AFTER THE DEATH OF ANASTASIA a change came over Ivan. Her restraining influence, intelligence, and deep religious faith had served him well and often saved him from disaster. Now she was gone, and there was only an emptiness in his heart. Within ten days of her death he commanded that all mourning should end abruptly and threw himself into a life of dissipation, drunkenness, and revelry.
She died at the wrong time and in the wrong way. He convinced himself that she had been poisoned, that spells had been cast on her, that in some mysterious way the boyars were determined to punish him by doing away with her. Grief, which had struck him so hard, loosened the bonds. Henceforth violence became a way of life; murder was his companion; to see the dead around him was his solace. In his rage he attempted to destroy everything he could lay his hands on—the state, the boyars, his friends. In him power assumed its ultimate form: the power to kill. After the death of Anastasia the story of Ivan is one of unrelieved tragedy. The Tsar as mass murderer entered the stage.
His character seemed to change overnight. The man who had been deeply religious and conscientious in his duties, carefully weighing the advice of his Chosen Council, acting for the most part mildly and judicially, rarely giving way to the cruelty that lay just below the surface, suddenly showed himself to be a harsh and tyrannical voluptuary. He lived riotously, drank heavily, surrounded himself with peculators, murderers, thieves, drunkards, and perverts, criminals who had no difficulty recognizing the latent criminality in him. Violent men urged him to hitherto unimaginable feats of violence. He enjoyed carousing all night, the tables laden with food, with the skomorokhi entertaining him. They were clowns who sometimes wore masks, singers of lewd songs, professional mimes, actors of vaudeville farces, storytellers, buffoons, and jesters, and while they represented an aspect of the degenerate taste of Ivan’s court, they also derived from the ancient pre-Christian Russian culture; and though the Church inveighed against them, the masses adored them.
There were many weaknesses in Ivan. Like many men who appear to be outwardly bold and fearless, he was in fact very timid, easily terrified, likely to strike out at imagined enemies, at the mercy of uncontrollable fears. What he regarded as his greatest strength—his relentless and passionate determination to rid the world of evil—was in fact his greatest weakness, for he saw evil everywhere, and so there grew in him a monstrous appetite for murder. If necessary, he would destroy all Russia to save its soul. He succeeded in reducing Russia to a state of timidity, from which it never completely recovered. For nearly a quarter of a century, all the remaining years of his life, he gave himself up to a reign of violence and terror.
Prince Andrey Kurbsky, who observed him closely, believed that Ivan made a conscious choice between good and evil. “The Tsar came to detest the narrow pathway laden with sorrows which leads to salvation through repentance,” he wrote. “Instead he ran joyfully along the broad highway that leads to Hell. Many times I heard from his own lips—when he was depraved he would say these things in the hearing of all: I must make my choice between this world and the other world! He meant: the broad highway of Satan or the sorrowful pathway of Christ.”
Perhaps it was not quite so simple as that. Perhaps the choice was made for him and was dictated by his ancestors, his character, his upbringing. Within Ivan “this world” and “the other world” were never completely separated. He remained fervently religious and God-fearing even when he was committing atrocious crimes.
Already during the last months of Anastasia’s life we can watch the process of corruption at work. In October 1559, at Mozhaisk, he learned that the Livonians had broken the truce and were advancing on Dorpat under the command of Gottgard Kettler, the Grand Master of the Livonian Order. The truce had been arranged by Alexey Adashev, his chief adviser on foreign affairs. He therefore raged against Adashev and against all those who had supported the policy of peaceful coexistence with Livonia. He felt that he had been outwitted and outmaneuvered, and suspected treachery. He wanted to hurry back to Moscow but the weather was terrible and for several days he was trapped in Mozhaisk like a prisoner. The news of the attack on Dorpat especially depressed him. As soon as the weather cleared, he drove off to Moscow with Anastasia, his family, and the entire court. The snow was on the ground, there was mud and slush everywhere, and progress was slow. To make matters worse Anastasia fell ill during the journey. He was not a man who could resolve two crises simultaneously, and the double blow was almost more than he could take. The Archpriest Sylvester was traveling with him and he appears to have been incensed by the priest’s insistence that all human misfortunes—the war in Livonia, the illness of the Tsaritsa—were God’s punishment for sins. Nor did he feel that Adashev and Sylvester were sufficiently solicitous of Anastasia; they could at least have provided her with medicines, but did nothing.
In this sullen mood, aware that great issues were at stake and that he was powerless to order them, he rode through the angry winter, allowing his own anger to boil up in him. His worries and frustrations precipitated an explosion. There were violent words addressed to Adashev or Sylvester, or both. We do not know exactly what happened, but when Ivan remembered the long exhausting journey he also remembered the “little, unbecoming word” uttered in a moment of rage. Since his little words were likely to be long tirades and since he later regretted having spoken them, it is possible that he deeply offended his former friends. Soon after reaching Moscow, Sylvester asked permission to retire from the scene and went to live at the Kirillov Monastery in Beloozero in the far north. For a few more weeks Adashev remained in charge of foreign affairs, but it was clear that he had lost the Tsar’s confidence. Anastasia was seriously ill, and in his loneliness and misery Ivan “embarked on all sorts of things in an ungodly manner.” These were the words of Prince Kurbsky and leave little doubt that Ivan, while Anastasia was still alive, was beginning to sow his wild oats.
In May 1560, Ivan got rid of Adashev by sending him to Livonia to take charge of one of the armies commanded by Prince Ivan Mstislavsky. This was a punishment, for Adashev had protested vehemently against continuing the Livonian war, preferring to direct the main forces of the Russian army against the Crimean Tatars. Adashev had never previously commanded an army in the field; he had none of the makings of a general but was admirably fitted to preside over the Chosen Council. His friends hoped he would be permitted to return to court, but the death of Anastasia on August 7, 1560, drove Ivan into a madness of grief. In his confused, unbalanced mind he convinced himself that Sylvester and Adashev were the authors of her death. Later he would say they practiced magic spells on her and half the nobility of Russia were in league with them.
There were always sycophants and provocateurs at court, and by the end of the year they were saying both Adashev and Sylvester should be placed on trial for casting spells on Anastasia. When Sylvester and Adashev heard about it, they asked to be allowed to confront their accusers face to face. Ivan refused, assembled a court which consisted of himself, the Metropolitan Makary, and the leading boyars and bishops, and eagerly listened to the two monks, Missail Sukin and Vassian Toporkov, who produced the necessary “evidence.” Makary protested that it was unseemly to hold a trial in which the accused were not allowed to be present, but was drowned out by the voices of those who feared the presence of spellbinders. “They are well-known evil-doers and great sorcerers!” they cried. “They will bewitch the Tsar and destroy us, if they come here!” Adashev and Sylvester were pronounced guilty. Sylvester was ordered to leave the Kirillov Monastery and enter the Solovetsky Monastery, which lies on an island in the White Sea. Adashev was removed from his command and kept under house arrest. Two months later he caught a fever and died. Ivan ordered that his body should be buried in the family tomb in Uglich—a last salute to the man who had served him so well.
In this way, in a period of a few weeks, Ivan lost Anastasia, Adashev, and Sylvester, the three people who in their different ways had dominated his life and restrained him from his worst impulses. In his mind Anastasia was the murdered innocent struck down by evil sorcerers, while Adashev and Sylvester were figures of incarnate evil. Concerning Adashev an early seventeenth century chronicler wrote that when he was in power “there was a great peace and well-being in the land, and also justice.” Prince Kurbsky relates that he was a man of deep piety who “kept scores of sick people in his house, feeding and washing them and many times cleansing their sores with his own hands, and he did all this in secret.” Meanwhile Ivan continued to rage against them, hating them most of all because their strength of character mocked his own weakness.
Henceforward he was determined to live his own life without interference. He would no longer deny himself the pleasures that Sylvester regarded as sinful. He would marry whomever he pleased, surround himself with agreeable flatterers and drinking companions, and conduct himself as though Russia were his private possession. Although as a youth he maintained that it would be disastrous for a Tsar to marry a foreign princess, he chose as his second wife the beautiful and high-spirited Princess Kocheney Temriukovna, the daughter of a Circassian chieftain, Prince Temriuk, who ruled over territories on the slopes of the Caucasus Mountains. The fame of her beauty had already reached Moscow, where two of her brothers were serving at court. Ivan had evidently seen pictures of her, and was properly impressed. She reached Moscow on June 15, 1561, with an immense retinue. Her sister, Princess Altynchach, who was married to the Tatar Prince Bekbulat, accompanied her. The young son of the princess, Prince Sayin, was a member of the retinue. In the course of time this Tatar prince would for a brief period become the Grand Prince of Russia, taking Ivan’s place. Circassians and Tatars flocked to the court.
Ivan was well-pleased with Princess Kocheney when she was presented to him. He ordered that she should be instructed in the dogmas of the Orthodox faith. A month later she was solemnly baptized, taking the name of Maria. In August, just a year after the death of Anastasia, Ivan and Maria were married in the Church of the Annunciation in the Kremlin. Sir Jerome Horsey records that “the manner and solemnity of this marriage was so strange and heathenly as credit will hardly be given to the truth thereof.” Nodoubt he was referring to the wild Circassian entertainments that followed the marriage ceremony.
Many persons at court expressed dismay and displeasure at the marriage of Ivan and Princess Kocheney. They found her willful, strange, with a streak of cruelty in her, preferring Circassians and Tatars to Russians. They suspected rightly that she would be unable to restrain her husband from his excesses and was herself violent to excess. She loved intrigue, attended bearbaiting, and enjoyed watching the public executions on the Red Square from a vantage point high on the Kremlin wall. Boyars who snubbed her did so at their peril. She was well aware of the power that went with her title: Tsaritsa Maria.
Deep down she appears to have feared and despised the Russians, and to have suffered from a corrosive loneliness and melancholy. A popular folk song of the period puts into her mouth the words:
God grant that I should not be here
In the Tsar’s Moscow built of stone,
Nor my children nor my grandchildren,
Not only grandchildren but all my descendants!
But it was not her loneliness so much as her violence that people feared. As the historian Soloviev wrote, “One could see clearly what Ivan would gain by marrying a savage,” but it was more difficult to understand what Russia would gain.
About the same time that he married Princess Kocheney Ivan received another visitor from abroad. This was no less a person than Ioasaf, Metropolitan of Kizikos, who came bearing a gift without price, a document signed by the Patriarch of Constantinople confirming Ivan in his title as Tsar. The Metropolitan was rewarded with costly presents, and Feodorit, the monk who made a special journey to Constantinople to secure this privilege, was offered three hundred silver rubles, a valuable sable coat, and any ecclesiastical distinction he chose. Feodorit smiled, said he had renounced all earthly possessions and honors, and wanted only to be allowed to live out his days in the silence of his cell. Ivan pressed him hard, reminding him that it was disrespectful to refuse the gifts of the Tsar. So Feodorit agreed to accept twenty-five silver rubles and the sable coat, which he sold, giving the money to the poor.
At the end of the year Ivan’s temper, which always grew more violent in winter, became increasingly explosive. What especially enraged him was the discovery that young Prince Ivan Belsky, the nephew of the former Regent bearing the same name, was in secret correspondence with King Sigismund II Augustus and preparing to flee to Lithuania, having already received a safe-conduct signed by the King. Prince Belsky was arrested; two noblemen implicated in the plot were publicly whipped; a musketeer officer, who prepared the escape map, had his tongue torn out. Prince Belsky was in grave danger. Makary pleaded for him, and when the spring came he was released after renewing his oath of allegiance to the Tsar and obtaining bonds from 124 noblemen who pledged to pay vast sums into the Tsar’s treasury if he fled to Lithuania.
Meanwhile Ivan was engaged in a war of nerves with King Sigismund II Augustus. Lithuanian ambassadors came to Moscow, but the negotiations were at a standstill. The Russians had intercepted a letter from the King to the Khan of the Crimea, urging that they should attack Russia simultaneously and offering rich rewards. Ivan was displeased. He possessed an ungovernable hatred for the King and was determined to wreak vengeance. Accordingly he prepared for a massive invasion of Lithuania, set up his headquarters in Mozhaisk, and was about to order the attack when he learned that the Khan of the Crimea was invading Russia from the south. The Khan’s forces were surprisingly small, amounting to no more than fifteen thousand men. Prince Mikhail Vorotynsky was ordered to attack them but failed to engage them after they ran off. Ivan then ordered his arrest. His possessions and vast ancestral estates were confiscated, and he was exiled to Beloozero. Since there was no formal trial, and since he ranked above all Russian princes except those connected by blood to the Tsar, his downfall came as a blow to the nobility. Some Russian historians suspect that his real crime was that he did not show sufficient respect for the Tsaritsa.
In October 1562 another nobleman, Prince Dmitry Kurliatev, who was one of Adashev’s closest collaborators, was also arrested on a charge of treason. Ivan had an experimental attitude toward punishment and ordered him tonsured and sent him to a monastery on an island in Lake Ladoga together with his son. His wife and two daughters were ordered into a nunnery. Later the entire family was strangled. Ivan’s resentment against Prince Kurliatev was expressed in a letter written to Prince Kurbsky in 1577. “And Kurliatev—why was he better than me? For his daughters all sorts of adornments were bought—well and good! But for my daughters—rejection and funerals!” Ivan lost two of his daughters by Anastasia in infancy and he was always blaming others for their deaths.
By November 1562 Ivan had received information that led him to believe that a winter campaign against Lithuania might be successful. On the last day of the month he prayed for victory before the Icon of the Virgin of Vladimir in the Uspensky Cathedral, and soon he was marching off once more to Mozhaisk at the head of his army. The staging point for the invasion of Lithuania was Veliki Luki, which he reached early in January 1563. The aim was to capture Polotsk, once an important town in Kievan Russia. The journey through dense forests was slow and difficult; some columns were lost; others blundered about in the darkness; supply trains were in the wrong places. Ivan did his best to bring order to the confusion. At the border fortress of Nevel, on January 19, 1563, where he rested for a day, Ivan for the first time killed someone with his own hands. Tired and irritated by the difficulties of the long march in the dead of winter, he fell into an argument with Prince Ivan Shakhovskoy and struck him with a mace. The wound was fatal.
Polotsk, defended by 500 Polish soldiers and some foreign mercenaries, fell to the Russians without much difficulty. The easy victory pleased Ivan, who made a triumphal entry into the town and visited all the Orthodox churches to pray before the icons, saying, according to the chroniclers, “Thou hast shown unto me, thy unworthy servant, thy mercy and thou hast given me this city without bloodshed. And what shall I give thee in return, O Lord?” It was not, of course, a question he intended to pursue at any length. The gold and silver vessels and all the valuables of Polotsk were shipped to Moscow. The Polish soldiers who had defended the city so ignominiously were given presents and allowed to leave under safe-conduct.
Ivan was in an affable and triumphant mood as he returned to Moscow by slow stages. Polotsk had satisfied, at least temporarily, his lust for conquest. The announcement that the Tsaritsa Maria had given birth to a son also pleased him. But at Veliki Luki he quarreled violently with Prince Andrey Kurbsky, who was lucky enough to escape with a reprimand and exile in Livonia—Ivan accused him of taking morbid offense over “a small single angry word.” Ivan had a vile tongue, and his small single ugly words were likely to be screaming insults.
When Ivan was a day’s march from Veliki Luki, on March 5, 1563, a messenger arrived from Mikhail Morozov, the governor of Smolensk. The messenger reported that the Russian commanders of Starodub were about to surrender the city to the Lithuanians. The news was almost certainly untrue, but Ivan became wildly excited. One of the commanders of Starodub was Ivan Shishkin, a close relative of Alexey Adashev. Obviously Shishkin was a traitor; just as obviously the entire Adashev family was tainted with treachery and sorcery. Ivan Shishkin, together with his wife and children, were executed. The matter did not end there. One by one Ivan rounded up all other relatives of Alexey Adashev and executed them. Daniel Adashev, Alexey’s brother, the hero of the 1559 invasion of the Crimea, was among those killed, and his young son was killed with him. Altogether sixteen members of the Adashev family were put to death in a display of malicious fury unexampled in Russia until this time.
Another family to feel the weight of the Tsar’s displeasure was the Sheremetevs. Nikita and Ivan Sheremetev were both members of the Boyar Council, rich, powerful, and well-liked. Both held high military rank, and Nikita bore the scars of many wounds. They belonged to the faction that insisted that the Tsar should make war with the Tatars, not with the Lithuanians and Livonians, and it was clearly for this reason that the Tsar decided to punish them. Ivan Sheremetev’s punishment was graphically described by Prince Kurbsky in his History of the Grand Prince of Moscow:
His torture chamber was a terribly cramped cell with a rough earth floor; heavy chains were fastened round his neck and his arms and legs, while a thick iron hoop girdled his loins with ten weights of iron hanging from it. The Tsar came to talk to him while he lay prostrate on the rough floor, wearing his heavy chains, half-alive and scarcely breathing. Among other questions the Tsar interrogated him in the following way.
“Where are your many treasures?” he asked. “Tell me, for I know you are very rich. Nevertheless I have failed to find in your treasure house what I expected to find.”
“They lie hidden where no one can find them.”
“You must tell me. Otherwise I shall add torture to torture.”
“Do as you wish. I am near the end of my journey.”
“I insist that you tell me about your treasure.”
“I have already told you that even if I told you where they were, you would not be able to make use of them. The hands of the poor and the needy have removed them to the heavenly treasure house, to my Christ.”
According to Prince Kurbsky the Tsar was sufficiently impressed by the brave words of Ivan Sheremetev to order the heavy chains removed. He was eventually released from prison and became a monk. His brother was strangled.
The Sheremetevs had long been a thorn in Ivan’s side: like Adashev and Sylvester they represented the Russian humanistic tradition, reasonableness, sobriety, a deep awareness of the Tatar menace. Gleefully Ivan reported to the Khan of the Crimea: “Adashev, Sylvester, and Sheremetev, all those who have been creating troubles between the Tsar and the Khan, have fallen into disgrace.” He was sacrificing Russians to be in the good graces of the Crimean Khan.
It was a year of many deaths, many executions. Three deaths moved Ivan deeply. The Tsarevich Vasily, his son by the Tsaritsa Maria, died on May 4, 1563, aged just over two months. On November 24 the Tsar’s brother Yury died at the age of thirty-one. Yury was quiet, uncomplaining, and simpleminded, but there was a deep bond of affection between the brothers. Ivan took care that his brother should appear at all the ceremonies in the Kremlin, magnificently robed, receiving the honors due to the younger brother of the Tsar. The death of a brother can be a shattering thing, and it is possible that Ivan was as shattered by the death of Yury as by the death of Anastasia.
Finally on the last day of the year the Metropolitan Makary died, a weak but kindly man, scholarly and possessed of genuine piety. For twenty-one years he had ruled the Russian Church with gentle austerity. If he bowed too often to Ivan’s will, he nevertheless took pains to plead for mercy. Under his rule important reforms were carried out, and they were embodied in the Stoglav, or Hundred Chapters. He edited and wrote a part of the Minei Chetii, a compilation of the lives of the Russian saints, a voluminous work with readings for every day of the year. With his death a chapter of the history of the Russian Church came to an end. In his lengthy testament, which was read out during the funeral service held in the Cathedral of the Annunciation, he forgave everyone and asked forgiveness from everyone, and he spoke of how, weighed down by sorrows, he had hoped to be permitted to lay down the burdens of his office and retire to the peace of a monastery, but the Tsar and the Church hierarchy always prevailed on him to remain.
If Ivan had possessed the leisure to take stock of this unhappy year, he would have found much that was pleasurable. There had been no battles after Polotsk. There were some skirmishes on the borders, many embassies flocked to Moscow, his relations with the Khan of the Crimea improved considerably, and the Lithuanians were unusually quiet. He had been on many pilgrimages and worshipped at many shrines. God had blessed him with a mild winter. Early in December there was a warm spell and the ice melted on the rivers.
There was another matter which gave him unrelieved pleasure. A certain Savliuk Ivanov, one of the secretaries of Prince Vladimir of Staritsa, had been thrown into prison. From his prison cell he smuggled out a letter accusing Prince Vladimir of abominable crimes. Ivan treated the letter with the importance it deserved, sent his agents to Staritsa, cross-examined witnesses, drew up an impressive bill of particulars, and finally confronted the Prince in the presence of the Metropolitan Makary and high ecclesiastical officials with his crimes. Since he regarded Vladimir of Staritsa as a potential claimant to his throne, this was an eminently satisfactory procedure. Vladimir confessed, or at least he realized the futility of defending himself. Ivan then forgave him on condition that his entire court was transferred to Moscow and a new set of courtiers was chosen for him. Princess Efrosinia, Vladimir’s mother, was ordered to take the veil and sent to a nunnery at Beloozero.
Albert Shlichting, who learned Russian and served as an interpreter to Ivan’s Belgian doctor, Arnold Lenzey, believed that the easy victory at Polotsk had an unsettling effect on Ivan. He thought Polotsk was the turning point. “After the capture of Polotsk,” Shlichting wrote, “the tyrant became arrogant with success and began to plan how to destroy his councillors, especially those who were distinguished by an ancient and illustrious lineage.” Shlichting thought Ivan “lost his reason by virtue of his pride,” the pride of a great military commander who conquers towns and cities by his mere presence. But it was more likely that the turning point came earlier with the death of Anastasia. The murder of Prince Ivan Shakhovskoy and the victory at Polotsk only reinforced his delighted awareness of his power over people’s lives. Henceforth he killed his real and imagined enemies whenever he pleased, safe in the knowledge that no one would ever punish him. He became the pure tyrant, divested of all human sympathy, rejoicing in his ferocity, capable of acts of such obscene violence that they took the breath away and left people stunned and helpless; and it would be to underestimate his intelligence to suggest that he did not know the effect of his crimes. He knew very well what he was doing. He was ruling by terror, and terror is always effective.
Nevertheless there was some truth in Shlichting’s contention. A military victory, even such an easy victory as Ivan gained at Polotsk, can corrode the mind of the conqueror with the knowledge that he is the supreme arbiter over the lives of all the people he has conquered. In fact, Ivan permitted all the Polish defenders to leave and offered them safe-conducts, thus publicly presenting himself as a man of mercy. But this act of mercy was designed to impress the Poles with his benign intentions toward them; he had no need to show acts of mercy to the Russians.
In his drunken rages Ivan was becoming increasingly murderous. Blood flowed at his drinking parties, which often lasted through the night. One day a certain courtier called Molchan Mitkov was commanded to drink from a huge bowl of mead. He had already drunk more than enough, and now in a loud voice he heard himself saying: “Accursed one, you force us to drink mead mixed with the blood of our brothers, the Orthodox Christians!” Ivan was so enraged that he transfixed the man with the iron point of his staff and then ordered him to be dragged out of sight and put to death.
On another occasion Ivan was carousing with his drinking companions. The skomorokhi, the masked clowns, were also present. The Tsar, who was drinking heavily, put on a mask and began dancing with the skomorokhi, and all joined him except Prince Mikhail Repnin who was outraged at the sight of Ivan cavorting like a madman. He was so distressed that he began to weep and said through his tears, “Christian Tsar, it is unbecoming of you to do such things!” The Tsar, who liked Prince Repnin and wanted to be friends with him, urged him to do what all the others were doing. “Be of good cheer and play with us!” he commanded, and placed a mask over Prince Repnin’s face. The Prince took the mask, flung it to the floor, and trampled on it, saying, “May I never perform such indecorous and insane acts.” The Tsar was enraged and ordered him out of the room.
It was winter, a few days after the death of the Metropolitan Makary, and bad news had just come from the Lithuanian front, where fighting had broken out again. An army under Prince Peter Shuisky had been savagely mauled by the army of Christopher Radziwill. In his anger the Tsar began to cast about for a victim, and he settled on Prince Repnin. The Metropolitan was dead, no new Metropolitan had been appointed, the Tsar did not have to answer for any crimes before the ecclesiastical authorities. He gave orders that Prince Repnin should be killed while attending an all-night vigil in church. “He was killed,” wrote Prince Kurbsky, “during the reading of the Gospel, while he was standing near the altar like an innocent lamb of God.”
On the same day the Tsar ordered the death of Prince Yury Kashin, who was struck down as he entered the church. What crime he had committed is unknown.
When Prince Andrey Kurbsky wrote the first of his five long letters to the Tsar protesting against the endless murders and persecutions ordered and instigated by him, he had these two murders particularly in mind. “Why,” he asked, “have you spilt their holy blood in God’s churches and stained the thresholds with the blood of martyrs?”
Prince Kurbsky’s letters and Ivan’s two lengthy replies are among the most amazing documents of the age. They both wrote with vehemence, with raging tempers, in a style that reproduces the sound of clanging metal. Kurbsky accuses Ivan of committing abominable crimes against God and man, and Ivan answers that he is absolute Tsar ruling by divine right with the God-given power to root out evil wherever he sees it. Kurbsky keeps asking what devilish impulse has led to so much murder and concludes that Ivan must himself be Antichrist. Ivan answers that he is the only true believer, the one man who stands between Russia and Satan, more God-fearing than any of his subjects. To Kurbsky, who was once his friend, Ivan opens out his heart to display all the griefs and sorrows written on it, his miserable childhood, the treachery of his advisers, the threats on his life, the murder of his uncle Prince Yury Glinsky, the dreadful rumors spread about his grandmother, Princess Anna Glinskaya; and as he recounts these episodes in passionate detail, he commends himself for his steadfastness, his sobriety, his fearful faith in God’s justice. He is innocent, this above all, and to deny his innocence is to show oneself a traitor. He protests too much, screams too loudly, and denounces his enemies so violently that it becomes obvious that he is a man of uncontrollable brutality and ferocity. Again and again Prince Kurbsky asks, “Why did you kill?” and there is no answer.
Kurbsky did not of course write his letters from Russian soil. He would have been tortured to death very slowly if Ivan could have laid hands on him. Fearing that he was about to be arrested, he fled on the night of April 30, 1564, from Dorpat in Russian Livonia to Volmar which was under the control of Lithuania. The decision to flee was taken quite suddenly, although he had been contemplating it for some time and already possessed a safe-conduct from King Sigismund II Augustus. He asked his wife which she preferred: to see him dead at her feet or to lose him for ever. She answered that his life was more important to her than her own happiness, and then he bade her farewell, blessed his nine-year-old son, and slipped out of the house, abandoning all his possessions, his books, his manuscripts, and even his suit of armor. A servant was waiting for him outside the city wall with two horses. At the last moment twelve noblemen from his court—he had been governor of Dorpat and lived in great state—joined him in his flight. They rode through the night as fast as their horses could carry them, and at Volmar they were received with open arms.
On that same day Ivan had taken part in a curious ceremony. The virtuous Yuliana, the widow of his brother Yury, had decided to accept the fate reserved for nearly all widowed princesses: she became a nun. Fulfilling the vow she made at the death of her husband she made the journey from the Kremlin to the Novodevichy Nunnery on foot, followed by the Tsar, the Tsaritsa Maria, Prince Vladimir of Staritsa, and a host of people who adored her, and did not want to see her vanish into the silence of a nunnery. The long procession wound its way silently through the streets of Moscow. Ivan demanded that in the nunnery she should be given every luxury. She wanted to live alone in a bare cell; he filled it with furniture and insisted that she should be provided with ladies-in-waiting, and granted her vast estates for her upkeep. Princess Yuliana, now known as the nun Alexandra, humbly submitted to the will of the Tsar.
Prince Andrey Kurbsky had not the least inclination to play the role of the humble spectator. Aroused to fury by the thought that Ivan had ordered his arrest and by the anarchy that prevailed in Russia, he wrote his first accusing letter in a seething rage, addressing it to “the Tsar, exalted above all by God, who appeared once to be most illustrious, especially in observance of the Orthodox Faith, but now as a consequence of our sins has been found to be the direct opposite.” Having written the letter, Kurbsky sent it to the Tsar by his loyal servant Vasily Shibanov. We learn from a seventeenth-century chronicler that the Tsar glanced at it, realized that it was a deliberate attack on him, bade Vasily Shibanov come closer, and then pierced the servant’s foot with the sharp point of his staff. Leaning heavily on the staff, he ordered the letter read aloud. The story may be true, for in another letter to Kurbsky the Tsar goes out of his way to praise the courage of Vasily Shibanov.
Kurbsky was well-equipped to engage the Tsar in argument. He was intelligent, well-read, courageous. He had distinguished himself at the battle of Kazan and at many other battles. His lineage was impeccable, for he descended from the Princes of Yaroslavl and was related through his grandmother to the family of Anastasia. Tall, swarthy, with gray eyes, diffident only in the presence of scholars and priests—among his closest friends was the great theologian known as Maxim the Greek—he belonged to the rare group of Russian princes who were also humanists. He translated the works of John Chrysostom, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzen, Nil Cabasilas, Nicephorus Callistus, and many other Greek theologians into Church Slavonic, and he was so intrigued by the Paradoxiof Cicero that he set himself to learn Latin in order to translate them. He was a Renaissance man who turned easily from the study of weapons and fortifications to the study of philosophy and theology.
The exchange of letters between Kurbsky and the Tsar has become part of Russian history. For the first time we witness a head-on collision between autocracy and freedom. The autocrat presents himself as little less than divine while the man who loves freedom or at least wants more freedom than autocracy can provide asks why this particular autocrat should be in league with the devil, accomplishing devilish things. Ivan answers sometimes blandly, sometimes cunningly, and always menacingly—his crowns were given to him by God, he is free to reward and punish his servants as he pleases, no limit has been set to his earthly powers. What Kurbsky calls insane killing is merely just retribution; no one has been killed who did not deserve it a thousandfold. King David killed, but was found pleasing to God. Constantine the Great killed his own son, but what emperor was greater? “It is always proper for Tsars to be perspicacious—now very gentle, now fierce—mercy and gentle dealing for the good, ferocity and torture for the evil.” He depicts himself as one who stands in perpetual judgment. In a breathtaking passage he pronounces judgment on Prince Kurbsky: “If thou considerest thyself just and faithful to the Tsar, so why didst thou not accept sufferings and the crown of death from us, who are thy wicked master?”
Kurbsky accuses Ivan of having “a leprous conscience,” of a fierce addiction to sin, of surrounding himself with lewd and debased flatterers, and of committing heinous murders. Ivan tends to brush the murders aside. “As for ‘blood in churches’—we have spilt none,” he writes, dismissing two murders with a wave of his hand. Kurbsky accuses him of overweening pride, the sin by which the angels fell, and Ivan replies calmly from the heights of his superb arrogance:
I boast not in my pride, and indeed I have no need for pride, for I perform my royal task and place no man higher than myself. It is rather you who puff yourselves up with pride, for being servants you usurp the royal and ecclesiastical dignity: teaching, forbidding, commanding.
It was a neat disclaimer, but not completely convincing. Ivan claimed that the boyars were always attempting to take power by transforming the government into a debating society with the debaters teaching him how to do his job. He thanks God that the days are over when he permitted others to do his own thinking for him. Accepting his premise that he has received his power from God, the argument he presents is unanswerable except on the one point that Kurbsky continually presses home: how can it be that God, through Ivan, should commit so many crimes and associate Himself with so many despicable villains?
Both Kurbsky and Ivan quote the Scriptures to bolster their arguments; they have a priestly cast of mind, a priestly dogmatism. Ivan had read widely in the Fathers of the Eastern Church, and quotes at length from the letter to the monk Demophilus written by Dionysius the Areopagite. In the letter Dionysius tells the story of Carpus of Crete, who learned that a pagan had entered a church and converted a Christian to paganism. The matter deeply disturbed Carpus. At night in his prayers he begged God utterly to destroy these two sinners, and at that moment the house where he was praying split in two and he saw a vast abyss opening below him with the two sinners clinging to the edge, trembling with terror. Serpents crept out of the abyss, twining round their feet and attempting to pull them down into the darkness below. Men came out of nowhere and rained blows on the heads of the sinners, hoping they would fall into the abyss. Carpus watches all this, supremely content because the sinners are being punished. But Christ steps down from the heavens, stretches his hand toward the sinners and bids the angels lift them up, and then turns to Carpus, saying: “Now lift your hand and strike Me, for I am ready again to suffer for the salvation of men. Which do you prefer, to be cast down into the abyss or to live with God and the kindly angels?”
The story of Carpus is worthy to rank with Dostoyevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor.” It is something seen in a vision, in a lightning flash. Ivan quotes the story accurately and then tells it all over again in his own words, unable to resist the temptation to improvise on the theme. In this second version the men are tied with ropes and forcibly dragged into the abyss, Christ is seated on the shoulders of the Cherubim, and as he turns to Carpus, he says: “If it is sweet to thee, Carpus, strike Me, for heretofore I offered my shoulders so that I might suffer wounds and bring all men to repentance.” Then Ivan comments: “If the Lord of the Angels did not hearken to such a just and holy man, who justly prayed for the destruction of sinners, how much less will he hearken unto you, you stinking dog and evil unjust traitor, who desires only evil!”
In this way Kurbsky is rebuked, but Ivan has demonstrated that he is impervious to earthly mercy and has no understanding of the mercy of Christ. For his part Kurbsky is more generous, for he pleads and prays that Ivan will see the error of his ways. “Why do you not join the side of God and the angels who love mankind?” he asks in his last letter; and following John Chrysostom, he suggests that Ivan would do well to give himself up to tearful penitence, the divine antidote.
The Tsar remained impenitent; the murders continued; even more terrible murders were being contemplated.
Prince Kurbsky lived out the remainder of his life in Livonia. He had hoped the Tsar would spare his family, but his mother, wife, and son were thrown into prison. King Sigismund II Augustus loaded him with properties and estates and he received a new title: he became Prince of Kowel. Sometimes he fought with the Lithuanian army against the Russians but the days when he could cover himself with military glory were over; he fought well but without great distinction. He continued to write and translate, completing his History of the Grand Prince of Moscow, which is a prime source for the reign of Ivan, studied languages, corresponded with friends, and when he learned that his wife had died, he married again. His new wife was a certain Princess Golshansky, rich, well-connected, and influential. For five years they lived happily together, and then, fearing that death was approaching, she wrote a will bequeathing all her property to her husband. She recovered; her children by a former marriage learned about the will; there were family quarrels; Kurbsky took to his bed. While he was ill, the princess had an affair with a steward. Kurbsky found three witnesses who would attest to her infidelity and obtained a divorce. In 1579 he married again, this time to a much younger woman, who gave him a son and a daughter. He died in May 1583 after a short illness. He was about fifty-five years old.
In 1564, when Kurbsky fled to Lithuania, the Tsar was thirty-four years old and in the fullness of his power. He was still an impressive figure with his bright eyes, his rippling beard, his broad shoulders and barrel chest, but already his hair was thinning out, deep wrinkles were forming on his forehead, and the once handsome features had grown coarse. Drinking and self-indulgence were destroying him. Yet he still commanded the gestures of kingship, knew how to play his role, and inspired respect and fear. Crowned and sitting on his throne, robed in cloth of gold, he was a formidable presence.
One day in the summer of 1564 he invited Prince Dmitry Ovchina-Obolensky to a banquet, commanded him to drink a huge bowl of mead to the last drop, thus demonstrating how dearly he held the health and well-being of his lord, and watched closely while the prince struggled to perform the task entrusted to him. And when the prince, having successfully drunk half of the bowl, showed that he was incapable of drinking any more, the Tsar in his most caressing voice suggested that there was an effective medicine for people who were not too well disposed toward him. “Go to the wine cellar and drink anything you choose and as much as you want,” he said. The prince then made his way to the cellar, where the Tsar’s dog-keepers were waiting for him with a rope. They strangled him. His crime was that he had offended Fyodor Basmanov, the Tsar’s favorite, with the words: “We serve the Tsar with useful labor; you serve him with sodomy.”
A new Metropolitan had been appointed in the spring of 1564 several months after the death of Makary. This was Andrey Protopopov, who had been Ivan’s confessor and took the name of Afanasy. The new Metropolitan and the boyars were deeply disturbed by these senseless acts of cruelty. Courageously the Metropolitan reminded the Tsar that it was unbecoming of a Christian ruler to destroy people as though they were cattle. For the shedding of innocent blood God punishes even unto the third generation. Shamed by the Metropolitan’s words, and offering no justification for his crimes, the Tsar gave hope that he would correct his ways. For six months he committed no more murders.
This was the private Ivan; the public man continued to be on display. We have a glimpse of him in the memoirs of Rafaello Barberini, an Italian merchant of Antwerp, who visited Moscow in November 1564 to represent the interests of the Italian merchants of Flanders. He came with excellent credentials, being armed with letters of introduction from both King Philip II of Spain and Queen Elizabeth of England. Ivan gave him the seat of honor just below the throne. “The Tsar,” Barberini wrote, “wore a gold crown studded with jewels, a rich black sable cape hung from his shoulders, and beneath it he wore a long robe of cloth of gold decked with pearls, falling all the way to his feet and fastened with gold buttons as large as small eggs. His tan leather boots had long points and were studded with tiny silver nails. In one hand he held a gilded silver staff like a bishop’s crook.”
Barberini witnessed the ceremonial procession which took place when the Tsar swept out of the room to change his clothes, always followed by young ax bearers who perhaps represented a link with the splendors of imperial Rome. He observed that the axes were made of gold and silver, and the ax bearers were all younger members of noble families, tall and robust, dressed in silver cloth with silver buttons and ermine linings, and they wore white velvet hats sprinkled with pearls and silver. They were suitably impressive.
He was less impressed by the continual toasting of the Tsar’s health, for there were so many toasts and at each toast it was necessary to stand up and bow to the Tsar and this seriously interfered with his supper. In November there were only five hours of daylight and it was already dark when they sat down to eat by the light of tallow candles stuck in brass candlesticks. Some tables were high, some low, and this somehow added to the general air of confusion. Servants were rushing about, the Tsar was continually making the sign of the Cross, ambassadors were being led up to receive goblets of wine from his hands, and suddenly, quite unexpectedly, it was all over, for the Tsar had given the signal bringing the feast to an end. “Then the ambassadors, and I with them, were rudely chased out of the room,” Barberini wrote. “We were rushed out as hurriedly as the Scribes and the Pharisees from the temple. Passing through unlit rooms, mingling with drunken and rowdy crowds, we came to the palace stairs. Some sixty feet away the grooms with their horses were waiting to take their masters home, but between the stairs and the horses lay a sea of mud that came up to our knees. It was a dark night, there were no lights, and we had a long way to go.”