Ivan the Terrible (36 page)

Ivan had at first intended to build a new palace for himself within the Kremlin walls, and took over the site of the palace belonging to his cousin Vladimir of Staritsa, which had recently burnt down, thus leaving Vladimir without a dwelling within the Kremlin. But he changed his mind and finally took over a large site outside the walls of the Kremlin, (which had belonged to his brother-in-law, Mikhail Cherkassky
²⁷
), in the Arbat district, to set up his
dvor
, which became a fortified palace, isolated from the
zemshchina
. All those who had dwellings there and were not taken into the
oprichnina
were expelled and sent to find a settlement elsewhere. The common people were unaffected.

The special
oprichnina dvor
outside the Kremlin was a formidable building, with stone and brick walls, lead-covered gates, ‘on which were painted lions the eyes of which were set with mirrors; one stood with its mouth open, looking towards the
zemshchina
, the other towards the
oprichnina
’. Between the two was a large double-headed eagle painted black, with extended wings. On the north side there was another large gate with tin-covered iron plates and all the domestic buildings, such as kitchens, storehouses, and the ice houses and cellars, in which doubtless large quantities of sturgeon and sterlet and meat and game were kept. The whole complex, apart from the walls, was built of wood.
²⁸

Ivan who seemed indeed to be going through a period of intensive fear welling up from deep psychological depths, now turned his attention to other suspected traitors: P.P. Golovin was executed on 4 February and two Kurakin princes and Prince I.I. Sukhovo Kashnin were executed at the same time, one Kurakin prince was forced to take the cowl, and Prince D.F. Shevyrev was impaled, for what offence is not known, possibly for attempting to flee to Lithuania; he is said to have sat on the pole, singing a canon to the Virgin Mary.
²⁹
The property of the disgraced was confiscated.
³⁰
More executions followed, but what most shocked the aristocracy was the cruelty of the methods chosen and the extermination of whole families when adolescents and even girls were executed. The fear that swept through them is illustrated by the case of one of the Obolensky princes, a soldier so distinguished that Ivan had to release him because he needed him, but who could not find a single prince or boyar to sign a surety bond for him and had to fall back on the merchantry.
³¹

The most important task before Ivan was the delimitation of his
oprichnina
. This was a major undertaking, involving the division of the country, of the administration and of the armed forces, a division which had to be carried out while at the same time Ivan pursued his foreign policy aims. Though the Tsar had obviously given some thought to it
beforehand, he had now to delimit the areas of Russia he proposed to take in, and then set about expelling from them princes, boyars,
pomeshchiki
and even peasants, recruiting new people he judged more reliable, and settling them in these new lands. Obviously he took over the most productive and economically developed areas and the well-established commercial towns, markets and trade routes, though not necessarily the most agriculturally productive (see map on p. 233). But the major fortifications against outside enemies were left to the care of the
zemshchina
³²
.

The area in which the English Russia Company was allowed to operate was also taken into the
oprichnina
, as was the most prosperous part of northern Russia and the capital of salt production, Staraia Russa. The central districts of Russia, Viaz'ma, Mozhaisk, Suzdal', areas thickly settled with gentry estates, were taken over.
³³
Suzdal' for instance lost about 80 per cent of its gentry, but it was high on the list of Ivan's unreliable provinces since it was the centre of the powerful, wealthy, though not large Shuisky clan. While many of the Suzdal' princes had served in the Council in the early part of the reign, during the
oprichnina
not one remained and this powerful clan was leaderless.

The corps of
oprichniki
was set up by recruiting a number of princes and service gentry from the upper ranks of the existing court military servitors and taking them to serve Ivan in the court at Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda, and a second, larger contingent of provincial service gentry was recruited from the towns Ivan had chosen to form part of his appanage. Aleksei Basmanov and Prince A.D. Viazemsky were in overall charge of carrying out this operation which involved detailed inquiries into the families, opinions, histories, relationships, marriages and friendships of all potential recruits. The class composition of the recruits to the corps of
oprichniki
has served historians as evidence for Ivan's alleged intention of downgrading the princes and boyars in favour of men of humbler origin. The principal critics of the
oprichnina
who recorded their views, Prince Kurbsky, the nobles Taube and Kruse, and the German mercenary Staden, all describe the recruits to the armed guard and to the special armed forces as being men who sometimes came from humble beginnings or even from the peasantry, and who were allotted lands ranging from fifty to sixty or more
haken
(a Livonian measure of the production of land). This was true of the early days of the
oprichnina
, when Ivan showed a particular hostility towards high-ranking boyars and princes and recruited lower ranking nobles to the Privy Council. But in the early 1570s the trend was reversed and the
princes flooded back again.
³⁴
The
oprichniki
had to swear an oath of allegiance as follows:

In order to emphasize their total separateness from the rest of the people, the
oprichniki
wore a special black uniform of coarse cloth over their rich clothes, and rode around with the head of a dog attached to their bridle and a brush fastened to their whip, to symbolize their function: first they barked and bit the enemies of the Tsar and then they swept them out of the country.
³⁶

The two Livonians do not spare Ivan in their description of the horrors he inflicted on the people of Russia in order to carry out his plan. From relatively small beginnings, the
oprichnina
expanded in area and depth, and embraced extensive territories, its administration becoming more and more arbitrary, relentless and inhuman. In 1565 Rostov, Beloozero and Vologda were taken over and well-born men were expelled from their ancestral lands, forced to leave even their moveable property behind, and sent to new lands; their wives and children were sent on after them, on foot; in 1566 another eight districts in central Russia harbouring some 12,000 boyars and landowners, of whom only 570 were taken into the
oprichnina
, were cleansed in the depth of winter, forcing noble ladies to give birth in the snow. Any peasant who attempted to assist them on the way was promptly executed. Those who died were left unburied, the prey of dogs, birds and wild animals. Those who had once been rich were left to beg, and those who had been their servants and possessed nothing now sat in their lands and were given as much as ten of them were given previously. And it happened, conclude the two Livonian nobles, as in the old song: ‘Where peasants rule, the government is rarely good.’
³⁷
Even Ivan himself felt that his new companions were somewhat baseborn.
³⁸

There was at this time no shortage of land at the disposal of the Tsar. Apart from confiscated land, there were abundant resources in conquered Kazan' territory. There were several ways of redistributing lands to Ivan's
oprichnina
guard: either by adding to what they already held
in a given province from lands of
pomeshchiki
who had been expelled, or by moving them to provinces from which all existing landowners were expelled. Obviously, throughout the country there were wealthy owners of patrimonial lands (
votchiny
) and these too were removed wherever necessary. If they were taken into the
oprichnina
, they kept their patrimonial estates in the
zemshchina
, and were given additional
pomest'ia
. The extent of the upheaval varied from district to district according to the number and size of
votchina
estates, and the extent of the enrolment into the
oprichnina
. The privileged status of the
oprichniki
enabled them to carry out the policy of resettlement with as much brutality as came naturally to each individual, and there were indeed members of the
zemshchina
who dressed up as
oprichniki
in order to benefit from the immunity of the latter and oppress their fellows.

The introduction of the
oprichnina
was accompanied by a veritable orgy of arrests and killings, in which it is difficult to detect a specific policy. Sometimes it seems as though Ivan were singling out those who had been slow to acknowledge his son Dmitri in 1553; at other times it seems his blows were aimed at those who participated in the alleged plot against him by Vladimir of Staritsa in 1563; sometimes they were aimed at more distant enemies, the members of the large Obolensky clan whose alleged misrule, together with that of the Shuiskys during his minority, was not forgotten, and whose disregard for his status as Grand Prince was not forgiven. At first it was the princes of Suzdal' who suffered most; many of whom had achieved the rank of boyar. Many, though not all, of the far more numerous and less significant Princes Iaroslavsky, Rostovsky, and Starodubsky, were expelled from their lands and exiled to Kazan' in the course of 1565, together with a number of untitled boyars and a considerable number of service gentry.
³⁹
Including wives and children it is estimated that some six to seven hundred were exiled to Kazan', with the loss of all their property, to continue their service from new, often very small holdings, often seized from their native owners in the newly conquered lands of Kazan' and granted to the newcomers in lieu of their previous holdings, in order to consolidate the Russian presence in these areas.
⁴⁰

Ivan certainly achieved the object of severing the local links uniting a prince or boyar with his ‘people’; the people of course sometimes did not survive either, as in the case of P.I. Gorensky, fifty of whose vassals or retainers were hanged with him.
⁴¹
Prince Semen Lobanov Rostovsky, who had disgraced himself in 1554,
⁴²
and had been thrown into prison for attempting to flee to Lithuania, had been released and resumed
service. In 1565 he was serving as
voevoda
in Nizhnii Novgorod when he was arrested by
oprichniki
, with forty of his retinue. Taken to Moscow by the
oprichniki
, he was killed on the way and his body pushed under the ice; his head was cut off and sent to Ivan in a bag. The Tsar reputedly addressed it: ‘Oh head, head, as long as you were alive you shed a lot of blood!’
⁴³
The fates of Gorensky and Rostovsky were a warning of what might befall those who fled to Lithuania. Many boyars too were exiled, or imprisoned, often for connections with disgraced princes. V.V. Morozov, who had arranged for the burial of Kurbsky's servant, Shibanov, was confined to prison as were other members of his family. The surviving relatives and connexions of Aleksei Adashev were rounded up. What shattered public opinion, if this phrase can be used, was not only the massacre of the élite but also the indiscriminate executions of their families and followers.

While Ivan was organizing the
oprichnina
, he was also fortifying Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda, which had now become the place where above all he felt safe. It was gradually expanded, becoming a small town with many painted churches, houses and stone shops and eventually prisons and torture chambers. The Church of the Mother of God shone in many colours and in gold and silver, and every brick was marked with the sign of the cross. Ivan himself lived in a spacious palace surrounded by ramparts and a moat, while the soldiers and officials lived in specially built quarters. No one could enter or leave without Ivan's knowledge.
⁴⁴

Ivan never gave any indication of why he set up the
oprichnina
, or of what he hoped to achieve with it. Russian and Soviet historians have in turn never stopped constructing interpretations of his policy, indeed of what are frequently described as his ‘reforms’ – though if words have any meaning then a reform nowadays implies an improvement on what went before. The effectiveness of an institution must be analysed in relation to its ostensible purpose, particularly in the case of an institution deliberately created by an act of will, as distinct from one which has evolved over time. But since historians have no idea what Ivan intended the
oprichnina
for, they have had to work back to intentions from consequences, a very unsatisfactory method, particularly where the evidence is both scanty and contradictory. The problem of interpretation has been further obscured by the distinction drawn in Marxist scholarship between subjective and objective forces of history, and by the imposition on historical analysis of the anachronistic concept of the class war. Ivan's conscious purpose, whatever it was, may not have corresponded at all with the results he achieved. Judging by what he did achieve, however, he intended to procure for himself a total freedom of
action, in every field, so well expressed in the Russian word
volia
. It is a word which denotes total freedom to pursue one's arbitrary will, not freedom under the law.