The Origins of Autocracy

And suddenly all this changed as though by magic. As might have easily been predicted, by "turning against the Germans," Ivan vir­tually invited the Tatars to attack. In 1571 Russia was unable to pre­vent the khan of the Crimea from burning Moscow before the eyes of an astonished Europe. Russia's power and prestige declined to such a point that it became itself, for the first time since the Ugra, the target of greedy neighbors. As of old, the khan of the Crimea suddenly once again began to consider Muscovy a tributary of the horde. He had, in fact, already divided up Russia among his lieutenants and granted his merchants the right to trade there without paying tariffs. One would- be conqueror hastened to outdo the other. A letter to the emperor from the oprichnik Heinrich Staden, who fled Moscow, is headed: "Plan of How to Thwart the Desire of the Khan of the Crimea with the Help and Support of the Sultan to Conquer the Russian Land."

Having in the course of his Oprichnina²¹ terrorized and laid waste his country, the haughty tsar suddenly began to construct an impreg­nable fortress in the impassable forests of the Vologda region in the hope of hiding in it from his own people, and opened negotiations with the "common maiden" Elizabeth I for the right of political asy­lum in England.[11] Muscovy lost not only the 101 Livonian cities—ev­erything which it had conquered over a quarter of a century—but five key Russian cities as well. All this had to be surrendered to the Poles. The Baltic shore which had previously belonged to Russia— that same "window on Europe" which Peter I was to reconquer at the price of yet another Livonian slaughter a century and a half later— went to the Swedes. The seventeenth-century French historian de Thou, generally favorably disposed toward Ivan the Terrible, was obliged to end his panegyric of the tsar on an unexpectedly mournful note:

Thus ended the Muscovite War, in which Tsar Ivan poorly supported the reputation of his ancestors and his own reputation. The whole country from Chernigov on the Dnieper to Staritsa on the Dvina, and the regions of Novgorod and Lake Ladoga, was utterly ruined. The tsar lost more than 300,000 men, and some 40,000 were carried off as pris­oners. These losses turned the regions of Velikie Luki, Zavoloch'e, Novgorod, and Pskov into deserts, because all the youth of these re­gions were killed and the old people left no descendants behind them.[12]

But de Thou was mistaken. He did not know that by the calculations of that time up to 800,000 people perished or were taken away as prisoners by the Tatars after their campaign against Moscow in 1571 alone. Inasmuch as the entire population of Muscovy at the time was about ten million, it turns out that the life of every tenth person, ter­ritorial losses which cut it off from access to the sea, and unprece­dented national humiliation were the price paid by Russia for its fatal choice.

Its defeat in the Livonian War was no mere military setback. This was the political collapse of Muscovy. As a market for raw materials, and as a convenient path of communication with Persia, it did not, of course, cease to exist after the war. But it did effectively cease to exist as one of the centers of world trade and European politics, and was transformed into a third-rate power—something like an eastern Hanover. Here, it seems, is the point at which Russia was transformed into a "weak, poor, almost unknown" nation, as Solov'ev put it, and fell into the void of political nonexistence referred to by Golovkin.