Ivan the Terrible (47 page)

Ivan's foreign policy and military alliances suffered a severe setback as a result of these events, for Sweden, in the person of John III, became a hostile power, while Lithuania was immeasurably strengthened by being able to call on Polish forces much stronger than her own. Moreover, any attempt to secure the crown of Lithuania now implied election to the crown of Catholic Poland too and rendered the diplomatic manoeuvring infinitely more complex.

Was there something in the alleged plot of Vladimir of Staritsa, preceded by the alleged plot of Ivan Petrovich Fedorov, which particularly aroused Ivan's suspicions that Novgorod too might be on the verge of revolt against his rule? The town of Staritsa was on the border of Novgorod land and many of the latter's nobles had a soft spot for Prince Vladimir, possibly because he seemed unlikely to become a threat to them. Novgorod had long ceased to be a centre of old style separatism, because the original Novgorodian citizens had been expelled when it was annexed by Ivan III in 1478, and lands had been granted as
pomest'ia
to incoming Muscovites. The fifteenth-century political tradition had been broken and the city was governed from Moscow. But a new-style Novgorodian ‘localism’ had developed.
⁵
Culturally Novgorodians, living in a great centre of trade, arts and crafts, and still in contact with European commerce, were different from Muscovites; they spoke with a different intonation, and above all they still felt a primary allegiance to the traditional form of government by their Archbishop, who had his own boyars and service gentry and wore the white cowl.
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The Church and the monasteries were extremely wealthy both in treasure and in land.

The Novgorodians were not happy with Ivan's constant warfare, particularly when called upon to fight as far away as Kazan'. They were finding it difficult to pay for the equipment they had to provide for themselves and with the introduction of the
oprichnina
their financial situation only worsened. A number of
pomeshchiki
had been moved out to make room for
oprichniki,
and this caused resentment and reduced agricultural production, making increasing taxes more difficult to pay at
a time of harvest failure. A number of
pomeshchiki
had attended the assembly of 1566 and had subsequently been disgraced or killed. Novgorod had been relegated to the
zemshchina
and the land was therefore the butt of the violence of the
oprichniki,
and some of the
pomeshchiki
had perished in the aftermath of the Fedorov affair. There had also been two severe epidemics of plague in the 1560s. The last straw perhaps had been the execution of Vladimir of Staritsa and his family, who were liked in Novgorod where they had a secondary residence.

What seems to have launched Ivan on a furious search for treason was the recapture of the town of Izborsk by the Lithuanians in January 1569. Izborsk was not far from Pskov, and the Lithuanians had entered by subterfuge, disguising their troops in the uniform of the
oprichniki,
and inviting the Russian garrison to open the gates and let them in.
⁷
They did not keep the town long, but the Russians who had failed to defend it, and were recaptured when the
oprichniki
recovered the town, were beheaded; those who had been taken prisoner by the Lithuanians were executed in July after they were released and repatriated, and the Lithuanian prisoners taken in the campaign were all treated as traitors and executed. So were a number of prisoners held in Moscow.
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This seemed to arouse Ivan to the idea that the lands of Tver', Pskov and Novgorod were seething with treason, and in March 1569 he turned on their inhabitants and forcibly removed some 450 families from Pskov and 150 from Novgorod to the interior, mostly from the lower orders. He felt justified when he heard later that in Stockholm it was these same lower orders who had opened the gates of Stockholm to Duke Karl in the rising against King Erik.
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Throughout 1567, 1568 and 1569 executions followed each other in Moscow, or wherever the Tsar was. There was no formal procedure. The Tsar simply gave orders wherever he was, on horseback, in church or in his chamber.

Obviously determined to root out the treason he saw everywhere, by any and every means, Ivan turned on Novgorod in a mood of suppressed rage. He collected a substantial force of
oprichniki
, late in December 1569 and established a cordon around all the post houses between Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda and Novgorod, forbidding all travel on the pretext of the plague. The troops advanced, executing people as they went; records of their progress have been perpetuated in the
Sinodiki
: ‘on orders from Moscow, six people; … Pskovians with their wives and children thirty people’. The city of Tver', where ex-Metropolitan Filipp was incarcerated in a monastery, was surrounded. Ivan apparently entrusted Maliuta Skuratov with an attempt to conciliate his prisoner, in
the hope that Filipp would feel sufficiently vindictive to welcome what Ivan planned to do to the Church and to Archbishop Pimen in Novgorod, and would take up his previous position again. Maliuta visited Filipp in his cell, and asked for his blessing on the punishment to be meted out to his former rival. But Filipp declared that he would take up the metropolitanate again only if Ivan dissolved the
oprichnina,
and threatened to place his malediction upon him. To prevent this disaster, Maliuta seized a cloth to shut Filipp's mouth, and suffocated him. The Abbot of the monastery was told that he had died from the unbearable stuffiness in his cell, on 23 December 1569.

For some five days the
oprichniki
ravaged Tver', sparing neither buildings, property nor human beings. The bodies had their legs cut off before being pushed under the ice on the Volga. (Torzhok had already been dealt with.) The total numbers killed vary according to the source, but one estimate was that some thirty-six thousand perished, including nine thousand who were killed and double that number who died of starvation and disease. All Lithuanian prisoners held there were dispatched.
¹⁰
Then Ivan moved on to Novgorod on 2 January 1570 and surrounded the city with a cordon allowing not one soul to escape. Here his first target was the Church. The
oprichniki
descended on churches, monasteries and convents, and arrested several hundred clerics who, four days later, on Ivan's arrival with his special guard of some 1,500
oprichniki,
were whipped and beaten on the shins (
na pravezh
) to force them to give away their property.
¹¹
Pravezh
continued for a whole year before the survivors were released since one of Ivan's principal aims in the sacking of Novgorod was to fill up his empty coffers, and indeed by 13 October 1570, 13,000 rubles had reached Moscow.

On Sunday 8 January, Ivan proceeded to the Cathedral of St Sophia, and was met on the bridge over the River Volkhov by Archbishop Pimen, hitherto a loyal supporter of Ivan's, bearing aloft the cross and the icons. Pandemonium now ensued. The Tsar refused to allow the Archbishop to bless him and loudly accused all Novgorodians of treason: he alleged that they wanted to hand over his patrimony of Novgorod to Latins, to foreigners, to Sigismund Augustus. Nevertheless, Ivan was too pious to miss the service for Epiphany, and he attended the mass before sitting down to the banquet specially prepared for him. He then in an access of fury ordered the immediate arrest of Pimen and his boyars. According to Schlichting, Ivan called up his retainers and launched them on the plundering of the Cathedral of Saint Sophia, tore the white cowl from Pimen's head, and had his robes removed. Accusing him of being unfit to be an archbishop, he told him he ought to be a
strolling player and that he would find him a wife, at the expense of the clergy then present, who were forced to hand over large sums of money. Ivan then sent for a mare and said to Pimen: ‘Here is your bride, bestride her and ride to Moscow where you can be enrolled among the strolling players.’ The prelate was mounted facing backwards on the mare, a major ritual humiliation common all over Europe, his feet tied beneath her belly, and driven out of the city with a zither and bagpipes, the accoutrements of a
skomorokh
in his hands as a further humiliation (musical instruments were banned in Russian churches) and escorted to Moscow, to await a trial by a Church Council.
¹²

The next day the trial of those accused of treason began in Gorodishche, Ivan's camp outside Novgorod, with all the corresponding tortures (this time with red hot stoves, boiling water, semi-drowning in the Volkhov river) while Ivan's confessor Evstafii and the
duma d'iak
L.A. Saltykov, supervised the looting of the churches and monasteries, and the removal of all valuable treasures. Men, women and children and babes in arms were tortured, tied up, roped together and thrown into the river, and since it was frozen, other
oprichniki
followed on foot and broke holes in the ice to push them under the water. According to one interpretation this form of execution, being pushed under the ice, traditional in old Novgorod, was also used here to signify that the victims were guilty of apostasy, in attempting to hand the city over to the ‘Latins’, that in drowning them in this way their executioners were sending them straight to hell, identified at times in folklore with the depths of a river. Indeed one victim who was dragged on a rope through the water, and then raised up, when asked what he had seen down below replied that he had been with the evil spirits in hell, and saw the place prepared for the Tsar.
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It was not difficult in these circumstances to procure evidence of treason. According to a careful reconstruction of the evidence by Skrynnikov, the
Sinodik
listing Ivan's victims in Novgorod suggests that the principal leader in the city of a movement against Ivan was a boyar named V.D. Danilov. The current tale had it that a dweller in Polotsk had become the servant of an
oprichnik
, then fled back to the Commonwealth and there informed the authorities that treason was being prepared in Torzhok, Tver', Novgorod and Pskov, where the people had sent couriers to Sigismund asking to be taken under his protection. Some kind of treasonable document to this effect had been found in Novgorod and supplied to Ivan. The general trend of this treasonable plot was in line with the supposed earlier attempts at treason of 1567, which had culminated in the execution of Ivan Petrovich
Fedorov. The present plot was in appearance a renewed attempt by Sigismund to induce the treasonably inclined boyars of the
zemshchina
to rise against Ivan, making use of Danilov who had been close to Fedorov, and it lists precisely those towns Ivan had attacked when he embarked on his northern tour: Torzhok, and Tver'. It was now Novgorod's turn and Pskov's was still to come.

Danilov was arrested and a confession that he had planned to go over to Sigismund was finally wrung out of him by torture. Archbishop Pimen was also implicated. Ivan was all the more inclined to believe in the existence of this new plot, for it bore all the signs not only of having been cooked up in Lithuania, but of having been thought up by Prince A. M. Kurbsky, whose sinister hand was seen everywhere by the quivering Ivan. There was clearly a continuing course of rebellion of the spirit, which was mainly confined to words and rumours, but which was being fostered in the Commonwealth with two aims in view: the first was to prevent the accession of Ivan or any of his sons to the throne of Poland in the event of a vacancy; the second was to promote the accession of Sigismund to the throne of Russia in the event of the death of Ivan, of which rumours occasionally floated around.
¹⁴
According to the reports of a Venetian diplomat, Gerio, who was in Moscow soon after the destruction of Novgorod, the plot was discovered as a result of the seizure of a courier bearing a treasonable letter. The careful unravelling by Skrynnikov of such evidence as there is points the finger at Lithuanian initiatives instigated by Russian émigrés at a time when Kurbsky's influence in Lithuania was at its highest.
¹⁵
But there is no proof.

A detachment of
oprichniki
was sent to Narva, where it looted the goods and property of Russian citizens, and exacted a fine of 8,000 rubles from them by beating them on the calves, apparently leaving untouched the property of non-Russians.
¹⁶
Brigands and robbers disguised themselves as
oprichniki
and wandered the countryside raiding and killing.
¹⁷

After looting the churches of Novgorod, including the Cathedral of St Sophia, the great doors of which were removed and taken to Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda, where they still are, the
oprichniki
turned on the nobles and the rich tradesmen, destroying not only their goods but their houses, and finally on the poor townspeople, destroying dwellings, storehouses, barns, food supplies. Coming in the middle of a harsh winter and on top of two epidemics of plague (in 1566/7 and 1570/1) such destruction deprived the population of food which could not be found anywhere else at that time of year, and of shelter. But when Ivan heard that the dead were being salted down in barrels, he rounded on
those suspected of cannibalism. Indeed famine and plague, which had already made severe inroads in the 1560s in Novgorod, had contributed greatly to the death toll among those who had not simply frozen to death, and rivers full of dead bodies probably accounted for the spread of cholera.

The total number killed in the devastation of Novgorod, a city of about 30,000 inhabitants at this time, has never been established and estimates vary hugely, ranging from 2,771 given by Schlichting, to 700,000 given by Horsey. Historians now accept that about 2,200 people were deliberately executed, but that many more died as a result of the rampages of the
oprichniki
.
¹⁸
The
Sinodiki
did not, of course, contain all the names of the people killed in the devastation of Novgorod, (and their wives and children) but among them 379 are named, including 211
pomeshchiki
and officials, and 137 members of their families. Among the others were bondsmen, craftsmen and monks.
¹⁹
All those belonging in any way to the circle of the Staritsa princes were executed. Many of the senior merchants (
gosti
) and senior
d'iaki
perished, some of them after fiendish tortures in order to extract from them all their treasure. Heinrich von Staden did well out of the ravages of the
oprichnina
. He left Moscow with 1 horse and 2 servants, and returned with 49 horses and 22 carts.
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