Having in the course of his Oprichnina21 terrorized and laid waste his country, the haughty tsar suddenly began to construct an impregnable fortress in the impassable forests of the Vologda region in the hope of hiding in it from his own people, and opened negotiations with the "common maiden" Elizabeth I for the right of political asylum in England.[11] Muscovy lost not only the 101 Livonian cities—everything which it had conquered over a quarter of a century—but five key Russian cities as well. All this had to be surrendered to the Poles. The Baltic shore which had previously belonged to Russia— that same "window on Europe" which Peter I was to reconquer at the price of yet another Livonian slaughter a century and a half later— went to the Swedes. The seventeenth-century French historian de Thou, generally favorably disposed toward Ivan the Terrible, was obliged to end his panegyric of the tsar on an unexpectedly mournful note:
Thus ended the Muscovite War, in which Tsar Ivan poorly supported the reputation of his ancestors and his own reputation. The whole country from Chernigov on the Dnieper to Staritsa on the Dvina, and the regions of Novgorod and Lake Ladoga, was utterly ruined. The tsar lost more than 300,000 men, and some 40,000 were carried off as prisoners. These losses turned the regions of Velikie Luki, Zavoloch'e, Novgorod, and Pskov into deserts, because all the youth of these regions were killed and the old people left no descendants behind them.[12]
But de Thou was mistaken. He did not know that by the calculations of that time up to 800,000 people perished or were taken away as prisoners by the Tatars after their campaign against Moscow in 1571 alone. Inasmuch as the entire population of Muscovy at the time was about ten million, it turns out that the life of every tenth person, territorial losses which cut it off from access to the sea, and unprecedented national humiliation were the price paid by Russia for its fatal choice.
Its defeat in the Livonian War was no mere military setback. This was the political collapse of Muscovy. As a market for raw materials, and as a convenient path of communication with Persia, it did not, of course, cease to exist after the war. But it did effectively cease to exist as one of the centers of world trade and European politics, and was transformed into a third-rate power—something like an eastern Hanover. Here, it seems, is the point at which Russia was transformed into a "weak, poor, almost unknown" nation, as Solov'ev put it, and fell into the void of political nonexistence referred to by Golovkin.
And here we approach the most interesting and mysterious problem of this book. For this is not what Russian historians have traditionally thought, or think today, of the Livonian War. One of them tells us, in fact, that it was precisely in his decision to turn against Europe that Ivan the Terrible "emerges as a great politician" (I. I. Smir- nov). Another asserts that precisely because of this decision, the tsar attains "his full stature as a ruler of the peoples and a great patriot" (R. Iu. Vipper). From a third we hear that Ivan "anticipated Peter, and manifested . . . statesman-like perspicacity" (S. V. Bakhrushin). From a fourth, that "Ivan the Terrible understood the interests of the state better than his opponents" (la. S. Lur'e). All these are contemporary Soviet historians. But their prerevolutionary colleagues (with the solitary exception of N. I. Kostomarov) held analogous views. In any case, none of them ever interpreted the Livonian War as a historical catastrophe, which laid the basis for the de-Europeanization of Russia. No one has ever seriously tried to analyze the alternative to this war—as though it were natural, fated, inevitable, the sole possible strategy available to Muscovy. No one has ever connected it with the origin of Russian autocracy.
Why?
6. "A Riddle for the Mind"
It is no exaggeration to say that over the past 400 years, a whole library has been written about Ivan IV, his character, his reforms, his wars, his terror, and the Oprichnina: articles, monographs, pamphlets, dissertations, poems, odes, and novels—volumes upon volumes. Everything that these historians, novelists, dissertation writers, and poets have thought about the present of their country, they have sought to justify by reference to the gigantic figure of Ivan the Terrible. In this sense, what I call Ivaniana—the theme of Ivan the Terrible in Russian literature—is a model for the development of Russian public consciousness, and as such deserves special study in itself.
The most honest scholars have often declared in desperation that the riddle of Ivan the Terrible appears to have no solution, and that there can therefore be no end to Ivaniana—at least not until the history of Russia comes to an end. In the eighteenth century, Mikhail Shcherbatov pronounced the unfortunate verdict, which later became classic, that Tsar Ivan "is presented in such varying forms that he does not appear to be one person."24 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Nikolai Karamzin cried out in pique that "the character of Ioann [Ivan], a hero of virtue in his youth and the pitiless drinker of blood in his adult years and old age, is a riddle for the mind."25 At the end of the nineteenth century, Nikolai Mikhailovskii, the greatest ideologist of Russian Populism, wrote:
For some reason, all the hopes for a firmly established, definite judgment about Ivan the Terrible are destroyed one after another. . . . Considering that the best minds of Russian scholarship, people of brilliant talents and erudition, have participated in the effort to work out this definite judgment, we may perhaps reach the conclusion that the task of removing the disagreements in this particular case is something fantastic ... if so many intelligent, talented, conscientious and learned people cannot agree, does this not mean that it is impossible to agree?2"
In our own day, one of the most remarkable of Soviet historians, Stepan Veselovskii, has commented:
Since the time of Karamzin and Solov'ev, a very large quantity of new sources, both native and foreign, has been found and published, but the maturing of the science of history is going so slowly that the power of human reason as a whole, and not only the question of Tsar Ivan and his time, may be shaken."
There has been a great deal in Ivaniana, as there has been a great deal in Russian history; there have been discoveries and there have been disappointments, there have been hopes and there has been despair. But we are interested here not in what has been, but in what has not been in it. And there have been in it no hypotheses about Ivan the Terrible as the forefather—I might even say the inventor—of a political monstrosity which neither coups d'etat, nor reforms, nor revolutions have proved capable of destroying. There have in Ivaniana been no hypotheses about the Livonian War as a sort of alchemical laboratory in which this monstrous form of power—not susceptible, it seems, to time and corrosion—was worked out. There have been
Cited in N. K. Mikhailovskii, Ivan Groznyi v russkoi literature, vol. 6, p. 131.
Russkoe proshloe. Istoricheskii sbornik, p. 6.
Mikhailovskii, p. 135.
S. V. Veselovskii, Issledovaniia po istorii oprichniny, p. 35.
no hypotheses about Russian autocracy originating in the "revolution from above" carried out by Ivan the Terrible in January 1565.
The necessary documents, archival discoveries, and textual analyses have not been wanting. "It may be held," wrote Aleksandr Zimin in a book published in Moscow in 1964, "that the main surviving material on the history of the Oprichnina at the present time has already been published."[13] Anthony Grobosky expressed himself still more decisively in a book published in 1969 in New York: