Karamzin, who was an adherent of "enlightened autocracy" (tyranny without a tyrant, so to speak), offers a subtler explanation for the "doubling" of the figure of the tsar, which permits him both to be condemned as a human being and justified as a political figure. Karamzin seeks to rehabilitate the autocracy by condemning the terror (in contemporary terms, he tried to do exactly what the Eurocom- munists and Solzhenitsyn are now doing: the former would like to separate communism from the GULAG, and the latter would like to separate communism from traditional Russian autocracy). Karamzin writes:
Despite all the speculative explanations, the character of Ivan—a hero
of virtue in his youth and an insatiable bloodsucker in the years of his
maturity and his old age—is a riddle to the mind, and we would doubt the truth of even the most reliable information about him, if the chronicles of other peoples did not reveal to us equally surprising examples: that is to say, that if Caligula, the model sovereign and the monster, and Nero, the pupil of the wise Seneca, the object of love, and the object of loathing, had not ruled in Rome. They were pagans, but Louis XI was a Christian, who yielded to Ivan neither in ferocity nor in the outward piety with which they wished to smooth over their lawless acts: both were pious out of fear, both were bloodthirsty and lecherous like the Asiatic and Roman tormentors. Monsters outside the law, and outside all the rules and probabilities of reason; such horrible meteors, such wandering fires of unrestrained passions reveal to us across the extent of the centuries the abyss of possible human wickedness, seeing which, we tremble![152]
Karamzin goes even further, equating the reign of Ivan the Terrible with the Tatar yoke.[153] And still—despite all the sincerity of his moral indignation—something holds him back from unconditional condemnation of Ivan as a statesman. "But let us give even the tyrant his due," he suddenly declares, right after the comparison of the Oprichnina with the "yoke of Batu Khan."
Ivan, in the very extremes of evil, is, as it were, the ghost of a great monarch, zealous, tireless, frequently penetrating in his political activity; although ... he did not have even a shadow of courage in his soul, he remained a conqueror, and in foreign policy followed unde- viatingly the great intentions of his grandfather; he loved justice in the court . . . and is famous in history as a lawgiver and a shaper of the state.[154]
This unexpectedly conciliatory rider, after all Karamzin's curses, has usually been overlooked by later historians, who have chiefly quoted the famous phrase "a riddle to the mind." But in it there is already contained, as in a seed, all the later drama of the Ivaniana.
6. Pogodin's Conjecture
Karamzin's craftiness did not escape his contemporaries. "In his history, refinement and simplicity show us, with no partiality at all, the necessity of autocracy and the beauties of the knout," wrote Pushkin.53 Nevertheless, after Karamzin, the mysterious duality in the character of the tsar became one of the favorite topics of Russian literature. "Whereas historians like Kostomarov transform themselves for the sake of [Ivan] the Terrible into men of letters, poets like Maikov transform themselves for his sake into historians," Mikhailov- skii observed.54
Vissarion Belinskii asserted that Ivan was "a fallen angel, who even after his fall revealed at times both the strength of an iron character and the strength of an exalted mind."55 The Decembrist Ryleev, on the other hand, naturally brandished thunder and lightning against "the tyrant of our precious fatherland."56 Another brilliant Decembrist, Mikhail Lunin, also unambiguously condemned tyrannical autocracy because "in its original form, it brought the Russians the mad tsar, who for twenty-four years bathed in the blood of his subjects."57 In a great multitude of novels, plays, narrative poems, odes, and portraits, there appeared, in place of the real tsar,
now a fallen angel, now merely a villain, now an exalted and penetrating mind, now a pedestrian person, now an independent figure consciously and systematically following great aims, and now some kind of rotten boat without a tiller or sails; now a person standing unattainably high over Rus', and now a base nature, alien to the best strivings of his time.58
The first voice to call a halt belonged to the well-known Russian historian Mikhail Pogodin. Pogodin was a rock-ribbed reactionary, even more convinced than Karamzin of the beneficial nature of the autocracy, but when it came to Ivaniana he was no less an iconoclast than Keenan is. Though even Kurbskii "praises Ivan for the middle years of his rule,"59 Pogodin asserts that, "Ivan from 1547 onward became a completely passive figure and did not take any part in administration whatever."60 The "blue period" of the reign simply did not belong to Tsar Ivan. "Obviously these were actions by the new party at court, unlike all the preceding ones, and the credit for them belongs to it, and to Sil'vestr, the founder and leader of it, and not to Ivan." Furthermore, Pogodin discovered an astonishing coincidence in the correspondence of the mortal enemies: Kurbskii attributed all of the "holy acts" of this period to the Chosen Rada (praising them, of course), and the tsar did the same (cursing them, of course). Ivan
N. K. Mikhailovskii, p. 130.
V G. Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, p. 135.
K. F. Ryleev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, p. 155.
M. S. Lunin, Dekabrist Lunin, sochineniia i pis'ma, p. 80.
Mikhailovskii, p. 131.
M. P. Pogodin, Istoriko-kriticheskie otryvki, p. 251.
Ibid., p. 246.
never claimed to be the author of the law code, of the decisions of the church assembly of 1551, or of the administrative reform. "If Ivan did anything noteworthy during that time," Pogodin concluded from this, "he surely would not have neglected to speak of it in his letters to Kurbskii, where he tried to brag to him of his exploits." The conquest of Kazan'? "Ivan participated in it to the same extent as in the compilation of the law code and in the church assembly.... In the taking of Astrakhan', as in Siberia later on, and in the establishment of trade with England, he took no part whatever. ... So what remains to Ivan in this so-called brilliant half of his reign?"6'
Pogodin explains the transition from the "blue" to the "black" period by the machinations of the relatives of the tsaritsa, the Zak- har'ins, who skillfully played on Ivan's wounded self-esteem. He even lets slip an utterly heretical thought (which was not developed): "Was not the war with the Germans in Livonia a clever stratagem of the opposing party [i.e., the Zakhar'ins]?"[155] He refutes not only the opinions of Kurbskii and Karamzin, but also those of Tatishchev, who, it will be remembered, attributed the tsar's failures in his "black" period to the mutinies and treason of the villainous boyars. Pogodin replies that the measures undertaken by Ivan in the period of the Oprichnina had neither sound reasons of state behind them, nor even the most elementary common sense—that the boyars were not fighting against the tsar, and that his terror was therefore purposeless and itself the cause of the "mutinies and treason." "A villain, a beast—a pedantic chatterbox, with the mind of a petty bureaucrat—and that is all. Must it be that such a creature, who had lost the aspect even of a human being, let alone the exalted image of a tsar, should find people to glorify him?"63