Ivan the Terrible

“ The interpretations laid on the character and temperament of Ivan the Terrible seem to me based, in the first place, on a general error, which I am inclined to consider an anachronism. The subject under examination has been treated as though he had lived in our own day, and an analysis correct enough in itself falls to the ground because it has been arrived at without any regard for historical surroundings, which ought to have been taken into account. Take such a man as Louis XI., with the faculties everyone recognises him to have possessed. ”

“ That Ivan IV., in the course of his work, may have gone somewhat beyond the atrocity usual in his century, may be. We will go back to that. But both in legendary and in critical history the surname of 'the Terrible' has become synonymous with an unreasonable and inexcusable ferocity, purely barbarous in its origin, and carried to madness in its manifestations. To anybody who knows the power there is in words the consequence cannot be doubted: the word has set its false hallmark on the thing. ”

“ IN a previous chapter we have told the story, full of horror and crime, of the life of Ivan the Terrible of Russia. It was not one famous assassination which placed that life-story in this series of historical murders; it was an uninterrupted, long-continued succession of butcheries and assassinations which entitled it to this place. In the long line of historical characters extending through the ages there is not one who so fully deserves the designation of a wholesale assassin as Ivan the Terrible, the demon of the North. ”

“ At last, on January 13, 1570, when nothing was left him to destroy, Ivan commanded the chief of the townsmen who had been spared, so many for each street, to be brought into his presence. The poor wretches, already more dead than alive, were asking themselves what yet more hideous fate could be reserved for them. Contrary to all their expectations, the monarch, pacified, turned a gracious eye upon them, and made them a most friendly speech, advising them to cast off all fear, and live peaceful lives, praying God to preserve the Tsar and his Empire from all such traitors as Pimenius. ”

“ Going back to Moscow, Ivan treated himself to a triumphal entry, as if he had been returning from a successful campaign, and to an entertainment in the form of one of those masquerading processions in which, at a later period, Peter the Great was to take so much delight. Preceded by one of his jesters, mounted on an ox, he was seen parading along at the head of his Opritchniki, and displaying, like them, the insignia of that dreaded confraternity—a broom and a dog's head. ”

“ The vices of Ivan the Terrible had been as monstrous, but even in the thick of his crimes he was a true Russian, as superstitious a devotee as the meanest of his subjects. But the astonishment and bewilderment inspired by Peter the Great were only deepened by the reverence felt by the old Russian for the person of his sovereign. Men could not help doubting whether such a man, who had cast aside his national and scriptural title for the foreign and heathen style of emperor, could be the true, the "white" czar. ”

“ Ivan is inclined to see enemies in every corner; but when, while he warns his sons against the snares that will be set for them, he counsels them to inquire personally into every business, and never to depend on others with regard to anything, unless they wish those others to obtain the real power and leave them nothing but its shadow, it is a master in the art of government who speaks, and no madman! ”

“ All legends apart, the Sloboda of Alexandrov has left memories most offensive both to morality and decency. The banquets that followed on the pious exercises already referred to were absolute orgies. Women played an important part in the life of Ivan the Terrible, and the Opritchniki, it may be, did what they could to ensure the satisfaction of tastes and needs which neither age nor sickness seem ever to have diminished, in this passionate and most immoderate nature. ”

“ The choute, with his jeers at the precepts of the Domostroï and the rules of an Oriental etiquette, stirred the heavy atmosphere of prison and cloister combined, which hung stagnant in every Russian household; he opened doors and broke window-panes, and let a little fresh air into these smothering stoves. In those days every house of any importance sheltered one or two such persons. Ivan had dozens of them, and some paid with their lives for the honour of rubbing elbows familiarly with their Sovereign. ”

“ Saints have always been the exceptions everywhere. Was Ivan an exception in the opposite sense? The docility with which the massacres he ordered were endured would seem a proof to the contrary. There is no doubt that by their means he aggravated the savage atrocity of the instincts and habits of those about him, and sowed the Russian soil with a seed of blood, whereof the murder of his younger son at Ouglitch, the reign of the false Dmitri, and the horrors of the 'troublous times' were the harvest. ”

“ Ivan the Terrible holds in his arms the son he has just stricken to death with his heavy staff. It is a horrible scene from which one turns because of the almost unbearable misery depicted there, and yet you return to it again and again. So great is the conception, so wonderful the insight, so incomparable the technique. The madman, whom a nation of slaves endures as its master, is at last overtaken by Nemesis, and he is truly an object for pity as he crouches on the ground with the body of his dying son in his arms. ”

“ The fellow-workers to whom Ivan found himself obliged to appeal, some of them drawn from the lowest strata of society, and all incapable of understanding the nature and real object of his enterprise, were even more inclined than he himself to confuse violence with energy. And, docile instruments and complaisant courtiers as they were, they flattered and increased the taste for coarse debauchery which the Sovereign owed to his education, and to certain cruel instincts, inherent, no doubt, in his temperament. The chroniclers have preserved the names of these fellow-workers to us. ”

“ This is the course generally pursued by backward peoples anxious to make up for lost time. Look at Japan. In this fashion, too, artificial and superficial civilizations are attained. Modern Russia is an example of this even in the present day.
The detractors of Ivan the Terrible have gone the length of refusing him any originality at all, declaring all he did was to walk, and rather clumsily at that, in the rut his grandfather had cut for him, defend old theories against literary attack on the part of the opposition party, and turn over ideas drawn from the books he had read. ”

“ What did he offer the mass of the peasants, husbandmen yesterday, half-serfs to-day, and soon to be utterly enslaved—to these beings whose backs were bent in never-ending labour, bound to the soil, and more and more ground down, more mercilessly cheated, as the needs of the State increased? Yet the facts speak for themselves. Ivan has been sung, lauded, extolled, by the population of helots whose slavery and misery he deepened. When suffering has reached a certain pitch, any change, even if it should increase the torture, is a benefit. ”

“ The Kazan Tartars, forsaken by the Crimeans, who quitted the town to the number of 300 fighting men, leaving their women and children behind them, but sacking everything before they went, displeased with Outémich, whom they betrayed to the Russians, and just as ill-pleased, soon afterwards, with Schah-Ali, ended by asking the Tsar to choose them a ruler, and Ivan fancied himself on the brink of a bloodless triumph. ”

“ Obediently all men prepared to bear their part in the coming comedy. The boïars betrayed the correct amount of emotion, the populace rose up, shouted aloud, and was much affected. The merchants offered money, the most eloquent fashion of proving their share in the general feeling, and the Metropolitan was called upon to intercede with the Sovereign. Ivan was entreated not to forsake his people, but to rule as best pleased him, and mete out such treatment as he deemed fit to those of whom he thought he had reason to complain. ”

“ In the play of Ivan the Terrible, the interest centers around one man, the Czar Ivan. If anybody but Richard Mansfield played the part, there would be nothing in it. We simply get a glimpse into the life of a tyrant who has run the full gamut of goosedom, grumpiness, selfishness and grouch. Incidentally this man had the power to put other men to death, and this he does and has done as his whim and temper might dictate. ”

“ This is the theory of morals peculiar to the period to which Ivan's name is attached. The ideal it evolves is one of material greatness and brute force—a twofold postulate to which the Russian race has proved itself ready to sacrifice everything else, though it has endeavoured to delude itself as to the value of the end pursued, and the extent of the sacrifice it has entailed. In this other dream, Tsar and people both had their part, and they were to make it a living reality on the day when Peter took Ivan's place, and completed the incarnation which gave birth to modern Russia. ”

“ Some people have regarded Ivan's propensity to confess his crimes, and even exaggerate them, to which I have already referred, as a sign of mania or neurosis. This, as it seems to me, is merely a symptom of the actor's temperament, frequent in the case of men who, having every other passion likewise, have that for showing themselves off, attracting onlookers' attention, even to their own disadvantage. Look at Luther, amongst the Tsar's own illustrious contemporaries. ”

“ Yet the very fact of his otherwise inexplicable obstinacy in seeking to enter into fresh bonds of matrimony would seem—so far as the Sovereign himself is concerned, at all events—to weaken the authority of the legend concerning the troops of women conveyed into the suburb, and the harem said to have accompanied the Tsar wherever he went. Ivan was a man addicted to women, but his religious scruples made him a man addicted to wives, and who cared so much about marrying them that he would play at being honestly wedded just as he played at living in a monastery. ”

“ At that inclement season of the year, Ivan started forth with his Opritchniki and a whole army corps, as if he were going forth to war. A military execution it was to be, indeed, and one before which the memories of the first Livonian campaign, hideous as they had been, were destined to pale. The punishment began on the frontier of the province of Tver, and involved the systematic destruction of the whole country. All along his road from Klin to Novgorod the Tsar left nothing but a desert behind him. ”

“ Ivan's pursuance of his plan of reform was to rally every element of opposition against him: religious and political interests were to join hands, and with them all he was to enter on a fearful struggle, from which he did indeed emerge victorious, but leaving a terrifying name, and a memory that makes men shiver, even now, to his descendants. ”

“ But if he cannot make himself admired, he is quite willing to inspire horror, so long as people notice him and pay attention to him. Jean Jacques Rousseau must surely have been trained in the self-same school.
Though he generally appears in tragic parts, Ivan, as I have shown, does not object to play chief buffoon at his own Court. Any part will do for him, so long as he can be upon the stage. Now and then he mingles the two styles together. The aged Tchiéliadnine falls under suspicion of being a conspirator. The Tsar is not content with handing the traitor over to the executioner. ”

“ But when Kourbski and his likes entered into secret intercourse with Poland they were betraying their Sovereign and their country. They were conspiring with the foreigner, and treason in every form, dogging Ivan's steps, crushed twenty times over in its own blood, and perpetually raising its head afresh, is the leitmotiv of all the poems which take the Terrible for their hero. ”

“ Every man sought to hide deeper than his neighbour. The Tsar had to send reassuring messages allover the town. 'Come along! Don't be afraid! Nobody will be hurt! ...' At last, out of cellars and garrets, the necessary spectators were tempted forth, and forthwith Ivan, inexhaustible and quite unabashed, began a lengthy speech. ”

“ Thus, in the struggle which, from 1538 to 1543, filled Moscow with violence and carnage, and from which Ivan's own person and the integrity of his inheritance found no protection save in the antagonism of the rival families and their eagerness to destroy each other, the whole existence of the work accomplished by the younger branch of the Rurikovitchy was threatened. But the child had to pass through cruel trials. In their triumph the Chouïski lost all moderation, sacked the Tsar's treasury, and made themselves absolute masters. ”

“ Ivan preferred his dog-boys to members of the aristocracy, whom he was apt to suspect and dread as being fresh Chouíski. In May, 1546, while he was hunting near Kolomna, he found himself face to face with a troop of armed men who barred his way. They were the Novgorod musketeers, coming to complain of their governor. Ivan, who understood nothing about their business, ordered them to be put aside. There was a scuffle, in the course of which several shots were exchanged. The young Prince was not hurt, but he was very much frightened. His physical courage was always to fail him. ”

“ Brave in their own way—as brave as they were temperate—they were seldom known to sue for mercy, even if they were worn out and on the brink of giving way. But they broke up very easily. They were useless in the service of any skilled strategy, and they were just as useless for siege operations, such as those which awaited Ivan under the walls of Kazan. ”