Ivan the Terrible (16 page)

More doubtful is the attribution to Sylvester of the
Domostroi
, the book of household management that began to circulate in the mid-sixteenth century, though the present text incorporates sections dating from the seventeenth century. The book deals with the running of a substantial household, from a man's, possibly from a priest's point of view, or even possibly from the point of view of a high-ranking official, who would in all probability be literate. Apart from its detailed and strictly practical instructions on the control of bonded labour and
servants, the storage of goods, the brewing of mead, the preparation of food and sweetmeats, the
Domostroi
dwells on the religious duties of the wife, who shall obey her husband in all things. It is this book that is one of the sources of the myth of the universality of uniquely severe corporal punishment prevailing in Russia.
³⁹
A wife is enjoined to strike a servant if he does not heed her; if she in turn fails to live up to her duties, her husband should ‘beat her when you are alone together; then forgive her and remonstrate with her. But when you beat her, do not do it in hatred, do not lose control. A husband must never get angry with his wife; a wife must live with her husband in love and purity of heart.’ Similarly, when disciplining servants, beat them, but then forgive them; a wife must ‘grieve over her servant's punishment, insofar as that is reasonable, for that gives the servants hope’. The author further recommends that no one should box the ears or hit another about the eyes or around the heart. These admonitions, possibly more honoured in the breach than in the observance, fit in well with the general tone and context of similar books of manners and household management in use elsewhere in Europe at the time.
⁴⁰

Sylvester's overpowering rhetoric and possibly his threats of damnation certainly seem to have had a profound moral and spiritual influence on the Tsar and to have led him to repent publicly, and dramatically, of many personal and political misdeeds. Sylvester was evidently a man of strong personality, who may have exercised an influence on Ivan's personal behaviour and private thoughts which the Tsar came in time to resent. During the years of the priest's ascendancy there are few if any references to licentiousness and drunken behaviour at court. Even Ivan's innate cruelty seems to have been held somewhat in check. The years 1549–59 saw the smallest number of executions among the magnates of the court and in the Tsar's own family, in spite of occasional serious political crises.
⁴¹
The Chronicles reflect a relatively peaceful decade in domestic matters perhaps because Ivan was for much of the time actively engaged in war and legislation.

Ivan does seem to have been very much attached to his wife, Anastasia. The couple were childless for two years and spent much time on pilgrimages in accordance with the Russian tradition of asking for divine intervention, a tradition followed by Grand Princess Sofia, who waited a long time for a son, and by Grand Princess Elena Glinskaia, who also had to wait after her marriage to Vasily III.
⁴²
Ivan and Anastasia then had two short-lived daughters, Anna (1549–50) and Maria (1551–4), before their first son and heir, Dmitri, was born in 1552.

Of Sylvester's relations with Anastasia we know nothing, but there is
an intriguing suggestion that she did not like him, and that he did not like her, possibly because he interfered too much between husband and wife. In his second letter to Kurbsky, Ivan charged Sylvester with likening Anastasia to the Empress Eudoxia (
AD
395–404), wife of the Emperor Arcadius. Eudoxia became extremely hostile to St John Chrysostom, who attacked her virulently from the pulpit, seeing in her the incarnation of Jezebel and Salome.
⁴³
Had Anastasia ever compared Sylvester with the golden-mouthed Archbishop of Constantinople and fretted at his hold over her husband?

Possibly – though we have no evidence of this – Sylvester was also able to influence the Tsar's views on policy. His moral ascendancy was so deeply felt that Ivan, again according to his own later account, raised him to the position of a favourite (whatever that might mean in sixteenth-century Russia), though he had no official governmental rank or status. He is said by A.A. Zimin to have represented the interests of those boyars who, though boyars, were nevertheless inclined to introduce some reforms in order to strengthen the central government. Sylvester was not corrupt, and when his influence ceased, he simply withdrew around 1560 to a monastery.

Sylvester is almost never mentioned without his alter ego, Aleksei Fedorovich Adashev, indeed the two are frequently mentioned together as ‘the government of Sylvester and Adashev’ and their supporters, friends etc. Ivan implies that he had known Adashev, who was a couple of years older, since adolescence and it is therefore possible that he was one of the young men brought into the palace to provide companionship for the young Grand Prince. He might also have attracted the young Tsar's attention by his knowledge of the Ottoman Empire.

Karamzin's dramatization of events, based on the accounts given respectively by the Tsar himself and by Prince A.M. Kurbsky, has launched one of the most controversial episodes in the history of Ivan IV on a long and complicated historiographical life. It is assumed by Karamzin, and by most subsequent Russian historians, that around 1549 Russian government was entrusted by Ivan into the hands of the priest Sylvester and the young Adashev, who represented a ‘holy union’ of chosen, experienced and virtuous men, including incidentally Metropolitan Makarii and Prince D. Kurliatev. The name ‘Chosen Council’ (
Izbrannaia rada
) was first launched by Prince A.M. Kurbsky in his
History
of Ivan IV,
⁴⁴
written probably in the late 1570s. It does not appear in either of the first two letters which Kurbsky addressed to Ivan, but the existence of such a council is implied in the first letter of Ivan to Kurbsky.

The notion of a specific party, ruled by Sylvester and Adashev, was given enormous weight and importance by Solov'ev in his
History of Russia since Olden Times
. Without further explanation, Solov'ev stated as a fact that Sylvester and Adashev ruled Russia at the head of a ‘vast clique’, a powerful and multitudinous party; sometimes Sylvester is mentioned without Adashev, but with many unnamed advisers, followers, adherents. This all-powerful party has been described for instance as ‘a close circle of men, with Sylvester at its head, a circle which managed everything; and acting carefully, and slowly, was able to conceal from the eyes of the Tsar its real purpose, which was, acting in concert with the great boyars, to overthrow all that the Tsar's predecessors had achieved’.
⁴⁵

V.I. Sergeevich, one of the great Russian legal historians, writing in 1900, developed the idea of the existence and the constitutional significance and powers of the Chosen Council even more. According to him, the Chosen Council had converted the pre-existing Duma or Council from an advisory body with a fluctuating membership, appointed by the Tsar, into a permanent, executive, representative body whose decisions were binding on the Tsar, who was merely its chairman. He then provided the names of people he thought had been appointed members of the Chosen Council, without any evidence that this was so.
⁴⁶

It is true that at the beginning of Ivan's reign the only policy-making body, the Boyar Council, had become unwieldy: it was composed of thirty-two people, after the riots of 1547, of which ten were appointed after February 1549 (leaving aside the large number of additional
okol'nichie
appointed in these years).
⁴⁷
The effort to renew the membership of the Council by introducing new blood could not get very far because of the
mestnichestvo
system, which defended the right of the next ranking boyar family to a post in the event of a new appointment.
⁴⁸
Moreover, Ivan's marriage had not been popular in some princely circles. Until the first marriage of Vasily III, Russian grand princes had always married either into Russian princely houses or into foreign ones, such as Lithuania or Moldavia. The new system of choosing a bride at a bride-show made it possible for the tsar to choose according to looks and not according to status. This is possibly what Ivan did, and it was to cause trouble. For it led to the appointment of several of the Tsaritsa's male relatives to the Boyar Council. This was far too large a number for efficient consultation and administration, and it has been suggested that the ‘Chosen Council’ was just another name for a smaller group of some nine to twelve people, the so-called
Blizhniaia Duma
, which could be viewed as a closet council, carved out of the Duma and composed of many of the same people.
⁴⁹
Many of these were associates of Aleksei Adashev, states the leading historian of this period, A.A. Zimin. But in the period 1547–53 Adashev was a mere guard (
rynda
) or at most a gentleman of the bedchamber (
postel'nichii
or
spal'nik
), while among his so-called ‘associates’ there were boyars of long standing, for instance, the princely descendants of Gedimin, Prince Ivan Dmitrievich Bel'sky (son of a great survivor Prince Dmitri Bel'sky), who had married a niece of Ivan III, Princess Anna of Ryazan', and Prince I.F. Mstislavsky, a
rynda
in 1547 but already a boyar in 1549, who occupied important military posts in the 1550s, another survivor if ever there was one, and largely because he too was closely related to the Tsar (his mother had been a niece of Vasily III); and the boyars I.V. Sheremetev Bol'shoi (major), and M. Ia. Morozov, D.R. Iur'ev Zakhar'in, the nephew of the Tsaritsa, and V.M. Iur'ev Zakhar'in, her cousin.

It is inconceivable that in a society deeply imbued with the consciousness of rank and clan a mere stripling whose father was not yet a boyar, and a priest, should be accepted as equals, let alone superiors, by magnates and descendants of Riurik and Gedimin. Moreover, although the political authority of a metropolitan was acceptable, and Ivan sometimes delegated tasks to Metropolitan Makarii, the whole notion of government by priests was alien to Russian Orthodoxy, as Ivan made clear in the long diatribe in his first letter to Kurbsky against the spiritual ascendancy of Sylvester, whom he likened to the priest Eli in the Old Testament. Eli, a good and just man, had taken upon himself the role of ruler and as a result Israel was conquered and the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord was in captivity unto the days of David the King. ‘Do you not then see’, exclaims Ivan, ‘how the authority of priest and governor are incompatible with royal power?’ Even Moses had not been allowed by God to be both king and priest, and had been forced to hand over the priestly office to Aaron.
⁵⁰

Ivan has a great deal to say on the misdeeds of Sylvester and Adashev, but the question that must be dealt with now is who actually composed the Chosen Council – who were its members if it existed? At one point Ivan accused Prince A.M. Kurbsky of having been a member, but it is obvious from his career – constantly on the move as a senior general – that Kurbsky could not have been sitting in Moscow. The trouble is that when the Chosen Council is mentioned it is always said, in the sources or in the work of subsequent historians, to be composed of Adashev and Sylvester and their associates, their fellows, their supporters, people who
thought like them, their clique. Only one other member is ever mentioned by name: boyar Prince D.I. Kurliatev-Obolensky, who had a fairly distinguished military career and who was said later by Ivan IV to have been imported by Adashev and Sylvester in order to help them to seize power. (How could underlings appoint a boyar, one wonders?)

The sources are of course extremely exiguous and partisan. One must remember that the only person to use the phrase ‘Chosen Council’ was Prince Kurbsky – Ivan himself never uses it. So was it a council at all? Or was Kurbsky merely referring to a group of influential moral advisers who gave encouragement and backing to Ivan at a time when the Tsar was interested in taking positive political action in various spheres? Different historians have viewed it differently: as a restricted council superimposed on the Boyar Council; or as a Privy Council, a
Blizhniaia Duma
. Nineteenth-century historians seized upon the phrase ‘
Izbrannaia rada
’ to describe an institution which allegedly existed and ruled the country from about 1549 to 1560. But the whole concept of such an institution is riddled with inconsistencies, some of which have now been pointed out by Russian historians, and which came under a withering attack by A.N. Grobowski, in 1969.
⁵¹
The evidence suggests more and more clearly that it did not exist as a separate political institution.

From a purely practical point of view the Tsar needed to draw on advice, information and knowledge from his advisers, and he needed competent generals and officials to carry out his policies, or the policies agreed upon in council. But to work with and through advisers does not make them into a formal council, nor does it limit his authority at its source, since the ultimate decision-making power is his. Moreover, all the evidence of the existence of this Chosen Council comes either from Ivan or from Kurbsky and dates from a period when the Tsar was already showing signs of the paranoia that was later to overtake him, and which led him to see all his one-time friends as enemies.

Why, then, have Russian historians been so anxious to make of the Chosen Council an institution of a new and effective kind? It may well be because of a historical inferiority complex which sees Russia as a latecomer in the development of political (and social) institutions able to formulate and channel the interests and needs of the people. There are even historians who have argued that Ivan introduced a certain ‘democratism’ into the government of Russia, a most anachronistic concept in the sixteenth century, and doubtless meant to represent what in modern English is described as populism, equally inaccurately.