Keenan and Makovskii fail to notice the revolutionary character of the Oprichnina, which was not an extension of the previous structure of power, but its complete reversal. Or, rather, it was a triumph of the autocratic political tradition and at the same time a complete debacle for the absolutist tradition—a debacle which decisively changed the historical course of the nation.
Ivan the Terrible was unarguably mentally unbalanced, and the longer he lived, the more severe his illness became. But there was also something discernibly political to this illness which Keenan ignores. Just as in the case of Paul, Peter, or Stalin (who were no less indisputably ill), madness not only did not hinder the tsar from having his own personal political goals, but actually helped him to subordinate the strategy of the state to them.
The character and personal political goals of Ivan the Terrible were manifested vividly in the international relations of the Russia of that time, when the question of whether the country would adopt a European or an isolationist orientation was decided. Toward the end of the 1550s, R. Iu. Vipper notes,
The haughtiness and caprices of [Ivan] the Terrible began to be reflected in the official diplomatic notes sent to foreign powers as soon as he himself began to direct policy. In the diplomatic correspondence with Denmark, the appearance of Ivan IV at the head of affairs was marked by a striking incident. Since the time of Ivan III, the Muscovite tsars had called the king of Denmark their brother, and suddenly in 1558 Shuiskii and the boyars found it necessary to reproach the king for the fact that he called "such an Orthodox tsar as the autocrat of all Rus' his brother; and previously there was no such reference.". . . The boyars are obviously telling an untruth. Certainly, nothing had been forgotten in Moscow and there had been no mistake, but the tsar had simply decided to change his tone with Denmark and behave more haughtily/1"
In the 1560s, at the height of the Livonian campaign, when the efforts of Muscovy should logically have been concentrated on preventing Sweden from becoming involved in the war, Ivan the Terrible suddenly began a mortal quarrel with the Swedish king, too, because the latter was seized by an impious desire to call Ivan his brother in diplomatic papers. "The [Holy] Roman emperor and other great sovereigns are our brothers, but it is impossible to call you a brother because the Swedish land is lower in honor than those states," the tsar declared.[131]
Here, at least, it is hinted that there are other "great sovereigns," in addition to the emperor, who are permitted to call him brother. During the arguments of the 1570s, it becomes clear that these "other great ones" are a fiction. The number of candidates for brotherhood is reduced to two—the emperor and the Turkish sultan, who "are the preeminent sovereigns in all kingdoms."
In 1572, when the question of the candidacy of Tsarevich Fedor for the Polish throne arose, a hint was dropped in the tsar's letter to the Poles which showed that he was not against expelling the emperor himself from the narrow circle of the "preeminent":
We know that the Holy Roman Emperor and the king of France have sent to you: but this is not an example for us, because other than us and the Turkish sultan there is in no state a sovereign whose house has ruled for two hundred years without interruption . . . [we are] the sovereign of the state starting from Augustus Caesar, from the beginning of time, and all people know this.
Who was the Holy Roman Emperor but a mere elected official—a "functionary" for his own vassals? And, if it came to that, who was the Turkish sultan, a Mohammedan who had no claims to the heritage of Augustus Caesar? And what price the rest of the crowned rabble— the Polish king Stefan Batory, who until recently had been a miserable voevoda\ the English queen Elizabeth, a "common maiden"; Gus- tav of Sweden, who, when the merchants came with goods to trade, personally put on gloves and measured out lard and wax "like the common people"; and all the other "functionaries," whether Hungarian, Danish, or French? This was the way Muscovite diplomats talked at the end of Ivan's life in the 1580s, on the brink of the catastrophe: "Even if old Rome and the new Rome, the ruling city of Byzantium, were compared to our sovereign, his Muscovite state would yield to none."
The crueller the blows which fate inflicted upon Ivan the Terrible's self-esteem, the paler his phantasmal star became, the more arrogant he grew. On his very deathbed he asserted that "by the mercy of God no state was higher than ours."41 He was like one of the Fates—blind, unstoppable, and inhuman. In his own city of Novgorod, he behaved like a foreign conqueror; he treated foreign sovereigns like his own boyars: all are slaves, and nothing but slaves.
This was not simply the ridiculous bragging of a paranoid head of state; it was the logical behavior of an autocrator. Liberated from all limitations on power within the country, intoxicated by his own wild freedom, he came logically and inevitably to the thought of liberation from all limitations on earth. Such was, it seems, the pure political core of the tsar's mental illness, the method, one may say, of his madness.
Ivan the Terrible was the first of the Muscovite princes (unless we count the Tsarevich Dimitrii, who never ruled) to be crowned as tsar—that is, caesar. But it did not suffice merely to call himself this. In the official hierarchy of European sovereigns, he remained the prince of Muscovy—not even a king, let alone caesar. Such leaps on one's own initiative were not permitted. They had to be bought by first-class, generally recognized victories. Ivan learned from his tutors and intimates that he was "the great tsar of the greatest empire on earth" (and if he can hear after death, he has undoubtedly rejoiced to
41. Ibid., p. 156.
hear the same thing from both classical Russian and Soviet historians, the tutors and intimates of other autocrators). But he did not hear this from his peers, the "other great sovereigns." And he developed a kind of royal inferiority complex.
Peter ended the Northern War as an emperor. Ivan the Terrible was named tsar before the Livonian War, and even before the war with Kazan'. He wanted his own Northern War. The anti-Tatar strategy, perhaps requiring generations of painstaking effort, did not suffice. He needed the immediate and sensational rout of a European state, Livonia, in order to be considered a "preeminent sovereign." The arguments of the Government of Compromise for a sound national strategy, and a blow at the Crimea as the logical completion of the Kazan' campaign, finally routing the Tatars and freeing their Christian slaves, must have seemed to him naive and boring. His personal goals seemed to him infinitely more important. Rather, as to every patrimonial feudal lord, it must have seemed to him that the state simply could have no other goals than his own; by subordinating the country to these goals, he threw it "into the abyss of extermination."
Having conquered the kingdoms of the Volga in the middle of the century, supplied with Caspian silk and furs from the Urals (which were no less valuable than the treasures of India), swiftly urbanizing and expanding its wealth, trying to liberate itself by the Great Reform from the Tatar heritage, the young Muscovite state emerged onto the broad expanse of world politics, from the very beginning claiming a primary role in it. A quarter of a century later, sunk in an endless and fruitless war, unable even to protect its own capital from the assault of the Crimeans, Russia had been thrown back into the ranks of third- class powers, into the darkness of "nonexistence."