Prince Afanasii Viazemskii died ... in iron shackles. Aleksei [Basma- nov] and his son [Fedor] with whom [the tsar] practiced depravity were killed. . . . Prince Mikhail [Cherkasskii], brother-in-law [of the tsar] was hacked to pieces by strel'tsy [musketeers] with axes. . . . Prince Vasilii
Temkin was drowned. Ivan Zobatyi was killed. Petr [Shcheniat'ev?] was hanged on his own gates in front of his bedroom. Prince Andrei Ovtsyn was hanged at Oprichnina headquarters in Arbatskii street; a live sheep [Ovtsyn's name recalls the Russian word for sheep (ovtsa)] was hanged together with him. The marshal Bulat wished to make a match between his sister and [the tsar] and was killed, and the sister was raped by 500 strel'tsy. Kuraka Unkovskii, head man of the strel'tsy, was killed and pushed under the ice.[227]
What are we to conclude from this "defense testimony"? Were the Oprichniki actually the most honorable of men, as Kostylev suggests to the mass reader in a large edition of books, with Druzhinin's blessing? What are we, then, to say of the tsar who hanged them upon the gates of their own houses, as he did "enemies of the people"? What are we to say of the tsar who after 1572 forbade the very use of the term "Oprichnina," threatening its users with the severest penalties? And if the Oprichniki really did deserve such punishment, who was right—the "oppositionist circles" or the respected scholars?
Let us assume that the writer Kostylev was deceived by his capricious muse. But it was harder to fool experts who had read the primary sources. Bakhrushin, one of the major Russian historians of the twentieth century, knows quite well what went on in the Oprichnina. He knows, for example, that "the service landholders were interested in having on the throne a strong tsar, capable of satisfying the need of the service class for land and serf labor," while "on the other hand, the boyars were interested in protecting their lives and property from the arbitrary behavior of the tsar."[228]
What, one wonders, is so bad about defending one's life and property from the arbitrary behavior of the tsar? Why did such a natural human desire make the boyars "enemies of the people"? And why were the service landholders, who needed the serf labor of the people, their friends? Why does the author take this need of theirs so much to heart? Why is the "arbitrary behavior of the tsar" so dear to him that he is prepared to justify it by declaring the terror "inevitable under the given historical conditions"? Here is the concluding characterization of the tsar given by Bakhrushin in his book Ivan the Terrible:
There is no need for us to idealize Ivan the Terrible. . . . His deeds speak for themselves. He created a mighty feudal state. His reforms, which assured order within the country and its defense from external enemies, met with warm support from the Russian people. . . . Thus, in the person of [Ivan] the Terrible we have not an "angel of virtue" and not the mysterious villain of melodramas, but a major statesman of his period, who correctly understood the interests and needs of his people, and struggled to see them satisfied.53
This picture plainly shows that Russian historiography even in the twentieth century is still in the paws of the Middle Ages. But if this is so, then a completely different question arises: how did it happen that Russian historiography was not transformed into an undifferentiated heap of lies? The only answer consists, I believe, in the fact that, along with the tradition of collaborationism, there exists in Russian historiography another, parallel tradition, deriving precisely from the "oppositionist circles" which Vipper damns—one which I would call the tradition of Resistance, which passed like a torch from Kurbskii to Krizhanich, from Shcherbatov to Aksakov, from Lunin to Herzen, from Kliuchevskii to Veselovskii. There has never been an epoch when the tradition of Resistance was not present in Russian historiography. Even in the somber years of the "historiographic nightmares," this torch flickered before our eyes, even if it did not exactly shine. In this, in our capacity for opposition, is our real hope. Every oppositionist, individually, is easy to slander as an "enemy of the people," to throw into prison, to exile, or to slay—"with his wife and his sons and his daughters." But for some reason there always remain five families which have not been murdered, and perhaps thanks to this, it has been impossible to murder completely the tradition of Resistance. Russia lives by it, and Russian historiography lives by it.
8. The Mutiny of Dubrovskii
This tradition did not die out in Ivaniana even under the ice of Stalin's Oprichnina. Exactly as the terrible tsar was exposed after his death by M. Katyrev and I. Timofeev during the first Russian Time of Troubles, so S. Dubrovskii and V. Sheviakov rebelled against the heirs of the Oprichnina during the seventh Time of Troubles. "Ivan IV must be considered ... as the tsar of the serfholding service landholders," declared the rebels. "The personality of Ivan IV has overshadowed [in Soviet historiography] the people, and overshadowed the epoch. The people have been allowed to appear on the historical scene only in order to show 'love' for Ivan IV and to praise his actions."54
Ibid., p. 90. Emphasis added.
S. Dubrovskii, "Protiv idealizatsii deiatel'nosti Ivana IV," pp. 123-29.
Professor Dubrovskii sincerely believed that he was combatting Vipper, Bakhrushin, and Smirnov. But, as we have seen, they were not his only opponents in this battle. Karamzin, Kavelin, Platonov, and the entire mighty collaborationist tradition stood against him. It could not be overcome simply by appeals to obvious facts and common sense. The rebellions of Pogodin and Veselovskii had already shown this. Facts were powerless against the hypnosis of the myth. Dubrovskii could rely on the tradition of the "oppositionist circles," on Kurbskii and Krizhanich in the attempt to create an alternative conception of Ivaniana. But are we entitled to demand so much of him? After all, he came out of the same school as the collaborationists. He himself considered autocracy—"the dictatorship of the serf holders," as he called it—an inevitable and natural dominant feature of Russian history. He himself had grown up with the traditional contempt for "reactionary boyardom." And for this reason an instrumental apparatus different from the one with which his opponents, the collaborationists, worked was simply not available to him. And this was easily demonstrated by I. I. Smirnov in a rebuff (which I would rather call a punitive expedition) that deserves description. If the reader finds this rebuff to be a terrible oversimplification, full of logical and factual errors, I would agree with him completely. But I am here only the modest reporter of a discussion which actually took place in Moscow, in the summer of 1956 (that is, in the middle of the post-Stalinist thaw).
Was the liquidation of the feudal fragmentation, and the centralization of the country, not a current necessity of state in the epoch of Ivan the Terrible? Smirnov asked. Was the absolute monarchy not an inevitable phase in the history of feudal society, and did it not play the role of the centralizing element in the state? Did all the European countries in the Middle Ages not know a "terrible, bloody struggle" (compare the Wars of the Roses in England, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in France, the Stockholm Bloodbath, etc.)? From this collection of cliches Smirnov drew the conclusion—as simple as two times two equals four—that the Oprichnina was an inevitable form of the struggle of absolute monarchy for the centralization of the country against the reactionary boyars and formerly sovereign princes. As for the "cruel form" which was taken by this struggle for centralization in the epoch of the Oprichnina, and as for the enserfment of the peasants and the atrocities of the terror, on these questions Smirnov was excellently prepared—once more, with Kavelin. Alas, he replied, such is the price of progress and of liberation from "the forces of reaction and stagnation."