Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

not to leave the country and deliver us to the wolves like unhappy sheep with no shepherd, and to protect us from the strong. . . . Who will defend us from attack by foreign peoples? . . . How can we live without a lord?

Here we see one of the recurring themes of Russian history: the ordinary people welcome a strong ruler because he can defend them both from external aggressors and from their own internal strongmen, who exploit them and sometimes fight one another, unleashing destructive warfare in which everyone suffers. When power is mediated through persons rather than institutions, those persons are always liable to give priority to their own individual, family, or factional interests. Ivan, for all his paranoia, was endeavouring to combat this tendency and assert the priority of state service.

His improvised method of doing so was to carve out his own personal territorial realm, in which he would rule as he saw fit. He called it the oprichnina

– literally, widow’s portion. The remaining territory he left to the boyars to rule according to their own customs. In the oprichnina, he expropriated most of the boyars and appanage princes, deporting them to the new territories now available around Kazan, and awarded their ancestral lands as pomestia to his own servitors. His oprichniki

rode the country on black horses, each carrying a dog’s head and a broom, as it were to sniff out treachery and sweep it away. Supposed traitors were tortured and murdered. Ivan believed that, as God’s chosen, uniquely among men he was entitled to commit evil in order to do good. The grotesque cruelty of his campaign, however, divided the elites among themselves and weakened Muscovy’s resistance. It was during the oprichnina that the Tatars successfully raided Moscow; shortly afterwards, Ivan abolished it.

On the whole, though, boyars accepted the Tsar’s dominance, since they recognized that feuding among themselves was mortally dangerous in Muscovy’s geopolitically exposed situation. In a sense, the Muscovite polity was the product of a tacit compact between Tsar and boyar elite: the latter acknowledged the Tsar’s symbolic omnipotence in return for his ensuring stability and internal peace, including their own dominance over other social orders.

Compared with many of his European contemporaries, Ivan was relatively successful at creating unified authority – though not central control, which was impossible in such a huge and relatively primitive country. This was the impressive side of his achievement. Yet so great were the costs that he left behind him a realm hopelessly overstrained, underpopulated, and devastated. Peasants fled exorbitant taxes and labour dues to seek refuge in monasteries or to try their luck on the open frontier. Above all, he bequeathed a tradition that, to fulfil its demanding functions, the Russian state has to be harsh and domineering, to the extent of violating both human customs and divine laws, and also to depend on personal ties and patron–client networks rather than on stable institutions and laws.

Moreover, Ivan’s style of diplomacy impeded the integration of Muscovy into the European diplomatic system. His insistence on the title of Tsar and on precedence over non-hereditary rulers, the failure to develop expertise in European languages and cultures, similar to that which Rus already deployed to deal with the steppe khanates, Byzantium, and the Balkans, all put Muscovy at a disadvantage and closed it to the Renaissance, Reformation, and other developments going forward at the time. In the technical sense, Rus kept up with European military developments, but in other respects remained a closed and rather isolated world of its own.

Orthodox Church

The fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 horrified the Christians of Rus. They had been accustomed to look up to the Byzantine church as mentor and patron, ultimate guarantor of their spiritual welfare. Yet at the same time, that disaster opened new opportunities for the Muscovite church. Already wealthy, powerful, and accustomed to speaking for Rus as a whole, it now became the spiritual home of the largest contingent of Orthodox believers in any independent realm. Churchmen began to see Muscovy as successor to Rome and Byzantium, as the ‘Third Rome’.

This view was articulated in an epistle of the monk Filofei of Pskov, probably written to Ivan III, warning him against his intention of expropriating ecclesiastical land to award to his military servitors.

If Thou rulest thine empire rightly, thou wilt be a son of light, and a citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem. . . . And now I say unto thee: take care and take heed. . . . All the empires of Christendom are united. . . . in thine, for two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and there will be no fourth.