In the failure of rational explanations of the Oprichnina, historians now focus on Ivan himself, positing a range of irrational motivations, for example, that Ivan was paranoid and fearful ofboyar disloyalty in a time ofwar; indeed several grandees did try to flee the realm (although plans to depose Ivan cannot be firmly identified). Some, such as Richard Hellie, argue he was insane, while others interpret his violence as inspired by a messianistic image of himself as inflicting "sacred violence" in an era of apocalyptic expectation. The latter argument would seem to rationalize his behavior in a millenarian time. But the theory of "sacred violence" evoked by these authors does not fit the model established by scholars such as Rene Girard and
Giorgio Agamben. They have theorized that "sacred violence" is the exclusive right of sovereigns (or sovereign states) to wield violence even unto death to maintain or restore social stability. In other words, sovereign authority uses violence in a ritualized or regularized manner—regular rituals of sacrifice, just war, capital punishment in the criminal justice system. But Ivan's violence was outside of the norm, arbitrary, short-lived, and fundamentally destabilizing. "Sacred violence" as theory does not apply here. An intriguing insight into Ivan's life was provided by inspection of his skeleton in the 1960s; Ivan was found to have suffered from a painful disease of the spine and to have taken mercury, traces of which were evident in the bones. Mercury is intoxicating and harmful, causing brain damage. Ivan's body was malformed; he probably limped. Whether the mercury affected him, whether one can draw a causal connection between his pain and suffering and the Oprichnina, has been hotly debated, but this evidence certainly complicates our understanding of his complex behavior. Irrationality of some sort is the best solution to the puzzle of Ivan's terribleness, but no analytical framework has yet satisfactorily explained the tremendous violence, destruction, and futility of the Oprichnina years.
A few points might be made in conclusion about Russia's imperial imaginary and its relationship to politics on the ground. First of all, Muscovy's ideal image of politics embodied in art, ritual, architecture, and political practice did not envision politics as institutions, but as practices and relationships between ruler and people and ruler and elite. The ruler's power was envisioned as unlimited in theory, like that of a father in a family, but moderated in practice. Like a patriarchal father figure, the ruler was to be stern but fair, merciful and forgiving, constrained by piety and Christian kindness. He led his people to salvation by his own pious example. He dispensed "politics" as personal favor and mercy. Not institutions but practices of liturgy, ceremony, and advice taking kept the ruler on the righteous path and the political system in balance.
Second, the intrinsic flexibility of this ideology allowed it to serve all the ruler's varied subjects. He provided justice, order, and providential blessing upon his people and his realm. Within that umbrella, political practices were shaped to fit the varied circumstances of empire, in a way that Jane Burbank has called an "imperial regime of rights." All groups in society could claim the autocrat's protection and benevolence, but each group's "rights" were defined differently, according to religion, ethnicity, and class. The presumption that the ruler would accommodate his people, in the affinitive groups to which they belonged, enacted the ideology of patrimonial, pious ruler.
Third, political reality was hardly as serene and harmonious as this ideal, but the ideal corresponded to the real and shaped it. The political world was organized around clans, marriage, kinship, and clientage. Elite families were well taken care of (land, serfs, gifts, status) and did not need (or have a vocabulary with which) to seek legal guarantees of rights or institutions. We see in practice a taboo of killing the ruler (no assassination attempts in Russian history until Peter I), since the elite rightly feared competition among themselves, which indeed turned bloody and destabilizing in the few moments when the stabilizing center was vulnerable (the minorities of Ivan IV and Ioann and Peter Alekseevichi) or disappeared (1598). Consensus and cooperation maintained the system that gave them access to benefits, so boyars strove for a united front. Rulers and elites understood the mandate to take advice, and the political world provided for it, with an empire- wide court system ready to accept petitions from even the lowliest subject; rulers, hierarchs, and boyars participated in personal advice-giving councils in sizes from the intimate group of the tsar and his boyar in-laws, or all the boyars, or boyars and hierarchs, or large public assemblies. Boyars and rulers might not have been personally pious, but they readily participated in religious rituals that demonstrated legitimacy in this God-appointed ideology. Political life acted out and was structured by an ideology ofthe state as "Godly community," to quote Daniel Rowland. What resulted was an affinitive, personal political system based on kinship and connection, very stable and enduring over time.
Finally, a word about "despotism." Since the sixteenth century when European travelers applied this Aristotelian category to Russia, it is a cliche that has been repeated about Russia, gaining renewed currency during the Cold War of the last century. But the power of the Muscovite tsar was hardly unlimited. Even though grand princes and tsars claimed to own all land patrimonially, the power of the state in daily practice was limited by the imperial imaginary. As self-styled Orthodox rulers, Muscovy's tsars were required to be pious, to patronize the faith and defend the realm, to provide justice and perhaps most importantly to protect their people from evil. It was this expectation, in the absence of constitutional guarantees of the right to resist, that created justifications for the populace to turn against a ruler until he fulfilled his duty. Rarely did Muscovite rulers behave unilaterally and despotically; that is why Ivan the Terrible's excesses were so shocking. Even as they wielded coercion to mobilize the people and resources of the empire, and even as they used those resources for the benefit of a narrow elite, Muscovite rulers fulfilled the expectations of their roles, not only in symbolically carrying out rituals but pragmatically in providing justice and order. Such equilibrium between expansive theoretical claims of power and pragmatic limitations of political practice was the same for Russia's early modern neighbors who have also been labeled despotic by European observers. Regarding Ming China, Timothy Brook noted that a Chinese emperor's power was limited by centuries of codified law and bureaucracy, while Camal Kafadar enumerated the wide array of expectations (that sultans be pious, just, merciful) that limited Osmanli power in its founding centuries. Theories of legitimacy prescribed roles that rulers had to act on and limits that bound them in order to create legitimacy. Legitimacy, however, did not require timidity. Muscovy's imperial imaginary by no means prevented Muscovite tsars from using forceful policies to reach their goals of conquest, control, and mobilization of resources. They conquered, they bound populations to the land and moved others en masse, they created empire-wide institutions. From the power of an abstract imaginary we turn to the power of the knout, the army, and the bureaucracy.
Comparative perspectives: Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2010); Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). On Ottoman succession and political symbolism: Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Gulru Necipoglu, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (New York: Architectural History Foundation, 1991). For theoretical perspectives by Jane Burbank, Fred Cooper, and Karen Barkey: see Introduction. On the trope of despotism in Russia: Marshall Poe, "A People Born to Slavery": Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476—1748 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). On dynastic promotion in history and art by the sixteenth-century Tudors: F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1967); Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Daniel Woolf, "From Hystories to the Historicaclass="underline" Five Transitions in Thinking about the Past, 1500-1700," in Paulina Kewes, ed., The Uses of History in Early Modern England (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 2006), 31-67 and his The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1990). On Osmanli dynastic promotion and portraiture: Esin Atil, SU.leymanname: The Illustrated History of SUleyman the Magnificent (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1986); H. Erdem Cipa and Emine Fetvaci, eds., Writing History at the Ottoman Court: Editing the Past, Fashioning the Future (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 100-28; Emine Fetvaci, Picturing History at the Ottoman Court (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013); Baki Tezcan, "Ottoman Historical Writing," in Andrew Feldherr and Grant Hardy, eds., The Oxford History of Historical Writing, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011-12), Vol. 3 (2012): 192-211; Selmin Kangal, ed., The Sultan's Portrait: Picturing the House of Osman (Istanbuclass="underline" Ijbank, 2000), 22-61. On early construction of Muscovite ideology: Donald G. Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304—1589 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Gustave Alef, "The Adoption of the Muscovite Two-Headed Eagle: A Discordant View," Speculum 41 (1966): 1-21; Nancy S. Kollmann, "The Cap of Monomakh," in Valerie A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger, eds., Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 38-41 and Illus. 7.1. A translation of the "Tale of the Princes of Vladimir": J. V. Haney, "Moscow: Second Constantinople, Third Rome or Second Kiev? The Tale of the Princes of Vladimir," Canadian Slavic Studies 3 (1968): 354-67. On boyar genealogies, see my Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System, 1345-1547 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987); Sergei Bogatyrev, "Ivan the Terrible Discovers the West: The Cultural Transformation of Autocracy during the Early Northern Wars," Russian History 34, nos. 1-4 (2007): 161-88.