When the new tsar, Vasilii Shuiskii, ascended the Russian throne on May 19, 1605, the first thing he did was to make a public declaration in the cathedral Church of the Holy Virgin: "I kiss the cross before the whole world that I will take no action against anyone without the approval of the assembly; and that if the father is guilty, I will take no action against the son; and if the son is guilty, no action against the father." One need only remember the Sinodik of Tsar Ivan, with its requests to remember the soul of so-and-so, killed "along with his mother, and his wife, and his sons, and his daughters," for it to become entirely clear what the new tsar is promising the people. He
6. Pokrovskii, vol. 1, p. 313.
12. Platonov, Ocherki . . . , p. 157. Emphasis added.
13. Platonov, Ivan Groznyi, p. 122. Emphasis added.
14. Platonov, Ocherki . . . , p. 157. Emphasis added.
17. Pokrovskii, vol. 1, pp. 271-73.
18. Ibid., p. 313. 19. Ibid., p. 307.
20. Ibid., pp. 317-18. Emphasis added.
21. Ibid., p. 319.
25. R. Iu. Vipper, p. 3. On the importance of the legitimizing function of historical studies in the Soviet context, Nancy Whittier Heer notes correctly: "Historical writings in the Soviet Union have come to perform vital sociopolitical functions of a degree and scope perhaps unique and certainly beyond those found under other political systems" ("Political Leadership in Soviet Historiography," p. 12).
26. Fedor Raskol'nikov, one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Party, was Soviet ambassador to Bulgaria during the 1930s. In 1937, he, like the then Soviet ambassador to Greece, A. Barmin, refused to return to Moscow to certain death, and instead wrote Stalin a sharply denunciatory letter from abroad. An analogous letter, incidentally, was written two days before his arrest by Nikolai Bukharin, who, unlike Kurbskii and Raskol'nikov, returned from abroad in 1936, to receive a martyr's crown from the hands of tyrant, as Ivan the Terrible had presaged.
30. Vipper, pp. 113-14.
33. Cited in Vipper, p. 123. Emphasis added.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., p. 75. Emphasis added.
40. Polosin, p. 137.
45. Polosin, p. 182.
46. S. V. Bakhrushin, Ivan Groznyi, p. 5.
49. Vipper, p. 174.
50. Ibid., p. 105.
69. Skrynnikov, Ivan Groznyi, p. 114.
74. Ibid., pp. 144-45. Emphasis added.
[1] Ibid., pp. 206-7.
[2] Ibid., vol. 5, p. 340.
[3] S. M. Solov'ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, Bk. 5, p. 560.
[4] M. S. Anderson, "English Views of Russia in the Age of Peter the Great."
[5] Angliishie puteshestvenniki v Moskovskom gosudarstve v XVI vehe, p. 55.
[6] Ibid., p. 78.
[7] Cited in R. Iu. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi, p. 83.
[8] Biblioteka inostrannykh pisatelei о Rossii XV—XVI vekov, vol. 1, pp. 111-12. Emphasis added.
[9] Here is a clear example of the dynamics of this abandonment of the land: in the region of Bezhetsk, in Novgorod Province, in 1551, only 6.4 percent of the land was abandoned (grown up to woods); in 1564 this figure was 20.5 percent, and in 1584,95.3 percent (S. G. Strumilin, "O vnutrennem rynke Rossii XVI-XVIII vekov"). As a whole in Novgorod province at the beginning of the sixteenth century, living plowland made up 92 percent of the whole, and, in the 1580s, not more than 10 percent (Makovskii, Razvitie . . .). So much for agriculture. In industry and trade, the differentiation of entrepreneurs and merchants into the "best" (that is, largest-scale), the "middle," and the "younger" had already gone quite far at the beginning of the sixteenth century. According to the data of the Soviet historian E. I. Zaozerskaiia, who studied the posad of Ustiuzhnia Zhelezopol'skaia and the population employed there in metal-working and in the trade in metal articles in 1567, 40 shops there belonged to the "best," 40 to the "middle," and 44 to the "younger" people. "After the passage of 30 years," the author writes, "which were no less difficult for Ustiuzhnia than for the rest of the Russian state, in the census of 1597 in Ustiuzhnia there were no 'best' households, the 'middle' ones did not number more than a dozen, and in addition the census-takers registered 17 empty farmsteads and 286 vacant lots. The posad had become deserted" (E. I. Zaozerskaiia, U istokov krupnogo proizvodstva v russhoi promyshlennosti XVI—XVII vekov, p. 220).
[10] D. Egorov, "Ideia turetskoi reformats» v XVI veke," p. 7.
[11] No one any longer considered him great or mighty. On the contrary, he was laughed at—both in Asia and in Europe. The khan of the Crimea wrote him when leaving burning Moscow: "And you did not come out and did not stand against us and still boast that, forsooth 'I am the sovereign of Muscovy.' Had there been shame or dignity in you, you would have come out and stood against us." And the Polish King Stefan Batory echoed him: "Why did you not come to us with your troops, and defend your subjects? A poor chicken will cover her chicks with her wings against a hawk or an eagle, but you the two-headed eagle (for such is your crest) hide yourself" (Vipper, p. 161).
[12] Ibid., p. 175.
[13] A. A. Zimin, Oprichnina Ivana Groznogo, p. 55.
[14] Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, pp. Ill, 110.
[15] Robert Crummey, "The Seventeenth-Century Moscow Service Elite in Comparative Perspective," p. 1.
[16] Aristotle, Politika, p. 136; quoted from the Russian edition.
[17] Cited in Donald W. Treadgold, ed., The Develoment of the USSR, p. 202.
[18] Aristotle, p. 112.
[19] C. de Montesquieu, О duhhe zakonov, p. 27; quoted from the Russian edition.
[20] Cf. Wittfogeclass="underline" "The men of the apparatus state are a ruling class in the most unequivocal sense of the term; and the rest of the population constitutes the second major class, the ruled" (p. 303).
[21] Cf. Hegeclass="underline" "In China we have the realm of absolute equality, and all the differences that exist are possible only in connection with the administration, and by virtue of the worth which a person may acquire, enabling him to fill a high post in the government. Since equality prevails in China, but without any freedom, despotism is necessarily the mode of government. . . . The emperor is the center, around which everything turns; consequently, the well-being of the country and people depends on him. . . . There is no other legal power or institution extant, but the superintendance and oversight of the emperor. ... In China the distinction between slavery and freedom is necessarily not great, since all are equal before the emperor—that is, all alike degraded. . . . And though there is no distinction conferred by birth, and everyone can attain the highest dignity, this very equality testifies to no triumphant assertion of the worth of the inner man, but a servile consciousness" (Lectures on the Philosophy of History, pp. 130, 133-4, 137, 145).