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.