The Tatars constructed their own strategies along similar lines. As early as 1520, the khan of the Crimea had called Kazan' "our yurt," which in Tatar meant what "otchina" meant for Ivan III, that is, fatherland. From here it was only a step to the sultan himself declaring Kazan' his yurt, and claiming a legitimate right to seek the dismemberment of Muscovy. Unless Tatar claims were disposed of once and for all, the Damoclean sword of a new attack would hang over Muscovy for decades, and perhaps centuries. The Ugra, it suddenly turned out, had been merely a symbolic liberation from Tatar rule, complete liquidation of which was a historical prerequisite of the Reconquista. The very status of Muscovy as a great power now depended on this. How could Russia enter the European family of nations as a full member if the shadow of Tatar domination still hung over it?
But, besides all these abstract considerations, the Crimea not only kept under its control extremely rich sections of the Russian land, it constantly threatened to destabilize economic life within Muscovy. Even if it could not conquer the country, it was capable of provoking a national crisis at any time. Thus historians have, for example, attributed the economic catastrophe which shook Muscovy in the 1570s to the attack by Devlet Girei in 1571. To cite M. N. Pokrovskii:
The Tatars burned the entire posad of Moscow to the ground, and . . . seventeen years later it had not yet been entirely rebuilt. A whole series of cities suffered the same fate. According to the stories told at the time, as many as 800,000 persons perished in Moscow and its environs alone, and another 150,000 were taken away as captives. The total loss of population must have exceeded one million, and the kingdom of Ivan Vasil'evich hardly contained more than ten million inhabitants. In addition, it was the long established and most cultured regions which were laid waste: it was not accident that the people in Moscow for a long period reckoned time from the ruination by the Tatars, just as in the nineteenth century they for a long time reckoned from the year 1812 [that is, Napoleon's invasion]. A good part of the almost instantaneous desolation which scholars note in the central uezdy, beginning precisely in the 1570s, must be laid at the door of the Tatar ruination. [This] is the chronological point of departure for the desolation of most of the uezdy of the central region of Muscovy. . . . The faint beginnings of a population exodus which were observed in the 1550s and 1560s were now transformed into an intensive and extremely pronounced flight of peasants from the central regions.[119]
If we remember that Soviet historians usually use this "instantaneous desolation of the center of Muscovy" to explain the beginning of the enserfment of the peasantry (although without mentioning the abandonment of the anti-Tatar strategy as a cause of this phenomenon),[120] the consequences of the Tatar attack of 1571 for the whole course of Russian history begin to look truly sinister. The more so since a second attack was scheduled for the following year. In 1572, in the words of Heinrich Staden,
The cities and uezdy of the Russian land were already divided up and distributed among the lords (murzas) who were with the Crimean tsar, as to who should hold what land. The Crimean tsar also had with him a number of noble Turks, who were to supervise this matter: they had been sent by the Turkish emperor. . . . The Crimean tsar bragged before the Turkish emperor that he would take all of the Russian land in the course of the year, and would bring the grand prince as a prisoner to the Crimea and with his murzas occupy the Russian land. . . . He gave his merchants and many others papers to the effect that they should go with their wares to Kazan and Astrakhan and trade there without paying duty, since he was the emperor and lord of all Rus'.[121]
Even so passionate an apologist for Ivan the Terrible as R. Iu. Vipper does not dare to ignore this testimony. "Staden," he writes, "teaches us to properly evaluate . . . the epoch of the Crimean danger."[122]
Devlet Girei did not succeed in carrying out his intentions, but their very dimensions and the fact that his troops included not only Tatars, but also all the previous allies of Muscovy—the Nogais, and even the Kabardinian Prince Temriuk, Ivan the Terrible's father-in- law, who had swiftly abandoned the sinking ship of Muscovy—indicate how real this danger was. There can hardly be any serious doubt that if the Turks had been able to help Devlet Girei in 1572, as they had helped him previously, Muscovy would have been brought to the brink of collapse. The country was desolated and demoralized, its best military cadres had been exterminated by the Oprichnina, and its capacity for resistance catastrophically reduced. Fortunately, the complete defeat of the Turkish fleet by Don Juan of Austria at Le- panto in 1571 tied the hands of Turkey, and compelled it for the time being to pass from the offensive to the defensive. Thus, it was Europe which helped Muscovy, albeit involuntarily, in this, its most terrible hour. And how did Ivan the Terrible repay it for this help? Immediately after Lepanto, he suggested to the Turkish Sultan Selim II a plan for an anti-European coalition, a Russo-Turkish alliance "against the Roman emperor and the Polish king and the Czech king and the French king and other kings and against all the Italian princes."23
The sultan scorned this proposal, however, thereby confirming that the abandonment of the anti-Tatar strategy inevitably condemned Russia to complete isolation in European politics, which led not only to irreversible changes in its internal political structure, but to the necessity of paying tribute to the Tatars for another whole century.
In the first half of the seventeenth century alone, up to a million rubles went to the Tatars in "gifts," as they were shamefully called by the Muscovite ambassadors, or in "tribute," as they were frankly interpreted in the Crimea. This was the very time when the tsar was humbly begging King James of England for a subsidy of 120,000 rubles. Furthermore, this tribute did not prevent the Tatars from carrying away into captivity and selling as slaves 200,000 Russians. One cannot read without sadness Iurii Krizhanich's secret memorandum that,
On all of the Turkish warships, almost no oarsmen except Russians are to be seen, and in the cities and towns in all of Greece, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, and Anatolia—that is, in all of the Turkish kingdom—there is such a multitude of Russian slaves that they usually ask their fellow countrymen, newly arrived, whether anyone is still left in Rus'.'21
Thus, in the 1560s the "turn against the Tatars" was a strategic imperative for Muscovy. The "turn against the Germans," war on Livonia and consequently on Europe, proposed at that time by the Russian right as an alternative to the anti-Tatar strategy, inevitably led to isolation and ruin. And indeed it brought both. Russia simply ceased to be either a European power or a great one. In the words of a modern historian,
Until the beginning of the eighteenth century, Russia had remained scarcely more than a name to the West, where it was thought to be an amorphous geographical area occupied by barbarous schismatics owing a vague allegiance to a priest-king. It was thought of little importance to Europe save as a source of raw materials and a pasture for impoverished German Baltic barons.25