Sylvester and Adashev, owing to their extraordinary backwardness
in supporting the claims of his infant son to the throne
while he himself lay at the point of death. The ambiguous and
ungrateful conduct of the tsar’s intimate friends and protégés
on this occasion has never been satisfactorily explained, and he
had good reason to resent it. Nevertheless, on his recovery,
much to his credit, he overlooked it, and they continued to direct
affairs for six years longer. Then the dispute about the Crimea
arose, and Ivan became convinced that they were mediocre
politicians as well as untrustworthy friends. In 1560 both of
them disappeared from the scene, Sylvester into a monastery
at his own request, while Adashev died the same year, in honourable
exile as a general in Livonia. The death of his deeply
beloved consort Anastasia and his son Demetrius, and the
desertion of his one bosom friend Prince Kurbsky, about the
same time, seem to have infuriated Ivan against God and man.
During the next ten years (1560–1570) terrible and horrible
things happened in the realm of Muscovy. The tsar himself
lived in an atmosphere of apprehension, imagining that every
man’s hand was against him. On the 3rd of December 1564 he
quitted Moscow with his whole family. On the 3rd of January
1565 he declared in an open letter addressed to the metropolitan
his intention to abdicate. The common people, whom he had
always favoured at the expense of the boyars, thereupon implored
him to come back on his own terms. He consented to do
so, but entrenched himself within a peculiar institution, the
oprichina or “separate estate.” Certain towns and districts all
over Russia were separated from the rest of the realm, and their
revenues were assigned to the maintenance of the tsar’s new
court and household, which was to consist of 1000 carefully
selected boyars and lower dignitaries, with their families and
suites, in the midst of whom Ivan henceforth lived exclusively.
The oprichina was no constitutional innovation. The duma, or
council, still attended to all the details of the administration;
the old boyars still retained their ancient offices and dignities.
The only difference was that the tsar had cut himself off from
them, and they were not even to communicate with him except
on extraordinary and exceptional occasions. The oprichniki,
as being the exclusive favourites of the tsar, naturally, in their
own interests, hardened the tsar’s heart against all outsiders,
and trampled with impunity upon every one beyond the charmed
circle. Their first and most notable victim was Philip, the
saintly metropolitan of Moscow, who was strangled for condemning
the oprichina as an unchristian institution, and refusing to
bless the tsar (1569). Ivan had stopped at Tver, to murder St
Philip, while on his way to destroy the second wealthiest city
in his tsardom—Great Novgorod. A delator of infamous character,
one Peter, had accused the authorities of the city to the
tsar of conspiracy; Ivan, without even confronting the Novgorodians
with their accuser, proceeded at the end of 1569 to
punish them. After ravaging the land, his own land, like a wild
beast, he entered the city on the 8th of January 1570, and for
the next five weeks, systematically and deliberately, day after
day, massacred batches of every class of the population. Every
monastery, church, manor-house, warehouse and farm within a
circuit of 100 m. was then wrecked, plundered and left roofless,
all goods were pillaged, all cattle destroyed. Not till the 13th
of February were the miserable remnants of the population
permitted to rebuild their houses and cultivate their fields
once more.
An intermittent and desultory war, with Sweden and Poland simultaneously, for the possession of Livonia and Esthonia, went on from 1560 to 1582. Ivan’s generals (he himself rarely took the field) were generally successful at first, and bore down their enemies by sheer numbers, capturing scores of fortresses and towns. But in the end the superior military efficiency of the Swedes and Poles invariably prevailed. Ivan was also unfortunate in having for his chief antagonist Stephen Báthory, one of the greatest captains of the age. Thus all his strenuous efforts, all his enormous sacrifices, came to nothing. The West was too strong for him. By the peace of Zapoli (January 15th, 1582) he surrendered Livonia with Polotsk to Báthory, and by the truce of Ilyusa he at the same time abandoned Ingria to the Swedes. The Baltic seaboard was lost to Muscovy for another century and a half. In his latter years Ivan cultivated friendly relations with England, in the hope of securing some share in the benefits of civilization from the friendship of Queen Elizabeth, one of whose ladies, Mary Hastings, he wished to marry, though his fifth wife, Martha Nagaya, was still alive. Towards the end of his life Ivan was partially consoled for his failure in the west by the unexpected acquisition of the kingdom of Siberia in the east, which was first subdued by the Cossack hetman Ermak or Yermak in 1581.
In November 1580 Ivan in a fit of ungovernable fury at some contradiction or reproach, struck his eldest surviving son Ivan, a prince of rare promise, whom he passionately loved, a blow which proved fatal. In an agony of remorse, he would now have abdicated “as being unworthy to reign longer”; but his trembling boyars, fearing some dark ruse, refused to obey any one but himself. Three years later, on the 18th of March 1584, while playing at chess, he suddenly fell backwards in his chair and was removed to his bed in a dying condition. At the last moment he assumed the hood of the strictest order of hermits, and died as the monk Jonah.
Ivan IV. was undoubtedly a man of great natural ability. His political foresight was extraordinary. He anticipated the ideals of Peter the Great, and only failed in realizing them because his material resources were inadequate. But admiration of his talents must not blind us to his moral worthlessness, nor is it right to cast the blame for his excesses on the brutal and vicious society in which he lived. The same society which produced his infamous favourites also produced St Philip of Moscow, and by refusing to listen to St Philip Ivan sank below even the not very lofty moral standard of his own age. He certainly left Muscovite society worse than he found it, and so prepared the way for the horrors of “the Great Anarchy.” Personally, Ivan was tall and well-made, with high shoulders and a broad chest. His eyes were small and restless, his nose hooked, he had a beard and moustaches of imposing length. His face had a sinister, troubled expression; but an enigmatical smile played perpetually around his lips. He was the best educated and the hardest worked man of his age. His memory was astonishing, his energy indefatigable. As far as possible he saw to everything personally, and never sent away a petitioner of the lower orders.
See S. M. Solov’ev, History of Russia (Rus.) vol. v. (St Petersburg, 1895); A. Brückner, Geschichte Russlands bis zum Ende des 18ten Jahrhunderts (Gotha, 1896); E. Tikhomirov, The first Tsar of Moscovy, Ivan IV. (Rus.) (Moscow, 1888); L. G. T. Tidander, Kriget mellan Sverige och Ryssland åren 1555–1557 (Vesterås, 1888); P. Pierling, Un Arbitrage pontifical au XVI e siècle entre la Pologne et la Russie (Bruxelles, 1890); V. V. Novodvorsky, The Struggle for Livonia, 1570–1582 (Rus.) (St Petersburg, 1904); K. Waliszewski, Ivan le terrible (Paris, 1904); R. N. Bain, Slavonic Europe, ch. 5 (Cambridge, 1907).
Ivan V.[1] (1666–1696), tsar of Russia, was the son of Tsar Alexius Mikhailovich and his first consort Miloslavzkoya. Physically and mentally deficient, Ivan was the mere tool of the party in Muscovy who would have kept the children of the tsar Alexis, by his second consort Natalia Naruishkina, from the throne. In 1682 the party of progress, headed by Artamon Matvyeev and the tsaritsa Natalia, passed Ivan over and placed his half-brother, the vigorous and promising little tsarevich Peter, on the throne. On the 23rd of May, however, the Naruishkin faction was overthrown by the stryeltsi (musketeers), secretly worked upon by Ivan’s half-sister Sophia, and Ivan was associated as tsar with Peter. Three days later he was proclaimed “first tsar,” in order still further to depress the Naruishkins, and place the government in the hands of Sophia exclusively. In 1689 the name of Ivan was used as a pretext by Sophia in her attempt to oust Peter from the throne altogether. Ivan was made to distribute beakers of wine to his sister’s adherents with his own hands, but subsequently, beneath the influence of his uncle Prozorovsky, he openly declared that “even for his sister’s
- ↑ Ivan V., if we count from the first grand duke of that name, as most Russian historians do; Ivan II., if, with the minority, we reckon from Ivan the Terrible as the first Russian tsar.
