Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (17 page)

As he considered his courtiers’ entreaties, Ivan himself may not have known what terms he would eventually demand.
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His immediate condition was that he should be permitted to dispose of certain enemies without further interference from the church, the bureaucrats or the boyars. The first victims, beheaded in the shadow of the Kremlin walls, were senior members of the ancient Shuisky clan.
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Though he showed no pity for the condemned, Ivan paid for expiatory prayers to be said after the event; as tsar, he always saw his actions as service to God.
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One of the more vivid explanations for his violence, indeed, sees it as a way of putting his own kingship to the test before the courts of heaven, casting Ivan more in the role of Lucifer than of Christ.
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But Ivan’s plans were not limited to assassination. More far-reaching was his scheme to split his empire and create a separate kingdom within it where no plot or whisper (and certainly no pressure from a council of boyars) could challenge his personal writ. According to this programme, part of the Muscovite realm would continue more or less as it had done before, with a government in the Kremlin that involved the principal boyars and with
prikazy
to manage most routine administration. This territory, whose ruler in the first instance was to be a boyar called Ivan Mstislavsky, would soon be known as the
zemshchina,
from the Russian word for land. The other part, however, which included almost all the wealthiest towns, was the portion that Ivan intended to rule, alone and without interference, from his effective capital at Alexandrovskaya sloboda. In practice, Ivan never quit the Kremlin for all time, just as his threats to abdicate were never really implemented, but the uncertainty he generated was oppressive. Muscovites began to whisper a new term,
oprichnina,
the word (derived from the Russian for separate, apart) that Ivan had chosen to describe the unfortunate estates that he proposed to control for himself. In time, the same term would also become a byword for the terror that his tyranny unleashed.

To run the new
oprichnina,
Ivan shipped wagon-loads of clerks and trusted officials from Moscow to his out-of-town stronghold; his next requirement was an army to enforce his orders and make sure of his lands. The corps he recruited, the extortionists and bullies who became infamous as the
oprichniki,
was swathed in black, a nightmare vision of apocalypse. The symbols on their bridles were a dog’s head and a broom, for their mission was to savage the tsar’s enemies and drive them from the realm. Initially about a thousand in number, their ranks grew in the next five years and ultimately comprised about six thousand mounted men, drawn from all classes and united by a common greed.
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The appearance of these horsemen in a district almost always spelled misery. Not only adult males – the clansmen Ivan might justly have feared, the councillors who had queried a policy or chafed under a tax – but entire families including children were tortured and killed. Villages were burned and the houses of former boyars left to the wind and snow. Some of this property was supposed to go to the
oprichniki,
and many profited significantly from their work, but at the time the land seemed merely ruined.
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Heinrich von Staden, the German who had visited the
prikazy
and described the conditions of the clerks, was also a hired mercenary with the
oprichniki,
and he left a chilling account of their impact. ‘The villages were burned with their churches, and everything that was in them, icons and church ornaments,’ he wrote. ‘Women and girls were stripped naked and forced in that state to catch chickens in the fields.’
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As Ivan and his minions came and went, Moscow’s sacred fort witnessed more than its share of executions. In 1568, the tsar’s spies reported a new plot to remove him from power. The chief conspirator, Prince Ivan Petrovich Cheliadnin-Fedorov, was summoned to the Kremlin and stabbed in the heart by Ivan himself. His body was dragged several times around the fortress walls before being dumped in the main commercial square.
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Cheliadnin-Fedorov’s estates fell to the
oprichniki.
‘He did not spare them,’ a contemporary source related, explaining how Ivan’s men killed over a hundred of the prince’s noble servitors. No-one was pardoned, not even ‘their wives, nor their little children sucking at their mothers’ breasts; and they say that he even ordered that not a single animal be left alive.’
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But the tsar’s wrath was not assuaged, and the land around Moscow’s fortress continued to be stained with blood. The dead – impaled, beheaded, quartered or strangled – were left in piles under the Kremlin walls, and bodies choked the fetid ditch along the Neglinnaya river.
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The following year, the
oprichnina
claimed its most illustrious victim when Ivan’s thirty-six-year-old cousin, Vladimir of Staritsa, was forced to swallow poison at the hands of the infamous
oprichnik
Malyuta Skuratov, at Alexandrovskaya sloboda. His children were murdered beside him. The pretext was a rumour (improbable) that Vladimir was plotting to seize the crown, but there did not have to be a reason for specific killings at this time. The terror had a logic of its own. No-one could feel safe, not even leaders of the church. In 1568, the new metropolitan, Filipp II, who had dared to speak against the tsar’s cruelty, was seized by Ivan’s men during a public service, forcibly unfrocked, and bundled off to a monastery in Tver. Months later, still protesting against unnecessary bloodshed, he was smothered there by Skuratov.
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Ivan himself remained tormentedly devout despite this outrage, and he frequently ordered his torturers to suspend their activities, wherever he was, while he engaged in extended prostrations and prayers. ‘Dying for the tsar,’ the historian Sergei Bogatyrev explains, ‘was represented as being akin to dying for Christ … [Ivan] subjected his counsellors to disgrace and execution in the belief that he would thereby purify himself and his subjects on the eve of judgement day.’
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Apart from any plot to drive him from the throne, the treachery Ivan feared most was collaboration with neighbouring powers, and notably with the recently united state of Poland-Lithuania.
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At stake, perhaps, was his chance of establishing a port for Russia on the Baltic Sea, to gain which he seemed determined to fight a coalition of regional rivals, including Sweden. One problem with this plan was that the preparations drained Ivan’s exchequer, and more cash would be needed by the day if he unleashed the northern war. As townsmen and peasants struggled with grievous rates of tax, no attention was given to the vulnerable border to the south, and the risk to this increased considerably when the Crimean khan, Devlet-Girey, began to build an alliance of his own with the Ottoman sultan. The country was in mortal danger from a combination of internal misery, economic ruin and military threat. As if to aggravate these problems, Ivan’s public life was also coloured by personal tragedy. In 1569, his second wife, Mariya, died, and her loss seems to have tipped him into even deeper hell.

The impact of his rage, whatever its source, was shattering. That winter, Ivan and his black-clad host made a progress north through Tver and Torzhok towards Novgorod. In Tver, which was accused of negotiating with the Lithuanians (and which had also given shelter in the past to the metropolitan, Filipp), Ivan’s
oprichniki
ran riot, torturing and killing hundreds of citizens and throwing the mutilated bodies into the Volga. Among the torments that Tverites endured were prolonged sessions of
pravezh,
the painful and humiliating beating on the shins, or a further horrifying refinement that involved hacking the victim’s legs off at the knee.
Pravezh
had always been a punishment for debt, and this savage version was designed to symbolize a profound indebtedness, material and in terms of loyalty to Ivan, on the part of the entire city.
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Novgorod’s fate was even more extreme. Despite the pleas of its loyal archbishop, Pimen, the city was sacked, its coffers and stores were looted and several thousand of its people were put to death, sometimes after the kinds of torture – physical mutilation, scalding, simulated drowning, impalement – in which Ivan took such delight. ‘Every day,’ noted von Staden, ‘the Grand Prince could be found in the torture-chamber in person.’
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The miserable survivors, a fraction of the city’s former strength, were abandoned to midwinter ice, disputing scraps of carrion and rags.
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Novgorod’s wealth, rebuilt in the decades since Ivan III had plundered it, now disappeared south a second time; even the altar-doors of its eleventh-century Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom were dragged away to adorn one of the two churches that Ivan was building at Alexandrovskaya sloboda ‘in expiation for his sins’.
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The tsar’s attention then turned back to the capital. In July 1570, several hundred former nobles and court servants were brought to the gallows in Moscow, many of them accused of collaboration with Archbishop Pimen. The spectacle was organized on a piece of ground beyond the city walls where public executions had been held for centuries; perhaps the idea was to draw the largest possible crowd.
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Attendance was not really optional, however, and Ivan urged the people to draw close and watch. He even asked the crowd whether some traitors should be killed, goading them to collude as if he were a dictator from a much later age. The people, gripped by panic, naturally urged him on. As the knives glinted and the entrails spilled, the scene was like another icon, though this time the subject was the Last Judgement. Among the victims were the heads of several
prikazy,
including Ivan Viskovatyi. The official who had managed Ivan’s diplomacy was strung up on one of the temporary scaffolds and hacked to pieces, dying only when an
oprichnik
cut off his genitals.
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The families, as ever, were deemed to share a traitor’s guilt. Over the next two or three weeks, the wives and children of the most distinguished of them were publicly drowned in the Moscow river.
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Ivan’s most bloodthirsty campaigns were launched from Alexandrovskaya sloboda. The palace there suited the tsar; it was old, it was solid, and its ghosts were all of his own making. In 1571, a bride show was organized in it for him to select his third wife (she died soon after the wedding). Ivan even received some foreign diplomats at the provincial court. But Moscow’s fortress was too valuable to abandon, and certainly too important to leave for others to annex. The Kremlin’s grand spaces were practical: when Ivan needed to summon an assembly of his notable subjects (
zemskii sobor
) in 1566, a strategem to gain support for his intended northern war, for instance, there was no other place in Moscow with the room to host it.
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The splendid Golden Palace was still the best venue in which to receive foreign embassies, too, and Ivan needed to impress potential friends abroad. The Kremlin as a whole was a sacred site, the only place where sovereignty was linked to God as well as to dynastic history. In 1575 Ivan used it to install a new ruler for the
zemshchina,
a Tatar prince from the dynasty of Chinghis Khan called Simeon Bekhbulatovich. According to at least one witness, this nobleman’s brief reign (Ivan demoted him in 1576) began with a desultory coronation in the Dormition Cathedral.
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Useful though the Kremlin was, however, the tsar vacillated over the question of establishing a residence for himself inside the fort. He had to weigh the need to keep control of its labyrinthine palaces against his horror of historic ghosts and real conspirators. At one point, he lived in a modest four-room wooden building on the site of his first wife’s lodging near the Cathedral of the Saviour in the Forest.
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But he also toyed with several possibilities in Moscow itself, and his most extravagant venture involved an entirely new palace. It stood at the notional boundary of his divided state, on land that he claimed for the
oprichnina.
But it was close to the Kremlin – a ‘gunshot’s distance’ in Heinrich von Staden’s words – and in its brief heyday it must have dominated the marshy bank of the Neglinnaya.

Ivan requisitioned the site in 1566, evicting the existing owners and taking advantage of another fire, which conveniently cleared much of the land. In January 1567, he moved in, accompanied by his aides, his spies, minstrels, doctors, astrologers and the entire
oprichnina
court. The new headquarters was defended by walls of stone and brick, and its gates, covered with lead and carved with two stone lions with mirrors for eyes, could be sealed at any time with two massive oak logs. A double-headed eagle, fashioned from wood and painted black, spread sinister wings above this gate, and there were more on the roofs of the palace buildings. Every entrance and passageway was watched, but Ivan’s personal lodgings were designed so that he could not be observed. There were three regal buildings inside the walls, but Ivan’s own preference was for an austere ‘cottage’ in a corner of the compound. His luxuries were few, although he did have a personal scaffold from which to mount and dismount his horse. It was a sensible concession to the pain that wracked his spine, as was the thick white sand that was spread over every courtyard, probably to counteract the damp.
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In the 1930s, when teams of engineers were digging the first tunnels of Moscow’s underground metro near the Lenin Library, this sand, like a flaxen thread within the claggy soil of the Mokhovaya, was the only trace they could find of Ivan’s once-infamous palace.
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