Such was the extraordinary complexity of the Kurbskii-tsar correspondence which Vasilii Kliuchevskii found so difficult to analyze and Edward Keenan failed to notice.
4. The First Attack of the "Historiographic Nightmare"
Until the publication of volume 9 of Karamzin's History of the Russian State, declared the Russian historian N. Ustrialov,
Ivan was recognized among us as a great sovereign: he was seen as the conqueror of three kingdoms, and even more as a wise and solicitous legislator; it was known that he was hardhearted, but only by obscure traditions; and he was partly excused in many matters for having established a brilliant autocratic regime. Peter the Great himself wished to justify him. . . . This opinion was shaken by Karamzin, who solemnly declared that in the last years of his reign, Ivan did not run second either to Louis XI or to Caligula, but that until the death of his first wife, Anastasia Romanovna, he was the model of a pious, wise monarch, zealous for the glory and happiness of the state.[142]
Ustrialov is both right and wrong. As early as 1564, Kurbskii quite clearly divided the reign of Ivan the Terrible into the same two periods. Karamzin follows this division to the letter. More than this, following Kurbskii, he even divides his description into two volumes. Volume 8, devoted to the "blue" period, ends thus: "This is the end of the happy days of Ivan and of Russia: for he lost not only his wife but his virtue."[143] Volume 9, devoted to the "black" period, opens with this declaration: "We are approaching the description of terrible changes in the soul of the tsar and in the fate of the kingdom."[144]
In Kliuchevskii's apt formula, "the tsar was split in two in the thought of his contemporaries."[145] At the beginning he was great and glorious, wrote one of them, "and then it was as if a terrible storm, coming from a distance, disturbed the peace of his good heart, and I do not know what upset his mind, great with wisdom, into a cruel disposition, and he became a mutineer in his own state." Even more decisive hostility to the "double tsar" was expressed in 1626 by Prince Katyrev-Rostovskii, who described vividly how the tsar—"a man of marvelous mind, skilled at book learning and eloquent"—suddenly "was filled with wrath and fury" and "ruined a multitude of the people in his kingdom, both great and small." Finally, in the Chronicle of Ivan Timofeev, the description of Ivan's evil deeds is brought out in truly sculptural relief. It is true that as a motive for them only "poisonous fury" is cited, but it is said that the tsar suddenly "took a hatred to the cities of his land, and in wrath . . . divided all the land in his realm in two as though with a cleaver.'"" Iurii Krizhanich, with whom we are already familiar, in his Politics, written in the 1660s, proposed a special term "liudoderstvo"[146] to define autocracy. Krizhanich knew where this began in Rus':
Who was the Russian Jeroboam [i.e., the beginning of evil]? Tsar Ivan Vasil'evich, who introduced extremely hard and merciless laws in order to rob his subjects. . . . That is how matters have gone in this kingdom from the reign of Ivan Vasil'evich, who was the originator of this liudoderstvo
Thus, contemporaries and immediate descendants clearly understood that there was something terrible in the activity of Tsar Ivan— something which called forth a national disaster. For them, he was Ivan the Tormenter and "a mutineer in his own state." We hear from them no justifications of the tsar.
However, all these "dark legends" could not prevent the growth of the "historiographic nightmare" in the first half of the eighteenth century. The famous Russian scholar and poet Mikhail Lomonosov wrote an ode "On the Capture of Khotin," in which Peter I says to Ivan the Terrible, "Thy and my exploits are not in vain, that Russia should be feared by the whole world."[147] (In fact, after Ivan the Terrible, Russia by no means inspired the world with fear, but rather with contempt.) The historian Vasilii Tatishchev asserted that, "Ivan subjugated Kazan' and Astrakhan' to himself . . . and if the mutiny and treason of a few good-for-nothing boyars had not prevented it, it would certainly not have been hard for him to conquer Livonia and a good part of Lithuania.'"15 It was hard to blame Ivan's defeat on the Poles, the Germans, or the Jews (who would be blamed by Tati- shchev's descendants and followers for other misfortunes of Russia). He was therefore forced to seek an internal enemy. His formula was brief: the boyars are guilty. They conspired, they mutinied, they betrayed. Thus even in the period of this first "historiographic nightmare," Kurbskii's view of the Oprichnina as a conflict between the tsar and the boyars was revealed as a stick with two ends.
The criterion used by Tatishchev and Lomonosov was the national power of Russia, understood exclusively as its potential for intimidation. All sacrifices were justified for the achievement of this result. To the credit of Russian historiography, it must be said, however, that the first "historiographic nightmare" did not last long. Prince M. M. Shcherbatov, the most prestigious representative of the conservative opposition in the time of Catherine the Great, branded the epoch of Ivan the Terrible a time when "love for the fatherland died out, and in its place came baseness, servility, and a striving only for one's own property."[148] Unlike Lomonosov and Tatishchev, Shcherbatov connected the decline of morality within the country with the catastrophic fall of its prestige abroad. He damned Ivan because the latter "made his name hated in all the countries of the world." And unlike the contemporaries of the tsar, he saw the source of these calamities neither in the tsar's character nor in his "poisonous fury," but in his striving for unlimited power: "Thus the unrestricted power, which autocrats only desire, is a sword serving to punish by cutting off their own glory, even if nothing else happens."[149]
As we see, there was no lack of testimony to Ivan the Terrible's "baseness of heart," "poisonous fury," and striving for "unrestricted power" before Karamzin. But nevertheless, Ustrialov was partly right. For society remained deaf to this testimony. It did not hear it, did not wish to hear it, and having heard it, did not understand it. The curses in the chronicles and the investigations in the archives were one thing and the public consciousness was quite another. Lulled by dreams of the national might of Russia (as Catherine the Great's chancellor, Bezborodko, said, "Not a single cannon in Europe dare be fired without our permission"), it was inclined to believe Lomonosov rather than Shcherbatov. The truth could not become a fact of public consciousness until Karamzin's time; by then Russia had experienced a brief, but fearful, parody of the Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible under Emperor Paul, at the very end of the eighteenth century, when the frightful power of the state was again turned inward, against the society itself. And the latter, mortally frightened, "felt on its own skin" the immediate need to understand what the Russian Oprichnina really was.[150]
5. "Hero of Virtue" and "Insatiable Bloodsucker"
How to explain the contradictions in Ivan the Terrible's character? Shcherbatov reached the conclusion that "the inclinations of the heart [of Ivan the Terrible] were always the same," but that circumstances prevented them from being manifested before the Oprichnina. Precisely what these circumstances were, Shcherbatov does not exactly explain. He was inclined to think that it was primarily the gentleness of his first wife, Anastasia, which restrained the tsar.[151] But though we may accept this as an explanation of why Ivan did not commit crimes during his marriage to Anastasia, how is it that he accomplished great reforms and "sacred tasks" during this period? Again under beneficial feminine influence? Cherchez la femme? Neither Shcherbatov nor Karamzin (who in practice shares his predecessor's viewpoint as to Anastasia's role) is prepared to venture so gallant an explanation.