The monarchist K. Iarosh—who, if the reader remembers, was horrified by the Sinodik of Ivan the Terrible—nevertheless justified the tsar's destruction of his advisors. In the middle of the sixteenth century, in his opinion, the tsar "understood that the sole danger in terms of the establishment of cordial relations between the Russian people and the throne consisted of these importunate 'councillors' holding letters patent. Ivan wanted to reduce them entirely to the ranks of ordinary citizens of Russia and servants of the fatherland."[204]And since they did not wish to be "reduced," he destroyed them. This was a recommendation to Nicholas II to head a new Oprichnina.
Thus, the dramatic quality of the times entered into Ivaniana. Ancient history returned, as it were, to modern Russia. The dead seized the living. A contemporary civilized country, which had succeeded in astonishing the world not only with its military might, as in the time of Lomonosov and Kavelin, but also with its great literature—a country to whose greatest historian, Kliuchevskii, the Oprichnina had quite recently seemed "purposeless"—stood again on the point of undergoing a medieval spasm.
Platonov, an infinitely more serious and subtle scholar than Iarosh, depicted the sources of the Oprichnina in this way: "[Ivan] the Terrible felt around himself the danger of an opposition, and of course understood that this was a class opposition, a princely opposition, led by the political memories and instincts of formerly sovereign princes 'who desired by their traitorous custom' to become appanage 'lords' along with the Muscovite sovereign."[205] Thus, Platonov refused to consider the conflict which led to the Oprichnina in the traditional terms of Solov'ev and Gorskii—in the terms of a "struggle of the service nobility (the new) with the boyardom (the old)." For him the matter was much more serious: the might of the formerly sovereign princes was so great that it threatened the very existence of the centralized Russian state, which might perhaps collapse again into a collection of appanage principalities. For this reason I will call his view the "appanage" conception.
Pokrovskii was even more adamant in refusing to accept the oversimplified scheme of the "state school." Platonov gave the "class of formerly sovereign princes" the center of the stage. Pokrovskii placed the "class of the bourgeoisie" there. Whereas for Platonov, the Government of Compromise accordingly represented this "class of formerly sovereign princes," for Pokrovskii it represented a class alliance of the bourgeoisie with the boyardom. For Platonov the essence of the Oprichnina consisted in the fact that the tsar took land away from the formerly sovereign princes, who had a great deal, and gave it to the service landholders, who had little, and thereby strengthened his power. For Pokrovskii its essence consisted in more or less the same thing—with the difference that the tsar himself appeared in this conflict as the tool of the bourgeoisie, which, having repudiated its class alliance with the boyardom, had chosen a new partner, the service landholders. For Pokrovskii, "the whole coup was a matter of establishing a new class regime, for which the personal power of the tsar was only a tool, and not at all a matter of freeing [Ivan] the Terrible personally from the tutelage of the boyars which hindered him."(i
But for both Platonov and Pokrovskii, the basis of the conflict was the redistribution of the land and the agrarian crisis, that is, the economic revolution. Both of them, in trying to replace the old models with their own, even more fantastic ones, suffered defeat. At the same time, both triumphed: the mongrel "agrarian school" born of their unnatural alliance prevails to this day in Ivaniana.
3. Platonov's Contradiction
Platonov's attitude towards the Oprichnina was no less complex than Solov'ev's. On the one hand, he declares just as categorically as Solov'ev that "the meaning of the Oprichnina had been thoroughly explained by the scholarly studies of recent decades."[206] And we already know that this meaning consisted, according to Platonov, in the confiscation of the lands of the formerly sovereign princes. But on the other hand, the blood and bestialities of the Oprichnina provoke exactly the same revulsion in the new classical writer as they did in the old one. And Platonov makes the qualification that "the goal of the Oprichnina could have been achieved by less complex means," since "the means which were used by [Ivan] the Terrible, although they proved effective, brought with them not only the destruction of the nobility, but also a number of other consequences which [Ivan] the Terrible can hardly have wished or expected.""
But in that case, what was the alternative to the Oprichnina? How otherwise could the tsar have acted in the face of the disintegration which threatened the country? What could he have done if the Muscovite government itself (or the "Chosen Rada," as Platonov by tradition called it) had taken the side of the formerly sovereign princes? The historian, after all, himself notes that "the Rada, we must suppose, was made up of princes, and its tendency was apparently also in accordance with their interests. The influence of the 'priest' and his 'collection of dogs' in the first years of their activity was very strong. . . . The entire mechanism of administration was in their hands."" Was the tsar's victory conceivable without the Oprichnina—that is to say, without a coup d'etat, without the creation of his own army and police, free of the influence of the formerly sovereign princes, without mass terror and all those atrocities which were so repugnant to Platonov? In the final analysis, Platonov himself, almost 400 years later, is unable to think up any alternative to the Oprichnina. Moral lamentations appear to be of no more help to him than they were to Solov'ev: his logic leads inexorably to justification of the Oprichnina.
But this is only half the problem. The real trouble begins when the reader recognizes to his astonishment that despite his loud declarations, Platonov is, in fact, not even sure of his main thesis that the Oprichnina was directed against the formerly sovereign princes and not against the nobility in general.
The touchstone, which gives an appearance of novelty to Platonov's deductions, is "expulsion." "The father and grandfather of [Ivan] the Terrible, following the old custom, when they conquered Novgorod, Pskov, Riazan', Viatka, and other places, expelled the leading strata of the population, which were dangerous for Muscovy, to the internal districts of Muscovy, and placed settlers from central
Muscovy in the newly conquered districts," Platonov says. True, the father and the grandfather applied "expulsion" to the conquered districts; but the grandson applied it to the Muscovite heartland. This, Platonov solemnly declares, however, is precisely what the grandson's political innovation consisted in: "That which succeeded so well with external enemies, [Ivan] the Terrible thought of trying with internal enemies."[207] In other words, the tsar, just like Lenin, applied the methods of international war to class war. But the question still remains: Who were these sinister "internal enemies" who were expelled?
Platonov gives two answers. "On the one hand," he tells us in his book Ivan the Terrible, in full accordance with his "appanage" concept, "the tsar decided to remove from the hereditary appanage lands their owners, the formerly sovereign princes, and to settle them in places distant from their former residence, where there were no memories of appanage conditions or conditions conducive to opposition."[208] His formulation of the role of the Oprichnina in his Outlines of the History of the Rebellions supports this: "The Oprichnina systematically broke up the land tenure of the service princes."™