Ivan the Terrible (71 page)

It is mainly in relations with foreign rulers and envoys that Ivan's arrogance as an hereditary monarch and his claim to descend from the brother of the Emperor Augustus, Prus, is proclaimed. However, the religious dimension of Ivan's personality cannot be ignored. The extent to which it pervades letters written as part of the conduct of foreign affairs is striking. Fundamental to Ivan's conception of his role as Tsar was his responsibility for the eternal salvation of his people, for which he would be called upon to answer at the Last Judgment, which in Russian goes by the more dramatic name of
Strashnyi Sud
, Doomsday, the Fearful Judgment. It is to this aspect of his role as Tsar that his people responded, for they too needed to feel the judgment of God in the judgment of the Tsar.

Ivan derived his ideas of sovereignty not merely from the Eastern Roman Empire but from the Old and New Testaments. It may well have taken some time for him to work out a consistent justification for his extreme interpretation of his sovereign rights. The first stage in the process is made clear in his first letter to Prince Kurbsky, in which he stresses his right to reward and punish his subjects, and in which he begins to reveal the mental processes which lead him to the conclusion that he is surrounded by treason. This is based on what he sees as his betrayal by his subjects, as reflected by the refusal of some of the boyars to swear allegiance to his son Dmitri in 1553; the death, clearly by poisoning, of Anastasia, the boyars’ objection to his debauchery and wild way of life after her death, culminating in the flight of Kurbsky. At this point, in his first letter, Ivan also articulates his complaints against Sylvester and Adashev, again justifying himself by accusing them of betraying him and depriving him of his power.
³⁶

The sadism and cruelty of the regime, imposed by Ivan IV and his henchmen, are given added authority by the religious overtones and
symbolism which the Tsar's particular form of mania had taken. The ritual he had introduced in Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda in which he played the main role in a parody of a monastic order is described at length by Taube and Kruse, though we do not know for how long he carried on with it.
³⁷

By then Ivan was launched on the policy of the
oprichnina
, which gave him a free hand to organize repression. Within his
udel
, or appanage, he was sole master, but the
udel
itself was the instrument of control and oppression throughout the rest of the country. It could no longer be regarded as a tool for imposing a particular policy (e.g., centralization) by fighting
against
something, or someone, but as a way of fighting
for
something. This view, was first put forward by V. Kobrin, who argued that Ivan was fighting
for
unlimited power, for total, arbitrary power over his subjects.
³⁸
Much depends on the meaning which is attached to the words
samoderzhavie
and
samovlastie
.

Samoderzhavie
, usually misleadingly translated as ‘autocracy’, was not at this time part of the official titulature of the Tsar. Again, the Austrian envoy, Prinz von Buchau is illuminating. After the enunciation of all the territories of which Ivan was Tsar, and over which he ruled, Prinz von Buchau adds: ‘To this title he often adds the name of “monarcha”, which in the Russian language, which is, like the Greek happy in its constructions, is successfully translated by the word samoderzhets, which means he who governs alone.’ The emblem of the Grand Prince Ivan Vasil'evich, continued Prinz von Buchau is: ‘I am subject to no-one except Christ, son of God.’
³⁹
Samovlastie
is closer in meaning to arbitrary will, and to ‘free will’ in the theological sense, and Ivan claims that Man does not enjoy free will since even in the Garden of Eden there was at least one prohibition: eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Nevertheless, it was
samovlastie
that Ivan wanted and claimed, ‘unlimited power’.

Priscilla Hunt has argued that Ivan's self-justification was founded on the concept of sacred kingship developed by Metropolitan Makarii
after
the Tsar's coronation in 1547. This was an official ‘wisdom theology’ which enabled Ivan to live out the dual ‘image of Christ’ on earth with two bodies, one human and one divine, by expanding the divine until it absorbed the human. It enabled him to commit widescale atrocities in his role of Christian ruler, because he was engaged in purifying the world of sin. And it was adopted in order to compensate for the paranoia which seized him intermittently, and to justify measures seen as self-protective. Ivan, as ruler, lived on a higher plane than other men, defined not only by his role as Tsar, but
by his role as like unto God himself. In no way therefore can the
oprichnina
be explained away as required by objective political or social causes

Priscilla Hunt has specifically pointed to some of the origins of Ivan's thought in her exploration of a source which seems particularly fruitful, namely the
Velikii Chetii Minei
put together by Metropolitan Makarii, which contained,
inter alia
, the treatise ‘On the Celestial Hierarchies’ of the Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite, as well, incidentally, as the Epistle to Filofei on the Third Rome and the tale of Barlaam and Josaphat. Other sources of Ivan's conception of his role are found in Revelations, in the Apocrypha, the Slavonic Book of the Secrets of Enoch (2 Enoch) and in the iconography of the period, for the Tsar is also the Lord of Hosts and the Archangel Michael, the ultimate judge, the instrument of cleansing destructiveness.
⁴⁰
In Ivan's interpretation, the two bodies – human and divine – are joined, thus superseding the conception of Agapetus of two separate bodies, and following rather the idea of the Areopagite on the union of the two bodies in one, proceeding through repentance and prayer to divine grace.
⁴¹

This last expression of the nature of Orthodox spirituality explains the form taken by so many of Ivan's verbal interventions in spiritual matters. The exaggerated depiction of his sinfulness, a medieval topos, in his letter to the Abbot of the Beloozero monastery in 1573, and the lengthy prologue to his will, believed to date from summer 1572 or 1579,
⁴²
show him wallowing in repentance, not for his atrocities, but for what the Church would regard as sins, blasphemy, fornication, the anti-world of the
skomorokhi
. This repentance was a necessary preliminary to inflicting punishment on those who betrayed him.

Already in the campaign against Kazan', the young Tsar had taken on the role of spiritual leader more than military general, by attending religious services and following the precepts of Metropolitan Makarii from a distance. We do not know enough about his presence on the battlefield to know whether he was consistent in his behaviour, but there is sufficient evidence about his participation in one of his major campaigns during the Livonian war to reconstruct the spiritual dimension. The Tsar's role was not that of the warrior, he would do little fighting. But he was responsible for the moral purity of the host under his command, and his constant concern for it was expressed by sending for both religious relics and magicians. The same spirit of religious commitment was noticeable in Kazan' and in the victorious campaign against Polotsk in 1562 to 1563 which is more fully described in the Chronicle than any other of Ivan's campaigns. There is a suggestion that
Ivan was urged onwards by an upsurge of Lutheranism in Polotsk, against which he had to fight as the Orthodox Tsar.

The intensity of Ivan's drive on Polotsk is reflected in the religious rhetoric in the Chronicles and in the working documents of the campaign. The central religious objective of Ivan's crusade was symbolized by the cathedral of Saint Sophia in Polotsk, the third cathedral of that name in Russia after Kiev and Novgorod. Unfortunately, both Hunt and Bogatyrev speak of the symbolic creation of analogies between the ‘king and the state’, in the ideology developed by Ivan which articulated the likeness of the ruler to the second person in the Trinity. But it is difficult to accept the existence of such an objective concept as the ‘state’ in Ivan's understanding of the relationship between the ruler and what he ruled over. He was physically and spiritually one with his realm, united in a profounder symbiosis than the patrimonialism which is often attributed to him. He brought together the human and the divine, which authorized him to act to purify the world of sin, using divine violence. He was an incarnation of this union, which gave moral authority to everything he did and placed him on a par with God.
⁴³

It was this self-identification of Ivan with the idea of sacred violence which opened the way for the Tsar's belief in the purificatory value of his cruelty, and enabled him to accept as divine in origin the sadism which made life a hell for his subjects. He needed it in order to cleanse both himself and his people from sin. He expresses this notion in so many words in his first letter to Kurbsky: ‘If you are so righteous and pious … why have you feared an innocent death? … that is the will of God – doing good to suffer. If you are so righteous … why do you not permit yourself to accept suffering from me, your froward master and so inherit the crown of life?’
⁴⁴

It was also the quality of Ivan's firm conviction in his God-given duty of rewarding and punishing his people that induced in them the acceptance of the duty of obedience to the divinely powerful Tsar, to whose judgment they submitted as though it were the Last Judgment.

In his power to decide their fate, Ivan was not like God, he tried to be God. His reign is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.
⁴⁵
His cruelty served no purpose, and as Ivan Timofeev wrote, ‘The killers filled our land with blood … every place was so filled with the bodies of the dead that the animals which ransack the ground, and swim in the water, and fly in the air were unable to devour their corpses, for they were all more than replete.’ Kliuchevsky, who seized upon this aspect of the Tsar, compared him with Samson, who brought down the columns of the
temple of Gaza upon himself.
⁴⁶
But Prince Kurbsky and Timofeev (and I) see him as Lucifer, the star of the morning, who wanted to be God, and was expelled from the Heavens:
⁴⁷

1
See for instance the works of S. Platonov, M.N. Pokrovsky, and more relevant to the present those of, among others, A.A. Zimin, S.O. Schmidt, D.N. Al'shits, V. Kobrin, R.G. Skrynnikov and B. Floria. They all begin their main works with lengthy, serious, if sometimes idiosyncratic, chapters on the evolution of the historiography of Ivan IV.

2
For a full account of the career of S.F. Platonov, see the Introduction by John T. Alexander to his
Boris Godunov Tsar of Russia
, ed. and tr. by I. Rex Pyles, Academic International Press, Gulf Breeze Florida, 1973.

3
A. Yanov,
The Origins of Autocracy – Ivan the Terrible in Russian History
, University of California Press, Berkeley and London, 1981.

4
The very anti-German film Aleksandr Nevsky was withdrawn from public showing after the signature of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939.

5
See Maureen Perrie,
The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin's Russia,
Studies in Russian and East European History and Society, Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave, 2001.

6
Ibid., p. 154.

7
In a meeting to discuss part II of the film with Stalin, Molotov, Zhdanov, Cherkasov, the actor who played the part of Ivan IV, and Eisenstein, at the end of February 1947, Cherkasov explained that the film would end with the words: ‘Na moriakh stoim i stoiat' budem’ to which Stalin replied; ‘that's what happened and even more’. See G.B. Mar'yamov,
Kremlevskii tsenzor: Stalin smotrit kino
. Moscow, Kinotsentr, 1992, pp. 83ff, at p.90. Zhdanov objected to Cherkasov's beard as too long.

8
Ibid., p. 89.

9
Perrie, p. 173.

10
See S. Bogatyrev, ‘
Oprichnina
A.A. Zimina, ed. A.L. Khoroshkevich’, in
JGOE
, 52, 2004, no. 2, pp. 279–82.

11
G. Hoff (G. Khoff),
Erschreckliche, greuliche und unerhoerte Tyranney Iwan Wasiljeviec,
1582.

12
See under Hugh Graham in the bibliography.

13
A. Käppeler,
Ivan Groznyj im Spiegel der ausländischen Zeitschriften seiner Zeit, Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Westländischen Russlandsbilde
, Bern/ Frankfurt am Main, 1972.

14
Edward L. Keenan,
The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha. The Seventeenth-Century
Origin of the “Correspondence” Attributed to Prince A.M. Kurbskii and Tsar Ivan IV
, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA., 1971.