The Origins of Autocracy

Temkin was drowned. Ivan Zobatyi was killed. Petr [Shcheniat'ev?] was hanged on his own gates in front of his bedroom. Prince Andrei Ovtsyn was hanged at Oprichnina headquarters in Arbatskii street; a live sheep [Ovtsyn's name recalls the Russian word for sheep (ovtsa)] was hanged together with him. The marshal Bulat wished to make a match between his sister and [the tsar] and was killed, and the sister was raped by 500

strel'tsy. Kuraka Unkovskii, head man of the strel'tsy,

was killed and pushed under the ice.[227]

What are we to conclude from this "defense testimony"? Were the Oprichniki actually the most honorable of men, as Kostylev suggests to the mass reader in a large edition of books, with Druzhinin's bless­ing? What are we, then, to say of the tsar who hanged them upon the gates of their own houses, as he did "enemies of the people"? What are we to say of the tsar who after 1572 forbade the very use of the term "Oprichnina," threatening its users with the severest penalties? And if the Oprichniki really did deserve such punishment, who was right—the "oppositionist circles" or the respected scholars?

Let us assume that the writer Kostylev was deceived by his capri­cious muse. But it was harder to fool experts who had read the pri­mary sources. Bakhrushin, one of the major Russian historians of the twentieth century, knows quite well what went on in the Oprichnina. He knows, for example, that "the service landholders were interested in having on the throne a strong tsar, capable of satisfying the need of the service class for land and serf labor," while "on the other hand, the boyars were interested in protecting their lives and property from the arbitrary behavior of the tsar."[228]

What, one wonders, is so bad about defending one's life and prop­erty from the arbitrary behavior of the tsar? Why did such a natural human desire make the boyars "enemies of the people"? And why were the service landholders, who needed the serf labor of the peo­ple, their friends? Why does the author take this need of theirs so much to heart? Why is the "arbitrary behavior of the tsar" so dear to him that he is prepared to justify it by declaring the terror "inevita­ble under the given historical conditions"? Here is the concluding characterization of the tsar given by Bakhrushin in his book Ivan the Terrible:

There is no need for us to idealize Ivan the Terrible. . . . His deeds speak for themselves. He created a mighty feudal state. His reforms, which assured order within the country and its defense from external en­emies, met with warm support from the Russian people. . . . Thus, in the person of [Ivan] the Terrible we have not an "angel of virtue" and not the mysterious villain of melodramas, but a major statesman of his period, who correctly understood the interests and needs of his people, and struggled to see them satisfied.⁵³