The Giants of Russian Literature: The Greatest Russian Novels, Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький

removed Christian Moskva from the ethic-level of pagan Rome. Up to the mounted monarch was led the first victim, Viskovatui, whom Ivan accused of treasonable correspondence with the King of Poland, with the Sultan, and with the Krim Khan, emphasising his accusations by slashing the boyarin’s face with his whip. Bound, gagged, and hung by the feet, he was forthwith hacked to pieces; Maluta Skouratov, descending from his horse, sliced off an ear by way of a beginning. Founikov was dispatched by alternate drenching with boiling and iced water, and “expired in horrible torments.” Others, to the number of about 200, were put to death in various manners, the Tzar himself having the credit of impaling one old man on his lance.161 On what evidence, if any, these men were found guilty of treason and disloyalty it is impossible to know, but this at least may be remarked, that, enjoying as they did the Tzar’s favour and patronage, they had scarcely a motive for wishing to overturn or undermine his authority. The executions on the Red Place, renewed after an interval of a few days, were not the only outlet for the monarch’s anger or blood-thirst; other evil deeds are related of this reign of terror, this running amok of a human being among his unresisting fellows. It was said that Ivan forced Thedor Basmanov, the “angel-faced,” to kill his own father: a ghastly deed which did not save the perpetrator from a death by torture, and which at least need not be unreservedly believed in. Torture was also meted out to the widows of some of the most distinguished of the victims of the Red Place, and eighty were said to have been flung into the Moskva river. Such a glut of corpses defied expeditious or thorough burial, and for many days and nights the inhabitants of that horror-haunted city witnessed packs of dogs crunching and tearing human bones and flesh in the dry ditches beneath the Kreml walls and in the open spaces of the Kitai-gorod. Some of the bodies appear to have found their way into the tzarskie fish-ponds, and carp and pike grew bloated on the rich banquet.162 And amid the gloom and stifled wailing the dread author of it all, the man of terror and blood and punishments, prostrates himself daily in the holy places, bumping his forehead on the pavement before the sacred ikons. Splendid triumph of the Nazarene! Oh glorious irony! The great Orthodox Tzar, conqueror of Kazan and Astrakhan and Polotzk, master of the lives and liberties of his trembling subjects, bows in abject worship before the picture of a woman and a little child.

Amid the seemingly indiscriminating severities with which Ivan cowed the inhabitants of his principal cities, his mind was engaged in the conduct of a dexterous and well-thought-out foreign policy. The same year that witnessed the episode of Novgorod and the butchery in the Kitai-gorod was signalised by a long-laboured truce (to run for three years) between Moskovy and Poland. 1570The growing expectancy of a vacancy of the Polish-Lit’uanian throne had no doubt something to do with this reconciliation. That Ivan seriously put himself forward as a candidate for that extremely limited and curtailed monarchy seems to be the case, judging from the significant instructions which his ambassadors received, to keep strict silence, when in Poland, on the subject of the Tzar’s domestic tyrannies.163 Equally surprising, but nevertheless credit-worthy, the Tzar was not without a party among the liberty and license-loving Polish nobles, many of whom, particularly at Warszawa, were said to be adopting Moskovite costume in view of a coming dynastic displacement. His adherents were chiefly among the szlachta, or small nobility, who numbered in their ranks many of the Reformed persuasion. At this period Protestants and Orthodox were lumped together in Poland, under the common designation of Dissidents, and suffered equally at the hands of the dominant Catholics. Hence many members of the Diet were more alarmed at the prospect of an Austrian, or other Jesuit-ridden king, than at the possible unmanageability of the Moskovite Tzar. While awaiting the drift of events in Poland, Ivan set in motion a course of action by which he hoped to drive the Swedes out of the Baltic provinces. His idea was to enlist the sympathy and support of the long-suffering Livlanders and Estlanders by setting up a puppet king who should govern the old lands of the Bund, under the suzerainty of Moskva. The title of King of Livland, offered, according to contemporary report, successively to ex-Master von Fürstenberg and the Duke of Kourland (by both of whom it was declined), was eventually accepted by the ambitious but effete Magnus of Holstein, Duke of Oesel and Wiek. (1570)Magnus paid a visit to Moskva—in some trepidation, for the city was getting an unhealthy reputation—and returned with the Tzar’s proclamation of his new dignity, backed up by five-and-twenty thousand Russian troops. With this force and his own German guards, the Holsteiner advanced upon Revel, which, however, held out against both his wiles and his assaults; the latter he discontinued after a siege of thirty weeks’ duration (16th March 1571), burning his camp-works and withdrawing his army into quarters. This rebuff settled the fate of the vassal “kingdom.” In another direction Ivan’s foreign policy had been equally unsuccessful—in an attempt, namely, to cultivate friendly relations with the Ottoman power. The embassy which he sent in 1570 to Constantinople, to congratulate Sultan Selim on his accession, was coldly received, and a demand put forward for the relinquishing of the Russian sovereignty over Kazan and Astrakhan. The uneasiness which the Tzar felt with regard to the possibility of a forward Mussulman movement was increased by news which was brought to Moskva in the spring of 1571 of a warlike activity among the Krimskie Tartars. Whether instigated by Turkish influences, or by the anti-Moskovite party in Poland, or whether acting on his own initiative, Devlet-Girei was certainly preparing for an inroad upon Russian territory, and Ivan hastily assembled an army of 50,000 men, which he posted, under the leadership of several voevodas, along the banks of the Oka, where the enemy was expected to pass. The invading force, said to be 120,000 strong, eluded this first line of defence and bore straight upon Moskva. The Tzar, who might with the forces at his disposal have held the Tartars in check till the army of the Oka came up on their flank, fled, as his father Vasili had done, as most of the Grand Princes of Moskva had from time to time done under similar circumstances, and sheltered himself at Rostov, leaving the capital to its fate. Weakened and dispirited by this desertion, the force which had raced back from the Oka and arrived at much the same time as the Krimskies made no attempt to defend the slobodas and outlying quarters of the city, which were set on fire by the Khan’s orders. Ignorant, probably, of the strength of the Russian garrison, and fearing to be taken unawares by a reinforcement from the north, the Tartars made no further move upon the city, and indeed the rapid spread of the flames made pillage impossible. With the exception of the stone-built Kreml, nearly the whole town was destroyed, and the loss of life, though probably enormously exaggerated by contemporary writers, was undoubtedly very great. “Then might you haue seene a lametable spectacle,” writes an English traveller twenty years later, “... the people burning in their houses and streates, but most of all such as laboured to passe out of the gates farthest from the enemie, where meeting together in a mighty throng, and so pressing euery man to preuent another, wedged themselves so fast within the gate, and streates neare vnto it, as that three ranks walked one vpon the others head, the vppermost treading downe those that were lower: so that there perished at that time (as was sayd) by the fire and the presse, the number of 800,000 people, or more.”164 Or less. Another Englishman, Sir Jerome Horsey, bears witness to the fact that numbers of the inhabitants, plunging, with all their removable valuables, into the river, to escape from the flames and the Tartars, sank beneath its waters, and that long after the bodies had been disposed of, it was a fashionable amusement to drag the river bed for submerged treasure, adding significantly, “I my selfe was somewhat the better for that fishing.” Satisfied with the striking and easily-accomplished chastisement which he had inflicted upon the half-dreaded, half-despised enemy, the Khan withdrew his Hordes, carrying with him immense numbers of captured Moskovites, and pursued at a safe distance by the tzarskie voevodas. Ivan, returning to his desolated capital and dreading a renewal of the struggle with an antagonist, formidable in himself and possibly a forerunner of Turkish hostility, began to reckon on the necessity of purchasing peace by the surrender of Astrakhan. While, however, the victorious Tartar was plaguing him with taunting messages and importunate demands, the Tzar diverted his mind to the consideration of a more pleasing matter. His second wife Mariya had died in 1569, and he had for some time contemplated a renewal of the marriage state. The present seemed to him a good opportunity for carrying out his project, and the usual preliminaries were set in motion. The selection of a mate for the Russian Gosoudars was conducted