The Origins of Autocracy

Devlet Girei did not succeed in carrying out his intentions, but their very dimensions and the fact that his troops included not only Tatars, but also all the previous allies of Muscovy—the Nogais, and even the Kabardinian Prince Temriuk, Ivan the Terrible's father-in- law, who had swiftly abandoned the sinking ship of Muscovy—indi­cate how real this danger was. There can hardly be any serious doubt that if the Turks had been able to help Devlet Girei in 1572, as they had helped him previously, Muscovy would have been brought to the brink of collapse. The country was desolated and demoralized, its best military cadres had been exterminated by the Oprichnina, and its capacity for resistance catastrophically reduced. Fortunately, the complete defeat of the Turkish fleet by Don Juan of Austria at Le- panto in 1571 tied the hands of Turkey, and compelled it for the time being to pass from the offensive to the defensive. Thus, it was Europe which helped Muscovy, albeit involuntarily, in this, its most terrible hour. And how did Ivan the Terrible repay it for this help? Imme­diately after Lepanto, he suggested to the Turkish Sultan Selim II a plan for an anti-European coalition, a Russo-Turkish alliance "against the Roman emperor and the Polish king and the Czech king and the French king and other kings and against all the Italian princes."²³

The sultan scorned this proposal, however, thereby confirming that the abandonment of the anti-Tatar strategy inevitably condemned Russia to complete isolation in European politics,

which led not only to irrevers­ible changes in its internal political structure, but to the necessity of paying tribute to the Tatars for another whole century.

In the first half of the seventeenth century alone, up to a million rubles went to the Tatars in "gifts," as they were shamefully called by the Muscovite ambassadors, or in "tribute," as they were frankly in­terpreted in the Crimea. This was the very time when the tsar was humbly begging King James of England for a subsidy of 120,000 ru­bles. Furthermore, this tribute did not prevent the Tatars from carry­ing away into captivity and selling as slaves 200,000 Russians. One cannot read without sadness Iurii Krizhanich's secret memorandum that,

On all of the Turkish warships, almost no oarsmen except Russians are to be seen, and in the cities and towns in all of Greece, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, and Anatolia—that is, in all of the Turkish kingdom—there is such a multitude of Russian slaves that they usually ask their fellow countrymen, newly arrived, whether anyone is still left in Rus'.'²¹

Thus, in the 1560s the "turn against the Tatars" was a strategic im­perative for Muscovy. The "turn against the Germans," war on Livon­ia and consequently on Europe, proposed at that time by the Russian right as an alternative to the anti-Tatar strategy, inevitably led to isola­tion and ruin. And indeed it brought both. Russia simply ceased to be either a European power or a great one. In the words of a modern historian,

Until the beginning of the eighteenth century, Russia had remained scarcely more than a name to the West, where it was thought to be an amorphous geographical area occupied by barbarous schismatics owing a vague allegiance to a priest-king. It was thought of little importance to Europe save as a source of raw materials and a pasture for impover­ished German Baltic barons.²⁵