The Origins of Autocracy

After the division of the country into the Oprichnina and the Zemshchina, power in the Zemshchina fell into the hands of a stra­tum of untitled boyars which in a certain sense was sympathetic to the tsar (and sometimes helped directly in the struggle with the "right op­position" and the Government of Compromise). Whatever the atti­tude of these people to the formerly sovereign princes and to the methods used by the tsar may have been, however, now, when they were actually at the wheel, they must have thought: this is enough! They had already made their revolution. The continuation of the ter­ror became not only meaningless, but also dangerous for them. It must be supposed that it was not without their influence that the seven­teenth congress of the party was held in the spring of 1566—the "con­gress of the victors" (I mean, of course, the Assembly of the Land, which, incidentally, was the most representative in the history of Rus­sia). The delegates to the congress tactfully indicated to the tsar that it was now time to put an end to the Oprichnina. Others, more realis­tic, conceived a plan for putting up a Kirov (in the shape of Prince Vladimir Staritskii, the tsar's cousin) against Ivan the Terrible. The matter never came to a conspiracy, but conversations were enough for the tsar. The following blow was against this group. "When this stra­tum became involved in the conflict," Skrynnikov notes, "the transition from limited repressions to mass terror became inevitable."[234]

Terror has its own logic. One after another, the leaders of the Duma of the Zemshchina, the last leaders of boyardom, perished. Next came the turn of the higher bureaucracy. One of the most influ­ential opponents of the Government of Compromise, the Muscovite minister of foreign affairs, the great secretary Viskovatyi, who had undoubtedly lent a hand in the fall of Sil'vestr, was first crucified and then chopped into pieces. The state treasurer Funikov was boiled alive in a kettle. Next came the leaders of the Orthodox hierarchy, then Prince Staritskii himself. And each of these drew after them into the maelstrom of terror wider and wider circles of relatives, sympa­thizers, acquaintances, and even strangers, with whom the Oprich­nina settled accounts. When the senior boyar of the Duma of the Zemshchina, Cheliadnin-Fedorov, laid his head on the block, his ser­vants were hacked to bits with sabers, and all his household members were herded into a barn and blown up. (The Sinodnik

carries the no­tation: "In Upper Bezhitsk, sixty-five people were done away with . . . and twelve people were beheaded with swords.")[235]

I will spare the reader and myself any more, for I am not writing a martyrology of the Oprichnina. Suffice it to note that, just as in the 1930s, the leaders of the Oprichnina apparently did not notice that the circles of terror were coming ever closer to them. Aleksei Basma- nov, that medieval Yezhov, already seemed a dangerous liberal to the favorite of Stalin and Ivan the Terrible, Maliuta Skuratov, who per­sonally strangled Metropolitan Filipp. Prince Afanasii Viazemskii, who had organized the reprisals against Gorbatyi and Obolenskii, was himself already under suspicion when his appointee, Archbishop Pimen, a rabid supporter of the Oprichnina, perished during the sack of Novgorod. "Under conditions of mass terror, universal fear, and denunciations, the apparatus of violence created in the Oprich­nina acquired an entirely overwhelming influence on the political structure of the leadership," Skrynnikov relates with horror. "In the final analysis, the infernal machine of terror escaped from the control of its creators. The final victims of the Oprichnina proved to be all of those who had stood at its cradle."[236]

As we see, Skrynnikov knows perfectly well what was happening in Russia during the 1560s. He does not show the slightest desire to jus­tify this horrible rehearsal for Stalin's purges as the "struggle against treason," as Vipper and Polosin had done twenty years before him. And although he notes that in pre-Oprichnina Muscovy, "the mon­archy had become the prisoner of the aristocracy,"^6i> he does not seem inclined to justify the terror as the "objective inevitability of the physi­cal extermination of the princely and boyar families," as his teacher Smirnov had done. More than this, he does not hide from himself (or from the reader) that, in the first place, "the period of the Oprichnina is marked by a sharp intensification of feudal exploitation," which preconditioned "the final triumph of serfdom." In the second place, he notes, "the pogroms of the Oprichnina, and the indiscriminate bloody terror, brought deep demoralization to the life of the coun­try."[237] And then what?