The Icon and the Axe

The mounting fury of Ivan IV's last years seems less a product of his paranoia than of a kind of schizophrenia. Ivan was, in effect, two people :* a true believer in an exclusivist, traditional ideology and a successful practitioner of experimental modern statecraft. Because the two roles were fre-queritly in "cSffiflict,~ffir~relgn became a tissue of contradictions. His" personality was increasingly ravaged by those alternations of violent outburst and total withdrawal that occur in those who are divided against themselves.

The Livonian War provides the background of contradiction and irony. Launched for astute economic and political reasons, the war was portrayed as a Christian crusade in much the same manner that the Livonian order hadfohce spoken of its forays with Russia. To aid in fighting, this zealot of Orthodoxy participated in a mixed Lutheran-Orthodox church service, marrying his niece to a Lutheran Danish prince whom he also proclaimed king of Livonia. At the same time, Ivan made strenuous, if pathetic, efforts to arrange for himself an English marriage.86 To aid in makihgpeace, Ivan turned first to a Czech Protestant in the service of the Poles and theh to an Italian Jesuit in the service of the Pope.87 Though antagonisticJx› both, Ivan found a measure of agreement with each by joiniug in the damnation of the other. He was, characteristically, hardest on the Protestants oh whom he was most dependent-calling the Czech negotiator J^not so muclf a heretic [as] a servant of the satanic council of the Antichrists."88

Meanwhile^this defender of total autocracy_had_become thejirst ruler in Russian^istOTj_Jo_s^mmpn_„a representative national assembly: the zemsky sobor of 1566. This was an act of pure political improvisation on the part of this avowed traditionalist. In an effort to support an extension of the war into Lithuania, Ivan sought to attracTwandering western Russian noblemen accustomed to the aristocratic assemblies (sejmiki) of Lithuania, while simultaneously enlisting the new wealth of the cities by adopting the more inclusive European system of three-estate representation.89 As constitutional seduction gave way to military assault, Lithuania hastened to consummate its hitherto Platonic political link with Poland. The purely aristocratic "diet (sejm) that pronounced this union at Lublin in 1569 was far less broadly representative than Ivan's sobor of 1566; but it acquired, the importahTrbTe of electing the king of the new multi-national republic (Rzeczpospolitd) when the Jagellonian dynasty became extinct in 1572.

Ivan and his successors (like almost every other European house) participated vigorously in the parliamentary intrigues of this body, particu-

larly during the Polish succession crisis of 1586. Then, in 1598, when the line of succession came to an end in Russia also, they turned to the Polish procedure of electing a ruler-the ill-fated Boris Godunov-in a specially convened zemsky sobor: the first since 1566. For a quarter of a century thereafter these sobers became even more broadly representative, and were in many ways thestrpfeme political authority in the nation. Not only in 1598"" but in 1606, 1610, 1611, and 1613 roughly similar representative bodies made the crucial decisions on the choice of succession to the throne.90 / Despite many differences in composition and function, these councils aff / j shared the original aim of Ivan's council of 1566: to attract western Rus-!"-'| sians away from the Polish-Lithuanian sejm and to create a more effective I fund-raising body by imitating the multi-state assemblies of the North ^/European Protestant nations.91

Thus, ironically, this most serious of all proto-parliamentary challenges to Muscovite autocracy originated in the statecraft of its seemingly most adamant apologist. Increasingly torn by contradiction, Ivan brought the first printing press to Moscow and sponsored the first printed Russian book, The Acts of the Apostles, in 1564. Then, the following year, he let a mob burn the press and drive the printers away to Lithuania. He increased the imperial subsidies and the numbers of pilgrimages to monasteries, then sponsored irreverent parodies of Orthodox worship at the oprichnik retreat in Alexandrovsk. Unable to account for the complexities of a rapidly changing world, Ivan intensified his terror against Westernizing elements in the years just before abolishing the oprichnina in 1572. In 1570, he razed and depopulated Novgorod once again, and summarily executed Viskovaty, one of his closest and most worldly confidants. One year later, Moscow was sacked and burned by a sudden Tatar invasion. In 1575, Ivan-the first man ever to be crowned tsar in Russia-retired to Alexandrovsk and abdicated tKeTitle in favor of a converted Tatar khan. Though he soon resumed his rule, he used the imperial title much less after this strange episode/

Ivan's denigration of princely authority provided a shock that terror by