During Ivan's minority the country was governed, or rather misgoverned, first by his mother, and then by rival factions
Ivan the Terrible, 1533-84.
led by great nobles such as the princes Shuiski and Bêlski. Only once during this period did the young tsar come forward and assert his authority. Having convoked his boyars he reproached them collectively with robbing the treasury and committing acts of injustice, and he caused one of them, a Prince Shuiski who happened to be in power at the moment, to be seized by his huntsmen and torn in pieces by a pack of hounds, as a warning to others. Thus apparently he asserted his authority, but in reality, being only thirteen years old, he was a mere puppet in the hands of one of the opposition factions, who wished to oust their rivals, and for the next four years the misgovernment of the nobles went on as before. It was not till he was about seventeen that he took an active part in the administration, and one of his first acts foreshadowed his future policy: he insisted on the metropolitan crowning him, not as grand-prince of Muscovy, but as tsar of all Russia (1547). From the earliest times the term tsar—a contraction of the word Caesar—had been applied to the kings in Biblical history and the Byzantine emperors, and Ivan III. had already been described in the Church service as “the ruler and autocrat of all Russia, the new Tsar Constantine in the new city of Constantine Moscow,” but on no previous occasion had a grand-prince been crowned under that title. A few months later occurred in Moscow a great fire, which destroyed nearly the whole of the city, and a serious popular tumult, in which the tsar's uncle was murdered by the populace. Ivan regarded these events as a punishment from Heaven for the neglect of his duties, and he began to attend to public affairs under the influence of an enlightened priest called Sylvester and an official of humble origin called Adashev. With the assistance of these two counsellors he held in check the lawless, turbulent nobles, and ruled justly, to the satisfaction of the people, for fourteen years. Then suddenly, for reasons which cannot easily be explained, he inaugurated a reign of terror which lasted for twenty-four years and earned for him the epithet of “the Terrible.” Though there had been no open insurrection, he caused many boyars and humbler persons to be executed, and when some of the great nobles, fearing a similar fate, fled across the frontier and tendered their allegiance to the prince of Lithuania, his suspicion and indignation increased and he determined to adopt still more drastic measures. For this purpose he organized, outside the regular administration, a large corps of civil officials and armed retainers, whose duty it was to obey him implicitly in all things; and with this force, which rose rapidly from 1000 to 6000 men, he acted like a savage invader in a conquered country. Accompanied by these so-called Oprichniki , who have been compared to the Turkish Janissaries of the worst period, he ruthlessly devastated large districts—with no other object apparently than that of terrorizing the population and rewarding his myrmidons—and during a residence of six weeks in Novgorod, lest the old turbulent spirit of the municipal republic should revive, he massacred, it is said, no less than 60,000 of the inhabitants, including many women and children. It is quite possible, as some apologists suggest, that the number of his victims may have been exaggerated, but that they are to be counted by thousands there can be no doubt. In the monastery of St Cyril has been preserved a list of those for whom he requested the prayers of the Church, the total being 3470. The only reference to Novgorod in this curious document is: “Remember, O Lord, the souls of thy Novgorodian servants to the number of 1505 persons.” According to the Novgorodian annalists as many as 1500 persons were sometimes put to death in a single day. Perhaps the discrepancy is to be explained by supposing that the pious tsar did not consider all his victims as servants of the Lord, whose souls deserved the prayers of the faithful.
While thus uniting under their vigorous autocratic rule the small rival principalities, the Moscow princes had to keep a watchful eye on their eastern neighbours. The Golden Horde, long weakened by internal dissensions, had now fallen into several khanates, the chief of which were Kazan, Astrakhan and the Crimea. As these independent Tatar states were always jealous of each other, and their jealousy often broke out in open hostility, it was easy to prevent any combined action on their part; and as in each khanate there were always several pretenders and contending factions, Muscovite diplomacy had little difficulty in weakening them individually and preparing for their annexation. In the case of Kazan and Astrakhan the annexation was effected without any great effort in 1552-54, and two years later the Bashkirs, who had likewise formed part of the great Mongol empire, consented to pay tribute. On the other hand, the khans of the Crimea were able, partly from their geographical position and partly from having placed themselves under the protection of the sultans of Turkey, to resist annexation for more than two centuries and to give the Muscovites a great deal of trouble, not only by frequent raids and occasional invasions, but also by allying themselves with the Western enemies of the tsars. As late as 1571 Moscow was pillaged by a Tatar horde; but there was no longer any question of permanent political subjection to the Asiatics, and the Russian frontier was being gradually pushed forward at the expense of the nomads of the steppe by the constant advance of the agricultural population in quest of virgin soil. These latter, like the colonists in the American Far West, had to be constantly on the alert against the attacks of their troublesome neighbours, and they accordingly organized themselves in semi-military fashion. Those of them who lived on the outskirts of the pacified territory adopted a mode of life similar to that of their hereditary opponents, and constituted a peculiar
The Cossacks.
class known as Cossacks, living more by flocks and herds and by marauding expeditions than by agriculture. In the basins of the southern rivers they formed semi-independent military communities. Those of the Volga and the Don professed allegiance to the tsar of Muscovy, whilst those of the Dnieper recognized at first as their suzerain the king of Poland. In neither case did the allegiance involve strict obedience to orders from the superior, and their loyalty was always in danger of being troubled by their love of independence and equality and their desire for loot. More than once they raided and pillaged in wholesale fashion the territory they were supposed to protect. On the whole, however, at that period as in more recent times, they contributed largely to the process of territorial expansion. (See also Poland : History .)