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  Ivan the Terrible

  Ivan the Terrible

  First Tsar of Russia

  Isabel de Madariaga

  Yale University Press

  New Haven and London

  Copyright © 2005 by Isabel de Madariaga

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

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  Set in Sabon by MATS, Southend-on-Sea, Essex

  Printed in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press Ltd, Bury St Edmunds

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  De Madariaga, Isabel, 1919–

  Ivan the Terrible/Isabel de Madariaga.— 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0–300–09757–3 (cl.: alk. paper)

  1. Ivan IV, Tsar of Russia, 1530–1584. 2. Russia—Tsars and rulers—Bibliography. 3. Russia—History—Ivan IV, 1533–1584. I. Title.

  DK106.D4 2005

  947’.043‘092—dc22

  2004029807

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  List of Illustrations

  List of Maps

  Foreword

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter I The Historical Background

  Chapter II The Reign of Vasily III

  Chapter III Ivan's Birth, Childhood, Adolescence, Coronation and Marriage

  Chapter IV The Era of Aleksei Adashev

  Chapter V The ‘Government of Compromise’

  Chapter VI The Conquest of Kazan'

  Chapter VII The Dynastic Crisis of 1553: Domestic and Military Policy, and the Arrival of the English

  Chapter VIII The War in Livonia and the End of the ‘Chosen Council’

  Chapter IX The Death of Anastasia, and Ivan's Second Marriage

  Chapter X Tsar Ivan and Prince Andrei Kurbsky

  Chapter XI The Setting Up of the Oprichnina

  Chapter XII War in Livonia and the Zemskii Sobor of 1566

  Chapter XIII The Boyar Plot: 1) the Letters to King Sigismund

  Chapter XIV The Boyar Plot: 2) the Executions of Ivan Fedorov, Metropolitan Filipp and Vladimir of Staritsa

  Chapter XV Armageddon

  Chapter XVI Foreign Policy and the Tatar Invasions

  Chapter XVII The End of the Oprichnina, and the Succession to the Polish-Lithuanian Crown

  Chapter XVIII Grand Prince Simeon Bekbulatovich

  Chapter XIX Peace Negotiations

  Chapter XX The Truce of Iam Zapol'sky

  Chapter XXI The Death of Ivan

  Chapter XXII Ivan's Legacy to Russia

  Abbreviations

  Notes

  Brief Glossary

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Illustrations

  1. The christening of Ivan IV, miniature from the Litsevaia Chronicle.

  2. The coronation of Ivan IV, miniature from the Litsevaia Chronicle.

  3. The execution of boyars near Kolomna in 1546, miniature from the Litsevaia Chronicle.

  4. The wedding of Ivan IV and Anastasia, miniature from the Nikon Chronicle (akg-images).

  5. The fire in Moscow in 1547, miniature from the Litsevaia Chronicle.

  6. The Church Militant, icon, c. 1550s, Tret'yakov Gallery, Moscow.

  7. Benozzo Gozzoli, The Journey of the Magi, wall painting, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (© 1993, Photo Scala, Florence – courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali).

  8. The departure of an ailing Anastasia from Moscow in flames, miniature from the Litsevaia Chronicle.

  9. Monastery of St Cyril of the White Lake (author's photograph).

  10. A session of the Boyar Council, miniature from the Litsevaia Chronicle.

  11. Ivan IV bids farewell to Richard Chancellor and Osip Nepea on their return to England, miniature from the Litsevaia Chronicle.

  12. Interpolations in the Litsevaia Chronicle, c. 1569–July 1570.

  13. Ivan IV receives the letter from Prince Kurbsky in 1564, miniature from the Litsevaia Chronicle.

  14. Peasants cutting wood, miniature from the Litsevaia Chronicle.

  15. Princess Evfrosin'ia of Staritsa.

  16. Michael Peterle, ‘Russian envoys to the diet of Regensburg in 1576’, woodcut (V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum).

  17. Stephen Bathory (Mary Evans Picture Library).

  18. Sigismund II Augustus (Mary Evans Picture Library).

  19. Still from Sergei Eisenstein, Ivan Groznyi (part I), 1945 (Alam Ata/Album/akg-images).

  Maps

  Russia and Poland–Lithuania, mid-sixteenth century

  Livonia and north Russia

  Areas incorporated into the oprichnina

  Foreword

  The complex historiography of the reign of Tsar Ivan IV is usually expounded in detail in the first chapters of most late nineteenth- and twentieth-century works on Russian history.1 It is a highly politicized historiography because at all stages since the beginning of the nineteenth century, historians have only too often forgotten that history is about human beings, and have been wedded to one or another theory of the interpretation of historical trends: Hegelianism, economic determinism, populism, historical materialism, Marxism, Eurasianism, economic materialism, Marxism–Leninism, most of which theories are at all times difficult to apply to a pre-modern society.

  I have carried out no original research in Russian archives for this book, but have relied entirely on published sources and historical works. Among older historians I have drawn often on N.M. Karamzin whose Istoria gosudarstva rossiikogo appeared between 1814 and 1824 – the last of the Chronicles and the first of the histories, as Pushkin put it. It is invaluable not just for the simplicity and humanity of its moral approach, but also for the richness of the sources quoted in the footnotes, some of which have now been lost. I have also made ample use of S.M. Solov'ev's Istoria Rossii s drevneishikh vremen (1851–79), for he also quotes extensively from sources, though I do not share his reliance on the state as the motor of history. V.O. Kliuchevsky, one of the most balanced of Russian historians, does not attribute any ultimate political significance to Ivan's oprichnina, and sees it as the ‘product of the excessively fearful imagination of the Tsar’. His conclusion that it was directed against persons and not against a system revived the conception of the moral rather than the political role of the Tsar, but though Kliuchevsky's judgments are always valuable, he has not devoted so much of his time specifically to writing about Ivan IV.

  A ‘bourgeois’ historian stands out as bestriding the transition from anti-tsarist history to full-fledged Marxist history: S. Platonov developed the theory that Ivan set up the oprichnina in order to destroy the boyar and princely aristocracy and establish a new ruling class, the dependent military servitors, the future dvoriane, who served from the land and who would support the Tsar. It was an interpretation which made up for the deficiencies of Kliuchevsky, for it portrayed Ivan's policy as clearly directed not at persons but at the system, and in Platonov's view it led to a profound social, economic and political crisis, culminating in the Time of Troubles. It proved a very influential theory, and in one form or another continued in use until the fall of communism. But
Platonov, one of the major historians of Russia, had not hesitated to stress the atrocities of Ivan and his moral culpability, and he succumbed to academic plotting against his position and was arrested in 1930, possibly at the instigation of the historian M.N. Pokrovsky, and exiled to Samara in miserable conditions, where he died within two years.2

  While historiography floundered in ideological rapids, the Russian intelligentsia, and intellectuals in general, developed their own unprofessional, but human views of the Tsar. The Decembrist Kondratii Ryleev called him a tyrant, and Mikhail Lunin wrote of the mad Tsar who for twenty-four years bathed in the blood of his subjects. Belinsky wrote of a ‘fallen angel … who revealed at times both the strength of an iron character and the strength of an exalted mind’.3

  Soviet historiography presented particular problems, such as the need to apply rigid Marxist criteria to the analysis of what had actually happened, without agreement having been reached on what the Marxist criteria actually were or on what had actually happened.

  Platonov's rival in the transition period was Pokrovsky himself, a committed Marxist and a bolshevik, who dominated the historical scene until the mid-1930s. His Russian History from Earliest Times, was published before the Revolution. He attributed the institution of the oprichnina to the victory of the monetary economy over the feudal natural economy, leading to an alliance between the service gentry and the merchant bourgeoisie and disregarding the personal influence of Ivan IV. By 1936 (after his death) he was denounced as anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist. More important, though difficult to classify, was the work of R. Wipper, which in different versions appeared in 1922 and in 1942, when it glorified Ivan as a leader and statesman. But it would be unjust to assume that historians and for that matter playwrights or historical novelists were all cast in one ideological mould, and new interpretations of Ivan's reign emerged into history and literature, reflecting individual judgments and the twists and turns of Soviet foreign policy and alliances. Victim of these changes of direction was S.B. Veselovsky, one of the greatest scholars of mid-sixteenth century Russia, who reverted, mid-twentieth century, to the position of Kliuchevsky, that the oprichnina served no political purpose, and who was therefore attacked as non-Marxist and whose work was stifled.

  At this point Stalin's interest in Russian history becomes more noticeable, and it culminated in his influence on the novels of A.N. Tolstoy and the films about Aleksander Nevsky and Ivan Groznyi, of Eisenstein, the second of which was commissioned by Stalin in 1941 before the German invasion of Russia, during the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact.4 The treatment of the subject reflects the changing political situation, and Ivan, though a Tsar, is depicted, in Part I of Eisenstein's film, as a wise statesman, leader of his people, opposed by treacherous boyars and supported by the common people.

  The trials which Eisenstein's film of Ivan met with have been analysed in an exemplary manner by Maureen Perrie,5 and there is no point in recounting them here. However, there is one interesting feature in her account of Eisenstein's original screenplay, the emphasis on the sea, for which there is no evidence in the sixteenth-century sources. As a boy, Ivan's nurse sings to him the song:

  Ocean Sea,

  Sea of deepest blue

  Glorious sea

  The Russian rivers run towards you

  Towns stand on your shores

  There stand our ancient towns

  Captured by a dark foe …6

  The musical theme and the song recur throughout the screen play, where Ivan's right to the Baltic Shore is emphasized repeatedly to its strains, right to the end where Ivan carries the dying Maliuta Skuratov in his arms to the sea shore, and the waves obey his commands. This reflects Stalin's personal commitment to the conquest of the Baltic states lost by Russia after the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution,7 but though access to a port seems an obvious Russian political aim, there is no specific mention of it in sixteenth-century sources, other than references to the efforts to keep or recover Narva. Ivan's atrocities are shown, up to a point, in the film (by permission: ‘“yes, murders did happen” said Stalin’8) but they are justified as necessary in view of the constant treason which surrounded the Tsar. The first part of the film was shown publicly from January 1945. The second part was shown in the Kremlin in March 1946 and met with some criticism among the intellectuals but Stalin, when he saw it, was revolted and described it as a nightmare, with the oprichnina reminding him of the Ku Klux Klan, and Ivan as a weakling, a ‘sort of Hamlet’.9 The oprichniki were ‘portrayed’ as a gang of bandits, ‘cannibals’ who called to mind the Phoenicians and the Babylonians, whereas they were a progressive force which Ivan needed to forge the unification of Russia.

  By now Ivan had to be portrayed as a ‘state-building’ ruler, a farseeing, wise statesman, and a brilliant war leader and diplomat, regardless of the previous critical attitude of all historians towards all tsars, who were ipso facto negligible and negative factors in history. Ivan's executions had to be explained as rendered necessary to uproot treason, a justification of Stalin's own terror, and the identification of Stalin with Ivan was encouraged openly though at times the authors subverted it by using Aesopian language – possibly including Eisenstein himself.

  The image of Ivan as a ‘progressive’ ruler, was useful also during the Second World War, and it lasted until the death of Stalin, when it was undermined by the rejection of ‘the cult of the individual’, opening the way for a far more wide ranging debate on what was the correct Marxist interpretation of the policies of Ivan. Pokrovsky and Veselovsky were both gradually rehabilitated, and the image of Stalin as Ivan Groznyi served only to discredit Stalin. Historians free of the ideological burden of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, though in many cases still wedded to Marxism, came forward, and made good use of the increasing number of sources which were being discovered and edited. There is now genuine debate between historians, in part fuelled by the availability in Russia of English originals or Russian translations of many works published by Western historians, and of free communication on the internet.

  In this book I have drawn to a great extent on the great Russian stalwarts of the history of Ivan IV who published in the twentieth-century. Veselovsky and Sadikov go back to the 1940s. The doyen of Russian historians of Ivan IV was for many years, until his death in 1988, A.A. Zimin; his major work on the oprichnina appeared in 1964, and was reprinted after his death in 1988, edited by A.L. Khoroshkevich, in 2001. There are some changes, of fact and of emphasis, in this new edition which have been carefully pointed out and assessed in a review by S.N. Bogatyrev.10 Others who have taken up the torch are S.O. Schmidt, N.E. Nosov, I.I. Smirnov, R.G. Skrynnikov, B.V. Kobrin and many more all of whom have contributed to the pursuitof the elusive truth. I have relied very greatly on their work for factual information, reserving my right to differ on interpretations. I have also drawn upon the work of American and German scholars in this field and here acknowledge my debt to them.

  The present book is not about Russia in the age of Ivan the Terrible. It is an attempt, on the evidence at present available, to understand and explain Ivan the man and the ruler, whose personal reign, lasting from 1547 to 1584, had such a devastating impact on his people and his expanding country. Any such attempt faces formidable difficulties. First of all the uneven nature of the surviving evidence, so much of which has been destroyed by fire. There is no written trace of Ivan's personal relationship with any of his seven wives or his children. There is no original written record of any letter, or order, given by the Tsar; there are a few records of private discussions in which he took part, but they are mostly with foreigners, such as the Englishmen Anthony Jenkinson or Sir Jerome Bowes, or the Austrians Count Cobenzl and Daniel Prinz von Buchau, or the Jesuit Antonio Possevino. There are no records of meetings of the Boyar Council, or of any other administrative body, though there are formal records of Ivan's participation in public assemblies and in occasional formal discussions such as the sessions of the joint meeting of the Boyar
Council and the Church Sobor to discuss the major reform programme of the Church and of canon law, known as the Stoglav (Hundred Chapters) in 1551. Formal documents are thus usually very impersonal, when compared with the lively exchange of letters between kings and their counsellors in other countries.

  There are however very many records, which have survived in a haphazard way, of the organization of military campaigns, the raising of revenue, the distribution of estates, the execution of alleged traitors, and the barbarities committed by and for the Tsar. More source material is continuously being discovered and put into circulation, so that there is a vast amount of material to read. The scholarship, the ingenuity and the assiduity in interpreting this source material displayed by Russian historians over many generations, can only arouse admiration. Nevertheless, the uneven nature of what has survived conduces to a great diversity in its interpretation, and leads the historian to hesitate between possibilities, forcing him or her to lay a number of suppositions before the reader, thus weighing the narrative down with analysis. Much of this discussion has been relegated to the footnotes, which in this case are of greater relevance to the general tenor of the narrative than is usually so. Moreover excessive reliance has had to be placed on foreign sources, which have been discovered little by little. The accounts of the two Livonian nobles, Kruse and Taube, were already known at the end of the sixteenth century but were not translated into Russian until 1922.11 The account of the German Schlichting was only translated into Russian in 1934.12

  Foreign written sources have been supplemented by foreign prints and engravings, allegedly portraits of Ivan or illustrations of the atrocities committed by his troops. There is no authentic portrait of the Tsar in existence and all those reproduced in books about him are imaginary. The same applies to his father Vasily III. Portraits are printed allegedly of Ivan IV, but facing the other way they are used of the Jesuit Antonio Possevino.13 The engravings of Russian atrocities are all imaginary. What they illustrate may well have happened, because warfare was terribly cruel everywhere at that time, and there is no doubt that Ivan was utterly ruthless towards his enemies, real or imagined. But pictures of atrocities can intensify the impact on the reader and leave a distorted picture on the mind. It is thus infinitely more difficult to study Russian sixteenth-century history than, say, that of Elizabethan England, where the correspondence between the Queen's advisers, Burleigh, Leicester and Walsingham, for instance, or between her enemies, has survived and enables the historian to associate personality with policy.