Russia. A History

‘Russia’ constituted the realm of the grand princes (after 1547, the tsars) of Moscow, the Daniilovich line of the Riurikid dynasty that traced its descent to the rulers of Kievan Rus. Moscow amassed regional power starting in the fourteenth century; by 1450, after a decisive dynastic war, it embarked on expansion that continued unabated into the nineteenth century. Although much has been made of Moscow’s relentless expansion, it was hardly unusual for the time. In Europe the Habsburgs and Jagiellonians were building empires, while England, France, and the Dutch were expanding overseas. They may have justified their expansion by the theory of mercantilism while Muscovy claimed to be restoring the ‘patrimony’ of Kievan Rus, but the motives—pursuit of resources, wealth, power—were the same.

Muscovy’s expansion easily equalled that of other sixteenth-century empires. Russia expanded along lucrative trade routes, towards the Baltic, along the Volga, and into fertile steppe or the fur-bearing north and Siberia. Despite pious claims, much of what Muscovy won had not been part of Kievan Rus and Muscovy’s expansionist zeal never turned to the Ukrainian heartland in the sixteenth century. Under Ivan III Moscow acquired, through marriage, inheritance, coercion, or conquest, contiguous territories that had once been sovereign principalities: Riazan, 1456–1521; Iaroslavl, 1463; Rostov, 1463, 1474; Tver, 1485. With the conquest in 1478 of the Baltic trading city of Novgorod came a rich hinterland stretching to the Urals. Since the conquest of Novgorod and of Pskov in 1510 under Vasilii III put Muscovy face to face with the grand duchy of Lithuania and Sweden, much of the sixteenth century was consumed with wars on the western border, including the draining and fruitless war for Livonia (1558–82). Under Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) and Fedor Ivanovich Muscovy moved on several fronts, conquering Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan at the Caspian Sea in 1556, thereby assuring Russian control of the Volga river route. The steppe on either side became the next target of expansion in the second half of the century. Simultaneously, from the 1580s Muscovy was asserting political control into western Siberia, seeking the treasure of furs.

The only significant diversion that Moscow’s rulers faced from these foreign policy goals was the era of the oprichnina

(1564–72), a murky episode in which about half the tsardom (almost all the lucrative trading areas north and northwest of Moscow, stretching to the White Sea, plus several major towns in the centre) was designated as Ivan IVs personal realm. Parallel élites, armies, and bureaucracies were formed, with attendant confiscations of land and purges of individuals, clans, institutions, and regions deemed hostile to Ivan IV. The oprichnina might have been intended to consolidate central power, as some have argued, but more likely was the fruit of Ivan IVs own personal devils. Some, such as V. O. Kliuchevskii and S. B. Veselovskii, have argued that Ivan was insane or paranoid; Edward L. Keenan suggests that a debilitating spinal illness made Ivan create the

oprichnina in an attempt to abdicate power, an argument made all the more persuasive by Ivan’s later year-long abdication (1574/5) and by his erratic behaviour (he married several times, throwing clan-based court politics into disarray; even after 1572 he patronized a parallel élite of low-born families called the court [dvor]

). Certainly some explanation in the psychological realm is required, since evidence shows that the oprichnina had no positive social or political consequences, devastating much of the centre of the realm and disrupting social and institutional structures.

The Span of the Russian Empire

We will begin by surveying the regions that made up Russia in the sixteenth century. There were three large divisions: the north, the centre, and the frontier, primarily a steppe frontier but also including the western border with the grand duchy of Lithuania. The north stretched from the Gulf of Finland in the west to beyond the Urals in the east and from the White Sea south to about 60° L. The north is a land of taiga, a largely coniferous forest turning into tundra and permafrost as one goes north; in addition to the taiga’s acidic and leached soil, its marshiness and the brevity of the growing season (only three to four months, sufficient for only one crop) make it inhospitable to agriculture. This was an area of forest exploitation and trade.