Ivan the Terrible (17 page)

The ‘government’, allegedly, of the ‘Chosen Council’ has also been called by historians the ‘government of compromise’, meaning that neither side in the class war said to be raging between the boyars, anxious to keep their lands, and the service gentry, anxious to acquire more land at their expense, was able to dominate policy. It was Adashev's position, halfway between these two social groups, which enabled him to become the instrument of compromise. He is said to have ‘joined the government’ in 1547, though at that time his official rank was still that of an armed
rynda
or guard and his father was still an
okol'nichii.
¹

During the period 1547–58 the Tsar and the Boyar Council were able to introduce a number of useful policies in the domestic field and to accomplish one of the main foreign policy aims of the previous grand princes of Moscow, namely the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan', which controlled both banks of the Volga down to the Caspian Sea.
²

It is difficult to tell to what extent Ivan himself initiated any of the domestic policies which marked these years. Assuming that the new policies were not imposed by his domineering guardians on a reluctant young Tsar, mainly interested in amusing himself, they seem to have been the result of personal rather than political compromises between different forces and clans at court which were on the whole in broad agreement on the policies to be pursued. These were concerned with law and the administration of justice, the extension of the control of the central legal system to territories acquired since the previous law code of 1497 was drawn up (Ryazan', Pskov, Smolensk), the reform of local government, the recasting of property rights in land to ensure the performance of military service, some reduction in ecclesiastical land-holdings, and improvement in church discipline. It is difficult to discern in this list, concerned mainly with ‘tidying up’, a clear pattern of class-inspired
positions. According to the most influential historian of the period,
³
the basic conflict was between the progressive Tsar, attempting to centralize the administration of the country, and the reactionary boyars, anxious to preserve the decentralized ‘feudal’ structure. Since neither side was systematic in the pursuit of its alleged aim, and the boyars in any case were not united, it is difficult to sustain this interpretation.

The new spirit in which the Tsar proposed to govern was expounded in an allocution pronounced on 27 February 1549 to a large public gathering composed of the Metropolitan, the Church Council, the Boyar Council and the boyars in general, service gentry, and possibly some popular urban elements, since it met in Moscow. According to contemporary accounts Ivan – who evidently could never resist a dramatic scene – is said to have summoned selected people from every rank and station in every town (unlikely), and, having withdrawn to pray and to commune in silence, he went on a Sunday after mass, in procession with his boyars, the Church hierarchy and the armed forces, to the
lobnoe mesto
(which was to acquire fame as the place of execution) just outside the Kremlin, where the people had gathered in deep silence. Here he solemnly addressed the Metropolitan Makarii, begging him to support a Tsar who had been left fatherless and motherless, and whose nobles had taken no care of him. He begged the people's pardon for the offences he had committed in his unregenerate days, through no fault of his own, and he prayed them to forget the past and to unite in the love of Christ, bowing in all directions to the people.
⁴

Ivan then accused the boyars of having, while they ruled on his behalf, oppressed and injured the service gentry and nobles, as well as the peasants, and he warned that any such future oppression would lead to disgrace and punishment. The boyars in turn begged the Tsar to bring to trial anyone charged with such behaviour. The same speech was repeated by the Tsar to an assembly of army commanders, senior officers and service gentry on the following day. The Tsar then decreed that in future service gentry in the towns and provinces were no longer to be tried before the courts of the lieutenants (
namestniki
) in the provincial centres, except for murder, theft and brigandage, when caught in the act, and orders were duly sent out. Both the political élite and the administration in the ‘court’ or
dvor
were conciliated by this new approach which placed the service gentry under the jurisdiction of the officials in the capital, even of the Tsar himself, and removed them from the jurisdiction of the provincial governors.
⁵
This order can therefore be seen as the result of a process of balancing of interests.
⁶

The Assembly of 1549 ranks in Soviet historiography as the first in a long chain of so-called ‘assemblies of the land’ or z
emskie sobory
, which allegedly brought together selected (or elected) representatives of the various estates, the Boyar Council, the Church Council, the higher court ranks and the top level of the merchantry. It is held to be the ancestor of the Russian version of the assemblies of estates which existed at the time in France, Spain, Germany, Sweden and, of course, Poland–Lithuania.
⁷
Russian historians also include the English Parliament among the models of the z
emskii sobor
, but this reflects a modern misunderstanding of the nature of the sixteenth-century English Parliament, of which more will be said below.
⁸
The assembly of February 1549 has acquired a quite spurious importance owing to the determination of Russian nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians to detect in it the meeting of a Russian Estates General. They were at the time obsessed with representative institutions and democracy, concepts which were all the rage when they wrote, as symbols of a modern political system. ‘The February assembly was the first
Zemskii sobor
. Its summoning was the indication that the Russian state had now been converted into a “monarchy governed by representative estates”, a central estates institution had now been founded.’
⁹
The author of this statement, A.A. Zimin, admits that the institution was not as yet fully fledged, since the towns were not represented, and no one was elected, but he argues that there was a substantial change in the nature of the Russian constitution since legislation had now to issue from and be approved by a representative body. Subsequent events will show that this was simply not the case. As before, and later, the Tsar could just issue orders when he wished, though he did at times issue what one might term orders of national significance after formal discussion with members of his Privy Council.
¹⁰

The political nature of the ‘assembly’ is better explained by a suggestion put forward by the historian G. Vernadsky. He argued that the original popular gathering of 1547 – which organized the riot after the fire in Moscow, and the murder of Iuri Glinsky – may have derived from some latent communal memory of the past role in political life of a popular
veche
, the medieval, unelected, town assembly of all the heads of free families, and that the gatherings which took place in 1549, 1550, 1551 etc. should rather be envisaged as
tserkovno-zemskie sobory
(Church and Land Assemblies).
¹¹
These early
sobory
were not ‘representative’, they were transient, summoned at the will of the ruler; there were no legally incorporated estates or other orders or bodies to serve as electorates. To quote an English historian on England, ‘the development
of parliament from an extension of the
curia regis
into something like a national assembly – from an “occasion” into an “institution” – was probably the most important political legacy of the late Middle Ages.’
¹²
This did not happen in Russia until the seventeenth century. The meeting of an ‘assembly of the land’ in 1566 was still an occasion, not an institution. The first assembly to qualify as a genuine political institution was the assembly of 1598, which elected Boris Godunov to the throne of Russia.
¹³
But the concept of two distinct political organisms, the Crown and the land, was now beginning to emerge. Previously all state affairs had been
gosudarevye dela
, affairs of the Crown, there were now also
zemskie dela
, affairs of the land.
¹⁴

Soon after Ivan's speech to the people of Moscow in February 1549, Aleksei Adashev was allegedly appointed head of a new office for receiving petitions for the redressing of wrongs (
chelobitnaia izba
), in response to Ivan's assurance that he would provide justice to the common people against the boyars (an office roughly corresponding to the Master of Requests or the
maître des requêtes
in England and France).
¹⁵
The
chelobitnaia izba
is said to have been located in a building opposite the Cathedral of the Annunciation, in which Sylvester served. From here, according to the early seventeenth-century Piskarevsky Chronicle, Adashev ‘ruled the Russian land’, and Sylvester with him.
¹⁶
The reference to the presence of Sylvester in this
izba
in this early seventeenth-century chronicle has led historians to assume that he played a major part in its activities all along. It must be said, however, that not all historians agree that this institution was founded at this time, nor do they agree on the importance of this particular office as the centre in which all wrongs were redressed, nor on its location.
¹⁷
In any case, an ordinary priest was unlikely to act as an official.

Makarii was in fact often left in charge of Moscow when Ivan travelled outside the city. This was the case in the second half of 1549, when the Tsar, with a large military contingent, left on the first of several attempts to conquer the Khanate of Kazan', and his cousin Vladimir of Staritsa (then aged only thirteen) was left in nominal charge under the aegis of the Metropolitan in Moscow. Policy was discussed in Makarii's rooms, he was evidently present at some meetings of the Boyar Council, and in Ivan's absence he sometimes received ambassadors and discussed foreign policy.
¹⁸

A second major undertaking of the new ‘government’ was the revision in 1550 of the law code of Ivan III, dating back to 1497. Here again Russian and Soviet historians have differed on its significance. There was no judiciary in the English sense of the word (and no public teaching of
law) in Russia, though canon law – as expounded in the
Nomokanon
, in use in ecclesiastical matters – gave some training in legal thinking. The heads of government offices were judges (
sud'i
) as well as administrators, and the Boyar Council had both judicial and executive functions; members acted as judges over the Council's members and over issues arising within the range of their responsibilities. Adashev may have played a part in the preparation of the new code; he was at the time
kaznachei
or treasurer in the
bol'shaia kazna
, which was both the Tsar's public treasury and his central chancery, but no one had any real knowledge of law and it is impossible to pinpoint the guiding hand.
¹⁹

The new code repeated many of the clauses of the old. It attempted to bring order into the existing maladministration and corruption in the field of justice; to deal with the problem of brigandage and public order and with the status of the various social groups, including the graduated compensation for injury to the honour of members of the various ranks; it regulated the conditions for the departure of peasants from their masters on St George's Day (26 November), and dealt with the various types of bondage (
kholopstvo
), landownership, taxation, and local government. The promised removal of the service gentry from the jurisdiction of the provincial governors was confirmed. The code was in general harsher than the code of 1497: crimes against the Crown, such as treason, were punished by death (art. 61). Ominously so was the surrender of a town to the enemy. The regulation of justice in the provinces increased the responsibilities of the local elders (
gubnye starosty
) in the maintenance of order in the core region of Russia, as enacted during the regency of the boyars (1539). Taxes and fees payable to the local administration now began to be regulated by individual charters issued to the localities.
²⁰

One of the most important articles was no. 85, which had no model in the previous code. It laid down the law regarding the right to repurchase ancestral allodial land which had been sold, setting down the conditions in which relatives would be allowed to repurchase it. To this extent it was a limitation on the free use of boyar and noble land. (It should be borne in mind that owners of allodial land could not in any case dispose of it freely, since it was usually burdened by family and clan claims.)
²¹

Did this policy represent the victory of the service nobility over the boyars? Or did it represent the victory of the ruling class as a whole – anxious to consolidate its ownership of property in land – over the Tsar? Or did it represent a consensus in Russian society? The principality of Vladimir Moscow had swallowed up many appanages and princely
estates, had absorbed a number of important cities since 1497 and had annexed lands in Lithuania. Titles to land remained very confused and confusing. There was land belonging to the Tsar, confiscated land, appanage land held of old by Riurikid princes, new grants of land as appanages, with occasional judicial or military privileges attached to suzerainty, made by grand princes (Ivan III, Vasily III) to members of the ruling family or their relations, or to Orthodox princes deserting Lithuania for Russia.
²²
The administration of the country by means of the
dvortsy
or chambers responsible for individual principalities contributed to the perpetuation of the fragmented judicial system. Here again Russian and Soviet historians have differed on its significance.
²³