Ivan the Terrible, page 11
Soviet historians have spilled much ink in the attempt to link this popular revolt with specific individual boyars or social groups, such as the service gentry rising against the misrule of the boyars and the neglect of their own landed interests, notably the abuse of justice when they were forced to go before boyar courts in the provinces; or the people as a whole rising against the service gentry in defence of their class interests. Present-day historians have discarded these interpretations as farfetched and consider the outbreak of violence as a straightforward primitive revolt inflamed by the catastrophe of the fire and by tales of witchcraft, a revolt which had but little effect on the balance of power at court between the aristocratic boyars and the service gentry and did not in any way reflect a conflict of interest between those, namely the boyars, assumed to favour ‘reactionary’ decentralization and the service gentry, assumed to favour centralization and the ‘progressive’ strengthening of the absolute power of the Tsar. But it provided an opportunity for a fresh round of the conflict between the boyar and princely clans over the division of power around the throne, regardless of policy.
There remains the question of the impact of these events on the young Ivan. He had been faced with the frightening spectacle of popular clamour for his grandmother to be delivered to the mob, and of the murder of his uncle at the hands of an incensed crowd, as well as popular disregard of his authority. Historians of Peter I have often remarked on the psychological effect on the ten-year-old Peter of the horrible death of the elder statesman, A.S. Matveev in 1682 at the hands of the strel'tsy (musketeers) in Moscow, and the possibility that this may have left him with the tic to which he was always subject and inured him to spectacles of cruelty. Ivan IV had already shown himself unbalanced and cruel in his relations with human beings. He had now experienced fear, and probably also outrage at the sense of his powerlessness when faced with a howling horde which, he probably suspected, was being directed against him by a hidden hand. This episode may well, in his case, have fostered an incipient paranoia. In an address to a meeting of the Church Council four years later, in 1551, Ivan remembered these events and described his own reaction to the threatening multitude: ‘and fear entered into my soul and trembling into my bones’.9
In his letter to Prince A.M. Kurbsky dated 1564, seventeen years later, Ivan describes these events in burning language, blowing them up into a suspected attack on his own life in order to force him to hand over his grandmother.10 At any rate the rising spelt the end of the power of the Glinskys. The remaining brother, Mikhail Vasil'evich, attempted to flee to Lithuania, was intercepted, arrested and then forgiven, but he lost the post of Master of the Horse, which he had briefly held. The winners in the struggle for power were the non-princely relatives of the Tsaritsa Anastasia, the Yur'ev-Zakhar'in Romanov clan, two of whom were promoted, Danila Romanovich, her brother, to the rank of boyar, and her cousin, Vasily Mikhailovich, to the rank of okol'nichi.
One cannot do better than turn to the description given by the historian Karamzin of the ensuing events, for he imparts to them an atmosphere of drama which brings out their flavour:
In these dreadful times … there appeared a certain remarkable man by name Sylvester, by rank a priest, by origin from Novgorod; he approached Ivan with a raised and menacing finger and the appearance of a prophet and in a convincing voice told him that the judgment of God was thundering above the head of the light-minded Tsar, driven by his evil passions [zlostrastnyi], that fire from the Heavens had turned Moscow into ashes, that a higher Power had stirred up the people and poured the vials of its wrath into their hearts. Opening the Holy Scriptures, this man showed Ivan the commandments, given by the All-Powerful, to the body of tsars on earth.
Sylvester's powerful oratory won the young Tsar over to the desire to fulfil these divine injunctions, impressed his heart and soul, inflamed his imagination and achieved a miracle: Ivan became a different man and begged Sylvester to help him.11 But it was not quite like that, as will be shown.12
There was evidently a government in Russia in the sense that a number of people were charged with making and implementing decisions bearing on the military, judicial, financial and political needs of the nation. How much time and attention Ivan himself gave to problems of government at this time we cannot tell. Government and administration both proceeded from and took place in the court, which had evolved over the years but was still strongly marked by its origins in the appanages. When appanages or non-sovereign principalities of importance were taken over by Moscow, they were not incorporated into a unified administration, for it did not exist. For each new unit (unless the appanage was re-created for a member of the tsar's family) a new chamber or dvorets, under a dvoretskii (majordomo, maire du palais), usually of the rank of okol'nichi, was set up in Moscow which dealt with those parts of the administration which had been taken over by the centre. There were thus many of these dvortsy, one each for Tver', Ryazan', Uglich, Dmitrov, Nizhny Novgorod and eventually Kazan', and many others.13 But there were princes who still retained some part of the attributes of sovereignty, particularly their own boyars, service gentry, men-at-arms, retinues and extensive lands, notably Prince I.F. Mstislavsky, who owned two fortified southern towns, which constituted a miniature state. In one uezd (district) he owned 524 peasant households, and in another over a thousand; in both he maintained Cossacks and strel'tsy.14 The Vishnevetskys and the Bel'skys also owned miniature states, as did the princes of the Upper Oka, such as the Vorotynskys, Odoevskys and Trubetskoys, and the occasional solid blocks of ‘lineages’,15 like the Shuiskys, Princes of Shuia in Suzdal', who formed a strong, interrelated group, ‘united by a consciousness of a right to participate together with the monarch in the government of the country’, because they were descended from Andrei, a brother of Alexander Nevsky's.16
The structure of the administration, as distinct from political decision-making, was beginning to take shape in the sixteenth century in response to the increasing needs of the government of an expanding realm. But it still was based on a distinctive feature which pervaded Russian administration and society, the system of suretyship and collective responsibility. In one form or another it seems to have existed in most European countries and in many non-European ones. In England it was known as frankpledge, the responsibility of the individual for the group, and of the whole group for the individual.17 It is a system typical of the organization of power where the state is undeveloped and has few administrative tools at its disposal. By delegating the exercise of power down to the lowest social groups and making all groups at all levels responsible for the fulfilling of duties laid on them, the central administration is discharging its obligations while keeping free of any financial or manpower commitments. The krugovaya poruka, as it is known in Russia, applied equally to the local group charged with conveying a criminal to the law court which was to try him, to the family of a criminal, or to the princely sureties who guaranteed that one of their number would not be disloyal to the Tsar and escape to Lithuania.
In Western Europe, as the state grew stronger it dispensed with collective suretyship, and the individual gradually emerged from the group and bore his own burdens.18 But in Russia in the sixteenth century collective responsibility was essential for the fulfilment of government tasks at every level, and it continued to be so in the seventeenth century.19 It did not begin seriously to unravel until the eighteenth century, and even then remained in force in many areas of life.
In the reigns of Vasily III and Ivan IV collective suretyship has been studied in most detail in relation to the aristocracy, about which some written evidence has survived. Though an individual might find himself incriminated by the actions of those he could not control, he was also to some extent protected by belonging to a group which would share his responsibility for administrative actions. But because he was responsible for his kin and his surety group, he was also closely concerned in preventing treasonable action, which might rebound on him. This explains the frequent comments by foreigners on the culture of denunciation in Russia, which was particularly evident in cases of political suretyship. Bonds signed by members of the aristocracy would commit them to serve the grand prince and his sons, ‘and to report to them anything that anyone else said, favorable or unfavorable, pertaining to the Grand Prince and his sons’.20 The texture of Russian society was thus still much more closely woven than elsewhere in Europe, though suretyship probably had a common, possibly Viking, origin.
The magnates and officials who formed the government or manned the administration were part of the court, and the court ranks were strictly graduated. The highest rank at court, granted by the tsar, which very few enjoyed, that of sluga was non-hereditary and may have been awarded mainly to distinguished soldiers.21 The title of ‘boyar’ too was granted by the tsar, usually to the highest aristocrats, from princely or old noble clans, appointed to the Council, who would expect to be given the senior army commands in time of war or to be supplied with the income from a province or a town as a reward for present or past service (kormlenie). (But not all boyars were members of the Council.) The okol'nichie often carried out the duties of a dvoretskii in the central Moscow office (prikaz) of a province. The dumnye dvoriane, or duma nobles, came next, when the rank was finalized in the 1550s. They could be of gentry or even of non-landowning origins, and maintained and developed the incipient bureaucracy. However, by the sixteenth century the numbers of d'iaki,22 and of subordinate clerical posts, were increasing and the evolution of the bureaucracy in Russia was not so different from that which was taking place in France, except that there was no necessity for the Crown to introduce the venality of office, because it could count on service from the community. But with the increase of departments dealing with specific geographical areas or branches of the administration such as the Treasury or the regulation of the armed forces, the number of permanent officials was bound to increase. The d'iaki who were the lynchpin of the administration, and ran the various prikazy or offices, disposed of a subordinate clerical staff. The d'iak himself might be well born, even a landowner.23 The best known d'iaki of the sixteenth century, Ivan Mikhailovich Viskovaty and the Shchelkalov brothers, all came from landowning families. Had Peter I not intervened in the eighteenth century by tying landowning to nobility, Russia might well have developed a noblesse de robe on the lines of the French, Spanish and English models.24
The striapchie or ‘special attendants’, the treasurers or kaznachei, the pechatniki in charge of the seal, the junior clerks or pod'iachie also formed part of the court but were already primarily associated with the administration. Those in the court ranks could be raised to a higher rank, but the concept of ‘ennoblement’ did not exist for there was no legally defined noble status. There were military ranks but no knights or squires, or coats of arms, no ethos of chivalry, no jousting (only fisticuffs), no military orders, whether secular or religious, and the only woman who was worshipped was the Mother of God.
It was the weakness of the notion of inheritance from father to son, as distinct from the much better established practice of inheritance from elder brother to next brother, which, coupled with the partible inheritance of land, weakened the aristocratic élite.25 Men in or raised to high military posts as commanders of garrisons in vulnerable cities, or as governors in charge of public order, tax collection and justice, had not been able to turn these functions into hereditary positions and establish firm regional bases after the appanages were destroyed, by extending their ‘affinities’ as in England, or becoming semi-independent dukes, counts or even barons as in France or Germany. Hence the reliance on mestnichestvo as a means of perpetuating high status.
The career of Aleksei Adashev serves to illustrate the nature and the pitfalls of court service. Adashev came from a fairly prosperous gentry family in Kostroma which had not yet achieved boyar rank, but was highly regarded. His father, Fedor, was sent on a mission to the Ottoman Porte in 1538–9; he was accompanied by Aleksei, who stayed on for a further year, 1539–40, on grounds of ill health.26 Aleksei had, therefore, a far better opportunity to study Ottoman civil and military organization than had Ivan Peresvetov, of whom more below. His father was raised to okol'nichi in 1547 and to boyar by 1553, and insofar as we can follow his career Aleksei started his life at court either as a trusted rynda and personal guard of Ivan's, or as a striapchi, or court attendant. Whether this post ranked above or below a rynda is not clear.27 It is possible that the Adashevs were linked by marriage with the family of the Tsaritsa Anastasia, the Iur'ev Zakhar'ins, which may explain Aleksei's promotion at court.28 The Adashev estates lay not far from those of the Iur'ev-Zakhar'ins in Kostroma.
S.O. Schmidt explains the eventual promotion of Aleksei Adashev by his closeness both to the boyars and to the run-of-the-mill service gentry, that is to say by his political capacity to mediate between the demands of these two social groups. Yet it is far more likely that this relatively young man achieved prominence because of his role as a favourite personal servant of Ivan's. A later chronicle of the seventeenth century relates that on his return from Constantinople the Tsar viewed Aleksei's father, Fedor, with great favour, and on Aleksei's return from the Porte a year later he too was brought into the intimate circle of the Tsar and remained there for many years, until the oprichnina was founded.29 He was a member of the thousand specially appointed guards allotted lands near Moscow in 1550 which formed part of Ivan's personal military household, serving on a rota basis. Aleksei owned a large estate, the village of Borisoglebsk, in Kostroma, and probably estates elsewhere.30 Ivan himself exclaimed in his raging denunciation of 1564 that in his young days he had raised Adashev up out of the mire,31 he knew not how. But there is no doubt of Adashev's closeness to the Tsar, certainly from 1547, when he is listed as being present, together with his brother Daniil, as one of those performing personal services at Ivan's wedding, such as making the bed, and he is named in the official record as a spal'nik (in the same bedchamber service but in a slightly lower rank than a postel'nichii).32 Both these ranks of spal'nik and postel'nichii imply service in the bedchamber, and in Russia, as in England or France, gentlemen of the bedchamber had exceptional opportunities of making use of physical proximity to the ruler to acquire influence or to achieve promotion.33 Adashev's closeness to Ivan is further documented by his role, together with his wife, at the wedding of Ivan's brother, Iuri, on 3 November 1547, and on 31 May 1550 at the wedding of Prince Vladimir of Staritsa. By 1548, both Adashevs, father and son, were prominent enough at court to be on the list of recipients of Christmas presents sent by the abbot of the Trinity monastery, though Aleksei was only thirty-fifth on the list. The priest Sylvester received nothing.34
The first external sign of a new way, inspired by the moral authority of Sylvester, was the summoning of a meeting, called ‘the assembly of reconciliation’ by historians, in the autumn of 1549. It cannot be said that this gathering was an embryonic representative political institution, since as far as one knows, no one was elected to it, its size is unknown, and as a body it did not discuss any issues of public concern, it merely listened. It was summoned in order to pacify the public. But changes in the court did indicate that the Tsar was bent on new policies and new advisers.
The years 1549–60 are roughly identified in Russian historiography as the period of the so-called Chosen Council (Izbrannaia rada), or ‘the government of Sylvester and Adashev’. The priest Sylvester, Karamzin's hero, who had so impressed Ivan, according to chronicles written well after the event, and so dominated him, according to Ivan's own letter to Prince Kurbsky,35 was not Ivan's confessor. His early history is much debated; some historians consider him to have been a follower of Makarii, and therefore of the Josephians, others consider him to have been a sympathizer with the ‘non-possessors’.36 The date of his move from Novgorod to Moscow is uncertain, but in 1545–6 he is recorded as priest in the Cathedral of the Annunciation in the Kremlin. Sylvester was an expert copyist and trader in manuscripts, and had apparently run a workshop in Novgorod with his son Anfim, employing free labour, and attached to the Cathedral, to train copyists. He was also an experienced icon-painter. Icon-painting was not only a skill, it required theological understanding of the traditional ways in which saints and apostles, let alone Christ himself and the Virgin, were portrayed in accordance with ecclesiastical rules.
Sylvester was a man of some education, who knew Greek, perhaps Latin, possessed a small library, and made no effort to secure ecclesiastical promotion. Some historians have suspected him of being a narrow-minded fanatic, others recognize that very little is known about his personal views (though he may have been a very good businessman). As is so often the case in sixteenth-century Russia, it is not easy to obtain a clear picture of a personality, particularly someone who had no official position at court. Sylvester, on the evidence of one letter in 1553, is said by some historians to have been close to the Shuisky clan, notably Prince A.B. Gorbaty-Shuisky. And according to A.A. Zimin, on very slenderevidence, he was also close to Prince Vladimir Andreevich of Staritsa and his mother, Princess Evfrosin'ya.37 One written work of considerable importance is attributed by some historians to Sylvester, namely the ‘Missive to Ivan Vasil'evich’ found in a collection of sixteenth-century manuscripts in Sylvester's possession. In language reminiscent of the priest's admonition described above, Sylvester attempts to frighten the Tsar by drawing attention to the fate which overtakes wicked rulers, such as Nebuchadnezzar, reduced to the level of a brute beast grazing on grass for six years, until he repented, or Manasseh, King of Judah, a bloodthirsty idolater taken captive by the Assyrians for his many sins, who later repented and became a wise king in Jerusalem.38 Sylvester warns Ivan of the universal flood, of the destruction of Sodom, and of the fire of 1547 in Moscow as punishments for wicked kings, and particularly for those who practise sodomy.
