background of its victims ranged from members of the royal family and prominent courtiers, including some leaders of the Oprichnina court, to rank-and-file servitors, townsmen, and clergy. Indictments and repressions, however, were often followed by amnesties. The mass exile of around 180 princes and cavalrymen to Kazan and the confiscation of their lands (1565) were counterbalanced when they were pardoned and their
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property partially restored. As a gesture of spiritual reconciliation with the executed, the tsar ordered memorial services in monasteries for more than three thousand victims. The Oprichnina involved the ritualization of executions and peculiar symbolism that alluded to the tsar and his oprich-niki as punitive instruments of divine wrath. The oprichniki dressed in black, acted like a pseudo-monastic order, and carried dog’s heads and brooms to show they were the “dogs” of the tsar who would sweep treason from the land.
The tsar abolished the Oprichnina in 1572 after its troops proved ineffective during a raid of Tatars on Moscow. Together with the Livonian War, famines, and epidemics, the Oprichnina led to the country’s economic decline. During the Oprich-nina, Ivan IV thought to strengthen his personal security by taking to extremes such Muscovite political traditions as disgraces, persecution of suspects, and forced resettlements. The Oprichnina revealed the vulnerability of the social and legal mechanisms for personal protection when confronted by authorities exceeding the political system’s normal level of violence. Transgressions and sudden changes in policy contributed to the image of the tsar as an autocratic ruler accountable only to God. The court system, however, survived the turmoil of the Oprichnina. Despite the division of the realm and purges, members of established clans maintained their positions in the court hierarchy and participated in running the polity throughout the period of the Oprichnina.
Some historians believe that the main force behind the Oprichnina was Ivan IV’s personality, including a possible mental disorder. Such interpretations prevailed in the Romantic historical writings of Nikolai Karamzin (early nineteenth century) and in the works of Vasily Klyuchevsky, foremost Russian historian of the early twentieth century. The American historians Richard Hellie and Robert Crummey offered psychoanalytical explanations for the Oprichnina, surmising that Ivan IV suffered from paranoia. Priscilla Hunt and Andrei Yurganov saw the Oprichnina as an actualization of the cultural myth of the divine nature of the tsar’s power and eschatological expectations in Muscovy. According to other historians, the Oprichnina was a conscious struggle among certain social groups. In his classic nineteenth-century Hegelian history of Russia, Sergei Solovyov interpreted the Oprichnina as a political conflict between the tsar acting in the name of the state and the bo-yars, who guarded their hereditary privileges. In the late nineteenth century, Sergei Platonov took those views further by arguing that the Oprich-nina promoted service people of lower origin and eliminated the hereditary landowning of the aristocracy. In the mid-twentieth century, Platonov’s conception was questioned by Stepan Veselovsky and Vladimir Kobrin, who reexamined the genealogical background of the Oprichnina court and the redistribution of land during the Oprichnina. According to Alexander Zimin, the Oprichnina was aimed at the main separatist forces in Muscovy: the church, the appanage princes, and Novgorod. Ruslan Skrynnikov accepted a modified multiphase version of Platonov’s views. See also: AUTOCRACY; IVAN IV
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hellie, Richard. (1987). “What Happened? How Did He Get Away with It? Ivan Groznyi’s Paranoia and the Problem of Institutional Restraints.” Russian History 14(1-4):199-224. Hunt, Priscilla. (1993). “Ivan IV’s Personal Mythology of Kingship.” Slavic Review 52:769-809. Platonov, Sergei 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. Skrynnikov, Ruslan G. (1981). Ivan the Terrible, ed. and tr. Hugh F. Graham. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. Zimin, A. A. (2001). Oprichnina, 2nd ed. Moscow: Ter-ritorriya.
(c. 1605-1680), military officer, governor, diplomat, boyar.
Afanasy Lavrentievich Ordin-Nashchokin was born to a gentry family near Pskov in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, probably around 1605. He received an unusually good education for a Russian of the time, learning mathematics and several languages, and entered military service at fifteen. Exposed at a young age to foreign customs, he put his insights and ideas to good use throughout his life. In 1642 he helped settle a border dispute with Sweden, honing his talents for careful
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preparation, thorough investigation, and skillful negotiation. Next he led a mission to Moldavia, gaining experience and valuable information on the Poles, Turks, Cossacks, and Crimeans who populated the tsar’s southern borders. For most of the 1650s he served as a military officer and governor of several regions in western Russia. While working to draw the local population to Moscow’s side and achieving diplomatic agreements with Cour-land and Brandenburg, he also pondered ways to improve Russia’s military, economic, and political standing. In 1658 he was able to achieve some of his greater goals in negotiating the three-year Va-liesar truce with Sweden, gaining Russia peace, free trade, Baltic access, and all the territories it had conquered in the region. For this coup Ordin- Nashchokin received the rank of dumny dvoryanin (consiliar noble).
In 1660 his son Voin, likewise educated in foreign languages and customs, fled to Western Europe. A grieving and humiliated Ordin-Nashchokin requested retirement, but the tsar was reluctant to lose his able statesman and refused to hold the father accountable for his son’s actions. Ordin-Nash-chokin continued to negotiate for peace with Poland and to govern Pskov, becoming okolnichy (a high court rank) in 1665.
The peak of his career came in 1667 when he signed the Andrusovo treaty, ending a long war with Poland and establishing guidelines for a productive peace. For this achievement he was made boyar (the highest Muscovite court rank) and head of the Department of Foreign Affairs (Posolsky Prikaz). The same year he dispatched envoys to nearly a dozen countries to announce the peace and offer diplomatic and commercial ties with Russia. He also drew up the New Commercial Statute, aimed at stimulating and centralizing trade and industry and protecting Russian merchants. Over the next four years as head of Russia’s government he enacted administrative reforms; supervised the construction of ships; established regular postal routes between Moscow, Vilna, and Riga; expanded Russia’s diplomatic representation abroad; and began the compilation of translated foreign newspapers (kuranty). The number and character of his innovations have sometimes led to his description as a precursor of Peter the Great.
By 1671, however, his day was passing. Always outspoken and demanding, he began to irritate the tsar with his contentiousness. Worse, his views of international politics-he perceived Poland as Russia’s natural ally, Sweden as its natural foe- no longer fit Moscow’s immediate interests. Arta-mon Matveyev, the more flexible new favorite, was ready to step in. In 1672 Ordin-Nashchokin retired to a monastery near Pskov to be tonsured under the name Antony. In 1679 he briefly returned to service to negotiate with Poland, but soon retreated to his monastery and died the next year. See also: ANDRUSOVO, PEACE OF; BOYAR; MATVEYEV, AR-TAMON SERGEYEVICH; OKOLNICHY; TRADE STATUTES OF 1653 AND 1667
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kliuchevsky, V. O. (1968). “A Muscovite Statesman. Or-din-Nashchokin.” In A Course in Russian History: The Seventeenth Century, tr. Natalie Duddington. Chicago: Quadrangle Books. O’Brien, C. Bickford. (1974). “Makers of Foreign Policy: Ordin-Nashchokin.” East European Quarterly 8: 155-165.
(1886-1937), leading Bolshevik who participated in bringing Ukraine and the Caucasus under Soviet rule and directed industry during the early five-year plans.
Grigory Konstantinovich (“Sergo”) Ordzhonikidze was born in Goresha, Georgia, to an impoverished gentry family. In 1903, while training as a medical assistant, he joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, and in 1906 met Josef Stalin, with whom he formed a close, lifelong association. After a time in prison and exile, Ordzhonikidze traveled to Paris where in 1911 he met Vladimir Lenin and studied in the
