Download PDF | (Eurasian Studies Library 6) Ruslan G. Skrynnikov, Paul Williams - Reign of Terror_ Ivan IV-Brill Academic Publishers (2016).
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Introduction
Reign of Terror: A Bibliographic Note Charles J. Halperin Although Ruslan Grigor’evich Skrynnikov probably published more pages about Ivan IV than any other historian past or present, it is not the quantity of Skrynnikov’s publications on the “Terrible Tsar” that has assured his reputation as one of the greatest specialists in sixteenth-century Muscovite history of all time. Skrynnikov knew the published and archival sources and Russian-language secondary works about Ivan inside and out. Indeed, perhaps his most lasting contribution to studies of Ivan consists of his manuscript and textual studies of the land surveys of Kazan’ and Sviiazhsk, which demonstrated which Muscovites were exiled there at the beginning of the oprichnina1 and of the memorial lists (synodicals) which Ivan gave to monasteries with gifts for monks to say prayers in memory of Ivan’s victims.
These records of gifts for prayers enabled Skrynnikov to concretize the scope of Ivan’s terror. Reign of Terror is Skrynnikov’s best known and most-often cited work; it is entirely representative of his assumptions, methods of research, mode of argument, and conclusions. It was not, however, his last word on the subject, indeed, far from it. Skrynnikov continued to publish on Ivan from 1991 when Reign of Terror appeared virtually until his death in 2009. While Skrynnikov frequently changed his expositions on points of detail, he never deviated from the overarching interpretive framework in Reign of Terror, which itself originated in earlier monographs dating back to the 1960s. However, his later works gave Skrynnikov the opportunity to comment on the books and articles of other scholars about Ivan which appeared after 1991, especially those in Russian.2 Skrynnikov’s summary of historiography about Ivan before 1991 in his preface to Reign of Terror was very selective.
It examined barely twenty authors, far fewer than the number whose works were cited in the lengthy monograph which follows. Its omissions of Russian-language scholarship pale in significance to those of Western scholarship, but for understandable reasons. Access to Western scholarship was not very great when Skynnikov wrote Reign of Terror, nor was it even late Soviet practice to deal substantively with the views of Western historians.3 Since 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has experienced a massive wave of publications about Ivan both by professional scholars and amateurs expostulating virtually every conceivable approach to his personality and reign. Nor have Western scholars lagged far behind in re-examining crucial questions about Ivan’s role in Russian history.
This “Note” will reference all major works since 1991 which address the questions Skrynnikov discussed in Reign of Terror as well as works which deal with matters Skrynnikov slighted or ignored but which supplement or complement his assertions. Often only articles rather than books have appeared on relevant topics, so I have cited both. The goal of this “Note” is to give readers who are not specialists on sixteenth-century Russia a framework for seeing as a whole what historians have written about Ivan and thus to help the reader navigate Skrynnikov’s lengthy exposition. Ivan the Terrible is the most controversial ruler in Russian history, surpassing Peter the Great, Lenin, even Stalin. Almost everything about Ivan is contested. One would hardly expect all historians of Russia to assent to all of Skrynnikov’s conclusions. It is true that specialists in Ivan’s reign have sometimes agreed with elements of Skrynnikov’s interpretation, for example, that the initial phrase of the oprichnina was directed at the Suzdal’ princely aristocracy or that near the end of the oprichnina Ivan was attacking the bureaucracy and the gentry, the very social groups who constituted the political base of the regime, but no other historian has accepted the conclusion Skrynnikov drew from his depiction of successive phases in the oprichnina, namely that the oprichnina did not have a single, consistent political aim.
Skrynnikov asserted that Ivan abandoned policies because he could not overcome opposition to them. Skrynnikov also claimed that Ivan needed the theater of his abdications in 1564 and 1575 to create the “extraordinary conditions” that would allow him to disregard custom in imposing his will upon the elite through violence and terror. No one is willing to follow his logic to that point. The core of Reign of Terror is, of course, Skrynnikov’s depiction of Ivan and of Ivan’s relationship with his elite. In a phrase, Skrynnikov’s Ivan was a political animal. Ivan was religious but the primary motives for his actions were pragmatic and decidedly secular. Skrynnikov spends very little time on Ivan’s religious beliefs. Indeed, Skrynnikov’s exposition of Ivan’s theory of autocracy, absolute and unrestricted political authority, is minimal; intellectual history per se did not in his view merit more attention. Historians, Skrynnikov insisted, had been deceived by Ivan into thinking that Ivan’s theory of autocracy was real rather than an idealized misrepresentation of reality. Ivan often acted emotionally or from ignorance, but he was rational.
Ivan conducted Muscovy’s foreign policy but paid most attention to domestic affairs. Overall Ivan was a tyrant, a despot, whose senseless repression4 and terror inflicted much harm on Russian society, economy and politics. Skrynnikov based his largely consistent and rather unflattering portrait of Ivan upon written narrative sources such as chronicles and foreign accounts and political, diplomatic, genealogical, and cadastral documents. Works about Ivan fall loosely into six sections: 1. General evaluations of Ivan’s reign and character 2. Source Studies 3. Pragmatic politics: periodization, the power of the state, political institutions, administration 4. Intellectual history 5. Religion and religious symbolism 6. Ivan’s personal life and image: marriages, literary activity, epithet and place in Russian culture.
1 General Evaluations of Ivan’s Reign and Character The two best surveys of Ivan’s reign to appear since 1991 are by Boris Floria5 and a co-authored monograph by Andrei Pavlov and Maureen Perrie.6 Both share Skrynnikov’s political approach and his rejection of assertions of Ivan’s insanity. Viacheslav Shaposhnik is ultimately more sympathetic toward Ivan than Skrynnikov and emphasizes religious criteria for evaluating Ivan more than “secular”-minded historians.7 The most widespread theory of Ivan’s behavior in Western scholarship is undoubtedly that he was insane, a view recently and eloquently articulated by Isabella de Madariaga.8 This theory surfaces in passing in Russian-language scholarship as well but not as frequently or consistently. Russian scholars tend to adhere to a pre-psychiatric approach to Ivan as “good” or “evil.” Unfortunately the former characterization of Ivan as “good,” even among professional historians, almost always degenerates into apologias. A prime example is Igor Froianov, whose rabid anti-Semitism leads him to claim that Ivan’s major political goal was to save Russia from the Jews despite the fact that there were no Jews in Russia during Ivan’s reign.9
Natal’ia Pronina’s book is only slightly more restrained in excusing Ivan’s actions but just as unreliable.10 These works make no serious contribution to scholarship but must be mentioned here to illustrate the extreme politicization of Ivan’s reign in Russia today. Sometimes works espousing the latter characterization of Ivan as “bad” succumb to sensationalism, such as in the volumes by Sergei Tsvetkov11 or Eduard Radzinskii,12 which are akin to Western tabloid “biographies,”13 of which Robert Payne and Nikita Romanoff14 is probably the least objectionable. Factual errors and historical misjudgments abound in such scholarship. More useful and a bit surprisingly more objective, though still partisan, are studies critical by profes sional historians in Russia that criticize Ivan from an explicitly Russian Orthodox religious pont of view, of which the best are certainly several works by Dmitrii Volodikhin.15 Since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 a flood of works have appeared in Russia trying to slake the seemingly infinite thirst of the Russianreading public for “Ivaniana.”
These publications are extremely uneven in quality. Even the most bizarre explanations find their way into print, let alone onto the Internet. Georgii Grigor’ev argued that Ivan’s oprichnina was devoted to finding and assassinating the mythical son born to Solomoniia Saburova, ex-wife of Ivan’s father Grand Prince Vasilii III, after she was forcibly confined to a convent.16 Andrei Nikitin concluded that the oprichnina was a Satanist cult.17 The two most absurd post-1991 interpretations are the so-called “New Chronology” which argues that Ivan IV is a composite concocted in the seventeenth century of four men, beginning with the “real” Ivan,18 and the apologetics on behalf of Ivan’s proposed canonization as a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church by an extremist fringe group of monarchists, ultra-Orthodox religious devotees and anti-Semites, a proposal which Patriarch Alexei II of Moscow squashed in 2001.19 Skrynnikov did not have to deal with either the New Chronology or the “canonize Ivan” adherents in 1991, but he chose to ignore them in his later writings. Skrynnikov reacted only to professional scholarly publications. Many professional historians in Russia, but strangely enough almost no specialists on Ivan, did respond vociferously to the “New Chronology.” The movement to canonize Ivan was ignored by all specialists on Ivan in Russia except those committed to the Russian Orthodox Church, namely the previously mentioned Volodikhin and archimandrite Makarii, to be discussed below.
2 Source Studies All studies of Ivan the Terrible begin with questions of the provenance and reliability of primary sources. In Reign of Terror Skrynnikov argued for his interpretation of sources when opinions other than his own had currency. More recent scholarship on three texts central to Skrynnikov’s analysis may be mentioned here. First, the correspondence between Ivan and the defector boyar Prince Andrei Kurbskii is a basic source for Ivan’s reign, as it contains major statements of sixteenth-century political ideology. When Edward Keenan cast doubt on the authenticity of the correspondence, an opinion first expressed in 1971, Skrynnikov contributed significantly to the debate, contending that all of Keenan’s arguments could be definitively refuted. By 1991 he (and nearly all scholars in Russia) considered the issue closed. Some American historians thought and continue to think otherwise, as shown by articles by this writer and Keenan.20
A second key source, the interpolations to the “Tsar’s Book” (Tsarstevennaia kniga), provides the fullest narrative of the succession crisis of 1553 occasioned by Ivan’s near-fatal illness. The “Tsar’s Book” is a component of the “Illustrated Chronicle Compilation” (Litsevoi letopisnyi svod). Scholars disagree on who wrote the interpolations, but no one could have done so until the work was extant. Therefore the dating of the “Illustrated Chronicle Compilation” has been a major question. In Reign of Terror Skrynnikov rejected the arguments based upon the evidence of the watermarks on the text’s paper for a significantly later dating of the text than Skrynnikov’s advanced by Aleksandr Amosov in a series of articles, but without referring to Amosov’ fuller exposition of his conclusions in his 1988 monograph.21 A third contentious source is Ivan’s Testament, which Skrynnikov attempted to break down into several datable layers. Skrynnikov both correlated the contents of each layer to Ivan’s actions in the years to which he assigned them and invoked the contents of each layer as a reflection of Ivan’s thinking at those times. In a series of articles Cornelia Soldat has questioned the authenticity of the Testament entirely.
Two general comments about Skrynnikov’s use of sources are also in order. Skrynnikov identified some chronicles as “official.” Before the appearance of Reign of Terror Nancy Shields Kollmann had analyzed the risks incurred by taking chronicle cliches and motifs literally.23 Subsequently the present writer criticized the legitimacy of applying the concept of “official” sources to any narrative text from Ivan’s reign.24
3 Pragmatic Politics Again and again Skrynnikov emphasizes the limits on Ivan’s power, Ivan’s inability to carry his programs out to their logical conclusion. Skrynnikov argued that not only the aristocracy, but other social groups such as the gentry and merchants, and institutions, such as the Royal Council (Boyar Duma), Assembly of the Land (zemskii sobor), and the Russian Orthodox Church, sets limits upon Ivan’s authority. These contentions resonate with a recent debates on the theory of Muscovy as an autocratic hypertrophic state by Marshall Poe, Valerie Kivelson, and the present writer.25 Skrynnikov called the period of Ivan’s minority by its old name, “boyar rule,” a conception undermined by the new monograph by Mikhail Krom.26 Skrynnikov also adhered to the traditional paradigm for the 1550s according to which Ivan’s government was dominated by a group of reformers led by the gentry servitor Aleksei Adashev and the priest Sylvester called the “Chosen Council.” Anthony Grobovsky, whom Skrynniov cites, holds a different opinion,27 and Aleksandr Filiushkin has recently continued criticism of that schema.28 It must be said that most historians in Russia, unlike in the West, also refuse to discard the “Chosen Council” conception.
On the political elite Ann Kleimola addressed its composition in numerous older articles.29 Sergei Bogatyrev also analyzed the composition of the elite and the ideal of political consultation.30 Marshall Poe has shed new light on the mentality of the elite as embodied in the tradition by which aristocrats called themselves “slaves” of the tsar in petitions to him.31 Irina Mikhailova has addressed the social history of the Muscovy’s “serving people.”32 Skrynnikov treated all decision in law suits about precedence (mestnichestvo)33 as political; whoever was superior in political influence won.
Nancy Shields Kollmann has presented an anthropological and sociological analysis of this system34 Skrynnikov did not in 1991 avail himself of numerous articles in English on Muscovite law and administration by Horace Dewey,35 Dewey and Kleimola,36 and Brian Davies37; there is also a more recent article by Brian Davis on the “feeding” (kormlenie) system.38 Anna Khoroshkevich emphasizes foreign policy more than Skrynnikov does, identifying the influence of foreign affairs on Ivan’s domestic policies.39 Hieronym Grała’s study of the most influential Muscovite diplomat, the “state secretary” Ivan Viskovatyi, also speaks to this question.
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