Russia: People and Empire: 1552–1917

To some extent, however, these quasi-imperial pretensions were an illusion, concealing the reality that, given primitive technology and communications, power still rested with boyar clans, which used the autocratic façade to lend some stability and decorum to a power constellation which would otherwise have fallen apart in perpetual feuding. Court ceremonial, the Tsar’s religious processions, his public almsgivings and pilgrimages to distant monasteries all gave substance to an ideal of God-ordained rule which veiled the sordid brutality of internecine boyar rivalry. Boyars might fight each other for influence, but not for the throne itself, for that would plunge the entire realm into chaos. Ivan IV had ample opportunity to convince himself of this underlying reality during his minority, when boyars squabbled violently over the regency and his own favourites were murdered before his eyes, but he himself was left unharmed. He assumed full royal power convinced of the need to tame the boyars and make the reality more like the image.

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Soon after his coronation Ivan and his advisers made a start towards equipping Moscow for the role it was gradually but ostentatiously assuming, that of a sovereign and integrated Eurasian great power with extensive imperial responsibilities. The theorist who inspired this brief and imperfect but fruitful period of state-building was Ivan Semenovich Peresvetov, a minor nobleman from Lithuania who had seen service in a number of countries, including the Ottoman Empire, before coming to Moscow. When Ivan was crowned, Peresvetov presented him with a most unusual chelobitnaia (humble petition) in the form of two treatises, The Legend of the Fall of Tsar’grad and The Legend of Sultan Mehmet, which recounted the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by the Ottomans.

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The theme was well chosen. The fate of Byzantium was a constant preoccupation of the Muscovites, both because by now they were claiming its heritage, and also because its eclipse at the hands of the Ottomans was a precedent whose repetition they wished to avoid. The persistent raids from the south were a constant reminder of the danger. Peresvetov charged that Byzantium had fallen because of the irresponsible lifestyle of its aristocrats: their idleness, their greed, their feuding, their rapacious exploitation of the common people. The parallel with the Muscovite boyars was inescapable, especially to Ivan after his childhood experiences. Peresvetov contrasted the laxity of the Byzantine Emperors in tolerating this kind of behaviour with the wise statesmanship of the victorious Sultan Mehmet II, who drew his advisers and military leaders from all social classes according to merit, and did not allow kinship and precedence to enfeeble the sinews of the state.

Peresvetov was almost certainly right. The Ottomans owed the creation of their empire at least in large part to reforms which weakened the native Turkish nobles who had previously formed the backbone of its tribal confederacies. Those nobles had been supplanted at the Ottoman court by Christian youths recruited from the Balkans and converted to Islam under the devshirme system. They furnished both the Janissaries, the elite corps of the army, and the principal civilian advisers. The Sultan required all his military and governmental leaders, whatever their provenance, to accept the status of his personal slaves, in order to separate them forcibly from their kinship loyalties. The conquered city of Constantinople was used for the same purpose: to give his new elite a power base remote from the native grazing lands of the Turkish nobles.

Such a system had obvious attractions for a Muscovite ruler also building an empire on vulnerable territories on the frontier between Christianity and Islam, and also struggling to free himself from aristocratic clans. Peresvetov did not go as far as his Ottoman model, and refrained from recommending slavery; but he did propose that the army should be recruited and trained by the state and paid for directly out of the treasury. This would ensure that individual regiments could not become instruments of baronial feuding. He favoured a service nobility promoted on the basis of merit and achievement, but he did not envisage serfdom as a means of providing them with their livelihood: in so far as he considered the matter at all, he assumed they would be salaried out of tax revenues.

Peresvetov’s importance was that he offered a vision of a state able to mobilize the resources of its peoples and lands equitably and efficiently. He was one of the first European theorists of monarchical absolutism resting on the rule of law. He believed that a consistent law code should be published, and that its provisions should be guided by the concept of pravda (which in Russian means both truth and justice): it would be the task of the ‘wise and severe monarch’ to discern and uphold this principle, according no favour to the privileged and powerful.

In the early years of his reign we can see Ivan endeavouring to implement, in his own way, some of Peresvetov’s ideas, especially where they would enhance the strength and efficiency of the monarchy. At the same time he was trying to reach out beyond the fractious boyars and courtiers to make contact with the local elites of town and countryside and bind them into a more cohesive system of rule. Together with his Chosen Council, an ad hoc grouping of boyars, clergymen and service nobles personally chosen by him, he tried to make a start towards removing the ‘sovereign’s affairs’ (gosudarevo delo) from the private whims of the boyars and their agents, and bringing them under the control of himself in alliance with the ‘land’ (zemlia). The word zemlia is crucial to an understanding of Muscovite politics. It referred to local communities as contrasted with the sovereign or the central government – what in English we often call the ‘grass roots’.

Hitherto taxation, local government and justice had been ‘privatized’ under a system known as kormlenie or ‘feeding’, that is, handled by the prince’s appointed officials as part of their patrimony. In return for their services they kept a part of the income raised. In theory the amount they were entitled to was agreed in advance, but in practice it was difficult to monitor. Ivan wanted greater control over both the revenues and the ‘feeders’, so he now replaced kormlenie with a system under which these functions were exercised by elected local assemblies, known as zemstva (or in the case of criminal justice, guby). In doing this, Ivan was giving official status to elected village and urban assemblies (usually denoted by the word mir) which already existed informally in many places. Their starosty, or ‘elders’, now took over most of the functions of the prince’s appointees.

This reform was very imperfect. It did not apply in territories where there was direct military danger, like the south, or the western border with Lithuania and Livonia. Furthermore, it created very tiny local government units, often just one village or group of villages, not linked with one another or with the central government. The members of the mir assemblies were bound by ‘mutual responsibility’ for their tax revenues and for the conduct of their elected officials, which meant they had to make up shortfalls and damages out of their own pockets. All this generated a reluctant and ineffective local administrative, judicial and fiscal system, which in practice soon had to be supplemented once more by appointed officials.

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Nevertheless Ivan made some attempt to draw the people of the zemlia into consultation with himself. In 1549 he convened a so-called ‘Council of Reconciliation’ (sobor primireniia) to deal with the conflicts which had flared up during his minority and had provoked rioting in Moscow after his coronation. There were consultations with lay people over a law code in 1550 and with clergymen, service nobles, merchants and government officials in 1566 over whether to continue the war he was waging in Livonia [see the p. 52] and how to pay for it.

(#litres_trial_promo) Often referred to in historical literature as zemskie sobory or ‘assemblies of the land’, these were not representative assemblies in the sense in which that term was understood in the medieval West: they were more like consultations of the Tsar with such local agents as could be conveniently assembled. But they do indicate a desire to spread the responsibility for state authority wider than the court.

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To gain a tighter grip over the army Ivan tried to extend the system of ‘service estates’ (pomest’ia) introduced by his grandfather. In 1550 he published a so-called ‘Thousand Book’, a list of one thousand leading servitors whom he wished to summon to state service, endowing them with cultivated land in the neighbourhood of Moscow. He was unable, however, to implement his plan in full because the church refused to surrender any of the immense acreage in the hands of its hishops and monasteries. All the same, he issued a decree in 1556 laying down in principle the military duties of all those who held landed estates, whether hereditary patrimonies (votchiny) or pomest’ia. Their obligations varied somewhat from region to region, but broadly speaking 150 desiatiny of arable land obliged a servitor to furnish one fully equipped armed man for the Tsar’s service. These requirements meant that for the first time, at least in theory, there were now limits to the rights of holders of patrimonial estates. Ivan also restricted the right of boyars to serve in the army according to the seniority of their family.

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Ivan tried to incorporate these measures in the religious world view to which he subscribed personally and which, as we have seen, was the legitimization of his burgeoning empire. He began his reign and his marriage with a pilgrimage to the monastery of the Trinity and St Sergii, which had been at the centre of Moscow’s religious life in the middle ages. He launched his work of reform, as we have seen, by summoning a special so-called ‘Council of Reconciliation’, at which he reproached the boyars with their disloyal behaviour towards him, but also confessed his own sins and called for general repentance.

Since his imperial claims rested on religious as much as on secular grounds, Ivan tried to bring order and discipline to the church as much as to the state. If the priests were drunken and the monks corrupt, and if the scriptures were mistranslated, then what price talk of the Third Rome? In 1551 he summoned a Church Council and submitted to it a long series of questions, a hundred in number – hence the Council’s generally accepted name, Stoglav, or ‘a hundred headings’. He himself participated in the debates, as the Byzantine Emperor had done at the early ecumenical councils. The Councils of 1547 and 1549 had consolidated the church’s claim to a ‘great tradition’ of its own. Now Ivan wanted both to discipline the church internally to make it more worthy of its great mission, and to persuade it to yield some of its landholdings to award to his military servitors.

The Council decreed a large number of measures raising standards and tightening discipline within both parishes and monasteries. It also considered the question whether the scriptures and liturgical practices needed reforming to bring them into line with Greek models. It explicitly upheld existing texts and liturgical practices-such as making the sign of the cross with two fingers raised, rather than with three as was the practice elsewhere in the Orthodox world, including Novgorod. The Council resisted Ivan’s wish to pursue a widespread secularization of church lands, but accepted a degree of limitation on them.

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The problem with the Stoglav resolutions was that in the turbulence of the coming decades there was no way of ensuring that they were carried out, and in the seventeenth century most of the reforming work had to be carried out again from the beginning. The question of the scriptures and liturgy would also be raised again then.

Ivan was a pious, learned and intense young man. His view of the world and of his own duties was imbued with a kind of monastic spirit, as if he took wholly seriously the notion of the ‘Third Rome’ becoming God’s kingdom on earth.

(#litres_trial_promo) At the same time, his ideals were patently too grandiose, ascetic and demanding. As a result, at times he would veer from heartfelt contrition and self-denial into orgies of sensuality and sadism. The tension was present in his personality, as a result probably of his strange upbringing, but it was exacerbated by the circumstances in which he had to rule, as head of an empire proclaiming an exalted religious and secular mission on the basis of inadequate resources and a still insecure tradition.

It is not surprising, then, that before long his reform programme ran into the ground and both Ivan and his realm were plunged into a divisive and destructive crisis. In 1558 he launched a third military campaign, to follow those of Kazan’ and Astrakhan’, this time against the Livonian Knights, in order to secure an outlet to the Baltic Sea and thus to easier contact with other European powers. Early successes gave way to setbacks as Lithuania intervened against Muscovy and the war became more general and costly. In 1560, moreover, Ivan’s beloved wife, Anastasia, died, removing a restraining element on his unstable personality, and he fell out with several leading members of his Chosen Council.

One of them, Prince Andrei Kurbskii, actually abandoned his military command and went over to Lithuania. From the safety of his new home he wrote a series of devastating epistles designed to discredit Ivan. They raise issues of fundamental importance in understanding the new style of monarchy, not least because Kurbskii accepted its basic validity as a model. He was not a proponent of appanage princely freedoms, nor was he a western liberal humanist of the renaissance type. He believed in the religious mission of Rus’ and in absolute monarchy as the means to fulfil it, but he felt that to be true to that mission, the monarchy must observe its own laws and those of God. He referred to Rus’ as ‘the holy Russian land’, and he accused Ivan of defiling her by his gross and sinful behaviour. The Muscovite armies he called ‘the strong in Israel’, and berated Ivan for beating and killing his own commanders. Ivan rejected many of the charges and hurled others back in Kurbskii’s face, but the main burden of his response was that his authority had been granted to him by God, and that Kurbskii’s flight was therefore treachery and apostasy. Both parties to the correspondence believed in Rus’s mission and in autocracy, but differed over the moral and legal obligations incumbent on the autocrat.

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Ivan was convinced that harsh and even cruel means were justified when sovereignty had to be demonstratively exercised. He was determined to put an end to the kinship appanage principle, under which a member of a princely family could choose for himself under which liege lord to serve: this was doubly dangerous to him when he was waging war with Lithuania, which had a rival claim as ‘gatherer of the Russian lands’. He feared particularly the claims to the throne of his cousin, Prince Vladimir Staritskii, the most powerful of the surviving appanage lords. At the same time he wanted to have at his disposal more land which he could award to his military servitors: the simplest way to obtain it was to confiscate it from those same free-wheeling boyars.

In autumn 1564, a Lithuanian offensive, supported by Kurbskii, coincided with one mounted from the south by the Crimean Khan, Devlet-Girei. Muscovite forces managed to repel the double danger, but it nevertheless dramatized the country’s vulnerability, and Ivan reacted to it in an abrupt and histrionic manner. In December 1564 he suddenly withdrew from Moscow along with his court and resettled in Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda, a minor princely residence to the north-east. From there he sent the bewildered boyars, prelates and officials a missive accusing them of treason and of plundering the treasury for their own selfish interests. If they wished him to return to the throne, he demanded that they must give him the right to set up his own separate and special realm (oprichnina), which would guarantee him the income he needed for his court and army, and they must leave him free to proceed against peculators, traitors and heretics as he saw fit.

Ivan’s expedition was an act of pure theatre, externalizing his crushing sense of lonely responsibility, isolation and rejection (more or less as British royals nowadays resort to the press to conduct their own psychological and familial struggles), but also dramatizing the country’s helplessness without a strong ruler. As he had anticipated, the boyars begged him to return and conceded to him what he was demanding. There followed another set-piece scene of mutual repentance and simulated forgiveness, after which Ivan put his design into effect.

He divided his territory into two realms, in one of which, the oprichnina, he had complete and unrestricted power, while the other, the zemshchina, was governed by the boyar council (the Boyar Duma) according to existing customs. The oprichnina included extensive lands in the north and east which had originally belonged to Novgorod, as well as some towns and regions within the appanage principality of Moscow. Boyars living on it were expropriated and assigned territory in the zemshchina, while their former lands were offered to Ivan’s newly promoted servitors. This exchange of land uprooted many, though not all, of the leading boyar clans, including the Staritskiis, from their ancestral domains and their local power bases, and eliminated the restraints on endowing the ‘chosen thousand’ servitors with land and peasants. Some of the boyars were executed on charges of heresy or treason, others were exiled or awarded land in remote regions. The process was not a tidy one: Ivan rewarded individuals not for their social origin but for their loyalty and devotion to him. The general tendency was to strengthen the service nobility at the expense of the boyars, but the process was far from completed, and the boyars remained a considerable force in the land.

Meanwhile the oprichnina lands provided the finances for a wholly new army and police force, charged both with defending the frontiers and with extirpating treason and heresy. The oprichnina was also a kind of grotesque monastic court: Ivan referred to his oprichniki as ‘brothers’. Their humble unadorned clothes and ascetic existence were intended to serve as a model of the Christian life Ivan intended his subjects to lead. The oprichniki were given special powers of investigation, arrest and emergency judicial procedure. Dressed in long black cloaks, resembling a monk’s habit, they rode on black horses, each carrying a dog’s head and a broom mounted on a long stick. ‘This means that first of all they bite like dogs, and then they sweep away everything superfluous out of the land.’

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Within a short time, their arbitrary, violent and sadistic procedures had inspired fear in every subject and horrified incredulity among foreign observers. Far from exemplifying the Christian life, the ‘brothers’ seemed only to demonstrate what monstrous atrocities can befall a people whose ruler tramples underfoot not only human laws but those of God as well. This was precisely what Kurbskii had alleged. The leading churchman, Metropolitan Filipp, not in the safety of Lithuania, protested courageously in the same terms. Once, in the cathedral, he asked in the presence of clergy and boyars, ‘How long will you go on spilling the innocent blood of faithful people and Christians …? Tatars and heathens and the whole world can say that all peoples have justice and laws, but only in Russia do they not exist.’ Ivan tolerated Filipp for a while, so anxious was he to preserve his alliance with the church, but eventually had him arrested in the middle of a sermon and confined in a monastery where he was later strangled.

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Ivan got rid of his most dangerous rival in 1569, when he accused Vladimir Staritskii publicly of plotting to assassinate him and compelled him to drink poison. This murder was followed by an inquisitorial visit to the ancient city of Novgorod, which he suspected of supporting Staritskii and seeking a rapprochement with Lithuania. In January 1570 he took his revenge, unleashing his oprichniki on the townsfolk in a frenzy of vindictiveness. In the course of a few weeks, thousands of people were tortured and killed: a once prosperous city, model for an alternative Rus’, was left devastated, a mere shadow of its former self.

The Novgorod excesses revealed that the oprichnyi army had become a travesty of Peresvetov’s vision of soldiers selected for their courage and achievement. Corrupted and enfeebled by their own impunity, they proved incapable in 1571 of repelling Khan Devlet-Girei, who attacked and sacked the city of Moscow, capturing thousands of its inhabitants for slaves. After this debacle, Ivan executed the oprichnyi commanders and reunited the army with its zemskii counterpart. Together, they succeeded in repelling Devlet-Girei the following year.

The episode of the oprichnina suggests the extraordinary vulnerability of the Muscovite state at the time when it had just taken on itself extensive new claims and responsibilities both religious and secular. It was poorly adapted to an assertion of imperial and ecumenical power which required internal unity and the efficient use of resources. The inherited kinship principle obstructed both these ideals. Ivan had set out to create the framework of what might have become a national government, but, stumbling at the first hurdle, he changed course convulsively in completely the opposite direction.

Paradoxically, in order to overcome the appanage mentality, Ivan himself set up what was in effect a vastly bloated appanage territory, where in the name of a higher state principle he attempted to exercise an authority even more complete than that of any patrimonial ruler. To add to the hubris, he tried to combine church and state in one monopolistic dispensation: to promote a Christian ideal, he unleashed a frenzy of debauchery and cruelty. He succeeded in almost none of his aims, and he exposed the population of Muscovy to such privations and excesses as seriously to weaken their economic and military potential for the following decades. The Livonian Wars, which he fought on and off for quarter of a century, ended with Muscovy not only failing to gain territory, but also losing the foothold on the eastern Baltic which she had inherited from Novgorod. As a founder of empire, Ivan had made a promising start, but had then jeopardized all his gains through his external over-ambition and his unbalanced internal policy.

Time of Troubles

Ivan IVs endless wars, his ruthless and haphazard remodelling of Muscovy’s political and social structure, his campaigns of unrestrained terror against his own people – all these upheavals left a country traumatized. Every stratum of society was affected. Many of the boyars had been evicted from their ancestral domains and shorn of the power they had previously taken for granted, the service nobility was still insecure, the clergy was torn apart by the heresy hunts, while the merchants and peasants were being fixed to their abode by ‘mutual responsibility’ and heavy taxation. More and more peasants were becoming enserfed by debt or by the dues they owed to the holders of service estates. Not a few decided to flee these new or increased burdens and seek a new life somewhere in the distant forests or among the Cossacks of the frontiers.

The late sixteenth century was thus a time of deep crisis, the central Russian lands becoming depopulated by peasant flight, the towns troubled by poverty and disorder. Ivan himself added a vital new element to the crisis when he killed his eldest son in a fit of fury. He of all people should have known what a disaster to Muscovy was the weakening of the succession to the throne. Of his two surviving sons, one, Fedor, ruled from 1584–98, but was always in poor health and died young, while the other, Dmitrii, was the offspring of his fifth wife and thus not acknowledged as heir by the Orthodox Church, in any case he died in mysterious circumstances in the provincial town of Uglich in 1591.

At this time, when the dynasty seemed to be faltering, Moscow took one final step to buttress its claims to be the ‘Third Rome’. By a mixture of cajolery and pressure, the eastern Patriarchs were persuaded in 1589 to consent to the elevation of the title of Metropolitan of Moscow to that of Patriarch. This was a step of little practical importance, since the Muscovite church had long been self-governing, but its symbolic significance was considerable, since this was the first patriarchal title to be created since the age of the ecumenical councils ten centuries earlier. The Muscovite church joined the ranks of the most ancient and dignified Orthodox jurisdictions.

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The end of the Riurik dynasty in 1598 posed for the Muscovite state questions it had never faced before. Hitherto the state had been inseparable from the person of the Grand Prince/Tsar: indeed the word ‘state’ is a misnomer if applied to most people’s contemporary understanding of the authority under which they lived. But now for the first time those active in politics – those holding a chin, or official status – had to learn to look at monarchical authority in a more abstract way, to ask themselves what qualities they expected of the person who would exercise it, and under what conditions he would do so. This was a mental leap which was extraordinarily difficult to make.

The problem was that Ivan IVs brief attempt to institutionalize and frame in law the demands the Tsar could make on the various strata of society had collapsed as a result of his wars and the grotesque machinations of the oprichnina. No service noble, merchant or peasant could know for certain in advance what obligations he would have to discharge from one year to the next, nor could he apply to a court if he felt they had been exceeded. The whole concept of sovereignty remained that of the appanage principality, whose lands and people were completely at the disposal of its ruler, while he answered only to God for his treatment of them. Muscovy had not outgrown this mentality before it became a proto-national state, claiming to speak for all Russians, and on top of that an incipient and fast-growing empire.

The patrimonial outlook had implications for the subjects as well as the ruler. They too could treat the realm as a master’s estate which they were at liberty to quit if they preferred to seek employment elsewhere. The impenetrable forests and immense open plains gave them the geographical means to escape the most importunate ruler. This very fluidity of social relations made the creation of either legality or intermediate institutions extremely difficult. As we have seen, Ivan abandoned the attempt at an early stage. It also meant that subjects who wished to oppose authority rather than merely flee it had no accepted channels for doing so other than by sponsoring an alternative ruler, that is, a pretender.

The only shadowy institutions which did exist to represent the various strata of society were the zemskie sobory. The new importance of the Patriarchate was underlined when Patriarch Job convened a sobor to solve the crisis created by the abrupt end of the dynasty. It unanimously offered the throne to Boris Godunov, who, though not from one of the most senior boyar families, had been Fedor’s brother-in-law and regent, and was thus a natural candidate.

The circumstances of his election are of interest, for they represent a moment when the beginnings of a covenant between Tsar and people might have been worked out. Godunov several times declined the throne when it was offered to him. According to the historian Kliuchevskii, the boyar members of the sobor were expecting that he would accept a charter (gramota) defining the limits of his power. By playing a ‘comedy of silence’, refusing the crown but also refusing to sign any kind of limitation on the authority of the crown, Godunov put the sobor in the position where they had either to offer him traditional unrestrained patrimonial authority or open the way to a potentially very damaging struggle for the succession. Not surprisingly, the delegates put stability first, and Godunov became Tsar without any restraints to his power. Kliuchevskii feels that Godunov’s behaviour was misguided: ‘Boris was not the hereditary patrimonial ruler of the Muscovite state, but the people’s choice. He began a new succession of Tsars with a new political significance, In order not to be absurd or detested, he should have behaved in a different way, and not aped the defunct dynasty with its appanage customs and prejudices.’

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