The Icon and the Axe

itself could not have produced on the toughened Muscovite mentality? The

. .image of the tsar as_Jeader-ofChristian empire, which IvanJn^donejio .-«-MtaucTTtoTmcourage, was severely damaged. The divinized prince-the focal point of all loyalties and "national" sentiment in this paternalistic society- had renounced his divinity. The image was impaired not so much by the fact that Ivan was a murderer many tinies~Qyef""as by the identity of two of his victims. In murdering Metropolitan Philip of Moscow in 1568, Ivan sought primarily to rid himself of a leading member of a boyar family suspected of disloyalty. But by murdering a revered First Prelate of the Church, Ivan

passed on to Philip something of the halo of Russia's first national saints, Boris and Gleb, who had voluntarily accepted a guiltless death in order to redeem the Russian people from their sin. Philip's remains were venerated in the distant monastery of Solovetsk, which began to rival St. Sergius at nearby Zagorsk as a center for pilgrimage. The close ties between the great monasteries and the grand dukes of Muscovy were beginning to loosen.

An even more serious shock to the Muscovite ideology was Ivan^ "^ murder of his son, heir, and namesake: Ivan, the tsarevich. The Tsar's claim to absolute kingship was based on an unbroken succession from the distant 1 apostolic and imperial past. Having spelled this genealogy out more fully 1 and fancifully than ever before, Ivan now broke the sacred chain with his 1 own hands. In so doing he lost some of the aura of a God-chosen Christian warrior andjQld Testament king, which had surrounded him since his* victory at Kazan.

The martyred Philip and Ivan became new heroes of Russian folklore; and the Tsar's enemies thus became in many eyes the true servants of "holy Russia." In the religious crisis of the seventeenth century both contending factions traced their ancestry to Philip: Patriarch Nikon, who theatrically transplanted his remains to Moscow, and the Old Believers, who revered him as a saint. In the political crises of the seventeenth century the idea was born that Ivan the_ Isareyich had survived after all, that there still existed a "true tsar" with unbroken links to apostolic times. Ivan himself had helped launch the legend by donating the unprecedented sum of five thousand rubles to the Monastery of St. Sergius to subsidize memorial services for his son.92

The struggle between the two became one of the most recurrent of all themesjn the popirlur songs of early modern Russia.93 The most dramatic of all nineteenth-century Russian historical paintings is probably Repin's crimson-soaked canvas of Ivan's murder of his son, and Dostoevsky entitled the key chapter in The Possessed, his prophetic novel of revolution, "Ivan the Tsarevich."

Ivan the Terrible was succeeded by a feeble-minded son Fedor, whose , death in 1598 (following the mysterious murder of Ivan's only other son, the young prince Dmitry, in 1591) brought to an end the old line of imperial -V* successionTThe"accession to the throne of the regent Boris Godunov represented a further affront to"the Muscovite mentality7Boris, who had a non-boyar, partly Tatar genealogy, was elected amidst venal political controversy by "a zemsky sobor, and with the connivance of the Patriarch of Russia (whose position had been created only recently, in 1589, and by the somewhat suspect authority of foreign Orthodox leaders). Kurbsky's anti-autocratic insistence that the Tsar seek council "from men of all the

people" was seemingly gratified by the official proclamation that Boris was chosen by representatives of "all the popular multitude."94

Once in power, Boris became an active and systematic Westernizer. He encoufagecHEe European practice of shaving. Economic contacts were greatly expanded at terms favorable to foreign entrepreneurs; thirty selected future leaders of Russia were sent abroad to study; important positions were assigned to foreigners; imperial protection was afforded the foreign community; Lutheran churches were tolerated not only in Moscow but as far afield as Nizhny Novgorod; and the crown prince of Denmark was brought to Moscow to marry Boris' daughter Xenia, after an unsuccessful bid by a rival ^Swedish prince.