The idea involuntarily occurs to one that this is a purge of the last of the "right opposition" from the Politburo-Duma (perhaps members or fellow travelers of the Government of Compromise), and that it was supposed to be the prelude to some kind of broad social action. In fact, it was followed by the confiscation of the lands of the titled aristocracy (formerly sovereign princes) and the expulsion of princely families to Kazan', which in the Russia of that time fulfilled the function of Siberia. The confiscation was accompanied, of course, by robbery and ruination of the peasants living on the confiscated land, and spoliation of the lands themselves. In a word, this was a medieval equivalent of what in the 1930s was called "dekulakization." The fixed quitrent paid by the peasants "by the old ways" was liquidated, and along with it whatever legal or traditional limitations on arbitrary behavior of the landowners might have existed. This was the beginning not only of mass famine and devastation in the central regions of Russia, but essentially also of serfdom (since, as Academician B. D. Grekov would say later, "the government of the service landholders could not be silent" in the face of the "great ruin" which threatened its social base).[233] But the main analogy, in any case, is the mechanism of the purge: first phase—removal of a faction in the Politburo- Duma representing both a particular social group and an intellectual current within the elite; second phase—removal of this social group itself; third phase—mass "dekulakization" of the "best people" (which is to say those who have something which can be stolen).
After the division of the country into the Oprichnina and the Zemshchina, power in the Zemshchina fell into the hands of a stratum of untitled boyars which in a certain sense was sympathetic to the tsar (and sometimes helped directly in the struggle with the "right opposition" and the Government of Compromise). Whatever the attitude of these people to the formerly sovereign princes and to the methods used by the tsar may have been, however, now, when they were actually at the wheel, they must have thought: this is enough! They had already made their revolution. The continuation of the terror became not only meaningless, but also dangerous for them. It must be supposed that it was not without their influence that the seventeenth congress of the party was held in the spring of 1566—the "congress of the victors" (I mean, of course, the Assembly of the Land, which, incidentally, was the most representative in the history of Russia). The delegates to the congress tactfully indicated to the tsar that it was now time to put an end to the Oprichnina. Others, more realistic, conceived a plan for putting up a Kirov (in the shape of Prince Vladimir Staritskii, the tsar's cousin) against Ivan the Terrible. The matter never came to a conspiracy, but conversations were enough for the tsar. The following blow was against this group. "When this stratum became involved in the conflict," Skrynnikov notes, "the transition from limited repressions to mass terror became inevitable."[234]
Terror has its own logic. One after another, the leaders of the Duma of the Zemshchina, the last leaders of boyardom, perished. Next came the turn of the higher bureaucracy. One of the most influential opponents of the Government of Compromise, the Muscovite minister of foreign affairs, the great secretary Viskovatyi, who had undoubtedly lent a hand in the fall of Sil'vestr, was first crucified and then chopped into pieces. The state treasurer Funikov was boiled alive in a kettle. Next came the leaders of the Orthodox hierarchy, then Prince Staritskii himself. And each of these drew after them into the maelstrom of terror wider and wider circles of relatives, sympathizers, acquaintances, and even strangers, with whom the Oprichnina settled accounts. When the senior boyar of the Duma of the Zemshchina, Cheliadnin-Fedorov, laid his head on the block, his servants were hacked to bits with sabers, and all his household members were herded into a barn and blown up. (The Sinodnik carries the notation: "In Upper Bezhitsk, sixty-five people were done away with . . . and twelve people were beheaded with swords.")[235]
I will spare the reader and myself any more, for I am not writing a martyrology of the Oprichnina. Suffice it to note that, just as in the 1930s, the leaders of the Oprichnina apparently did not notice that the circles of terror were coming ever closer to them. Aleksei Basma- nov, that medieval Yezhov, already seemed a dangerous liberal to the favorite of Stalin and Ivan the Terrible, Maliuta Skuratov, who personally strangled Metropolitan Filipp. Prince Afanasii Viazemskii, who had organized the reprisals against Gorbatyi and Obolenskii, was himself already under suspicion when his appointee, Archbishop Pimen, a rabid supporter of the Oprichnina, perished during the sack of Novgorod. "Under conditions of mass terror, universal fear, and denunciations, the apparatus of violence created in the Oprichnina acquired an entirely overwhelming influence on the political structure of the leadership," Skrynnikov relates with horror. "In the final analysis, the infernal machine of terror escaped from the control of its creators. The final victims of the Oprichnina proved to be all of those who had stood at its cradle."[236]
As we see, Skrynnikov knows perfectly well what was happening in Russia during the 1560s. He does not show the slightest desire to justify this horrible rehearsal for Stalin's purges as the "struggle against treason," as Vipper and Polosin had done twenty years before him. And although he notes that in pre-Oprichnina Muscovy, "the monarchy had become the prisoner of the aristocracy,"6i> he does not seem inclined to justify the terror as the "objective inevitability of the physical extermination of the princely and boyar families," as his teacher Smirnov had done. More than this, he does not hide from himself (or from the reader) that, in the first place, "the period of the Oprichnina is marked by a sharp intensification of feudal exploitation," which preconditioned "the final triumph of serfdom." In the second place, he notes, "the pogroms of the Oprichnina, and the indiscriminate bloody terror, brought deep demoralization to the life of the country."[237] And then what?
Working with his eyes open, and having before him the horrifying facts, many of which he himself introduced into scholarly discourse, does he make an attempt to reinterpret the Oprichnina? Unfortunately, once again, as in the case of Zimin, we are doomed to experience a dramatic disappointment. In Skrynnikov's understanding, it turns out, "the Oprichnina terror, the limitation of the competence of the boyar duma . . . unarguably promoted . . . the reinforcement of the centralized monarchy, developing in the direction of absolutism."[238] The sacred invocation has been pronounced. Skrynnikov remains within the limits of the consensus. The "great purge" of Ivan the Terrible, which Skrynnikov described with unexampled power, nevertheless proves to be "historically inevitable and progressive." The king is dead: long live the king! The Marxist-Platonovist hypostasis of the myth, once again advanced by Zimin, is once again refuted—for the sake of a new triumph of its Marxist-Solov'evist hypostasis.
On closer consideration of Skrynnikov's paradigm, we see clear traces of the myth. Zimin had firmly denied "the notorious collision of the boyardom with the service landholders" and rehabilitated the great oppositionists of the sixteenth century. In refuting him, Skrynnikov not only condemns "the treasonous relations of Kurbskii," but gives us to understand that the terror against the aristocracy, "which imprisoned the monarchy," was by no means such a bad thing. The outrageousness began when the terror spread to other social strata, who were objectively the allies of the monarchy in its struggle with the aristocracy. "The Oprichnina terror," he says, "weakened the boyar aristocracy, but it also did great damage to the service landholders, the church, the higher government bureaucracy—that is, to those social forces which served as the most reliable support of the monarchy. From a political point of view, the terror against these strata and groups was complete nonsense."[239]