The Origins of Autocracy

Karamzin goes even further, equating the reign of Ivan the Terri­ble with the Tatar yoke.[153] And still—despite all the sincerity of his moral indignation—something holds him back from unconditional condemnation of Ivan as a statesman. "But let us give even the tyrant his due," he suddenly declares, right after the comparison of the Oprichnina with the "yoke of Batu Khan."

Ivan, in the very extremes of evil, is, as it were, the ghost of a great monarch, zealous, tireless, frequently penetrating in his political ac­tivity; although ... he did not have even a shadow of courage in his soul, he remained a conqueror, and in foreign policy followed unde- viatingly the great intentions of his grandfather; he loved justice in the court . . . and is famous in history as a lawgiver and a shaper of the state.[154]

This unexpectedly conciliatory rider, after all Karamzin's curses, has usually been overlooked by later historians, who have chiefly quoted the famous phrase "a riddle to the mind." But in it there is already contained, as in a seed, all the later drama of the Ivaniana.

6. Pogodin's Conjecture

Karamzin's craftiness did not escape his contemporaries. "In his his­tory, refinement and simplicity show us, with no partiality at all, the necessity of autocracy and the beauties of the knout," wrote Push­kin.⁵³

Nevertheless, after Karamzin, the mysterious duality in the character of the tsar became one of the favorite topics of Russian lit­erature. "Whereas historians like Kostomarov transform themselves for the sake of [Ivan] the Terrible into men of letters, poets like Maikov transform themselves for his sake into historians," Mikhailov- skii observed.⁵⁴

Vissarion Belinskii asserted that Ivan was "a fallen angel, who even after his fall revealed at times both the strength of an iron character and the strength of an exalted mind."⁵⁵ The Decembrist Ryleev, on the other hand, naturally brandished thunder and lightning against "the tyrant of our precious fatherland."⁵⁶ Another brilliant Decem­brist, Mikhail Lunin, also unambiguously condemned tyrannical au­tocracy because "in its original form, it brought the Russians the mad tsar, who for twenty-four years bathed in the blood of his subjects."⁵⁷ In a great multitude of novels, plays, narrative poems, odes, and por­traits, there appeared, in place of the real tsar,

now a fallen angel, now merely a villain, now an exalted and penetrat­ing mind, now a pedestrian person, now an independent figure con­sciously and systematically following great aims, and now some kind of rotten boat without a tiller or sails; now a person standing unattainably high over Rus', and now a base nature, alien to the best strivings of his time.⁵⁸

The first voice to call a halt belonged to the well-known Russian historian Mikhail Pogodin. Pogodin was a rock-ribbed reactionary, even more convinced than Karamzin of the beneficial nature of the autocracy, but when it came to Ivaniana he was no less an iconoclast than Keenan is. Though even Kurbskii "praises Ivan for the middle years of his rule,"⁵⁹ Pogodin asserts that, "Ivan from 1547 onward be­came a completely passive figure and did not take any part in admin­istration whatever."⁶⁰ The "blue period" of the reign simply did not belong to Tsar Ivan. "Obviously these were actions by the new party at court, unlike all the preceding ones, and the credit for them be­longs to it, and to Sil'vestr, the founder and leader of it, and not to Ivan." Furthermore, Pogodin discovered an astonishing coincidence in the correspondence of the mortal enemies: Kurbskii attributed all of the "holy acts" of this period to the Chosen Rada (praising them, of course), and the tsar did the same (cursing them, of course). Ivan

N. K. Mikhailovskii, p. 130.

V G. Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, p. 135.

K. F. Ryleev,

Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, p. 155.

M. S. Lunin, Dekabrist Lunin, sochineniia i pis'ma, p. 80.

Mikhailovskii, p. 131.

M. P. Pogodin, Istoriko-kriticheskie otryvki, p. 251.

Ibid., p. 246.