorod-Severski to acknowledge his sovereignty. “Only the infants at the breast,” said a Russian annalist, “could refrain from tears” when the once proud republic of Pskov submitted to Vasili’s rule (1510). Russia was now a major European power; Vasili corresponded on equal terms with Maximilian I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent, and Leo X. When some boyars tried to limit his autocracy he checked them with a contemptuous word—“Peasants! “—and had one noble head cut off. Getting no children from his wife, he divorced her and married the accomplished and masterful Helena Glinski. After his death she took the regency for her three-year-old son Ivan IV Vasilievitch. The boyars resumed their turbulence when she died; their rival factions controlled the government in turn; they disordered the cities with their violence, and spilled the blood of their helpless muzhiks in civil war.

Amid these struggles the young Sovereign of All the Russias was almost ignored, even at times left destitute. Seeing brutality everywhere around him, he took it as an accepted mode of behavior, adopted the most cruel sports, and grew into a moody and suspicious youth. Suddenly, while still a boy of thirteen (1544), he threw to his dogs Andrei Shuiski, leader of a boyar faction, and seized command of the state. Three years later he had himself crowned czar by the metropolitan of Moscow. Then he ordered a selection of noble virgins to be sent to him from divers parts of his realm; from them he chose and married Anastasia Romanovna, whose family name would soon designate a dynasty.

In 1550 he summoned the first national assembly (Zemski Sobor) of all Russia. He confessed to it the errors of his youth, and promised a just and merciful government. Perhaps influenced by the Reformation in Germany and Scandinavia, the assembly considered a motion to confiscate ecclesiastical wealth for the support of the state. The proposal was rejected, but a related motion was passed by which all alodial lands—those free from liens—deeded to the Church were to be restored, all gifts made to the Church during Ivan’s minority were canceled, and monasteries were no longer to acquire certain kinds of property without the czar’s consent. The clergy were partly appeased when Ivan took the priest Sylvester as his spiritual director and made him and Alexis Adashef his chief ministers. Supported by these able aides, Ivan at twenty-one was master of a realm reaching from Smolensk to the Urals, and from the Arctic Ocean almost to the Caspian Sea.

His first care was to strengthen the army, and to balance the forces provided by the unfriendly nobles with two organizations responsible directly to himself: Cossack cavalry and Strieltsi infantry armed with harquebusesmatchlock firearms invented in the fifteenth century.* The Cossacks originated in that century as peasants whose position in South Russia, between Moslems and Muscovites, obliged them to be ready to fight at short notice, but gave them irresistible opportunities to rob the caravans that carried trade between north and south. The main Cossack “hosts”—the Don Cossacks in southeast Russia and the Zaporogue Cossacks in the southwest—were semi-independent republics, strangely democratic; male householders chose a hetmán (German Hauptmann, head man) as executive officer of a popularly elected assembly. All land was owned in common, but was leased to individual families for temporary use; and all classes were equal before the law.⁸ Famous for their dashing courage, the Cossack horsemen became the main support of Ivan IV at home and in war.

His foreign policy was simple: he wanted Russia to connect the Baltic Sea with the Caspian. The Tatars still held Kazan, Astrakhan, and the Crimea, and still demanded tribute from Moscow, though in vain. Ivan was sure that Russia’s security and unity required its possession of these khanates, and control of the Volga to its outlet. In 1552 the young Czar led 150,000 men against the gates of Kazan in a siege that lasted fifty days. The 30,000 Moslems resisted with religious pertinacity; they sallied out in repeated sorties; and when some of them were captured and hanged on gibbets before the walls, the defenders shot them with arrows, saying that “it was better for these captives to receive death from the clean hands of their countrymen than to perish by the impure hands of Christians.”⁹ When the besiegers lost heart after a month of failure, Ivan sent to Moscow for a miraculous cross; this, displayed to them, reanimated his men; on both sides God was conscripted into military service. A German engineer mined the walls; they collapsed; the Russians poured into the city, crying “God with us!”—and massacred all who could not be sold as slaves. Ivan, we are told, wept with pity for the defeated; “they are not Christians,” he said, “but they are men.” He repeopled the ruins with Christians. Russia acclaimed him as the first Slav to take a Tatar stronghold, and celebrated the victory as France had hailed the check of the Moslems at Tours (732). In 1554 Ivan took Astrakhan, and the Volga became a completely Russian stream. The Crimea remained Moslem till 1774, but the Cossacks of the Don now bowed to Moscow’s rule.

Having cleared his frontier in the east, Ivan looked longingly toward the west. He dreamed of Russian commerce flowing west and north along great rivers into the Baltic. He envied the industrial and commercial expansion of Western Europe, and looked for any opening by which the Russian economy might attach itself to that development. In 1553 Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor were commissioned by London merchants to find an Arctic route around Scandinavia to China. They sailed from Harwich in three vessels; two crews perished in a Lapland winter, but Chancellor reached the site of Arkhangelsk—which the British so named after the archangel Michael. Chancellor made his way through a hundred perils and hardships to Moscow. With him, and later with Anthony Jenkinson, Ivan signed treaties giving “The London and Muscovite Company” special trading privileges in Russia.

But to Ivan these treaties were knotholes, not a door or window, into the West. He tried to import German technicians; 123 were gathered for him at Lübeck, but Charles V refused to let them go. A great river, the Southern Dvina, flowed from the heart of Russia into the Baltic near Riga, but through hostile Livonia. The headwaters of the Dvina and the Volga were not far apart; the two rivers could be connected by canals; here, by “manifest destiny,” was the water route that might atone for the disproportion of Russia’s enormous land mass to her coasts and ports; so the Baltic would mingle with the Caspian and the Black Sea, East and West would meet, and amid the interchange of goods and ideas the West could repay some of its ancient cultural debt to the East.

So in 1557 Ivan invented a casus belli—usually a case of the belly—with Livonia. He sent against it an army under Shah-Ali, lately Tatar Khan of Kazan; it ravaged the country brutally, burning houses and crops, enslaving men, raping women till they died. In 1558 another Russian army captured Narva, only eight miles from the Baltic. Desperate Livonia appealed to Poland. Denmark, Sweden, Germany, all Central Europe trembled at the prospect of a Slav inundation reaching westward, as in the sixth century, to the Elbe. Stephen Báthory roused the Poles, and led them to victory over the Russians at Polotsk (1582). Ivan, defeated, yielded Livonia to Poland.

Long before this decisive setback the failure of his campaigns had led to revolt at home. The merchants whom Ivan had thought to enrich with new avenues of trade lost stomach for the costly and disruptive war. The nobles had opposed it as bound to unite the Baltic powers, with their superior armament, against a Russia still feudal in political and military organization. During and before the war Ivan had suspected the boyars of conspiracies against his throne. In a nearly fatal illness (1553) he learned that a powerful group of nobles was planning, when he died, to repudiate his son Dmitri and crown Prince Vladimir, whose mother was disbursing large gifts to the army. His closest advisers, Sylvester and Adashef, were flirting with treasonable boyars. For seven years after suspecting them Ivan kept these officials in power; then (1560) he dismissed them, but without violence; Sylvester died in a monastery, Adashef in one of the Livonian campaigns. Several of the boyars deserted to Poland and took up arms against Russia; in 1564 Ivan’s bosom friend and leading general, Prince Andrei Kurbski, joined this flight, alleging that the Czar was planning to kill him. From Poland Kurbski sent to Ivan what amounted to a declaration of war, denouncing him as a leprous criminal. Tradition claims that Ivan, when this letter was read to him, nailed a foot of the bearer to the floor with a blow of the royal staff. But the Czar condescended to reply to Kurbski in a rebuttal sixty-two pages long, eloquent and chaotic, passionate and Biblical, recounting the intrigues of the boyars to depose him. Believing that they had poisoned Anastasia, he asked, “Why did you divide me from my wife? Had you not taken from me my young heifer, never had there been the slayings of the boyars.... In vain I have looked for some man to have pity on me, but I have found none.”¹⁰ Kurbski, in the evening of his life, wrote a relentlessly hostile History of Ivan, which is our chief source for Ivan’s terribilità.

These plots and desertions illuminate the most famous and peculiar event of the reign. On December 13, 1564, Ivan left Moscow with his family, his icons, his treasury, and a small force of soldiery, withdrew to his summer home at Alexandrovsk, and sent to Moscow two proclamations. One alleged that the boyars, the bureaucracy, and the Church had conspired against him and the state; therefore “with great sorrow” he now resigned his throne, and would henceforth live in retirement. The other assured the people of Moscow that he loved them, and that they might rest assured of his lasting good will. In fact he had consistently favored the commons and merchants against the aristocracy, and the present action of the middle and lower classes attested it. They broke out in threatening cries against the nobility and the clergy, and demanded that a deputation of bishops and boyars should go to the Czar and beg him to resume his throne. It was done, and Ivan agreed to “take unto him his state anew,” on conditions that he would later specify.

He returned to Moscow (February 1565), and summoned the national assembly of clergy and boyars. He announced that he would execute the leaders of the opposition, and confiscate their property; he would henceforth assume full power, without consulting the nobles or assembly, and he would banish all who should disobey his edicts. The assembly, fearing a revolt of the masses, yielded and dissolved. Ivan decreed that in the future Russia should be divided into two parts: one, the Zemstchina or assemblage of provinces, was to remain under the government of the boyars and their duma; it was to be taxable in gross by the Czar, and be subject to him in military and foreign affairs, but would otherwise be self-governed and free; the other part, the Oprichnina, or “separate estate,” was to be ruled by him, and was to be composed of lands assigned by him to the oprichniki or separate class, chosen by the Czar to police and administer this half-realm, to guard it from sedition, and to give him personal protection and special military service. The new officials—at first a thousand, ultimately six thousand—were selected chiefly from the younger sons of the nobility, who, being landless, were ready to support Ivan in return for the estates now conferred upon them. These lands were taken partly from the possessions of the Crown, largely from the confiscated properties of rebellious boyars. By the end of the reign the Oprichnina included nearly half of Russia, much of Moscow, and the most important trade routes. The revolution was akin to that which Peter the Great attempted 150 years later—the elevation of a new class to political power, and the promotion of Russian commerce and industry. In a century when practically all the military power was held by the aristocracy, the enterprise required a wild courage in a Czar armed only with his personal soldiery and the unreliable support of the merchants and the populace. Some contemporaries assure us that in this critical period Ivan, then thirty-five, aged twenty years.¹¹

Ivan now made Alexandrovsk his regular residence, and transformed it into a fortified citadel. The strain of his revolt against the boyars, added to the failure of the long war against Livonia, may have disordered a never quite balanced mind. He clothed his guardsmen like monks in black cassocks and skull caps, called himself their abbot, sang in their choir, attended Mass with them daily, and so fervently prostrated himself before the altar that his forehead was repeatedly bruised. This added to the awe that he inspired; Russia began to mingle reverence with the fear it felt for him; and even the armed oprichniki were so abject before him that they came to be called his dvor or court.

Ivan’s revolution, like others, had its terror. Those who opposed it and were caught were executed without mercy. A monastic chronicle, presumably hostile to him, reckoned the casualties of his wrath in those years (1560–70) at 3,470; often, it reports, the victim was executed “with his wife,” or “with his wife and children,” and, in one case, “with ten men who came to his help.”¹² Prince Vladimir and his mother were put to death, but his children were spared and provided for. The Czar, we are told, asked the monks to pray for the repose of his victims’ souls. He defended the executions as the usual punishment for treason, especially in time of war; an agent of Poland conceded the argument; and an Englishman who witnessed some of the butchery prayed, “Would to God our own stiff-necked rebels could be taught their duty to their prince after the same fashion! “¹³

The climax of the terror came in Novgorod. Ivan had recently given its archbishop a large sum to repair churches, and thought himself popular with at least the clergy there. But he was informed that a document—not indisputably genuine—had been found behind a picture of the Virgin in a Novgorod monastery, pledging the co-operation of Novgorod and Pskov with Poland in an attempt to overthrow the Czar. On January 2, 1570, a strong military force led by oprichniki pounced upon Novgorod, sacked its monasteries, and arrested 500 monks and priests. Arriving in person on January 6, Ivan ordered those clerics who could not pay fifty rubles’ ransom to be flogged to death. The archbishop was unfrocked and jailed. According to the Third Chronicle of Novgorod a massacre of the population ensued for five weeks; sometimes 500 persons were slain in a day; the official records number 2,770 dead; Ivan Drotested they were only 1,502. Since many merchants, eager for the reopening of trade with the West, were believed to have shared in the conspiracy, the soldiers of the Czar burned all the shops in the city, and the homes of the merchants in the suburbs; even the farmhouses in the environs were destroyed. Unless unfriendly monastic chroniclers have exaggerated the carnage, we must go back to the punishment of rebellious Liège by Charles the Bold (1468), or the Sack of Rome by the troops of Charles V (1527) to find analogies for Ivan’s savage revenge. Novgorod never recovered its old prominence in the commercial life of Russia. Ivan passed on to Pskov, where he restricted his soldiers to pillage. Then he returned to Moscow and celebrated with a royal masquerade ball his escape from a dangerous conspiracy.

So turbulent a reign hardly favored economic progress or cultural pursuits. Commerce was favored in peace and wounded in war. In the lands allotted to the oprichniki, and then on other lands as well, the peasant was legally attached to the soil as a means of promoting continuous cultivation (1581); serfdom, rare in Russia before 1500, became by 1600 the law of the land. Taxation was predatory, inflation was precipitous. The ruble in 1500 was worth ninety-four, in 1600 twenty-four, times the ruble of 1910;¹⁴ we need not follow the decline further, except to note, as one of the lessons of history, that money is the last thing that a man should save.

The improvident fertility of families and exhaustion of soils compelled a restless migration to fresh terrain. When this passed the Urals it found a Tatar khanate established over a population of Bashkirs and Ostyaks, around a capital known by the Cossack word Sibir. In 1581 Semen Stroganov enlisted 600 Cossacks and sent them under Ermak Timofeevitch to conquer these tribes. It was done; western Siberia became part of the swelling Russian realm; and Ermak, who had been a brigand chief, was canonized by the Orthodox Church.

The Church remained the real ruler of Russia, for the fear of God was everywhere, while Ivan’s reach was limited. Strict rules of ritual, if not of morality, bound even the Czar; the priests saw to it that he washed his hands after giving audience to ambassadors from outside the Orthodox pale. No Roman Catholic worship was allowed, but Protestants were tolerated as fellow foes of the Roman pope. Ivan IV, like Henry VIII, prided himself on his knowledge of theology. He indulged in a public debate in the Kremlin with a Bohemian Lutheran divine, and it must be admitted that the most violent of the Czars conducted the discussion with more courtesy than appeared in the religious disputes of contemporary Germany.¹⁵ He did not come off so well with another theologian. At a Sunday service in the Cathedral of the Assumption (1568) Philip, Metropolitan of Moscow, conspicuously refused the blessing that Ivan solicited. Thrice the Czar asked for it in vain. When his attendants demanded reason for the refusal, Philip began to list Ivan’s crimes and debaucheries. “Hold thy peace,” cried the Czar, “and give me thy blessing!” “My silence,” answered the prelate, “lays a sin upon thy soul, and calls down thy death.” Ivan departed unblessed, and for a wondering month Philip remained unhurt. Then a servitor of the Czar entered the cathedral, seized the Metropolitan, and dragged him to a prison in Tver. His fate is debated; the account accepted by the Russian Church is that he was burned alive. In 1652 he was canonized, and his relics remained till 1917 an object of reverence in the Uspenskiy Sobor.

The Church still produced most of the literature and art of Russia. Printing arrived about 1491, but the only books printed during this reign were manuals of prayer. The leading scholar was the metropolitan Macarius; in 1529, aided by secretaries, he began to compile the surviving literature of his country in twelve huge volumes, which again were almost entirely religious, mostly monkish, chronicles. Ivan’s confessor Sylvester composed a famous Domostroi, or Household Book, as a guide to domestic economy, manners, and eternal salvation; we note in it the admonition to the husband to beat his wife lovingly, and precise instructions for spitting and for blowing the nose.¹⁶ Ivan himself, in his letters, was not the least vigorous writer of his time.

The most brilliant product of Russian art under his rule was the Church of Basil the Blessed (Khram Vasilia Blajennoi), which still stands aloof from the Kremlin at one end of the Red Square. On returning from his triumphant campaigns against Kazan and Astrakhan (1554) Ivan began what he called Pokrovski Sobor—the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Virgin, to whom he judiciously ascribed his victories. Around this central shrine of stone there later rose seven chapels in wood, dedicated to saints on whose festivals Ivan had overcome his foes. Each chapel was crowned with a graceful painted cupola, each bulbous but varying from the others in ornament. The final chapel, raised to St. Basil in 1588, gave its name in time to the whole charming ensemble. Inevitable legend credited the architecture to an Italian, and told how Ivan had gouged out his eyes lest he should ever rival this masterpiece; but it was two Russians, Barma and Postnikov, who designed it, merely adopting some Renaissance motives in its decoration.¹⁷ Every year, on Palm Sunday, as part of the wisdom of government, the lords and clergy of Moscow walked in awesome procession to this cathedral; the metropolitan rode sideways on a horse equipped with artificial ears to simulate the ass on which Christ was described as entering Jerusalem; and the Czar, on foot, humbly led the horse by the bridle; banners, crosses, icons, and censers flourished, and children raised hosannas of praise and gratitude to inclement skies for the blessings of Russian life.

By 1580 Ivan seemed to have triumphed over all his enemies. He had survived several wives, was married to a sixth, and thought of adding another in friendly bigamy.¹⁸ He had four children: the first died in infancy, the third, Feodor, was a half-wit; the fourth, Dmitri, was alleged to have epileptic fits. One day in November 1580, the Czar, seeing the wife of his second son, Ivan, in what seemed to him immodest attire, reproved and struck her; she miscarried; the Czarevitch reproached his father; the Czar, in unpremeditated rage, struck him on the head with the imperial staff; the son died from the blow. The Czar went insane with remorse; he spent his days and nights crying aloud with grief; each morning he offered his resignation; but even the boyars now preferred him to his sons. He survived three years more. Then a strange disease attacked him, which made his body swell and emit an unbearable stench. On March 18, 1584, he died while playing chess with Boris Godunov. Gossip accused Boris of poisoning him, and the stage was set for grand opera in the history of the czars.

We must not think of Ivan IV as merely an ogre of brutality. Tall and strong, he would have been handsome but for a broad flat nose that overlay a spreading mustache and a heavy auburn beard. The appellation Groznyi is mistranslated Terrible; it meant, rather, awesome, like the Augustus that was applied to the Caesars; Ivan III had also received the name. To our minds, and even to his cruel contemporaries, he was repulsively cruel and vengeful, and he was a merciless judge. He lived in the age of the Spanish Inquisition, the burning of Servetus, the decapitating habits of Henry VIII, the Marian persecution, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; when he heard of this holocaust (which a pope welcomed with praise) he denounced the barbarism of the West.¹⁹ He had some provocations, which set on fire a readily combustible temper made violent by heredity or environment; sometimes, says a witness, a small annoyance made him “foam at the mouth like a horse.” ²⁰ He confessed and at times exaggerated his sins and crimes, so that his enemies could only plagiarize him in their accusations. He studied zealously, and made himself the best-educated layman of his land and time. He had a sense of humor, and could roar with Jovian laughter, but a sinister cunning showed often in his smile. He paved his hell with wonderful intentions: he would protect the poor and the weak against the rich and the strong; he would favor commerce and the middle classes as checks on the feudal and quarrelsome aristocracy; he would open a door of trade in goods and ideas to the West; he would give Russia a new administrative class not bound, like the boyars, to ancient and stagnant ways; he would free Russia from the Tatars, and raise her out of chaos into unity. He was a barbarian barbarously struggling to be civilized.

He failed because he never matured to self-mastery. The reforms that he had planned were half forgotten in the excitement of revolution. He left the peasants more bitterly subject to the landlords than before; he clogged the avenues of trade with war; he drove able men into the arms of the enemy; he divided Russia into hostile halves, and guided her into anarchy. He gave his people a demoralizing example of pious cruelty and uncontrolled passion. He killed his ablest son, and bequeathed his throne to a weakling whose incapacity invited civil war. He was one of the many men of his time of whom it might be said that it would have been better for their country and humanity if they had never been born.