The Origins of Autocracy

And here we approach the most interesting and mysterious prob­lem of this book. For this is not what Russian historians have tradi­tionally thought, or think today, of the Livonian War. One of them tells us, in fact, that it was precisely in his decision to turn against Eu­rope that Ivan the Terrible "emerges as a great politician" (I. I. Smir- nov). Another asserts that precisely because of this decision, the tsar attains "his full stature as a ruler of the peoples and a great patriot" (R. Iu. Vipper). From a third we hear that Ivan "anticipated Peter, and manifested . . . statesman-like perspicacity" (S. V. Bakhrushin). From a fourth, that "Ivan the Terrible understood the interests of the state better than his opponents" (la. S. Lur'e). All these are contem­porary Soviet historians. But their prerevolutionary colleagues (with the solitary exception of N. I. Kostomarov) held analogous views. In any case, none of them ever interpreted the Livonian War as a histor­ical catastrophe, which laid the basis for the de-Europeanization of Russia. No one has ever seriously tried to analyze the alternative to this war—as though it were natural, fated, inevitable, the sole possi­ble strategy available to Muscovy. No one has ever connected it with the origin of Russian autocracy.

Why?

6. "A Riddle for the Mind"

It is no exaggeration to say that over the past 400 years, a whole li­brary has been written about Ivan IV, his character, his reforms, his wars, his terror, and the Oprichnina: articles, monographs, pam­phlets, dissertations, poems, odes, and novels—volumes upon vol­umes. Everything that these historians, novelists, dissertation writers, and poets have thought about the present of their country, they have sought to justify by reference to the gigantic figure of Ivan the Ter­rible. In this sense, what I call Ivaniana—the theme of Ivan the Terrible in Russian literature—is a model for the development of Rus­sian public consciousness, and as such deserves special study in itself.

The most honest scholars have often declared in desperation that the riddle of Ivan the Terrible appears to have no solution, and that there can therefore be no end to Ivaniana—at least not until the his­tory of Russia comes to an end. In the eighteenth century, Mikhail Shcherbatov pronounced the unfortunate verdict, which later be­came classic, that Tsar Ivan "is presented in such varying forms that he does not appear to be one person."²⁴ At the beginning of the nine­teenth century, Nikolai Karamzin cried out in pique that "the charac­ter of Ioann [Ivan], a hero of virtue in his youth and the pitiless drinker of blood in his adult years and old age, is a riddle for the mind."²⁵ At the end of the nineteenth century, Nikolai Mikhailovskii, the greatest ideologist of Russian Populism, wrote:

For some reason, all the hopes for a firmly established, definite judg­ment about Ivan the Terrible are destroyed one after another. . . . Considering that the best minds of Russian scholarship, people of bril­liant talents and erudition, have participated in the effort to work out this definite judgment, we may perhaps reach the conclusion that the task of removing the disagreements in this particular case is something fantastic ... if so many intelligent, talented, conscientious and learned people cannot agree, does this not mean that it is impossible to agree?²"

In our own day, one of the most remarkable of Soviet historians, Stepan Veselovskii, has commented:

Since the time of Karamzin and Solov'ev, a very large quantity of new sources, both native and foreign, has been found and published, but the maturing of the science of history is going so slowly that the power of human reason as a whole, and not only the question of Tsar Ivan and his time, may be shaken."