Ivan the Terrible (34 page)

It is more than probable that Kurbsky's desertion intensified in Ivan the need to clarify the theory and extent of his power. As he wrote later, ‘whenever the Tsar wanted to investigate and punish his boyars and his officials for their faults, archbishops and bishops and archimandrites and abbots got together with the boyars and the service gentry and the
d'iaki
, and with all the officials and covered things up from the Lord Tsar and Grand Prince.’
⁴⁹
There were plots against him, or at any rate he believed there were,
⁵⁰
centred around his cousin Vladimir, whom he had always, and particularly since 1553, viewed as a dangerous rival for the throne, and who was indeed the only one.

The right of the eldest son, and his descendants, to inherit the throne was not long-established in Russia, as indeed in many other European countries.
⁵¹
In his efforts to secure the throne for the baby Dmitri in 1553 Ivan cannot have forgotten that he himself had inherited the throne because of his father's success in asserting the principle of lateral succession, namely the priority of the younger son, Vasily, over Dmitri, who was already crowned and anointed as Grand Prince, and who was descended from the elder son, Ivan the Younger,

To what extent the princes and boyars really plotted to dethrone Ivan and replace him with Vladimir of Staritsa which would have inevitably meant Ivan's death, is almost impossible to establish on present evidence, though there were many rumours, and Vladimir's mother, princess Evfrosin'ya was regarded as particularly prone to promote
conspiracies in favour of her son. It was easy for any disgruntled boyar or lower servant to denounce a rival as a supporter of Vladimir of Staritsa and be believed; it was also easy for Ivan to believe that Vladimir would be supported by the Lithuanian King Sigismund Augustus and his nobles. At the session of the Polish Sejm held in 1563, the speech from the throne informed those present that the King ‘hoped that as soon as his armed forces entered Russia many boyars, and noble generals, oppressed by the tyranny of that monster will voluntarily come over to his Majesty's grace, and become his subjects with all their lands’.
⁵²
There are also frequent hints in the chronicles that Ivan might have regarded some of the Tatar
tsarevichi
, notably the descendants of Tsar Peter of Kazan', Vasily III's brother-in-law, as possible heirs to the throne.
⁵³

Another deep-rooted Russian tradition acted as a brake on Ivan's effort to achieve total power: the tradition which was still alive mainly among the Gediminovichi and Riurikovichi of Lithuania (and it is referred to in the speech from the throne mentioned above) and to a lesser degree among those serving the Russian Tsar, of deserting as Kurbsky had done, though he claimed to have done so in order to save his life. One has only to look at the list of princes who moved to Russia from Lithuania, and deserted back to Lithuania, or attempted to do so. The Patrikeevs moved from Lithuania in the fifteenth century, and left a large clan of descendants in Russia,
⁵⁴
some of whom returned or attempted to return to Lithuania. Mikhail L'vovich Glinsky, Tsaritsa Elena's uncle came over to Russia then, dissatisfied with his treatment, attempted to go back to Lithuania and paid the price. Prince Dmitri Vishnevetsky also moved backwards and forwards, and so did the Princes Bel'sky, and many others whose names are not recorded.
⁵⁵
Now, however, there seem to have been many desertions lower down the ranks of the service gentry, many of whom went over even on the battlefield to the troops of the Commonwealth, doubtless to the dismay of the Tsar.
⁵⁶

The principle of family or collective responsibility for a whole range of activities, whether the maintenance of order, the detection and punishment of crime, and the collection and payment of taxes was common to many European medieval societies, and probably had its roots in Germanic law.
⁵⁷
It was superseded little by little as the state evolved out of the dynastic patrimony and the administration emerged out of the King's household. But family responsibility in the West declined more quickly than in Russia, with a few remarkable exceptions, as paid royal servants took over the administration. The Mongol period prevented any natural evolution in Russia in this field as in so many others, so that collective responsibility lasted much longer. It was not
until the reign of Catherine II that family property ceased to be confiscated by the Crown for the crimes of the father. In the reign of Ivan collective responsibility was still an integral part of the administration of the country. It was collective responsibility which kept the borders secure, and ensured that anyone attempting to escape would be denounced to the authorities. It was the same system which maintained a culture of denunciation at all levels of society. Everyone was bound to report any evidence of treason or disloyalty, or even inefficiency, for the obvious reason that they would themselves be punished if they failed to reveal their knowledge of forthcoming treason. It was also collective responsibility expressed in written surety bonds which kept the boyars from flight. Under Ivan, collective
political
responsibility justified the Tsar in executing wives, children, servants and peasants belonging to the households of those he had disgraced. All levels of society were affected.
⁵⁸
And the increasing number of these bonds, involving more and more people, was clearly resented by the aristocracy and the service gentry and intensified their discontent.

In turn, when he was confronted with his nobility Ivan felt that he was caught in a spider's web, spun by the treacherous boyars, who were linked together by endless marriage connexions but even more effectively by the net he had woven himself out of the collective sureties, forcing leading courtiers to put up large sums of money, which in turn forced them to make common cause if they did not want to be destroyed, and drew large numbers of service gentry into their orbit. It was a question of
quis custodiet ipsos custodies
. Ivan believed that the lower military servitors would thwart the boyars and princes if the latter plotted against him, but they knew only too well that if they denounced these supposed plotters, they too would be destroyed – and their families. And Ivan's suspicious nature led him to believe that the very fact that his courtiers put up money and agreed to stand surety for a man whom Ivan distrusted or had disgraced was further proof of the secret treachery of those who signed the sureties. The practice of demanding financial sureties to guarantee loyalty worked both ways. It created guarantees of loyalty to the Tsar, but it rendered it difficult for the Tsar to single out an individual as responsible for an offence, as distinct from the kin as a whole.

What made it even more difficult is that important courtiers at the time of Ivan were drawn from a relatively small number of large princely family clans – there were 120 Princes Yaroslavsky, 69 Obolenskys, 29 Belozerskys, 25 Rostovskys, 28 Starodubskys who could be expected, up to a point, to stand together. Among the non-titled boyars there were a
few large clan groups which might be expected to present a common front. Intermarriages between the Tsar's family and princely and boyar families, within princely families, within boyar families, and between princes and boyars rendered the situation still more complex. Ivan was faced by the fact that it was too dangerous for him to bring down a magnate by calling in his sureties, for they would bring too many down with them. At the same time he evidently felt hemmed in by the close network of boyars, priests, courtiers and administrators. Surviving records of collective guarantees of this kind are few, but there were many cases. There are records of at least twelve members of princely and boyar families who fled. Among the ten published surety bonds which are known, the Russian historian Veselovsky has calculated that up to 950 people put up money and guarantees of the loyalty of others, 117 of them twice, sixteen three times, seven four times.
⁵⁹

It should be observed that the disciplining of the nobility in this manner was not confined to Russia. Surety bonds and recognizances, ‘a terrifying system of suspended penalties’, were also widely used in England in the reign of Henry VII. Out of 62 peerage families in his reign some 46 were under various forms of financial threat including the Marquess of Dorset, the Earl of Northumberland and Lord Mountjoy.
⁶⁰

Kurbsky was not the only one to flee at this time. One of those who escaped successfully was an officer in the musketeers, of modest noble origin, T.I. Teterin Pukhov, who had enjoyed a brilliant military career but, after the fall of Adashev, fell into disgrace, was forcibly shorn as a monk and incarcerated in a monastery from which he ran away to Lithuania around 1564. After his flight he wrote an insolent letter to the new governor of Dorpat, the boyar Mikhail Iakovlevich Morozov deriding him for sitting, unpaid, in a Russian fort, while his wife and children remained as hostages in the power of the Tsar. Writing to Teterin in September 1577, in ‘the refuge of your Tsar, prince Andrei Mikhailovich Kurbsky, in Wolmar, in our ancestral land of Livonia’, Ivan who never forgot or forgave anything, taunted him, the renegade-hero, with taking refuge beyond the Dvina, with not a fort to his name.
⁶¹
Of course a forsworn monk was an infinitely worse criminal than even a traitor to the Tsar, as Ivan himself recognized in his letter to Kurbsky, where he praised those who had been forcibly tonsured but yet lived to see the light as monks.
⁶²
Skrynnikov makes a striking parallel with more recent times when he says that in the 1560s the flood of immigrants from Lithuania was reversed, and it was now Russians who left for Lithuania, forming a veritable ‘Russian emigration’ which for the first time in years could defend their interests and their views against the Tsar.
⁶³

According to the chronicle, on 3 December 1564 Ivan left for Kolomna, to celebrate the day of St Nicholas there on the 6th. He was making for his palace of Kolomenskoye, accompanied by the Tsaritsa Maria and his sons. According to both the chronicle and two Livonian nobles, Johann Taube and Eilhard Kruse, who had been in captivity in Russia and had then entered Russian service, before the Tsar left Moscow he had ordered the removal from churches and monasteries of many icons, crosses, jewels and plate, embroidered robes and money, indeed of all his treasure. He also collected church ornaments from monasteries and churches in the countryside around Moscow. They were to be loaded onto carts and sledges in the Kremlin.
¹

Ivan then issued a proclamation, ‘either inspired by his native suspiciousness or by the suggestion of the devil or by his tyrannical habit’, communicating the following to all religious and secular ranks: ‘he knew well and had definite information that they did not wish to suffer either him or his heirs, that they were making attempts on his health and life, and wanted to transfer the Russian realm to be ruled by a foreigner; he had therefore summoned them to him in order to hand over his rule to them’. He then divested himself of his Tsarist crown, his sceptre and his robes in the presence of members of all ranks.
²

The Tsar then summoned all ecclesiastic and civil ranks to attend a service performed by Metropolitan Afanasii while his servants drew up and loaded the sledges he needed in the courtyard. At the end of the service the Tsar emerged from the church and the Tsaritsa appeared at once with the two children, ready dressed for a journey. The Tsar gave his hand in farewell, and blessed all the high-ranking churchmen and the senior boyars, like Prince Ivan Bel'sky, and Prince Ivan Mstislavsky, gathered there, and all the officials and the commanders and the many merchants.

Then the Tsar sat in his sledge with his sons on either side and drove off accompanied by many distinguished boyars such as Aleksei Basmanov, Prince Afanasii Viazemsky and others to Kolomenskoe. The Tsar also ordered a number of boyars, courtiers and officials to accompany him together with their wives and children, and also a contingent of specially selected military servitors, fully armed and with horses and men-at-arms. The Muscovite public was somewhat astonished at the size and solemnity of the procession, and the number of the escort. This was clearly not an ordinary pilgrimage.
³

The Tsar was confined for a fortnight or so in Kolomna, by bad weather, and then moved on to the Trinity monastery, arriving on 21 December. Thence he moved to Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda. This estate, used intermittently by Vasily III, was now Ivan's preferred residence outside Moscow, used for his hunting expeditions; he had been fortifying it and supplying it throughout the summer of 1564. He sent the Tsaritsa and his children there at the time of the Crimean raid on Ryazan' in October 1564. Some half way between the Trinity monastery and Pereiaslavl' Zalesskii, it was surrounded by estates belonging to the élite of the Russian aristocracy, mainly the princes of Suzdal', such as the Shuisky clan, but also other branches, both princes and boyars, who found it convenient to have estates near the Tsar's favourite residence. The boyars remaining in Moscow were bewildered, and so were the people for they did not understand what was happening. Ivan now sent for those boyars and
voevody
whom he trusted enough to keep them in his service, while those who seemed reluctant to join him were stripped naked and released to make their way back to Moscow in the snow.
⁴

Not until 3 January 1565 was a formal communication of Ivan's intentions received in Moscow, addressed to Metropolitan Afanasii, thus indicating Ivan's rejection of the existing government of Russia, the Boyar Council. Even before reaching Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda, Ivan wrote to the Metropolitan and the men of rank that he: ‘would go where God and the weather would allow, and give his realm to the traitors, though a time might come when he would demand it back again and would take it’.