V. O. Klyuchevsky – Oprichnina
S. F. Platonov - What is oprichnina?
Establishment of the oprichnina by Ivan the Terrible. Oprichnina and zemshchina. Alexandrovskaya Sloboda. The destruction of Tver and Novgorod by the guardsmen. Opinions on the meaning of oprichnina
This name was given, firstly, to a detachment of bodyguards, like the Turkish Janissaries, recruited by Ivan the Terrible from boyars, boyar children, nobles, etc.; secondly, a part of the state, with special administration, allocated for the maintenance of the royal court and guardsmen. The era of the oprichnina is the time from approximately 1565 to the death of Ivan the Terrible. For the circumstances under which the oprichnina arose, see Ivan the Terrible. When, at the beginning of February 1565, Ivan IV returned to Moscow from the Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda, he announced that he was again taking over the reign, so that he would be free to execute traitors, put disgrace on them, and deprive them of their property without bothering and sorrowing with side of the clergy and establish an oprichnina in the state. This word was used at first in the sense of special property or possession; now it has acquired a different meaning.
In the oprichnina, the tsar separated part of the boyars, servants and clerks, and in general made his entire “everyday routine” special: in the Sytny, Kormovy and Khlebenny palaces a special staff of housekeepers, cooks, hounds, etc. was appointed; special detachments of archers were recruited. Special cities (about 20) with volosts were assigned to maintain the oprichnina. In Moscow itself, some streets (Chertolskaya, Arbat, Sivtsev Vrazhek, part of Nikitskaya, etc.) were given to the oprichnina; the former residents were relocated to other streets. Up to 1,000 princes, nobles, and children of boyars, both Moscow and city, were also recruited into the oprichnina. They were given estates in the volosts assigned to maintain the oprichnina; the former landowners and patrimonial owners were transferred from those volosts to others. The rest of the state was supposed to constitute the “zemshchina”; the tsar entrusted it to the zemstvo boyars, that is, to the boyar duma itself, and put Prince Iv at the head of its management. Dm. Belsky and Prince. Iv. Fed. Mstislavsky. All matters had to be resolved in the old way, and with major matters one should turn to the boyars, but if military or important zemstvo matters happened, then to the sovereign. For his ascent, that is, for the trip to Alexandrovskaya Sloboda, the tsar exacted 100 thousand rubles from the Zemsky Prikaz.
After the establishment of the oprichnina, executions began; many boyars and boyar children were suspected of treason and exiled to different cities. The property of those executed and exiled was taken from the sovereign and distributed to the oprichniki, whose number soon increased to 6,000. The oprichnina were recruited from young nobles and boyar children who were distinguished by their daring; they had to renounce everything and everyone, family, father, mother, and swear that they would know and serve only the sovereign and unquestioningly carry out only his orders, report everything to him and have no relations with zemstvo people. The outward distinction of the guardsmen was a dog's head and a broom attached to the saddle, as a sign that they gnaw and sweep traitors to the tsar. The tsar turned a blind eye to all the actions of the guardsmen; When confronted with a zemstvo man, the guardsman always came out on the right. The guardsmen soon became a scourge and an object of hatred for the people, but the tsar believed in their loyalty and devotion, and they truly unquestioningly carried out his will; all the bloody deeds of the second half of Ivan the Terrible’s reign were committed with the indispensable and direct participation of the guardsmen.
N. Nevrev. Oprichniki (Murder of Boyar Fedorov by Ivan the Terrible)
Soon the tsar and his guardsmen left for the Alexandrovskaya Sloboda, from which they made a fortified city. There he started something like a monastery and recruited 300 people from the guardsmen. brethren, called himself abbot, Prince. Vyazemsky - cellarer, Malyuta Skuratov - paraclesiarch, went with him to the bell tower to ring, zealously attended services, prayed and at the same time feasted, entertained himself with torture and executions; made visits to Moscow, where executions sometimes took on a horrific character, especially since the tsar did not encounter opposition from anyone: Metropolitan Athanasius was too weak for this and, after spending two years at the see, retired, and his successor Philip, who boldly spoke truth to the king, he was soon deprived of his dignity and life (see). The Kolychev family, to which Philip belonged, was persecuted; some of its members were executed on Ivan's orders. At the same time, the Tsar’s cousin Vladimir Andreevich (see) also died.
N. Nevrev. Metropolitan Philip and Malyuta Skuratov
In December 1570, suspecting the Novgorodians of treason, Ivan, accompanied by a squad of guardsmen, archers and other military men, moved against Novgorod, plundering and devastating everything on the way. First, the Tver region was devastated; The guardsmen took from the residents everything that could be taken with them and destroyed the rest. Beyond Tver, Torzhok, Vyshny Volochok and other cities and villages lying on the way were devastated, and the guardsmen beat the Crimean and Livonian captives who were there without mercy. At the beginning of January, Russian troops approached Novgorod and the guardsmen began their reprisals against the residents: people were beaten to death with sticks, thrown into the Volkhov, put on the right to force them to give up all their property, and fried in hot flour. The beating continued for five weeks, thousands of people died. The Novgorod chronicler says that there were days when the number of those killed reached up to one and a half thousand; days on which 500-600 people were beaten were considered happy. The tsar spent the sixth week traveling with guardsmen to plunder property; Monasteries were plundered, stacks of bread were burned, cattle were beaten. Military detachments were even sent into the depths of the country, 200-300 miles from Novgorod, and there they carried out similar devastation.
From Novgorod, Grozny went to Pskov and prepared the same fate for him, but limited himself to the execution of several Pskov residents and the robbery of their property and returned to Moscow, where searches and executions began again: they were looking for accomplices of the Novgorod treason. Even the tsar’s favorites, the guardsmen Basmanov father and son, Prince Afanasy Vyazemsky, the printer Viskovaty, the treasurer Funikov, etc., were accused. Together with them, at the end of July 1570, up to 200 people were executed in Moscow: the Duma clerk read the names of the condemned, the executioners-oprichniki they stabbed, chopped, hung, doused the condemned with boiling water. The tsar himself took part in the executions, and crowds of guardsmen stood around and greeted the executions with cries of “goyda, goyda.” The wives, children of those executed, and even their household members were persecuted; their estate was taken away by the sovereign. Executions were resumed more than once, and subsequently they died: Prince Peter Serebryany, Duma clerk Zakhary Ochin-Pleshcheev, Ivan Vorontsov, etc., and the tsar came up with special methods of torture: hot frying pans, ovens, tongs, thin ropes rubbing the body, etc. He ordered the boyar Kozarinov-Golokhvatov, who accepted the schema to avoid execution, to be blown up on a barrel of gunpowder, on the grounds that the schema-monks were angels and therefore should fly to heaven.
In 1575, Ivan IV placed the baptized Tatar prince Simeon Bekbulatovich, who had previously been the Kasimov prince, at the head of the zemshchina, crowned him with a royal crown, went to pay his respects to him, styled him “Grand Duke of All Rus',” and himself “Sovereign Prince of Moscow.” . On behalf of Grand Duke Simeon of All Rus' Some letters were written, however, not important in content. Simeon remained at the head of the zemshchina for no more than two years: then Ivan the Terrible gave him Tver and Torzhok as his inheritance. The division into oprichnina and zemshchina was not, however, abolished; oprichnina existed until the death of Ivan the Terrible (1584), but the word itself fell out of use and began to be replaced by the word yard, and the guardsman - in a word yard; instead of “cities and governors of the oprichnina and zemstvo” they said “cities and governors of the courtyards and zemstvo.” Solovyov tries to comprehend the establishment of the oprichnina, saying: “the oprichnina was established because the tsar suspected the nobles of hostility towards him and wanted to have completely loyal people with him to him. Frightened by Kurbsky's departure and the protest that he filed on behalf of all his brothers, Ivan became suspicious of all his boyars and grabbed a means that freed him from them, freed him from the need for constant, daily communication with them. " S. M. Solovyov's opinion is shared by K N. Bestuzhev-Ryumin V. O. Klyuchevsky also finds that the oprichnina was the result of the tsar’s struggle with the boyars, a struggle that “had not a political, but a dynastic origin”; neither one nor the other side knew how to get along with one another and how to get along without each other. They tried to separate, to live side by side, but not together. An attempt to arrange such political cohabitation was the division of the state into the oprichnina and the zemshchina. E. A. Belov, appearing in his monograph: “On the historical significance of the Russian boyars until the end of the 17th century." an apologist for Grozny, finds a deep state meaning in the oprichnina. Karamzin, Kostomarov, D.I. Ilovaisky not only do not see a political meaning in the establishment of the oprichnina, but attribute it to the manifestation of those painful and at the same time cruel eccentricities that The second half of Ivan the Terrible's reign is complete. See Stromilov, "Alexandrovskaya Sloboda", in "Readings of Moscow. General History and Ancient." (1883, book II). The main source for the history of the establishment of the oprichnina is the report of the captured Lithuanians Taube and Kruse to the Duke of Courland Kettler, published by Evers in “Sammlung Russisch. Geschichte” (X, l, 187-241); see also "Tales" book. Kurbsky, Alexander Chronicle, " Full Assembly Ross. Chronicles" (III and IV). For literature, see Ivan IV the Terrible.
N. Vasilenko.
Encyclopedia Brockhaus-Efron
V. O. Klyuchevsky - Oprichnina
Circumstances that prepared the oprichnina
I will outline in advance the circumstances under which this ill-fated oprichnina appeared.
Having barely emerged from childhood, not yet 20 years old, Tsar Ivan set about the affairs of government with extraordinary energy for his age. Then, on the instructions of the smart leaders of Tsar Metropolitan Macarius and Priest Sylvester, from the boyars, who were divided into hostile circles, several efficient, well-meaning and gifted advisers came forward and stood near the throne - the “elected council,” as Prince Kurbsky calls this council, which obviously received actual dominance in the boyars. Duma, generally in the central administration. With these trusted people, the king began to rule the state.
In this government activity, evident from 1550, bold external enterprises went hand in hand with broad and well-thought-out plans for internal change. In 1550, the first Zemsky Sobor was convened, at which they discussed how to organize local government, and decided to revise and correct the old Code of Law of Ivan III and develop a new one, best order legal proceedings. In 1551, a large church council was convened, to which the king proposed an extensive project church reforms, which had the goal of putting in order the religious and moral life of the people. In 1552, the kingdom of Kazan was conquered, and immediately after that they began to develop a complex plan for local zemstvo institutions, which were intended to replace the crown regional administrators - “feeders”: zemstvo self-government was introduced. In 1558, the Livonian War began with the goal of breaking through to the Baltic Sea and establishing direct relations with Western Europe, taking advantage of its rich culture. In all these important enterprises, I repeat, Ivan was assisted by employees who concentrated around two persons, especially close to the tsar - priest Sylvester and Alexei Adashev, the head of the Petition Order, in our opinion, the Secretary of State for accepting petitions in the highest name.
Various reasons - partly domestic misunderstandings, partly disagreement in political views - cooled the king towards his elected advisers. Their flaring hostility towards the queen’s relatives, the Zakharyins, led to Adashev and Sylvester moving away from the court, and the tsar attributed the death of Anastasia, which happened under such circumstances in 1560, to the grief that the deceased suffered from these palace squabbles. “Why did you separate me from my wife?” Ivan Kurbsky painfully asked in a letter to him 18 years after this family misfortune. “If only my youth had not been taken away from me, there would have been no crown sacrifices (boyar executions”).” Finally, the flight of Prince Kurbsky, his closest and most gifted collaborator, caused a final break. Nervous and lonely, Ivan has lost his moral balance, which is always shaky for nervous people when they remain alone.
The Tsar's departure from Moscow and his messages.
With the tsar in this mood, a strange, unprecedented event happened in the Moscow Kremlin. Once at the end of 1564 a lot of sleighs appeared there. The king, without telling anyone, got ready with his entire family and some courtiers for a long journey somewhere, took with him utensils, icons and crosses, clothes and his entire treasury and left the capital. It was clear that this was neither an ordinary pilgrimage nor a pleasure trip for the king, but a whole resettlement. Moscow remained perplexed, not knowing what the owner was up to.
Having visited Trinity, the tsar and all his luggage stopped in Alexandrovskaya Sloboda (now it is Alexandrov - a district town in the Vladimir province). From here, a month after leaving, the tsar sent two letters to Moscow. In one, having described the lawlessness of the boyar rule in his youth, he placed his sovereign’s anger on all the clergy and boyars on all service and clerks, accusing them without exception of not caring about the sovereign, the state and all Orthodox Christianity, from their enemies they were not defended, on the contrary, they themselves oppressed Christians, plundered the treasury and the sovereign’s lands, and the clergy covered up the guilty, defended them, interceding for them before the sovereign. And so the king, the letter read, “out of great pity of heart,” unable to tolerate all these betrayals, left his kingdom and went to settle somewhere where God would show him. It’s like abdicating the throne in order to test the strength of his power among the people. To the Moscow common people, merchants and all the tax-paying people of the capital, the tsar sent another, a letter, which was read to them publicly in the square. Here the tsar wrote so that they should not have doubts that the tsar’s disgrace and anger were not with them. Everything froze, the capital instantly interrupted its usual activities: the shops were closed, the orders were empty, the songs fell silent. In confusion and horror, the city screamed, asking the metropolitan, bishops and boyars to go to the settlement and beat the sovereign so that he would not leave the state. At the same time, ordinary people shouted for the sovereign to return to the kingdom to defend them from wolves and predatory people, but they did not stand for the state traitors and scoundrels and would destroy them themselves.
Return of the Tsar.
A deputation of the highest clergy, boyars and officials headed by the Archbishop of Novgorod Pimen went to the settlement, accompanied by many merchants and other people who went to beat the sovereign with their foreheads and cry, so that the sovereign would rule as he pleased, according to his entire sovereign will. The tsar accepted the zemstvo petition, agreed to return to the kingdom, “and take back our states,” but on the terms that he promised to announce later. Some time later, in February 1565, the tsar solemnly returned to the capital and convened a state council of boyars and higher clergy. They didn’t recognize him here: his small gray, penetrating eyes went out, his always lively and friendly face was drawn and looked unsociable, only remnants of his former hair remained on his head and beard. Obviously, the king spent two months of absence in terrible state of mind, not knowing how his idea would end. In the council, he proposed the conditions under which he would take back the power he had abandoned. These conditions were that he should put opals on his traitors and disobedient people, and execute others, and take their property into the treasury, so that the clergy, boyars and officials would put all this at his sovereign will, and would not interfere with him. It was as if the king had begged state council police dictatorship - a unique form of agreement between the sovereign and the people!
Decree on oprichnina.
To deal with traitors and disobedient people, the tsar proposed establishing an oprichnina. It was a special court, which the tsar formed for himself, with special boyars, with special butlers, treasurers and other managers, clerks, all sorts of clerks and courtiers, with a whole court staff. The chronicler strongly emphasizes this expression “special court”, the fact that the king sentenced everything in this court “to be done to himself in a special way.” From the service people, he selected a thousand people for the oprichnina, who in the capital, in the suburbs outside the walls White City, behind the line of current boulevards, streets were allocated (Prechistenka, Sivtsev Vrazhek, Arbat and the left side of the city Nikitskaya) with several settlements to the Novodevichy Convent; the former inhabitants of these streets and settlements, servicemen and clerks, were evicted from their homes to other streets of the Moscow suburb. For the maintenance of this court, “for his daily use” and his children, princes Ivan and Fyodor, he allocated from his state up to 20 cities with districts and several separate volosts, in which the lands were distributed to the guardsmen, and the former landowners were removed from their estates and estates and received land in neoprichny districts. Up to 12 thousand of these deportees in winter, with their families, walked on foot from the estates taken from them to the remote empty estates allotted to them. This oprichnina part, separated from the state, was not an entire region, a continuous territory, but was made up of villages, volosts and cities, even just parts of other cities, scattered here and there, mainly in the central and northern districts (Vyazma, Kozelsk, Suzdal, Galich, Vologda, Staraya Rusa, Kargopol, etc.; after that the Trade side of Novgorod was taken into oprichnina).
“Their own Moscow state,” that is, the entire rest of the land subject to the Moscow sovereign, with its army, court and administration, the tsar ordered the boyars to be in charge and to do all sorts of zemstvo affairs, whom he ordered to be “in the zemstvo,” and this half of the state received the name Zemshchina. All central government institutions remaining in the zemshchina, orders, were supposed to operate as before, “repair the government in the old way,” turning on all important zemstvo matters to the duma of zemstvo boyars, which ruled the zemstvo, reporting to the sovereign only about military and most important zemstvo affairs.
So the entire state was divided into two parts - the zemshchina and the oprichnina; the boyar duma remained at the head of the first, the tsar himself became the head of the second, without giving up the supreme leadership of the duma of the zemstvo boyars. “For his rise,” that is, to cover the costs of leaving the capital, the tsar exacted from the zemshchina, as if for an official business trip on its business, lifting money - 100 thousand rubles (about 6 million rubles in our money). This is how I stated it old chronicle the “decree on oprichnina” that has not reached us, apparently prepared in advance in Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda and read at a meeting of the State Council in Moscow. The Tsar was in a hurry: without hesitation, the very next day after this meeting, using the authority granted to him, he began to put disgraces on his traitors, and to execute others, starting with the closest supporters of the fugitive Prince Kurbsky; on this one day, six of the boyar nobility were beheaded, and the seventh was impaled.
Life in the suburbs.
The establishment of the oprichnina began. First of all, the Tsar himself, as the first guardsman, hastened to leave the ceremonial, decorous order of the sovereign's life established by his father and grandfather, left his hereditary Kremlin palace, moved to a new fortified courtyard, which he ordered to build for himself somewhere among his oprichnina, between the Arbat and Nikitskaya, at the same time ordered his oprichnina boyars and nobles to build courtyards in the Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda, where they were to live, as well as government buildings intended to govern the oprichnina. Soon he himself settled there, and began to come to Moscow “not for a great time.” Thus, a new residence arose among the dense forests - the oprichnina capital with a palace surrounded by a moat and rampart, with outposts along the roads. In this den, the tsar staged a wild parody of the monastery, selected three hundred of the most notorious guardsmen who made up the brethren, he himself accepted the title of abbot, and prince Af. Vyazemsky ordained the rank of cellarer, covered these full-time robbers with monastic robes and black robes, composed a community rule for them, he and the princes climbed the bell tower in the morning to ring for matins, read and sang in the church on the choir and made such prostrations that from the forehead his bruises did not go away. After mass at the meal, when the cheerful brethren ate and got drunk, the tsar read the teachings of the church fathers about fasting and abstinence at the lectern, then dined alone, after dinner he liked to talk about the law, dozed off or went to the dungeon to witness the torture of the suspects.
Oprichnina and Zemshchina
At first glance, the oprichnina, especially with such behavior of the tsar, seems to be an institution devoid of any political meaning. In fact, having declared all the boyars in his message to be traitors and plunderers of the land, the tsar left the management of the land in the hands of these traitors and predators. But the oprichnina also had its own meaning, albeit a rather sad one. It is necessary to distinguish between territory and goal. The word oprichnina in the 16th century. was already an obsolete term, which the then Moscow chronicle translated into the expression special courtyard. It was not Tsar Ivan who invented this word, borrowed from the old specific language. In specific times, this was the name for special allocated possessions, mainly those that were given full ownership to princesses-widows, in contrast to those given for lifelong use, from subsistence. The oprichnina of Tsar Ivan was a palace economic and administrative institution in charge of the lands allocated for the maintenance of the royal court. A similar institution arose in our country later, at the end of the 18th century, when Emperor Paul, by the law of April 5, 1797 on the imperial family, allocated “special real estate estates from state possessions” in the amount of over 460 thousand souls of male peasants, who were “in the state calculation under the names of palace volosts and villages" and received the name of specific ones. The only difference was that the oprichnina, with further additions, captured almost half of the entire state, while the appanage department of Emperor Paul included only 1/38 of the then population of the empire.
Tsar Ivan himself looked at the oprichnina he established as his private possession, a special court or appanage, which he separated from the state; he assigned the zemshchina after himself to his eldest son as a king, and the oprichnina to his younger son as an appanage prince. There is news that a baptized Tatar, the captive Kazan king Ediger-Simeon, was installed at the head of the zemshchina. Later, in 1574, Tsar Ivan crowned another Tatar, the Kasimov Khan Sain-Bulat, in the baptism of Simeon Bekbulatovich, giving him the title of Sovereign Grand Duke of All Rus'. Translating this title into our language, we can say that Ivan appointed both Simeons as chairmen of the Duma of Zemstvo boyars. Simeon Bekbulatovich ruled the kingdom for two years, then he was exiled to Tver. All government decrees were written on behalf of this Simeon as a real all-Russian tsar, and Ivan himself was content with the modest title of sovereign prince, not even a great prince, but simply a prince of Moscow, not of all Rus', went to bow to Simeon as a simple boyar and in his petitions to Simeon called himself as the Prince of Moscow Ivan Vasilyev, who beats his forehead “with his children”, with the princes.
One might think that not everything here is a political masquerade. Tsar Ivan opposed himself as an appanage prince of Moscow to the sovereign of all Rus', who stood at the head of the zemshchina; By presenting himself as a special, oprichnina prince of Moscow, Ivan seemed to recognize that the rest of the Russian land was part of the department of the council, consisting of the descendants of its former rulers, the great and appanage princes, who made up the highest Moscow boyars, who sat in the zemstvo duma. Afterwards, Ivan renamed the oprichnina into the courtyard, the boyars and service people of the oprichnina - into the boyars and service people of the courtyard. The tsar in the oprichnina had his own duma, “his own boyars”; The oprichnina region was governed by special orders, similar to the old zemstvo orders. National affairs, how to say imperial affairs, were conducted by the Zemstvo Duma with a report to the Tsar. But the tsar ordered other issues to be discussed by all the boyars, zemstvo and oprichnina, and the “boyars wallpaper” put forward a common decision.
The purpose of the oprichnina.
But, one might ask, why was this restoration or this travesty of fate necessary? To an institution with such a dilapidated form and such an archaic name, the tsar assigned a hitherto unprecedented task: the oprichnina received the significance of a political refuge, where the tsar wanted to hide from his seditious boyars. The thought that he should flee from his boyars gradually took possession of his mind and became his incessant thought. In his spiritual, written around 1572, the king very seriously portrays himself as an exile, a wanderer. Here he writes: “Because of the multitude of my iniquities, the wrath of God has spread upon me, I was expelled by the boyars for their arbitrariness from my property and am wandering around the countries.” He was credited serious intention flee to England.
So, the oprichnina was an institution that was supposed to protect the personal safety of the tsar. She was given a political goal, for which there was no special institution in the existing Moscow state structure. This goal was to exterminate the sedition that nested in the Russian land, mainly among the boyars. The oprichnina received the appointment of the highest police in cases of high treason. A detachment of a thousand people, enlisted in the oprichnina and then increased to 6 thousand, became a corps of watchmen for internal sedition. Malyuta Skuratov, i.e. Grigory Yakovlevich Pleshcheev-Belsky, relative of St. Metropolitan Alexy, was, as it were, the chief of this corps, and the tsar begged himself from the clergy, boyars and the whole land for a police dictatorship to combat this sedition. As a special police detachment, the oprichnina received a special uniform: the oprichnina had a dog's head and a broom tied to the saddle - these were the signs of his position, which consisted in tracking down, sniffing out and sweeping out treason and gnawing the sovereign's seditious villains. The oprichnik rode all in black from head to toe, on a black horse in black harness, which is why contemporaries called the oprichnina “pitch darkness”, they said about it: “... like night, dark.” It was some kind of order of hermits, like monks who renounced the land and fought with the land, like monks fight the temptations of the world. The very reception into the oprichnina squad was furnished with either monastic or conspiratorial solemnity. Prince Kurbsky in his History of Tsar Ivan writes that the Tsar from all over the Russian land gathered for himself “nasty people and filled with all sorts of evils” and obliged them with terrible oaths not to know not only their friends and brothers, but also their parents, but to serve only him and this forced them to kiss the cross. Let us remember at the same time what I said about the monastic order of life, which Ivan established in the settlement for his chosen oprichnina brethren.
Contradiction in the structure of the state.
This was the origin and purpose of the oprichnina. But, having explained its origin and purpose, it is still quite difficult to understand its political meaning. It is easy to see how and why it arose, but it is difficult to understand how it could have arisen, how the very idea of such an institution could have come to the king. After all, the oprichnina did not answer the political question that was then on the agenda, and did not eliminate the difficulties that it caused. The difficulty was created by the clashes that arose between the sovereign and the boyars. The source of these clashes was not the contradictory political aspirations of both state forces, but one contradiction in the political system of the Moscow state itself.
The sovereign and the boyars did not disagree irreconcilably with each other in their political ideals and plans public order, but only came across one inconsistency in the already established state order, which they did not know what to do with. What was the Moscow state really like in the 16th century? It was an absolute monarchy, but with aristocratic government, i.e., government personnel. There was no political legislation that would define the boundaries of the supreme power, but there was a government class with an aristocratic organization that was recognized by the government itself. This power grew together, simultaneously and even hand in hand with another political force that constrained it. Thus, the character of this power did not correspond to the character of the governmental instruments through which it was supposed to act. The boyars imagined themselves to be powerful advisers to the sovereign of all Rus' at the very time when this sovereign, remaining faithful to the view of the appanage patrimonial landowner, in accordance with ancient Russian law, granted them as his courtyard servants the title of the sovereign's slaves. Both sides found themselves in such an unnatural relationship to each other, which they did not seem to notice while it was developing, and which they did not know what to do with when they noticed it. Then both sides felt in an awkward position and did not know how to get out of it. Neither the boyars knew how to settle down and establish state order without the sovereign power to which they were accustomed, nor did the sovereign know how to manage his kingdom within its new borders without the boyars’ assistance. Both sides could neither get along with each other nor do without each other. Unable to either get along or separate, they tried to separate - to live side by side, but not together. The oprichnina was such a way out of the difficulty.
The idea of replacing the boyars with the nobility.
But this solution did not eliminate the difficulty itself. It consisted in the inconvenient political position of the boyars as a government class for the sovereign, which constrained him.
There were two ways out of the difficulty: it was necessary either to eliminate the boyars as a government class and replace them with other, more flexible and obedient instruments of government, or to separate them, to attract the most reliable people from the boyars to the throne and to rule with them, as Ivan ruled in the beginning of his reign. He could not do the first soon, the second he was unable or did not want to do. In conversations with close foreigners, the tsar inadvertently admitted his intention to change the entire government of the country and even exterminate the nobles. But the idea of transforming government was limited to dividing the state into zemshchina and oprichnina, and the wholesale extermination of the boyars remained an absurd dream of an excited imagination: it was tricky to isolate from society and destroy an entire class, intertwined with various everyday threads with the layers that lay under it. In the same way, the tsar could not soon create another government class to replace the boyars. Such changes require time and skill: it is necessary for the ruling class to get used to power and for society to get used to the ruling class.
But undoubtedly, the tsar was thinking about such a replacement and saw preparations for it in his oprichnina. He took this thought from childhood, from the turmoil of boyar rule; She also prompted him to bring A. Adashev closer to himself, taking him, in the tsar’s words, from the stick insects, “from the rot,” and putting him together with the nobles, expecting direct service from him. So Adashev became the prototype of the guardsman. Ivan had the opportunity to become acquainted with the way of thinking that later dominated the oprichnina at the very beginning of his reign.
In 1537 or so, a certain Ivan Peresvetov left Lithuania for Moscow, counting himself among the family of the monk hero Peresvet, who fought on the Kulikovo Field. This native was an adventurer-condottieri, who served in a mercenary Polish detachment for three kings - Polish, Hungarian and Czech. In Moscow he suffered from big people, lost his “sobinka,” the property acquired during his service, and in 1548 or 1549 he submitted an extensive petition to the tsar. This is a harsh political pamphlet directed against the boyars, in favor of the “warriors,” that is, the ordinary military-service nobility, to which the petitioner himself belonged. The author warns Tsar Ivan against being caught by his neighbors, without whom he cannot “exist for an hour”; There will be no other such king in all the sunflowers, if only God would keep him from “catching the nobles.” The king's nobles are thin, they kiss the cross and cheat; tsar internecine war“he lets them into his kingdom,” appointing them as governors of cities and volosts, and they become richer and lazy from the blood and tears of Christians. Anyone who approaches the king through grandeur, and not through military merit or other wisdom, is a sorcerer and a heretic, he takes away the happiness and wisdom of the king, and he must be burned. The author considers the order established by Tsar Makhmet-saltan to be exemplary, who will raise the ruler high, “and he will choke his neck,” saying: he did not know how to live in good glory and serve the sovereign faithfully. It is fitting for the sovereign to collect income from the entire kingdom for his treasury, to gladden the hearts of soldiers from the treasury, to let them close to him and to trust them in everything
The petition seemed to have been written in advance to justify the oprichnina: so its ideas were in the hands of the “artful devils,” and the tsar himself could not help but sympathize with the direction of Peresvetov’s thoughts. He wrote to one of the guardsmen, Vasyuk Gryazny: “Because of our sins, what happened, and how can we hide it, that our father and our boyars taught us to cheat and we, the sufferers, brought you closer, expecting service and truth from you.” These oprichnina sufferers, noble people from the ordinary nobility, were supposed to serve as those children of Abraham made of stone, about whom the tsar wrote to Prince Kurbsky. Thus, according to Tsar Ivan, the nobility was supposed to replace the boyars as the ruling class in the form of the oprichnik. At the end of the 17th century. this change, as we will see, took place, only in a different form, not so hateful.
The aimlessness of the oprichnina.
In any case, in choosing one way or another, one had to act against the political situation of an entire class, and not against individuals. The tsar did exactly the opposite: suspecting the entire boyars of treason, he rushed at the suspects, tearing them out one by one, but left the class at the head of the zemstvo administration; not being able to crush the government system that was inconvenient for him, he began to exterminate individual suspicious or hated individuals.
The guardsmen were not placed in the place of the boyars, but against the boyars; they could, by their very purpose, not be rulers, but only executioners of the earth. This was the political aimlessness of the oprichnina; caused by a clash whose cause was order, not persons, it was directed against persons, and not against order. In this sense, we can say that the oprichnina did not answer the question that was next in line. It could only have been instilled in the tsar by an incorrect understanding of the position of the boyars, as well as his own position. She was largely a figment of the king’s overly fearful imagination. Ivan directed her against the terrible sedition that allegedly nested among the boyars and threatened with the extermination of the entire royal family. But was the danger really that bad?
The political power of the boyars, even in addition to the oprichnina, was undermined by the conditions directly or indirectly created by the Moscow gathering of Rus'. The possibility of a permitted, legal departure, the main support of the boyar's official freedom, had already disappeared by the time of Tsar Ivan: there was nowhere to leave except for Lithuania, the only surviving appanage prince Vladimir Staritsky undertook by treaties not to accept either princes, boyars or any people leaving the tsar. The service of the boyars from free became mandatory, involuntary. Localism deprived the class of the ability for friendly joint action. The land shuffling of the most important service princes, carried out under Ivan III and his grandson through the exchange of ancient princely estates for new ones, moved the princes of Odoevsky, Vorotynsky, Mezetsky from dangerous outskirts, from where they could establish relations with foreign enemies of Moscow, somewhere on the Klyazma or the upper Volga , into an environment alien to them, with which they had no connections. The noblest boyars ruled the regions, but in such a way that by their governance they acquired only the hatred of the people. Thus, the boyars did not have a solid foundation either in the administration, or among the people, or even in their class organization, and the tsar should have known this better than the boyars themselves.
A serious danger threatened if the incident of 1553 was repeated, when many boyars did not want to swear allegiance to a child, the son of a dangerously ill tsar, with the intention of elevating the appanage Vladimir, the prince’s uncle, to the throne. The tsar, barely over it, directly told the sworn boyars that in the event of his death, he foresaw the fate of his family under the tsar-uncle. This is the fate that usually befell rival princes in Eastern despotisms. Tsar Ivan's own ancestors, the princes of Moscow, dealt with their relatives who stood in their way in the same way; Tsar Ivan himself dealt with his cousin Vladimir Staritsky in exactly the same way.
The danger of 1553 was not repeated. But the oprichnina did not prevent this danger, but rather intensified it. In 1553, many boyars took the side of the prince, and the dynastic catastrophe might not have taken place. In 1568, in the event of the death of the tsar, his direct heir would hardly have had enough supporters: the oprichnina united the boyars instinctively - with a sense of self-preservation.
Judgments about her by contemporaries
Without such danger, boyar sedition did not go further than thoughts and attempts to flee to Lithuania: contemporaries do not talk about conspiracies or attempts on the part of the boyars. But if there had been truly rebellious boyar sedition, the tsar should have acted differently: he should have directed his blows exclusively at the boyars, and he did not beat only the boyars and not even the boyars primarily. Prince Kurbsky in his History, listing the victims of Ivan’s cruelty, numbers over 400 of them. Foreign contemporaries even counted it at 10 thousand.
When carrying out executions, Tsar Ivan, out of piety, entered the names of those executed in memorial books (synodics), which he sent to monasteries to commemorate the souls of the deceased, enclosing memorial contributions. These memorials are very interesting monuments; in some of them the number of victims rises to 4 thousand. But there are relatively few boyar names in these martyrologies, but here were listed courtyard people who were killed by the masses and who were not at all guilty of boyar sedition, clerks, huntsmen, monks and nuns - “deceased Christians of the male, female and child ranks, whose names you yourself, Lord, weigh “, as the synodik mournfully laments after each group of those beaten by the masses. Finally, the turn came to the very “utter darkness”: the tsar’s closest oprichnina favorites—Prince Vyazemsky and the Basmanovs, father and son—perished.
In a deeply depressed, restrained indignant tone, contemporaries talk about the turmoil that the oprichnina brought into minds unaccustomed to such internal upheavals. They portray the oprichnina as a social strife. The tsar, they write, instigated internecine sedition, in the same city he unleashed some people against others, called some oprichninas, made them his own, and called others zemshchina and commanded his part to rape another part of the people, put them to death and plunder their houses. And there was intense hatred against the king in the world, and bloodshed and many executions took place. One observant contemporary portrays the oprichnina as some kind of incomprehensible political game of the tsar: he cut his entire power in half, as if with an ax, and thereby confused everyone, thus playing with God’s people, becoming a conspirator against himself. The tsar wanted to be a sovereign in the zemshchina, but in the oprichnina to remain a patrimonial landowner, an appanage prince. Contemporaries could not understand this political duplicity, but they understood that the oprichnina, while eliminating sedition, introduced anarchy, protecting the sovereign, shook the very foundations of the state. Directed against imaginary sedition, it prepared for the real one. The observer whose words I have just quoted sees a direct connection between Time of Troubles, when he wrote, and the oprichnina) which he remembered: “The king created a great split in the entire earth, and this division, I think, was a prototype of the current all-terrestrial discord.”
This course of action by the king could be the result not of political calculation, but of a distorted political understanding. Faced with the boyars, having lost all confidence in them after the illness of 1553 and especially after the escape of Prince Kurbsky, the tsar exaggerated the danger and became afraid: “... I became for myself.” Then the question of state order turned for him into a question of personal safety, and he, like an overly frightened man, closed his eyes and began to strike right and left, not distinguishing between friends and enemies. This means that in the direction that the tsar gave to the political conflict, his personal character is largely to blame, which therefore receives some significance in our state history.
V. O. Klyuchevsky. Russian history. Full course of lectures. Lecture 29
S. F. Platonov - What is oprichnina?
Scientists have worked hard on the question of what the oprichnina of Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich is. One of them rightly and not without humor noted that “this institution has always seemed very strange, both to those who suffered from it and to those who studied it.” In fact, no original documents on the establishment of the oprichnina have survived; the official chronicle talks about this briefly and does not reveal the meaning of the institution; Russian people of the 16th century, who spoke about the oprichnina, do not explain it well and do not seem to know how to describe it. Both the clerk Ivan Timofeev and the noble prince I.M. Katyrev-Rostovsky see the matter as follows: in rage at his subjects, Grozny divided the state into two parts - he gave one to Tsar Simeon, took the other for himself and ordered his part to “rape that part of the people.” and put to death." To this Timofeev adds that instead of “well-meaning nobles” who were beaten and expelled, Ivan brought foreigners closer to himself and fell under their influence to such an extent that “his entire interior fell into the hand of the barbarian.” But we know that Simeon’s reign was a short-lived and later episode in the history of the oprichnina, that although foreigners were part of the oprichnina, they had no significance in it, and that the ostentatious purpose of the institution was not at all to rape and beat up the sovereign’s subjects, but in order to “create a special court for him (the sovereign) and for his entire daily life.” Thus, we have nothing reliable for judging the matter, except for the chronicler’s brief record of the beginning of the oprichnina, and individual mentions of it in documents not directly related to its establishment. There remains a wide field for guesswork and conjecture.
Of course, the easiest way is to declare the division of the state into oprichnina and zemshchina “ridiculous” and explain it as the whims of a timid tyrant; That's what some people do. But not everyone is satisfied with such a simple view of the matter. S. M. Solovyov explained the oprichnina as an attempt by Ivan the Terrible to formally separate himself from the boyar government class, which was unreliable in his eyes; The new tsar's court, built for such a purpose, in fact degenerated into an instrument of terror, distorted into a detective agency for cases of boyar and any other treason. It is precisely this detective institution, the “highest police for cases of high treason,” that V. O. Klyuchevsky presents to us as the oprichnina. And other historians see in it a weapon in the fight against the boyars, and, moreover, a strange and unsuccessful one. Only K. N. Bestuzhev-Ryumin, E. A. Belov and S. M. Seredonin are inclined to attach great political meaning to the oprichnina: they think that the oprichnina was directed against posterity appanage princes and was intended to break their traditional rights and advantages. However, this view, in our opinion, close to the truth, has not been revealed with the desired completeness, and this forces us to dwell on the oprichnina in order to show what its consequences were and why the oprichnina influenced the development of unrest in Moscow society.
The original decree establishing the oprichnina has not survived to this day; but we know about its existence from the inventory of the royal archives of the 16th century. and we think that the chronicle contains a not entirely successful and intelligible abbreviation of it. From the chronicle we get only an approximate idea of what the oprichnina was like at its beginning. It was not just “the recruitment of a special corps of bodyguards, like the Turkish Janissaries,” as one of the later historians put it, but there was something more complex. A special sovereign court was established, separate from the old Moscow court. It was supposed to have a special butler, special treasurers and clerks, special boyars and okolnichi, courtiers and service people, and finally, special servants in all kinds of “palaces”: food, fodder, grain, etc. To support all this people were taken there were cities and volosts from different places of the Moscow state. They formed the territory of the oprichnina interspersed with lands left in the old order of management and received the name “zemshchina”. The initial volume of this territory, determined in 1565, was increased in subsequent years so much that it covered a good half of the state.
For what needs was this territory given such a large size? The chronicle itself offers some answer to this in the story about the beginning of the oprichnina.
Firstly, the tsar started a new household in the oprichnina palace and, according to custom, took over the palace villages and volosts. A location in the Kremlin was initially chosen for the palace itself, the palace services were demolished and the estates of the Metropolitan and Prince Vladimir Andreevich, which burned in 1565, were taken over by the sovereign. But for some reason, Grozny began to live not in the Kremlin, but on Vozdvizhenka, in a new palace, where he moved in 1567. Some streets and settlements in Moscow itself were assigned to the new oprichnina palace, and in addition, palace volosts and villages near Moscow and in the distance from her. We do not know what caused the choice of those and not other localities from the oprichnina. total stock actual palace lands, we cannot even imagine an approximate list of volosts taken into the new oprichnina palace, but we think that such a list, even if possible, would not be of particular importance. In the palace, as you can guess, the palace lands themselves were taken to the extent of economic need, for the establishment of various services and for the dwellings of the court staff performing palace duties.
But since this court and service staff in general required security and land allocation, then, secondly, in addition to the palace lands themselves, the oprichnina needed patrimonial lands and estates. In this case, Grozny repeated what he himself had done 15 years before. In 1550, he immediately placed “a thousand people among the landowners of the children of the boyars’ best servants” around Moscow. Now he also chooses for himself “princes and nobles, children of boyars, courtyards and policemen, a thousand heads”; but does not place them around Moscow, but in other, mainly “Zamoskovny”, districts: Galitsky, Kostroma, Suzdal, also in Zaotsky cities, and in 1571, probably in Novgorod Pyatina . In these places, according to the chronicle, he exchanges land: “He ordered the votchinniks and landowners who were not in the oprichnina to be taken out of those cities and ordered the land to be given to that place in other cities.” It should be noted that some letters certainly confirm this chronicle testimony; patrimonial owners and landowners were indeed deprived of their lands in oprichnina districts and, moreover, by the entire district at once or, in their words, “with the city together, and not in disgrace - as the sovereign took the city into oprichnina.” For the lands taken, service people were rewarded with others, wherever the sovereign would grant them, or where they themselves would find themselves. Thus, every district taken into oprichnina with service lands was condemned to radical destruction. Land ownership in it was subject to revision, and the lands changed owners, unless the owners themselves became guardsmen. There seems to be no doubt that such a revision was caused by political considerations. In the central regions of the state, for the oprichnina, precisely those areas were separated where land ownership of princes, descendants of the ruling princes, still existed in the ancient appanage territories. The oprichnina operated among the patrimonial estates of the princes of Yaroslavl, Belozersk and Rostov (from Rostov to Charonda), the princes of Starodub and Suzdal (from Suzdal to Yuryev and Balakhna), the princes of Chernigov and other southwestern ones on the upper Oka. These estates gradually became part of the oprichnina: if we compare the lists of princely estates in the well-known decrees about them - the Tsar’s in 1562 and the “Zemsky” in 1572, we will see that in 1572 only the Yaroslavl and Rostov estates remained under the jurisdiction of the “Zemsky” government , Obolensky and Mosalsky, Tver and Ryazan; all the rest, named in the “old sovereign code” of 1562, had already been relegated to the oprichnina. And after 1572, both the estates of Yaroslavl and Rostov, as we have already indicated, were taken into the sovereign’s “yard”. Thus, little by little, the old appanage lands, whose original owners aroused the anger and suspicion of Ivan the Terrible, were almost completely gathered into the oprichnina administration. It was these owners who were to bear the full brunt of the revision of land ownership initiated by Ivan the Terrible. Some of them were torn from their old places by Ivan the Terrible and scattered to new distant and alien places, while others were brought into the new oprichnina service and placed under his strict direct supervision. In Ivan the Terrible's will we find numerous indications that the sovereign took "for himself" the lands of the serving princes; but all these and similar indications, unfortunately, are too fleeting and brief to give us an accurate and complete picture of the upheavals experienced by princely landowners in the oprichnina. We can judge comparatively better the state of affairs in the Zaotsk cities along the upper Oka. The descendants of appanage princes, the princes Odoevsky, Vorotynsky, Trubetskoy and others, were there on their ancestral possessions; “Those princes were still on their appanages and had great fatherlands under them,” he says about them famous phrase Kurbsky. When Ivan the Terrible invaded this nest of princes with the oprichnina, he took some of the princes into the oprichnina “a thousand heads”; Among the “governors from oprishnina” were, for example, princes Fyodor Mikhailovich Trubetskoy and Nikita Ivanovich Odoevsky. He gradually brought others to new places; thus, Prince Mikhail Ivanovich Vorotynsky, a few years after the establishment of the oprichnina, was given Starodub Ryapolovsky instead of his old patrimony (Odoev and other cities); other princes from the upper Oka received lands in the districts of Moscow, Kolomensky, Dmitrovsky, Zvenigorod and others. The results of such events were varied and important. If we remember that oprichnina administration was introduced, with few and insignificant exceptions, all those places in which the old appanage principalities, then we will understand that the oprichnina systematically destroyed the patrimonial land tenure of the serving princes in general, throughout its entire territory. Knowing the true dimensions of the oprichnina, we will be convinced of the complete validity of Fletcher’s words about the princes (in Chapter IX), that Ivan the Terrible, having established the oprichnina, seized their hereditary lands, with the exception of a very small share, and gave the princes other lands in the form of estates that they own, as long as it pleases the king, in areas so remote that there they have neither popular love nor influence, for they were not born there and were not known there. Now, adds Fletcher, the highest nobility, called appanage princes, are compared with the rest; It is only in the consciousness and feeling of the people that it retains some significance and still enjoys outward honor in ceremonial gatherings. In our opinion, this is very precise definition one of the consequences of the oprichnina. Another consequence arising from the same measures was no less important. On the territory of the old appanage estates, the ancient orders still lived, and the old authorities still acted alongside the power of the Moscow sovereign. "Service" people in the 16th century. Here they served from their lands not only to the “great sovereign”, but also to private “sovereigns”. In the middle of the century in the Tver district, for example, out of 272 estates, in no less than 53 the owners served not the sovereign, but Prince Vladimir Andreevich Staritsky, the princes Obolensky, Mikulinsky, Mstislavsky, Rostovsky, Golitsyn, Kurlyatev, even simple boyars; from some estates there was no service at all. It is clear that this order could not be maintained despite the changes in land ownership brought about by the oprichnina. Private authorities wilted under the threat of the oprichnina and were removed; their service people became directly dependent on the great sovereign, and the general revision of land ownership attracted them all to the sovereign's oprichnina service or took them outside the oprichnina. With the oprichnina, the “armies” of several thousand servants, with WHICH the princes had previously come to the sovereign’s service, should have disappeared, just as all other traces of the old Appanage customs and liberties in the field of official relations should have been eradicated. Thus, seizing ancient appanage territories into the oprichnina to accommodate his new servants, Ivan the Terrible made radical changes in them, replacing the remnants of appanage experiences with new orders, ones that made everyone equal in the face of the sovereign in his “special everyday life,” where there could no longer be appanage memories and aristocratic traditions. It is curious that this revision of ancestors and people continued many years after the beginning of the oprichnina. The Terrible himself describes it very graphically in his famous petition on October 30, 1575 addressed to the Grand Duke Simeon Bekbulatovich: “So that you, sir, show mercy, free the little people to sort out, the boyars and nobles and the children of the boyars and courtyard people: others if freed to send away, and you would grant others free to accept; ... and you would free, you would grant from all sorts of people to choose and accept, and who we do not need, and you would grant us those, sir, to free to send away...; and who want to come to us, and you, sir, would have shown mercy, freed them to be with us without disgrace and did not order them to be taken from us; and those who go from us and teach you to the sovereign, beat them with your forehead; and you would... those of our little people who they will teach you to leave us, I didn’t accept the complaint.” Under the feigned self-deprecation of the Tsar “Ivanets Vasiliev” in his address to the newly installed “Grand Duke” Simeon, hides one of the usual decrees for that time on the revision of service people with the introduction of the oprichnina order.
Thirdly, in addition to the palace patrimonial and local lands, many volosts, according to the chronicle, “the sovereign received a fed payout, from which the volosts received all kinds of income for his sovereign household, the salaries of the boyars and nobles and all of his sovereign’s courtyard people who would be with him in the oprichnina." This is true, but not full indication chronicles on income from oprichnina lands. Fed payback is a special collection, a kind of redemption payment volosts for the right of self-government, established in 1555–1556. We know that they were not limited to the income of the oprichnina. The oprichnina received, on the one hand, direct taxes in general, and on the other hand, various kinds indirect taxes. When the Simonov Monastery was taken into the oprichnina, he was ordered to pay “all sorts of taxes” to the oprichnina (“both yam and notable money for the policeman and for the zasechnoye and for the yamchuzh business” - the usual formula of that time). When the Trade side of Veliky Novgorod was taken into the oprichnina, the oprichnina clerks began to be in charge of all customs duties on it, determined by a special customs charter of 1571. Thus, some cities and volosts were introduced into the oprichnina for financial reasons: their purpose was to deliver to the oprichnina separate from "Zemstvo" income. Of course, the entire territory of the oprichnina paid the “tributes and quitrents” that had existed in Rus' from time immemorial, especially the volosts of industrial Pomerania, where there were no landowners; but the main interest and importance for the oprichnina tsarist treasury were the large city settlements, since their population and markets received varied and rich collections. It is interesting to see how these commercial and industrial centers were selected for the oprichnina. In this case, a simple acquaintance with the map of the Moscow state can lead to some seemingly indisputable and not without significance conclusions. Having mapped the most important routes from Moscow to the borders of the state and marked on the map the places taken into the oprichnina, we will make sure that all the main routes with most of the cities located on them were included in the oprichnina. One can even say, without the risk of falling into exaggeration, that the oprichnina had control over the entire space of these routes, with the exception, perhaps, of the most bordering places. Of all the roads connecting Moscow with the borders, perhaps only the roads to the south, to Tula and Ryazan were left unattended by the oprichnina, we think, because their customs and other income was small, and their entire length was in troubled places in southern Ukraine.
The observations we have outlined on the composition of the lands taken into the oprichnina can now be reduced to one conclusion. The territory of the oprichnina, which was formed gradually, in the 70s of the 16th century. was composed of cities and volosts located in the central and northern regions of the state - in Pomorie, Zaotsk and Zaotsk cities, in the Obonezh and Bezhetskaya areas. Resting in the north on the “great sea of oceans,” the oprichnina lands crashed into the “zemshchina,” dividing it in two. In the east, behind the zemshchina there remained the Perm and Vyatka cities, Ponizovye and Ryazan; in the west, border cities: “from the German Ukraine” (Pskov and Novgorod), “from the Lithuanian Ukraine” (Velikie Luki, Smolensk, etc.) and the cities of Seversk. In the south, these two strips of “Zemshchina” were connected by Ukrainian cities and a “wild field”. The oprichnina owned the north of Moscow, Pomorie and the two Novgorod Pyatina areas undividedly; in the central regions, its lands were mixed with zemstvo lands in such a striped pattern that it is impossible not only to explain, but also simply to depict. Of the big cities, it seems, only Tver, Vladimir, and Kaluga remained behind the zemshchina. The cities of Yaroslavl and Pereyaslavl Zalessky, it seems, were taken from the “zemshchina” only in the mid-70s. In any case, the vast majority of cities and volosts in the Moscow center moved away from the zemshchina, and we have the right to say that the outskirts of the state were ultimately abandoned to the zemshchina. The result was something opposite to what we see in the imperial and senate provinces ancient Rome: there the imperial power takes direct control of the military outskirts and fetters the old center with a ring of legions; here the tsarist government, on the contrary, separates the internal regions into oprichnina, leaving the military outskirts of the state to the old administration.
Here are the results our study led us to: territorial composition oprichnina. Established in 1565, the new court of the Moscow sovereign in ten years covered all the internal regions of the state, made significant changes in the service land tenure of these regions, taking over the routes of external communications and almost all the most important markets of the country and quantitatively equaled the zemshchina, if only it did not outgrow it. In the 70s of the 16th century. This is far from being a “detachment of the royal bodyguards” and not even an “oprichnina” in the sense of an appanage court. The new court of the Terrible Tsar grew and became so complicated that it ceased to be an oprichnina not only in essence, but also in its official name: around 1572 the word “oprichnina” disappeared in the categories and was replaced by the word “court”. We think that this is not an accident, but a fairly clear sign that in the minds of the creators of the oprichnina it has changed its original form.
A number of observations outlined above put us at a point of view from which existing explanations of the oprichnina do not seem to be entirely consistent historical reality. We see that, contrary to popular belief, the oprichnina did not stand “outside” the state at all. In the establishment of the oprichnina there was no “removal of the head of state from the state,” as S. M. Solovyov put it; on the contrary, the oprichnina took into its own hands the entire state in its fundamental part, leaving boundaries to the “zemstvo” administration, and even sought to government reforms, because it introduced significant changes to the composition of service land tenure. Destroying his aristocratic system, the oprichnina was directed, in essence, against those aspects of the state order that tolerated and supported such a system. It acted not “against individuals,” as V. O. Klyuchevsky says, but precisely against order, and therefore was much more an instrument of state reform than a simple police means of suppressing and preventing state crimes. In saying this, we do not at all deny the disgustingly cruel persecution to which the Terrible Tsar subjected his imaginary and real enemies in the oprichnina. Both Kurbsky and foreigners talk a lot about them and believe them. But it seems to us that the scenes of atrocity and debauchery, which horrified everyone and at the same time occupied them, were like dirty foam that boiled on the surface of the oprichnina’s life, covering up the everyday work happening in its depths. The incomprehensible bitterness of Ivan the Terrible, the gross arbitrariness of his “kromeshniks” much more affected the interest of contemporaries than the ordinary activities of the oprichnina, aimed at “sorting out the little people, the boyars and nobles and the children of the boyars and courtyard little people.” Contemporaries noticed only the results of this activity - the destruction of princely land ownership; Kurbsky passionately reproached Ivan the Terrible for him, saying that the tsar destroyed the princes for the sake of estates, acquisitions and belongings; Fletcher calmly pointed out the humiliation of the "appanage princes" after Ivan the Terrible seized their estates. But neither one nor the other of them, and indeed no one at all, left us a complete picture of how Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich concentrated in his hands, in addition to the “zemsky” boyars, the management of the most profitable places of the state and its trade routes and, having his oprichnina treasury and oprichnina servants, gradually “sorted through” the service people, tore them away from the soil that nourished their inconvenient political memories and claims, and planted them in new places or completely destroyed them in fits of his suspicious rage.
Perhaps this inability of contemporaries to discern behind the outbursts of the tsar’s anger and behind the arbitrariness of his oprichnina squad a certain plan and system in the actions of the oprichnina was the reason that the meaning of the oprichnina became hidden from the eyes of posterity. But there is another reason for this. Just as the first period of reforms of Tsar Ivan IV left few traces in the paperwork of Moscow orders, so the oprichnina with its reform of service land tenure was almost not reflected in the acts and orders of the 16th century. When transferring the regions to the oprichnina, Grozny did not invent new forms or a new type of institutions to govern them; he only entrusted their management to special persons - “from the court”, and these persons from the court acted side by side and together with persons “from the zemstvo”. That is why sometimes the name of the clerk alone, who sealed this or that document, shows us where the document was given, in the oprichnina or in the zemshchina, or only by the locality to which this or that act relates, we can judge what we are dealing with, with whether by oprichnik order or with the zemstvo. The act itself does not always indicate exactly which governing body in this case should be understood, zemstvo or courtyard; it simply says: “Big Palace”, “Grand Parish”, “Discharge” and only sometimes an explanatory word is added, like: “from the Zemstvo Palace”, “courtyard Discharge”, “to the courtyard Grand Parish”. Equally, positions were not always mentioned with the meaning of which order, oprichnina or zemstvo, they belonged to; sometimes it was said, for example, “with the sovereign, the boyars from the oprichnina”, “Butler of the Great Zemsky Palace”, “court voivodes”, “deacon of the Order of the courtyard”, etc., sometimes persons who obviously belonged to the oprichnina and “to the court”, are named in documents without any indication. Therefore, there is no way to give a definite image of the administrative structure of the oprichnina. It is very tempting to think that the oprichnina did not have administrative institutions separate from the “zemshchina”. There was, it seems, only one Class, one Big Parish, but in these and other public places various clerks Zemstvo and courtyard affairs were entrusted to localities separately, and the procedure for reporting and solving those and other cases was not the same. Researchers have yet to resolve the question of how things and people were demarcated in such a close and strange neighborhood. It now seems to us that the enmity between the zemstvo and oprichnina people is inevitable and irreconcilable, because we believe that Ivan the Terrible commanded the oprichniki to rape and kill zemstvo people. Meanwhile, it is not visible that the government of the 16th century. considered courtyard and zemstvo people as enemies; on the contrary, it ordered them to act jointly and concordantly. So, in 1570, in May, “the sovereign ordered to speak about the (Lithuanian) borders to all the boyars, zemstvo and from the oprichnina... and the boyars, zemstvo and from the oprishnina, spoke about those borders; the sovereign ordered about the (Lithuanian) borders speak to all the boyars, zemstvo and oprishnina... and the boyars, zemstvo and oprishnina, talked about those borders" and came to one general decision. A month later, the boyars made the same general decision regarding the unusual “word” in the title of the Lithuanian sovereign and “for that word they ordered to stand strong.” Also in 1570 and 1571. on the “shore” and in the Ukraine there were zemstvo and “oprishninsky” detachments against the Tatars, and they were ordered to act together, “wherever the zemstvo governors happened to meet with the oprishninsky governors.” All such facts suggest that the relationship between the two parts of his kingdom was not built by Ivan the Terrible on the principle of mutual hostility, and if the oprichnina, according to Ivan Timofeev, caused “a great split in the whole land,” then the reasons for this lay not in the intentions of Ivan the Terrible, but in the ways of their implementation. Just one episode with the enthronement of Simeon Bekbulatovich in the zemshchina could contradict this if serious significance could be attached to it and if it clearly indicated the intention to separate the “zemshchina” into a special “great reign.” But it seems that this was a short-term and not at all sustained test of power division. Simeon had the opportunity to sit in the rank of Grand Duke in Moscow for only a few months. Moreover, since he did not bear the royal title, he could not be crowned king; simply, according to one discharge book, the sovereign “placed him on a great reign in Moscow,” perhaps with some ritual, but, of course, not with the rite of a royal wedding. Simeon had one shadow of power, because during his reign, along with his letters, letters from the real “Tsar and Grand Duke of All Rus'” were also written, and the clerks did not even unsubscribe to the letters of “Grand Duke Simeon Bekbulatovich of All Rus'”, preferring to answer only to the “sovereign” Prince Ivan Vasilyevich of Moscow." In a word, it was some kind of game or whim, the meaning of which is not clear, and the political significance is negligible. Simeon was not shown to foreigners and they spoke about him confusedly and evasively; if real power had been given to him, it would hardly have been possible to hide this new ruler of the “zemshchina”.
So, the oprichnina was the first attempt to resolve one of the contradictions of the Moscow political system. It crushed the landownership of the nobility as it existed in ancient times. Through a forced and systematically carried out exchange of land, she destroyed the old connections of the appanage princes with their ancestral estates wherever she considered it necessary, and scattered the princes, suspicious in the eyes of Grozny, to different places of the state, mainly on its outskirts, where they turned into ordinary service landowners. If we remember that along with this land movement there were disgraces, exiles and executions, directed primarily at the same princes, then we will be convinced that in the oprichnina of Grozny there was a complete destruction specific aristocracy. True, it was not exterminated “all the people”, without exception: this was hardly part of Grozny’s policy, as some scientists are inclined to think; but its composition thinned out significantly, and only those who knew how to appear politically harmless to Ivan the Terrible, like Mstislavsky and his son-in-law “Grand Duke” Simeon Bekbulatovich, were saved from death, or they knew how, like some princes - the Skopins, Shuiskys, Pronskys, Sitskys, Trubetskoys, Temkins - to earn the honor of being accepted into service in the oprichnina. The political significance of the class was irrevocably destroyed, and this was the success of Ivan’s policy. Immediately after his death, what the boyar-princes were so afraid of during his time came true: the Zakharyins and Godunovs began to own them. Primacy in the palace passed to these simple boyar families from a circle of people of the highest breed, broken by the oprichnina.
But this was only one of the consequences of the oprichnina. Another was the unusually vigorous government-led mobilization of land ownership. The oprichnina moved service people in droves from one land to another; lands changed owners not only in the sense that instead of one landowner another came, but also in the fact that palace or monastery land turned into local distribution, and the estate of a prince or the estate of a boyar’s son was assigned to the sovereign. There was, as it were, a general revision and a general reshuffling of ownership rights. The results of this operation were of undeniable importance for the government, although they were inconvenient and difficult for the population. Eliminating the old land relations in the oprichnina, bequeathed by allotment time, the government of Grozny, in their place, everywhere established monotonous orders that firmly linked the right of land ownership with compulsory service. This was required both by the political views of Ivan the Terrible himself and by the more general interests of state defense. Trying to place “Oprichnina” service people on the lands taken into the oprichnina, Grozny removed from these lands their old service owners who did not end up in the oprichnina, but at the same time he had to think about not leaving without lands and these latter ones. They settled in the "zemshchina" and settled in areas that needed a military population. Political considerations of Grozny drove them away from their old places, strategic needs determined the places of their new settlement. The clearest example of the fact that the placement of service people depended simultaneously on the introduction of the oprichnina and on circumstances of a military nature is found in the so-called Polotsk scribal books of 1571. They contain data on the children of the boyars who were brought to the Lithuanian border from Obonezhskaya and Bezhetskaya Pyatina immediately after these two Pyatins were taken into the oprichnina. In the border places, in Sebezh, Neshcherda, Ozerishchi and Usvyat, Novgorod servicemen were given lands to each in full at his salary of 400–500 chieti. Thus, not accepted among the guardsmen, these people completely lost their lands in the Novgorod Pyatina and received a new settlement on the border strip that had to be strengthened for the Lithuanian war. We have few such expressive examples of the influence that the oprichnina had on the turnover of land in the service center and on the military outskirts of the state. But there is no doubt that this influence was very great. It intensified land mobilization and made it anxious and disorderly. The mass confiscation and secularization of estates in the oprichnina, the mass movement of service landowners, the conversion of palace and black lands into private ownership - all this had the character of a violent revolution in the field of land relations and was inevitably bound to cause a very definite feeling of displeasure and fear in the population. The fear of the sovereign's disgrace and execution was mixed with the fear of being evicted from his native nest to the border wasteland without any guilt, “with the city together, and not in disgrace.” It was not only landowners who suffered from involuntary, sudden movements, who were forced to change their patrimony or local settlement and abandon one farm in order to start another in an alien environment, in new conditions, with a new working population. This working population suffered equally from the change of owners; it suffered especially when, together with the palace or black land on which it sat, it had to fall into private dependence. Relations between land owners and their peasant population were already quite complicated at that time; the oprichnina was supposed to complicate and muddy them even more.
But the question of land relations XVI V. takes us to a different area of Moscow social difficulties...
S. F. Platonov. Lectures on Russian history
In January 1565, from the royal residence of the village of Kolomenskoye near Moscow, through the Trinity-Sergius Monastery, the tsar left for Alexandrovskaya Sloboda (now the city of Alexandrov, Vladimir region). From there he addressed the capital with two messages. In the first, sent to the clergy and the Boyar Duma, Ivan IV reported the renunciation of power due to the betrayal of the boyars and asked to be allocated a special inheritance - oprichnina (from the word “oprich” - in addition, in the old days this was the name of additional land granted to the grand duchesses). In the second message, addressed to the townspeople of the capital, the tsar reported on the decision made and added that he had no complaints about the townspeople.
It was a well-calculated political maneuver. Using the people's faith in the tsar, Ivan the Terrible expected that he would be called to return to the throne. When this happened, the tsar dictated his conditions: the right to unlimited autocratic power and the establishment of the oprichnina. The country was divided into two parts: the oprichnina and the zemshchina. Ivan IV included the most important lands in the oprichnina. It included Pomeranian cities, cities with large settlements and strategically important ones, as well as the most economically developed areas of the country. The nobles who were part of the oprichnina army settled on these lands. Its composition was initially determined to be one thousand people. The population of the zemshchina had to support this army. The oprichnina, in parallel with the zemshchina, developed its own system of governing bodies.
Management of Russia during the oprichnina period
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Comparison lines |
Oprichnina |
Zemshchina |
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Territory |
Center of Russia, Stroganov lands in the Urals, Primorye, part of Moscow |
All lands outside the oprichnina |
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Alexandrovskaya Sloboda | ||
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Ruler |
Grand Duke of Moscow (Ivanets Vasiliev) |
Sovereign of All Rus' (Simeon Bekbulatovich) |
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Control |
Oprichnaya Duma Oprichnina orders Oprichnina treasury |
Zemsky Boyar Duma Zemstvo orders Zemstvo treasury |
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Military forces |
Oprichnina army |
Zemstvo army |
Oprichnina is a system of measures of a terrorist military dictatorship to defeat the enemies of the tsar, strengthen autocracy, and further enslave the people.
It cannot be considered that the oprichnina was directed entirely against the willfulness of the boyars. It did not change the nature of feudal land tenure, nor did it eliminate the remnants of the appanage system. If the Elected Rada followed the path of gradual reforms necessary for the country, then the oprichnina is an attempt at accelerated centralization, the establishment of the most brutal despotism, autocratic order.
In an effort to destroy the separatism of the feudal nobility, Ivan IV did not stop at any cruelty. Oprichnina terror, executions, exiles began. In Tver, Malyuta Skuratov strangled Moscow Metropolitan Philip (Fedor Kolychev), who condemned the oprichnina lawlessness. In Moscow, Prince Vladimir Staritsky, the Tsar's cousin who claimed the throne, his wife and daughter, who was summoned there, were poisoned. His mother, Princess Evdokia Staritskaya, was also killed. The center and north-west of the Russian lands, where the boyars were especially strong, were subjected to the most severe defeat. In December 1569, Ivan undertook a campaign to Novgorod, whose inhabitants allegedly wanted to come under the rule of Lithuania. On the way, Klin, Tver, and Torzhok were destroyed. Particularly cruel executions (about 200 people) took place in Moscow on June 25, 1570. In Novgorod itself, the pogrom lasted six weeks. Thousands of its inhabitants died a cruel death, houses and churches were plundered.
However, an attempt to resolve contradictions in the country with brute force (executions and repression) could only give a temporary effect. It did not completely destroy boyar-princely land ownership, although it greatly weakened its power; the political role of the boyar aristocracy was undermined. The wild tyranny and death of many innocent people who became victims of oprichnina terror still evoke horror and shudder. The oprichnina led to an even greater aggravation of contradictions within the country, worsened the position of the peasantry and largely contributed to its consolidation.
In 1571, the oprichnina army was unable to repel a raid on Moscow Crimean Tatars, who burned the Moscow suburb - this revealed the inability of the oprichnina troops to successfully fight external enemies. True, the following year, 1572, not far from Podolsk (the village of Molodi), 50 km from Moscow, the Crimeans suffered a crushing defeat from the Russian army, led by the experienced commander M.I. Vorotynsky. However, the tsar abolished the oprichnina, which in 1572 was transformed into the “Sovereign Court”.
Oprichnina weakened the country politically and economically. A number of historians believe that an alternative to the oprichnina could be structural transformations similar to the reforms of the Chosen Rada. This would allow, according to experts who share this point of view, instead of the unlimited autocracy of Ivan IV, to have an estate-representative monarchy with a “human face.”
CONCLUSION
During the reign of Tsar Ivan IV (the Terrible), the Kazan, Astrakhan and Siberian khanates were conquered, and the raids of the Crimean hordes on Moscow were stopped. During his many-year reign, Ivan IV sought to create an autocratic government, a centralized power, introduced a legal code (Code), the Streltsy army, and significantly expanded the territory of Russia.
At the same time, the tsar led the country to economic ruin, political destabilization, and weakening positions in foreign policy.
There is an eternal dispute: “who was the Terrible - a hero or an executioner.” Oprichnina, senseless executions of prominent people, tyranny and arbitrariness do not go unnoticed by historians. The Livonian War, which lasted 25 years and cost Russia countless victims, was unsuccessful.
The reign of Ivan the Terrible largely predetermined the course of the further history of our country - the “rust” of the 70-80s of the 16th century, the establishment of serfdom on a state scale and that complex knot of contradictions at the turn of the 16th – 17th centuries, which contemporaries called “troubles”.
But, despite the “character of despotism” often characteristic of that era, every truly Russian person with feelings of gratitude and respect should remember the first dynasty, with which the Russian people, in the eyes of history, experienced more than six centuries of its existence, filled with and great deeds and great disasters; during whose reign it developed into a powerful nation, acquired a vast territory and took its rightful place among other historical peoples of Europe and the whole world.
The role of the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible in the history of the Russian state
Hundreds, if not thousands of historical studies, monographs, articles, reviews have been written about such a phenomenon as the oprichnina of I. the Terrible (1565-1572), dissertations have been defended, the main causes have long been identified, the course of events has been reconstructed, and the consequences have been explained.
However, to this day, neither in domestic nor in foreign historiography there is a consensus on the importance of the oprichnina in the history of the Russian state. For centuries, historians have been debating: how should we perceive the events of 1565-1572? Was the oprichnina simply the cruel terror of a half-mad despot king against his subjects? Or was it based on a sound and necessary policy in those conditions, aimed at strengthening the foundations of statehood and increasing the authority of central government, improving the country's defense capability, etc.?
In general, all the diverse opinions of historians can be reduced to two mutually exclusive statements: 1) the oprichnina was determined by the personal qualities of Tsar Ivan and had no political meaning (N.I. Kostomarov, V.O. Klyuchevsky, S.B. Veselovsky, I. Y. Froyanov); 2) the oprichnina was a well-thought-out political step of Ivan the Terrible and was directed against those social forces that opposed his “autocracy.”
There is also no unanimity of opinion among supporters of the latter point of view. Some researchers believe that the purpose of the oprichnina was to crush the boyar-princely economic and political power associated with the destruction of a large patrimonial land ownership(S.M. Solovyov, S.F. Platonov, R.G. Skrynnikov). Others (A.A. Zimin and V.B. Kobrin) believe that the oprichnina “aimed” exclusively at the remnants of the appanage princely aristocracy (Staritsky Prince Vladimir), and was also directed against the separatist aspirations of Novgorod and the resistance of the church as a powerful one opposing the state organizations. None of these provisions are indisputable, so the scientific discussion about the meaning of the oprichnina continues.
What is oprichnina?
Anyone who is at least somehow interested in the history of Russia knows very well that there was a time when guardsmen existed in Rus'. In the minds of most modern people, this word has become the definition of a terrorist, a criminal, a person who deliberately commits lawlessness with the connivance of the supreme power, and often with its direct support.
Meanwhile, the very word “oprich” in relation to any property or land ownership began to be used long before the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Already in the 14th century, “oprichnina” was the name given to the part of the inheritance that goes to the prince’s widow after his death (“widow’s share”). The widow had the right to receive income from a certain part of the land, but after her death the estate was returned to the eldest son, another eldest heir, or, in the absence of one, was assigned to the state treasury. Thus, the oprichnina in the XIV-XVI centuries was a specially allocated inheritance for life.
Over time, the word “oprichnina” acquired a synonym that goes back to the root “oprich”, which means “except.” Hence “oprichnina” - “pitch darkness”, as it was sometimes called, and “oprichnik” - “pitch”. But this synonym was introduced into use, as some scientists believe, by the first “political emigrant” and opponent of Ivan the Terrible, Andrei Kurbsky. In his messages to the Tsar, the words “pitch people” and “utter darkness” are used for the first time in relation to the oprichnina of Ivan IV.
In addition, it should be noted that the Old Russian word “oprich” (adverb and preposition), according to Dahl’s dictionary, means: “Outside, around, outside, beyond what.” Hence “oprichnina” - “separate, allocated, special.”
Thus, it is symbolic that the name of the Soviet employee of the “special department” - “special officer” - is actually a semantic tracing of the word “oprichnik”.
In January 1558, Ivan the Terrible began the Livonian War to take possession of the coast. Baltic Sea to gain access to sea communications and simplify trade with Western European countries. Soon the Grand Duchy of Moscow faces a broad coalition of enemies, which include Poland, Lithuania, and Sweden. Actually participates in the anti-Moscow coalition and Crimean Khanate, which ravages the southern regions of the Moscow principality with regular military campaigns. The war is becoming protracted and exhausting. Drought, famine, plague epidemics, Crimean Tatar campaigns, Polish-Lithuanian raids and a naval blockade carried out by Poland and Sweden devastate the country. The sovereign himself continually faces manifestations of boyar separatism, the reluctance of the boyar oligarchy to continue the Livonian War, which was important for the Moscow kingdom. In 1564 the commander western army Prince Kurbsky - in the past one of the tsar’s closest personal friends, a member of the “Elected Rada” - goes over to the enemy’s side, betrays Russian agents in Livonia and participates in offensive actions Poles and Lithuanians.
Ivan IV's position becomes critical. It was possible to get out of it only with the help of the toughest, most decisive measures.
On December 3, 1564, Ivan the Terrible and his family suddenly left the capital on a pilgrimage. The king took with him the treasury, personal library, icons and symbols of power. Having visited the village of Kolomenskoye, he did not return to Moscow and, after wandering for several weeks, stopped in Alexandrovskaya Sloboda. On January 3, 1565, he announced his abdication of the throne, due to “anger” at the boyars, church, voivode and government officials. Two days later, a deputation headed by Archbishop Pimen arrived in Alexandrovskaya Sloboda, which persuaded the tsar to return to his kingdom. From Sloboda, Ivan IV sent two letters to Moscow: one to the boyars and clergy, and the other to the townspeople, explaining in detail why and with whom the sovereign was angry, and against whom he “bears no grudge.” Thus, he immediately divided society, sowing the seeds of mutual distrust and hatred of the boyar elite among ordinary townspeople and the minor serving nobility.
At the beginning of February 1565, Ivan the Terrible returned to Moscow. The Tsar announced that he was again taking over the reigns, but on the condition that he was free to execute traitors, put them in disgrace, deprive them of their property, etc., and that neither the boyar Duma nor the clergy would interfere in his affairs. Those. The sovereign introduced the “oprichnina” for himself.
This word was used at first in the sense of special property or possession; now it has acquired a different meaning. In the oprichnina, the tsar separated part of the boyars, servants and clerks, and in general made his entire “everyday life” special: in the Sytny, Kormovy and Khlebenny palaces a special staff of housekeepers, cooks, clerks, etc. was appointed; special detachments of archers were recruited. Special cities (about 20, including Moscow, Vologda, Vyazma, Suzdal, Kozelsk, Medyn, Veliky Ustyug) with volosts were assigned to maintain the oprichnina. In Moscow itself, some streets were given over to the oprichnina (Chertolskaya, Arbat, Sivtsev Vrazhek, part of Nikitskaya, etc.); the former residents were relocated to other streets. Up to 1,000 princes, nobles, and children of boyars, both Moscow and city, were also recruited into the oprichnina. They were given estates in the volosts assigned to maintain the oprichnina. Former landowners and patrimonial owners were evicted from those volosts to others.
The rest of the state was supposed to constitute the “zemshchina”: the tsar entrusted it to the zemstvo boyars, that is, the boyar duma itself, and put Prince Ivan Dmitrievich Belsky and Prince Ivan Fedorovich Mstislavsky at the head of its administration. All matters had to be resolved in the old way, and with big matters one should turn to the boyars, but if military or important zemstvo matters happened, then to the sovereign. For his rise, that is, for his trip to Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda, the tsar exacted a fine of 100 thousand rubles from the Zemsky Prikaz.
The "oprichniki" - the sovereign's people - were supposed to "root out treason" and act exclusively in the interests of the tsarist power, maintaining authority supreme ruler in wartime conditions. No one limited them in the methods or methods of “eradicating” treason, and all the innovations of Ivan the Terrible turned into cruel, unjustified terror of the ruling minority against the majority of the country’s population.
In December 1569, an army of guardsmen, personally led by Ivan the Terrible, set out on a campaign against Novgorod, who allegedly wanted to betray him. The king walked as if through enemy country. The guardsmen destroyed cities (Tver, Torzhok), villages and villages, killed and robbed the population. In Novgorod itself, the defeat lasted 6 weeks. Thousands of suspects were tortured and drowned in Volkhov. The city was plundered. The property of churches, monasteries and merchants was confiscated. The beating continued in Novgorod Pyatina. Then Grozny moved towards Pskov, and only the superstition of the formidable king allowed this ancient city to avoid a pogrom.
In 1572, when it was created real threat the very existence of the Moscow state on the part of the Krymchaks, the oprichnina troops actually sabotaged the order of their king to oppose the enemy. The battle of Molodin with the army of Devlet-Girey was won by regiments under the leadership of the “Zemstvo” governors. After this, Ivan IV himself abolished the oprichnina, disgraced and executed many of its leaders.
Historiography of the oprichnina in the first half of the 19th century
Historians were the first to talk about the oprichnina already in the 18th and early 19th centuries: Shcherbatov, Bolotov, Karamzin. Even then, a tradition had developed to “divide” the reign of Ivan IV into two halves, which subsequently formed the basis of the theory of the “two Ivans,” introduced into historiography by N.M. Karamzin based on the study of the works of Prince A. Kurbsky. According to Kurbsky, Ivan the Terrible was a virtuous hero and a wise statesman in the first half of his reign and a crazy tyrant-despot in the second. Many historians, following Karamzin, associated the sharp change in the sovereign’s policy with his mental illness, caused by the death of his first wife Anastasia Romanovna. Even versions of “replacing” the king with another person arose and were seriously considered.
The watershed between the “good” Ivan and the “bad”, according to Karamzin, was the introduction of the oprichnina in 1565. But N.M. Karamzin was still more of a writer and moralist than a scientist. Painting the oprichnina, he created an artistically expressive picture that was supposed to impress the reader, but in no way answer the question about the causes, consequences and the very nature of this historical phenomenon.
Subsequent historians (N.I. Kostomarov) also saw the main reason for the oprichnina exclusively in personal qualities Ivan the Terrible, who did not want to listen to people who disagreed with the methods of carrying out his generally justified policy of strengthening the central government.
Solovyov and Klyuchevsky about the oprichnina
S. M. Solovyov and the “state school” of Russian historiography he created took a different path. Abstracting from the personal characteristics of the tyrant king, they saw in the activities of Ivan the Terrible, first of all, a transition from old “tribal” relations to modern “state” ones, which were completed by the oprichnina - state power in the form as the great “reformer” himself understood it. . Solovyov was the first to separate the cruelties of Tsar Ivan and the internal terror he organized from the political, social and economic processes of that time. From the point of view of historical science, this was undoubtedly a step forward.
V.O. Klyuchevsky, unlike Solovyov, believed domestic policy Ivan the Terrible was completely aimless, moreover, dictated solely by the personal qualities of the sovereign’s character. In his opinion, the oprichnina did not answer pressing political issues, and also did not eliminate the difficulties that it caused. By “difficulty,” the historian means the clashes between Ivan IV and the boyars: “The boyars imagined themselves to be powerful advisers to the sovereign of all Rus' at the very time when this sovereign, remaining faithful to the view of the appanage patrimonial landowner, in accordance with ancient Russian law, granted them as his courtyard servants the title of the sovereign's slaves. Both sides found themselves in such an unnatural relationship to each other, which they did not seem to notice while it was developing, and which they did not know what to do with when they noticed it.”
The way out of this situation was the oprichnina, which Klyuchevsky calls an attempt to “live side by side, but not together.”
According to the historian, Ivan IV had only two options:
Eliminate the boyars as a government class and replace them with other, more flexible and obedient instruments of government;
To divide the boyars, to attract to the throne the most reliable people from the boyars and rule with them, as Ivan ruled at the beginning of his reign.
It was not possible to implement any of the outputs.
Klyuchevsky points out that Ivan the Terrible should have acted against the political situation of the entire boyars, and not against individuals. The tsar does the opposite: unable to change the political system that is inconvenient for him, he persecutes and executes individuals (and not only the boyars), but at the same time leaves the boyars at the head of the zemstvo administration.
This course of action of the tsar is by no means a consequence of political calculation. It is, rather, a consequence of a distorted political understanding caused by personal emotions and fear for one’s personal position:
Klyuchevsky saw in the oprichnina not a state institution, but a manifestation of lawless anarchy aimed at shaking the foundations of the state and undermining the authority of the monarch himself. Klyuchevsky considered the oprichnina one of the most effective factors that prepared the Time of Troubles.
Concept by S.F. Platonov
Developments " public school“were further developed in the works of S. F. Platonov, who created the most comprehensive concept of oprichnina, which was included in all pre-revolutionary, Soviet and some post-Soviet university textbooks.
S.F. Platonov believed that the main reasons for the oprichnina lay in Ivan the Terrible’s awareness of the danger of the appanage princely and boyar opposition. S.F. Platonov wrote: “Dissatisfied with the nobility that surrounded him, he (Ivan the Terrible) applied to her the same measure that Moscow applied to its enemies, namely, “conclusion”... What succeeded so well with the external enemy, the Terrible planned to try with the internal enemy, those. with those people who seemed hostile and dangerous to him.”
In modern language, the oprichnina of Ivan IV formed the basis for a grandiose personnel reshuffle, as a result of which large landowner boyars and appanage princes were resettled from appanage hereditary lands to places remote from the former settlement. The estates were divided into plots and complaints were made to those boyar children who were in the service of the tsar (oprichniki). According to Platonov, the oprichnina was not the “whim” of a crazy tyrant. On the contrary, Ivan the Terrible waged a focused and well-thought-out struggle against large boyar hereditary land ownership, thus wanting to eliminate separatist tendencies and suppress opposition to the central government:
Grozny sent the old owners to the outskirts, where they could be useful for the defense of the state.
Oprichnina terror, according to Platonov, was only an inevitable consequence of such a policy: the forest is cut down - the chips fly! Over time, the monarch himself becomes a hostage to the current situation. In order to stay in power and complete the measures he had planned, Ivan the Terrible was forced to pursue a policy of total terror. There was simply no other way out.
“The entire operation of reviewing and changing landowners in the eyes of the population bore the character of disaster and political terror,” the historian wrote. - With extraordinary cruelty, he (Ivan the Terrible), without any investigation or trial, executed and tortured people he disliked, exiled their families, ruined their farms. His guardsmen did not hesitate to kill defenseless people, rob and rape them “for a laugh.”
One of the main negative consequences of the oprichnina Platonov recognizes is the disruption of the economic life of the country - the state of stability of the population achieved by the state was lost. In addition, the population’s hatred of the cruel authorities brought discord into society itself, giving rise to general uprisings and peasant wars after the death of Ivan the Terrible - the harbingers of the Troubles of the early 17th century.
IN overall assessment oprichnina S.F. Platonov puts much more “pluses” than all his predecessors. According to his concept, Ivan the Terrible was able to achieve indisputable results in the policy of centralization of the Russian state: large landowners (the boyar elite) were ruined and partly destroyed, a large mass of relatively small landowners and service people (nobles) gained dominance, which, of course, contributed to increasing the country's defense capability . Hence the progressive nature of the oprichnina policy.
It was this concept that was established in Russian historiography for many years.
“Apologetic” historiography of the oprichnina (1920-1956)
Despite the abundance of contradictory facts that came to light already in the 1910-20s, S.F. Platonov’s “apologetic” concept regarding the oprichnina and Ivan IV the Terrible was not at all disgraced. On the contrary, it gave birth to a number of successors and sincere supporters.
In 1922, the book “Ivan the Terrible” by former Moscow University professor R. Vipper was published. Witnessing the breakup Russian Empire Having tasted the full extent of Soviet anarchy and tyranny, political emigrant and quite serious historian R. Vipper created not historical research, and a very passionate panegyric to the oprichnina and Ivan the Terrible himself - a politician who managed to “restore order with a firm hand.” The author for the first time examines the internal politics of Grozny (oprichnina) in direct connection with the foreign policy situation. However, Vipper's interpretation of many foreign policy events is largely fantastic and far-fetched. Ivan the Terrible appears in his work as a wise and far-sighted ruler who cared, first of all, about the interests of his great power. The executions and terror of Grozny are justified and can be explained by completely objective reasons: the oprichnina was necessary due to the extremely difficult military situation in the country, the ruin of Novgorod - for the sake of improving the situation at the front, etc.
The oprichnina itself, according to Vipper, is an expression of democratic (!) tendencies of the 16th century. Thus, the Zemsky Sobor of 1566 is artificially connected by the author with the creation of the oprichnina in 1565, the transformation of the oprichnina into a courtyard (1572) is interpreted by Vipper as an expansion of the system caused by the betrayal of the Novgorodians and the ruinous raid of the Crimean Tatars. He refuses to admit that the reform of 1572 was in fact the destruction of the oprichnina. The reasons for the catastrophic consequences for Rus' of the end of the Livonian War are equally unobvious to Vipper.
The chief official historiographer of the revolution, M.N., went even further in his apologetics for Grozny and the oprichnina. Pokrovsky. In his “Russian History from Ancient Times,” the convinced revolutionary turns Ivan the Terrible into a leader democratic revolution, the more successful forerunner of Emperor Paul I, who is also portrayed by Pokrovsky as a “democrat on the throne.” Justification of tyrants is one of Pokrovsky's favorite themes. He saw the aristocracy as such as the main object of his hatred, because its power is, by definition, harmful.
However, to faithful Marxist historians, Pokrovsky’s views undoubtedly seemed overly infected with an idealistic spirit. No individual can play any significant role in history - after all, history is governed by the class struggle. This is what Marxism teaches. And Pokrovsky, having listened enough to the seminaries of Vinogradov, Klyuchevsky and other “bourgeois specialists,” was never able to get rid of the burp of idealism in himself, attaching too much importance to individuals, as if they did not obey the laws of historical materialism common to all...
The most typical of the orthodox Marxist approach to the problem of Ivan the Terrible and the oprichnina is M. Nechkina’s article about Ivan IV in the First Soviet Encyclopedia (1933). In her interpretation, the personality of the king does not matter at all:
The social meaning of the oprichnina was the elimination of the boyars as a class and its dissolution into the mass of small land feudal lords. Ivan worked to realize this goal with “the greatest consistency and indestructible perseverance” and was completely successful in his work.
This was the only correct and only possible interpretation of the policies of Ivan the Terrible.
Moreover, this interpretation was so liked by the “collectors” and “revivers” of the new Russian Empire, namely the USSR, that it was immediately adopted by the Stalinist leadership. The new great-power ideology needed historical roots, especially on the eve of the upcoming war. Stories about Russian military leaders and generals of the past who fought with the Germans or with anyone remotely similar to the Germans were urgently created and replicated. The victories of Alexander Nevsky, Peter I (true, he fought with the Swedes, but why go into details?..), Alexander Suvorov were recalled and extolled. Dmitry Donskoy, Minin with Pozharsky and Mikhail Kutuzov, who fought against foreign aggressors, also after 20 years of oblivion, were declared national heroes and glorious sons Fatherland.
Of course, under all these circumstances, Ivan the Terrible could not remain forgotten. True, he did not repel foreign aggression and did not win a military victory over the Germans, but he was the creator of a centralized Russian state, a fighter against disorder and anarchy created by malicious aristocrats - the boyars. He began to introduce revolutionary reforms with the aim of creating a new order. But even an autocratic king can play a positive role if the monarchy is a progressive system in this segment stories…
Despite the very sad fate of Academician Platonov himself, who was convicted in an “academic case” (1929-1930), the “apologization” of the oprichnina that he began gained more and more momentum in the late 1930s.
Coincidentally or not, but in 1937 - the very “peak” Stalin's repressions- Platonov’s “Essays on the History of the Troubles in the Moscow State of the 16th–17th centuries” were republished for the fourth time, and the Higher School of Propagandists under the Central Committee of the Party published (though “for internal use”) fragments of Platonov’s pre-revolutionary textbook for universities.
In 1941, director S. Eisenstein received an “order” from the Kremlin to shoot a film about Ivan the Terrible. Naturally, Comrade Stalin wanted to see a Terrible Tsar who would fully fit into the concept of the Soviet “apologists.” Therefore, all the events included in Eisenstein’s script are subordinated to the main conflict - the struggle for autocracy against the rebellious boyars and against everyone who interferes with him in unifying the lands and strengthening the state. The film Ivan the Terrible (1944) exalts Tsar Ivan as a wise and fair ruler who had a great goal. Oprichnina and terror are presented as inevitable “costs” in achieving it. But even these “costs” (the second episode of the film) Comrade Stalin chose not to allow on screens.
In 1946, a Resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was issued, which spoke of the “progressive army of the guardsmen.” The progressive significance in the then historiography of the Oprichnina army was that its formation was a necessary stage in the struggle to strengthen centralized state and represented a struggle of the central government, based on the serving nobility, against the feudal aristocracy and appanage remnants.
Thus, a positive assessment of the activities of Ivan IV in Soviet historiography was supported at the highest levels state level. Until 1956, the most cruel tyrant in Russian history appeared on the pages of textbooks, works of art and in cinema as a national hero, a true patriot, a wise politician.
Revision of the concept of oprichnina during the years of Khrushchev’s “thaw”
As soon as Khrushchev read his famous report at the 20th Congress, all panegyric odes to Grozny came to an end. The “plus” sign abruptly changed to a “minus”, and historians no longer hesitated to draw completely obvious parallels between the reign of Ivan the Terrible and the reign of the only recently deceased Soviet tyrant.
A number of articles by domestic researchers immediately appear in which the “cult of personality” of Stalin and the “cult of personality” of Grozny are debunked in approximately the same terms and using real examples similar to each other.
One of the first articles published by V.N. Shevyakova “On the issue of the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible”, explaining the causes and consequences of the oprichnina in the spirit of N.I. Kostomarov and V.O. Klyuchevsky – i.e. extremely negative:
The tsar himself, contrary to all previous apologetics, was called what he really was - the executioner of his subjects exposed to power.
Following Shevyakov’s article comes an even more radical article by S.N. Dubrovsky, “On the cult of personality in some works on historical issues (on the assessment of Ivan IV, etc.).” The author views the oprichnina not as a war of the king against the appanage aristocracy. On the contrary, he believes that Ivan the Terrible was at one with the landowner boyars. With their help, the king waged a war against his people with the sole purpose of clearing the ground for the subsequent enslavement of the peasants. According to Dubrovsky, Ivan IV was not at all as talented and smart as historians of the Stalin era tried to present him. The author accuses them of deliberately juggling and distorting historical facts indicating the personal qualities of the king.
In 1964, A.A. Zimin’s book “The Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible” was published. Zimin processed a huge number of sources, raised a lot of factual material related to the oprichnina. But him own opinion literally drowned in an abundance of names, graphs, numbers and solid facts. The unambiguous conclusions so characteristic of his predecessors are practically absent in the historian’s work. With many reservations, Zimin agrees that most of the bloodshed and crimes of the guardsmen were useless. However, “objectively” the content of the oprichnina in his eyes still looks progressive: Grozny’s initial thought was correct, and then everything was ruined by the oprichnina themselves, who degenerated into bandits and robbers.
Zimin's book was written during the reign of Khrushchev, and therefore the author tries to satisfy both sides of the argument. However, at the end of his life A. A. Zimin revised his views towards a purely negative assessment of the oprichnina, seeing "the bloody glow of the oprichnina" an extreme manifestation of serfdom and despotic tendencies as opposed to pre-bourgeois ones.
These positions were developed by his student V.B. Kobrin and the latter’s student A.L. Yurganov. Based on specific research that began before the war and carried out by S. B. Veselovsky and A. A. Zimin (and continued by V. B. Kobrin), they showed that S. F. Platonov’s theory about the defeat as a result of the oprichnina of patrimonial land ownership - nothing more than a historical myth.
Criticism of Platonov's concept
Back in the 1910-1920s, research began on a colossal complex of materials, formally, it would seem, far from the problems of the oprichnina. Historians have studied a huge number of scribe books where land plots of both large landowners and service people were recorded. These were in in every sense words accounting records of that time.
And the more materials related to land ownership were introduced into scientific circulation in the 1930s-60s, the more interesting the picture became. It turned out that large landholdings did not suffer in any way as a result of the oprichnina. In fact, at the end of the 16th century it remained almost the same as it was before the oprichnina. It also turned out that those lands that went specifically to the oprichnina often included territories inhabited by service people who did not have large plots. For example, the territory of the Suzdal principality was almost entirely populated by service people; there were very few rich landowners there. Moreover, according to scribe books, it often turned out that many guardsmen who allegedly received their estates in the Moscow region for serving the tsar were their owners before. It’s just that in 1565-72, small landowners automatically fell into the ranks of the guardsmen, because The sovereign declared these lands oprichnina.
All these data were completely at odds with what was expressed by S. F. Platonov, who did not process scribal books, did not know statistics and practically did not use sources of a mass nature.
Soon another source was discovered, which Platonov also did not analyze in detail - the famous synodics. They contain lists of people killed and tortured by order of Tsar Ivan. Basically, they died or were executed and tortured without repentance and communion, therefore, the king was sinful in that they did not die in a Christian way. These synodics were sent to monasteries for commemoration.
S. B. Veselovsky analyzed the synodics in detail and came to an unequivocal conclusion: it is impossible to say that during the period of oprichnina terror it was mainly large landowners who died. Yes, undoubtedly, the boyars and members of their families were executed, but besides them, an incredible number of service people died. Persons of the clergy of absolutely all ranks died, people who were in the sovereign's service in the orders, military leaders, minor officials, and simple warriors. Finally, an incredible number of ordinary people died - urban, townspeople, those who inhabited villages and hamlets on the territory of certain estates and estates. According to S. B. Veselovsky’s calculations, for one boyar or person from the Sovereign’s court there were three or four ordinary landowners, and for one service person there were a dozen commoners. Consequently, the assertion that the terror was selective in nature and was directed only against the boyar elite is fundamentally incorrect.
In the 1940s, S.B. Veselovsky wrote his book “Essays on the History of the Oprichnina” “on the table”, because it was completely impossible to publish it under a modern tyrant. The historian died in 1952, but his conclusions and developments on the problem of oprichnina were not forgotten and were actively used in criticism of the concept of S.F. Platonov and his followers.
Another serious mistake of S.F. Platonov was that he believed that the boyars had colossal estates, which included parts of the former principalities. Thus, the danger of separatism remained – i.e. restoration of one or another reign. As confirmation, Platonov cites the fact that during the illness of Ivan IV in 1553, the appanage prince Vladimir Staritsky, a large landowner and close relative of the tsar, was a possible contender for the throne.
An appeal to the materials of the scribe books showed that the boyars had their own lands in different, as they would say now, regions, and then appanages. The boyars had to serve in different places, and therefore, on occasion, they bought land (or it was given to them) where they served. The same person often owned land in Nizhny Novgorod, Suzdal, and Moscow, i.e. was not tied specifically to any particular place. There was no talk of somehow separating, of avoiding the process of centralization, because even the largest landowners could not gather their lands together and oppose their power to the power of the great sovereign. The process of centralization of the state was completely objective, and there is no reason to say that the boyar aristocracy actively prevented it.
Thanks to the study of sources, it turned out that the very postulate about the resistance of the boyars and the descendants of appanage princes to centralization is a purely speculative construction, derived from theoretical analogies between social system Russia and Western Europe during the era of feudalism and absolutism. The sources do not provide any direct basis for such statements. The postulation of large-scale “boyar conspiracies” in the era of Ivan the Terrible is based on statements emanating only from Ivan the Terrible himself.
The only lands that could claim a “departure” from the 16th century were single state, there were Novgorod and Pskov. In the event of separation from Moscow in the conditions of the Livonian War, they would not have been able to maintain independence, and would inevitably have been captured by opponents of the Moscow sovereign. Therefore, Zimin and Kobrin consider Ivan IV’s campaign against Novgorod historically justified and condemn only the tsar’s methods of struggle with potential separatists.
The new concept of understanding such a phenomenon as the oprichnina, created by Zimin, Kobrin and their followers, is built on the proof that the oprichnina objectively resolved (albeit by barbaric methods) some pressing problems, namely: strengthening centralization, destroying the remnants of the appanage system and the independence of the church. But the oprichnina was, first of all, a tool for establishing the personal despotic power of Ivan the Terrible. The terror he unleashed was of a national nature, was caused solely by the tsar’s fear for his position (“beat your own so that strangers will be afraid”) and did not have any “high” political goal or social background.
The point of view of the Soviet historian D. Al (Alshits), already in the 2000s, expressed the opinion that the terror of Ivan the Terrible was aimed at the total subjugation of everyone and everything to the unified power of the autocratic monarch. Everyone who did not personally prove their loyalty to the sovereign was destroyed; the independence of the church was destroyed; The economically independent trading Novgorod was destroyed, the merchant class was subjugated, etc. Thus, Ivan the Terrible did not want to say, like Louis XIV, but to prove to all his contemporaries through effective measures that “I am the state.” The oprichnina acted as a state institution for the protection of the monarch, his personal guard.
This concept suited the scientific community for some time. However, trends towards a new rehabilitation of Ivan the Terrible and even towards the creation of his new cult were fully developed in subsequent historiography. For example, in an article in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1972), while there is a certain duality in the assessment, the positive qualities of Ivan the Terrible are clearly exaggerated, and the negative ones are downplayed.
With the beginning of “perestroika” and a new anti-Stalinist campaign in the media, Grozny and the oprichnina were again condemned and compared with the period of Stalinist repressions. During this period, the reassessment of historical events, including the causes, resulted mainly not in Scientific research, and into populist discussions on the pages of central newspapers and magazines.
Employees of the NKVD and other law enforcement agencies (the so-called “special officers”) in newspaper publications were no longer referred to as “oprichniki”; the terror of the 16th century was directly associated with the “Yezhovshchina” of the 1930s, as if all this had happened just yesterday. “History repeats itself” - this strange, unconfirmed truth was repeated by politicians, parliamentarians, writers, and even highly respected scientists who were inclined again and again to draw historical parallels between Grozny and Stalin, Malyuta Skuratov and Beria, etc. and so on.
The attitude towards the oprichnina and the personality of Ivan the Terrible himself today can be called a “litmus test” of the political situation in our country. During periods of liberalization of social and state life in Russia, which, as a rule, are followed by a separatist “parade of sovereignties”, anarchy, a change in the value system - Ivan the Terrible is perceived as a bloody tyrant and tyrant. Tired of anarchy and permissiveness, society is again ready to dream of a “strong hand,” the revival of statehood, and even stable tyranny in the spirit of Ivan the Terrible, Stalin, or anyone else...
Today, not only in society, but also in scientific circles, the tendency to “apologize” Stalin as a great statesman is again clearly visible. From television screens and the pages of the press they are again persistently trying to prove to us that Joseph Dzhugashvili created a great power that won the war, built rockets, blocked the Yenisei and was even ahead of the rest in the field of ballet. And in the 1930s-50s they imprisoned and shot only those who needed to be imprisoned and shot - former tsarist officials and officers, spies and dissidents of all stripes. Let us remember that Academician S.F. Platonov held approximately the same opinion regarding the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible and the “selectivity” of his terror. However, already in 1929, the academician himself became one of the victims of the oprichnina contemporary to him - the OGPU, died in exile, and his name was erased from the history of Russian historical science for a long time.
Based on materials:
Veselovsky S.B. Tsar Ivan the Terrible in the works of writers and historians. Three articles. – M., 1999
Platonov S.F. Ivan groznyj. – Petersburg: Brockhaus and Efron, 1923
Faces a broad coalition of enemies, including the Kingdom of Sweden, the Kingdom of Poland, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In fact, the Crimean Khanate, which is ravaging the southern regions of Rus' with regular military campaigns, also participates in the anti-Russian coalition and is a vassal of the Ottoman Empire. The war is becoming protracted and exhausting. Drought and famine, plague epidemics, Crimean Tatar campaigns, Polish-Lithuanian raids and a naval blockade carried out by Sweden devastate the country.
Reasons for introducing the oprichnina
According to Soviet historians A. A. Zimin and A. L. Khoroshkevich, the reason for Ivan the Terrible’s break with the “Chosen Rada” was that the latter’s program was exhausted. In particular, an “imprudent respite” was given to Livonia, as a result of which several European states were drawn into the war. In addition, the tsar did not agree with the ideas of the leaders of the “Chosen Rada” (especially Adashev) about the priority of the conquest of Crimea in comparison with military operations in the West. Finally, “Adashev showed excessive independence in foreign policy relations with Lithuanian representatives in 1559.” and was eventually dismissed.
It should be noted that such opinions about the reasons for Ivan’s break with “ Elected Rada“Not all historians share this opinion. In the 19th century, N.I. Kostomarov, a well-known critic of centralization, saw the background of the conflict in the negative characteristics of the character of Ivan the Terrible, and, on the contrary, highly appreciated the activities of the “Chosen Rada”. V. B. Kobrin also believed that the personality of the tsar played a decisive role here, however, at the same time, he linked Ivan’s behavior with his commitment to the program of accelerated centralization of the country, opposed to the ideology of gradual changes of the “Chosen Rada”. Historians believe that the choice of the first path was due to the personal character of Ivan the Terrible, who did not want to listen to people who did not agree with his policies. Thus, according to Kobrin, after 1560 Ivan took the path of tightening power, which led him to repressive measures.
According to R. G. Skrynnikov, the nobility would easily forgive Grozny for the resignation of his advisers Adashev and Sylvester, but she did not want to put up with the attack on the prerogatives of the boyar Duma. The ideologist of the boyars, Kurbsky, protested most strongly against the infringement of the privileges of the nobility and the transfer of management functions into the hands of clerks (deacons): “ The Great Prince has great faith in Russian clerks, and he chooses them neither from the gentry nor from the nobles, but especially from the priests or from the common people, otherwise he makes his nobles hateful» .
New discontent of the princes, Skrynnikov believes, was caused by the royal decree of January 15, 1562, limiting their patrimonial rights, even more than before, equating them with the local nobility. As a result, in the early 1560s, there was a desire among the nobility to flee from Tsar Ivan abroad. So, I. D. Belsky tried to escape abroad twice and was twice forgiven; Prince V. M. Glinsky and I. V. Sheremetev were caught while trying to escape and were forgiven. Tension was growing among those around Grozny: in the winter of 1563, boyars Kolychev, T. Pukhov-Teterin, and M. Sarokhozin defected to the Poles. He was accused of treason and conspiracy with the Poles, but then the governor of Starodub, V. Funikov, was pardoned. For attempting to leave for Lithuania, the Smolensk voivode, Prince Dmitry Kurlyatev, was recalled from Smolensk and exiled to a remote monastery on Lake Ladoga. In April 1564, Andrei Kurbsky fled to Poland in fear of disgrace, as Grozny himself later indicated in his writings, sending an accusatory letter from there to Ivan.
According to Doctor of Historical Sciences I. Ya. Froyanov, the sources of the oprichnina go back to the reign of Ivan III, when the West unleashed ideological war against Russia, having planted the seeds of a most dangerous heresy on Russian soil, undermining the foundations of the Orthodox faith, Apostolic Church and, therefore, the emerging autocracy. This war, which lasted almost a whole century, created such religious and political instability in the country that threatened the very existence of the Russian state. And the oprichnina became a unique form of his protection.
Device
The oprichnina was established by the tsar on the model of a monastic order, which was directly subordinate to him. Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda (Vladimir region) became its spiritual center. The ideological meaning of the oprichnina was the “sifting of Russian life” to separate the “good seeds of Orthodox conciliarity” from the “tares of heretical wisdom, foreign morals.”
The initial number of guardsmen was one thousand people. Then the staff of the oprichniki expanded, and oprichnina governors and heads appeared. The guardsmen's attire resembled monks (black skufeiks and cassocks), but unlike them, they had the right to carry and use weapons. The greeting of the guardsmen was the cry of “goyda!” Each oprichnik swore an oath of allegiance to the tsar and pledged not to communicate with the zemstvo. As the oprichnina "abbot", the tsar performed a number of monastic duties. The cellarer Afanasy Vyazemsky was considered second after the abbot. The sexton was Malyuta Skuratov. So, at midnight everyone got up for the midnight office, at four in the morning for matins, and at eight the mass began. The Tsar set an example of piety: he himself rang for matins, sang in the choir, prayed fervently, and during the common meal read the Holy Scriptures aloud. In general, worship took about 9 hours a day.
The guardsmen were divided into the sovereign's regiment (guard) and four orders, namely: Bed, in charge of maintaining the palace premises and household items of the royal family; Bronny - weapon; Stables, which was in charge of the huge horse farm of the palace and the royal guard; and Nourishing - food.
As the Livonian nobles Taube and Kruse argued, “The guardsmen (or chosen ones) should have a known and noticeable difference while riding, namely the following: dog heads on the horse’s neck and a broom on the whip. This means that they first bite like dogs, and then sweep everything unnecessary out of the country." There is no consensus among scientists whether we are talking about real dog heads, their symbolic images, or just a metaphor. Review of literature and opinions on this issue gives by Charles Halperin (he himself tends to take a literal understanding of the messages about heads). The broom could symbolize a wonderful weapon that kills the enemy to death.
Story
Course of events
At the same time, there is evidence that orders for executions and torture were often given in the church. Historian G.P. Fedotov believes that “ Without denying the repentant sentiments of the tsar, one cannot help but see that he knew how to combine atrocity with church piety in established everyday forms, desecrating the very idea of the Orthodox kingdom» .
In 1569, the tsar’s cousin, Prince Vladimir Andreevich Staritsky, died (presumably, according to rumors, on the order of the tsar, they brought him a cup of poisoned wine and ordered that Vladimir Andreevich himself, his wife and their eldest daughter drink the wine). Somewhat later, Vladimir Andreevich’s mother, Efrosinya Staritskaya, who repeatedly stood at the head of boyar conspiracies against Ivan IV and was repeatedly pardoned by him, was also killed.
In the Tver Otrochy Monastery in December, Malyuta Skuratov personally strangled Metropolitan Philip, who refused to bless the campaign against Novgorod. The Kolychev family, to which Philip belonged, was persecuted; some of its members were executed on Ivan's orders.
Formation of the oprichnina
The beginning of the formation of the oprichnina army can be considered the same year 1565, when a detachment of 1000 people selected from the “oprichnina” districts was formed. Subsequently, the number of “oprichniks” reached 6,000 people. The Oprichnina Army also included detachments of archers from the oprichnina territories. From that time on, service people began to be divided into two categories: boyar children, from the zemshchina, and boyar children, “household servants and policemen,” that is, those who received the sovereign’s salary directly from the “royal court.” Consequently, the Oprichnina army should be considered not only the Sovereign’s regiment, but also service people recruited from the oprichnina territories and who served under the command of the oprichnina (“yard”) governors and heads.
Schlichting, Taube and Kruse mention 500-800 people of the “special oprichnina”. These people, if necessary, served as trusted royal agents, carrying out security, intelligence, investigative and punitive functions.
In the Sytny, Kormovy and Khlebenny palaces, a special staff of housekeepers, cooks, clerks, etc. was appointed; special detachments of archers were recruited. Special cities (about 20, including Vologda, Vyazma, Suzdal, Kozelsk, Medyn, Veliky Ustyug) with volosts were assigned to maintain the oprichnina. In Moscow itself, some streets were put at the disposal of the oprichnina (Chertolskaya, Arbat, Sivtsev Vrazhek, part of Nikitskaya, etc.); the former residents were relocated to other streets. A thousand specially selected nobles, children of boyars, both Moscow and city, were also recruited into the oprichnina. The condition for accepting a person into the oprichnina army and the oprichnina court was the absence of family and service ties with noble boyars. They were given estates in the volosts assigned to maintain the oprichnina; the former landowners and patrimonial owners were transferred from those volosts to others.
The rest of the state was supposed to constitute the “zemshchina”: the tsar entrusted it to the zemstvo boyars, that is, the boyar duma itself, and put Prince Ivan Dmitrievich Belsky and Prince Ivan Fedorovich Mstislavsky at the head of its administration. All matters had to be resolved in the old way, and with big matters one should turn to the boyars, but if military or important zemstvo matters happened, then to the sovereign. For his ascent, that is, for the trip to Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda, the tsar exacted 100 thousand rubles from the Zemsky Prikaz (for that time an absolutely fantastic amount).
According to academician S. F. Platonov, the government ordered the oprichnina and zemstvo people to act together. So, in May 1570 " The sovereign ordered that all the boyars, zemstvo and oprishnina, talk about the (Lithuanian) borders... and the boyars, zemstvo and oprishnina, spoke about those borders" and came to one common decision.
According to Academician S. F. Platonov, after the establishment of the oprichnina, the land ownership of the large feudal nobility, boyars and princes, who were mostly resettled to the outskirts of the state, where constant military operations took place, was quickly destroyed:
Oprichnina was the first attempt to resolve one of the contradictions of the Moscow political system. It crushed the landownership of the nobility as it existed in ancient times. Through a forced and systematically carried out exchange of land, she destroyed the old connections of the appanage princes with their ancestral estates wherever she considered it necessary, and scattered the princes, suspicious in the eyes of Grozny, to different places of the state, mainly on its outskirts, where they turned into ordinary service landowners.
Critics of Platonov's approach point out the inconsistency of his concepts with the realities of the time, in particular the exaggeration of the role and influence of feudal landowners. As the Soviet historian S. B. Veselovsky noted, even the grandfather of Grozny, Ivan III, deprived the appanage feudal lords of almost all rights and privileges, including independence from the local grand-ducal volosts; in addition, the “sovereign oprichnina” included mainly lands that had never previously belonged to large boyar and princely families. In his own words:
Thus, the direction of the oprichnina against the old land ownership of the former appanage princes should be recognized as a complete misunderstanding<…>[There is] another statement by S. F. Platonov, which is also aimed at comprehending and rehabilitating the oprichnina. I mean his characterization of the former appanage princes as powerful feudal lords who retained some of the rights of semi-independent sovereigns, and who constituted a special category of persons in the class of privileged service landowners with interests that were in many respects hostile to the interests of other titled and untitled landowners. For the time of Tsar Ivan, such a view of the princes should be considered a hundred years too late.
Campaign against Novgorod (1569-1570)
In December 1569, suspecting the Novgorod nobility of complicity in the “conspiracy” of Prince Vladimir Andreevich Staritsky, who had recently been killed on his orders, and at the same time of intending to be handed over to the Polish king, Ivan, accompanied by a large army of guardsmen, marched against Novgorod.
Despite the Novgorod chronicles, the “Synodik of the Disgraced”, compiled around 1583, with reference to the report (“fairy tale”) of Malyuta Skuratov, speaks of 1505 executed under Skuratov’s control. Soviet historian Ruslan Skrynnikov, adding to this number all the named Novgorodians, received an estimate of 2170-2180 executed; stipulating that the reports may not have been complete, many acted “independently of Skuratov’s orders,” Skrynnikov admits a figure of three to four thousand people. V. B. Kobrin also considers this figure to be extremely underestimated, noting that it is based on the premise that Skuratov was the only, or at least the main organizer of the murders. In addition, it should be noted that the result of the destruction of food supplies by the guardsmen was famine (so cannibalism is mentioned), accompanied by a plague epidemic that was raging at that time. According to the Novgorod chronicle, in a common grave opened in September 1570, where the surfaced victims of Ivan the Terrible were buried, as well as those who died from the ensuing hunger and disease, 10 thousand people were found. Kobrin doubts that this was the only burial place of the dead, but considers the figure of 10-15 thousand closest to the truth, although total population Novgorod then did not exceed 30 thousand. However, the killings were not limited to the city itself.
From Novgorod, Grozny went to Pskov. Initially, he prepared the same fate for him, but the tsar limited himself to only executing several Pskovites and confiscating their property. Ivan the Terrible ordered the removal of bells from a Pskov monastery. At the same hour, his best horse fell under the king, which impressed Ivan. The Tsar hastily left Pskov and returned to Moscow, where searches and executions began again: they were looking for accomplices of the Novgorod treason. From this case, only a description has been preserved in the Census Book of the Ambassadorial Prikaz: “Pillar, and in it is an article list from the detective from the treason case of the 78th (1570) year on the Nougorodsk Archbishop Pimin, and on the Novgorod clerks, and on the clerks, and on the guests, and on the lord's clerks, and on the children of the boyars, and on the clerks, as they referred to Moscow (were in connection with Moscow; below is the list)... that Archbishop Pimin wanted to give Novgorod and Pskov to the Lithuanian king with them, and they wanted to destroy the Tsar and Grand Duke Ivan Vasilyevich of All Russia with evil intent, and put Prince Volodimer Ondreevich on the state; and in that case, from torture, many spoke about that treason against the Novgorod Archbishop Pimin and against his advisers and against themselves, and in that case, many were executed by death with various executions, and others were sent to prison, but the matter did not come to that, and they were released, and others were granted”; next comes important note: “...but the original case, where that list of articles was written out, was not found, but the verdict... and the list of the sexton’s mark, which is like an execution, is much dilapidated and torn, and the large list of articles is dilapidated”; that is, there are no authentic documents here either, as S. F. Platonov repeatedly points out. A number of persons were captured who set the tone in affairs after the dispersal of the “Chosen Rada”: A. D. Basmanov with his son Fyodor, clerk of the Ambassadorial Prikaz I. M. Viskovaty, treasurer N. Funikov-Kurtsev, oprichnina cellarer (supply) A. Vyazemsky and others (all of them were killed, some in a particularly savage manner: for example, Funikov was alternately doused with boiling water and cold water, his wife, having undressed, was placed on a tight rope and dragged along it several times, the meat was cut off from Viskovaty alive). In Alexandrova Sloboda they were drowned in the river. Gray household members of those executed (about 60 women and children). In total, 300 people were sentenced to execution, but the tsar pardoned 187 of them.
Moscow executions of 1570‒1571
Now the people closest to the tsar, the leaders of the oprichnina, came under repression. The tsar's favorites, the oprichniki Basmanovs - father and son, Prince Afanasy Vyazemsky, as well as several prominent leaders of the zemshchina - printer Ivan Viskovaty, treasurer Funikov and others were accused of treason. Together with them, at the end of July 1570, up to 200 people were executed in Moscow : the Duma clerk read the names of the condemned, the oprichniki executioners stabbed, chopped, hung, poured boiling water over the condemned. As they said, the tsar personally took part in the executions, and crowds of guardsmen stood around and greeted the executions with cries of “goyda, goyda.” The wives and children of those executed, even their household members, were persecuted; their estate was taken away by the sovereign. Executions were resumed more than once, and subsequently died: Prince Peter Serebryany-Obolensky, Duma clerk Zakhary Ochin-Pleshcheev, Ivan Vorontsov, etc., and the tsar came up with special methods of torture: hot frying pans, ovens, tongs, thin ropes rubbing the body, etc. n. Boyarin Kozarinov-Golokhvatov, who accepted the schema in order to avoid execution, he ordered to be blown up on a barrel of gunpowder, on the grounds that the schema-monks were angels, and therefore should fly to heaven. The Moscow executions of 1570-1571 were the apogee of oprichnina terror.
The end of the oprichnina
According to R. Skrynnikov, who analyzed the memorial lists, the victims of repression during the entire reign of Ivan IV were ( synodics), about 4.5 thousand people, however, other historians, such as V. B. Kobrin, consider this figure to be extremely underestimated.
The immediate result of desolation was “famine and pestilence,” since the defeat undermined the foundations of the shaky economy of even those who survived and deprived it of resources. The flight of the peasants, in turn, led to the need to forcibly keep them in place - hence the introduction of “reserve years”, which smoothly grew into the establishment of serfdom. In ideological terms, the oprichnina led to a decline in the moral authority and legitimacy of the tsarist government; from a protector and legislator, the king and the state he personified turned into a robber and rapist. The system of government that had been built over decades was replaced by a primitive military dictatorship. Ivan the Terrible’s trampling of Orthodox norms and values and repression against the church deprived the self-accepted dogma “Moscow is the third Rome” of meaning and led to a weakening of moral guidelines in society. According to a number of historians, the events associated with the oprichnina were the direct cause of the systemic socio-political crisis that gripped Russia 20 years after the death of Ivan the Terrible and known as the “Time of Troubles”.
The oprichnina showed its complete military ineffectiveness, which manifested itself during the invasion of Devlet-Girey and was recognized by the tsar himself.
The oprichnina established the unlimited power of the tsar - autocracy. In the 17th century, the monarchy in Russia became virtually dualistic, but under Peter I, absolutism was restored in Russia; This consequence of the oprichnina, thus, turned out to be the most long-term.
Historical assessment
Historical assessments of the oprichnina can vary dramatically depending on the era, the scientific school to which the historian belongs, etc. Before to a certain extent, the foundations of these opposing assessments were laid already in the times of Ivan the Terrible, when two points of view coexisted: the official one, which viewed the oprichnina as an action to combat “treason,” and the unofficial one, which saw in it a senseless and difficult to comprehend excess of the “terrible king.”
Pre-revolutionary concepts
According to most pre-revolutionary historians, the oprichnina was a manifestation of the tsar's morbid insanity and tyrannical tendencies. In the historiography of the 19th century, this point of view was adhered to by N. M. Karamzin, N. I. Kostomarov, D. I. Ilovaisky, who denied any political and generally rational meaning in the oprichnina.
V. O. Klyuchevsky looked at the oprichnina in a similar way, considering it the result of the tsar’s struggle with the boyars - a struggle that “had not a political, but a dynastic origin”; Neither side knew how to get along with one another or how to get along without each other. They tried to separate, to live side by side, but not together. An attempt to arrange such political cohabitation was the division of the state into the oprichnina and the zemshchina.
E. A. Belov, appearing in his monograph “On the historical significance of the Russian boyars until the end of the 17th century.” an apologist for Grozny, finds deep state meaning in the oprichnina. In particular, the oprichnina contributed to the destruction of the privileges of the feudal nobility, which impeded the objective tendencies of centralization of the state.
At the same time, the first attempts are being made to find the social and then the socio-economic background of the oprichnina, which became mainstream in the 20th century. According to K. D. Kavelin: “Oprichnina was the first attempt to create a service nobility and replace the clan nobles with it, in place of the clan, the blood principle, to put the beginning of personal dignity in public administration.”
In his " Full course lectures on Russian history" prof. S. F. Platonov presents the following view of the oprichnina:
In the establishment of the oprichnina there was no “removal of the head of state from the state,” as S. M. Solovyov put it; on the contrary, the oprichnina took into its own hands the entire state in its root part, leaving boundaries to the “zemstvo” administration, and even strived for state reforms, because it introduced significant changes to the composition of the service land tenure. Destroying his aristocratic system, the oprichnina was directed, in essence, against those aspects of the state order that tolerated and supported such a system. It acted not “against individuals,” as V. O. Klyuchevsky says, but precisely against order, and therefore was much more an instrument of state reform than a simple police means of suppressing and preventing state crimes.
S. F. Platonov sees the main essence of the oprichnina in the energetic mobilization of land ownership, in which land ownership, thanks to the mass withdrawal of former patrimonial owners from the lands taken into the oprichnina, was torn away from the previous appanage-patrimonial feudal order and associated with compulsory military service.
Since the late 1930s, the prevailing view in Soviet historiography was the progressive nature of the oprichnina, which, according to this concept, was directed against the remnants of fragmentation and the influence of the boyars, viewed as a reactionary force, and reflected the interests of the service nobility who supported centralization, which ultimately account, was identified with national interests. The origins of the oprichnina were seen, on the one hand, in the struggle between large patrimonial and small-scale landownership, and on the other hand, in the struggle between the progressive central government and the reactionary princely-boyar opposition. The guiding point of view was expressed by J.V. Stalin at a meeting with filmmakers regarding the 2nd episode of Eisenstein’s film “Ivan the Terrible” (as is known, banned):
(Eisenstein) portrayed the oprichnina as the last scabs, degenerates, something like the American Ku Klux Klan... The oprichnina troops were progressive troops that Ivan the Terrible relied on to gather Russia into one centralized state against the feudal princes who wanted to fragment and weaken his. He has an old attitude towards the oprichnina. The attitude of old historians towards the oprichnina was grossly negative, because they regarded the repressions of Grozny as the repressions of Nicholas II and were completely distracted from the historical situation in which this happened. Nowadays there is a different way of looking at it.
This concept went back to pre-revolutionary historians and, above all, to S. F. Platonov, and at the same time it was implanted through administrative means. However, it should be noted that not all Soviet historians followed the official line. For example, S. B. Veselovsky wrote:
S. F. Platonov lost sight of the fact that the Code of Law of 1550 definitely forbade the children of boyars who had not received full retirement from entering the service of rulers and private individuals.<…>in the same 1550, a decree was passed prohibiting the metropolitan and the rulers from accepting into their service the children of boyars without the special permission of the tsar. And in the coming years, in connection with the code of 1556 on feeding and service from the land, service from the land became mandatory and all landowners lost the right not to serve anyone or to serve princes, boyars and others large landowners. This big blow to the remnants of feudalism was made long before the oprichnina<…>And in general, the oprichnina had nothing to do with these really important state transformations.
In 1946, a Resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was issued, which spoke of the “progressive army of the guardsmen.” The progressive significance in the then historiography of the Oprichnina Army was that its formation was a necessary stage in the struggle to strengthen the centralized state and represented the struggle of the central government, based on the serving nobility, against the feudal aristocracy and appanage remnants, to make even a partial return to it impossible - and thereby ensure the military defense of the country. .
A detailed assessment of the oprichnina is given in the monograph by A. A. Zimin “The Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible” (1964), which contains the following assessment of the phenomenon:
The oprichnina was a weapon for the defeat of the reactionary feudal nobility, but at the same time, the introduction of the oprichnina was accompanied by an intensified seizure of peasant “black” lands. The oprichnina order was a new step towards strengthening feudal ownership of land and enslaving the peasantry. The division of the territory into “oprichnina” and “zemshchina” (...) contributed to the centralization of the state, because this division was directed with its edge against the boyar aristocracy and the appanage princely opposition. One of the tasks of the oprichnina was to strengthen the defense capability, therefore the lands of those nobles who were not serving were taken into the oprichnina. military service from their estates. The government of Ivan IV carried out a personal review of the feudal lords. The entire year of 1565 was filled with measures to enumerate lands, break up the existing ancient land tenure. In the interests of wide circles of the nobility, Ivan the Terrible carried out measures aimed at eliminating the remnants of former fragmentation and, restoring order in the feudal disorder, strengthening the centralized monarchy with strong royal power at the head. The townsfolk population also sympathized with the policies of Ivan the Terrible, interested in strengthening tsarist power and eliminating the remnants of feudal fragmentation and privileges. The struggle of the government of Ivan the Terrible with the aristocracy met with the sympathy of the masses. The reactionary boyars, betraying the national interests of Rus', sought to dismember the state and could lead to the enslavement of the Russian people by foreign invaders.
Oprichnina marked a decisive step towards strengthening the centralized apparatus of power, combating the separatist claims of the reactionary boyars, and facilitated the defense of the borders of the Russian state. This was the progressive content of the reforms of the oprichnina period. But the oprichnina was also a means of suppressing the oppressed peasantry; it was carried out by the government by strengthening feudal-serf oppression and was one of the significant factors that caused the further deepening of class contradictions and the development of class struggle in the country. .
At the end of his life, A. A. Zimin revised his views towards a purely negative assessment of the oprichnina, seeing "the bloody glow of the oprichnina" an extreme manifestation of serfdom and despotic tendencies as opposed to pre-bourgeois ones. These positions were developed by his student V.B. Kobrin and the latter’s student A.L. Yurganov. Based on specific research that began even before the war and carried out especially by S. B. Veselovsky and A. A. Zimin (and continued by V. B. Kobrin), they showed that the theory of defeat as a result of the oprichnina of patrimonial land ownership is a myth. From this point of view, the difference between patrimonial and local land ownership was not as fundamental as previously thought; the mass withdrawal of votchinniki from the oprichnina lands (in which S. F. Platonov and his followers saw the very essence of the oprichnina) was not carried out, contrary to declarations; and it was mainly the disgraced and their relatives who lost the reality of the estates, while the “reliable” estates, apparently, were taken into the oprichnina; at the same time, precisely those counties where small and medium landownership predominated were taken into the oprichnina; in the oprichine itself there was a large percentage of the clan nobility; finally, statements about the personal orientation of the oprichnina against the boyars are also refuted: the victims-boyars are especially noted in the sources because they were the most prominent, but in the end, it was primarily ordinary landowners and commoners who died from the oprichnina: according to the calculations of S. B. Veselovsky, on for one boyar or person from the Sovereign's court there were three or four ordinary landowners, and for one service person there were a dozen commoners. In addition, terror also fell on the bureaucracy (dyacry), which, according to the old scheme, should be the support of the central government in the fight against the “reactionary” boyars and appanage remnants. It is also noted that the resistance of the boyars and the descendants of appanage princes to centralization is generally a purely speculative construction, derived from theoretical analogies between the social system of Russia and Western Europe of the era of feudalism and absolutism; The sources do not provide any direct grounds for such statements. The postulation of large-scale “boyar conspiracies” in the era of Ivan the Terrible is based on statements emanating from Ivan the Terrible himself. Ultimately, this school notes that although the oprichnina objectively resolved (albeit through barbaric methods) some pressing tasks, primarily strengthening centralization, destroying the remnants of the appanage system and the independence of the church, it was, first of all, a tool for establishing the personal despotic power of Ivan the Terrible.
According to V.B. Kobrin, the oprichnina objectively strengthened centralization (which “the Elected Rada tried to do through the method of gradual structural reforms”), put an end to the remnants of the appanage system and the independence of the church. At the same time, oprichnina robberies, murders, extortion and other atrocities led to the complete ruin of Rus', recorded in the census books and comparable to the consequences of an enemy invasion. The main result of the oprichnina, according to Kobrin, is the establishment of autocracy in extremely despotic forms, and indirectly also the establishment of serfdom. Finally, oprichnina and terror, according to Kobrin, undermined the moral foundations of Russian society, destroyed self-esteem, independence, and responsibility.
Only comprehensive research political development Russian state in the second half of the 16th century. will allow us to give a substantiated answer to the question about the essence of the repressive regime of the oprichnina from the point of view of the historical destinies of the country.
In the person of the first Tsar Ivan the Terrible, the historical process of the formation of the Russian autocracy found an executor who was fully aware of his historical mission. In addition to his journalistic and theoretical speeches, this is clearly evidenced by the precisely calculated and completely successfully carried out political action of establishing the oprichnina.
Attempts to “revive” the oprichnina
Activists of the Eurasian Youth Union, who appeared in 2005 and opposed attempts to carry out an Orange Revolution in Russia, called themselves “new guardsmen”. The ideologist of the “new oprichnina” Alexander Dugin interpreted the oprichnina image of “dog heads” (“cynocephaly”) as a defense of the ideal of the “great Eurasian project” against wolves (including those in “sheep’s clothing”) attacking Holy Rus'.
Another form of revival of the oprichnina was the “Oprichnina Brotherhood” of Shchedrin-Kozlov, which perceived the oprichnina as a parallel (separate, internal) church with a tsar-high priest, a kind of “Orthodox Freemasonry”. This organization sometimes classified as a pseudo-Orthodox sect, where icons of Ivan the Terrible and Gregory Rasputin are venerated.
Oprichnina in works of art
- “The Oprichnik” is an opera by P. I. Tchaikovsky based on the tragedy of the same name by I. I. Lazhechnikov.
- “The Day of the Oprichnik” and “The Sugar Kremlin” are fantastic works by V. G. Sorokin.
- “The Tsar” is a 2009 historical film by Pavel Lungin.
- "Prince Silver" - historical novel A. K. Tolstoy
- “By Tsar’s Order” - story by L. A. Charskaya
Notes
- Oprichnina// Great Soviet Encyclopedia .
- V. S. Izmozik. Gendarmes of Russia. - Moscow: OLMA-PRESS, 2002. - 640 p. - ISBN 5-224-039630.
- “Textbook “History of Russia”, Moscow State University. M. V. Lomonosov Faculty of History, 4th edition, A. S. Orlov, V. A. Georgiev, N. G. Georgieva, T. A. Sivokhina">
- Yegor Gaidar Foundation “Oprichnina: terror or reform?” Public conversation with the participation of historians Vladislav Nazarov and Dmitry Volodikhin
- Russia in the time of Ivan the Terrible. - M., 1982. - P. 94-95.
- Skrynnikov R. G. Decree. op. - P. 66.
- Zimin A. A., Khoroshkevich A. L. Russia in the time of Ivan the Terrible. - M., 1982. - P. 95.
- Kostomarov N. The personality of Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich the Terrible. - M., 1990.
- Kobrin V. B. Ivan groznyj . - M., 1989.
- Kobrin V. B. Ivan groznyj . - M., 1989.
- Skrynnikov R. G. Ivan groznyj. - P. 75.
- Sat. RIB. T. XXXI. - pp. 114-115.
- Skrynnikov R. G. Decree. op. - P. 78.
- Valishevsky K. Decree, op. - P. 252-253.
- Zimin A. A., Khoroshkevich A. L. Decree, op. - pp. 99-100.
- PSRL. T. 13. - P. 258.
- Kurbsky A. M. Tales. - P. 279.
- Skrynnikov R. G. Ivan groznyj. - pp. 86-87.
- Veselovsky S. B. Research on the history of the oprichnina. - P. 115.
- Khoroshkevich A. L. Russia in the system international relations mid-16th century. - P. 348.
- Skrynnikov R. G. Decree. op. - P. 79.
- Skrynnikov R. G. Ivan groznyj . - M.: AST, 2001.
- , - T. 6. - Ch. 4. .
- Kostomarov N. I. Russian history in the biographies of its main figures. Chapter 20. Tsar Ivan Vasilievich the Terrible
- Kobrin V. B. Ivan groznyj
- N. M. Karamzin. History of Russian Goverment. T. 9, chapter 2 (undefined) .
Since ancient times, the word “oprichnina” was the name for a special land allotment that the prince’s widow received, that is, the land “oprichnina” - except for - the main lands of the principality. Ivan the Terrible decided to apply this term to the territory of the state allocated to him for personal management, his own destiny, in which he could rule without the intervention of the boyar duma, the zemstvo council and the church synod. Subsequently, oprichnina began to be called not the land, but the internal policy pursued by the tsar.
The beginning of the oprichnina
The official reason for the introduction of the oprichnina was the abdication of Ivan IV from the throne. In 1565, having gone on a pilgrimage, Ivan the Terrible refuses to return to Moscow, explaining his action as treason by the closest boyars. The tsar wrote two letters, one to the boyars, with reproaches and abdication of the throne in favor of his young son, the second - to the “posad people”, with assurances that his action was due to boyar treason. Under the threat of being left without a tsar, God’s anointed and protector, the townspeople, representatives of the clergy and boyars went to the tsar in Alexandrovskaya Sloboda with a request to return “to the kingdom.” The tsar, as a condition for his return, put forward the demand that he be allocated his own inheritance, where he could rule at his own discretion, without the intervention of church authorities.
As a result, the whole country was divided into two parts - zemshchina and oprichnina, that is, into state and personal lands of the kings. The oprichnina included the northern and northwestern regions, rich in fertile lands, some central destinies, the Kama region, and even individual streets of Moscow. The capital of the oprichnina became Alexandrovskaya Sloboda, the capital of the state still remained Moscow. The oprichnina lands were ruled personally by the tsar, and the zemstvo lands by the Boyar Duma; the oprichnina also had a separate treasury, its own. However, the Grand Parish, that is, the analogue of the modern Tax Administration, which was responsible for the receipt and distribution of taxes, was uniform for the entire state; The Ambassadorial Order also remained common. This seemed to symbolize that, despite the division of the lands into two parts, the state is still united and indestructible.
According to the tsar's plan, the oprichnina was supposed to appear as a kind of analogue of the European church Order. Thus, Ivan the Terrible called himself abbot, his closest associate Prince Vyazemsky became a cellarer, and the well-known Malyuta Skuratov became a sexton. The king, as the head of the monastic order, was assigned a number of responsibilities. At midnight the abbot rose to read the Midnight Office, at four in the morning he served matins, then followed mass. All Orthodox fasts and church regulations were observed, for example, daily reading of the Holy Scriptures and all kinds of prayers. The tsar's religiosity, previously widely known, grew to its maximum level during the oprichnina years. At the same time, Ivan personally took part in torture and executions, and gave orders for new atrocities, often right during divine services. Such a strange combination of extreme piety and undisguised cruelty, condemned by the church, later became one of the main historical evidence in favor of the tsar’s mental illness.
Reasons for the oprichnina
The “treason” of the boyars, to which the tsar referred in his letters demanding the allocation of oprichnina lands to him, became only the official reason for introducing a policy of terror. The reasons for the radical change in the format of government were several factors.
The first and, perhaps, most significant reason for the oprichnina was failures in Livonian War. The conclusion of an essentially unnecessary truce with Livonia in 1559 was actually giving the enemy a rest. The Tsar insisted on taking tough measures against the Livonian Order. The Elected Rada considered starting a war with the Crimean Khan a higher priority. The break with the once closest associates, the leaders of the Chosen Rada, became, in the opinion of most historians the main reason introduction of oprichnina.
However, there is another point of view on this matter. Thus, most historians of the 18th-19th centuries considered the oprichnina the result of the mental illness of Ivan the Terrible, whose hardening of character was influenced by the death of his beloved wife Anastasia Zakharyina. A strong nervous shock caused the manifestation of the most terrible personality traits of the king, bestial cruelty and imbalance.
It is impossible not to note the influence of the boyars on the change in the conditions of power. Fears for their own position caused some government officials to move abroad - to Poland, Lithuania, and Sweden. A big blow for Ivan the Terrible was the flight to the Principality of Lithuania of Andrei Kurbsky, a childhood friend and closest ally who took an active part in government reforms. Kurbsky sent a series of letters to the Tsar, where he condemned Ivan’s actions, accusing “faithful servants” of tyranny and murder.
Military failures, the death of his wife, disapproval of the tsar’s actions by the boyars, confrontation with the Elected Rada and the flight - betrayal - of his closest ally dealt a serious blow to the authority of Ivan IV. And the oprichnina he conceived was supposed to rectify the current situation, restore damaged trust and strengthen the autocracy. To what extent the oprichnina lived up to its obligations, historians are still arguing.