At this point it might be appropriate to reflect on the historical significance of Ivan IV ‘the Terrible’, whose enigmatic personality and actions have often been the main concern of narratives of Russia in the sixteenth century. His importance has been exaggerated in part because the oprichnina has long been considered Muscovy’s equivalent to the great clashes of monarchy and nobility or Church and state that made sixteenth-century European politics so turbulent. In other words, Ivan was writ large for historiographical imperatives. But, as already suggested, the oprichnina had no discernible political programme and no lasting results. Ivan’s significance has also been inflated because of the writings attributed to him, primarily a series of letters addressed to the émigré boyar, Prince A. M. Kurbskii, that articulated a claim to unlimited patrimonial power. But Edward L. Keenan has raised serious questions about the authenticity of Ivan’s and Kurbskii’s letters on the basis of manuscript history, content analysis, and linguistic style. Although most scholars have not accepted Keenan’s arguments, many recognize as apocryphal some later pieces of the correspondence and some related texts; the debate and manuscript research on the question endures. Keenan’s challenge sparked a fresh round of enquiry into the political and cultural world Ivan inhabited: was he literate, classically educated, and ahead of his time in political philosophy, or was he—like grand princes, tsars, and boyars before and after him to the mid-seventeenth century—cut from the same cloth as the Muscovite warrior élite, illiterate and little educated, but fiercely loyal to the ethos of Orthodox patrimonial authority? In any case, quandaries over Ivan’s personality and motives pale in the face of Braudel’s ‘longue durée’: Ivan IV did not divert, although he did disrupt, the Daniilovich project. His government, like that of his father and grandfather, made its main task the expansion of the tsardom, the consolidation of the élite, and the integration of a large and disparate realm. Perhaps the best indicator that the Muscovite rulers had managed to increase cohesion in their realm by the end of the sixteenth century was the fact that disparate forces—service tenure landholders from the centre, Cossacks of the steppe frontier, communes of the north—mobilized in the Time of Troubles to rescue the state from foreign invasion. Moscow’s rulers had at least consolidated an élite sufficiently cohesive to hold the state together. This achievement, done at the high human cost of enserfment, was possible because of the skilful use of coercion and co-option, but especially because of the state’s minimalism. However autocratically they styled themselves, Moscow’s rulers could exert their authority in only very narrow arenas. Sixteenth-century Russia is customarily called an ‘autocracy’, taking up the appellation (samoderzhets) that Boris Godunov introduced into the tsar’s title. But if this was an autocracy, it was a pragmatically limited one.
3. From Muscovy towards St Petersburg 1598–1689
HANS-JOACHIM TORKE
From the time of Ivan the Terrible’s oprichnina to the ascension of the Romanovs in 1613, Muscovy experienced uninterrupted crisis—extinction of a dynasty, foreign intervention, and tumultuous social and political upheaval. The seventeenth century witnessed a restless transition, as, amidst continuing upheaval at the dawn of modernity, Muscovy embarked on state-building, Westernization, and territorial expansion.
THE seventeenth century has long been a focus of historiographic debate. Impressed by the broad-ranging reforms of Peter the Great (1689–1725), most early historians tended to emphasize the ‘break’, juxtaposing a traditional Muscovy of the seventeenth century to a Westernizing state of the eighteenth. But for over a century specialists have realized that the Petrine reforms built upon changes initiated by his predecessors in the seventeenth century. The army, finances, state administration—favourite areas of Petrine reform—were also the subject of government reforms in the seventeenth century. While many of these reforms were driven by practical need, they reflected a desire not only to import Western technology and military experts, but also to reshape foreign and domestic policy in terms of Western ideas and theories.
Crisis: The Time of Troubles (1598–1613)
The age of transformation began with acute crisis—the ‘Time of Troubles’ (smutnoe vremia). This protracted crisis inaugurated a new period in Russian history, marked by fundamental changes that would culminate in the passing of ‘Old Russia’ and the onset of new ‘troubles’ in the 1680s. Perhaps the best schema for the Time of Troubles, devised over a century ago by the historian Sergei Platonov, divides this period into successive ‘dynastic’, ‘social’, and ‘national’ phases that followed upon one another but, to a significant degree, had some overlap.
The period begins with the extinction of the Riurikid line in 1598. The general crisis also had long-term social causes—in particular, the exhaustion of the land and its resources by the Livonian War and the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible, which had devastated the boyars and triggered new restrictions on the peasants’ freedom of movement. Without the trauma of 1598, however, the ensuing disorder would probably neither have been so intense nor have persisted for the entire seventeenth century, which contemporaries aptly called a ‘rebellious age’. This first phase was portentous both because the only dynasty that had ever reigned in Russia suddenly vanished without issue, and because the ensuing events triggered the first assault on the autocracy. In the broadest sense, the old order lost a principal pillar—tradition (starina); nevertheless, there remained the spiritual support of the Orthodox Church (which held firm for several more decades) and the service nobility (which retained its resiliency until well into the eighteenth century). The year 1598 had one further consequence: a tradition-bound people could not believe that the dynasty had actually come to an end and therefore tended to support false pretenders claiming to be descendants of the Riurikids.
Muscovy responded to the extinction of its ruling dynasty by electing a new sovereign. Interestingly, no one as yet proposed to emulate other countries by electing someone from a foreign ruling house—a remarkable testament to the insularity of Muscovite society. Such a proposal, undoubtedly faced an insuperable religious obstacle—obligatory conversion to Orthodoxy. In the end the choice fell on Boris Godunov—a Russian nobleman, though not from an élite family (i.e. descending from another Riurikid line or the Lithuanian grand princes). Nonetheless, Boris had single-mindedly prepared his advancement under Tsars Ivan the Terrible (1533–84) and Fedor Ivanovich (1584–98): he himself married the daughter of a favourite in Ivan’s court; his sister Irina married Ivan’s successor, Fedor. Because the latter was personally incapable of exercising power, Godunov became regent and excluded all other competitors. After Fedor’s death, on 17 February 1598 Boris was formally ‘elected’ as Tsar Boris by a council (sobor) of approximately 600 deputies drawn from the upper clergy, the boyar duma, and representatives of the service nobility who had gathered in Moscow. Although transparently stage-managed by Boris, the council seemed to confirm that the realm had ‘found’ the candidate chosen by God Himself.