II. THE PRINCES OF MOSCOW
Moscow remained an obscure village until Daniel Alexandrovitch, toward the end of the thirteenth century, extended its hinterland and made it a minor principality. Historical hindsight6 attributes Moscow’s growth to its position on the navigable Moscow River, which was connected by short overland portage with the Volga on the east and the Oka, Don, and Dnieper on the south and west. Yuri Danielovitch—son of Daniel—Prince of Moscow, coveted the neighboring principality of Suzdal, with its relatively rich capital, Vladimir; Michael, Prince of Tver, coveted the same; Moscow and Tver fought for the prize; Moscow won; Michael was killed and canonized; Moscow grew. Yuri’s brother and successor, Ivan I, took the double title of Grand Prince of Moscow and Grand Duke of Vladimir.
As collector of Russian tribute for the Tatar khan, Ivan I exacted more than he remitted, and prospered wickedly. His rapacity won him the nickname Kalita, Moneybag, but he gave the principalities thirteen years’ respite from Tatar raids. He died as a tonsured monk, censered with the odor of sanctity (1341). His son Simeon the Proud inherited his flair for taxgathering. Claiming authority over every province, he called himself Grand Prince of All the Russias, which did not prevent his dying of the plague (1353). Ivan II was a gentle and peaceable ruler, under whom Russia fell into fratricidal war. His son Dmitri had all requisite martial qualities; he defeated every rival, and defied the khan. In 1380 Khan Mamai assembled a horde of Tatars, Genoese mercenaries, and other flotsam, and advanced toward Moscow. Dmitri and his Russian allies met the horde at Kulikovo, near the Don, defeated it (1380), and won the cognomen Donskoi. Two years later the Tatars attacked again, with 100,000 men. The Russians, deceived and exhausted by victory, failed to raise a comparable force; the Tatars captured Moscow, massacred 24,000 of the population, and burned the city to the ground. Dmitri’s son Vasili I made peace with the Tatars, annexed Nijni Novgorod, and compelled Novgorod and Viatka to accept him as their overlord.
The Grand Princes of Moscow adopted the Tatar technique of despotism, perhaps as the alternative to an illiterate chaos. Under an autocracy of violence and craft a bureaucracy on Byzantine lines administered the government, subject to a Council of Boyars advising and serving the prince. The boyars were at once the leaders of the army, the governing lords of their localities, the organizers, protectors, and exploiters of the semifree peasants who tilled the land. Adventurous colonists migrated to unsettled regions, drained the swamps, fertilized the soil by burning the woods and brush, exhausted it with improvident tillage, and moved on again, until they reached the White Sea and the Urals, and seeped into Siberia. In the endless plains towns were many but small; houses were of wood and mud, calculated to burn down within twenty years at most. Roads were unpaved, and were least agonizing in winter, when they were covered with snow packed by sleds and patient boots. Merchants preferred rivers to roads, and by water or ice carried on a plodding trade between north and south, with Byzantium, Islam, and the Hanse. Probably it was this spreading commerce that overcame the individualism of the princes and compelled the unification of Russia. Vasili II (1425–62), called Tëmny, the Blind, because his foes gouged out his eyes (1446), brought all rebels to obedience with torture, mutilation, and the knout, and left to his son a Russia sufficiently strong to end the ignominy of Tatar rule.
Ivan III became “the Great” because he accomplished this task, and made Russia one. He was built to need: unscrupulous, subtle, calculating, tenacious, cruel, guiding his armies to distant victories from his seat in the Kremlin; punishing disobedience or incompetence savagely, whipping, torturing, mutilating even the boyars, beheading a doctor for failing to cure his son, and so sternly dominating his entourage that women fainted at his glance. Russia called him the Terrible until it met his grandson.
The easiest of his conquests was Novgorod. He looked with hungry anticipation upon that thriving taxable mart, and the merchants of Moscow urged him to destroy their competitors in the north.7 The Grand Prince controlled the plains between Moscow and Novgorod; there the mercantile republic bought its food and sold its goods; Ivan had only to close that granary and market to Novgorod’s trade, and the city-state must go bankrupt or yield. After eight years of alternating war and truce, the republic surrendered its autonomy (1478). Seven thousand of its leading inhabitants were transplanted to Suzdal, the Hanse was expelled, the merchants of Moscow inherited the markets, their Prince the revenues, of Novgorod.
Absorbing the colonies of the dead republic, Ivan extended his rule to Finland, the Arctic, and the Urals. Pskov submitted in time to preserve its republican forms under the sovereignty of the Grand Prince. Tver sought preservation by allying itself with Lithuania; Ivan marched in person against the city, and took it without a blow. Rostov and Iaroslavl followed. When Ivan’s brothers died he refused to let their appanages descend to their heirs; he added their territories to his own. One brother, Andrei, flirted with Lithuania; Ivan captured and imprisoned him; Andrei died in jail; Ivan wept, but confiscated Andrei’s lands. La politique nía pas d’entrailles.
Liberation from the Tatars seemed impossible and proved easy. The remnants of the Mongol-Turkish invaders had settled down in three rival groups centering at Sarai, Kazan, and in the Crimea. Ivan played one against another until he was assured that they would not unite against him. In 1480 he refused tribute. Khan Akhmet led a great army up the Volga to the banks of the Oka and Ugra south of Moscow; Ivan led 150,000 men to the opposite banks. For months the hostile hosts faced each other without giving battle; Ivan hesitated to risk his throne and life on one throw, the Tatars feared his improved artillery. When the rivers froze and no longer protected the armies from each other, Ivan ordered a retreat. Instead of pursuing, the Tatars too retreated, all the way to Sarai (1480). It was an immense and ridiculous victory. From that time no tribute was paid by Moscow to the Horde; the Grand Prince called himself autocrat (Samoderzhets), meaning that he paid tribute to none. The rival khans were maneuvered into mutual war; Akhmet was defeated and slain; the Golden Horde of Sarai melted away.
Lithuania remained. Neither the Grand Prince nor the metropolitan of Moscow could suffer peace so long as the Ukraine and Kiev and western Russia were under a power perpetually threatening Moscow, and inviting Orthodox Christians into Latin Christianity. An alleged Polish plot to assassinate Ivan gave him a casus belli and let loose a holy war for the redemption of the seduced provinces (1492). Many Lithuanian princes, uneasy under the Polish-Roman-Catholic union, opened their gates to Ivan’s troops. Alexander, Great Prince of Lithuania, made a stand at Vedrosha, and lost (1500). Pope Alexander VI arranged a six-year truce; meanwhile Moscow kept the region it had won—west to the river Sozh, including Chernigov and reaching almost to Smolensk. Ivan III, now sixty-three, left the redemption of the remainder to his heirs.
His reign of forty-three years was as important as any in the history of Russia before the twentieth century. Whether inspired by lust for wealth and power, or by a conviction that the security and prosperity of the Russians required the unification of Russia, Ivan III achieved for his country what Louis XI was doing for France, Henry VII for England, Ferdinand and Isabella for Spain, Alexander VI for the Papal States; the simultaneity of these events revealed the progress of nationalism and monarchy, dooming the supernational power of the papacy. The boyars lost their independence, the principalities sent tribute to Moscow, Ivan took the title “Sovereign of All the Russias.” Possibly at the behest of his Greek wife he assumed also the Roman-Greek title of czar (Caesar), adopted the Imperial double eagle as the national emblem, and claimed inheritance to all the political and religious authority of defunct Byzantium. Byzantine theories and ceremonies of government, and of the Church as an organ of the state, followed Byzantine Christianity, the Byzantine Greek alphabet, and Byzantine art forms, into Russia; and so far as Byzantium had been Orientalized by its proximity to Asia, so Russia, already oriented by Tatar rule, became in many ways an Oriental monarchy, alien and unintelligible to
the West.
III. IVAN THE TERRIBLE: 1533–84
Vasili III Ivanovitch (1505–33) continued the integration of Russia. He brought Smolensk within his realm, and compelled the principalities of Ryazan and Novgorod-Severski to acknowledge his sovereignty. “Only the infants at the breast,” said a Russian annalist, “could refrain from tears” when the once proud republic of Pskov submitted to Vasili’s rule (1510). Russia was now a major European power; Vasili corresponded on equal terms with Maximilian I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent, and Leo X. When some boyars tried to limit his autocracy he checked them with a contemptuous word—“Peasants! “—and had one noble head cut off. Getting no children from his wife, he divorced her and married the accomplished and masterful Helena Glinski. After his death she took the regency for her three-year-old son Ivan IV Vasilievitch. The boyars resumed their turbulence when she died; their rival factions controlled the government in turn; they disordered the cities with their violence, and spilled the blood of their helpless muzhiks in civil war.
Amid these struggles the young Sovereign of All the Russias was almost ignored, even at times left destitute. Seeing brutality everywhere around him, he took it as an accepted mode of behavior, adopted the most cruel sports, and grew into a moody and suspicious youth. Suddenly, while still a boy of thirteen (1544), he threw to his dogs Andrei Shuiski, leader of a boyar faction, and seized command of the state. Three years later he had himself crowned czar by the metropolitan of Moscow. Then he ordered a selection of noble virgins to be sent to him from divers parts of his realm; from them he chose and married Anastasia Romanovna, whose family name would soon designate a dynasty.
In 1550 he summoned the first national assembly (Zemski Sobor) of all Russia. He confessed to it the errors of his youth, and promised a just and merciful government. Perhaps influenced by the Reformation in Germany and Scandinavia, the assembly considered a motion to confiscate ecclesiastical wealth for the support of the state. The proposal was rejected, but a related motion was passed by which all alodial lands—those free from liens—deeded to the Church were to be restored, all gifts made to the Church during Ivan’s minority were canceled, and monasteries were no longer to acquire certain kinds of property without the czar’s consent. The clergy were partly appeased when Ivan took the priest Sylvester as his spiritual director and made him and Alexis Adashef his chief ministers. Supported by these able aides, Ivan at twenty-one was master of a realm reaching from Smolensk to the Urals, and from the Arctic Ocean almost to the Caspian Sea.
His first care was to strengthen the army, and to balance the forces provided by the unfriendly nobles with two organizations responsible directly to himself: Cossack cavalry and Strieltsi infantry armed with harquebusesmatchlock firearms invented in the fifteenth century.* The Cossacks originated in that century as peasants whose position in South Russia, between Moslems and Muscovites, obliged them to be ready to fight at short notice, but gave them irresistible opportunities to rob the caravans that carried trade between north and south. The main Cossack “hosts”—the Don Cossacks in southeast Russia and the Zaporogue Cossacks in the southwest—were semi-independent republics, strangely democratic; male householders chose a hetmán (German Hauptmann, head man) as executive officer of a popularly elected assembly. All land was owned in common, but was leased to individual families for temporary use; and all classes were equal before the law.8 Famous for their dashing courage, the Cossack horsemen became the main support of Ivan IV at home and in war.
His foreign policy was simple: he wanted Russia to connect the Baltic Sea with the Caspian. The Tatars still held Kazan, Astrakhan, and the Crimea, and still demanded tribute from Moscow, though in vain. Ivan was sure that Russia’s security and unity required its possession of these khanates, and control of the Volga to its outlet. In 1552 the young Czar led 150,000 men against the gates of Kazan in a siege that lasted fifty days. The 30,000 Moslems resisted with religious pertinacity; they sallied out in repeated sorties; and when some of them were captured and hanged on gibbets before the walls, the defenders shot them with arrows, saying that “it was better for these captives to receive death from the clean hands of their countrymen than to perish by the impure hands of Christians.”9 When the besiegers lost heart after a month of failure, Ivan sent to Moscow for a miraculous cross; this, displayed to them, reanimated his men; on both sides God was conscripted into military service. A German engineer mined the walls; they collapsed; the Russians poured into the city, crying “God with us!”—and massacred all who could not be sold as slaves. Ivan, we are told, wept with pity for the defeated; “they are not Christians,” he said, “but they are men.” He repeopled the ruins with Christians. Russia acclaimed him as the first Slav to take a Tatar stronghold, and celebrated the victory as France had hailed the check of the Moslems at Tours (732). In 1554 Ivan took Astrakhan, and the Volga became a completely Russian stream. The Crimea remained Moslem till 1774, but the Cossacks of the Don now bowed to Moscow’s rule.
Having cleared his frontier in the east, Ivan looked longingly toward the west. He dreamed of Russian commerce flowing west and north along great rivers into the Baltic. He envied the industrial and commercial expansion of Western Europe, and looked for any opening by which the Russian economy might attach itself to that development. In 1553 Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor were commissioned by London merchants to find an Arctic route around Scandinavia to China. They sailed from Harwich in three vessels; two crews perished in a Lapland winter, but Chancellor reached the site of Arkhangelsk—which the British so named after the archangel Michael. Chancellor made his way through a hundred perils and hardships to Moscow. With him, and later with Anthony Jenkinson, Ivan signed treaties giving “The London and Muscovite Company” special trading privileges in Russia.
But to Ivan these treaties were knotholes, not a door or window, into the West. He tried to import German technicians; 123 were gathered for him at Lübeck, but Charles V refused to let them go. A great river, the Southern Dvina, flowed from the heart of Russia into the Baltic near Riga, but through hostile Livonia. The headwaters of the Dvina and the Volga were not far apart; the two rivers could be connected by canals; here, by “manifest destiny,” was the water route that might atone for the disproportion of Russia’s enormous land mass to her coasts and ports; so the Baltic would mingle with the Caspian and the Black Sea, East and West would meet, and amid the interchange of goods and ideas the West could repay some of its ancient cultural debt to the East.
So in 1557 Ivan invented a casus belli—usually a case of the belly—with Livonia. He sent against it an army under Shah-Ali, lately Tatar Khan of Kazan; it ravaged the country brutally, burning houses and crops, enslaving men, raping women till they died. In 1558 another Russian army captured Narva, only eight miles from the Baltic. Desperate Livonia appealed to Poland. Denmark, Sweden, Germany, all Central Europe trembled at the prospect of a Slav inundation reaching westward, as in the sixth century, to the Elbe. Stephen Báthory roused the Poles, and led them to victory over the Russians at Polotsk (1582). Ivan, defeated, yielded Livonia to Poland.
Long before this decisive setback the failure of his campaigns had led to revolt at home. The merchants whom Ivan had thought to enrich with new avenues of trade lost stomach for the costly and disruptive war. The nobles had opposed it as bound to unite the Baltic powers, with their superior armament, against a Russia still feudal in political and military organization. During and before the war Ivan had suspected the boyars of conspiracies against his throne. In a nearly fatal illness (1553) he learned that a powerful group of nobles was planning, when he died, to repudiate his son Dmitri and crown Prince Vladimir, whose mother was disbursing large gifts to the army. His closest advisers, Sylvester and Adashef, were flirting with treasonable boyars. For seven years after suspecting them Ivan kept these officials in power; then (1560) he dismissed them, but without violence; Sylvester died in a monastery, Adashef in one of the Livonian campaigns. Several of the boyars dese
rted to Poland and took up arms against Russia; in 1564 Ivan’s bosom friend and leading general, Prince Andrei Kurbski, joined this flight, alleging that the Czar was planning to kill him. From Poland Kurbski sent to Ivan what amounted to a declaration of war, denouncing him as a leprous criminal. Tradition claims that Ivan, when this letter was read to him, nailed a foot of the bearer to the floor with a blow of the royal staff. But the Czar condescended to reply to Kurbski in a rebuttal sixty-two pages long, eloquent and chaotic, passionate and Biblical, recounting the intrigues of the boyars to depose him. Believing that they had poisoned Anastasia, he asked, “Why did you divide me from my wife? Had you not taken from me my young heifer, never had there been the slayings of the boyars.... In vain I have looked for some man to have pity on me, but I have found none.”10 Kurbski, in the evening of his life, wrote a relentlessly hostile History of Ivan, which is our chief source for Ivan’s terribilità.
These plots and desertions illuminate the most famous and peculiar event of the reign. On December 13, 1564, Ivan left Moscow with his family, his icons, his treasury, and a small force of soldiery, withdrew to his summer home at Alexandrovsk, and sent to Moscow two proclamations. One alleged that the boyars, the bureaucracy, and the Church had conspired against him and the state; therefore “with great sorrow” he now resigned his throne, and would henceforth live in retirement. The other assured the people of Moscow that he loved them, and that they might rest assured of his lasting good will. In fact he had consistently favored the commons and merchants against the aristocracy, and the present action of the middle and lower classes attested it. They broke out in threatening cries against the nobility and the clergy, and demanded that a deputation of bishops and boyars should go to the Czar and beg him to resume his throne. It was done, and Ivan agreed to “take unto him his state anew,” on conditions that he would later specify.