would-be tsar Boris Godunov. The established princely Shuysky and Mstislavsky clans and the Zakharin-Yurev bo-yar family retained their high positions at court throughout Ivan’s reign.
Ivan’s court also included Tatar servitors, including prominent members of the Chingissid dynasty, who received the title of tsar. Ivan granted the last survivor of those Tatar tsars, Simeon Bek-bulatovich (Sain-Bulat), the title of grand prince of Moscow and official jurisdiction over a considerable part of the realm. Historians usually interpret the reign of Simeon (1575-1576) as a parody of the Muscovite political system. It may be that Ivan, in granting Simeon the new title, sought to deprive Simeon of the title of tsar and thereby eliminate a possible Chingissid succession to the throne.
IVAN IV AND HIS REALM
In the 1550s, Ivan IV and his advisors attempted to standardize judicial and administrative practices across the country by introducing a new law code (1550) and delegating routine administrative and financial tasks to the increasingly structured chancelleries. The keeping of law and order and control of the local population’s mobility became the tasks of locally elected officials, in turn accountable to the central chancelleries. The remote northern territories enjoyed a greater autonomy in local affairs than the central parts of the country.
Albeit limited and inconsistent, these reforms allowed Ivan to maintain an approximately 70,000-man army and to pursue an aggressive foreign policy. With the capture of the Tatar states of Kazan (1552) and Astrakhan (1556), Ivan acquired vast territories populated with a multiethnic, predominantly Muslim population with distinctive cultural and economic traditions. The conquest of those lands, whose peoples remained rebellious throughout Ivan’s reign, contributed to the tension between Muscovy and the powerful Muslim states of Crimea and Turkey, which jointly attacked Astrakhan in 1569. The Crimean khan devastated Moscow in 1571, but Ivan’s commanders inflicted a defeat on him in 1572. Ivan failed to avoid simultaneous involvement in military conflicts on several fronts. Without settling the conflict in the south, he launched a war against his western neighbor, Livonia, in 1558. Historians traditionally interpret the Livonian War (1558-1583) in geopolitical terms, asserting that Ivan was looking for passage to the Baltic Sea to expand overseas trade. Revisionists explain the war’s origins in terms of Ivan’s short-range interest in getting tribute. The Livonian war only resulted in human and material losses for Muscovy. Ivan supported commercial relations between Muscovy and England, but attempts to conclude a political union with the queen of England were in vain. The war, famines, epidemics, and the Oprichnina caused a profound economic crisis in Muscovy, especially in the Novgorod region. By the end of Ivan’s reign, peasants abandoned 70 to 98 percent of arable land throughout the country. Many of them fled to the periphery of the realm, including Siberia, whose colonization intensified in the early 1580s.
IVAN IV AND THE ORTHODOX CHURCH
Ivan IV cultivated a close relationship with the Orthodox Church through regular pilgrimages and generous donations to monasteries. The symbolism of court religious rituals, in which the tsar participated with the metropolitan, and the semiotics of Ivan’s residence in the Kremlin stressed the divine character of the tsar’s power and the prevailing harmony between the tsar and the church. In 1551, Ivan participated in a church council that attempted to systematize religious practices and the jurisdiction of church courts. Metropolitan Macarius, head of the church and a close advisor to the tsar, sponsored an ideology of militant Orthodoxy that presented the tsar as champion and protector of the true faith. Macarius also played a part in conducting domestic and foreign policy. Contrary to traditional views, the court priest Silvester apparently did not exert political influence on the tsar. Ivan demonstrated a flexible attitude toward the landownership of the church and its tax privileges.
IVAN IV
Ivan often played ecclesiastical leaders off each other and even deposed disloyal hierarchs.
Ivan is credited with writing diplomatic letters to European monarchs, epistles to elite servitors and clerics, and a reply to a Protestant pastor. Dmitry Likhachev, J. L. I. Fennell, and other specialists describe Ivan as an erudite writer who developed a peculiar literary style through the use of different genres, specific syntax, irony, parody, and mockery of opponents. According to his writings, Ivan, traumatized by childhood memories of boyar arbitrariness, sought through terror to justify his autocratic rule and to prevent the boyars from regaining power. Edward Keenan argues that Ivan was illiterate, never wrote the works attributed to him, and was a puppet in the hands of influential boyar clans. The majority of experts do not share Keenan’s view. All information on the influence of particular individuals and clans on Ivan comes from biased sources and should be treated with caution.
Nikolay Karamzin created an influential romantic image of an Ivan who first favored pious counselors but later became a tyrant. Many historians have explained Ivan’s erratic policy in psychological terms (Nikolay Kostomarov, Vasily Klyuchevsky); some have assumed a mental disorder (Pavel Kovalevsky, D. M. Glagolev, Richard Hellie, Robert Crummey). The autopsy performed on Ivan’s remains in 1963 suggests that Ivan might have suffered from a spinal disease, but it is unclear how the illness affected his behavior. The probability that Ivan was poisoned should be minimized. Other historians sought to rationalize Ivan’s behavior, presuming that he acted as a protector of state interests in a struggle with bo-yar hereditary privileges (Sergei Solovyov, Sergei Platonov). According to Platonov, Ivan was a national democratic leader whose policy relied on the nonaristocratic gentry. This concept was revived in Stalinist historiography, which implicitly paralleled Ivan and Stalin by praising the tsar for strengthening the centralized Russian state through harsh measures (Robert Vipper, Sergei Bakhrushin, Ivan Smirnov). Stepan Veselovsky and Vladimir Kobrin subjected Platonov’s concept to devastating criticism. Beginning in the 1960s, Soviet historians saw Ivan’s policy as a struggle against various elements of feudal fragmentation (Alexander Zimin, Kobrin, Ruslan Skrynnikov). The political liberalization of the late 1980s evoked totalitarian interpretations of Ivan’s rule (the later works of Kobrin and Skrynnikov). Boris Uspen-sky, Priscilla Hunt, and Andrei Yurganov explain Ivan’s behavior in terms of the cultural myths of the tsar’s power. See also: AUTOCRACY; BASIL III; GLINSKAYA, ELENA VASILYEVNA; KIEVAN RUS; KURBSKY, ANDREI MIKHAILOVICH; MAKARY, METROPOLITAN; MUSCOVY; OPRICHNINA; OTHRODOXY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bogatyrev, Sergei. (1995). “Grozny tsar ili groznoe vre-mya? Psikhologichesky obraz Ivana Groznogo v is- toriografii.” Russian History 22:285-308. Fennell. J.L.I. ed., tr. (1955). The Correspondence between Prince Kurbsky and Tsar Ivan IV of Russia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Fennell, John. (1987). “Ivan IV As a Writer.” Russian History 14:145-154. Kalugin, V.V. (1998). Andrey Kurbsky i Ivan Grozny. Teoreticheskie vzglyady i literaturnaya tekhnika drevnerusskogo pisatelya. Moscow: Yazyki russkoy kultury. Keenan, Edward L. (1971). The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha: The Seventeenth-Century Genesis of the “Correspondence” Attributed to Prince A. M. Kurbskii and Tsar Ivan IV, with an appendix by Daniel C. Waugh. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kliuchevsky, V.O. (1912). A History of Russia, tr. C. J. Hogarth, vol. 2. London: J. M. Dent and Sons. Hunt, Priscilla. (1993). “Ivan IV’s Personal Mythology of Kingship.” Slavic Review 52:769-809. Perrie, Maureen. (2001). The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia. Basingstoke, NY: Palgrave. Platonov, S.F. (1986). Ivan the Terrible, ed. and tr. Joseph L. Wieczynski, with “In Search of Ivan the Terrible” by Richard Hellie. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. Rowland, Daniel. (1995). “Ivan the Terrible As a Car-olingian Renaissance Prince.” In Kamen Kraeugln, Rhetoric of the Medieval Slavic World: Essays Presented to Edward Keenan on His Sixtieth Birthday by His Colleagues and Students. Harvard Ukrainian Studies, vol. 19, ed. Nancy Shields Kollmann; Donald Ostrowski; Andrei Pliguzov; and Daniel Rowland. Cambridge, MA: The Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University. Skrynnikov, Ruslan G. (1981). Ivan the Terrible, ed. and tr. Hugh F. Graham. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.
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