In July 1667, a mob of 5,000 angry Russians marched to the palace of Tsar Alexis
in suburbs of Moscow.Poor harvest and a long war with Poland and
exhausted their patience over harsh taxation, currency devaluation and corrupt
officialdom, and they extracted a promise from the Tsar that he would act on
their grievances. But his solution to the problems was not what they had in
mind. According to the historian V.O. Klyuchevsky, ‘Tsar Alexis called on the
streltsy (musketeers who formed the Tsar’s bodyguard) and his courtiers for
assistance, and an incriminate slaughter ensued, followed by tortures and executions
Hundreds were drowned in the River Moskva and whole families were exiled
permanently to Siberia.’
Alexis was pious and artificially-minded. He tried to leave
government to ministers. But he had been born into succession of Tsars who
inherited absolute rule from the Mongols –and were equally merciless about
maintaining it. Any challenge to their authority was met by torture, exile and
execution. The loyalty of a few select aristocrats was bought with land and
honors. The peasants -90 percent of the population –were shackled in
medieval-style serfdom; denied education, the right to change jobs, even the right
to choose their own marital partners. And if they grew restless about their
lot, soldiers and secret army of informers soon brought them back into line
with bloodshed. For four centuries, the Tsars ruled Russia by fear. And few rulers
inspired more fear than Ivan the Terrible.
Ivan, was born in August 1530, was an orphan by the age of
eight. His father Vasily, Grand Duke of Moscow,
died when he was three. Five years later his mother Elena, who acted as Regent,
was poisoned. After that, Ivan was to claim that he received ‘no human care
from any quarter.’ Vicious power battles between leading families marked his
early years. Ivan was used as a pawn by rival factions wrestling for control,
only to lose it. In succession of bloodbaths. He watched one of his uncles
carried off to death by a Moscow
mob in one uprising. But he quickly learned how to fight back. He was just 13
when he ordered his first assassination. Then he threw the body of his victim,
a troublesome Shuisky prince, to his dogs.
In 1547, Ivan had himself crowned Tsar and, at parade of
the nation’s most beautiful and eligible virgins he selected himself a bride
-15-year-old Anastasia. She produced six children for him, but only two were
still alive when she died in 1560. Their deaths, plus the loss of his wife’s
calming influence and the trauma of his childhood, may all have played a part
in the horrors that followed.
First Ivan banished his closest advisers, his personal
priest Father Silvestr, and nobleman Alexei Adashev, accusing them of plotting
to kill Anastasia. Then he left Moscow
for virtual monastic seclusion in the provinces. All sections of the community
begged him to return, fearing a power vacuum. Ivan agreed –but only if he was
allowed to govern without any interference. When his terms were accepted, he
split the nation into two vast sections. In one, he was absolute master. The
rest of the country was too governed for him by bureaucrats.
Now Ivan unleashed unprecedented terror on his people,
using the sinister oprichniki. They were black-cloaked riders on black horses,
whose saddles carried the symbols of broom and dog’s head. With unbridled fury,
they slaughtered anyone suspected of opposition to Ivan, and settled many of
his old scores from the turmoil of his teenage days. More than 4,000
aristocrats were purged. The Staritsky family, relatives of Ivan but potential
rivals for power, was wiped out. When Metropolitan Philip, leader of the
Orthodox Church in Moscow,
condemned the oprichnickis’ attacks and refused to bless the the Tsar, the
ruthless riders tracked him down savagely executed him.
Ivan himself often took part in their orgies of rape,
torture and death. And his rage really ran wild when an informant told him
civic leaders of Novogorod, then Russia’s second city, were planning
rebellion. Without bothering to check the allegation, which was almost certainly
untrue, Ivan led his oprichniki north, pillaging and plundering aristocratic
homes, monasteries and churches within 50 miles of the city. Having laid waste
to the fields that fed Novgorod,
he then built a wooden wall around the metropolis to prevent anyone fleeing.
And for five weeks, he watched, or took part in, wholesale slaughter.
Husbands and wives were forced to watch as their partners
–and sometimes their children –were tortured. Many women were roasted alive on
revolving spears. Other killings were treated almost as sport. One German
mercenary wrote: ‘Mounting a horse and brandishing a spear, he (Ivan) charged
in and ran people through while his son watched the entertainment. . .’
Though Soviet scholars have claimed recently that no more
than 2,000 people died, Western historians put the total toll in the
annihilation of Novgorod
at over 60,000. And Ivan’s sadistic savagery there, and at Pskov, also suspected
of neigbouring Livonia, one besieged garrison blew themselves up rather than
fall into his cruel clutches.
In 1572 Ivan suddenly disbanded the oprichniki and banned
all mention of them. Throughout his life, his sadism alternated with periods of
maniacs religious depression, when he would publicity confess his sins and don
sackcloth. So perhaps genuine shame ended the six-year reign of terror. Perhaps
attacks on Russia
from the south by Turks forced him to call off internal vendettas.Or perhaps his assassins had eliminated
almost everyone Ivan wanted out of the way.
Ivan got away with his ruthless rule because he had the
support of the Orthodox Church. Western Europe
was undergoing the religious crisis of the Reformation, and Orthodox leader were
terrified of free-thinking Protestantism which would weaken their hold on the
unthinking masses. In exchange for a hard line on all religious dissent,
including burning for heresy’, the Church backed the Tsar and became an
effective propaganda machine on behalf. When peasant revolts were crushed with
total brutality, the causes and the consequences were never attributed to Ivan.
They were blamed on the corruption or excessive zeal of those who worked for
him.
For a few Russians, Ivan was not so terrible. They were the
people granted lands and power in territories the Tsar added to his empire,
north of the Black Sea and Siberia. But the
wars that won them, and campaigns which won nothing, forced an ever-increasing tax
burden on Russian landowners and their peasants. And by the end of Ivan’s
reign, English ambassador Gilles Fletcher was reporting to London: ‘the desperate state of things at
home make the people for the most part to wish for some foreign invasion, which
they suppose to be the only means to rid them of the heavy yoke of his
tyrannous government.’
In fact there was another way –Ivan’s death. It came in
March 1584, three years after he killed his son and heir Ivan with a spear
during a quarrel. A life of licentiousness –six more wives and innumerable
mistresses –had left the Tsar riddled with disease. As British trader Sir
Jerome Horsey put it: ‘The emperor began grievously to swell in cods, with
which he had most horribly offended above 50 years, boasting of a thousand
virgins he had deflowered and thousands of children of his begetting
destroyed.’ Ivan collapsed and died as he prepared to play a game of chess.
Yet even his departure did not spare Russia’s agony.
His heir’s death left Ivan’s imbecilic son Theodore as successor and he soon proved
hopelessly unable to govern. The country was plunged into 30 years of chaos,
which included occupation by the armies of both Poland
and Sweden,
before the Romanovs relatives of Ivan’s wife Anastasia –were able to re-impose
the authority of the Tsars.
Historians still dispute whether Tsarist Russia’s most
bloodthirsty tyrant was consciously bad or completely mad. Some seek excuses in
his traumatic childhood. Others blame a painful spinal defect for his excesses.
It was nearly 350 years before Ivan the Terrible found sympathetic
consideration from someone who believed his oprichniki had played a
‘progressive role’, someone who claimed his only mistake was not taking his
purges further. That sympathizer was Josef Stalin. And as the earlier chapter
on Stalin shows, he did not make the same ‘mistake’.
