IVAN THE TERRIBLE--ACQUISITION OF SIBERIA
In 1533 Vasili II. died, leaving the scepter to Ivan IV., an infant son
three years old. Now the humiliated Princes and _boyars_ were to have
their turn. The mother of Ivan IV., Helena Glinski, was the only
obstacle in their way. She speedily died, the victim of poison, and
then there was no one to stem the tide of princely and oligarchic
reaction against autocracy; and the many years of Ivan's minority would
give plenty of time to re-establish their lost authority. The _boyars_
took possession of the government. Ivan wrote later: "My brother and I
were treated like the children of beggars. We were half clothed, cold,
and hungry." The _boyars_ in the presence of these children
appropriated the luxuries and treasures in the palace and then
plundered the people as well, exacting unmerciful fines and treating
them like slaves. The only person who loved the neglected Ivan was his
nurse, and she was torn from him; and for a courtier to pity the
forlorn child was sufficient for his downfall. Ivan had a superior
intelligence. He read much and was keenly observant of all that was
happening. He saw himself treated with insolent contempt in private,
but with abject servility in public. He also observed that his
signature was required to give force to everything that was done, and
so discovered that he was the rightful master, that the real power was
vested only in him. Suddenly, in 1543, he sternly summoned his court
to come into his presence, and, ordering the guards to seize the chief
offender among his _boyars_, he then and there had him torn to pieces
by his hounds. This was a _coup d'état_ by a boy of thirteen! He was
content with the banishment of many others, and then Ivan IV.
peacefully commenced his reign. He seemed a gentle, indolent youth;
very confiding in those he trusted; inclined to be a voluptuary, loving
pleasure and study and everything better than affairs of state. In
1547 he was crowned Tsar of Russia, and soon thereafter married
Anastasia of the house of Romanoff, whom he devotedly loved. As was
the custom, he surrounded himself with his mother's and his wife's
relations. So the Glinskis and the Romanoffs were the envied families
in control of the government. His mother's family, the Glinskis, were
especially unpopular; and when a terrific fire destroyed nearly the
whole of Moscow it was whispered by jealous _boyars_ that the Princess
Anna Glinski had brought this misfortune upon them by enchantments.
She had taken human hearts, boiled them in water, and then sprinkled
the houses where the fire started! An enraged populace burst into the
palace of the Glinskis, murdering all they could find.
Ivan, nervous and impressionable, seems to have been profoundly
affected by all this. He yielded to the popular demand and appointed
two men to administer the government, spiritual and temporal--Adashef,
belonging to the smaller nobility, and Silvester, a priest. Believing
absolutely in their fidelity, he then concerned himself very little
about affairs of state, and engaged in the completion of the work
commenced by Ivan III.--a revision of the old code of laws established
by Yaroslaf. These were very peaceful and very happy years for Russia
and for himself. But Ivan was stricken with a fever, and while
apparently in a dying condition he discovered the treachery of his
trusted ministers, that they were shamefully intriguing with his Tatar
enemies. When he heard their rejoicings that the day of the Glinskis
and the Romanoffs was over, he realized the fate awaiting Anastasia and
her infant son if he died. He resolved that he would not die.
Banishment seems a light punishment to have inflicted. It was gentle
treatment for treason at the court of Moscow. But the poison of
suspicion had entered his soul, and was the more surely, because
slowly, working a transformation in his character. And when soon
thereafter Anastasia mysteriously and suddenly died, his whole nature
seemed to be undergoing a change. He was passing from Ivan the gentle
and confiding, into "Ivan the Terrible."
Ivan said later, in his own vindication: "When that dog Adashef
betrayed me, was anyone put to death? Did I not show mercy? They say
now that I am cruel and irascible; but to whom? I am cruel toward
those that are cruel to me. The good! ah, I would give them the robe
and the chain that I wear! My subjects would have given me over to the
Tatars, sold me to my enemies. Think of the enormity of the treason!
If some were chastised, was it not for their crimes, and are they not
my slaves--and shall I not do what I will with mine own?"
His grievances were real. His _boyars_ were desperate and determined,
and even with their foreheads in the dust were conspiring against him.
They were no less terrible than he toward their inferiors. There never
could be anything but anarchy in Russia so long as this aristocracy of
cruel slave-masters existed. Ivan (like Louis XI.) was girding himself
for the destruction of the power of his nobility, and, as one
conspiracy after another was revealed, faster and faster flowed the
torrent of his rage.
In 1571 he devoutly asked the prayers of the Church for 3470 of his
victims, 986 of whom he mentioned by name; many of these being followed
by the sinister addition: "With his wife and children"; "with his
sons"; "with his daughters." A gentle, kindly Prince had been
converted into a monster of cruelty, who is called, by the historians
of his own country, the Nero of Russia.
He was a pious Prince, like all of the Muscovite line. Not one of his
subjects was more faithful in religious observances than was this
"torch of orthodoxy"--who frequently called up his household in the
middle of the night for prayers. Added to the above pious petition for
mercy to his victims, is this reference to Novgorod: "Remember, Lord,
the souls of thy servants to the number of 1505 persons--Novgorodians,
whose names, Almighty, thou knowest."
That Republic had made its last break for liberty. Under the
leadership of Marfa, the widow of a wealthy and powerful noble, it had
thrown itself in despair into the arms of Catholic Poland. This was
treason to the Tsar and to the Church, and its punishment was awful.
The desperate woman who had instigated the act was carried in chains to
Moscow, there to behold her two sons with the rest of the conspirators
beheaded. The bell which for centuries had summoned her citizens to
the _Vetché_, that sacred symbol of the liberty of the Republic, is now
in the Museum at Moscow. If its tongue should speak, if its clarion
call should ring out once more, perhaps there might come from the
shades a countless host of her martyred dead--"Whose names, Almighty,
thou knowest." Ivan then proceeded to wreck the prosperity of the
richest commercial city in his empire. Its trade was enormous with the
East and the West. It had joined the Hanseatic League, and its wealth
was largely due to the German merchants who had flocked there. With
singular lack of wisdom, the Tsar had confiscated the property of these
men, and now the ruin of the city was complete.
While Germany, and Poland, and Sweden,--resolved to shut up Russia in
her barbaric isolation,--were locking the front door on the Baltic and
the Gulf, England had found a side door by which to enter. With great
satisfaction Ivan saw English traders coming in by way of the White
Sea, and he extended the rough hand of his friendship to Queen
Elizabeth, who made with him a commercial treaty, which was
countersigned by Francis Bacon. Then, as his friendship warmed, he
proposed that they should sign a reciprocal engagement to furnish each
other with an asylum in the event of the rebellion of their subjects.
Elizabeth declined the asylum he kindly offered her, "finding, by the
grace of God, no dangers of the sort in her kingdom." Then he did her
the honor to offer an alliance of a different kind. He proposed that
she should send him her cousin Lady Mary Hastings to take the place
left vacant by his eighth wife--to become his Tsaritsa. The
proposition was considered, but when the English maiden heard about his
brutalities and about his seven wives, so terrified was she that she
refused to leave England, and the affair had to be abandoned.
Elizabeth's rejection of his proposals, and also of his plan for an
alliance offensive and defensive against Poland and Sweden, so
infuriated Ivan that he confiscated the goods of the English merchants,
and this friendship was temporarily ruptured. But amicable relations
were soon restored between Elizabeth and her barbarian admirer. If she
had heard of his awful vengeance in 1571, she had also heard of the
massacre of St. Bartholomew in Paris in 1572!
Russia had now opened diplomatic relations with the Western kingdoms.
The foreign ambassadors were received with great pomp in a sumptuous
hall hung with tapestries and blazing with gold and silver. The Tsar,
with crown and scepter, sat upon his throne, supported by the roaring
lions, and carefully studied the new ambassador as he suavely asked him
about his master. A police inspector from that moment never lost sight
of him, making sure that he obtained no interviews with the natives nor
information about the state of the country. Although the Tsar was
reputed to be learned and was probably the most learned man in his
nation, and had always about him a coterie of distinguished scholars,
still there was no intellectual life in Russia, and owing to the
Oriental seclusion of the women there was no society. The men were
heavily bearded, and the ideal of beauty with the women, as they looked
furtively out from behind veils and curtains, was to be fat, with red,
white, and black paint laid on like a mask. It must have been a dreary
post for gay European diplomats, and in marked contrast to gay, witty,
gallant Poland, at that time thoroughly Europeanized.
Next to the consolidation of the imperial authority, the event in this
reign most affecting the future of Russia was the acquisition of
Siberia. A Cossack brigand under sentence of death escaped with his
followers into the land beyond the Urals, and conquered a part of the
territory, then returned and offered it to Ivan (1580) in exchange for
a pardon. The incident is the subject of a _bilina_, a form of
historical poem, in which Yermak says:
"I am the robber Hetman of the Don.
And now--oh--orthodox Tsar,
I bring you my traitorous head,
And with it I bring the Empire of Siberia!
And the orthodox Tsar will speak--
He will speak--the terrible Ivan,
Ha! thou art Yermak, the Hetman of the Don,
I pardon thee and thy band,
I pardon thee for thy trusty service--
And I give to the Cossack the glorious and gentle
Don as an inheritance."
The two Ivans had created a new code of laws, and now there was an
ample prison-house for its transgressors! The penal code was
frightful. An insolvent debtor was tied up half naked in a public
place and beaten three hours a day for thirty or forty days, and then,
if no one came to his rescue, with his wife and his children he was
sold as a slave. But Siberia was to be the prison-house of a more
serious class of offenders for whom this punishment would be
insufficient. It was to serve as a vast penal colony for crimes
against the state. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century it is
said one million political exiles have been sent there, and they
continue to go at the rate of twenty thousand a year; showing how
useful a present was made by the robber Yermak to the "Orthodox Tsar"!
This reign, like that of Louis XI. of France, which it much resembled,
enlarged the privileges of the people in order to aid Ivan in his
conflict with his nobility. For this purpose a _Sobor_, or
States-General, was summoned by him, and met at long intervals
thereafter until the time of Peter the First.
Of the two sons left to Ivan by his wife Anastasia, only one now
remained. In a paroxysm of rage he had struck the Tsarevitch with his
iron staff. He did not intend to kill him, but the blow was mortal.
Great and fierce was the sorrow of the Tsar when he found he had slain
his beloved son--the one thing he loved upon earth, and there remained
to inherit the fruit of his labors and his crimes only another child
(Feodor) enfeebled in body and mind, and an infant (Dmitri), the son of
his seventh wife. His death, hastened by grief, took place three years
later, in 1584.