Nature's Evil

This was the era of travel without maps, the hasty colonisation of distant lands, and well-thought-out ‘alliances’ with neighbouring countries. In 1553 three English ships, watched by the boy king Edward VI, set off from Greenwich to seek a new route to China through the northern seas. The ships were locked in the ice of the White Sea; one of the captains, Richard Chancellor, was saved by the Pomors, a northern people who had long been under the rule of Moscow. Chancellor managed to reach Moscow, conducted successful talks with Ivan IV (the Terrible), and took back to England a present of furs. More importantly, the tsar granted him a monopoly on trade in the White Sea. A year later Chancellor set off back to Russia, taking presents from the new English queen, Mary Tudor, to Tsar Ivan. He drowned on this voyage, but the English equated his discovery of Russia with the Spanish discovery of America. Another heroic Englishman, Anthony Jenkinson, sailed across the White Sea four times and reached Persia this way. All the same, he didn’t succeed in finding a new route to India; having entered Khwarazm in present-day Uzbekistan, he realised that he was on the old Silk Road. But Ivan the Terrible granted the English the right to trade freely and without duties, wholesale and retail, on the White Sea and throughout Russia; from there they could trade with third parties such as Persia or India. Most important was the English monopoly on trade on the White Sea; other foreigners, for example the Dutch, were forbidden to land on its shores or islands. The English were granted other unusual privileges – e.g., they were not subject to the Russian courts, and if they committed a crime on Russian territory they had to answer only to the Muscovy Company in London. They were also presented with a house in Moscow (now a museum, the Old English Court, not far from the Kremlin). They were given the right to establish trading posts in the north. The most important trading post was at Kholmogory, and there the English started a factory, making rope from local hemp. Customs officials and local governors did not have the right to interfere in Muscovy Company business. 9

What Ivan and his English partners created was a political regime intended to benefit traders and enrich the ruler. Today this would be called a special economic zone. Ivan called it ‘oprichnina ’. History textbooks use it untranslated, as if it were a proper name. In fact, the word comes from ‘oprich ’, which means ‘except’, ‘out-of-this’, ‘exceptional’, combined with the usual ending ‘nina ’ which means a domain or condition. The best translation of this Russian word is ‘the state of exception’. * Under the direct rule of Ivan, this state-within-the-state existed on the Russian land from 1565 to 1572.

Fighting endless wars, Ivan the Terrible needed allies and funds. He knew that he could no longer rely on the old source of revenue for the Moscow exchequer – fur: the tsar’s agents in Siberia reported difficulty in finding decent pelts. When the English adventurers expressed interest in the abundant hemp and pine trees in the estuary of the Dvina, it seemed like a miraculous solution to Ivan’s problems. English trade gave a boost to the White Sea coast at the very moment when Russian troops were losing their battle for access to the Baltic Sea.

Ivan’s new State of Exception controlled the convenient harbours of the White Sea, the upper course of the Volga, which the English had hoped to use as the route to Persia, and the profitable salt deposits on the Kama River. It had twenty cities, where about 6,000 special troops – oprichniki , ‘the exceptional ones’ – were stationed. The new capital assigned for this internal colony, Vologda, was the starting point of the river route to the White Sea and also the point of departure for long overland routes to Siberia. The construction of a new Kremlin in Vologda began, and a wharf and a rope factory were built. Later a new seaport, Arkhangelsk, was fortified. Expanding his State of Exception, Ivan destroyed the rival commercial centres, Novgorod and Pskov. His old capital, Moscow, had to send him enormous sums of money when he was not there. Initiated by the new authorities, pogroms resettled thousands of commoners from the old to the new commercial centres.