waged this struggle with foresight and intelligence. Platonov pointed out that the lands taken into the oprichnina, in particular in central Russia, included many estates of the descendants of former appanage princes and princelings who in their hereditary possessions had retained the prestige and largely the authority of rulers, including the rights to judge and collect taxes. Their transfer to other lands where they had no special standing or power and their replacement with reliable new men, together with the wholesale suppression of the boyar opposition, ensured the tsar's victory over the remnants of the old order.
Henceforth, the boyars were to be their monarch's obedient servants both in the duma and in their assigned military and administrative posts. In addition, the oprichnina territory contained important commercial centers and routes, notably the new trade artery from Archangel to central Russia. Platonov saw in this arrangement Ivan the Terrible's effort to satisfy the financial needs of the oprichnina; some Marxist historians have offered it as evidence of a new class alignment. Furthermore, the oprichnina gave the tsar an opportunity to bypass the mestnichestvo system and to bring to the fore servicemen from among the gentry, most of whom remained in important government work even after the country had returned to normalcy. And it provided an effective police corps to fight opposition and treason. The bitterness and the cruelty of the struggle stemmed likewise from more basic reasons than the tsar's character. In fact, in this respect too Ivan the Terrible's reign provided a close parallel to those of Louis XI in France or Henry VIII in England, who similarly suppressed their aristocracies. Platonov added that the tsar began with relatively mild measures and turned to severe punishments only after the boyar opposition continued.
Marxist historians developed an analysis of Ivan IV's reign in terms of the class struggle. Pokrovsky and others interpreted the reforms of 1564 as a shift from boyar control of the government to an alliance between the crown and the service gentry and merchants, to whom the tsar turned at the zemskii sobor of 1566 on the issue of the Livonian War and on other occasions. In fact, Ivan IV tried to establish, long before Peter the Great, an effective personal autocracy. Other Soviet scholars, especially Wipper, placed heavy emphasis on the reality of treason in the reign of Ivan the Terrible and the need to combat it. In general, Soviet historians gradually came to stress the progressive nature of Ivan IV's rule in Russia as well as the tsar's able championing of Russian national interests against foreign foes, although Makovsky did reinstate emphatically the negative view of the reign. The Soviet cinema versions of the reign of Ivan the Terrible reflect some of the major characteristics and problems of the shifting Soviet interpretations of the tsar and the period. It might be added that the Soviet evaluation of Ivan IV has, apparently, interesting points of contact with the image which the brilliant and restless tsar left with the Russian people. It seems that his popular epithet
Yet, after all the able and valuable rational explanations of Ivan the Terrible's actions in the broad setting of Russian history, grave doubts remain. Even if the boyars, or at least their upper layer, constituted an element linked to the appanage past and opposed to the Muscovite centraliza-
tion, we have very little evidence to indicate that they were organized, aggressive, or otherwise presented a serious threat to the throne. Probably, given time, their position would have declined further, eliminating any need for drastic action. The story of the oprichnina is that of civil massacre, not civil war. Also, even Platonov failed to provide objective reasons for many of Ivan IV's measures, such as his setting up Simeon as the Russian ruler to whom Ivan himself paid obeisance - although it should be added that some other historians tried to find rational explanations where Platonov admitted defeat. Most important, the pathological element in the tsar's behavior cannot be denied. People of such character have brought about many private tragedies. Ivan the Terrible, however, was not just a private person but the absolute ruler of a huge state.
The reign of Ivan IV's eldest surviving son Theodore, or Fedor, 1584-98, gave Russia a measure of peace. Physically weak and extremely limited in intelligence and ability, but well meaning as well as very religious, the new tsar relied entirely on his advisers. Fortunately, these advisers, especially Boris Godunov, performed their task fairly well.
An important and extraordinary event of the reign consisted in the establishment of a patriarchate in Russia in 1589. Largely as a result of Boris Godunov's skillful diplomacy, the Russians managed to obtain the consent of the patriarch of Constantinople, Jeremiah, to elevating the head of the Russian Church to the rank of patriarch, the highest in the Orthodox world. Later all Eastern patriarchs agreed to this step, although with some reluctance. Boris Godunov's friend, Metropolitan Job, became the first Muscovite patriarch. The new importance of the Russian Church led to an upgrading and enlargement of its hierarchy through the appointment of a number of new metropolitans, archbishops, and bishops. This strengthening of the organization of the Church proved to be significant in the Time of Troubles.
Foreign relations in the course of the reign included Theodore's unsuccessful candidacy to the Polish throne, following Stephen Bathory's death in 1586, and a successful war against Sweden, which ended in 1595 with the return to the Muscovite state of the towns and territory near the Gulf of Finland which had been ceded by the treaty of 1583. The pre-Livonian War frontier was thus re-established. In 1586 an Orthodox Georgian kingdom in Transcaucasia, beset by Moslems, begged to be accepted as a vassal of the Russian tsar. While Georgia lay too far away for more than a nominal, transitory connection to be established in the sixteenth century, the request pointed to one direction of later Russian expansion.
Theodore's reign also witnessed, in 1591, the death of Prince Dmitrii of Uglich in a setting which made it one of the most famous detective stories
of Russian history. Nine-and-a-half-year-old Dmitrii, the tsar's brother and the only other remaining male member of the ruling family, died, his throat slit, in the courtyard of his residence in Uglich. The populace rioted, accused the child's guardians of murder, and killed them. An official investigating commission, headed by Prince Basil Shuisky, declared that Dmitrii had been playing with a knife and had injured himself fatally while in an epileptic fit. Many contemporaries and later historians concluded that Dmitrii had been murdered on orders of Boris Godunov who had determined to become tsar himself. Platonov, however, argued persuasively against this view: as a son of Ivan the Terrible's seventh wife - while canonically only three were allowed - Dmitrii's rights to the throne were highly dubious; the tsar, still in his thirties, could well have a son or sons of his own; Boris Godunov would have staged the murder much more skillfully, without immediate leads to his agents and associates. More recently Vernadsky established that no first-hand evidence of an assassination exists at all, although accusations of murder arose immediately following Prince Dmitrii's apparently accidental death. But, whereas scholars may well remain satisfied with Platonov's and Vernadsky's explanation, the general public will, no doubt, prefer the older version, enshrined in Pushkin's play and Musorgsky's opera,
Even if Boris Godunov did not murder Dmitrii, he made every other effort to secure power. Coming from a Mongol gentry family which had been converted to Orthodoxy and Russified, himself virtually illiterate, Boris Godunov showed uncanny intelligence and abilities in palace intrigue, diplomacy, and statecraft. He capitalized also on his proximity to Tsar Theodore, who was married to Boris's sister, Irene. In the course of several years Boris Godunov managed to defeat his rivals at court and become the effective ruler of Russia in about 1588. In addition to power and enormous private wealth, Boris Godunov obtained exceptional outward signs of his high position: a most impressive and ever-growing official title; the formal right to conduct foreign relations on behalf of the Muscovite state; and a separate court, imitating that of the tsar, where foreign ambassadors had to present themselves after they had paid their respects to Theodore. When the tsar died in 1598, without an heir, Boris Godunov stood ready and waiting to ascend the throne. His reign, however, was to be not so much a successful consummation of his ambition as a prelude to the Time of Troubles.
XVI
