God, Tsar, and People: The Political Culture of Early Modern Russia

By Daniel B. Rowland and Russell E. Martin

God, Tsar, and People brings together in one volume essays written over a period of fifty years, using a wide variety of evidence—texts, icons, architecture, and ritual—to reveal how early modern Russians (1450–1700) imagined their rapidly changing political world.

This volume presents a more nuanced picture of Russian political thought during the two centuries before Peter the Great came to power than is typically available. The state was expanding at a dizzying rate, and atop Russia's traditional political structure sat a ruler who supposedly reflected God's will. The problem facing Russians was that actual rulers seldom—or never—exhibited the required perfection. Daniel Rowland argues that this contradictory set of ideas was far less autocratic in both theory and practice than modern stereotypes would have us believe. In comparing and contrasting Russian history with that of Western European states, Rowland is also questioning the notion that Russia has always been, and always viewed itself as, an authoritarian country. God, Tsar, and People explores how the Russian state in this period kept its vast lands and diverse subjects united in a common view of a Christian polity, defending its long frontier against powerful enemies from the East and from the West.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501752100

Book preview

The Textual

Breaking the Code

CHAPTER 1

Kurbskii and the Historians

If there is a Russkaia Sloboda in heaven as there was a Nemetskaia Sloboda in Muscovy, its unruly inhabitants must often have been amused at the roles in which they have been cast by succeeding generations of their countrymen. And few could have been more amused, amazed, and even, I think, horrified, than Prince Andrei Mikhailovich Kurbskii. Indeed one wonders if the poor prince, in the ages of ages left to him, will ever succeed in disentangling the various interpretations given to his life and works by historians and in reconciling the historians’ opinions with his own recollections.

Although the volume of opinion about Kurbskii is considerable, the information about his life prior to his desertion to Poland-Lithuania on April 30, 1564, is slight.¹ He was descended from the princes of Yaroslavl´, although he belonged to a cadet branch of that family. He was remotely connected to the family of the Tsaritsa Anastasia, and had closer connections with the important families of Bel´skii and Tuchkov.² A pupil and perhaps a friend of Maksim the Greek, he almost certainly had a better-than-average education for a Russian nobleman of his time.³ He seems to have thought he did.⁴ According to Iasinskii and Andreyev, he became a stol´nik (gentleman of the table) at the age of twenty-one.⁵ He then began a successful military career, serving in both sieges of Kazan´ and later in the Livonian war in increasingly important positions until about a year before his flight, when the service lists stop mentioning him altogether.⁶ This career is well documented both by his own accounts, chiefly in his History of Ivan IV, and by references in other sources. The main conclusion that may be drawn is that Kurbskii’s military services were in such demand that he spent very little time at home or at court in Moscow, but, as he wrote in his first letter to Ivan always in far-distant towns have I stood in arms against your foes.⁷

The exact nature of his relationship with Ivan remains unclear. His military duties must have prevented him from taking an active role in day-to-day governmental decisions, but the tsar seems to have felt well disposed toward him in the 1550s at least. During the succession crisis of March 1553, Kurbskii claims to have supported Ivan’s son Dmitrii against the claims of Prince Vladimir Andreievich Staritskii,⁸ and the tsar does not deny this. Shortly thereafter, Ivan took Kurbskii, along with Aleksei Adashev and several others who had sworn allegiance to Dmitrii, on a pilgrimage to the Holy Trinity and Kirillo-Belozerskii Monasteries.⁹ In 1560, Ivan used exceedingly loving words with Kurbskii before sending him to Derpt.¹⁰

This career is not particularly remarkable, and Kurbskii would have attracted little interest had he not been the alleged author of five polemical letters to Ivan and a history of the latter’s reign.¹¹ Since, as we shall see, many assumptions not only about Ivan’s reign but about the whole nature of politics in sixteenth-century Muscovy are based largely on these materials, it would be of some interest to compare the views of several of those historians whose work contributed to the acceptance of these assumptions with the documents themselves.

This essay, then, deals with historiography more than with history. Indeed its main concerns are very detailed, even esoteric matters. I don’t propose to enter into the about-to-be-created discussions on whether Kurbskii was or was not the author of these documents, nor to reinterpret Kurbskii’s role in Russian history. Rather I shall examine the interpretations given to these documents by three of the most influential Russian historians. I don’t even propose to show that any of these historians grossly misinterpreted this source—Karamzin, Solov´ev, and Kliuchevskii were all too skillful as historians and the source was too readily available for them to have attributed to Kurbskii statements completely at variance with what he said. Rather we shall explore fine points of interpretation, small increments of meaning that several of these historians, in my opinion, laid over or injected into the words of the documents. These subtle shifts in meaning had effects that were not small, for they collectively created the impression that Kurbskii’s work, together with Ivan’s letters to him, constituted the most complete summing-up of that conflict between the autocratic ideals of the Muscovite grand princes and the conservative opposition of the boyars which characterized the political life of the Muscovite state in the sixteenth century.¹² By the time of the Revolution, interpretations of this source by succeeding generations of historians had played a vital part in creating the general understanding implicit in almost all historical writing about the period that the interplay between the centralizing autocracy and the conservative, centrifugal boyarstvo constituted the basis of Muscovite politics during the sixteenth century.

Now one of the things that differentiate sixteenth-century Muscovite history from the history of Western European countries of the same period is the relative lack of sources. Fires and other acts of God and man succeeded in destroying much of the comparatively small amount that was originally written down. The result has been that the discovery of new sources has had a fairly small importance in altering the historian’s major assumptions about Muscovy before the Troubles. Many of the most important sources were known by the beginning of the nineteenth century; most were known by the middle of that century. Changes in interpretation were therefore due not so much to what historians read, but to how they interpreted what they read. Since no historian dealing with the period could afford to ignore Kurbskii’s work, each had to find what he needed in it, and in this task, it would not be unkind to say, these historians succeeded very well.

Before dealing with the historians, we should first get some feel for how Kurbskii operates as a historian and writer, some idea of his general style. We shall therefore begin by some simple, even obvious, observations drawn specifically from the first section of the History in which Kurbskii describes Vasilii’s second marriage to Elena Glinskii. I select this passage because it is a self-contained little section that has no great importance in itself but well illustrates Kurbskii’s style of argument.¹³

The main point of this passage is stated at the outset, that evil ends with evil—that is that Vasilii’s evil second marriage ended with the conception of Ivan IV. Kurbskii very quickly sketches out the two sides involved in the struggle over the marriage. On the one side we have Vasilii himself, the great (especially in pride and ferocity) prince; Elena, whom Kurbskii has already called one of the evil and sorcerous wives, whom the devil used to corrupt the clan of Russian princes; and, finally, the most wicked Josephians. On the other side we see Solomonia, Vasilii’s holy and innocent wife; a number of holy and reverend men who opposed the marriage and were persecuted by Grand Prince Vasilii; Prince Semen Kurbskii; Vasilii/Vassian Patrikeev; Maksim the Greek; and, somewhat to the side, that eminent man Herberstein, imperial ambassador to Moscow. There is no middle ground between these camps; except for ancestors mentioned in passing, everyone is put firmly into one camp or the other. Not surprisingly, we have here a good old-fashioned struggle between good and evil, told with no embarrassment and no apologies. The same struggle is the main focus of attention in the rest of Kurbskii’s work. On one side are the holy, the righteous, the wise, the brave; on the other, with the devil prompting them, are the evil flatterers, the children of darkness, the priests of Cronus.

Given this view of history, Kurbskii’s main task is to assign his characters to a given side, but after he has accomplished that, he relaxes a little. Once he has placed a figure in one category or the other, his concern for distinctions within each category is small. It wouldn’t matter very much, for example, if one were to call Vasilii most wicked or the Josephians great in pride and ferocity,¹⁴ and Semen Kurbskii’s holy way of life could have been ascribed equally to Maksim or Vassian. In the same way, there is very little to differentiate Ivan’s wicked flatterers from his companions of the table, or the accursed ones from the strong and great satanic host. The important thing about these figures is that they were evil, inspired by the devil. There is more precise meaning in the epithets applied to the other side, the good side, but not a great deal: glorious in virtue, and brilliant in birth, truly great in courage and bravery, "select [izbrannyi] in birth, and a man of great bravery and intellect … versed in the holy scriptures."¹⁵

This loose use of descriptions does not seem to be due so much to carelessness or even polemical exaggeration, but to a very primitive view of psychology. For Kurbskii, a figure either works for the devil or for Christ. Middle positions, difficult moral choices, psychological strains are all foreign to this view. Ivan himself is one of the very few figures who changes sides, so to speak, at first appearing as debauched, then as righteous under the spiritual guidance of Syl´vestr and Adashev, and finally as a foul beast surrounded by his children of darkness. But the interesting thing is that, although these changes in Ivan are the focus of Kurbskii’s attention, we learn almost nothing about Ivan’s character or the way he felt at any moment. His debauchery and his reform are both described in general terms with no real connection with a personality.¹⁶ And when he falls again into the devil’s hands, Kurbskii calls him the beast newly appeared (novoiavlennyi zver´).¹⁷ Thus "men, created gentle by God according to nature, change by their own self-will [samovlastno voleiu] to ferocity and inhumanity."¹⁸

Another thing that strikes the modern reader is that Kurbskii’s logic is not very logical. Again let us go back to the passage we have been examining. It seems strange that although he mainly seems interested in establishing the evil nature of Vasilii’s marriage, Kurbskii devotes over four times as much space to describing the holy and reverent men who opposed the marriage as he does to the marriage itself. Moreover, he never cites any scriptural or patristic authority as to why the marriage was against the law of God, but mentions rather the attendant circumstances, the forcible tonsure and incarceration of Solomonia and the disapproval of the holy men. In short, he does not argue with logical or legal precision.

There is, however, an important method of argument operating here, one that underlies almost all of the History and much of the Correspondence. It stems directly from Kurbskii’s strictly dualistic view of the world and operates by association and opposition. When he gratuitously mentions Vasilii’s many evil deeds committed against the law of God the implication is that if Vasilii had committed many evil deeds, he was likely to commit more. He used evil monks, those most wicked Josephians, to carry out the execution of Vassian. Vasilii and his second marriage are also condemned by the fact that holy and reverent men opposed the marriage and Vasilii cruelly persecuted them. In other words, because good men opposed it, the marriage was bad; because he persecuted good men, Vasilii was bad. One suspects that Solomonia, like many of Ivan’s victims described in the sixth and seventh chapters of the History, was holy and innocent at least in part because she suffered at the hands of an evil tsar. Thus the picture of the court as divided sharply into holy and foul camps is not only the end product of Kurbskii’s writing but an important part of his argument as well.

Since the welfare of the realm depended on the actions of the tsar, and since the actions of the tsar depended on his spiritual health, Kurbskii’s description of the reign falls into three periods according to Ivan’s spiritual condition. In the earliest period, Ivan was brought up in every enjoyment and lust by the great proud … boyars. The young prince, surrounded by evil men, became a cruel murderer both of dumb beasts and of his own servants. God punished Ivan and the land with the Moscow fire and Tatar invasions.¹⁹ The second phase begins with the appearance of Syl´vestr and Adashev. Their main good deed, according to Kurbskii, was the strengthening of the tsar, his spiritual regeneration. As part of that task, they separated him from his evil advisers and surrounded him with "advisers [sovetniki], men of understanding and perfection.²⁰ As a result, the country was well governed and prevailed against her enemies, principally Kazan´. After the victory over Kazan´, the devil began to tempt Ivan, shooting him like an arrow to Bishop Vassian Toporkov, who advised him not to keep about him advisers wiser than himself.²¹ Ivan listened, and thereupon disasters again began to recur: the death of Dmitrii Ivanovich and defeat at the hands of the Tatars. This latter defeat frightened the tsar, so that then it seemed as though he once again repented, and he ruled well for some years."²²

Flatterers and comrades of the table persuaded Ivan not to strike a final blow at the Tatars in 1558, which Kurbskii felt would have been successful.²³ But, in general, the second phase, the phase of good government, lasted until the disgrace of Syl´vestr and Adashev, when Ivan again opened his ears to those wicked flatterers, than whom, as I have already said many times, not a single deathly boil can be more pestilential in the tsardom.… Thus, with countless other tissues of lies, in agreement with their father the devil … they deceived their man with flattering words and overthrew the soul of the Christian tsar, who was living righteously and in penitence, and thus they broke that bond which was woven by God for spiritual love … and those accursed ones drove him away from the vicinity of God.²⁴ Thus began the final disastrous epoch of the reign marked by the slaughter of holy and innocent men and Russia’s defeat at the hands of her enemies.

Kurbskii’s interpretation is transparently clear. When the tsar surrounded himself with holy men, then he lived righteously, the tsarstvo prospered, and its enemies were defeated. When flatterers and comrades of the table replaced holy men in the tsar’s confidence, then his spiritual health declined, justice was perverted, and Russia’s enemies prevailed. This message is repeated over and over again.

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The first historian to use the Correspondence and the History extensively was N. M. Karamzin.²⁵ Their impact on him was great: a glance at the footnotes in volumes 8 and 9 of his History of the Russian State reveal the extent of his debt to Kurbskii. Karamzin relied on Kurbskii not only for details of various historical events such as the siege of Kazan´ but also for the interpretative framework of Ivan’s reign as a whole. He adopted Kurbskii’s general scheme of three phases based on Ivan’s moral progress. Ivan, after a debauched childhood, was suddenly and forcefully converted into a virtuous ruler by the stern admonitions of Syl´vestr, who for Ivan’s reform played upon the fear that the recent Moscow fire had inspired in the young tsar.²⁶ The priest was seconded in his efforts by Ivan’s virtuous first wife Anastasia and by the young tsar’s friend Aleksei Adashev, a handsome young man described as an angel on earth whose soul was pure and delicate, whose morals were excellent, and whose mind was as agreeable and substantial as it was strong.²⁷ Karamzin asserts, These friends of the fatherland and of piety were able to touch, to smite his heart using its own salutary terror.²⁸ The result of this moral conversion was the good government of the late 1540s and 1550s.

However, the soul of the tsar was not firm enough to remain on its path of virtue. First, seeds of distrust for Syl´vestr were planted in Ivan’s mind when Sil´vestr was reluctant to swear an oath to Ivan’s son and perhaps secretly supported Vladimir Andreevich Staritskii, the tsar’s cousin.²⁹ Virtue triumphed, however, and, after his recovery, Ivan showed the greatest clemency to those who had supported Vladimir. The real blow to Ivan and to the realm was Anastasia’s death in 1560. It is at this point, wrote Karamzin darkly at the end of volume 8, that the fortunate days of Ivan and of Russia ended, because, at the same time that he lost his wife, he abandoned the path of virtue.³⁰ In the first pages of volume 9,³¹ Karamzin describes the changes that took place in Ivan’s heart and in his court, his bitterness over Anastasia’s death, his resentment of Syl´vestr and Adashev’s domination, the trial of these former favorites, and the emergence of an evil group of counselors—debauchers (razvrashniki)³² as Karamzin calls them—who corrupt the tsar’s soul. Corruption having entered the heart of the ruler, the government of the realm is corrupted, the innocent are punished, evil flatterers are rewarded, the oprichnina begins.³³

Certainly there are differences between Kurbskii’s account and Karamzin’s. Kurbskii’s strictly Orthodox idea of piety and Karamzin’s sentimental idea of virtue are different.³⁴ Kurbskii everywhere sees the direct intervention of God, for our sins, while Karamzin goes further into the psychology of the tsar. Karamzin, for example, makes much of the role of Anastasia and of the influence of Ivan’s family life for the ruler and the realm, while Kurbskii hardly mentions Ivan’s first wife.³⁵ Even the family of the monarch, writes Karamzin of the situation after the appearance of Syl´vestr and Adashev, where coldness, envy and hatred had formerly reigned, now offered to Russia an example both of peace and of perfect union. Ivan was better able to appreciate the good qualities of his wife since he knew the happiness which flows from virtue. Strengthened by the beautiful Anastasia in good intentions, given to noble sentiments, he became a good prince, a good relative.³⁶

Yet this difference amounts to little compared with the overall similarity of points of view. Both Karamzin and Kurbskii pose the same question: How was it that a tsar formerly so excellent had now become a cruel and heartless ruler?³⁷ Both answer the question by describing the moral progress, or rather regress, of the tsar, surrounded first by virtuous advisers and then by debauchers. For both authors, the moving force of the realm was the tsar’s will, and therefore the most important causes were to be sought inside the tsar, in the forces that operated on his mind and soul.³⁸ The emphasis in both accounts is therefore thoroughly moral, and indeed moralistic. Both writers were essentially telling a story and not given to analysis of this or that factor, this or that class.³⁹ Both spend much of their time describing battles, praising the valor of warriors, roundly condemning those characters they disliked, all occupations generally avoided by their modern descendants. And yet, Karamzin at the least did manage to give an accurate rendering of this particular source, which is more than can be said of most of the later historians who dealt with it.

Before we leave Karamzin, it might be worth noting how that historian regarded Kurbskii himself, since Kurbskii’s own historical role (imagined or real) was soon to play a considerable part in determining what historians saw in his writings. Up until his flight to Lithuania, Kurbskii is only mentioned in passing as a sensitive contemporary whose opinion should be trusted, as a glorious warrior.⁴⁰ While describing Kurbskii’s flight, Karamzin devotes a good deal of space to Kurbskii and his correspondence with Ivan.⁴¹ The whole of this discussion is devoted to answering the question of whether Kurbskii’s flight was justified. Nothing is said about Kurbskii as a representative of this or that class of Russian society, or about his ideology.

S. M. Solov´ev had a different view of Ivan’s reign than did Karamzin, and asked different questions of his sources. Karamzin and Kurbskii concentrated their attention on the moral struggle taking place within Ivan, a struggle closely connected with the moral qualities of those surrounding the tsar. Solov´ev, although he mentions this moral struggle, prefers to concentrate on a social and political clash:

But around these princes [of Moscow], collected under the guise of servants of the new state the descendants of princes and appanage princes, deprived of their otchinas by the descendants of Kalita.… Around the Muscovite grand prince, the representative of the new order whose main interest lay in the consolidation and growth of that order, around this prince gathered people who lived in the past with all of their own best memories, who could not sympathize with the new, for whom even their prominent position, their title itself, reminded them of a more brilliant position, a greater importance in the not distant past, a past well known to all. A clash [stolknovenie] was inevitable given such a confrontation between two principles [dvukh nachal], one of which was striving toward continuing growth, while the other wished to hold it back from this striving, to hold it back in the name of old relationships now vanished.⁴²

It is not hard to guess where Kurbskii fits into this general scheme.

Solov´ev begins his discussion of the role of advisers in Kurbskii’s work with the following: "We saw that the main reason for the displeasure of the princes and the descendants of the old druzhina with the new order of things was that the Muscovite rulers stopped observing the old custom of doing nothing without the advice of the druzhina."⁴³ He then goes on to describe Kurbskii’s condemnation of Vassian Toporkov’s advice: to do the same, that is, apparently, to rule without the advice of the druzhina. By implication, Kurbskii is connected with "the princes and the descendents of the old druzhina. Moreover, already a slight distortion has crept in, since Toporkov’s advice was not to rule without any advisers at all, but to rule without advisers wiser than yourself.⁴⁴ When he translates Kurbskii’s condemnation of this advice into modern Russian, he makes a further slight alteration. Kurbskii cites the biblical example of David’s failure to take the advice of his counselors about counting the people of Israel.⁴⁵ But where Kurbskii refers to counselors" (singlity svoimi), Solov´ev translates this as grandees (svoimi vel´mozhami).⁴⁶ He ignores the fact that in the next example brought forward by Kurbskii, that of Rehoboam (1 Kings 12), difficulty arose not by consulting no advisers but by consulting the wrong advisers, by preferring the advice of young men to the counsel of old men. In neither case was the criterion for a good adviser noble birth; in the case of Rehoboam, the criterion was age, and in the case of David, military rank. (In the Church Slavic version of the Bible, he consulted with the leaders of the forces.)

Solov´ev then proceeds to argue that, in the mind of Kurbskii the work of Ivan was seen as the completion of the work of his father and grandfather, the conclusion of the struggle of the Muscovite rulers with the princes of the same family.⁴⁷ What are the words from which this observation is evident? "Already you have killed with various forms of death not only princes of your family, and [you have robbed] [not only] their movable and immovable possessions, such as your grandfather did not plunder; but also—I may speak with boldness according to the word of the Gospel—our last shirts have we not forbidden your haughty and royal [tsar´skomu] majesty to take."⁴⁸

There is a close but by no means exact correspondence between Kurbskii’s words and Solov´ev’s interpretation of them. In the first place, Solov´ev’s remarks, taken in the context of his overall views, carry a wide meaning that is absent from Kurbskii’s statement. Solov´ev’s words evoke the confrontation of two principles and all the political and social ideas that went along with them. Kurbskii is only talking of murder and plunder, with no principles involved. More important, Solov´ev injects a new element into Kurbskii’s statement, an element Kurbskii did not mention, the element of struggle. The idea of a struggle, confrontation, or clash recurs again and again in Solov´ev and is crucial to his picture of Muscovite politics. Kurbskii mentions no struggle but on the contrary states that, obeying the injunction of the Gospel, the princes did not refuse their last shirts. The passage to which Kurbskii refers is as follows: Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloak forbid not to take thy coat also (Luke 6). If this sufferance was indeed the model that the aristocracy set for itself in its dealings with the Muscovite rulers, then what of the image of struggle and conflict that Solov´ev and virtually all later historians use to describe the politics of this period?

Solov´ev ascribes to Kurbskii opposition to two specific innovations undertaken by the Muscovite rulers: the abrogation of the right of departure and the increasing use of new men (liudi novye), that is, d´iaki, in government.⁴⁹ Here again, Solov´ev is close to the truth but does not tell the whole story. Kurbskii argues that oaths exacted under force are not binding, but the fact remains that he never mentions the right of departure, and indeed doesn’t mention the argument about the invalidity of forced oaths until his third letter to Ivan after the latter has specifically accused him of breaking such an oath.⁵⁰ Now, since the right of departure was a prominent feature of the old order of things for which Kurbskii and the other aristocrats allegedly hankered, and since Kurbskii found himself in the embarrassing situation of having fled Muscovy, it is surprising that he hasn’t made more of this right of departure, which after all would have justified his flight and silenced one of Ivan’s most powerful arguments against him. What is notable is not that in this one instance Kurbskii obliquely referred to the right of departure, but that in the bulk of his polemics with Ivan, he made so little use of this right.

As evidence for Kurbskii’s opposition to new men, Solov´ev cites Kurbskii’s reference to "our Russian clerks [pisari], whom the grand prince puts great faith in—he chooses them, not from noble or high born stock but rather from priests’ sons or from the rank and file [ot prostago vsenarodstva]."⁵¹

Against this quotation, we could place another, cited a few pages earlier by Solov´ev himself. "Now a tsar, if he is honored by his realm but has not received certain gifts from God, must seek good and useful counsel not only from his advisers, but also from all kinds of men [no i u vsenarodnykh chelovek]."⁵² On the basis of the Correspondence and the History, Kurbskii can be made into a hater or a lover of new men.

However, taking these documents as a whole, Kurbskii seems to be more often an opponent than a supporter of new men, especially in the military, as when he describes the vagabonds (kaliki) who served as voevodas (generals or provincial governors) under the oprichnina.⁵³ But I don’t think this proves much. In general, Kurbskii considers one of the signs of a good government to be the just promotion of worthy men, and among the attributes of these deserving men is an eminent family. But there are many other qualities he ascribes to men deserving of high positions, such as wisdom, old age, piety, and skill in civil and military affairs.⁵⁴ There is evidence that Kurbskii, like most aristocrats of any time or place, felt a certain resentment against upstarts; Solov´ev’s main error was not in pointing out this feeling, but in exaggerating its importance until it became a major preoccupation. The resentment was Kurbskii’s, the preoccupation, Solov´ev’s.

There is also a short circuit in Solov´ev’s logic here. According to his own account, Ivan turned to the Syl´vestr and Adashev group, of which Kurbskii was an alleged member, as a way of freeing himself from that same conservative aristocratic opposition with a hankering after the old order of things that Kurbskii is supposed to represent.⁵⁵ Kurbskii thus finds himself on both sides of the struggle.

In fact, Kurbskii makes a poor champion of the boyar class. It is boyars who are responsible for the depravity of Ivan’s youth: After a few years his mother died too; then the great proud pans, or boyars in their tongue, brought him up—to their own misfortune and to the misfortune of their children—quarrelling with each other, flattering him, and pleasing him in every enjoyment and lust.⁵⁶

This is a strange way for Kurbskii to refer to his allies in the clash with the princes of Moscow. The boyars continue to be the main agents of Ivan’s corruption. It is boyars who seduce the tsar away from the saintly life into which Syl´vestr and Adashev, men of comparatively low birth, have led him. Just after the successful conquest of Kazan, for example, Ivan leaves for Moscow. His wise and judicious counselors advise him against this move, but he is persuaded to remain not by d´iaki or even by boyar children, but by his two brothers-in-law Daniil and Nikita Romanovich Yur´ev-Zakhar´in and other flatterers (drugi laskateli).⁵⁷

Solov´ev steadily pushes his evidence in a certain direction, in the direction of imputing to Kurbskii views that are more secular and political than the evidence warrants. And if the distortions in each case are small, the overall effect of them is not. For Solov´ev leaves us with the impression that Kurbskii’s main preoccupation was resentment that the boyars had lost their old rights: the right to be consulted, the right to depart, the right to fill the main positions in the government and army without competition from new men. Since these sentiments, or some approximation of them, are present in the evidence, one is at first inclined to agree with Solov´ev. But even these opinions, as we have seen, are not quite what they seem to be. More important, with the possible exception of the role of advisers, these opinions are not major preoccupations by any means. Kurbskii spends most of his time discussing the moral condition of Ivan at various points in his reign. He describes Ivan’s spiritual progress and not unreasonably relates the condition of the tsardom to the condition of the tsar. To transform this account into a kind of manifesto for the political aspirations of the declining boyar class demands not only the small misreadings of the sources but a major shift of emphasis from the moral to the political, and the exclusion of the bulk of the evidence.

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V. O. Kliuchevskii took over his teacher’s idea that the struggle between the Muscovite rulers and the boyars was the basis for sixteenth-century Muscovite politics. But whereas Solov´ev’s mind flew immediately to a conflict between two principles, Kliuchevskii connected each side with a particular kind of constitutional arrangement. The tsar aimed at autocracy, the boyars at a kind of constitutional monarchy with the tsar ruling through the Boyar Duma. The chief spokesman for the latter camp was, not surprisingly, Prince A. M. Kurbskii. Having just concluded his discussion of the boyar rule during Ivan’s minority with the observation that "the reason for its [the boyarstvo’s] disagreement with the ruler was not made clear at this time, Kliuchevskii continues, In the reign of Ivan the Terrible when the clash [stolknovenie] renewed itself, both sides in the dispute had a chance to express their political opinions more clearly, and to clarify the reasons for their mutual dislike. In 1564 the boyar Prince A. M. Kurbskii …"⁵⁸

The implication here, even more clearly than in Solov´ev’s work, is that Kurbskii is the mouthpiece for the boyar class, and that, at last, we can hear what the boyars (and Ivan as well) had to say for themselves. Throughout his discussion of Kurbskii’s writings, Kliuchevskii proceeds on this assumption; he never makes a distinction between Kurbskii’s private opinions and the opinions of the mass of boyars whom he is taken to represent. It is especially in the History, according to Kliuchevskii, that he expresses the political opinions of his boyar brothers. Kliuchevskii then goes on to make some revealing remarks:

Since both sides as it were confessed to each other, one would expect that they would express fully and frankly their political opinions [svoi politicheskie vozreniia], that is, the causes for their mutual hostility. But even in this polemic, carried out by both sides with great ardor and talent, we do not find a straightforward and clear answer about these causes: the polemic therefore does not relieve the reader of his perplexity. The letters of Kurbskii are all filled mainly with individual or class [soslovnymi] reproaches and political grievances [politicheskimi zhalobami], but in the History, he expresses several political and historical judgments of a general nature [obshchikh politicheskikh i istoricheskikh suzhdenii].⁵⁹

The first point of interest about these remarks is the admission that the polemic does not relieve the reader of his perplexity about the question at issue, which appears to be the question of Kurbskii’s and Ivan’s political opinions. If this observation is true, is it not strange that when Kurbskii, spokesman for the boyars, took the trouble to correspond at such length with the tsar, neither side should include their political opinions? Kliuchevskii gives us no answer to this puzzling question.

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Part of the confusion here stems from Kliuchevskii’s use of the term political opinions (politicheskie vozreniia). In the first sentence of the passage quoted above, he equates the phrases their political opinions and the reasons for their mutual hostility. Yet he does not seem to mean this, for both the Correspondence and the History abound in causes given by Kurbskii for his dislike of Ivan. Indeed, Kurbskii’s letters contain little else. Ivan is personally corrupt, surrounded by corrupt friends. He drinks, swears, massacres innocents, treats his friends badly, and is a sodomist to boot. One hardly needs more causes for Kurbskii’s hostility toward Ivan. But these reasons, religious and moral, are not what Kliuchevskii is searching for. The last sentence of the passage modifies his definition. There he implies that he is not looking for individual or class reproaches or even political grievances but for political and historical opinions of a general nature.

These are exceptionally hard to find in Kurbskii’s writings, as Kliuchevskii or anyone else who has read them will attest. The great bulk of these writings are devoted to demonstrating the religious and moral corruption that characterizes the tsar, his family, and his government. By the way in which he frames his question, therefore, Kliuchevskii refuses to consider most of the evidence at his disposal, that is the great majority of Kurbskii’s writing that concerns personal or class reproaches or political grievances. His desire to see Kurbskii as a constitutional or political thinker prevents him from listening to precisely those considerations on which Kurbskii, for whatever reasons, lavished most of his attention.⁶⁰

In fact, Kliuchevskii seems to have been looking for nothing less than a constitutional theory, a plan for the political organization of the land.⁶¹ To understand the way in which he extracted this plan, the reader must bear with an even longer quotation.

In Kurbskii we even come across political judgments similar to principles, to theory. He regards as normal only that governmental organization that is based not on the individual judgment of the autocracy, but on the participation of a sinklit, or boyar council [boiarskogo soveta] in the government. In order to carry out governmental affairs successfully and in good order [blagochinno] the ruler must get advice from the boyars [sovetovat´sia s boiarami]. The tsar should be the head and should love his wise advisers [sovetnikov] like his own limbs: thus Kurbskii expresses the just and seemly relations of the tsar with the boyars. His entire History is built on one thought, the beneficent activity of the boyar council. The tsar ruled wisely and gloriously when he was surrounded by well-born and just advisers. Therefore the tsar ought to confide in his royal dumas and not in individual well-born and truthful counselors. Prince Kurbskii allows even for popular participation in government; he stands for both the advantage and the necessity of the zemskii sobor. In his History, he relates just such a political thesis: "Now a tsar, if he is honored by his realm but has not received certain gifts from God, must seek good and useful counsel [sovet] not only from his advisers but also from men of all ranks [ne tol´ko u sovetnikov no i u vsenarodnykh chelovek], for the gift of the spirit is granted not according to worldly wealth and the strength of the realm, but according to righteousness of soul. By this men of all ranks," Kurbskii could only have understood an assembly of people summoned for advice from the different estates, from all the land: in camera consultation with separate individuals was hardly to his taste. Here are almost all of Kurbskii’s political opinions. The prince stands for the governmental significance of the boyar council and the participation in government of the zemskii sobor.⁶²

Let’s begin with the end of the argument. Kliuchevskii claims on the basis of the passage cited that Kurbskii envisioned a zemskii sobor as a regular part of government. This jump from all ranks of men to a constitutional body, the zemskii sobor, is the most obvious weakness in the exposition. It is not at all clear that Kurbskii could only have understood a zemskii sobor in this instance, and Kliuchevskii’s statement doesn’t make it any clearer. What is clear is Kliuchevskii’s imposition of a constitutional or institutional interpretation on words the plain sense of which points in a very different direction.

I think Kliuchevskii is guilty of the same reification or institutionalization in the case of the boyar council, although the Russian word sovet makes the transitions in meaning more difficult to detect. This word encompasses a spectrum of meanings from advice or counsel through a loose group of advisers or council to a constitutional body with a corporate identity and a fixed membership. And whereas when Kurbskii used the word, he intended a looser, more general meaning, Kliuchevskii used it in a sense with definite constitutional implications. In considering the passage directly quoted from Kurbskii, Kliuchevskii changes Kurbskii’s statement that the tsar should seek good and useful advice … from his advisers to "the governmental significance of the boyar council [boiarsago soveta]. That boyar council or even Boyar Council was meant in this case and not the advice of the boyars is evident in the next page when he says The Boyar Council [boiarskii sovet] and the zemskii sobor were already at that time political facts."⁶³ The institutional sense with which Kliuchevskii invested the term sovet is also evident a little earlier in the argument where he states that, in Kurbskii’s opinion, the tsar ought to confide in his royal dumas and not in individual well-born and just advisers. The use of the word duma has a more clearly constitutional sense than sovet—the royal dumas are evidently the Boyar Council and the zemskii sobor. Thus in the first part of the argument Kliuchevskii moves from the wise advisers of Kurbskii’s body metaphor to boyar council to royal dumas, constitutional bodies that by implication prevent the tsar from taking advice from an individual adviser or friend. Such ideas are common enough in English constitutional history (for example, the fear of Fox and the Rockingham Whigs that King George III was being influenced by a minister behind the drapes), but how far do they apply to a sixteenth-century Muscovite boyar? This imposition of a constitutional relationship to the tsar, this assumption that Kurbskii did not want the tsar to consult with individual well-born and truthful advisers, is Kliuchevskii’s and not Kurbskii’s.

It is ironic that the clearest statement of Kurbskii’s view of advice and advice givers is contained in the very passage of Kurbskii’s that Kliuchevskii quotes. The point of this passage is not darkly expressed nor difficult to understand. Good counsel or wisdom is a gift of God. If a tsar has not been granted this gift, then he must seek advice from counselors. The qualification for counselorship is not rank or wealth, not membership in one or another constitutional body, but righteousness of soul (po pravosti duchevnoi). Kurbskii had just spent a good deal of time explaining that, according to Saint John Chrysostom, the gift of counsel was a gift of God, a gift of the spirit. He cites the example of Moses, a powerful and glorious ruler who conversed with god, who divided the sea, who destroyed the god of Pharaoh and the mighty Amalekites, who worked most wondrous miracles, and yet who did not possess the gift of counsel. And whom did Moses consult? Not a man of noble birth, not a member of some council or other, but his father-in-law.⁶⁴

Kurbskii does not consider all sovets, radas, and dumas good in themselves. Arrogant counselors (siglitove) urge Ivan to greater ferocity in his youth.⁶⁵ The advisers of the khan of Kazan´ are all referred to as senators (senaty).⁶⁶ We even are told of the first duma of men-pleasers.⁶⁷

When describing Ivan’s final fall from righteousness just before the trial of Syl´vestr and Adashev, Kurbskii movingly states: "And thus, with countless other tissues of lies, in agreement with their father the devil … they deceived their man with flattering words and overthrew the soul of the Christian tsar, and thus they broke that bond which was woven by God in spiritual love [sitse rasterzaiut plenitsu onuiu, Bogom sopletenuiu v liubov´ dukhovnuiu]."⁶⁸ There, it seems to me, is the heart of Kurbskii’s theory of good counselors. God’s favor and wisdom are the essential attributes of a good counselor, and the relationship between him and the tsar is woven by God in spiritual love.

To be fair to Kliuchevskii, we must admit that he felt considerable misgivings about his own conclusions. The chapters of both the Kurs and the Boiarskaia Duma begin with gusto and end in perplexity. In the Kurs, Kliuchevskii finally decides that there isn’t so much difference between Ivan’s and Kurbskii’s views, since they both support the existing order of things. In the Boiarskaia Duma, he notes with surprise that the sixteenth-century boyars failed to use three potentially useful weapons to defend their threatened position: mestnichestvo (the Muscovite precedence system), the Duma, and their bastion of local power, the gubnoi elderships. He explains how important each of these was. And yet they were never used. Kurbskii never mentions either the first or the last, and never refers by name to the Duma: "The observer who is acquainted with the tactics of ruling classes in other countries and at other times will be struck by the lack of political foresight or the excess of political light-heartedness of the Muscovite boiarstvo of the sixteenth century."⁶⁹

It seems to me that if Kliuchevskii had listened more carefully to what Kurbskii or Kurbskii was saying, at least some of the reasons for this apparent lack of foresight would have become clear. For by finding in Kurbskii’s work a social, political, and constitutional awareness that was in fact absent, Kliuchevskii was able then to project this awareness on to the rest of the sixteenth-century Muscovite boiarstvo, thus creating an opposition party with its own ideology that clashed or struggled with the autocracy. But if we take into account our own conclusions about these documents, that their vocabulary and logic are loose, that their arguments have a religious basis, that political and social views are very hard to find in them, then perhaps we should change our views about this boyar opposition and about the nature of Muscovite politics as a whole.

What lesson can we learn from this little historiographical excursion? We should stand warned against a particular kind of error in the use of sources. This kind of error arises not from illegible manuscripts, dark places where the meaning is unclear, or from later interpolations in earlier texts. It arises from a misunderstanding between the historian and his source, when each uses the same words but means different things. In this case, two very eminent historians imposed their own meanings on the words of a given source, consistently pushing them in a secular, political direction, investing them with a social or constitutional meaning that their author did not put in them. In order to understand sources from a culture as remote from ours as sixteenth-century Muscovy we must at least try to get some notion as to how the people who wrote these documents thought, especially about politics. This is what I propose to do.

Notes

This littler essay was written almost entirely in the spring of 1969, toward the end of my second official year in graduate school at Yale. I wrote it for my own wise adviser, Robert Crummey, who had assigned a topic entirely different from this one. (I did complete the original assignment.) I include it here not because it is a great work of scholarship, but because it shows me trying to work on a problem that has preoccupied me ever since: How can modern historians more accurately interpret cultural evidence from Muscovite Russia? Edward Keenan’s major book (The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha) questioning the authenticity of both Kurbskii’s Correspondence with Ivan IV and his History was published in 1971 by Harvard University Press, and has occasioned much debate, both pro and con. I am a firm supporter of Keenan’s hypothesis, and so for me this essay relates more to historiography—how three seminal historians of Russia interpreted a famous set of texts—than to what that evidence tells us about Russia. But the significance of the Kurbskii corpus remains, only now the evidence applies to seventeenth-century, rather then sixteenth-century, Muscovy, a discussion now well under way.

Although the format of the notes has been modernized, I am presenting the essay pretty much exactly as it was written almost fifty years ago, though I must have added the references to Nebel and to Grabovsky slightly later. I have therefore resisted the temptation to delete the cheeky last sentence and other youthfully overconfident passages. I have relied on John Fennell’s translations for the Kurbskii texts, but the translations of texts from Karamzin, Solov´ev, and Kliuchevskii are mine.

1. The best easily available source in English about Kurbskii’s early life is in N. Andreyev, Kurbsky’s Letters to Vas´yan Muromtsev, Slavonic and East European Review 33, no. 81 (1955): 414–436, on which most of this very short account is based on.

2. For Anastasia, see the genealogy in A. M. Kurbskii, Skazaniia kniazia Kurbskago, ed. N. G. Ustrialov (Saint Petersburg: Tipografiia Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1868), end of vol. 1. For Bel´skii and Tuchkov, see A. N. Iasinskii, Sochineniia kniazia Kurbskogo kak istoricheskii material (Kiev: Tip. Imp. Universiteta sv. Vladimira, 1889), 26–27, cited in Andreyev, Kurbsky’s Letters, 419.

3. See Kurbskii’s preface to his edition of the Novyi Margarit, ed. Ustrialov, 273–274, and his remark in his History that Maksim trusted him along with several others to remonstrate with Ivan IV about his decision to go to the Kyrillo-Belozerskii Monastery, cited in J. L. I. Fennell, ed. and trans., Prince A. M. Kurbsky’s History of Ivan IV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 80–81, hereafter cited as History.

4. See Kurbskii’s disparaging remarks about Muscovy, that land which was, I say, indeed ungrateful and unworthy to receive learned men … the land of fierce barbarians. Fennell, History, 212–213. Except where noted, I use Fennell’s excellent and elegant translations.

5. Iasinskii, Sochineniia, 27; Andreyev, Kurbsky’s Lettters, 419.

6. V. I. Buganov, ed., Razriadnaia kniga 1475–1598 gg (Moscow: Izd. Nauka, 1966), citations listed under Kurbskii’s name in index.

7. J. L. I. Fennell, ed. and trans., The Correspondence between Prince A. M. Kurbsky and Tsar Ivan IV of Russia 1564–1579 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 6–7 (hereafter cited as Correspondence).

8. Fennell, Correspondence, 210–213.

9. Fennell, History, 74–91.

10. Fennell, History, 136–137, Fennell translates liubovnymi as amiable.

11. Edward Keenan at Harvard apparently doubts that Kurbskii was indeed the author of these works. Since his work has not been published, and also for stylistic reasons, I continue to refer to Kurbskii as the author, avoiding such awkward devices as encircling Kurbskii’s name in quotation marks, or perhaps referring to him as pseudo-Kurbskii. Since the main argument of this essay is historiographical rather than historical, however, Keenan’s conclusions, if they are true, should not interfere too much.

12. Fennell, Correspondence, ix.

13. Fennell, History, 2–9.

14. Indeed, Metropolitan Daniil, the leading Josephian during Vasilii’s reign, is called that most proud and fierce man later. Fennell, History, 76–77.

15. A. N. Grobovsky, The Chosen Council of Ivan IV: A Reinterpretation (Brooklyn, NY: Gaus, 1969) very skillfully points out the misunderstandings that resulted from this imprecision in the use of adjectives in the case of the phrase izbrannaia rada (chosen council). Needless to say, I am a great admirer of Grobovsky’s work.

16. Fennell, History, 16–23, 78–90, 152–157.

17. Fennell, History, 176–177.

18. Fennell, History, 238–241. Kurbskii varies in his ascription of responsibility for the corruption of human nature between free human will, as in this passage and the little section we have been examining at the beginning of the history, and the devil himself. For example, Consider now with attentiveness what our implacable enemy the devil devises (80–81).

19. Fennell, History, 8–17.

20. Fennell, History, 18–21.

21. Fennell, History, 80–83.

22. Fennell, History, 102–103.

23. Fennell, History, 122–127.

24. Fennell, History, 152–155.

25. N. M. Karamzin, Istoriia Gosudarstva Rossiiskago, 3rd. ed., vols. 8 and 9 (Saint Peterburg: Tip. A. Pliushara, 1830–1831).

26. See Karamzin, Istoriia, 8:98–120, for this conversion and its results.

27. Karamzin, Istoriia, 8:114.

28. Karamzin, Istoriia, 9:4.

29. Karamzin, Istoriia, 8:241. See 8:234–247 for the succession crisis.

30. Karamzin, Istoriia, 8:362.

31. Karamzin,