The division of the territory of the Russian state in 1565 1572. Literary and historical notes of a young technician

V. O. Klyuchevsky - Oprichnina

S. F. Platonov - What is oprichnina?

The establishment of the oprichnina by Ivan the Terrible. Oprichnina and land. Alexander Sloboda. The ruin of Tver and Novgorod guardsmen. Opinions on the meaning of oprichnina

This name was called, firstly, 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 Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda, he announced that he was taking over the reign again, so that he would be free to execute traitors, put them in disgrace, deprive them of their property without dokuki and sorrows from 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 taken on a different meaning.

In the oprichnina, the tsar separated part of the boyars, servicemen and clerks, and in general made all his "everyday life" special: in the palaces of Sytnoy, Kormovoi and Khlebenny, a special staff of keykeepers, cooks, psars, etc. was appointed; special detachments of archers were recruited. Special cities (about 20), with volosts, were appointed to maintain the oprichnina. In Moscow itself, some streets (Chertolskaya, Arbat, Sivtsev Vrazhek, part of Nikitskaya, etc.) were placed at the disposal of the oprichnina; the former inhabitants were relocated to other streets. Up to 1000 princes, nobles, boyar children, both Moscow and city, were also recruited into the oprichnina. They were given estates in the volosts assigned to the maintenance of the oprichnina; the former landowners and estate owners were transferred from those volosts to others. All the rest of the state was to constitute the "zemshchina"; the tsar entrusted it to the zemstvo boyars, that is, to the boyar duma proper, and put Prince Iv at the head of its administration. Dm. Belsky and Prince. Iv. Fed. Mstislavsky. All matters had to be decided in the old way, and with big cases it was necessary to turn to the boyars, but if military or most important zemstvo affairs happened, then to the sovereign. For his rise, that is, for a trip to Aleksandrovskaya 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 the executed and exiled was taken away for the sovereign and distributed to the guardsmen, whose number soon increased to 6000. Oprichnina were recruited from young nobles and boyar children, distinguished by their prowess; they had to renounce everything and everyone, from the family, father, mother, and swear that they would know, serve only the sovereign and unquestioningly fulfill only his orders, inform him about everything and not have relations with the people of the zemstvo. 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 king. The tsar looked through his fingers at all the actions of the guardsmen; in a collision with a zemstvo man, the oprichnik 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 really unquestioningly carried out his will; all the bloody deeds of the second half of the reign of the Terrible were committed with the indispensable and direct participation of the guardsmen.

N. Nevrev. Oprichniki (The murder of the Terrible boyar Fedorov)

Soon the tsar with guardsmen left for Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda, from which he made a fortified city. There he started something like a monastery, recruited 300 people from the guardsmen. brethren, called himself abbot, Prince. Vyazemsky - a 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 raids on Moscow, where executions sometimes took on a terrifying character, especially since the tsar did not meet opposition in anyone: Metropolitan Athanasius was too weak for this and, after spending two years in the department, retired, and his successor Philip, who boldly spoke the truth to the king, was soon deprived of 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 also died (see)

N. Nevrev. Metropolitan Philip and Malyuta Skuratov

In December 1570, suspecting the Novgorodians of treason, Ivan, accompanied by a squad of oprichniki, archers and other military men, set out against Novgorod, plundering and devastating everything on the way. First, the Tver region was devastated; guardsmen took from the inhabitants everything that they could carry 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 without mercy beat the Crimean and Livonian captives who were there. In early January, Russian troops approached Novgorod and the guardsmen began their massacre with the inhabitants: people were beaten to death with sticks, thrown into the Volkhov, put on the right to force them to give up all their property, fried in red-hot flour. The beating continued for five weeks, thousands of people died. The Novgorod chronicler tells that there were days when the number of those killed reached up to one and a half thousand; days in which 500-600 people were beaten were considered happy. The tsar spent the sixth week traveling with guardsmen to rob property; monasteries were plundered, stacks of bread were burned, cattle were beaten. Military detachments were sent even into the depths of the country, 200-300 versts from Novgorod, and there they carried out a similar devastation.

From Novgorod, the Terrible went to Pskov and prepared the same fate for him, but limited himself to the execution of several Pskovites and the robbery of their property and returned to Moscow, where searches and executions began again: they were looking for accomplices of Novgorod treason. Even the tsar's favorites were accused, the guardsmen Basmanov's father and son, Prince Afanasy Vyazemsky, the printer Viskovaty, the treasurer Funikov, and others. 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 convicts, the executioners-guardsmen they stabbed, chopped, hung, poured boiling water over the convicts. 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, even their household members, were persecuted; their estate was taken over by the sovereign. Executions were resumed more than once, and subsequently died: Prince Peter Serebryany, Duma clerk Zakhary Ochin-Pleshcheev, Ivan Vorontsov and others, and the tsar came up with special methods of torment: hot frying pans, stoves, tongs, thin ropes grinding the body, etc. Boyarin Kozarinov-Golokhvatov, who accepted the schema, in order to avoid execution, he ordered to blow up a barrel of gunpowder, on the grounds that schemas are angels, and therefore must fly to heaven.

In 1575, Ivan IV put the baptized Tatar prince Simeon Bekbulatovich, formerly the Kasimov prince, at the head of the zemshchina, crowned him with a royal crown, went to bow to him himself, styled him "the great prince of all Russia", and himself - "sovereign prince of Moscow" . On behalf of Grand Duke Simeon of All Russia some letters were written, however, not important in content. Simeon remained at the head of the Zemstvo for no more than two years: then Ivan the Terrible gave him Tver and Torzhok as inheritance. The division into oprichnina and zemshchina was, however, not abolished; oprichnina existed until the death of Grozny (1584), but the word itself fell into disuse and began to be replaced by the word yard, and the oprichnik - with a word yard; instead of “cities and governors of the oprichnina and zemstvos,” they said ““ cities and governors of the yard and zemstvos.” Solovyov tries to comprehend the establishment of the oprichnina, saying: “the oprichnina was established because the tsar suspected the nobles of hostility to himself and wanted to have completely devoted people with him to him. Frightened by the departure of Kurbsky and the protest that he filed on behalf of all his brethren, Ivan suspected 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 struggle of the tsar with the boyars, a struggle that "had not a political, but a dynastic origin"; neither side knew how to get along with one another. the other and how to do 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 oprichnina and zemshchina. E. A. Belov, appearing in his monograph: "On 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 the political meaning in the establishment of the oprichnina, but attribute it to the manifestation of those painful and at the same time cruel eccentricities, with which the second half of the reign of Grozny is full.See Stromilov, "Alexandrovskaya Sloboda", in "Readings of Moscow. Tot. 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 Ketler, published by Evers in "Sammlung Russisch. Geschichte" (X, l, 187-241); see also "Tales" of Prince Kurbsky, Alexander Chronicle, "Complete Collection of Ros. Chronicles" (III and IV). Literature - see Ivan IV the Terrible.

N. Vasilenko.

Encyclopedia Brockhaus-Efron

V. O. Klyuchevsky - Oprichnina

Circumstances that prepared the oprichnina

I will state in advance the circumstances under which this unfortunate oprichnina appeared.

Barely out of his infancy, not yet 20 years old, Tsar Ivan, with extraordinary energy for his age, set to work on the affairs of government. Then, on the instructions of the clever leaders of Tsar Metropolitan Macarius and the priest Sylvester, from the boyars, which had broken into hostile circles, several efficient, well-meaning and gifted advisers advanced and stood near the throne - the "chosen council", as Prince Kurbsky calls this council, which obviously gained actual dominance in the boyar Duma, in general, in the central administration. With these trusted people, the king began to rule the state.

In this governmental activity, which has been evident since 1550, bold outward enterprises have gone hand in hand with broad and well-thought-out plans for internal transformation. In 1550, the first Zemsky Sobor was convened, at which they discussed how to arrange local government, and it was decided to revise and correct the old Code of Laws of Ivan III and develop a new, better procedure for legal proceedings. In 1551, a large church council was convened, to which the tsar proposed an extensive project of church reforms, which had the goal of putting the religious and moral life of the people in order. 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 governors - "feeders": zemstvo self-government was introduced. In 1558, the Livonian War was launched in order to break through to the Baltic Sea and establish direct relations with Western Europe to enjoy its rich culture. In all these important enterprises, I repeat, Ivan was assisted by employees who concentrated around two persons who were especially close to the tsar - the priest Sylvester and Alexei Adashev, the head of the Petition Order, in our state secretary for accepting petitions to the highest name.

Various reasons - partly domestic misunderstandings, partly disagreement in political views - cooled the king to his chosen advisers. Their flaming hostility towards the tsarina’s relatives, the Zakharyins, led to the removal of Adashev and Sylvester 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 they hadn’t taken away my youth, there would have been no crown victims (boyar executions).” Finally, the flight of Prince Kurbsky, the closest and most gifted collaborator, produced a final break. Nervous and lonely, Ivan lost his moral balance, which is always shaky in nervous people when they are left alone.

Departure of the Tsar from Moscow and his message.

In this mood of the tsar, a strange, unprecedented event happened in the Moscow Kremlin. Once at the end of 1564, a lot of sledges appeared there. The tsar, without saying anything to anyone, gathered with his whole family and with some courtiers somewhere on a long journey, took with him utensils, icons and crosses, a dress and his entire treasury, and left the capital. It was evident that this was neither an ordinary pilgrimage nor a pleasure trip of the king, but a whole resettlement. Moscow remained at a loss, not guessing what the owner was up to.

Having visited the Trinity, the tsar with all his luggage stopped in the Alexander Sloboda (now it is Alexandrov - county town Vladimir province). From here, a month after his departure, the tsar sent two letters to Moscow. In one, describing the lawlessness of boyar rule in his infancy, he laid his sovereign's anger on all the clergy and boyars on all servicemen and clerks, without exception accusing them of not caring about the sovereign, the state and all of Orthodox Christianity, from enemies they were not defended, on the contrary, they themselves oppressed Christians, plundered the treasury and the lands of the sovereign, and the clergy covered the guilty, defended them, interceding for them before the sovereign. And so the tsar, the letter said, "out of great pity of the heart", unable to endure 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 power of his power among the people. The tsar sent another letter to the common people of Moscow, merchants and all the hard-working people of the capital, which was read to them publicly in the square. Here the king wrote that they should not hold doubts, that there was no royal disgrace and anger against them. Everything froze, the capital instantly interrupted its usual activities: the shops were closed, the orders were empty, the songs fell silent. In dismay and horror, the city screamed, asking the metropolitan, bishops and boyars to go to the settlement, beat the sovereign with his forehead so that he would not leave the state. At the same time, ordinary people shouted that the sovereign returned to the kingdom to defend them from wolves and predatory people, but they did not stand for the sovereign's traitors and villains and would exterminate them themselves.

The return of the king.

A deputation of the highest clergy, boyars and clerks headed by Archbishop Pimen of Novgorod, accompanied by many merchants and other people, went to the settlement, who went to beat the brow of the sovereign and cry so that the sovereign would rule as he pleases, according to all his sovereign will. The tsar accepted the zemstvo petition, agreed to return to the kingdom, "to take over his states," but on conditions 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 the boyars and the higher clergy. They didn’t recognize him here: his small gray penetrating eyes went out, his always lively and friendly face was haggard and looked out unsociablely, on his head and in his beard only remnants of his former hair survived. Obviously, the tsar spent two months of absence in a terrible state of mind, not knowing how his idea would end. In the council, he proposed the conditions under which he accepted back the power he had abandoned. These conditions consisted in the fact that he should put disgrace on his traitors and disobedients, and execute others, take their property to the treasury, so that the clergy, boyars and clerks would put all this on his sovereign will, they would not interfere with him. The king, as it were, begged himself from state council police dictatorship - a kind of contract between the sovereign and the people!

Oprichnina decree.

To deal with traitors and disobedient, the king proposed to establish an oprichnina. It was a special court that the tsar formed for himself, with special boyars, with special butlers, treasurers and other administrators, clerks, all sorts of clerks and courtyard people, with a whole court staff. The chronicler strongly strikes at this expression "special courtyard", that the tsar sentenced everything in this courtyard to "inflict yourself especially." From the service people, he selected a thousand people to the oprichnina, who in the capital in the settlement outside the walls of the White City, behind the line of the current boulevards, were assigned streets (Prechistenka, Sivtsev Vrazhek, Arbat and the left side of the city of Nikitskaya) with several settlements to the Novodevichy Convent; the former inhabitants of these streets and settlements from servicemen and clerks were evicted from their homes to other streets of the Moscow suburb. For the maintenance of this court, "for his own use" and his children, princes Ivan and Fedor, he allocated from his state up to 20 cities with counties and several separate volosts, in which the lands were distributed to the guardsmen, and the former landowners were withdrawn from their estates and estates and received land in neoprichnyh counties. Up to 12,000 of these deportees in the winter with their families walked from the estates taken from them to the remote empty estates allotted to them. This part of the oprichnina detached from the state was not an integral region, a continuous territory, made up of villages, volosts and cities, even only parts of other cities scattered here and there, mainly in the central and northern counties (Vyazma, Kozelsk, Suzdal, Galich, Vologda, Staraya Rusa, Kargopol, etc.; after that, the Merchant side of Novgorod was taken into the oprichnina).

“The state is his Moscow”, that is, the 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 do all kinds of zemstvo affairs, which he ordered to be “in the zemstvo”, and this half of the state received the name zemstvos. All the central government institutions that remained in the zemshchina, orders, were to act as before, "repair the administration in the old way", turning on all important zemstvo affairs to the duma of the zemstvo boyars, which ruled the zemstvo, reporting to the sovereign only about military and important zemstvo affairs.

So the whole state was divided into two parts - into the zemshchina and the oprichnina; the boyar duma remained at the head of the first, the tsar himself became directly at the head of the second, without renouncing 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 Zemstvo, as it were, for a business trip on her business, lifting money - 100 thousand rubles (about 6 million rubles for our money). This is how the old chronicle stated the “decree on the oprichnina” that has not come down to 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 delay, on the very next day after this meeting, using the authority granted to him, he began to place his disgrace on the traitors, and to execute others, starting with the closest supporters of the fugitive Prince Kurbsky; on that one day, six of the boyar nobility were beheaded, and the seventh was impaled.

Life in freedom.

The dispensation of the oprichnina began. First of all, the tsar himself, as the first oprichnik, hastened to get out of 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 himself somewhere among his oprichnina, between the Arbat and Nikitskaya, at the same time he ordered his oprichnina boyars and nobles to set up courtyards in Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda where they were to live, as well as buildings of government places intended to manage 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 a rampart, with outposts along the roads. In this lair, the tsar made a wild parody of the monastery, picked up three hundred of the most notorious guardsmen who made up the brethren, he himself accepted the title of abbot, and Prince Af. He invested Vyazemsky in the rank of a cellar, covered these full-time robbers with monastic skullcaps, black cassocks, composed a cenobitic charter for them, himself with the princes in the morning climbed the bell tower to ring for matins, in church he read and sang on the kliros and made such earthly bows that from his forehead he didn't bruise. After mass at the meal, when the merry brethren ate and drank, the tsar read the teachings of the church fathers about fasting and abstinence at the lectern, then he dined alone, after dinner he liked to talk about the law, dozed off or went to the dungeon to witness the torture of the suspected.

Oprichnina and Zemshchina

Oprichnina at first glance, especially with such behavior of the king, seems to be an institution devoid of any political meaning. In fact, having declared in his message all the boyars traitors and plunderers of the land, the tsar left the administration of the land in the hands of these traitors and predators. But the oprichnina had its own meaning, albeit a rather sad one. It must distinguish between territory and purpose. The word oprichnina in the 16th century. was already an outdated term, which the then Moscow chronicle translated as a special courtyard. Tsar Ivan did not invent this word, borrowed from the old specific language. In specific time, this was the name of special allocated possessions, mainly those that were given to the full ownership of the widowed princesses, in contrast to those given for life 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 law on April 5, 1797, on the imperial family, allocated "special immovable estates from state possessions" in the amount of more than 460 thousand souls of male peasants, who were "in state calculation under the name of the palace volosts and villages "and received the name of specific. The only difference was that the oprichnina, with further annexations, captured almost half of the entire state, while only 1/38 of the then population of the empire entered the appanage department of Emperor Paul.

Tsar Ivan himself looked at the oprichnina established by him as his private property, a special court or inheritance that he separated from the state; he assigned after himself the zemshchina to his eldest son as a king, and the oprichnina to his younger son as a specific prince. There is news that a baptized Tatar, the captive Kazan tsar Yediger-Simeon, was placed 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 of the Grand Duke of All Russia. Translating this title into our language, we can say that Ivan appointed both Simeons as chairmen of the duma of the 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 great, but simply the prince of Moscow, not all Russia, went to Simeon to bow like a simple boyar and in his petitions called Simeon himself the prince of Moscow, Ivanets Vasiliev, 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 the prince of the Moscow appanage to the sovereign of all Russia, who was at the head of the zemstvo; presenting himself as a special, oprichny prince of Moscow, Ivan seemed to admit that the rest of the Russian land was the department of the council, which consisted of the descendants of its former rulers, the grand and appanage princes, of whom the highest Moscow boyars, who sat in the Zemstvo Duma, consisted. After Ivan renamed the oprichnina into the courtyard, the boyars and service people of the oprichny - into the boyars and service people of the courtyard. The tsar had his own thought in the oprichnina, "his own boyars"; The oprichnina region was governed by special orders, similar to the old zemstvo ones. The affairs of the state, how to say imperial, were conducted with a report to the tsar by the Zemstvo Duma. But the tsar ordered other questions to be discussed by all the boyars, zemstvo and oprichny, and the "boyars wallpaper" was set common decision.

Appointment of the oprichnina.

But, one wonders, why was this restoration or this parody of destiny necessary? To an institution with such a dilapidated form and with such an archaic name, the tsar indicated an unprecedented task before: the oprichnina received the significance political asylum where the tsar wanted to hide from his seditious boyars. The thought that he should run away from his boyars gradually took possession of his mind, became his unrelenting thought. In his spiritual, written around 1572, the king seriously portrays himself as an exile, a wanderer. Here he writes: "For the multitude of my iniquities, the wrath of God has spread upon me; He was credited with the serious intention of fleeing to England.

So, the oprichnina was an institution that was supposed to protect the personal safety of the king. She was given a political goal, for which there was no special institution in the existing Moscow state system. This goal was to exterminate the sedition that nestled in the Russian land, mainly among the boyars. Oprichnina received the appointment of the highest police in cases of high treason. A detachment of a thousand people, enrolled in the oprichnina and then increased to 6 thousand, became a corps of watchers of 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 for himself from the clergy, boyars and the whole land a police dictatorship to fight this sedition. As a special police detachment, the oprichnina received a special uniform: the oprichnik had a dog's head and a broom tied to his saddle - these were the signs of his position, which consisted in tracking down, sniffing out and sweeping out treason and gnawing on sovereign villains-seditious. The oprichnik rode all in black from head to toe, on a black horse in a black harness, because contemporaries called the oprichnina "pitch darkness", they said about her: "... like a night, dark." It was some kind of order of hermits, like monks who renounced the earth and fought with the earth, as monks struggle with the temptations of the world. The very admission to the oprichnina squad was furnished with something that was 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 "bad people and filled with all sorts of malice" and obliged them with terrible oaths not to know not only friends and brothers, but also with their parents, but to serve only him and on this made them kiss the cross. At the same time, let us recall 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.

Such was the origin and purpose of the oprichnina. But, having explained its origin and purpose, it is still rather 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 come to the king. After all, the oprichnina did not answer the political question that was then in the queue, 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 very political system of the Muscovite state.

The sovereign and the boyars did not disagree with each other irreconcilably in their political ideals, in plans public order, but only came across one inconsistency in the already established state order, with which they did not know what to do. What was Muscovy really like in the 16th century? It was an absolute monarchy, but with aristocratic administration, i.e. government personnel. There was no political legislation that would define the boundaries of the supreme power, but there was a governmental class with an aristocratic organization that the power itself recognized. This power grew together, at the same time and even hand in hand with another political force that constrained it. Thus, the nature of this power did not correspond to the nature of the governmental instruments through which it was supposed to act. The boyars imagined themselves as powerful advisers to the sovereign of all Russia at the very time when this sovereign, remaining true to the view of the specific patrimony, in accordance with ancient Russian law, bestowed them as his servants in the yard with the title of servants of the sovereign. Both sides found themselves in such an unnatural relation to each other, which they did not seem to notice while it was taking shape, and which they did not know what to do with when they noticed it. Then both parties felt themselves in an awkward position and did not know how to get out of it. Neither the boyars were able to arrange themselves and organize the state order without sovereign power, to which they were accustomed, nor the sovereign knew how to manage his kingdom within its new limits without boyar assistance. Both sides could neither get along with one another, nor do without each other. Unable to get along or part, 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 political position of the boyars, uncomfortable for the sovereign, as a government class, which hampered him.

There were two ways to get out of the difficulty: it was necessary either to eliminate the boyars as a government class and replace it with other, more flexible and obedient instruments of government, or to separate it, attract the most reliable people from the boyars to the throne and rule with them, as Ivan ruled in the beginning of his reign. The first he could not do soon, the second he could not or did not want to do. In conversations with close foreigners, the tsar inadvertently admitted his intention to change the entire administration of the country and even exterminate the nobles. But the idea of ​​reforming the administration 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 wise to isolate and exterminate a whole class from society, intertwined with various everyday threads with layers lying under it. In the same way, the tsar could not soon create another governmental class to replace the boyars. Such changes require time, skill: it is necessary that the ruling class get used to power and that society get used to the ruling class.

But undoubtedly, the tsar was thinking about such a replacement and saw in his oprichnina a preparation for it. He took this thought out of childhood, from the turmoil of boyar rule; she also prompted him to bring A. Adashev closer to her, taking him, in the words of the king, from the stick insects, "from the pus", and doing direct service with the nobles in the expectation of him. So Adashev became the prototype of the guardsman. With the way of thinking that later dominated the oprichnina, Ivan had the opportunity to get acquainted at the very beginning of his reign.

In 1537 or so, a certain Ivan Peresvetov left Lithuania for Moscow, believing himself to belong to 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 to three kings - Polish, Hungarian and Czech. In Moscow, he suffered from big people, lost his "dog", the property acquired by the service, and in 1548 or 1549 he submitted an extensive petition to the tsar. This is a sharp 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 "not be an hour"; there will be no other such king in the entire sunflower, if only God would keep him from "catching the nobles." The nobles of the king are thin, they kiss the cross, but change; the tsar "allows internecine war into his kingdom", appointing them governors of cities and volosts, and they grow rich and lazy from the blood and tears of Christians. Whoever approaches the king with grandeur, and not with military merit or some other wisdom, he is a sorcerer and a heretic, he takes away happiness and wisdom from the king, he must be burned. The author considers exemplary the order established by Tsar Mahmet-Saltan, who will raise the ruler high, "and he will kick him over the top", saying: he did not know how to live in good glory and serve the sovereign faithfully. It is proper for the sovereign from all over the kingdom to collect income for himself in the treasury, from the treasury to gladden the hearts of soldiers, to let them close to him and to believe in everything

The petition seemed to have been written ahead of time to justify the oprichnina: so her ideas were in the hands of the "thin-minded Kreshniks", and the tsar himself could not help but sympathize with the direction of Peresvetov's thoughts. He wrote to one of the oprichniki, Vasyuk Gryazny: "It has been committed for our sins, and how can we conceal that our father and our boyars taught us to cheat and we brought you, the sufferers, closer, expecting service and truth from you." These oprichnina sufferers, thin-born 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. So, according to Tsar Ivan, the nobility was to replace the boyars as the ruling class in the form of guardsmen. At the end of the XVII century. this change, as we shall see, took place, only in a different form, not so hateful.

The aimlessness of the oprichnina.

In any case, choosing one way or another, it was necessary to act against the political position of the whole class, and not against individuals. The tsar did exactly the opposite: suspecting all the 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 persons.

The guardsmen were not put in the place of the boyars, but against the boyars, they could be, by their very designation, not rulers, but only executioners of the land. This was the political aimlessness of the oprichnina; caused by a collision, the cause of which was the order, and not the persons, it was directed against the persons, and not against the order. In this sense, it can be said that the oprichnina did not answer the question that was in the queue. It could only be instilled into the tsar by an incorrect understanding of the position of the boyars, as well as of his own position. She was to a large extent the product of the overly timid imagination of the king. Ivan directed her against the terrible sedition, as if nesting in the boyar environment and threatening the extermination of the entire royal family. But was the danger really so terrible?

The political strength of the boyars, and in addition to the oprichnina, was undermined by the conditions directly or indirectly created by the Moscow gathering of Russia. The possibility of a permitted, legal departure, the main pillar 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 agreements not to accept either princes or boyars and no people leaving the tsar. The service of the boyars from free became mandatory, involuntary. Localism deprived the class of the ability for unanimous joint action. The land shuffling of the most important service princes, carried out under Ivan III and his grandson through the exchange of old princely estates for new ones, moved the princes 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 , in an environment alien to them, with which they had no ties. The noblest boyars ruled the regions, but in such a way that by their management they acquired only the hatred of the people. Thus, the boyars had no solid ground under them either in government, or among the people, or even in their class organization, and the tsar had to know this better than the boyars themselves.

Serious danger threatened with the repetition of the case of 1553, when many boyars did not want to swear allegiance to the child, the son of a dangerously ill tsar, meaning to enthrone the specific Vladimir, the prince's uncle. The tsar, who had barely overcome himself, 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 in exactly the same way, who stood in their way; Tsar Ivan himself dealt with his cousin Vladimir Staritsky in exactly the same way.

The danger of 1553 did not recur. But the oprichnina did not prevent this danger, but rather strengthened 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 rallied the boyars instinctively - with a sense of self-preservation.

Judgments about her contemporaries

Without such a danger, boyar sedition did not go beyond thoughts and attempts to flee to Lithuania: contemporaries do not speak of conspiracies or assassination attempts on the part of the boyars. But even if there really was a rebellious boyar sedition, the tsar should have acted differently: he had to direct his blows exclusively at the boyars, and he beat not only the boyars, and not even the boyars predominantly. Prince Kurbsky in his History, listing the victims of Ivan's cruelty, has more than 400 of them. Contemporaries-foreigners counted even for 10 thousand.

When performing executions, Tsar Ivan, out of piety, entered the names of the executed in commemoration books (synodiks), which he sent to monasteries to commemorate the souls of the deceased with commemorative contributions. These memorials are very curious monuments; in some of them the number of victims rises to 4 thousand. But there are relatively few boyar names in these martyrology, but here were brought in the courtyard people killed by the masses and not at all guilty of boyar sedition, clerks, psari, monks and nuns - "deceased Christians of the male, female and children's rank, whose names you yourself, Lord, weigh ', as the synodic wails mournfully after each group of those beaten by the masses. Finally, the turn came to the very "pitch darkness": the closest oprichny favorites of the tsar died - Prince Vyazemsky and the Basmanovs, father and son.

In a deeply lowered, restrainedly indignant tone, contemporaries narrate about the confusion that the oprichnina brought to minds unaccustomed to such internal upheavals. They portray the oprichnina as a social strife. The tsar, they write, erected internecine sedition, in the same city set some people on others, called some oprichniki, committed his own, and called the rest zemshchina and commanded his part to rape the other part of the people, put them to death and rob their houses. And there was a tightness and hatred for the king in the world, and bloodshed, and many executions were committed. One observant contemporary portrays the oprichnina as some kind of incomprehensible political game king: he cut his entire state in half, like an ax, and this confused everyone, so, playing with God's people, becoming a conspirator against himself. The tsar wanted to be a sovereign in the zemshchina, and in the oprichnina to remain an patrimony, an appanage prince. Contemporaries could not understand this political duplicity, but they understood that the oprichnina, bringing out sedition, introduced anarchy, protecting the sovereign, shook the very foundations of the state. Directed against imaginary sedition, it prepared the real one. The observer, whose words I have now quoted, sees a direct connection between the Time of Troubles, when he wrote, and the oprichnina) that he remembered: "The great split of the whole earth was created by the king, and this division, I think, was a prototype of the current all-terrestrial disagreement."

Such a course of action of 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, he was frightened: "... you became for yourself." Then the question of state order turned for him into a question of personal security, and he, like a man who was too frightened, closed his eyes and began to beat right and left, not making out friends and enemies. This means that in the direction that the tsar gave to the political clash, his personal character is largely to blame, which therefore acquires 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 always seemed very strange, both to those who suffered from it, and to those who investigated it." In fact, no original documents on the case of the establishment of the oprichnina have been preserved; the official chronicle narrates 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 seem to be unable to describe it. Both the clerk Ivan Timofeev and the noble prince I.M. Katyrev-Rostovsky, the case appears as follows: in a rage at his subjects, Grozny divided the state into two parts - he gave one to Tsar Simeon, took the other and commanded his part "to rape this part of the people and put to death." Timofeev adds to this that instead of "good-minded nobles", beaten and expelled, Ivan brought foreigners closer to him and fell under their influence to such an extent that "his entire inner being was in the hands of a barbarian." But we know that the reign of Simeon was a short-term and latest episode in the history of the oprichnina, that foreigners, although they were in charge of the oprichnina, had no significance in it, and that the ostentatious goal of the institution was not at all to rape and beat the subjects of the sovereign, but in order to "make a special court for him (the sovereign) for himself and for all his everyday life." Thus, we have nothing reliable for judging the case, except for a brief note by the chronicler about the beginning of the oprichnina, and separate references to it in documents that are not directly related to its establishment. There remains a wide field for conjecture and conjecture.

Of course, it is easiest to declare the division of the state into oprichnina and zemshchina "absurd" and explain it as the whims of a timid tyrant; so some do. But not everyone is satisfied with such a simple view of the matter. S. M. Solovyov explained the oprichnina as an attempt by the Terrible to formally separate from the boyar government class, unreliable in his eyes; the new court of the tsar, arranged for this purpose, in fact degenerated into an instrument of terror, distorted into a detective agency for boyars and any other treason. V. O. Klyuchevsky introduces us to the oprichnina as such a detective institution, the "high police for high treason." And other historians see in it an instrument of struggle against the boyars, and, moreover, strange and unsuccessful. 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 the offspring of specific princes and was aimed at breaking their traditional rights and advantages. However, such a view, in our opinion, close to the truth, has not been disclosed with the desired completeness, and this forces us to dwell on the oprichnina in order to show what its consequences and why the oprichnina influenced the development of unrest in Moscow society.

The original decree on the establishment of the oprichnina has not survived to our time; but we know about its existence from the inventory of the royal archive of the 16th century. and we think that in the annals there is not quite a successful and intelligible abbreviation. According to the annals, we get only an approximate idea of ​​\u200b\u200bwhat the oprichnina was in its beginning. It was not only "a set of a special corps of bodyguards, like the Turkish Janissaries," as one of the later historians put it, but 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 roundabouts, courtiers and service people, and finally, a special household at all kinds of "palaces": nourishing, fodder, bread, etc. For the maintenance of all this people were taken there were cities and volosts from different parts of the Muscovite state. They formed the territory of the oprichnina interspersed with lands left in the old order of administration and received the name "zemshchina". The initial volume of this territory, determined in 1565, was in subsequent years increased so much that it covered a good half of the state.

For what needs was this territory given such a large size? Some answer to this is offered by the chronicle itself in the story about the beginning of the oprichnina.

Firstly, the tsar started a new economy in the oprichny palace and took to him, according to custom, palace villages and volosts. For the palace itself, a place in the Kremlin was initially chosen, palace services were demolished and the estates of Metropolitan and Prince Vladimir Andreevich, which burned down in 1565, were taken over by the sovereign. But for some reason, Grozny began to live not in the Kremlin, but on Vozdvizhenka, in the new palace, where he moved in 1567. Some streets and settlements were assigned to the new oprichnina palace in Moscow itself, and, moreover, palace volosts and villages near Moscow and far away from her. We do not know what was the reason for the choice of those and not other localities from the general reserve of the palace lands proper to the oprichnina, we cannot even approximately imagine a list of volosts taken into the new oprichnina palace, but we think that such a list, even if it were possible would not be of particular importance. In the palace, as one might guess, the lands of the palace proper were taken to the extent of economic needs, for the arrangement of various services and for the dwellings of the court staff, who were in the performance of palace duties.

But since this court and service staff in general required provision and land allocation, then, secondly, in addition to the palace lands proper, the oprichnina needed patrimonial lands and estates. Grozny in this case repeated what he himself had done 15 years before. In 1550, he immediately placed around Moscow "the landowners of the children of the boyars' best servants, a thousand people." Now he also chooses for himself "princes and nobles of the children of boyars, yards and townsmen, a thousand heads"; but he places them not around Moscow, but in other, mainly "Zamoskovny", counties: Galicia, Kostroma, Suzdal, also in Zaotsk cities, and in 1571, probably in the Novgorod pyatins. In these places, according to the chronicle, he exchanges lands: "Votchinnikov and landlords, who were not in the oprichnina, he ordered to withdraw from those cities and ordered land to be given to that place in other cities." It should be noted that some letters unconditionally confirm this chronicle testimony; votchinniks and landlords really lost their lands in oprichnina districts and, moreover, by the whole district at once, or, in their words, "together with the city, and not in disgrace - as the sovereign took the city into the oprichnina." For the lands taken, service people were rewarded by others, where the sovereign would wish, or where they themselves would find. Thus, every county, taken into the oprichnina with service lands, was condemned to a radical break. 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 considerations of a political nature. In the central regions of the state, for the oprichnina, precisely those areas were separated where land ownership of princes, descendants of sovereign princes, still existed in the ancient specific territories. Oprichnina acted among the patrimonial estates of the princes of Yaroslavl, Belozersky 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 were gradually included in the oprichnina: if we compare the lists of princely estates in the well-known decrees about them - the royal decree of 1562 and the "zemstvo" of 1572, we will see that in 1572 only Yaroslavl and Rostov estates remained under the jurisdiction of the "zemstvo" government , Obolensky and Mosalsky, Tver and Ryazan; all the rest, named in the "old sovereign code" of 1562, have already departed to the oprichnina. And after 1572, the estates of Yaroslavl and Rostov, as we have already indicated, were taken into the sovereign's "court". Thus, little by little, the old appanage lands, the original owners of which aroused the wrath and suspicion of Ivan the Terrible, almost completely gathered in the oprichnina administration. It was on these owners that the revision of land ownership initiated by Ivan the Terrible was to fall with all its weight. Some were plucked from their old places by Grozny and dispersed to new distant and alien places, others were introduced into the new oprichnina service and placed under his strict direct supervision. In Grozny's will we find numerous indications that the sovereign took "for himself" the lands of 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 in the oprichnina by princely land ownership. Comparatively better we can judge the state of affairs in the Zaotsk cities by the upper Oka. There were descendants of appanage princes, princes Odoevsky, Vorotynsky, Trubetskoy and others, on their original possessions; "Even those princes were on their inheritances and had great fatherlands under them," - says about them famous phrase Kurbsky. When Grozny invaded this nest of princes with the oprichnina, he took some of the princes into the oprichnina "thousand heads"; among the "voivode from the oprishna" were, for example, princes Fyodor Mikhailovich Trubetskoy and Nikita Ivanovich Odoevsky. Others he gradually took to new places; so Prince Mikhail Ivanovich Vorotynsky, already 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 receive land in the counties of Moscow, Kolomensky, Dmitrovsky, Zvenigorodsky and others. The results of such events were varied and important. If we remember that, with few and minor exceptions, all those places in which the old specific principalities previously existed were introduced into the oprichnina administration, then we will understand that the oprichnina systematically destroyed the patrimonial land tenure of the serving princes in general, throughout its entire space. Knowing the true size of the oprichnina, we will be convinced of the full justice of Fletcher’s words about the princes (in Chapter IX), that Grozny, 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 the king pleases, in regions so remote that they have neither the love of the people nor influence there, for they were not born there and were not known there. Now, adds Fletcher, the highest nobility, called appanage princes, is compared with the rest; only in the consciousness and feeling of the people does it retain some significance and still enjoy external honor in solemn assemblies. In our opinion, this is a very accurate definition of one of the consequences of the oprichnina. Another consequence arising from the same measures was no less important. On the territory of the old specific possessions, the old orders still lived, and the old authorities still acted alongside the power of the Moscow sovereign. "Servant" people in the XVI 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, princes Obolensky, Mikulinsky, Mstislavsky, Rostov, Golitsyn, Kurlyatev, even simple boyars; from some estates there was no service at all. It is clear that this order could not be maintained during the changes in land ownership that the oprichnina introduced. Private authorities drooped under the storm 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 oprichnina sovereign service or took them out of the oprichnina. With the oprichnina, the "hosts" of several thousand servants, with whom the princes used to come to the sovereign's service, were to disappear, as were all other traces of the old Appanage customs and liberties in the field of official relations. So, capturing the old appanage territories into the oprichnina to accommodate his new servants, Grozny made radical changes in them, replacing the remnants of specific experiences with new orders, such that equaled everyone in the face of the sovereign in his "special everyday life", where there could no longer be specific memories. and aristocratic traditions. It is curious that this revision of ancestors and people continued many years after the start of the oprichnina. Grozny himself describes it very vividly in his well-known petition on October 30, 1575 addressed to the Grand Duke Simeon Bekbulatovich: loosened to send, and if you would have granted others, you would have freed to accept; ... and you would have loosened if you had granted from all sorts of people to choose and receive, and which we do not need, and you would have granted us those, sovereign, freed us to send away ...; and which they would want to visit us, and you, sir, would show your mercy, loosened their stay with us safely and did not order them to imati from us; and those who will go from us and teach you the sovereign, beat with their foreheads; and you would ... those of our little people who they will teach you to leave us, they did not accept you." Under the feigned self-deprecation of Tsar "Ivanets Vasiliev" in his appeal to the newly installed "Grand Duke" Simeon, one of the usual decrees for that time on the revision of service people with the introduction of the oprichnina order is hidden.

Thirdly, in addition to the palace patrimonial and local lands, many volosts, according to the chronicle, “the sovereign caught with a fed payback, from which the volosts had all sorts of income for his sovereign household, to pay boyars and nobles and all his sovereign household people who would be with him in the wilderness." This is a true, but not complete, chronicle indication of income from the oprichnina lands. The paid payback is a special fee, a kind of redemption payment of volosts for the right to self-government, established from 1555–1556. We know that the income of the oprichnina was not limited to it. The oprichnina received, on the one hand, direct taxes in general, and on the other hand, various kinds of indirect taxes. When the Simonov Monastery was taken to the oprichnina, he was ordered to pay "all sorts of taxes" to the oprichnina ("both pit money and conspicuous money for both city and serif and yamchuzhny 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 letter of 1571. Thus, some cities and volosts were introduced into the oprichnina for financial reasons: their purpose was to deliver oprichnina separate from "zemstvo" income. Of course, the entire territory of the oprichnina paid the "tributes and dues" that existed in Russia from time immemorial, especially the volosts of the industrial Pomorye, where there were no landowners; but the main interest and importance for the oprichnina royal treasury was represented by large urban settlements, since diverse and rich collections came from their population and markets. It is interesting to see how these commercial and industrial centers were chosen for the oprichnina. In this case, a simple acquaintance with the map of the Moscow state can lead to some, it seems, indisputable and not without significance conclusions. Having mapped the most important routes from Moscow to the borders of the state and marking on the map the places taken to the oprichnina, we will make sure that all the main routes with a large part of the cities standing on them fell into the oprichnina. It is even possible, without the risk of falling into exaggeration, to say that the oprichnina controlled the entire space of these routes, excluding, perhaps, the most frontier places. Of all the roads that connected Moscow with the frontiers, perhaps only the roads to the south, to Tula and Ryazan, were left without attention by the oprichnina, we think, because their customs and any other profitability was small, and their entire length was in restless places of southern Ukraine.

Our observations on the composition of the lands taken in 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. It was composed of cities and volosts that lay in the central and northern areas of the state - in Pomorie, cities outside Moscow and Zaotsk, in the pyatinas of Obonezhskaya and Bezhetskaya. Leaning in the north on the "great sea of ​​oceans", the oprichnina lands cut into the "zemshchina", dividing it in two. In the east, beyond the zemshchina, there remained the Permian and Vyatka cities, Ponizovye and Ryazan; in the west, border cities: "from the German Ukraine" (Pskov and Novgorod), "from the Lithuanian Ukraine" (Velikiye Luki, Smolensk, etc.) and the cities of Seversky. In the south, these two strips of "Zemshchina" were connected by Ukrainian cities and "wild field". The Moscow north, Pomorye and two Novgorod pyatinas were completely controlled by the oprichnina; 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 simply to depict. From the big cities, it seems, only Tver, Vladimir, Kaluga were left behind the Zemstvo. 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 towns and volosts in the Moscow center moved away from the zemstvo, and we have the right to say that the outskirts of the state were left to the zemshchina in the end. It turned out something opposite to what we see in the imperial and senatorial provinces of ancient Rome: there the imperial power takes the military outskirts under direct jurisdiction and fetters the old center with a ring of legions; here the tsarist government, on the contrary, separates the inner regions into oprichnina, leaving the military outskirts of the state to the old administration.

These are the results that our study of the territorial composition of the oprichnina led us to. 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, seized the ways of external communications and almost all the most important markets of the country and quantitatively equaled the zemstvo, if only it did not outgrow it. In the 70s of the XVI century. this is far from being a "detachment of tsarist bodyguards" and not even an "oprichnina" in the sense of a specific 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 ranks and was replaced by the word "yard". 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 appearance.

A number of observations outlined above puts us in such a point of view from which the existing explanations of the oprichnina do not seem to be fully consistent with 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 over the entire state in its root part, leaving the "zemstvo" administration to its borders, and even sought state reforms, because it introduced significant changes in the composition of service land ownership. Destroying his aristocratic system, the oprichnina was directed, in essence, against those sides 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. Speaking in this way, we do not at all deny those disgustingly cruel persecutions to which the Terrible Tsar subjected his imaginary and real enemies in the oprichnina. Both Kurbsky and foreigners talk about them a lot and in a plausible way. But it seems to us that the scenes of atrocities and depravity, which terrified everyone and at the same time occupied, were, as it were, dirty foam that boiled on the surface of oprichnina life, closing the everyday work taking place in its depths. The incomprehensible bitterness of Grozny, the rude arbitrariness of his "Kromeshniks" affected the interest of contemporaries much more than the ordinary activities of the oprichnina, aimed at "sorting out little people, boyars and nobles and children of boyars and courtyard people." Contemporaries noticed only the results of this activity - the destruction of princely land ownership; Kurbsky passionately reproached the Terrible for him, saying that the tsar ruined the princes for the sake of estates, possessions and belongings; Fletcher calmly pointed to the humiliation of the "specific princes" after Grozny seized their estates. But neither one nor the other of them, and indeed no one left us a complete picture of how Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich concentrated in his hands, in addition to the "zemstvo" boyars, the disposal of the most profitable places of the state and its trade routes and, disposing of his oprichnina treasury and oprichny servants, gradually "sorted out" the service people, tore them away from the soil that nourished their uncomfortable 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 consider behind the outbursts of royal 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 the reforms of Tsar Ivan IV left few traces in the paperwork of the 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. Transferring the regions to the oprichnina, Grozny did not invent either 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 alongside and together with persons "from the zemstvo". That is why sometimes the mere name of the clerk who sealed this or that letter shows us where the letter was given, in the oprichnina or in the zemstvo, or only by the area to which this or that act relates, we can judge what we are dealing with, with whether by oprichny order or with the zemstvo. It is far from always that the act itself indicates exactly which governing body in this case should be understood, zemstvo or courtyard; it simply says: "Big Palace", "Big Parish", "Discharge" and only sometimes an explanatory word is added, like: "from the Zemstvo Palace", "yard Rank", "to the courtyard Big Parish". Equally, positions were not always mentioned with a meaning to which order, oprichnina or zemstvo, they belonged; sometimes it was said, for example, "with the sovereign boyars from the oprichnina", "Butler of the Grand Zemstvo Palace", "yard voivodes", "clerk to the rank of the courtyard", etc., sometimes persons who obviously belong to the oprichnina and "to the court", are named in the 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 any administrative institutions separate from the "zemshchina". There was, it seems, only one Category, one Big Parish, but in these and other government places, different clerks were entrusted with the affairs and areas of the zemstvo and courtyard separately, and the order of reporting and solving those and other cases was not the same. Researchers have yet to solve the question of how things and people were separated in such a close and strange neighborhood. Now it seems to us inevitable and irreconcilable enmity between the zemstvo and oprichniki people, because we believe that the Terrible ordered the oprichniki to rape and kill zemstvo people. Meanwhile, it is not clear that the government of the XVI century. considered the yard and zemstvo people as enemies; on the contrary, it prescribed them joint and concerted action. So, in 1570, in May, "when / h1 the sovereign ordered about the (Lithuanian) borders to speak to all the boyars, zemstvo and from the oprishnina ... and the boyars of the wallpaper, zemstvo and from the oprishnina, they spoke about those borders, the sovereign ordered about the (Lithuanian) borders tell all the boyars, zemstvo and from the oprishna ... and the boyars, both zemstvo and from the oprishna, talked about those frontiers "and came to one common decision. A month later, the same general decision "wallpaper" boyars decided on the unusual "word" in the title of the Lithuanian sovereign and "they ordered to stand strong for that word." In the same 1570 and 1571. on the "shore" and in the Ukraine against the Tatars there were zemstvo and "oprishna" detachments, and they were ordered to act together, "where it happens to meet" the zemstvo governors with the oprishna governors. All such facts suggest that Grozny did not build relations between the two parts of his kingdom on the principle of mutual hostility, and if, according to Ivan Timofeev, “the whole land was split into a great split” from the oprichnina, then the reasons for this lay not in Grozny’s intentions, but in the way they are implemented. Only one episode with the reign of Simeon Bekbulatovich in the zemshchina could contradict this if it could be given serious importance and if it clearly indicated the intention to separate the "zemshchina" into a special "great reign". But it seems that this was a short-lived and not at all sustained trial of the division of power. Simeon had a chance to sit in the rank of Grand Duke in Moscow for only a few months. At the same time, since he did not bear the royal title, he could not be crowned king; he was simply, in the words of one high-profile book, the sovereign "put him on a great reign in Moscow," perhaps with some ceremony, but, of course, not with the rank of a royal wedding. Simeon had one shadow of power, because during his reign, next to his letters, letters were written from the real "Tsar and Grand Duke of All Russia", and the clerks did not even unsubscribe to the letters of "Grand Duke Simeon Bekbulatovich of All Russia", preferring to answer one "sovereign Prince Ivan Vasilievich 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 talked about him confusedly and evasively; if he had been given real power, 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 state system. She crushed the land ownership of the nobility in the form in which it existed from antiquity. By means of a forced and systematic exchange of lands, she destroyed the old ties between the specific princes and their ancestral patrimonies wherever she considered it necessary, and scattered the princes, suspicious in the eyes of Grozny, in different parts of the state, mainly along its outskirts, where they turned into ordinary service landowners. If we remember that next to this land transfer there were disgraces, exiles and executions, directed primarily at the same princes, then we are sure that in the oprichnina of Grozny there was a complete defeat of the specific aristocracy. True, it was not exterminated "all over the world", without exception: it is unlikely that this was part of Grozny's policy, as some scientists are inclined to think; but its composition has thinned considerably, and only those who were able to seem politically harmless to Grozny, like Mstislavsky with his son-in-law "Grand Duke" Simeon Bekbulatovich, were saved from death, or were able, like some princes - Skopins, Shuiskys, Pronskys, Sitskys, Trubetskoys, Temkins - to earn the honor of being accepted into the service of the oprichnina. The political significance of the class was irrevocably destroyed, and therein lay the success of Grozny's policy. Immediately after his death, what the boyars-princesses were so afraid of under him came true: they began to be owned by the Zakharyins and the Godunovs. The primacy in the palace passed to these simple boyar families from a circle of people of the highest breed, defeated by the oprichnina.

But this was only one of the consequences of the oprichnina. The other was the unusually energetic mobilization of land ownership, led by the government. Oprichnina masses moved service people 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 the palace or monastery land turned into a local distribution, and the estate of a prince or the estate of a boyar son was unsubscribed to the sovereign. It was as if a general revision and a general shuffling of property rights took place. 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 specific time, the government of Grozny instead of them everywhere established monotonous orders, firmly linking the right to land ownership with compulsory service. This was demanded both by the political views of Grozny himself and by the more general interests of state defense. Trying to place "oprichnina" service people on the lands taken into the oprichnina, Grozny drove their old service owners from these lands who had not fallen into the oprichnina, but at the same time he had to think about not leaving without lands and these latter. They settled in the "zemshchina" and settled in such areas that needed a military population. The political considerations of Grozny drove them 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 both on the introduction of the oprichnina and on circumstances of a military nature is found in the so-called Polotsk scribe books of 1571. They contain data on the children of the boyars, who were brought to the Lithuanian border from the Obonezhskaya and Bezhetskaya Pyatina immediately after these two pyatins were taken to the oprichnina. In the border areas, in Sebezh, Nescherda, Ozerishchi and Usvyat, Novgorod servants were given land in full to each of them in his salary of 400-500 couples. Thus, not accepted as guardsmen, these people completely lost their lands in the Novgorod pyatinas and received a new settlement on that 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 circulation of land in the service center and on the military outskirts of the state. But there can be no doubt that this influence was very great. It intensified land mobilization and made it unsettling 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 upheaval in the field of land relations and was 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 their native nest to the border wasteland without any fault, "together with the city, and not in disgrace." It was not only landowners who suffered from involuntary, sudden movements, who were obliged to change their patrimony or local residence and abandon one economy in order to start another in an alien environment, in new conditions, with a new working population. This working population also suffered to the same extent from the change of masters, especially when, together with the palace or black land on which they sat, they had to fall into private dependence. Relations between landowners and their peasant population were already quite confused at that time; The oprichnina was supposed to complicate and stir them up even more.

But the question of land relations of the XVI century. takes us to another realm of Moscow's social difficulties...

S. F. Platonov. Lectures on Russian history

Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible - general characteristics

Oprichnina historians call the state policy of terror that reigned in Russia at the end of the sixteenth century under the rule of Ivan the Terrible.

The essence of the oprichnina

The essence of the oprichnina It consisted in taking away property from the population in favor of the state. At one wish of the king, special land allotments could be allocated, which were used only for the royal court or state needs. These territories had their own administrative power, and they were inaccessible to the common population. All such land areas were taken from the landlords by physical force or threats.

The origin of the word "oprichnina"

The very word "oprichnik" has ancient Russian roots and means "special". In addition, the oprichnina was sometimes called a part of the state that had gone into the sole royal (as well as his courtiers) use. Oprichniks are members of the sovereign's secret police.

The number of the royal retinue (oprichnina) at that time was about a thousand people.

Tsar Ivan the Terrible became famous in history for his military approaches and his harsh temper. Oprichnina arose in connection with the Livonian War. In 1558 Grozny started the Livonian War in order to seize the Baltic lands (coast), but the course of hostilities did not go as the tsar himself intended. He repeatedly reproached the boyars and governor for the fact that they do not at all respect their king for authority, therefore they act softly and not decisively. The betrayal of the tsar by one of his governors aggravates the situation even more, finally undermining Grozny's confidence in his own retinue. That is why the oprichnina were created.

Oprichniki had to follow their king everywhere, protecting him from dangers. However, more than once executions and moral abuses occurred from them. Usually the king preferred to turn a blind eye to this, justifying such cruelty of his subordinates in any disputes. The result of such excesses of the guardsmen was hatred towards them not only from the common population, but also from the boyars.

In just two years (1570-1571), many people died at the hands of Ivan the Terrible and his guardsmen. At the same time, the king did not even spare his own subordinates, who, according to researchers, were killed at least two hundred people. These Moscow executions were the apogee of the terror of the oprichnina.

Oprichnina system began to fall apart at the end of 1571 because of the attack of the Crimean Khan Devlet Giray. The oprichniki, who were used to living off the robberies of their own citizens and did not appear on the battlefield, after which the tsar canceled the oprichnina and introduced the zemshchina, which differed little from the first.

Oprichnina was a sharp change in domestic policy from reform to repression. Historians of the 19th century looked for the reasons for this turn in the character of the king and his relations with his inner circle. Soviet historians have long tried to present these reasons as a conscious desire to do away with the boyar aristocracy.

The modern interpretation of the oprichnina is based on the fact that it was the tsar's struggle against any political opponents for the establishment of autocracy.

Skrynnikov considers it to be an apex coup with the aim of establishing unlimited rule.

Florya is a political coup.

Reasons for the oprichnina

1. The inability to fully implement the reforms, especially the military one, due to the lack of land for distribution.

2. Political jealousy of the tsar for his inner circle as an obstacle to his autocracy.

3. The desire to weaken the influence of the princely-boyar aristocracy on public policy.

4. Failures in foreign policy. In 1564, the inevitability of war both in Livonia and with the Crimea became obvious.

Since it was a war of an Orthodox state with a Protestant and Muslim one, by blaming the negligent boyars for another conduct of the war, the tsar got the opportunity to accuse them of treason not only to the sovereign, but to all of Orthodox Christianity.

Background of the oprichnina

1. Personality of the king.

2. His belief that faithful servants can only be of poor birth.

3. His conviction that he should rule with autonomy.

4. The king's confidence that, as the viceroy of God on earth, he must save the souls of sinful subjects.

5. The state of war made it easy to accuse political enemies of treason.

Oprichnina preparation

In 1560, Empress Anastasia died and the collapse of the elected Rada began. Adashev fell into disgrace. Sylvester was sent to the Cyril Monastery to the north.

In 1561, Ivan 4 married Maria Temryukovna (Kabardian princess Kuchenya).

After that, the sons from the first marriage stood out in a special court. In the will, just in case, a list of boyars-guardians was provided in case Prince Ivan inherited the throne as a child. Prince Mstislavsky was at the head of the seven boyars. The Zakharins, maternal relatives, took four places on this list. More aristocratic families - Staritsky, Belsky, Sheremetyev, Morozov and others were offended.

In 1562, some aristocratic families were forbidden to inherit estates without the knowledge of the king, and the female line was excluded. The Vorotyn, Suzdal, Shuisky, Yaroslavl, and Starodub princes suffered. In terms of political weight and local account, they were higher than other service princes.

Then the accusation of treason began against Adashev's relatives, acquaintances and neighbors ("Starodub case").

Then the Sheremetyevs suffered. Kurbsky fled to Lithuania.

In 1564, Danila Romanovich Zakharyin died, and it became obvious that this family was losing its political weight.

Gradually, a new environment for the king is taking shape.

The place of the closest adviser was taken by Alexei Basmanov-Pleshcheev, boyar, voivode ("silovik"). His son Fyodor became Ivan's favorite.

The place of confessor Sylvester was first taken by Metropolitan Macarius, and then by Athanasius, who indulged the king.

Behind Basmanov, the convoy governor Afanasy Vyazemsky and the nobleman Petrok Zaitsev got into the tsar's entourage. + characteristic of the boyars-princes of Cherkasy.

But the Boyar Duma is dissatisfied and it is impossible to force it to reconcile by traditional means.

Extraordinary measures are needed. Departure of Ivan 4 in December 1564 to Alexandrov Sloboda. He was accompanied by the nobles. He has enough boyar children and governors. On the eve of the clash with the nobility, the tsar managed to secure the support of a number of boyars and clerks, members of the sovereign's court. It was the presence of such support that allowed the king to take an independent position.

In January 1565, a message to the metropolitan that he left his state, as he was expelled by his own serfs - the boyars. The accusation concerned not only the boyar Duma. But the entire ruling stratum, since they supported the boyars, compiling manual records. The accusation was supposed to remind the society what awaits the country if there is no king in it.

The Boyar Duma asks the tsar to lay down his anger from them and rule the state as he “pleases”. The townspeople were afraid that without the king, the nobles could force merchants and artisans to do everything for nothing, the mob is on the side of the sovereign.

Klyuchevsky wrote that "the Tsar seemed to beg for himself a police dictatorship from the State Council."

Boyar children could not be raised to war to protect the rights of a narrow circle of advisers to the sovereign and higher hierarchs. And there are no wars without privates. → it is “suitable” for him to demand the creation of an oprichnina. The elite was not psychologically ready for war with the "natural" king, who had recently been crowned king and conquered the Muslim kingdoms. The only Orthodox tsar in the world.

Initially, it was a territory with a separate administration. A little later, the word will be perceived as a symbol of politics.

The Muscovite state was called Zemshchina and remained under the control of the Boyar Duma. But the oprichnina was placed, as it were, above the zemstvos.

The territories taken under the control of the king were called oprichnina. To manage them, he received unlimited powers. In fact, it turned out to be the lot of the king.

Territory

1) palace volosts;

2) northern territories with active trade. Vologda, Ustyug + course of the Northern Dvina and access to the White Sea;

3) salt-making centers. Kargopol, Galician Salt, Vychegodskaya Salt, a kind of salt monopoly;

4) Suzdal, Mozhaisky, Vyazemsky counties.

Then the area expanded.

Finance

Taxes from the oprichnina lands + property of the disgraced (and the boyar had it in the zemshchina → and their king).

Oprichnaya Boyar Duma

Formally headed by the tsarina's brother Mikhail Cherkassky. The Basmanovs and their friends were really in charge.

A new duma rank has been introduced = - duma nobleman for those who are completely ignorant. The Duma included the old Moscow boyars Pleshcheevs, Kolychevs, Buturlins.

Oprichnaya army

Recruited from the poor nobles who did not know the boyars. The boyars received positions not according to the local account, but according to the will of the tsar. Land salaries are higher than in the zemshchina. Those who did not enter the troops of the sovereign could not count on the preservation of tribal property.

In order to actually find the lands, they were confiscated from everyone who was not enrolled in the oprichnina army (including nobles, and not just princes and boyars). So the nobility was divided. Oprichniki retained their estates located in zemstvo districts. Their lands were freed from a number of taxes and duties.

It was for the confiscation of land that such a large army was required (a vicious circle).

In the case of the participation of guardsmen in hostilities, the oprichny governors were considered higher than the zemstvos.

Discipline in the army due to the oath of personal loyalty to the king and the opportunity for the poor to curry favor.

The army has a guarantee of impunity in actions against the enemies of the king.

Thus, the oprichnina is a full-fledged state within a state.

Zemshchina

Manages the seven boyars headed by I.P. Chelyadnin (groom).

The Zemsky Boyar Duma was headed by the princes Belsky and Mstislavsky.

The orders continued. Despite the division made, the decision of all important issues concerning this territory and the entire state as a whole, continued to remain in the hands of the king.

Oprichny terror

1564–1565

Ivan 4 and his entourage understood that their policy was detrimental to the interests of many, did not enjoy the support of wide circles of the nobility and could meet with resistance → terror was supposed to frighten those who disagree and deprive them of the will to resist.

1567-1570 - mass terror.

First, the disgraced nobility was exiled to the Kazan lands and endowed them with estates. Kazan governors (!) P.A. Kurakin and A.I. Katyrev-Rostovsky, with a salary of one thousand quarters of arable land, received dachas of 120 quarters of fallow land. 12 princes Gagarins received one village for all, etc.

The Suzdal nobility suffered the most (after all, Moscow was the city of the Rostov-Suzdal principality, and not vice versa).

The decree on the oprichnina marked the beginning of the "great migration" of landowners of all categories in the old Moscow lands.

In 1566, some of the disgraced were returned back and even given land, including tribal ones (but not all). The king is free to execute and pardon.

But no compromise has been reached. The old Moscow boyars and the zemstvo nobility feared disgrace and began to express dissatisfaction with the policy of the tsar + rumors about the Staritsky conspiracy. It was possible to cope with their opposition only by turning to mass terror.

The king felt insecure.

The territory of the oprichnina was expanded → the army was already 1.5 thousand. New oprichny fortresses are being built in Moscow opposite the Kremlin and in Vologda.

Mass terror is judged mainly by the "Synodicus" of Ivan the Terrible. 3-4 thousand people were destroyed, of which at least 700 nobles (without family members).

Many members of the Zemstvo Boyar Duma were executed, princes and boyars returned from exile in Kazan. But untitled victims prevailed.

Malyuta Skuratov (Grigory Lukyanovich Belsky) appeared in the tsar's entourage. The rank of duma nobleman in the oprichnina was received by the executioner Vasily Gryaznoy.

After the death of Tsaritsa Maria in 1569, the Cherkasskys, Basmanovs, and Vyazemskys were repressed.

In 1570, the oprichnina pogrom of Novgorod and Pskov intimidated the townspeople and replenished the oprichnina treasury. Novgorod is taken to the oprichnina.

In Moscow, the top of the Zemshchina was executed, including a printer
I. Viskovaty, treasurer Nikita Funikov, chief clerks of orders (! And the bureaucracy got it).

By the end of 1570, the terror had exhausted itself. The top leadership, including the one that established the oprichnina, has been eliminated, the mob is intimidated.

Young people from zemstvo and disgraced families - Shuisky, Trubetskoy, Odoevsky, Pronsky - got into the new oprichnina duma. The real leaders were Skuratov and Gryaznoy. Skuratov died in the war in 1572.

1571 - Crimean Tatars burned Moscow.

The tsar had to gradually erase the difference between the administration of the oprichnina and the zemstvo. Equalized land salaries. Consolidated treasury. More and more often united troops are sent.

The text of the decree on the abolition of the oprichnina is not known to specialists. He might not have been.

Reasons for the collapse of the oprichnina

1. It is impossible to create a new environment without Zemstvo (since in the oprichnina its creators are either in power or eliminated, but there are no others).

2. The absolute power of the tsar has increased and he actually decides matters both in the oprichnina and in the zemshchina.

3. Fear of disobedience of the taxed population, which condemned terror.

The consequences of the oprichnina

1. Political:

1) Stabilization of the regime of the personal power of the king with the strengthening of despotism.

2) Limitation of the competence of the Boyar Duma in internal management.

3) The growth of the political weight of the service bureaucracy (duma nobles, clerks).

4) Unconditional unification around the king of all landowners.

5) Strengthening the relationship between the church and the royal power (objectionable churchmen are also victims of terror).

6) The prospect of consolidation of the nobility in the struggle for the expansion of their rights is excluded.

2. Social

1) The personal, but not the social composition of the large landowners changed (the boyars and princes remained).

2) Weakened the combat capability of the army.

3) The self-government of the townspeople was finally liquidated.

4) The exploitation of the tax-paying population and the dependent population has intensified.

3. Economic

1) The desolation of the old-tillage center (the departure of the population, the reduction of plowing)

2) Tax arrears.

3) The inability of the landowners to keep the dependent population (especially the petty nobles).

Deep crisis, demoralization of society.

State Polar Academy

Department of French Language and Literature

By discipline

"National history"

Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible: its background and consequences

Performed

student of group 201

Moroz E.S.

scientific adviser

cand. ist. Sci., Assoc. Portnyagina N.A.

St. Petersburg 2010

Introduction

1. Background

1.1.1Birth of Ivan the Terrible

1.1.2Childhood

1.2. The beginning of the reign of Ivan the Terrible

1.3 Foreign policy

2. Oprichnina

2.1 Definition

2.2 The beginning of the oprichnina

2.3 The essence of the oprichnina

3. Background of the oprichnina

4. Consequences of the oprichnina

historical sources

Introduction

Ivan IV (1533-1584) is a bright personality in Russian history, but few of us perceive him as a positive person, and yet he contributed to the development of his country, in particular, he took the first steps in creating a class-representative monarchy in Russia. And what is so darkened his reputation?

8. Oprichnina: its causes and consequences.

- One of the main reasons is the policy of the oprichnina. And although it cannot be called ill-conceived, it was still not far-sighted. It is noteworthy that at a glance modern man the main quality of this policy is cruelty. However, we must not forget that it took place more than 5 centuries ago and the temperament of the people of that time was strikingly different from the present: many things related to the oprichnina were completely tolerable for that time, nevertheless, some contemporaries of the king were shocked by the atrocities that took place at that time. It is also surprising how much the policy of the oprichnina contradicts that time of the reign of Ivan the Terrible, when the Elected Rada was created and the Zemsky Sobor was convened. Compared with the first period of the reign of Ivan IV, the oprichnina cannot be called a policy that works for the benefit of the inhabitants of the state. And now many generations of people are asking the question: What are the reasons for choosing such a tough policy? Could it subsequently become the cause of the crisis that engulfed Russia in the late 16th and early 17th centuries? Undoubtedly, the answers to these questions should be sought not only in the political situation of that time, but also in the life of the king himself. All these aspects will be considered in this essay.

Purpose: to determine why Ivan the Terrible decided to introduce the oprichnina and why this policy halted.

Tasks: to analyze the contradictory actions of the tsar, to trace the formation of his character, to understand how the personal aspect of his life influenced his political activity, what consequences his actions during the period of the oprichnina led to.

1. Background

1.1 The period of life of Ivan IV before the coronation

Since the personality and character of the king has no small influence on his political actions, it is worth paying attention to the conditions in which his personality was formed.

1.1.1 Birth of Ivan the Terrible

Ivan was born on August 25, 1530. Already at this time there were signs of the degeneration of the royal family: the brother of the future king was born a deaf and dumb idiot. “The descendants of “old Igor”, the Kiev prince of Varangian origin, for seven centuries married in their own circle. Moscow Rurikovichs chose brides from families of Tver, Ryazan princes and other Rurikoviches. Ivan IV received from his ancestors a heavy heredity. ”(2.1) His son, Fedor, suffered from dementia, and Dmitry was stricken with epilepsy from infancy. It is possible to assume that bad heredity could also affect mental health Ivana: At the end of his life, sharply pronounced features of foolishness and buffoonery become noticeable in Grozny's behavior (D.S. Likhachev). With amazing ease, Tsar Ivan moved in his writings from humility to pride and anger, which humiliated and destroyed the interlocutor. The king was not averse to starting a verbal duel with the victim at the moment when the executioner had already prepared the ax.

1.1.2 Childhood

After death Basil III the throne was occupied by his three-year-old son Ivan. In fact, his mother Elena Glinskaya ruled the state, although traditions did not allow the participation of women in government affairs, Vasily told his wife before his death: “I blessed my son Ivan with the state and the great reign, and to you I wrote in my spiritual letter, as in the previous spiritual letters of our fathers and forefathers according to their heritage, as to the former Grand Duchesses.

The Grand Duchess died on April 3, 1538 (there are suggestions that she was poisoned). Power passed to the surviving members of the Seven Boyars.

1.1.3 The boyhood and youth of the king

Ivan grew up in an atmosphere of palace coups, the struggle for power between the boyar families Shuisky and Belsky, who were at war with each other. “Being members of one of the most aristocratic Russian families, the Shuiskys did not want to share power with those who gained influence due to the personal location of Vasily III. The discord between the "princes of the blood" (as the Shuiskys were called by foreigners) and the old advisers of Vasily III (the boyars Yuryev, Tuchkov and the Duma clerks) was resolved by turmoil. Six months after the death of the ruler, the Shuiskys captured the close clerk Fyodor Mishurin and put him to death ”(2.1).

Therefore, it was believed that the murders, intrigues and violence that surrounded Ivan contributed to the development of suspicion, secrecy and cruelty in him. S. Solovyov, analyzing the influence of the mores of the era on the character of Ivan IV, notes that he “did not realize the moral, spiritual means for establishing the truth, or, even worse, having realized, forgot about them; instead of healing, he intensified the disease, accustomed him even more to torture, bonfires and chopping blocks.

The boyars, trying to get the favor of the young tsar, encouraged his “pranks” in every possible way: “Then important and proud gentlemen raised him, competing with each other, flattering and pleasing him in his voluptuousness and lust, - to themselves and their children in trouble. And when he began to grow up, at the age of twelve, - what he used to do, I will omit everything, I will only tell you this: at first he began to shed the blood of animals, throwing them from a great height ... to do many other worthless things as well ..., and the educators flattered him, allowing this , praising him, teaching the child to his misfortune ”(1.1) At the age of fifteen, he already began to“ throw people ”, more and more showing in himself, developed by boyar flattery, cruelty.

According to A.M. Kurbsky (from the "story of the Grand Duke of Moscow"), when Ivan IV was seventeen years old, senators began to use him in the fight against people they did not like: this is how the "bravest strategist" Ivan Belsky was killed. Some time later, the tsar himself "ordered the murder of another noble prince named Andrei Shuisky", two years later he killed three more noble people. And only with the advent of Sylvester, “a man in the rank of priest,” Ivan’s rampage was more or less pacified, “severely conjuring him with the formidable name of God and, in addition, revealing miracles to him and, as it were, signs from God,” Sylvester corrected the “corrupted” temper of the king and instructed him on Right way. And then Aleksey Adashev, who was useful to the state, entered into an “alliance” with him.

1.2 The beginning of the reign of Ivan the Terrible

At the age of 16, Ivan first expressed a desire to marry the kingdom, this can be explained from two points of view: Skrynnikov and Kostomarov believe that this was facilitated by Metropolitan Macarius and the tsar's relatives on the maternal side, acting in their own interests, and the historian V. O. Klyuchevsky suggested that Ivan of his own free will made such a decision - this was a pronounced desire for power in him. January 16, 1547 Ivan Vasilyevich became a full-fledged king.

After a period of "boyar rule", Ivan the Terrible needed to strengthen his power. The Russian nobility was especially interested in carrying out the reforms that were proposed by I.S. Peresvetov. The idea of ​​strong royal power, curbing boyar arbitrariness, relying on "service people" (nobles) were approved by the tsar. The Elected Rada was created, which included A.M. Kurbsky, A.F. Adashev, priest Sylvester, M.I. Vorotynsky, I.M. Viscous. She began to play the role of the boyar duma. The fall of the Chosen Rada is assessed by historians in different ways. According to V.V. Kobrin, this was a manifestation of the conflict between the two programs of centralization of Russia: through slow structural reforms or rapidly, by force. Historians believe that the choice of the second path is due to the personal nature of Ivan the Terrible, who did not want to listen to people who disagree with his policies. Thus, after 1560, Ivan takes the path of tightening power, which led him to repressive measures. A number of transformations were prepared in the Chosen Council: Zemstvo reform, Lip reform, transformations in the army. In 1549, the first Zemsky Sobor was convened, and in 1550 a new judicial code was created, etc.

However, the temper of Ivan the Terrible made itself felt even at that time. Political persecution did not stop, which became the subject of correspondence between Grozny and Kurbsky. Kurbsky complained about the injustice of the repressions against the boyars, to which the tsar replied that he was punishing not “well-wishers, but traitors, and that the boyars suffered from him much less than he did from them” (2.2) The tsar wrote about the suffering that he endured during of his orphan childhood through the fault of the boyars, described his resentment against Sylvester and Adashev. Soon Adashev's resignation took place, which had no explanation, this was the reason for the sovereign's desire to revise the Tsar's Book. The largest postscript to the text of this book is devoted to “the story of the conspiracy of the boyars and Prince Staritsky during the illness of the king in March 1553” (2.2) Almost all participants in the rebellion were severely punished: Staritsky was executed, and the tsar’s aunt (a rather young woman) was imprisoned in a monastery .

The royal book: "... and henceforth there will be enmity between the great sovereign and Prince Volodimer Ondreevich." It cannot be said that the excessive incredulity and secrecy of Ivan IV was groundless. Perhaps having originated in him in childhood, she was constantly "fueled" by subsequent conspiracies against the royal power: Synodal list: "... and from that time there was enmity between the sovereign and the people"

Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible.

Oprichnina- this is one of the periods in the history of Russia, between 1565 and 1572, marked by extreme terror in relation to the subjects of Tsar Ivan IV. Also, this concept was called a part of the country with a special management system, which was allocated for the maintenance of guardsmen and the royal court. The word itself is ancient Russian in origin and has the meaning "special".

Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible assumed repression, confiscation of property, forced relocation of people. It included the central, western and southwestern counties, partly Moscow and some northern regions, sometimes entire settlements fell under the oprichnina.

Reasons for the appearance of oprichnina.

Reasons for the oprichnina still not exactly named, perhaps it was just the desire of the king to strengthen power. The introduction of the oprichnina was marked by the creation of an oprichnina army of 1000 people, who were assigned to carry out royal decrees, later their number increased.

Oprichnina as a feature of state policy was a huge shock for the country. Implementing extreme measures to confiscate the property of feudal lords and lands for state benefit, the oprichnina was aimed at centralizing power and nationalizing income.

Goals of the oprichnina

The phenomenon was aimed at eliminating feudal fragmentation principalities and its purpose was to undermine the independence of the boyar class. Introduced in 1565 oprichnina became the desire of Ivan IV, tired of the betrayals of the boyars, to execute the unfaithful nobles at his own will.

The consequences of the introduction of oprichnina

Oprichnina Ivana 4 almost completely eliminated the owners, who could become the basis of civil society in the country. After its implementation, the people became even more dependent on the existing government and the absolute despotism of the monarch was established in the country, but the Russian nobility found itself in a more privileged position.

Background and consequences of oprichnina

Establishment of the oprichnina worsened the situation in Russia, in particular, in the economy. Some villages were devastated, the cultivation of arable land stopped. The ruin of the nobles led to the weakening of the Russian army, of which they formed the basis, and this became the reason for losing the war with Livonia.

The consequences of the oprichnina were such that no one, regardless of class and position, could feel safe. In addition, in 1572 the tsar's army could not repel the attack of the Crimean Tatar army on the capital, and Ivan the Terrible decided to cancel the existing system of repressions and punishments, but in fact it existed until the death of the sovereign.

The second stage of Ivan's reign is the introduction of the oprichnina in Russia.

In January 1565 ᴦ. from the royal residence near Moscow, he left for Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda.

From there he turned to the capital with two messages.

Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible: causes and consequences

In the first, sent to the clergy and the Boyar Duma, Ivan IV reported on the renunciation of power due to the betrayal of the boyars and asked for a special inheritance - the oprichnina.

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 against the townspeople.

It was a well-calculated political maneuver.

Using the faith of the people in the tsar, Ivan the Terrible expected to be called back to the throne. When this happened, the tsar dictated his conditions: the right of unlimited autocratic power and the establishment of an 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, as well as the most economically developed regions of the country.

Nobles who were part of the oprichnina army settled on these lands.

Oprichnina- this is the internal policy of Ivan the Terrible from 1565 to 1572, the purpose of which was to strengthen the personal power of the tsar and fight against the boyars.

Ivan IV, fighting the rebellions and betrayals of the boyar nobility, saw them as the main reason for the failure of his policy.

Due to the constant betrayals of Ivan, he sought to strengthen his power. His goal is to exterminate any betrayal. In the life of Ivan the Terrible there was a period when he became very ill

The center and north-west of the Russian lands, where the boyars were especially strong, were subjected to the most severe defeat.

At the same time, the king canceled the oprichnina, which in 1572 ᴦ. was transformed into the royal court.

Oprichnina results:

Strengthening the personal power of the king

Social crisis, population decline and deterioration of the people's situation

State crisis (some lands were about 70% uncultivated)

Further processes of registration of serfdom. 1581 - Decree on the Protected Years.

Oprichnina is a period in the history of Russia from 1565 until the death of Ivan the Terrible, marked by state terror and a system of emergency measures.

In 1572, the oprichnina actually stopped - the army showed its inability to repel the attack of the Crimean Tatars on Moscow, after which the tsar decided to cancel it.

Question 19.

The best that history gives us is the enthusiasm it arouses.

Goethe

The oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible is considered briefly by modern historians, but these were events that had a great influence both on the tsar himself and his entourage, and on the whole country as a whole. During the oprichnina of 1565-1572, the Russian tsar tried to strengthen his own power, the authority of which was in a very precarious position. This was due to the increased cases of treason, as well as the mood of the majority of the boyars against the current king. All this resulted in massacres, largely because of which the tsar received the nickname "Terrible." In general, the oprichnina was expressed in the fact that part of the lands of the kingdom was transferred to the exclusive rule of the state. The influence of the boyars was not allowed on these lands. Today we will briefly consider the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible, its causes, the stages of the reform, as well as the consequences for the state.

Reasons for the oprichnina

Ivan the Terrible remained in the historical view of his descendants a suspicious person who constantly saw conspiracies around him. It all started with the Kazan campaign, from which Ivan the Terrible returned in 1553. The tsar (at that time still the Grand Duke) fell ill, and greatly fearing the betrayal of the boyars, ordered everyone to swear allegiance to his son, baby Dmitry. The boyars and court people were reluctant to swear allegiance to the "diaper", and many even completely evaded this oath. The reason for this was very simple - the current king is very sick, the heir is less than a year old, a large number of boyars who claim power.

After recovery, Ivan the Terrible changed, becoming more cautious and angry with others. He could not forgive the betrayal of the courtiers (refusal of the oath to Dmitry), knowing full well what caused it. But the decisive events that led to the oprichnina were due to the following:

• In 1563, Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow dies. He was known for having a huge influence on the king and enjoyed his favor. Macarius restrained the aggression of the king, instilling in him the idea that the country was under his control and there was no conspiracy. The new metropolitan Athanasius took the side of the discontented boyars and opposed the tsar. As a result, the king only strengthened in the idea that there were only enemies around him.
• In 1564, Prince Kurbsky left the army and went to serve in the Principality of Lithuania. Kurbsky took with him many military commanders, and also declassified all Russian spies in Lithuania itself. It was a terrible blow to the pride of the Russian Tsar, who after that became completely convinced that there were enemies around him who could betray him at any moment.

As a result, Ivan the Terrible decided to eliminate the independence of the boyars in Russia (at that time they owned lands, maintained their own army, had their assistants and their court, their own treasury, and so on). It was decided to create an autocracy.

The essence of the oprichnina

At the beginning of 1565, Ivan the Terrible leaves Moscow, leaving behind two letters. In the first letter, the tsar addresses the metropolitan, saying that all the clergy and boyars are involved in state treason. These people only want to have more land and plunder the royal treasury. With the second letter, the tsar addressed the people, saying that his reasons for his absence from Moscow were connected with the actions of the boyars. The tsar himself went to Alexander's settlement. There, under the influence of the inhabitants of Moscow, the boyars were sent in order to return the tsar to the capital. Ivan the Terrible agreed to return, but only on the condition that he receive unconditional power to execute all enemies of the state, and also to create a new system in the country. This system is called the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible, which is expressed in the division of all the country's lands into:

1. Oprichnina - lands that the tsar seizes for his own (state) administration.
2. Zemshchina - the lands that the boyars continued to control.

To implement this plan, Ivan the Terrible created a special detachment - guardsmen. Initially, their number was 1000 people. These people made up the king's secret police, which was directly subordinate to the head of state, and which brought the necessary order to the country.

Part of the territory of Moscow, Kostroma, Vologda, Mozhaisk and some other cities were chosen as oprichnina lands. Local residents who were not included in the state program of the oprichnina were forced to leave these lands. As a rule, they were given land in the most remote hinterlands of the country. As a result, the oprichnina solved one of the most important tasks that was set by Ivan the Terrible. This task was to weaken the economic power of individual boyars. This limitation was achieved due to the fact that the state took some of the best land in the country into its own hands.

The main directions of the oprichnina

Such actions of the king were met with sincere discontent of the boyars. Prosperous families, which previously actively expressed their dissatisfaction with the activities of Ivan the Terrible, now began to wage their struggle even more actively to restore their former power. To counter these forces, a special military unit "guardsmen" was created. Their main task, by order of the king himself, was to "gnaw" all traitors and "sweep" treason from the state. It was from here that those symbols that are directly related to the guardsmen went. Each of them carried a dog's head at the saddle of his horse, as well as a broom. The guardsmen destroyed or sent into exile all the people who were suspected of treason to the state.

In 1566 another Zemsky Sobor was held. On it, the tsar was given an appeal with a request to eliminate the oprichnina. In response, Ivan the Terrible ordered the execution of all those who were involved in the transfer and in the compilation of this document. The reaction of the boyars and all the dissatisfied followed immediately. The most indicative is the decision of the Moscow Metropolitan Athanasius, who resigned his clergy. Metropolitan Philip Kolychev was appointed in his place. This man also actively opposed the oprichnina and criticized the tsar, as a result of which, just a few days later, Ivan's troops sent this man into exile.

Main blows

Ivan the Terrible sought by all means to strengthen his power, the power of the autocrat. He did everything for this. That is why the main blow of the oprichnina was aimed at those people and those groups of people who could really claim the royal throne:

• Vladimir Staritsky. This is the cousin of Tsar Ivan the Terrible, who enjoyed great respect among the boyars, and who was very often named as the person who should take power instead of the current king. To eliminate this man, the guardsmen poisoned Vladimir himself, as well as his wife and daughters. It happened in 1569.
• Velikiy Novgorod. From the very beginning of the formation of the Russian land, Novgorod had a unique and original status. It was an independent city that obeyed only itself. Ivan, realizing that it is impossible to strengthen the power of the autocrat without pacifying the recalcitrant Novgorod is impossible. As a result, in December 1569, the king at the head of the army went on a campaign against this city.

  Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible 1565 - 1572

  On their way to Novgorod, the tsarist army destroys and executes thousands of people who in any way showed dissatisfaction with the actions of the tsar. This campaign lasted until 1571. As a result of the Novgorod campaign, the oprichnina army established the power of the tsar in the city and in the region.

Cancellation of the oprichnina

At a time when the oprichnina was being asserted by a campaign against Novgorod, Ivan the Terrible received news that Devlet Giray, the Crimean Khan, had raided Moscow with an army and almost completely set fire to the city. Due to the fact that almost all the troops that were subordinate to the tsar were in Novgorod, there was no one to resist this raid. Boyars, refused to provide their army to fight the royal enemies. As a result, in 1571 the oprichnina army and the tsar himself were forced to return to Moscow. To fight the Crimean Khanate, the tsar was forced to temporarily abandon the idea of ​​the oprichnina, uniting his troops and the zemstvos. As a result, in 1572, 50 kilometers south of Moscow, the united army defeated the Crimean Khan.

One of the most significant problems of the Russian land of that time was on the western border. The war with the Livonian Order did not stop there. As a result, the constant raids of the Crimean Khanate, the ongoing war against Livonia, internal unrest in the country, the weak defense of the entire state contributed to the fact that Ivan the Terrible abandoned the idea of ​​​​oprichnina. In the autumn of 1572, the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible, which we briefly reviewed today, was canceled. The tsar himself forbade everyone to mention the word oprichnina, and the guardsmen themselves became outlaws. Almost all the troops that were subordinate to the king and brought the order he needed were later destroyed by the king himself.

The results of the oprichnina and its significance

Any historical event, well, especially such a massive and significant one as an oprichnina, carries certain consequences after itself, which are important for posterity. The results of the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible can be expressed in the following main points:

1. Significant strengthening of the autocratic power of the king.
2. Reducing the influence of the boyars on state affairs.
3. The strong economic decline of the country, which came as a result of the split that has emerged in society because of the oprichnina.
4. The introduction of reserved years in 1581. The protected years, which prohibited the transition of peasants from one landowner to another, were due to the fact that the population of the central and northern parts of Russia fled en masse to the south. Thus, they were saved from the actions of the authorities.
5. Destruction of large boyar lands. One of the first steps of the oprichnina was aimed at destroying and taking away their property from the boyars, and transferring this property to the state. This has been successfully implemented.

Historical score

A brief narrative about the oprichnina does not allow us to accurately understand the whole essence of those events. Moreover, it is difficult to do even with a more detailed analysis. The most indicative in this regard is the attitude of historians to this issue. Below are the main ideas that characterize the oprichnina, and which indicate that there is no single approach to assessing this political event. The main concepts boil down to the following:

• Imperial Russia. Imperial historians presented the oprichnina as a phenomenon that had a detrimental effect on the economic, political and social development of Russia. On the other hand, many historians of imperial Russia said that it was in the oprichnina that one should look for the origins of autocracy and the current imperial power.
• The era of the USSR. Soviet scientists have always described the bloody events of the tsarist and imperial regimes with particular enthusiasm. As a result, in almost all Soviet works, the oprichnina was presented as a necessary element that shaped the movement of the masses against the oppression of the boyars.
• Modern opinion. Modern historians speak of the oprichnina as a pernicious element, as a result of which thousands of innocent people died. This is one of the reasons that allow you to accuse Ivan the Terrible of bloodshed.

The problem here is that the study of the oprichnina is extremely difficult, since there are practically no real historical documents of that era left. As a result, we are not dealing with the study of data, nor with the study of historical facts, but very often we are dealing with the opinions of individual historians, which are not substantiated by anything. That is why oprichnina cannot be assessed unambiguously.

All we can talk about is that at the time of the oprichnina inside the country there were no clear criteria by which the definition of “oprichnik” and “zemstvo” took place. In this regard, the situation is very similar to the one that was at the initial stage of the formation of Soviet power, when dispossession took place. In the same way, no one had even a remote idea of ​​what a fist was, and who should be considered a fist. Therefore, as a result of dispossession as a result of the oprichnina, a huge number of people who were not guilty of anything suffered. This is the main historical assessment of this event. Everything else fades into the background, because in any state main value is human life. Strengthening the power of the autocrat at the expense of the destruction of ordinary people is a very shameful step. That is why, in the last years of his life, Ivan the Terrible forbade any mention of the oprichnina and ordered the execution of practically people who took an active part in these events.

The rest of the elements that presents modern history as the consequences of the oprichnina and its results are highly doubtful. After all main result that all history textbooks talk about is the strengthening of autocratic power. But what kind of strengthening of power can we talk about if after the death of Tsar Ivan a troubled time came? All this resulted not just in some riots or other political events. All this resulted in a change in the ruling dynasty.

; complete the political centralization of the Russian state; establish autocracy (by repressive means).

Tasks:

1) Eliminate the specific system: in 1563, the inheritance of Yuri Staritsky was liquidated;

2) To subordinate the church to the royal will (the church must approve all the actions of the king) - the work of Metropolitan Philip;

3) The defeat of the opposition centers - Novgorod, Pskov, Tver;

4) The defeat of the boyar-princely opposition;

5) Carrying out a purge of the boyar duma and the system of orders;

6) Resolve the conflict between the nobility and the boyars in favor of the nobles (support of the autocracy).

Stages of oprichnina:

1) 1565 - 1566 - the beginning of terror, is not of a mass character;

2) 1567 - 1572. - the period of mass terror, the peak of terror - the summer of 1569 - the summer of 1570;

3) 1572 - 1584. - terror is hidden (veiled) in nature;

February 3, 1565 - the beginning of the oprichnina; crop failures occur in the north of the country, leading to severe famine.

1570 - 1571 - a terrible plague epidemic in North-Western and Central Russia; setbacks in the Livonian War. A sacred element was superimposed - preparation for the Last Judgment.

1st stage. Executions are of a single nature: the Obolenskys, the Kurakins, the Hunchbacked-Shuisky, the Repnins; Yaroslavl, Starodub, Rostov princes were sent to Kazan exile. In the spring of 1566, Metropolitan Athanasius voluntarily retired from his rank and entered a monastery. Ivan the 4th left his eyes on Fyodor Kolychev (Philip) in the role of metropolitan, put forward as a condition the abolition of the oprichnina. In June 1566, Philip became a metropolitan - there was a decline in terror, they began to return from Kazan exile; collapses occur.

In 1566, Vladimir Staritsky was deprived of his inheritance and exiled to Vologda.

2nd stage (1566 - 1572) - the case of Ivan Fedorov, the leader of the Boyar Duma in the Zemshchina, is being promoted. At the very beginning of the reign of Ivan Fedorovich, Ivan the 4th ordered the execution of his son. In March 1568, Metropolitan Philip refused Ivan the 4th and the guardsmen in favor. Philip was captured, sent to the Otroch Monastery (Tver), and in December 1569 Malyuta Skuratov killed the Metropolitan.

In 1569, 2 rumors persisted:

Allegedly, Novgorod does not want Ivan the 4th, but Staritsky;

Novgorodians want to go under the rule of Lithuania.

Rumors spread on purpose.

In September 1566, Vladimir Staritsky with his wife and children (youngest daughter) were summoned to Moscow, Ivan the 4th forced them to take poison. On the same day, Staritsky's mother was killed.

At the end of autumn, Ivan the 4th, with an oprichny army, sets off on a punitive campaign, burned: Klin, Tver, Torzhok, Novgorod and Pskov. In Novgorod, 1/2 of the population was slaughtered, 27 monasteries were destroyed, all icons were taken out, St. Sophia Cathedral was destroyed. In Pskov, the terror was not so massive.

On July 25, 1570, mass executions take place at the Poganaya Puddle in Moscow. 300 people were sentenced to death, but 194 were pardoned. Viskovaty and Afanasy Vyazemsky were executed.

In 1571, Divlet Giray approached Moscow and set fire to it (the ring to the center burned). As a result (“The smell of human bodies was carried over the whole district”), having left, Divlet-Girey demanded Kazan and Astrakhan.

In 1572, the oprichnina army (Khvorostynin) and the Zemsky army (Vorotynsky) were created. In 1545, near the village of Molodi (near Moscow), Divlet Giray was defeated (July 15, 1572). After this victory, Ivan the 4th forbade the use of the words "oprichnina, guardsman" and historians believed that it was canceled.

1) But there was no order to cancel the oprichnina;

2) The terror was secretive;

3) In 1572, the throne was vacated in the Commonwealth and Ivan the 4th put forward his candidacy for the throne.

3rd stage 1572-1584. Oprichnina was renamed the State Court. A new direction appears - terror against ardent guardsmen. The terror against the Zemshchina was weakened, several persons were posthumously rehabilitated and part of their property was returned to distant relatives. 2 icons were solemnly returned to Novgorod (one was miraculous). A surge of terror occurred in 1575.

In 1574, the throne was vacated in the Commonwealth, Ivan the 4th was promoted to the throne. The Magi predicted that Ivan the 4th should die (Ivan the 4th withdrew his royal title and took the title of Moscow Prince; Simeon Bikbulatovich was appointed king).

From 1578-1579 executions stop. In 1581, Ivan the 4th killed his son, Ivan, in the Alexander Sloboda. Ivan Ivanovich's daughter-in-law gave birth to a dead son.

Oprichnina results:

1) Autocracy was established, the centralization of the state was completed;

2) The Church became an instrument of royal policy, approving the actions of the king;

3) The state apparatus has become an apparatus of repression;

4) The deepest economic crisis occurred in the country (about 90% of the land was not cultivated);

5) The treasury is empty, taxation is intensifying, feudal exploitation of the population (in 1581, the "Decree on Reserve Years" was adopted - access is prohibited from one to another on St. George's Day);

6) Colossal human losses;

7) Embossed the color of the nation, the tops of all classes;

8) The military potential of the country has sharply weakened;

9) Shameful ending Livonian War(1558 - 1583).

In 1582, between Russia and the Commonwealth, the Yam-Zapolsky truce was signed for 10 years, and in 1583 between Russia and Sweden, the Plus truce for 10 years: Livonia was lost; access to the Baltic Sea; cities: Ivan-gorod, Yam, Koporie, Karela parish;

11) chronicle writing stopped, a blow to culture.

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 Ivan the Terrible (1565-1572), dissertations have been defended, the main causes have long been identified, the course of events has been restored, and the consequences have been explained.

However, to this day, neither in domestic nor in foreign historiography there is no consensus on the issue of the significance of the oprichnina in the history of the Russian state. For centuries, historians have been breaking spears in disputes: with what sign should we perceive the events of 1565-1572? Was the oprichnina just a cruel terror of a half-mad despot tsar against his subjects? Or was it still based on a sound and necessary policy in those conditions, aimed at strengthening the foundations of statehood, increasing the authority of the 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 due to the personal qualities of Tsar Ivan and had no political meaning (N.I. Kostomarov, V.O. Klyuchevsky, S.B. Veselovsky, I. Ya. Froyanov); 2) the oprichnina was a well-thought-out political step by Ivan the Terrible and was directed against those social forces that opposed his "autocracy".

Among the supporters of the latter point of view there is also no unanimity of opinion. Some researchers believe that the purpose of the oprichnina was to crush the boyar-princely economic and political power associated with the destruction of 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 specific 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 is indisputable, so the scientific discussion about the meaning of the oprichnina continues.

What is an oprichnina?

Anyone who is at least somehow interested in the history of Russia knows perfectly well that there was a time when guardsmen existed in Russia. In the minds of the majority 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 XIV century, "oprichnina" is called the part of the inheritance that goes to the widow of the prince 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 senior heir, or, in the absence of such, was attributed to the state treasury. Thus, in the XIV-XVI centuries, the oprichnina was a destiny specially allocated for lifelong possession.

Over time, the word "oprichnina" has a synonym that goes back to the root "oprich", which means "except". Hence the “oprichnina” - “pitch darkness”, as it was sometimes called, and the “oprichnik” - “kromeshnik”. But this synonym was put 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 "kromeshniks" and "pitch darkness" in relation to the oprichnina of Ivan IV are used for the first time.

In addition, it should be noted that the Old Russian word "oprich" (adverb and preposition), according to Dahl's dictionary, means: "Outside, outside, outside, beyond what." Hence "oprichny" - "separate, distinguished, special."

Thus, it is symbolic that the name of the Soviet employee of the "special department" - "special officer" - is in fact a semantic copy of the word "oprichnik".

In January 1558, Ivan the Terrible began the Livonian War for the mastery of the coast of the Baltic Sea in order to gain access to sea lanes and facilitate trade with Western European countries. Soon the Grand Duchy of Moscow is faced with a broad coalition of enemies, which include Poland, Lithuania, Sweden. In fact, the Crimean Khanate also participates in the anti-Moscow coalition, which ruins the southern regions of the Moscow principality with regular military campaigns. The war takes on a protracted and exhausting character. 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 now and then encounters manifestations of boyar separatism, the unwillingness of the boyar oligarchy to continue the Livonian War, which is important for the Muscovite kingdom. In 1564, the commander of the western army, Prince Kurbsky - in the past one of the closest personal friends of the tsar, a member of the Chosen Rada - goes over to the side of the enemy, betrays Russian agents in Livonia and participates in the offensive actions of the Poles and Lithuanians.

The position of Ivan IV becomes critical. It was possible to get out of it only with the help of the toughest, decisive measures.

On December 3, 1564, Ivan the Terrible and his family suddenly left the capital on a pilgrimage. With him, the king took the treasury, personal library, icons and symbols of power. Having visited the village of Kolomenskoye, he did not return to Moscow and, having wandered for several weeks, stopped in Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda. On January 3, 1565, he announced his abdication of the throne, due to "anger" at the boyars, church, voivodship and order people. Two days later, a deputation headed by Archbishop Pimen arrived in Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda and persuaded the tsar to return to the kingdom. From Sloboda, Ivan IV sent two letters to Moscow: one to the boyars and the clergy, and the other to the townspeople, explaining in detail why and with whom the sovereign was angry, and with whom he “does not hold evil.” Thus, he immediately divided society, sowing the seeds of mutual distrust and hatred for the boyar elite among ordinary townspeople and petty service nobility.

In early February 1565, Ivan the Terrible returned to Moscow. The tsar announced that he was again taking over the reign, but on the condition that he was free to execute traitors, put them in disgrace, deprive them of property, etc., and that neither the boyar thought nor the clergy interfere in his affairs. Those. the sovereign introduced for himself "oprichnina".

This word was used at first in the sense of special property or possession; now it has taken on a different meaning. In the oprichnina, the tsar separated part of the boyars, servicemen and clerks, and in general made all his “everyday life” special: in the palaces of Sytnoy, Kormovoi and Khlebenny, 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 appointed 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 inhabitants were relocated to other streets. Up to 1000 princes, nobles, boyar children, both Moscow and city, were also recruited into the oprichnina. They were given estates in the volosts assigned to the maintenance of the oprichnina. Former landlords and estate owners were evicted from those volosts to others.

The rest of the state was to constitute the “zemshchina”: the tsar entrusted it to the zemstvo boyars, that is, to the boyar duma proper, and put Prince Ivan Dmitrievich Belsky and Prince Ivan Fedorovich Mstislavsky at the head of its management. All matters had to be decided in the old way, and with big cases it was necessary to turn to the boyars, but if military or most important zemstvo affairs happen, then to the sovereign. For his rise, that is, for a 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 "correct treason" and act solely in the interests of the tsarist government, maintaining the authority of the supreme ruler in wartime conditions. No one restricted them in the methods or in the methods of "correcting" treason, and all the innovations of Grozny turned into a cruel, unjustified terror of the ruling minority against the majority of the country's population.

In December 1569, the army of guardsmen, personally led by Ivan the Terrible, set out on a campaign against Novgorod, who allegedly wanted to betray him. The king was walking as though he were in an enemy country. Oprichniki sacked cities (Tver, Torzhok), villages and villages, killed and robbed the population. In Novgorod itself, the rout lasted 6 weeks. Thousands of suspects were tortured and drowned in Volkhov. The city was sacked. The property of churches, monasteries and merchants was confiscated. The beating continued in the Novgorod Pyatina. Then Grozny moved to Pskov, and only the superstition of the formidable king allowed this ancient city to avoid a pogrom.

In 1572, when a real threat to the very existence of the Muscovite state was created by the Krymchaks, the oprichnina troops actually sabotaged the order of their king to oppose the enemy. The Molodinsky battle with the army of Devlet Giray was won by regiments under the leadership of the “zemstvo” governors. After that, 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, there was a tradition to “divide” the reign of Ivan IV into two halves, which subsequently formed the basis of the theory of “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 is 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 abrupt change in the sovereign's policy with his mental illness caused by the death of his first wife, Anastasia Romanovna. Even versions about the “substitution” of the king by another person arose and were seriously considered.

The watershed between the "good" Ivan and the "bad" one, 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. Depicting the oprichnina, he created an artistically expressive picture that was supposed to impress the reader, but in no way answer the question of the causes, consequences and the very nature of this historical phenomenon.

Subsequent historians (N.I. Kostomarov) also saw the main reason for the oprichnina solely in the personal qualities of Ivan the Terrible, who did not want to listen to people who disagreed with the methods of pursuing his generally justified policy of strengthening the central government.

Solovyov and Klyuchevsky about 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 Grozny, first of all, the transition from the old "tribal" relations to the modern "state", which was completed by the oprichnina - state power in the form in which the great "reformer" himself understood it . Solovyov for the first time separated the cruelties of Tsar Ivan and the internal terror organized by him 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, considered Ivan the Terrible's domestic policy to be completely aimless, moreover, dictated solely by the personal qualities of the sovereign's character. In his opinion, the oprichnina did not answer urgent political issues, and also did not eliminate the difficulties that it caused. By "difficulty" the historian means clashes between Ivan IV and the boyars: “The boyars imagined themselves as powerful advisers to the sovereign of all Russia at the very time when this sovereign, remaining true to the view of the specific patrimony, in accordance with ancient Russian law, granted them as his servants in the yard to the title of servants of the sovereign. Both sides found themselves in such an unnatural relation to each other, which they did not seem to notice while it was taking shape, 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 it with other, more flexible and obedient instruments of government;

Separate the boyars, bring to the throne the most reliable people from the boyars and rule with them, as Ivan ruled at the beginning of his reign.

None of the outputs were implemented.

Klyuchevsky points out that Ivan the Terrible should have acted against the political position of the entire boyars, and not against individuals. The tsar does the opposite: not being able 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.

Such a course of action of the king is by no means a consequence of political calculation. Rather, it is 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 undermining the foundations of the state and undermining the authority of the power of the monarch himself. Klyuchevsky considered the oprichnina one of the most effective factors that prepared the Time of Troubles.

The concept of S.F. Platonov

The developments of the "state school" received further development in the works of S. F. Platonov, who created the most integral concept of the 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 specific princely and boyar opposition. S.F. Platonov wrote: “Dissatisfied with the nobility surrounding him, he (Ivan the Terrible) applied to her the measure that Moscow applied to her enemies, namely, “withdrawal” ... What worked so well with the external enemy, the Terrible planned to test with the internal enemy, those. with those people who seemed to him hostile and dangerous.

In modern terms, the oprichnina of Ivan IV formed the basis of a grandiose personnel reshuffling, as a result of which large landowning boyars and specific princes were relocated from specific hereditary lands to places far from their former settled way of life. The votchinas were divided into plots and complained to those boyar children who were in the service of the tsar (guardsmen). According to Platonov, the oprichnina was not a "whim" of a crazy tyrant. On the contrary, Ivan the Terrible waged a purposeful and well-thought-out struggle against large boyar hereditary land ownership, thus wishing 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: they cut down the forest - chips fly! Over time, the monarch himself becomes a hostage to the current situation. In order to stay in power and bring to the end 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 whole operation of revising and changing landowners in the eyes of the population was in the nature of disaster and political terror,” the historian wrote. - With extraordinary cruelty, he (Ivan the Terrible), without any investigation or trial, executed and tortured people who were objectionable to him, exiled their families, ruined their households. His guardsmen were not shy about killing defenseless people, robbing and raping them “for laughing”.

One of the main negative consequences of the oprichnina Platonov recognizes the disruption of the economic life of the country - the state of population stability achieved by the state was lost. In addition, the hatred of the population for the brutal government 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. early XVII century.

In the general assessment of the oprichnina, S.F. Platonov puts much more “pluses” than all his predecessors. According to his concept, Ivan the Terrible managed 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, service people (nobles) gained predominance, which, of course, contributed to the increase in the country's defense capability . Hence the progressiveness of the policy of the oprichnina.

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 were revealed already in the 1910s and 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 rise to a number of successors and sincere supporters.

In 1922, the book of the former professor of Moscow University R. Vipper "Ivan the Terrible" was published. Having witnessed the collapse of the Russian Empire, having fully tasted Soviet anarchy and arbitrariness, the political emigrant and quite serious historian R. Vipper created not a historical study, but a very passionate panegyric of the oprichnina and Ivan the Terrible himself - a politician who managed to "put things in order with a firm hand." For the first time, the author considers Grozny's domestic policy (oprichnina) in direct connection with the foreign policy situation. However, Wipper's interpretation of many foreign policy events is in many respects 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 because of the extremely difficult military situation in the country, the ruin of Novgorod was for the sake of improving the situation at the front, etc.

The oprichnina itself, according to Vipper, is an expression of the democratic (!) tendencies of the 16th century. So, 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 devastating 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 end of the Livonian War, which was catastrophic in its consequences for Russia, are also not obvious to Vipper.

The main official historiographer of the revolution, M.N., went even further in the apologetics of Grozny and the oprichnina. Pokrovsky. In his Russian History from Ancient Times, the convinced revolutionary turns Ivan the Terrible into the leader of a democratic revolution, a more successful forerunner of Emperor Paul I, who is also portrayed by Pokrovsky as a “democrat on the throne.” The justification of tyrants is one of Pokrovsky's favorite topics. He saw the aristocracy as such as the main object of his hatred, because its power is, by definition, harmful.

However, to orthodox Marxist historians, Pokrovsky's views undoubtedly seemed excessively infected with an idealistic spirit. No individual can play any significant role in history - after all, history is controlled by the class struggle. This is what Marxism teaches. And Pokrovsky, having heard enough of the seminaries of Vinogradov, Klyuchevsky and other "bourgeois specialists", could not get rid of the burp of idealism in himself, attaching too much importance to personalities, as if they did not obey the laws of historical materialism common to all ...

The most typical for 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 in the elimination of the boyars as a class and its dissolution in the mass of small landed feudal lords. Ivan worked to realize this goal with "the greatest consistency and invincible perseverance" and completely succeeded in his work.

This was the only true and only possible interpretation of the policy of Ivan the Terrible.

Moreover, this interpretation was so liked by the "collectors" and "revivalists" 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. Narratives about Russian military leaders and commanders of the past who fought the Germans or anyone remotely similar to the Germans were urgently created and replicated. The victories of Alexander Nevsky, Peter I (it is true, he fought with the Swedes, but why go into details? ..), Alexander Suvorov were remembered and extolled. Dmitry Donskoy, Minin with Pozharsky and Mikhail Kutuzov, who fought against foreign aggressors, were also declared national heroes and glorious sons of the Fatherland after 20 years of oblivion.

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 malevolent aristocrats - the boyars. He began to introduce revolutionary reforms in order to create a new order. But even an autocratic tsar can play a positive role if the monarchy is a progressive system in a given period of history...

Despite the very sad fate of Academician Platonov himself, who was convicted on an "academic case" (1929-1930), the "apologia" of the oprichnina he began in the late 1930s gained new momentum.

Coincidentally or not, but in 1937 - the most "peak" Stalinist repressions- for the fourth time, Plato's "Essays on the History of the Troubles in the Moscow State of the XVI-XVII centuries" were republished, and high school propagandists under the Central Committee of the party published (albeit "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 the Terrible Tsar, who would fully fit into the concept of the Soviet "apologists". Therefore, all the events included in Eisenstein's scenario are subject to the main conflict - the struggle for autocracy against the recalcitrant boyars and against all those who prevent him from uniting the lands and strengthening the state. The film "Ivan the Terrible" (1944) glorifies Tsar Ivan as a wise and just ruler who had a great purpose. Oprichnina and terror are presented as inevitable "costs" in achieving it. But even these "costs" (the second series of the film), Comrade Stalin preferred not to be allowed on the screens.

In 1946, the Decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was issued, which spoke of the "progressive army of guardsmen." The progressive significance in the then historiography of the Oprichny army was that its formation was a necessary stage in the struggle to strengthen the centralized state and was a struggle of the central government, based on the service nobility, against the feudal aristocracy and specific remnants.

Thus, a positive assessment of the activities of Ivan IV in Soviet historiography was supported at the highest state level. Until 1956, the most cruel tyrant in the history of Russia 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 in the years of Khrushchev's "thaw"

As soon as Khrushchev read his famous report at the 20th Congress, all panegyric odes to Grozny were put 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 recently deceased Soviet tyrant.

A number of articles by domestic researchers immediately appear in which Stalin's "personality cult" and Grozny's "personality cult" are debunked in approximately the same terms and on real examples similar to each other.

One of the first was an article by V.N. Shevyakov "On the question 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. very negative:

The king himself, contrary to all previous apologetics, is called what he really was - the executioner of his subjects exposed by the authorities.

Following the article by Shevyakov, an even more radical article by S.N. Dubrovsky “On the cult of personality in some works on questions of history (on the assessment of Ivan IV, etc.)” comes out. The author considers the oprichnina not as a war of the tsar against the specific aristocracy. On the contrary, he believes that Ivan the Terrible was at one with the landowning boyars. With their help, the tsar waged 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 intentionally rigging and distorting historical facts that testify to 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 personal 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 work of the historian. 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: Ivan the Terrible's initial thought was correct, and then everything was spoiled by the guardsmen 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 dispute. However, at the end of his life, A. A. Zimin revised his views towards a purely negative assessment of the oprichnina, seeing in "The bloody glow of the oprichnina" an extreme manifestation of feudal 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. Relying on the case studies, which began before the war and carried out by S. B. Veselovsky and A. A. Zimin (and continued by V. B. Kobrin), they showed that the theory of S. F. Platonov about the defeat of patrimonial land ownership as a result of the oprichnina was nothing else, like a historical myth.

Criticism of Platonov's concept

Back in the 1910-1920s, research began on a colossal complex of materials that, formally, would seem to be far from the problems of the oprichnina. Historians have studied a huge number of scribe books, where land allotments of both large landowners and service people were recorded. These were in the full sense of the word accounting records of that time.

And the more materials related to land ownership were introduced into scientific circulation in the 1930s and 60s, the more interesting the picture became. It turned out that as a result of the oprichnina, large land ownership did not suffer in any way. 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 allotments. 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 that. Just in 1565-72, small landowners automatically fell into the number of 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 scribe books, did not know statistics and practically did not use sources that were of a mass character.

Soon another source was uncovered, 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 died not in a Christian way. These synodics were sent to the 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 the oprichnina terror, it was mainly large landowners who died. Yes, no doubt, 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 state service in orders, military leaders, petty officials, simple warriors. Finally, an incredible number of inhabitants died - urban, townspeople, those who inhabited villages and villages on the territory of certain estates and estates. According to S. B. Veselovsky, for one boyar or a person from the Sovereign's court there were three or four ordinary landowners, and for one service person - a dozen commoners. Consequently, the assertion that terror was selective in nature and was directed only against the boyar elite is fundamentally wrong.

In the 1940s, S.B. Veselovsky wrote his book “Essays on the history of the oprichnina” “on the table”, because. to publish it under the modern tyrant was absolutely impossible. The historian died in 1952, but his conclusions and developments on the problem of the oprichnina were not forgotten and were actively used in criticizing 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, acted as a possible contender for the throne.

An appeal to the materials of cadastral books showed that the boyars had their own lands in different, as they would say now, areas, but 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. One and the same person often had land in Nizhny Novgorod, Suzdal, and Moscow, i.e. was not tied specifically to any particular place. There was no question of somehow separating, 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 quite 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 the specific princes of centralization is a purely speculative construction, derived from theoretical analogies between the social system of Russia and Western Europe in the era of feudalism and absolutism. The sources do not provide any direct basis for such assertions. The postulation of large-scale "boyar conspiracies" in the era of Ivan the Terrible is based on statements that come only from Grozny himself.

Novgorod and Pskov were the only lands that in the 16th century could lay claim to a "departure" from a single state. In the event of separation from Moscow in the conditions of the Livonian War, they would not be able to maintain their independence, and would inevitably be captured by the opponents of the Moscow sovereign. Therefore, Zimin and Kobrin consider Ivan IV's campaign against Novgorod historically justified and condemn only the methods of the tsar's struggle against potential separatists.

The new concept of understanding such a phenomenon as the oprichnina, created by Zimin, Kobrin and their followers, is based on the proof that the oprichnina objectively resolved (albeit by barbaric methods) some urgent tasks, namely: strengthening centralization, destroying the remnants of the appanage system and the independence of the church. But the oprichnina was, first of all, an instrument for establishing the personal despotic power of Ivan the Terrible. The terror unleashed by him was of a national character, was caused solely by the king’s fear for his position (“beat your own so that strangers are afraid”) and had no “high” political goal or social background.

Not without interest is the point of view of the Soviet historian D. Al (Alshits), who already in the 2000s expressed the opinion that the terror of Ivan the Terrible was aimed at the total subordination of everyone and everything to the unified power of the autocratic monarch. All those who did not personally prove their loyalty to the sovereign were destroyed; the independence of the church was destroyed; the economically independent commercial Novgorod was destroyed, the merchants were subjugated, and so on. Thus, Ivan the Terrible did not want to say, like Louis XIV, but by effective measures to prove to all his contemporaries that "I am the state." Oprichnina acted as a state institution for the protection of the monarch, his personal guard.

This concept satisfied the scientific community for a while. However, the tendencies towards a new rehabilitation of Ivan the Terrible and even the creation of his new cult were fully developed in subsequent historiography. For example, in an article in the Bolshoi Soviet Encyclopedia(1972) in the presence of a certain ambiguity in the assessment, positive traits 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 reasons, resulted mainly not in scientific research, but in populist reasoning on the pages of central newspapers and magazines.

Employees of the NKVD and other law enforcement agencies (the so-called "specialists") in newspaper publications were no longer referred to other than "guardsmen", the terror of the 16th century was directly associated with the "Yezhovshchina" of the 1930s, as if it all happened only yesterday. “History repeats itself” - this strange, unconfirmed truth was repeated by politicians, parliamentarians, writers, and even highly respected scientists who tend to draw historical parallels Grozny-Stalin, Malyuta Skuratov - Beria, etc. again and again. etc.

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 public 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 Grozny, Stalin, and 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 stubbornly trying to prove to us that Iosif Dzhugashvili created a great power that won the war, built rockets, blocked the Yenisei, and even in the field of ballet was ahead of the rest. And in the 1930s and 50s they planted and shot only those who had to be planted and shot - former tsarist officials and officers, spies and dissidents of all stripes. Recall that Academician S.F. Platonov had approximately the same opinion regarding the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible and the “selectivity” of his terror. However, the academician himself, already in 1929, was among the victims of his contemporary incarnation of the oprichnina - the OGPU, died in exile, and his name was deleted from the history of national historical science for a long time.

According to materials:

Veselovsky S.B. Tsar Ivan the Terrible in the works of writers and historians. Three articles. - M., 1999

Platonov S.F. Ivan the Terrible. - Petersburg: Brockhaus and Efron, 1923