The Giants of Russian Literature: The Greatest Russian Novels, Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький
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within his reach—and took advantage of the popular excitement and general disorder to upset the palace intrigues of both the Glinski and Shouyskie factions. That Silvestr, and the equally nebulous layman, Adashev, whom he associated with him in the new government, exercised a restraining and beneficent influence on the young Prince may well be believed; with an opposition of watchful and resentful nobles in the background, circumspection was essential, and Ivan, who had seen a consuming fire, an angry populace, and a frowning Providence threatening him on all sides, was likely to be a docile pupil. For the time. The austere and monkish repression of the latest Vremenszhiki was the finishing touch necessary to perfect the education of the Terrible Tzar.
The early part of Ivan’s reign, and the whole of the preceding one, are characterised by the recurrence at irregular periods of a deliberate campaign against Kazan. The Russians seem to have borrowed the tactics of the wolves which inhabited their steppes and forests, and to have leisurely and persistently wearied their quarry down, without caring to rush in and dispatch it. Again and again did the Tzar summon from the far corners of his dominions an enormous army, trail forth his ponderous siege-pieces and sacred banners, take an affecting farewell of his capital, and march upon the Tartar city. The wooden walls were relentlessly battered down, the garrison reduced to the last extremity, and then the Moskovite hosts would return home in good order. The walls were easily rebuilt and the Kazanese would pursue the even tenor of their way. It would almost appear as though the Russians were loth to irrevocably destroy the only enemy against whom they warred with any comfort. A more feasible explanation is that the Kazanese supplemented their feeble defences by a judicious outlay of the metal which corrupts, and that some of the Moskovite voevodas did not return empty-handed from these abortive expeditions. In 1552 Ivan determined to set once more in motion the huge army which had been left quartered on the frontiers of Kazan, a locality which had had a demoralising effect on the troops, many of whom had shaved off their beards to please the Tartar maidens who for the time being under-studied their wives, “to prove,” remarked a scandalised messenger from the Metropolitan, “by the indecent nudity of your faces, that you have shame to be men.” Familiarity had bred contempt, and the dwellers in the city by the Volga’s shore scornfully refused to open their gates at the approach of the 150,000 footmen and the 150 cannon which the Tzar brought against them. The Moskovites prepared for a long and obstinate resistance, and by way of a beginning erected and dedicated three pavilion churches in their camp. Events justified their expectations; the Kazanese held out stoutly against both the assaults of the besiegers and the offers of the Tzar. August and September passed in continual sorties and battles without the walls, skirmishing attacks by the Kozaks in the tzarskie army, and mining operations by the German engineers. The overwhelming forces and superior artillery which Ivan was able to bring against the city at length beat down the heroic defence, and the triumphant Moskovites put their stubborn and still resisting enemies to the sword. The Tzar is said to have been moved to tears at the sight of so many Tartar corpses; “they are not Christians,” he observed, “but yet they are men.” The reduction of Kazan was an event of the first importance in Russian annals. It marked an epoch. “The victory of Ivan the Terrible is the first great revenge of the vanquished over the vanquishers ... the first stage reached by European civilisation in taking the offensive towards Asia.”142 Prudence suggested that Ivan should remain on the scene of his conquest until his authority over the neighbouring districts was assured; a desire to return to his capital in the full flush of triumph prompted him to disregard more solid considerations. He was still very young. The newly-acquired territory was therefore left under the united protection of the Christ, the Virgin, the Russian intercessory saints, and Aleksandr Shouyskie. Ivan, on his homeward way, received the welcome intelligence that his wife had given birth to a son, the Tzarevitch Dimitri, first of a series of Ivanovitches so named. The prolonged rejoicings, banquetings, and thanksgivings which ensued at Moskva were followed by a disagreeable sequel; Kazan, despite the august protection under which it had been left, rose in revolt, and the Russian ascendency was seriously imperilled. 1553The Tzar’s health at the same time broke alarmingly down, and another long minority seemed to threaten the State. The boyarins and princes, summoned to take an oath of allegiance to the infant Dimitri, showed a strong reluctance to bind themselves down in the manner required; the succession of Ivan’s child to the Tzardom would mean a Romanov regency and a repetition of the faction intrigues which had attended the early years of the present reign. Urii, the Tzar’s brother, appears to have been a weakling in mind and body, too feeble even to decorate with the divine attributes of monarch; in Vladimir Andreievitch, the Tzar’s first cousin, however, there existed a possible candidate for the throne, and even Silvestr and Adashev hesitated between the claims of the hereditary and collateral succession. The oath, whatever its value might be, was exacted from the unwilling courtiers, but Ivan’s recovery prevented the necessity of testing it. The convalescent Tzar, in spite of the remonstrances of his advisers, set off on a course of shrine visiting, taking with him his unfortunate offspring, who was scarcely of an age to stand such energetic piety. In fact he died on the journey. The pilgrimage of Ivan was, if the chroniclers and some of the later historians are to be believed, disastrous in another fashion. Among the religious establishments visited was the Piesnoshkie monastery, wherein was caged an interesting prisoner. Vassian, Bishop of Kolumna in the reign of Vasili, had been deprived of his episcopal office during the time of the regencies on account of his evil life; now, in the decrepitude of age, he is represented as harbouring with unquenched passion the unholy frettings of a sin-warped mind. Ivan desired an interview with the hoary reprobate; perhaps after a course of devotions among a community of irreproachable saints, living and departed, he was attracted by the rare personality of a sometime bishop who was no better than he should be. The monk-with-a-past seized the grand opportunity to poison the monarch’s mind against his boyarins, his relations, and his subjects, and Ivan drank in with greedy ears the vicious counsels of the unhallowed recluse. It is a fascinating picture, the aged priest who had eaten his heart out in helpless bitterness these many years, and chafed against the restraint of his prison-cell, given at last one deadly moment of revenge in which to work a superb evil against the society that had mishandled him. And as the Tzar went out from his presence a changed man, might not the ex-prelate have flung a crowning blasphemy at his heaven and chanted exultingly nunc dimittis? Ivan, indeed, in the hands of the chroniclers, is a creature easily swayed; a monk from Novgorod tells him to be good, and he straightway abandons the wrong-headed sins of his wayward youth and becomes an exemplary monarch, till a monk of Piesnoshkie gives him dark and evil counsel, and sends him forth upon the world with a cankered, blood-lusting soul.
The Tzar’s return to health was accompanied by a return of Moskovite prosperity. Another Tzarevitch, Ivan, replaced the dead Dimitri; Kazan was gradually Kozaked into submission, and received a bishop as a mark of special favour. Another conquest equally important was achieved without bloodshed. The Astrakhanese having insulted the envoys of Moskovy, a small but well-equipped army was sent against them, with the result that this khanate, once the head-country of the redoubtable Golden Horde, acknowledged Ivan’s sovereignty and yielded equal rights in the Volga fishery to his Great Russian subjects. 1554The Nogai Tartars, occupying the intermediate steppes, submitted at the same time to the Moskovite dominion, and the Russian state, still cut off from the Black Sea, to which in the tenth century it had given its name,143 wriggled its way down to the Kaspian.
The acquisition of the two Tartar sovereignties, while giving increased importance and security to Ivan’s dominions, and opening up a valuable trade with Persia and other eastern countries, did not tend to make Moskovy less Asiatic, or bring her closer into the European family. The Tzar’s political ambitions turned naturally towards the west. With a sagacity equal to that of his most celebrated successor, and in opposition to the advice of his counsellors, he wished to find a free outlet for communication with the great Empire-Republic (which, though decaying in organisation, was at this moment so instinct with life), and with Europe generally. The death of Sigismund of Poland (1548) and the accession of his son, Sigismund-August, had scarcely affected the grudgingly pacific relations between the two countries, though their common grievance against the Krim Tartars seemed to warrant the hope of a more cordial understanding. With Sweden the Moskovites waged one of those short inconclusive wars, in which