The Origins of Autocracy

But the Crimea could not be conquered—put an end to, as an end had been put to Kazan'—by such raids. It was a matter of a difficult and long-drawn-out war, which might last for many years. The Cri­mea was hundreds of miles from Moscow. Kazan', which was much closer, had not fallen in a day—first, under Vasilii, the fortress of Vasil'sursk had had to be built at the halfway mark; then, under the Government of Compromise, Sviiazhsk had been erected opposite it on the other bank of the Volga to consolidate Muscovy's hold there. In the case of the Crimea, dozens of fortresses had to be built, a chain

Ibid., p. 603.

Solov'ev, htoriia Rossii, bk. 3, p. 493.

In Karamzin's opinion, only the military help of the Turks saved the Tatars. "Devlet Girei trembled," he writes, "and thought that Rzhevskii, Vishnevetskii, and the Circassian princes were only the forward division of our troops. He was expecting Ivan himself, and petitioned him for peace, and wrote in desperation to the sultan that all was lost if he did not save the Crimea." The sultan saved it: "We . . . did not follow the indications of the finger of God, and gave the infidels time to recover. Vishnevetskii did not hold out at Khortitsa when numerous detachments of Turks and Wallachians, sent to Devlet Girei by the sultan, appeared" (N. M. Karamzin, pp. 253-54).

of cities stubbornly moving further and further into the southern steppe each year, conquering the land from the Tatars mile by mile, one frontier after another. The whole life of the country had to be subordinated to this "open frontier" strategy. The economic boom had to supply it with materials, and reforms and secularization of church lands had to yield financial resources; a modernized infantry had to balance cavalry manned by service gentry, since only new tac­tics and European technology could assure the Muscovite armies of decisive superiority over the Tatars.[129] For this struggle Muscovy needed to utilize European experience of military organization, as well as European trade and diplomatic ties—not the war with Europe for which the tsar had thirsted, but alliance. In modern language, detente.

7. The Autocrator's Complex

The great secretary Viskovatyi, the head of the Foreign Office, was a personal enemy of Sil'vestr. He may have impressed on the tsar the enormous difficulties involved in the anti-Tatar strategy. Metropoli­tan Makarii may have supported Viskovatyi (it is hard to believe that he would have missed such an opportunity to topple his mighty en­emy from power). They may have introduced the tsar to the pam­phlets of Peresvetov, which were circulating in Moscow, arguing the fatal danger of taking political decisions under the influence of "advisors."

We shall never know what the role of this whole complex network of personal conflicts and ideological influences was in the formation of the Oprichnina alternative to the Great Reform, in the victory of terror over compromise, of the Livonian War over the anti-Tatar strategy. But we do know what Viskovatyi and the Josephite hierarchs could not know—that they themselves were to be victims of the coup d'etat to which they had egged on Ivan IV They paid for their victory with their heads. The terror which they had helped to unleash had its own logic. In telling the tsar that all of his troubles came from "ad­visors," and that in relation to the autocrator

all men were slaves, did they expect that, having rejected the advice of Sil'vestr and Adashev, he would be willing to be advised by Viskovatyi and the hierarchs? Were they not also the same kind of slaves as Kurliat'ev and Kurbskii? Why should they not also be skinned alive?

And, furthermore, in encouraging the tsar to believe that he was the only Orthodox (that is, true Christian) sovereign in the world, that he was descended in a direct line from the Roman emperor Au­gustus, and carried on the work of the Byzantine autocrators, how could they expect patience in international affairs and respect for the other European governments and monarchs from him? What diplo­matic calculations could be required from the only genuine viceroy of God on earth?

The tsar was in the eye of the Russian political storm; his character therefore acquires enormous significance. Such was the opinion of classical historiography. According to the latest historiographic fash­ion, however, it is mistaken.

The most vivid and articulate proponent of this view of the matter is perhaps Edward L. Keenan, Jr., earlier famous for asserting that the cornerstone of the Russian political literature of the sixteenth century, the Ivan the Terrible-Kurbskii correspondence, is a forgery. To judge by his short essay in the Harvard Magazine in 1978, Keenan's suspicions are increasing swiftly. Now not only the correspondence of Ivan the Terrible, but even Ivan the Terrible himself, seems to him in a certain sense a forgery: