A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

3 The Emergence of Russia

At the end of the fifteenth century, Russia came into being as a state – no longer just a group of related principalities. Precisely at this time in written usage the modern term Rossia (a literary expression borrowed from Greek) began to edge out the traditional and vernacular Rus. If we must choose a moment for the birth of Russia out of the Moscow principality, it is the final annexation of Novgorod by Grand Prince Ivan III (1462–1505) of Moscow in 1478. By this act, Ivan united the two principal political and ecclesiastical centers of medieval Russia under one ruler, and in the next generation he and his son Vasilii III (1505–1533) added the remaining territories. In the west and north, the boundaries they established are roughly those of Russia today, while in the south and east the frontier for most of its length remained the ecological boundary between forest and steppe. In spite of later expansion, this territory formed the core of Russia until the middle of the eighteenth century, and it contained most of the population and the centers of state and church. The Russians were still a people scattered along the rivers between great forests.

In the south and east, mostly beyond the forests and out in the steppe, Russia’s neighbors remained the Tatar khanates that emerged in the 1430s from the breakup of the Golden Horde: Kazan, Crimea in the Crimean peninsula, and the Great Horde ruling the steppe. The Great Horde in turn broke up around 1500 to form the khanate of Astrakhan on the lower Volga and farther east the Nogai Horde. Farther east the khanate of Siberia held sway over the tiny population of the vast plain of the Ob’ and Irtysh rivers. These states were complex social organisms. Kazan’ was the only one to occupy part of the forest zone, and its people settled along the rivers and farmed the land like the Russians but with a nomadic appendage where the steppe began to the southeast. The Nogais were pure nomads. Crimea and Astrakhan’ were somewhere in between, their population made up of mostly steppe dwellers, but Astrakhan’ was a town and Crimea had towns and garden agriculture. Its location meant that it had a lively trade and close political ties with its great neighbor to the south, the Ottoman Empire.

At this moment the Ottomans were at the peak of their power, for in 1453 Mehmed the Conqueror, already master of most of Anatolia and the Balkans, took Constantinople, the ancient capital of Byzantium. In 1516 the Turks moved south, quickly capturing the Levant and Egypt, north Africa and Mesopotamia. Thus the last great empire of western Eurasia was born, and it soon turned its attention to central Europe. In 1524 the defeat of Hungary at the battle of Mohacs laid open the road into Germany and in 1529 the Ottomans laid siege to Vienna itself. For the moment, the Ottoman Turks paid little attention to Russia. Their great opponents were Iran and the Holy Roman Empire, and in any case the Crimeans, from 1475 Ottoman vassals, stood between Russia and the Turks. The Sultans in Istanbul wanted the Crimean cavalry for the Turkish wars in Hungary and Iran and did not want to waste them in raids against a minor state far in the north. At the same time the Sultans gave their Crimean vassals considerable freedom of action, and Ivan III was able to establish an understanding with the Crimeans that lasted into the sixteenth century. Russia continued to play a major role in the politics of the steppe, sending and receiving envoys back and involving itself in the endless feuds and rivalries among the ruling dynasties and clans.

To the west Russia had only one major rival, Lithuania, now united with Poland. The resultant Polish-Lithuanian state was the hegemonic power of Eastern Europe, more populous than Russia and more powerful than any of its neighbors. Poland, having vanquished the Teutonic Knights and fended off the Tatars and Turks to the south, had only Russia as a rival left. Poland’s power came not only from the weakness of most neighbors, but also from its political structure, for the growing role of the diet provided a major role for the magnates and nobility. The diet gave its elites an important stake in the prosperity of the state but a strong king still guaranteed basic order and direction. That constitution would lead to ruin later, but in 1500 it was more durable than that of its neighbors’, and Poland’s armies could dominate the field against most enemies.

Russia’s other neighbors to the west were of little account. The Livonian Order was too small and too decentralized to matter much in political affairs, and Sweden (including Finland) was part of the united kingdom of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden until 1520. The center of gravity of the three kingdoms was in Denmark, which was too far to the west to pay much attention to the remote border of Finland and Russia. Trade continued through both Livonia and Finland, and even increased in importance, but with little overall political effect.

The situation of its neighbors allowed Russia to emerge onto the stage of European politics at an exceptionally favorable moment. The Tatar khanates were preoccupied with one another and the Ottomans, while Livonia and Sweden for very different reasons scarcely impinged on Russia’s consciousness. Russia had only one important rival, Poland-Lithuania, the primary focus of its foreign policy. That rival was powerful enough to provide a challenge to the new state of Ivan III, a challenge which he handled with great skill.

The new Russian state that emerged at the end of the fifteenth century was much larger and more complex than the medieval Moscow principality even in its later phases. A new state required new institutions and terminology. The Grand Prince began to style himself “Sovereign of All Rus” or even “autocrat,” the latter to signify his new independence from the Horde and any other claimants. Ivan III did not rule alone, any more than did his predecessors. Russia’s ruling elite now included princelings and boyars from the newly acquired territories, Iaroslavl’ and Rostov princes, and Lithuanian Gediminovichi – all of whom formed an expanded ruling elite around the prince of Moscow. This new elite was small for the time being, for in Ivan III’s time it comprised only eighteen or so families, growing to about forty-five by 1550. Most of the senior men from these clans made up the duma, or council of the Grand Prince, and held the rank of boyar, or that of a sort of junior boyar with the untranslatable title “okol’nichii.”¹ Just barely a formal institution, the duma met with the prince in the palace and discussed the major issues of law and administration, war and peace. The men of these ruling clans attained the rank of boyar and other ranks and offices by tradition and a complex system of precedence (Russian “mestnichestvo”) that regulated their place in the court, military, and government hierarchy. The precedence system mandated that no man should serve the prince at a lesser rank and office than had his ancestors.

The Grand Prince had some leeway with the precedence system, for it did not dictate exactly who in each clan should receive what rank. The system required only that some of the men from each of the great families should receive certain ranks, and that the greatest should sit in the duma and receive the rank of boyar. In theory the princes could appoint anyone to the duma, but in practice they chose members of the same families year after year, adding new ones only occasionally. These men were not just servants of the prince, but also immensely wealthy aristocrats with great landholdings – the pinnacle of a much larger landholding class. The Russian nobleman’s primary duty was service in the army, mainly on the frontier, for the administration of the state was in the hand of a tiny group of officials and princely servants.

Some of these officials were great boyars, like the treasurers, usually chosen from the Greek Khovrin clan, or the major domo and the equerry, who managed the Kremlin palace and the prince’s household. To assist these aristocrats there were also secretaries, men of lesser status from the prince’s household who were sometimes of Tatar origin. Most of them served in the Treasury, where a dozen or so clerks and copyists kept the records of foreign policy and the charters and testaments of the princes, carefully preserved with the furs, jewels, tax receipts in silver, and other treasures in the basement under the palace church of the Kremlin, the Cathedral of the Annunciation. In the time of Ivan III there were only a few dozen such secretaries, and the state was still essentially the prince’s household, its offices being rooms in his palace.

For all their dominant role in Russian politics, the Kremlin and its elite were not the whole of Russia. Several million of peasants, almost all of them still free and most of them tenants only of the crown, made up the great mass of its population. They grew the food, raised cows and chickens, and supplemented their meager fare from the berries, mushrooms, and wild game of the great forests. Their status as tenants of the crown, however, was rapidly coming to an end as the great monasteries and the boyars encroached on their lands. The Grand Princes needed to reward loyal supporters, especially in newly annexed territories, and to maintain a cavalry army as well. The army had to live off its own, from the private lands of the cavalrymen. The princes so far lacked cash to pay them, and thus it was not merely to curry favor that the princes granted lands. The only restriction that they could put on such grants was to give them with the proviso that the estate could not be sold or willed without the knowledge of the prince. This type of grant was called pomest’e, and great boyars as well as humble provincials received such lands. The landholding class of cavalrymen fell into two broad groups: the “Sovereign’s court” who served in Moscow (at least in theory) immediately below the boyars, and the “town gentry” of the provinces. The “town gentry” normally held their lands mainly in one local area and served together in the cavalry. The elite of the army was the Sovereign’s court. The growth of the state and its army meant constant tinkering with the organization of the landholding gentry, but the basic outlines that began to form late in the fifteenth century remained until the end of the sixteenth. Then the pomest’e system spread to the southern borders, considerably enlarging the landholding class at the expense of the peasant freeholders. This new situation contributed greatly to the upheavals of the ensuing decades.

The gentry resided mainly in the towns, most of which were small, and the boyars lived in Moscow. A few centers, Moscow, Novgorod, and Pskov were real cities that supported merchants who traded with Western Europe or the Near East. Though a largely agrarian economy, Russia was not bereft of crafts or commerce, nor was it a land of subsistence peasants cut off from any markets. The sheer size of the country and the sparse population dictated exchange among regions: almost all salt, for example, came from saline springs in the northern taiga belt until late in the seventeenth century. The men who boiled down the water to make salt and ship it south made great fortunes. Most notable were the Stroganovs, who amassed a fortune large enough to finance the first steps in the conquest of Siberia. Novgorod and its neighbor Pskov remained important centers of trade with northern Europe through the Baltic Sea, but their capacity was limited by the small rivers and absence of large harbors at the east end of the Gulf of Finland. Then in 1553 the English sea captain and explorer Richard Chancellor made his way around Norway into the White Sea, landing at the mouth of the Northern Dvina River. With this voyage a direct path for large ships opened to Western Europe, and Tsar Ivan the Terrible encouraged the English Muscovy Company to bring their ships every summer to the northern port. The Dvina and other rivers made possible the long journey from Moscow to the new port of Archangel, and the English were soon joined by the even more enterprising Dutch. Moscow itself was the hub of all Russian trade, and the city grew rapidly throughout the 1500s. Commerce with Russia was not minor for the Dutch and English, for by 1600 the Dutchmen engaged in the Archangel trade had made so much money that they could form a new company, the Dutch East India Company, which then set out to conquer what is today Indonesia. The Russian trade partly financed Holland’s greatest commercial adventure.

Against this background of social change and economic evolution the rulers of Russia and their court did not remain idle. For the whole of his life Ivan III conducted a relentless struggle to expand the power and territory of the grand princes of Moscow. The annexation of Novgorod was his greatest victory, but not the only one. He exploited the dissatisfaction of the regional princelings of Lithuania along his western border so as to encourage several of them to accept his sovereignty, and he rounded out and confirmed these acquisitions by war. He absorbed Moscow’s ancient rival Tver’ in 1485 and established his influence over the last two independent territories of Riazan’ and Pskov so that his son could later annex them without effort. Equally important, he put an end to the two and a half centuries of Russian dependency on the Tatar Hordes. In 1480 the Khan of the Great Horde sent its army north toward Moscow. Ivan and many of his boyars hesitated, unsure whether they should meet the Tatars or just flee north. With some encouragement from the church, he went out to meet them at the Ugra river, a small tributary of the upper Don. After a few days of watching one another, the two armies departed for home. This event, the “standing on the Ugra,” was ever after seen in Russia as the end of Tatar overlordship. Ivan moved aggressively into the space left by the fragmentation of the Horde, involving himself in Kazan’s dynastic politics. With time, Ivan’s intrigues with the Tatars would have great consequences.

Ivan III of Moscow began to call himself the ruler of “All Rus,” but his new larger state demanded a better defended and more adequate capital. For this Ivan turned to Italy, the center of European architecture as well as engineering and fortification. He had already been in contact with Italy from the time of his marriage in 1473 to Zoe Paleologue, the daughter of the last Byzantine ruler of the Peloponnesus, for Zoe had taken refuge from the Turks at the papal court. There were other Greeks in Moscow as well, who had extensive contacts with their compatriots and relatives in Italy, and through them Ivan sent for architects and engineers to rebuild the Moscow Kremlin and its churches. The result was that the Kremlin, the quintessentially Russian place to the modern eye, with its ancient churches and pointed towers in dark red brick, was not the work of Russians at all, but with few exceptions the product of Italian masters.

Figure 4. The Moscow Kremlin in a Seventeenth Century Atlas. The drawing shows the towers with low roofs after the example of the Sforza Castle. The high-pointed roofs on the towers that are so familiar today were added in the 1670s.

The earlier Kremlin of the fourteenth century had had white stone walls in the usual native style of Russian fortresses, and within the walls were wooden dwellings for princes and boyars as well as stone churches. Ivan did not want to modify the basic form of the churches. That form had a spiritual meaning that a Western plan could not have. Aristotele Fioravanti of Bologna solved the problem by building a new and larger Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin with Italian technique but Russian form. Then he and others, Marco Ruffo and Pietro Antonio Solari from Milan, Aloisio da Caresano, and others went to work on the walls. One of the builders wrote back to a brother in Milan that the prince of Moscow wanted a castle “like that of Milan” (referring to the Sforza castle), and that is more or less what the prince got. They also began a new palace in the north Italian style, parts of which still survive. Only the churches were built in the traditional Russian style, albeit by Italian builders, with the sole exception of the Annunciation Cathedral, the palace chapel. Today the Italian work is visible only in the walls and the “House of Facets,” one of the main audience chambers. The other fragments of the old palace and the Renaissance elements in the churches were heavily “russified” by later repairs. The seventeenth-century addition of pointed roofs to the towers along the wall effectively concealed the Milanese model, but in 1520 the palace and the walls must have looked very Italian indeed.

The new Russia with its Italianate Kremlin may have taken its architecture, if only for a generation, from Italy, but it remained Orthodox in religion and its culture remained firmly religious. The context of Orthodoxy, however, had altered, for the emergence of the new state had come rapidly on the heels of a major change in the status of the Orthodox church, the establishment of autocephaly in 1448. The new situation of the church and of Russia required a new conception of Russia’s place in the divine plan of salvation, and as early as Ivan III’s “standing on the Ugra” of 1480 the church found the answer. Russia was to be understood as a “new Israel,” and the Russians were a new chosen people with their capital in Moscow, the new Jerusalem. Like the ancient Israelites, the Russians were the one people on earth chosen by God to receive the correct faith. Like ancient Israel, Russia was beset on all sides by unbelieving enemies, the Catholic Swedes and Poles to the west and the Muslim Tatars to the south and east. Critical to their survival, as for ancient Israel, were firm adherence to the correct faith in God and punctilious obedience to God’s commandments. Such faith and behavior would guarantee survival, for God would deliver their enemies into their hand, as he had done for King David. If they could remain faithful, they would avoid the fate of ancient Israel until Christ came again to earth.

Holding to the correct faith in last years of the reign of Ivan III had become, however, a serious problem. For the first time since the conversion of Saint Vladimir in 988, the Russian church found itself confronting opponents from within and was beset by internal disputes over the system of belief. In Novgorod a small group of clergy began to question the Orthodox formulation of the notion of the divinity of Christ, the common forms of devotion involving icons, and monasticism as well. As they seem to have questioned the Christian notions of the Trinity, their opponents, mainly Saint Joseph of Volokolamsk, labeled them Judaizers, exaggerating their dissent and slandering them as enemies of Christianity. The group acquired some followers in Moscow, even among the officials of the Kremlin offices, before it was suppressed in 1503, and the leaders were burnt as heretics. These were the first such executions for heresy in Russian history. The church could find no defense of such actions in its traditions, and had to turn to the West, to a description of the Spanish inquisition taken from the words of the Imperial ambassador, to justify the executions.

More widespread was the controversy over monastic life that arose at the same time and lasted for a generation. This dispute was far from an arcane debate among monks, for monasticism was still central to Orthodoxy as it emerged from the medieval period. The Kremlin itself included the monastery of the Miracle of Saint Michael the Archangel and the Convent of the Ascension, the activities of both of which formed integral parts of the life of the court. The city of Moscow had dozens of small monasteries within its walls, and several great ones just beyond them. Only a day’s journey north, Saint Sergii’s Trinity Monastery was the annual site of the pilgrimage of the whole court for the saint’s festival in September. Every Russian town of any consequence boasted one or two monasteries in or around it. For much of the first half of the sixteenth century Russian monks discussed the proper type of monastic life, some stressing individual asceticism and common life. Both styles were part of Orthodox tradition, exemplified in the work and teaching of Saint Joseph of Volokolamsk and Nil Sorskii. Eventually some of Nil’s posthumous followers came to question the very idea of monastic landholding as an obstacle to a holy life.

This controversy was purely Russian, but the church was not entirely isolated from the world. Orthodox brethren still made up most of the population of the Balkans under Turkish rule, and the great monasteries on Mount Athos provided spiritual leadership. The most prolific writer on religious topics in early sixteenth-century Russia was actually a Greek named Michael Trivolis (1470–1556), in monastic life he took the name Maximos. Maksim the Greek, as he was known in Russia, had spent his youth in Venice and Florence, but ultimately came to reject the Renaissance secular culture for Orthodox monasticism. In this decision he imitated Savonarola, with whose teaching he was acquainted. In Russia he provided an encyclopedic collection of tracts and essays on topics from the errors of Islam to the correct stance on monastic landholding. His mild critique of that practice and other deviations from the then dominant notions among the higher clergy led to his condemnation and exile in the 1530s, but even in exile he remained a major figure in the church and ultimately the young Ivan IV ordered him released. His writings were widely copied and remained authoritative on many subjects for the ensuing century.

Ivan III’s successor, Vasilii III (1505–1533), came to the throne not as the eldest son but as the result of Ivan’s decision to give it to him. He was the son of Ivan’s second wife, the Greek Sophia Paleologue, and Ivan chose him, after some hesitation, over his grandson by his first wife (his son by the first wife had died). Much of Vasilii’s effort was to go to maintaining and expanding Russia’s position in the world. The territorial rivalry with Poland-Lithuania ended in a war that was successful for Russia with the capture of Smolensk in 1514. Smolensk was the last ethnographically Russian land outside the rule of Moscow, and in addition its conquest provided the state with a major fortress far to the west of Moscow. Though the war ended only in a truce, it fixed the Russo-Polish boundary for a century. Relations with the Tatar khanates, in contrast, involved a bewildering chain of intrigue and counter-intrigue as well as endless Tatar raids for slaves and booty on the southern frontier. About this time Vasilii adopted the practice of mobilizing the army on that southern frontier every summer, whether a formal state of war existed or not, for there was no other way to prevent the annual raids that formed an important part of the nomadic economy.

Vasilii’s greatest challenge, however, came not from the Tatars or Poland but from his own dynastic problems. For his first wife he had taken Solomoniia Saburova, not a foreign princess like his mother but the daughter of a prominent boyar. The marriage was successful in all but one crucial respect: no children were born. After much controversy and consultation with the church, he pressured Solomoniia into entering a convent and finally dissolved the marriage in 1525. Vasilii then married princess Elena Glinskaia, the daughter of a Lithuanian prince whose clan had taken refuge in Moscow after it had failed to successfully challenge its own soverereign. The Glinskiis had remained a powerful family in Russian exile, and claimed descent from the Tatar emir Yedigei, a great warrior who had fought Tamerlane himself in the early fifteenth century. In 1530 Elena gave birth to a son Ivan, who would be known to history as Ivan the Terrible.

IVAN THE TERRIBLE

Like so many such epithets “Terrible (grozny)” was a product of later romanticism, not of the sixteenth century. Even Ivan’s most determined Russian opponents never used it, and indeed in the language of the time the Russian word grozny would have meant “awe-inspiring” (the English is a traditional mistranslation) and so it had mildly positive connotations. Be that as it may, Vasilii’s untimely death in 1533 put the child Ivan on the throne of the Grand Prince of Moscow and all Rus, a situation that required a regency consisting of his mother and several prominent boyars to run the country. The great boyar clans, the Glinskiis and Shuiskiis, Bel’skiis and Obolenskiis, competed for power at the court and did not hesitate to exile and execute the losers. The death of Ivan’s mother in 1538 spurred on the intrigues, and only the marriage and majority of the young prince imposed a certain calm on the political waters.

Shortly after his marriage to Anastasiia, the daughter of the boyar Iurii Romanov-Koshkin, Ivan was crowned by Makarii, the head of the church as Metropolitan of Moscow, in 1547 in the Kremlin’s Dormition cathedral. Makarii crowned him not just Grand Prince, like his father, but also Tsar, a title derived ultimately from the name of Caesar. Tsar was the popular name among the Slavs for the Roman and Byzantine emperors, and thus conveyed a proclamation of equality in rank with those rulers as well as the Holy Roman Emperor in the West. Tsar was also the Russian word for title of the Khan of the Golden Horde and his successors in Kazan’ and Crimea as well as of the Ottoman Sultan. Most important, it was the title of David and Solomon in the Slavic Old Testament. In case anyone missed the point, Ivan had the walls of the audience chambers of the Kremlin palace decorated with Old Testament scenes. There the Old Testament kings (“tsars” to the Russians) surrounded Joshua’s conquest of the land of Canaan. Henceforth Russia’s rulers were tsars, the equals of the Western Emperor, the Sultan, and the Old Testament kings.

Thus began a reign of unprecedented activity that lasted thirty-five years, full of drama and victory, bloodshed, and defeat. Untiring in pursuit of his goals, Ivan left his mark on generations to come. Within a short time of his coronation, he set out on the first of his great enterprises. In the years of the regency, Moscow’s influence in Kazan’ had slipped, permitting Kazan’ once again to fall to hostile khans. Ivan set off to end the threat by installing a pro-Moscow khan, but after repeated failures to take the city, he simply annexed it when it fell to the Russian army in 1552. Ivan was only twenty-two years old, and he did not stop there. His armies went on down the Volga to Astrakhan’ and seized it and its territory as well. These conquests presented the Russians with a new situation, for never before had any substantial non-Christian population existed within their borders. On the capture of Kazan, Ivan ordered the Tatars remaining in the city to move out beyond the fortress walls, subsequently building a cathedral and settling Russians in their place in the city. Some of the Tatar elite entered Russian service, most of whom eventually converted to Orthodoxy, but many more fled to Crimea. The tsar enrolled thousands of Tatars in his army with the status of military servants. Other lesser landholders, townspeople, and peasants as well as the other nationalities of the khanate, the Chuvash, Mari, and Udmurt peasants, now acquired a special status. In place of the usual Russian taxes they paid yasak, a sort of tribute, to the tsar. Beyond these measures, the Russians did nothing to further subjugate the Tatars and other Volga peoples. There was no attempt at mass conversion. Virtually all Tatars and Bashkirs remained Muslims, visiting their mosques for Friday prayers, sending young men to Samarkand and other Central Asian towns to acquire the knowledge to become imams, and reading the Koran and other religious literature as before. There was no equivalent to the expulsion of the Moors from Spain after the end of the Reconquista.

With Astrakhan’ came control of the whole of the Volga basin and surrounding lands. By the 1560s the Russians had a fort on the Terek river at the foot of the Caucasus, looking up at the high mountains. Ivan established relations with the Circassian mountaineers of the Caucasus and the Circassians’ lesser dependents, the Chechens and other peoples. The conquest of the Volga, a response primarily to the local situation on the border with Kazan’, put Russia into a new geopolitical situation. Its control of the Volga for the first time in history cut off the western part of the Eurasian steppe from the main body to the east. Nomadic peoples continued to cross the Volga back and forth until the eighteenth century, but now they crossed under Russian control.

In the course of the 1550s Ivan acquired experience and maturity. In 1553, to be sure, he suffered a grave illness and some of the boyars were unwilling to accept his son as the rightful heir. This crisis, however, passed and peace returned to the court. Ivan governed with the boyars and apparently under the influence of his spiritual father Silvestr, the priest of the palace church, the Annunciation Cathedral, and his favorite Aleksei Adashev, a man of low rank in the landholding class but capable and able to work with the great boyar clans. The tsar and his government seem to have worked together fairly harmoniously. Together they expanded the state apparatus in Moscow and the provinces and reorganized the army. Peace did not last long: in 1558 tsar Ivan began a war with the aim of the annexation of Livonia, a war that would continue after his death and have profound effects on Russia. Livonia in 1558 was a country in crisis, which was brought on by the Reformation and the end of the Livonian Order that had ruled since the thirteenth century. As the state dissolved, various groups of knights began to turn to neighboring powers for support: the first group turned to Poland. Ivan had long advanced claims to the area based on spurious dynastic arguments, and indeed he claimed Livonia as the territory of his ancestors, which it had never been. In the winter of 1558, he decided on a preemptive strike to counter possible Polish involvement. The Russian army moved into Livonia and quickly captured Dorpat (Tartu) and the important port of Narva just across the Russian border. These two towns, and particularly Narva, seem to have been Ivan’s primary goals. At the lowest ebb of his military fortunes in coming years, he offered to give up everything else if he could keep Narva.

In the beginning, fortune favored the Russian armies, but their very success inevitably aroused the opposition of Poland-Lithuania. While the Russians were successful and English merchant ships began to come to Narva, Ivan cultivated the friendship of Queen Elizabeth of England, even proposing various marriage schemes. As the years wore on, however, Russia proved unable to sustain the necessary military effort. The Polish army defeated the Russians at several important battles, and to complicate matters, the nobles of northern Estonia turned to Sweden for help. The Swedish forces landed in Reval in 1561, turning the war into a three-way contest.

In this situation the political harmony at the Russian court began to evaporate. It seems that Adashev and Silvestr had always harbored doubts about the Livonian enterprise, and with Russian defeats some of the boyars, the most important being Prince Andrei Kurbskii, went over to Poland. Ivan’s wife, Anastasiia, died in 1560, and Ivan chose for his second wife the daughter of the Circassian prince Temriuk, the new tsaritsa taking the name Maria in baptism. Metropolitan Makarii’s death in 1563 removed the last restraining influence over the tsar. Ivan grew suspicious of many of the great boyars, whom he suspected of disloyalty to his policies and perhaps even his person. He had several of them executed or exiled. Many of them, he would claim, had been reluctant to support his young son as heir to the throne during his illness in 1553. In December 1564, Ivan suddenly left the Kremlin, taking with him only his family, his immediate and trusted servants, and the treasury. First he went south to one of the small suburban palaces and then turned northeast, circling around the city and coming to stay at Aleksandrovo, a small town some hundred miles to the northeast of Moscow. There he stayed several weeks, remaining out of all communication with the capital. He then sent a messenger to Moscow with an announcement that must have come to the population like a thunderbolt. The Tsar of all Russia announced that he was angry at the treason and misdeeds of the boyars and he abdicated the throne. Only the populace of Moscow was exempted from his suspicions: toward them he had no anger. After a few days, the people and the boyars, led by the church, sent a delegation out to Aleksandrovo, begging him to change his mind. Ivan consented and returned to Moscow.

The winter journey to Aleksandrovo and back was the beginning of five years of bloodshed and upheaval, the period that marked Ivan for later generations as “the Terrible.” Sergei Eisenstein’s famous film of of 1944 about Ivan ended its first part precisely at this moment, the petition of the people at Alexandrovo. Eisenstein’s portrait was notably ambiguous and historians have never ceased to debate Ivan’s policies and personality. Some have even argued that he was paranoid, but there is too little evidence to analyze his personality. We know only what he did, not his inner thoughts and feelings.

On his return from Alexandrovo, Ivan divided the country and the state into two parts, reserving the income and administration of the north, Novgorod, and much of central Russia to himself, as the “Oprichnina.”² The Oprichnina was a separate realm within the state, with a separate boyar duma and Oprichnina army. The remainder of the country he left to the boyars and the old boyar duma. Partly a military measure, the Oprichnina served Ivan as a political base from which to strike at the boyars whom he considered unreliable. Executions followed gruesome torture, and whole communities, like the landholders of the Novgorod area, were sent into exile on the Volga frontier. Protestations from the church were to no avail, and in 1568 Ivan had Metropolitan Filipp deposed and soon afterwards killed. Compliant churchmen were appointed in his place and the places of his supporters. Eventually some of the leaders of the Oprichnina were themselves killed, and finally in 1570 Ivan executed nearly two thousand people in Novgorod, including nobles and townspeople. Then, as suddenly as he had begun, he terminated the whole policy in 1572, prohibiting even the use of the name Oprichnina.

After the end of the Oprichnina, Russia’s internal politics were relatively quiet, broken only by bizarre episodes like Ivan’s temporary abdication in 1575 in favor of Semen Bekbulatovich, a scion of the Astrakhan’ khans who had converted to Orthodoxy, or the death of Ivan’s heir, Ivan Ivanovich, in 1581. The story, perhaps true, was that Tsar Ivan struck his son in a rage and the heir died on the spot. Toward the end of his life Ivan compiled long lists of his victims and sent large gifts to the great monasteries with orders to pray for the souls of those who had perished at his orders. The war in Livonia stagnated, but by 1580, Stefan Bathory, the newly elected king of Poland managed to expel the Russians and divide Livonia with Sweden. The only success for Ivan was Bathory’s subsequent failure to take Pskov after a long siege.

In 1584 Ivan died while playing chess in the Kremlin palace. He had nothing to show for the Livonian war but a country ruined by overtaxation to support a failed war. His earlier successes were overshadowed by the disorder and bloodshed of the Oprichnina years, though his conquests on the Volga remained as a permanent and crucial acquisition. In the very last years of Ivan’s life another rather different expedition enlarged Russia even further. In 1582–1583 the Cossack Yermak, perhaps sponsored by the Stroganovs rather than Ivan himself, crossed the Urals into western Siberia, following the rivers to the capital of the Tatar khanate of Siberia. There a few thousand Tatars ruled other native peoples of the Urals and subarctic regions. Yermak took the city, established a Russian fort nearby to be called Tobol’sk, and proclaimed Russian rule in the name of the tsar. Ivan and his successors quickly moved to send a small garrison and a governor, and the western third of Siberia was theirs. Russia now extended east to the longitude of modern Karachi, and by the 1640s further exploration and conquest brought Russia to the Pacific Ocean. The true importance of all this was far in the future, but for the time it meant a seemingly inexhaustible supply of sable and other furs to sell to the Dutch and English – all to the great profit of the northern Russian merchants and the tsar’s treasury.

THE TIME OF TROUBLES

On Ivan’s death the country was slowly recovering from the disasters of the last twenty-five years of his reign. He had two surviving sons, the eldest Fyodor from Anastasiia and Dmitrii (born 1582) from his fourth wife, Mariia Nagaia. Fyodor, who appears to have been limited in both abilities and health, was married to Irina Godunov, the sister of Boris Godunov, a boyar who had risen from modest origins in the landholding class through the Oprichnina. With the accession of his brother-in-law to the throne, Boris was now in a position to become the dominant personality around the tsar. First, however, he had to get rid of powerful boyar rivals who saw their chance to restore their power at the court. Indeed at the beginning of Fyodor’s reign virtually every boyar clan that had suffered under Ivan returned to the duma if they had not already done so. Boris lost no time in marginalizing them one by one and forcing some into exile. His second problem was the presence of the tsarevich Dmitrii, for Fyodor and Irina had only a daughter who died in infancy. Boris imported doctors from the Netherlands to examine Irina, but to no avail. Thus after Fyodor’s death the throne would presumably pass to Dmitrii, but in 1591 he perished, supposedly because he accidentally stabbed himself with a toy sword while playing. This was the conclusion of the official investigation. Naturally the rumor persisted that Boris had secretly ordered him killed, and the mystery has remained unsolved to the present. Certainly Dmitrii’s death made possible all that came later.

In 1598 Tsar Fyodor died. His reign had been one of modest success under the guidance of Godunov. A short war with Sweden recovered the originally Russian territory on the Gulf of Finland lost in the Livonian war. This outcome produced no gains in Livonia itself, but at least Russia was back to the pre-1558 status quo. Godunov’s government also reinforced the standing of the church by convincing the Greek Orthodox patriarchs not only to recognize the autocephaly of the Russian church but also to give the Metropolitan of Moscow the title of Patriarch in 1588–9. In the long run, far more important, and indeed fateful, were the changes in Russian rural society. In spite of the opening of new lands in the south and a booming trade, Russia acquired a new and ominous institution, the serfdom of the peasantry. Virtually all peasants in central and northwestern Russia lost their personal freedom at the end of the sixteenth century and became the bondsmen of the landholding class, boyars and lesser gentry, as well as of the church. The details of the serf’s status were never defined in Russian law, other than by the provision that their owners might recover them if they fled. At first this right of the owner could be exercised only for a few years, but from 1649 it became perpetual. Other relations between master and serf were in the realm of custom. Peasants paid rent as they had before, in kind or in cash, but labor services also became for a time nearly universal. Fortunately for the peasants most landlords were far away, in the towns or even in Moscow itself, and only the great boyars could afford numerous stewards of their estates. The absence of resident masters left the village community to manage payments and services itself, as well as most other affairs. Nevertheless the serfs came under the thumb of the landlord whenever he chose to exercise his power. In the north and on the eastern and southern borders where there were few or no landholders, the peasants – some twenty-five percent of the Russian peasantry – remained free, but even there they were fearful of the future.

With Fyodor dead Boris was determined to take full power. The death of all the heirs of Ivan had extinguished the dynasty that had ruled since the time of Prince Vladimir of Kiev. There were other princes of the line of Rurik, but rather than work out the genealogy and find an heir, the Russian elite chose to elect a new tsar. The Patriarch called an Assembly of the Land that included the boyars, the senior clergy, and representatives from the provincial gentry, and the Moscow merchants. There were several possible candidates among the boyars, including the Romanov clan, prominent boyars for two centuries and the relatives of Ivan the Terrible’s first wife Anastasiia and Tsar Fyodor. Instead, Boris managed to garner enough support in the duma, the church, and other circles to support his own candidacy, and soon the Assembly of the Land proclaimed Boris Godunov the tsar of all Russia.

This was to prove a hollow victory. Among the first acts of Tsar Boris was to exile the Romanovs and their allies. He ordred Fyodor Nikitich, the senior Romanov, to take monastic vows, removing him from politics, and he also forced Fyodor’s wife to enter a convent. The duma soon consisted only of Boris’s relatives and clients and a few others too timid or cowed to resist. Perhaps Boris could have waited out the palace intrigues and eventually restored a more harmonious court, but he did not have the chance. In the early 1600s famine struck the land, which created hardship and unrest, and the free peasants and Cossacks of the southern border began to grow restive. Then a new element arrived with the person of Grishka Otrep’ev, a defrocked monk from a minor landholding family who claimed that he was the tsarevich Dmitrii miraculously preserved from death and had hidden since 1591. Otrep’ev had gone to Poland some years before and told his story there, convincing the powerful magnate Jerzy Mniszech of his prospects and receiving Mniszech’s daughter Marina in marriage. Otrep’ev collected an army of Polish nobles discontented with their own king and ready for adventure as they crossed into Russia at the end of 1604. At first he made little progress, other than inspiring some of the local peasantry and Cossacks to join him. Boris sent out an army to capture the pretender, but early in 1605 the commanders of the army went over to the False Dmitrii, as he was known thereafter. Boris still had plenty of resources on which to draw, but his sudden death changed everything. The way to Moscow was open, and Grishka Otrep’ev entered the Kremlin in June 1605, as Tsar Dmitrii with an entourage of Poles and the support of many of the Russian boyars as well as the Cossacks. The story of Boris would later inspire Pushkin and Mussorgsky to great artistic heights, but for contemporaries his reign inaugurated a decade and a half of upheaval and war – the Time of Troubles.

The Time of Troubles (smuta, or “confusion” in Russian) was the result of the acceleration and unusual violence of the factional battles at the tsar’s court after Ivan IV’s death combined with the rebellions of the Cossacks and peasants. These agrarian revolts centered along the southern border since the new settlers came primarily from villages in the interior where the peasantry had recently been enserfed. In the south the peasantry and Cossacks were still free but had reason to fear that serfdom would soon catch up with them. To make matters worse, many of the new gentry landholders in the south, settled there to provide cavalry on the border, were equally discontented, fearful of falling into the peasantry and convinced that state policy favored the boyars over them. These two conflicts at the top and bottom of Russian society were not the whole story of the Troubles, for the result of the initial events was a general collapse of order in Russian society. The central government lost control of the situation, and the provinces were left to themselves, some choosing to obey the governors sent from Moscow, some not. The governors soon found that even with some local support they were on their own, improvising matters as best they could. Large numbers of armed bands began to roam the country, including some Poles and Ukrainians who had come to Russia with Dmitrii and some Russian Cossacks, many of them just local bandits. The various short-lived governments in Moscow tried to put together a viable army to control the situation, but to no avail.

The reign of “Tsar Dmitrii” was short. Within a year the populace of Moscow rebelled and stormed the Kremlin, tearing the pretender to pieces and killing many of his followers. They burned his body and shot the remains out of a cannon pointed at Poland. Marina saved her life by hiding under the skirts of one of her ladies in waiting, but she was soon captured. Prince Vasilii Shuiskii and other boyars were behind the riot, and Vasilii himself ascended the throne in May 1606. Vasilii Shuiskii’s seizure of the crown with the support of only a small group of boyars only worsened the chaos, for in opposition a vast peasant rebellion enveloped the south of the country and new pretenders arose. After Vasilii managed to defeat the peasants the next year, the “thief of Tushino,” another pretender, took up residence in the village of that name west of Moscow and besieged the capital. Marina Mniszech and her father turned up in the Tushino camp and pretended to recognize him as the true Tsar Dmitrii once again having been miraculously saved from death. The thief of Tushino was no longer just a peasant rebel, for he had the support of several Polish regiments and had attracted a number of Russian boyars to his camp. The elite had split once again, and to make matters worse King Sigismund of Poland appeared before Smolensk with a great army. In desperation Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii turned to Sweden, making a treaty in 1609 that gave him the mercenary army he wanted although under Swedish command, but ceded the Russian territory on the Gulf of Finland to his new ally. The Poles defeated the Russians and the Swedish mercenary army, which then went over to Sigismund. Shuiskii’s regime collapsed in 1610 and seven of the boyars formed an interim government in Moscow. At this point many of the boyars and the gentry, realizing Poland’s strength, decided to support the candidacy of Sigismund’s son Wladyslaw for the Russian throne. Negotiations with the King of Poland grew increasingly difficult for the Russian boyars and some began to resist his conditions. Sigismund responded by throwing them in prison. The Polish army occupied Moscow, while the surrounding anarchy reached its nadir. The King’s army only added its forces to the already numerous Polish bands of soldiers who roamed the countryside, competing for booty with ever more Russian Cossacks, peasant rebels, and simple bandits. For the population it was difficult to tell these bands apart, as their aims and methods were essentially the same. In many areas the inhabitants fled to the forests or farther away looking for safety.

Some areas of the country resisted the Polish-sponsored regime. The Trinity Monastery endured months of siege rather than recognize the new order in Moscow. The Volga and the North began to rally with the encouragement of the church. In Nizhnii Novgorod and elsewhere the merchant Kuzma Minin and the local gentry formed a volunteer army and provisional government. By the summer of 1612 the army, under the command of Prince Dmitrii Pozharskii, was strong enough to move toward Moscow and in October they defeated the Poles before the city wall. Soon they were able to enter the Kremlin, and while war and anarchy still raged, the leaders of the army, the remaining boyars and higher clergy called an Assembly of the Land to choose a new tsar. Once again they rejected the dynastic principle in favor of the consensus of the elite and the population as a whole. The Cossacks were particularly vocal, and the choice fell on the sixteen-year-old Michael Romanov, the son of Boris Godunov’s erstwhile enemy Fyodor Romanov, who had become the monk Filaret. Tsar Michael was crowned in July of 1613. As his father Filaret was in prison in Poland, the leadership of the new government fell to Michael’s mother, the nun Marfa, and her relatives, favorites, and the boyars who had finally come to support Minin and Pozharskii. Five more years were necessary to defeat the Poles and expel the Swedes from Novgorod and the northwest. In the south rebellion only slowly receded. The first false Dmitrii’s wife, Marina, took up with the Cossack chieftain Ivan Zarutskii and the two terrorized the lower Volga region for years until the new tsar’s army finally defeated them and executed Zarutskii. Marina soon died in prison. Russian society had been smashed, Smolensk lost to Poland, and the Russian coast of the Gulf of Finland ceded to Sweden at Stolbovo in 1617. Huge areas were devastated and depopulated. The Troubles, however, were over, and a new era began.

¹ From okolo (around, about); that is, someone “around” the person of the prince.

² From old Russian oprich’, meaning “separate” or “apart from.”