But the Crimea could not be conquered—put an end to, as an end had been put to Kazan'—by such raids. It was a matter of a difficult and long-drawn-out war, which might last for many years. The Crimea was hundreds of miles from Moscow. Kazan', which was much closer, had not fallen in a day—first, under Vasilii, the fortress of Vasil'sursk had had to be built at the halfway mark; then, under the Government of Compromise, Sviiazhsk had been erected opposite it on the other bank of the Volga to consolidate Muscovy's hold there. In the case of the Crimea, dozens of fortresses had to be built, a chain
Ibid., p. 603.
Solov'ev, htoriia Rossii, bk. 3, p. 493.
In Karamzin's opinion, only the military help of the Turks saved the Tatars. "Devlet Girei trembled," he writes, "and thought that Rzhevskii, Vishnevetskii, and the Circassian princes were only the forward division of our troops. He was expecting Ivan himself, and petitioned him for peace, and wrote in desperation to the sultan that all was lost if he did not save the Crimea." The sultan saved it: "We . . . did not follow the indications of the finger of God, and gave the infidels time to recover. Vishnevetskii did not hold out at Khortitsa when numerous detachments of Turks and Wallachians, sent to Devlet Girei by the sultan, appeared" (N. M. Karamzin, pp. 253-54).
of cities stubbornly moving further and further into the southern steppe each year, conquering the land from the Tatars mile by mile, one frontier after another. The whole life of the country had to be subordinated to this "open frontier" strategy. The economic boom had to supply it with materials, and reforms and secularization of church lands had to yield financial resources; a modernized infantry had to balance cavalry manned by service gentry, since only new tactics and European technology could assure the Muscovite armies of decisive superiority over the Tatars.[129] For this struggle Muscovy needed to utilize European experience of military organization, as well as European trade and diplomatic ties—not the war with Europe for which the tsar had thirsted, but alliance. In modern language, detente.
7. The Autocrator's Complex
The great secretary Viskovatyi, the head of the Foreign Office, was a personal enemy of Sil'vestr. He may have impressed on the tsar the enormous difficulties involved in the anti-Tatar strategy. Metropolitan Makarii may have supported Viskovatyi (it is hard to believe that he would have missed such an opportunity to topple his mighty enemy from power). They may have introduced the tsar to the pamphlets of Peresvetov, which were circulating in Moscow, arguing the fatal danger of taking political decisions under the influence of "advisors."
We shall never know what the role of this whole complex network of personal conflicts and ideological influences was in the formation of the Oprichnina alternative to the Great Reform, in the victory of terror over compromise, of the Livonian War over the anti-Tatar strategy. But we do know what Viskovatyi and the Josephite hierarchs could not know—that they themselves were to be victims of the coup d'etat to which they had egged on Ivan IV They paid for their victory with their heads. The terror which they had helped to unleash had its own logic. In telling the tsar that all of his troubles came from "advisors," and that in relation to the autocrator all men were slaves, did they expect that, having rejected the advice of Sil'vestr and Adashev, he would be willing to be advised by Viskovatyi and the hierarchs? Were they not also the same kind of slaves as Kurliat'ev and Kurbskii? Why should they not also be skinned alive?
And, furthermore, in encouraging the tsar to believe that he was the only Orthodox (that is, true Christian) sovereign in the world, that he was descended in a direct line from the Roman emperor Augustus, and carried on the work of the Byzantine autocrators, how could they expect patience in international affairs and respect for the other European governments and monarchs from him? What diplomatic calculations could be required from the only genuine viceroy of God on earth?
The tsar was in the eye of the Russian political storm; his character therefore acquires enormous significance. Such was the opinion of classical historiography. According to the latest historiographic fashion, however, it is mistaken.
The most vivid and articulate proponent of this view of the matter is perhaps Edward L. Keenan, Jr., earlier famous for asserting that the cornerstone of the Russian political literature of the sixteenth century, the Ivan the Terrible-Kurbskii correspondence, is a forgery. To judge by his short essay in the Harvard Magazine in 1978, Keenan's suspicions are increasing swiftly. Now not only the correspondence of Ivan the Terrible, but even Ivan the Terrible himself, seems to him in a certain sense a forgery:
A consideration of Ivan's medical record raises the question of whether he could even have been a functioning czar, let alone the volcanically energetic and Machiavellian prince of historical literature. ... In my opinion, for most of his life he was not. ... It seems impossible that he had any large role in the important events of his reign. ... A traditional political system ruled by an oligarchy of royal in-laws and an administration run by professional bureaucrats required little intervention by the czar. . . . Nevertheless, the boyars and the bureaucrats did require that the czar be dynastically legitimate, capable of performing certain ceremonial functions and serviceable as the symbol and source of their own unquestioned power. Ivan—caring little for the hard work of politics and administration . . . —was for the most part quite suitable for his officials' purposes. Possibly they spread stories of his "ter- ribleness" abroad to increase their own clout."
Thus Keenan cuts the Gordian knot over which chroniclers and historians, dissertation writers and poets, have despaired for centuries. True, his account contradicts the testimony of numerous eyewitnesses—but this may also turn out to be forged, and the subject of a subsequent expose. Unfortunately, however, it is not readily understandable why the all-powerful (according to Keenan) oligarchy of royal relatives and professional bureaucrats needed to unleash the train of events which resulted in their own ruin. Nor is it clear why the reign of this unfortunate invalid, who served only as a screen for the oligarchy, differs so strikingly from the epoch of "boyar rule" (during which the oligarchy was indeed powerful, and the child- sovereign was by definition a screen), which did not bring in its train either great reforms or revolution, and which was in general one of the most barren in Russian history. In fact, Keenan's thesis looks rather like a paraphrase of that submitted fifteen years previously by one of the most honest and bold (but, alas, not one of the most profound) of Soviet historians, D. R Makovskii:
It is not necessary to seek in the actions of Ivan IV any particular logic or consistency. Ivan IV—a mentally ill person—was always under the influence or suggestion of someone. The savage reprisals during the time of the Oprichnina were called forth, as contemporary sources note, by various adventurers (Basmanov, the Griaznyes, Skuratov, etc.) stimulating an unhealthy imagination and sadistic inclinations in Ivan, who did this in order to steal more goods and to enrich themselves.[130]