The Origins of Autocracy

A consideration of Ivan's medical record raises the question of whether he could even have been a functioning czar, let alone the volcanically energetic and Machiavellian prince of historical literature. ... In my opinion, for most of his life he was not. ... It seems impossible that he had any large role in the important events of his reign. ... A tradi­tional political system ruled by an oligarchy of royal in-laws and an ad­ministration run by professional bureaucrats required little interven­tion by the czar. . . . Nevertheless, the boyars and the bureaucrats did

require that the czar be dynastically legitimate, capable of performing certain ceremonial functions and serviceable as the symbol and source of their own unquestioned power. Ivan—caring little for the hard work of politics and administration . . . —was for the most part quite suita­ble for his officials' purposes. Possibly they spread stories of his "ter- ribleness" abroad to increase their own clout."

Thus Keenan cuts the Gordian knot over which chroniclers and historians, dissertation writers and poets, have despaired for cen­turies. True, his account contradicts the testimony of numerous eye­witnesses—but this may also turn out to be forged, and the subject of a subsequent expose. Unfortunately, however, it is not readily under­standable why the all-powerful (according to Keenan) oligarchy of royal relatives and professional bureaucrats needed to unleash the train of events which resulted in their own ruin. Nor is it clear why the reign of this unfortunate invalid, who served only as a screen for the oligarchy, differs so strikingly from the epoch of "boyar rule" (during which the oligarchy was indeed powerful, and the child- sovereign was by definition a screen), which did not bring in its train either great reforms or revolution, and which was in general one of the most barren in Russian history. In fact, Keenan's thesis looks rather like a paraphrase of that submitted fifteen years previously by one of the most honest and bold (but, alas, not one of the most pro­found) of Soviet historians, D. R Makovskii:

It is not necessary to seek in the actions of Ivan IV any particular logic or consistency. Ivan IV—a mentally ill person—was always under the influence or suggestion of someone. The savage reprisals during the time of the Oprichnina were called forth, as contemporary sources note, by various adventurers (Basmanov, the Griaznyes, Skuratov, etc.) stimulating an unhealthy imagination and sadistic inclinations in Ivan, who did this in order to steal more goods and to enrich themselves.[130]

Keenan and Makovskii fail to notice the revolutionary

character of the Oprichnina, which was not an extension of the previous structure of power, but its complete reversal. Or, rather, it was a triumph of the autocratic political tradition and at the same time a complete debacle for the absolutist tradition—a debacle which decisively changed the historical course of the nation.

Ivan the Terrible was unarguably mentally unbalanced, and the longer he lived, the more severe his illness became. But there was also something discernibly political to this illness which Keenan ignores. Just as in the case of Paul, Peter, or Stalin (who were no less indisput­ably ill), madness not only did not hinder the tsar from having his own personal political goals, but actually helped him to subordinate the strategy of the state to them.