Ivan the Terrible (40 page)

The well-known verdict of the historian Kliuchevsky on the
Zemskii sobor
of 1566, that the Tsar was merely consulting with his own agents, has weighed heavily on Russian interpretations of the subject. Kliuchevsky argued that if the
sobor
represented anything, it represented the capital, where the leading forces in the country were concentrated, and the capital represented the land. Thus a representative attended the
sobor
as his service duty in accordance with his rank or position;
⁶⁰
the government ordered him to attend a
sobor
as it might send him to any post. There was no fundamental difference between appointment and election. The government could appoint to a post, and if no one was available it could ask for someone to be elected. There was no question of full powers inherent in a deputy. What was required was a person capable of fulfilling the requirements of the government. This interpretation of the nature of elections in the sixteenth century as leading to the choice of a representative who was bound to act in the royal interest because he was an agent of the Crown, ignores the fact that elected members of Parliament in England carried out functions in the localities on behalf of the Crown, for instance as justices of the peace, without necessarily being or becoming agents of the crown. Both Tikhomirov and Zimin reject Kliuchevsky's view because they take ‘agent’ to mean a person mandated by the Tsar, and therefore committed to defending his policies and not those of his electors. They also, however, rejected Kliuchevsky's interpretation because it did not concord with the Soviet conception of the Russian government as a government by representative institutions (
soslovno-prestavitel'noe
).

Tikhomirov and Zimin, in rejecting Kliuchevsky's view also brushed
aside the Slavophile conception of the Tsar consulting with his people to obtain their support, and opted for the view that the people who attended the
sobor
represented the class interests of the social group they sprang from. Yet Kliuchevsky had a clearer vision of the way medieval western European parliamentary systems worked when he rejected a class-based orientation for the sixteenth-century
sobor
, for an ‘estate’ is not, or not yet, a class. Perhaps the most useful summing up of the debate on the nature of the Russian Assembly of the Land is the conclusion: ‘the Sobors were not visualized at the time as popular representative bodies [
Volksvertretungen
]’ but as ‘forums to ease the government's task by securing the participation of society’.
⁶¹

We have no evidence of what moved Ivan IV to require such a meeting. The military escort of the Lithuanian embassy amounted to over twelve hundred all told, possibly outnumbering the Russian soldiers present in Moscow. Ivan may well have felt the need for the support of the Russian service gentry, of a body representing Russian public opinion, or of the only opinion which was in any way relevant, a body similar in kind to a Lithuanian Sejm, when Lithuania was so powerfully present in Russian territory. It may be that reports of the public deliberations which had taken place in the Sejms at Vilna (November 1565) and Beresteisk (April 1566) influenced him to set up an authoritative rival forum for the consideration of Russian policy. It may be that he genuinely felt the need to win the support of important social groups to continue the war and to deal with its huge financial burden, to which must now be added the levy of 100,000 rubles for the setting up of the
oprichnina
. It is certainly evidence of the Tsar's capacity for political improvisation – already shown in the creation of the
oprichnina
. Maybe he called the Assembly on the advice of his councillors in the Privy Council, some of whom, including those closest to him, were of Lithuanian origin and therefore familiar with the political system prevailing there. For the
Zemskii sobor
, though not yet an institution, was an institution in the making. An ill-defined public assembly had moved from being a body that listened, to being a body that approved, and now in 1566, to a body which discussed and moulded policy.

The historiography of the
Zemskii sobor
has also been powerfully influenced in a different way by the fact that Russian historians began to engage seriously with the history of their own country only in the early nineteenth century. When it really took off Russian intellectual life soon fell into the morass of German romantic philosophy, followed by Hegelianism, economic determinism and eventually populism,
Marxism, Leninism and the class war, which was viewed as the driving force of historical development, even as far back as in the sixteenth century. It is really difficult to discern a class structure at that time, let alone any economic class solidarity in what was a pre-modern economy and a pre-modern social structure, vertically organized into clans, rather than into horizontal layers, and shot through with patronage and clientelism.

Thus because Russia was developing in a way analogous to, if separate from the rest of Europe, and with a time lag of several centuries,
⁶²
historians assumed that it had developed similar institutions, based on the principle of the representation of ‘estates’: ecclesiastics, aristocracy, nobility, merchantry/townspeople. And thanks to the dominant historical philosophy of the nineteenth century in Russia, estates had to be viewed as the sixteenth-century equivalent of economic classes. But a more modern approach is that consensus was a deeply rooted political system in Russia as elsewhere, that it goes back to an older tradition of the obligation of the King's retinue to provide counsel, and of the King to listen, in the expectation of achieving the outcome of harmony between the participants. The sixteenth-century Russian conception of the polity (it is too early to talk of the state
⁶³
) was not based on ideological struggle conditioned by social interests.
⁶⁴
It rested on and was represented by the language of medieval symbols which expressed the understanding and acceptance of the rule of a monarch, at that time.
⁶⁵
In any case parliaments and representative institutions everywhere usually met far too seldom to be able to act as institutions of government.
⁶⁶

There is no space here for a thorough analysis of the difference between the English Parliament and the Russian proto-parliamentary institutions, though the comparison with England is in many ways the most fruitful in the sixteenth century, because the English Parliament was more than a representative body, it was also an outgrowth of a judicial court. The ‘King in Parliament’ was judiciary, legislature and executive, all in one, which was not the case with representative institutions in other countries, and the Commons also had the right to initiate legislation, which no institution had in Russia: ‘For to propund bils what euery man thinketh good for the publike benefite (as the maner is in England) the
Russe Parliament
alloweth no such custome, nor libertie to subiects’, wrote Fletcher.
⁶⁷
Parliaments were not instruments of government but of intermittent conflict resolution between clans and factions by means of political bargaining.

Events in the summer of 1566 are somewhat confused and overlapping. There was first of all the question of appointing a new Metropolitan, since Afanasii had been given permission to withdraw in spring 1566. But more important was what appears to have been a plot among service gentry present at the
Sobor
of 1566, the Metropolitan, the Master of the Horse, I.P. Fedorov, one of the wealthiest and most prestigious boyars, and the Prince of Staritsa, to force Ivan to abolish the
oprichnina
. The difficulty with political experiments is that they can have unexpected results. Having given the Tsar, at the
Sobor
, the support he needed to continue the burdensome war in Livonia, members of the service gentry took the opportunity, to Ivan's consternation, to press, in a public demonstration, for the abolition of the hated
oprichnina
as a
quid pro quo
for their acquiescence. The evidence of this mutiny is as usual scanty and imprecise and comes from many different quarters.

According to one account, at the
Sobor
of 1566,

An obscure, undated entry in the later Piskarevsky Chronicle confirms that the Tsar, in setting up the
oprichnina
, provoked considerable ill feeling among the service gentry of the
zemshchina
, that

And the chronicle continues: ‘they started to think of Vladimir Andreevich’ (the Prince of Staritsa). The service gentry not only suffered from the executions and confiscations imposed by the
oprichniki
without any legal justification or form, but also from the taxes levied to pay for the costs of the war and the
oprichnina
(though Ivan did quite well out of confiscated lands) and many of them or their relatives had been expelled from their lands and had to resettle elsewhere, which caused great resentment.
³
The fact that Ivan had to some degree abated the persecutions which had accompanied the introduction of the
oprichnina
evidently emboldened the discontented to demand its total abolition, and enough of them were present in Moscow because of the Assembly of the Land to make an effort worth while. There is no evidence of the date on which the boyars and the service gentry submitted the request to Ivan to abolish the
oprichnina
(historians place their petition between 17 and 20 July 1566) but a considerable number of them were promptly arrested.
⁴

Some of the prisoners were soon released, though three nobles, V.F. Rybin Pronskii (a boyar), I. Karamyshev (a military servitor) and K. Bundov, who seems to have been a lower rank landowner of peasant origin, were executed. They were all closely connected with I.P. Fedorov, in his capacity of Master of the Horse,
⁵
head of the
prikaz
concerned with the supply of horses to the court and the armed forces, no sinecure. Fedorov was removed to Polotsk as Governor for the time being, possibly by the intercession of the future Metropolitan Filipp who was a relative. But Ivan's experience of actual open opposition not only from the boyars but from the service gentry, his growing suspicion of Fedorov's loyalty and his permanent suspicion of his cousin Vladimir of Staritsa, coupled with his reliance on his new guards in the
oprichnina
, launched him on a fresh and even more cruel campaign of repression. Some two hundred of the service gentry who had taken part in the demonstration against him were subjected to
torgovaya kazn
' (flogging through the streets with wire whips); servants and attendants of the Metropolitan were arrested and with other prisoners also subjected to flogging through the streets, some had their tongues cut out, some were quartered, some were flayed alive or strips were carved out from their skin.
⁶
Anthony Jenkinson, the agent of the English Russia Company, writing to Sir William Cecil from Kholmogory where he had just arrived
from England, in a letter allegedly dated 26 June 1566, but probably of 26 July, reported:

Jenkinson cannot by 26 June, when he is alleged to have written this letter in Kholmogory, have heard of events in Moscow in mid-July. And yet the description and the figures coincide with what is known from other sources.
⁸

Metropolitan Afanasii had not been present at the meeting of the Church Council in the
Zemskii sobor
. He was deeply opposed to the
oprichnina
, had criticized it openly to the Tsar, and had finally laid down the white cowl on 19 May 1566 without seeking the Tsar's permission. The presence of so many abbots and senior ecclesiastics in Moscow at the time may have been due to the need to summon a Church Council to elect a new metropolitan. It was not going to prove easy. Before he became Metropolitan, Afanasii had been Ivan's confessor. He had attempted on several occasions to use the Church's traditional power of intercession for those Ivan wished to destroy. Afanasii had lived up to the role Ivan attributed to him when angry, of acting as an obstacle to the implementation of his will. This irritated Ivan even more than usual at a time when he was in fact using the church hierarchy to communicate with the
zemshchina
, the mainly boyar government of the land which was not incorporated into his own private domain.

The first candidate for the metropolitanate, the Archbishop of Kazan', German Polev, seemed to be a ‘safe pair of hands’, a follower of Joseph of Volokolamsk, in the style of Makarii, not a fanatic, and acceptable to other trends. Polev came to Moscow but he lasted only two days. As a good churchman he threatened Ivan with damnation unless the Tsar mended his ways, and abolished the
oprichnina
, but he did so ‘gently’ and in private. However, tactless references to the Last Judgment, with its implication of the immediacy of death and its reference to the tortures of the damned, particularly aroused the timorous Ivan's ire, since he was just as afraid of divine justice as of
human rebellion. Polev was promptly told to leave the metropolitan's palace and go back to Kazan'.