Ivan was convinced that harsh and even cruel means were justified when sovereignty had to be demonstratively exercised. He was determined to put an end to the kinship appanage principle, under which a member of a princely family could choose for himself under which liege lord to serve: this was doubly dangerous to him when he was waging war with Lithuania, which had a rival claim as ‘gatherer of the Russian lands’. He feared particularly the claims to the throne of his cousin, Prince Vladimir Staritskii, the most powerful of the surviving appanage lords. At the same time he wanted to have at his disposal more land which he could award to his military servitors: the simplest way to obtain it was to confiscate it from those same free-wheeling boyars.
In autumn 1564, a Lithuanian offensive, supported by Kurbskii, coincided with one mounted from the south by the Crimean Khan, Devlet-Girei. Muscovite forces managed to repel the double danger, but it nevertheless dramatized the country’s vulnerability, and Ivan reacted to it in an abrupt and histrionic manner. In December 1564 he suddenly withdrew from Moscow along with his court and resettled in Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda, a minor princely residence to the north-east. From there he sent the bewildered boyars, prelates and officials a missive accusing them of treason and of plundering the treasury for their own selfish interests. If they wished him to return to the throne, he demanded that they must give him the right to set up his own separate and special realm (oprichnina), which would guarantee him the income he needed for his court and army, and they must leave him free to proceed against peculators, traitors and heretics as he saw fit.
Ivan’s expedition was an act of pure theatre, externalizing his crushing sense of lonely responsibility, isolation and rejection (more or less as British royals nowadays resort to the press to conduct their own psychological and familial struggles), but also dramatizing the country’s helplessness without a strong ruler. As he had anticipated, the boyars begged him to return and conceded to him what he was demanding. There followed another set-piece scene of mutual repentance and simulated forgiveness, after which Ivan put his design into effect.
He divided his territory into two realms, in one of which, the oprichnina, he had complete and unrestricted power, while the other, the zemshchina, was governed by the boyar council (the Boyar Duma) according to existing customs. The oprichnina included extensive lands in the north and east which had originally belonged to Novgorod, as well as some towns and regions within the appanage principality of Moscow. Boyars living on it were expropriated and assigned territory in the zemshchina, while their former lands were offered to Ivan’s newly promoted servitors. This exchange of land uprooted many, though not all, of the leading boyar clans, including the Staritskiis, from their ancestral domains and their local power bases, and eliminated the restraints on endowing the ‘chosen thousand’ servitors with land and peasants. Some of the boyars were executed on charges of heresy or treason, others were exiled or awarded land in remote regions. The process was not a tidy one: Ivan rewarded individuals not for their social origin but for their loyalty and devotion to him. The general tendency was to strengthen the service nobility at the expense of the boyars, but the process was far from completed, and the boyars remained a considerable force in the land.
Meanwhile the oprichnina lands provided the finances for a wholly new army and police force, charged both with defending the frontiers and with extirpating treason and heresy. The oprichnina was also a kind of grotesque monastic court: Ivan referred to his oprichniki as ‘brothers’. Their humble unadorned clothes and ascetic existence were intended to serve as a model of the Christian life Ivan intended his subjects to lead. The oprichniki were given special powers of investigation, arrest and emergency judicial procedure. Dressed in long black cloaks, resembling a monk’s habit, they rode on black horses, each carrying a dog’s head and a broom mounted on a long stick. ‘This means that first of all they bite like dogs, and then they sweep away everything superfluous out of the land.’12
Within a short time, their arbitrary, violent and sadistic procedures had inspired fear in every subject and horrified incredulity among foreign observers. Far from exemplifying the Christian life, the ‘brothers’ seemed only to demonstrate what monstrous atrocities can befall a people whose ruler tramples underfoot not only human laws but those of God as well. This was precisely what Kurbskii had alleged. The leading churchman, Metropolitan Filipp, not in the safety of Lithuania, protested courageously in the same terms. Once, in the cathedral, he asked in the presence of clergy and boyars, ‘How long will you go on spilling the innocent blood of faithful people and Christians …? Tatars and heathens and the whole world can say that all peoples have justice and laws, but only in Russia do they not exist.’ Ivan tolerated Filipp for a while, so anxious was he to preserve his alliance with the church, but eventually had him arrested in the middle of a sermon and confined in a monastery where he was later strangled.13
Ivan got rid of his most dangerous rival in 1569, when he accused Vladimir Staritskii publicly of plotting to assassinate him and compelled him to drink poison. This murder was followed by an inquisitorial visit to the ancient city of Novgorod, which he suspected of supporting Staritskii and seeking a rapprochement with Lithuania. In January 1570 he took his revenge, unleashing his oprichniki on the townsfolk in a frenzy of vindictiveness. In the course of a few weeks, thousands of people were tortured and killed: a once prosperous city, model for an alternative Rus’, was left devastated, a mere shadow of its former self.
The Novgorod excesses revealed that the oprichnyi army had become a travesty of Peresvetov’s vision of soldiers selected for their courage and achievement. Corrupted and enfeebled by their own impunity, they proved incapable in 1571 of repelling Khan Devlet-Girei, who attacked and sacked the city of Moscow, capturing thousands of its inhabitants for slaves. After this debacle, Ivan executed the oprichnyi commanders and reunited the army with its zemskii counterpart. Together, they succeeded in repelling Devlet-Girei the following year.
The episode of the oprichnina suggests the extraordinary vulnerability of the Muscovite state at the time when it had just taken on itself extensive new claims and responsibilities both religious and secular. It was poorly adapted to an assertion of imperial and ecumenical power which required internal unity and the efficient use of resources. The inherited kinship principle obstructed both these ideals. Ivan had set out to create the framework of what might have become a national government, but, stumbling at the first hurdle, he changed course convulsively in completely the opposite direction.
Paradoxically, in order to overcome the appanage mentality, Ivan himself set up what was in effect a vastly bloated appanage territory, where in the name of a higher state principle he attempted to exercise an authority even more complete than that of any patrimonial ruler. To add to the hubris, he tried to combine church and state in one monopolistic dispensation: to promote a Christian ideal, he unleashed a frenzy of debauchery and cruelty. He succeeded in almost none of his aims, and he exposed the population of Muscovy to such privations and excesses as seriously to weaken their economic and military potential for the following decades. The Livonian Wars, which he fought on and off for quarter of a century, ended with Muscovy not only failing to gain territory, but also losing the foothold on the eastern Baltic which she had inherited from Novgorod. As a founder of empire, Ivan had made a promising start, but had then jeopardized all his gains through his external over-ambition and his unbalanced internal policy.
Time of Troubles
Ivan IVs endless wars, his ruthless and haphazard remodelling of Muscovy’s political and social structure, his campaigns of unrestrained terror against his own people – all these upheavals left a country traumatized. Every stratum of society was affected. Many of the boyars had been evicted from their ancestral domains and shorn of the power they had previously taken for granted, the service nobility was still insecure, the clergy was torn apart by the heresy hunts, while the merchants and