Who was part of the oprichnina. When was oprichnina created and what is it: causes and consequences

Oprichnina - period at the end of the 16th century. in Rus', characterized by terror and bloody crimes of the vigilantes of Tsar Ivan the Terrible.

Characteristics of the oprichnina

The word “oprichnina” usually refers to several phenomena. The word comes from the Old Russian “oprich”, which means “special”, which is what Ivan the Terrible called his personal warriors who guarded him and committed atrocities by his decree. This is where the name of the entire historical period came from. In addition, Ivan the Terrible and his oprichniki took away lands and money from the people in favor of the tsar and the royal retinue; this phenomenon is also called oprichnina.

Thus, the essence of the oprichnina is the seizure of property from citizens in favor of the state through particularly cruel methods.

Oprichnina was the result of state reforms in 1565 carried out by Ivan the Terrible.

The beginning of the oprichnina, the reasons for its occurrence

The creation of a special guard and guardsmen was associated with the Livonian War. Ivan the Terrible was famous for his stern disposition and suspicion. In 1558, he started the Livonian War, the goal of which was to conquer new lands on the Baltic coast. Unfortunately, the war did not proceed as quickly and successfully as the tsar wanted, so he repeatedly expressed his dissatisfaction and reproached the governors for conducting military operations incorrectly.

Failures accumulated, and this aroused suspicion among Ivan the 4th. Quite soon, he came to the conclusion that there was a secret conspiracy against him, in which the boyars (who never supported his military decisions) and the governors participated. In confirmation of the king’s words, during the Livonian War, one of the governors () betrayed him and went over to the enemy’s side.

As a result, the king, tormented by suspicion, decides that they want to kill him and take his place. To protect himself, Ivan the Terrible creates a special retinue consisting of a thousand people, which he calls oprichniki. Ivan the 4th orders them to monitor his safety and the inviolability of royal power. The guardsmen included boyars and ordinary soldiers, as well as representatives of other segments of the population. Over time, the guardsmen began to represent an analogue of the royal court.

Main events of the oprichnina

Ivan the Terrible was very afraid for his power and life and suspected treason everywhere, so he quite often forced the guardsmen to execute people. The actions of the tsar's soldiers sometimes went beyond his orders and became extremely brutal: the guardsmen killed, robbed and took away property, often from innocent people. The king turned a blind eye to this, worrying only about his own safety.

The huge retinue had to be supported somehow. Ivan the Terrible, together with the guardsmen, decides to leave for Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda and organizes a settlement there, from where he manages state affairs and carries out executions of alleged state traitors. During the same period, a decree was adopted according to which funds and lands were to be received for the use of the state, which would then be directed to the maintenance of the guardsmen. Despite the decree, lands were often taken by force. By this time, the boyars, princes and ordinary people were already extremely dissatisfied with the atrocities of the tsar, but everyone who tried to stop him died.

In 1569, information reached Ivan the 4th that Novgorod was allegedly preparing a campaign against him with the aim of regicide. Ivan gathers a huge army of guardsmen and moves towards Novgorod to reason with the state traitors. While the tsar, having entered the city, tried to find the culprits, his guardsmen robbed and killed the inhabitants, taking their property for themselves.

After Novgorod, the tsar moved to Pskov, where he saw a new conspiracy. In Pskov, the guardsmen limited themselves to a few executions of residents whom the tsar called traitors.

The era of rampant oprichnina has arrived. In 1570-1571 Ivan the Terrible returns to Moscow. By this point, the tsar sees conspiracies almost everywhere, so real terror begins in Moscow. Almost everyone was executed, including those closest to the king. The guardsmen, on the orders of Ivan the 4th, and sometimes of their own free will, brutally beat people, maimed them, and took away their property and money. Moscow was mired in chaos and blood.

The end of the oprichnina

In 1571, the Crimean Khan attacked Rus'. Ivan the Terrible sends his guardsmen against him, but they refuse to go to war, continuing to rob ordinary citizens. Seeing what his reforms led to, Ivan the Terrible abolishes the oprichnina and replaces it with a softer version - zemshchina (allocates a part of the state to the boyars and his associates to govern). However, according to historians, only the name has changed, but the essence remains the same. But, fortunately, the terror has subsided.

Consequences of the oprichnina

Results of the oprichnina 1565-1572. extremely sad. The guardsmen's retinue was created in order to protect the king and avoid fragmentation of the state, but instead of benefit it brought only troubles. Rus', exhausted by terror, found itself in a difficult economic and political situation, many people were killed, and the defense capability of the state also suffered. The oprichnina divided the country into parts and led it to a serious decline.

The period from 1560 to 1584 was the time of the harsh dictatorship of Ivan 4. In 1560, his first wife, Anastasia Romanova, died. It was during this period that all the bad traits of his character came out: cruelty, suspicion, suspiciousness, deceit. In 1560, relations between the Tsar and the Elected Rada deteriorated. One of the reasons for the contention was differences in the field of foreign policy. And the real reason was the long-overdue desire to rule independently. He saw betrayals and conspiracies everywhere. He believed that peaceful methods of fighting the boyar clans were insufficient. His advisers from the Chosen Council were believers and virtuous people, they prevented the king from giving free rein to his bad instincts, his innate tendency to cruelty and tyranny. All members of the Chosen Rada did not escape disgrace.

Opal – discontent, distrust of the ruler towards one of his subjects; those who fall into disgrace are persecuted: resignation, exile, confiscation of property, accusation of treason, execution. A. Adashev was sent to the Livonian War, where he died of illness. Priest Sylvester was exiled to the Solovetsky Monastery, diplomat I. Viskovaty was executed, and Prince A. Kurbsky, saving his life, was forced to flee to Lithuania.

Oprichnina (1565-72) - this is a special territory and control system where a military dictatorship has been introduced and political terror is used to fight against its political opponents.

The main reason for the oprichnina was Ivan 4.’s desire for unlimited power.

The main tasks of the oprichnina:

Establishment of unlimited power of the king,

The fight against the independence of the boyar aristocracy,

Liquidation of specific holdings.

2. The main events of the oprichnina.

In December 1564, Ivan 4 unexpectedly left Moscow and settled in Alexandrova Sloboda (110 km from Moscow). He sends 2 letters to Moscow, in which he stated that he was leaving the throne. One letter is addressed to the common people, in which Ivan 4 writes that he holds no grudge against common people and complains about the betrayals of the boyars. The second letter is addressed to the boyars, where they are accused of treason.

Everyone was shocked, no one could imagine a state without a tsar; many well remembered the autocracy of the boyars during Ivan’s childhood. The people took to the streets of Moscow and demanded that the boyars and clergy return the Tsar. The Boyar Duma sent a delegation to Alexandrov Sloboda and a petition to the Tsar to return to the throne. Ivan agreed to return under certain conditions. This is how the oprichnina arose.

The tsar divided the country into 2 parts - the oprichnina and the zemshchina.

He included economically developed territories in the oprichnina: Pomorie, the lands of the Stroganovs in the Urals, a number of settlements in Moscow, boyar estates, the boyars were expelled from these estates.

The remaining territories made up the zemshchina.

The oprichnina was ruled by the tsar and guarded by the oprichnina army (6 thousand people). The Zemshchina was governed by the Boyar Duma.

Oprichnina violated the traditional order of government. The tsar behaved in the estates of the disgraced boyars as if in enemy territory.

Metropolitan Filaret openly opposed the oprichnina. This cost the metropolitan his life.

1566-68 – mass repressions, 500 people were executed, Metropolitan Philaret dies.

Metropolitan Filaret (Fedor Kolychev) - a representative of a noble boyar family, served at court, then took monastic vows at the Solovetsky Monastery. After the death of Metropolitan Macarius, he accepted this rank. He was an honest and brave man. He was killed by Malyuta Skuratov.

Malyuta Skuratov ( nobleman Grigory Skuratov-Belsky) is the most cruel executioner among the guardsmen of Ivan 4. He led the executions and pogroms in Novgorod.

1569-70 – reprisal against the family of appanage prince Andrei Staritsky, cousin of Ivan 4.

1570 - campaign against Novgorod, the whole city was accused of treason, 15 thousand residents of Novgorod were executed.

1570 – mass execution in Moscow, clerk I. Viskovaty dies.

In 1571, Russia was attacked by the Crimean Khan Devlet-Girey. The oprichnina army, which killed defenseless people, turned out to be unable to resist a well-trained army. In 1572, the Crimeans were defeated by the Zemstvo army near the village of Molodi under the command of governor M. Vorotynsky. The tsar, in his spirit, “rewarded” Vorotynsky - following a false denunciation, he was arrested, tortured and died on the way to exile.

After Devlet-Girey’s raid, the tsar forbade oprichnina, and even mentioning this word. His anger had already fallen on the guardsmen.

Almost every person is familiar with the term “oprichnina”. Is this word usually associated with the dark times of confrontation between Ivan the Terrible, the descendants of appanage princes and oprichniks? This is a man who served in the ranks of the oprichnina army, or guard, created by Tsar Ivan IV as part of the political reform of 1565.

History of the creation of the oprichnina

Tired of the boyars' lust for power and the arbitrariness of the princely aristocracy, which began to imagine itself as co-ruler of the sovereign, in 1565 Ivan the Terrible introduced a reform by decree. It was called oprichnina. Its goal was to deprive the king's opponents of all importance and power. From now on, the whole country was divided into two parts: the oprichnina and the zemstvo (territories not included in the oprichnina). The first included the northeastern lands, where a small number of patrimonial boyars were concentrated. The oprichnina lasted for seven years, but the memory of it is still fresh.

Direct participants in the reform

Who is the guardsman? First of all, this is an employee of the sovereign who was in the ranks of the oprichnina army. It could be a representative of different masses. The Tsar's guardsman swore an oath of allegiance. At the same time, he renounced his family and promised not to communicate with the zemstvo.

The characteristics of the guardsman included a distinctive feature - black robes, similar to those of a monk. In addition, they had special signs - the image of a broom and a dog's head. This symbolized a firm determination to sweep away and chew out the betrayal. Thus, everyone could determine who the guardsman was. Subsequently, this word itself became a dirty word among the people.

The essence of the activities of the guardsmen

All descendants of appanage princes who seemed suspicious to Ivan the Terrible were removed from the lands united into the royal possessions. All of them were subject to resettlement to new lands and the very outskirts of the state. According to the king, traitors there could not pose any danger to the throne. Small landowners and nobles settled on the former land holdings of the resettled people.

The oprichnik's day consisted of ruin and expulsion of the old nobility. Ivan the Terrible called it “sorting out little people.” During the entire period of persecution of those disliked by the tsar, almost half of the state was collected into the oprichnina. The remaining half was in the same position and was called “zemshchina”. I managed there

Of course, all these measures ran into active opposition. Most powerful people did not approve of Russia's course towards centralization and the elimination of old liberties. Therefore, opponents of the changes artificially or nullified a considerable share of the oprichniki’s cases. These people had allies in other countries, in particular Poland. Many traitors passed on information to their opponents, and the king had information about this.

Responsibilities of the guardsmen

The leak of important state information posed an immediate threat to the ruler. Therefore, the guardsman’s day included guarding Ivan IV. In fact, this meant the creation of the first in All those who swore allegiance were obliged to serve like dogs, to protect their sovereign and power. You can imagine who the guardsman is by familiarizing yourself with the activities of famous personalities: Malyuta Skuratov, boyar Alexei Basmanov, Prince Afanasy Vyazemsky.

Main characters

Malyuta Skuratov is a nickname, but the oprichnik’s real name was Grigory Lukyanovich Skuratov-Belsky. Thanks to his strict adherence to the tsar’s instructions during times of change in the country, he very quickly became one of those closest to Ivan the Terrible. He became popularly known as the main villain of those times. This happened mainly due to the January events of 1570. Novgorod was suspected of treason, and therefore Malyuta undertook to lead pogroms in the city, during which residents were slaughtered in the thousands. You can also imagine who the guardsman is by hearing the popular saying: “The Tsar is not as terrible as his Malyuta.” It was Skuratov who became an active executor of all government affairs.

The main inspirer of the oprichnina was Alexey Basmanov. He became its leading figure, blindly following all the king’s instructions. Basmanov stained himself by deposing Metropolitan Philip, driving him out of the cathedral with a broom.

The tsar's immediate advisor and one of the main guardsmen was Prince Afanasy Vyazemsky. He had the unlimited trust of Ivan the Terrible. Despite this, at the end of the Novgorod pogrom, Vyazemsky, like Basmanov, was accused of organizing plans to transfer Novgorod and Pskov to Lithuania.

Thus, the guardsman was a close associate of Ivan the Terrible, a participant in the tsarist reform of 1565 and a direct executor of state instructions to expel and neutralize the tsar’s traitors. This is a member of the “chosen thousand”, “the sovereign’s people”. The guardsmen were people from different social strata. And taking a personal oath of allegiance to the tsar and the state also testified to the creation of a single order formation.

V. O. Klyuchevsky – Oprichnina

S. F. Platonov - What is oprichnina?

Establishment of the oprichnina by Ivan the Terrible. Oprichnina and zemshchina. Alexandrovskaya Sloboda. The destruction of Tver and Novgorod by the guardsmen. Opinions on the meaning of oprichnina

This name was given, firstly, to a detachment of bodyguards, like the Turkish Janissaries, recruited by Ivan the Terrible from boyars, boyar children, nobles, etc.; secondly, a part of the state, with special administration, allocated for the maintenance of the royal court and guardsmen. The era of the oprichnina is the time from approximately 1565 to the death of Ivan the Terrible. For the circumstances under which the oprichnina arose, see Ivan the Terrible. When, at the beginning of February 1565, Ivan IV returned to Moscow from the Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda, he announced that he was again taking over the reign, so that he would be free to execute traitors, put disgrace on them, and deprive them of their property without bothering and sorrowing with side of the clergy and establish an oprichnina in the state. This word was used at first in the sense of special property or possession; now it has acquired a different meaning.

In the oprichnina, the tsar separated part of the boyars, servants and clerks and, in general, made his entire “everyday routine” special: in the Sytny, Kormovy and Khlebenny palaces a special staff of housekeepers, cooks, hounds, etc. was appointed; special detachments of archers were recruited. Special cities (about 20) with volosts were assigned to maintain the oprichnina. In Moscow itself, some streets (Chertolskaya, Arbat, Sivtsev Vrazhek, part of Nikitskaya, etc.) were given to the oprichnina; the former residents were relocated to other streets. Up to 1,000 princes, nobles, and children of boyars, both Moscow and city, were also recruited into the oprichnina. They were given estates in the volosts assigned to maintain the oprichnina; the former landowners and patrimonial owners were transferred from those volosts to others. The rest of the state was supposed to constitute the “zemshchina”; the tsar entrusted it to the zemstvo boyars, that is, to the boyar duma itself, and put Prince Iv at the head of its management. Dm. Belsky and Prince. Iv. Fed. Mstislavsky. All matters had to be resolved in the old way, and with major matters one should turn to the boyars, but if military or important zemstvo matters happened, then to the sovereign. For his ascent, that is, for the trip to Alexandrovskaya Sloboda, the tsar exacted 100 thousand rubles from the Zemsky Prikaz.

After the establishment of the oprichnina, executions began; many boyars and boyar children were suspected of treason and exiled to different cities. The property of those executed and exiled was taken from the sovereign and distributed to the oprichniki, whose number soon increased to 6,000. The oprichnina were recruited from young nobles and boyar children who were distinguished by their daring; they had to renounce everything and everyone, family, father, mother, and swear that they would know and serve only the sovereign and unquestioningly carry out only his orders, report everything to him and have no relations with zemstvo people. The outward distinction of the guardsmen was a dog's head and a broom attached to the saddle, as a sign that they gnaw and sweep traitors to the tsar. The tsar turned a blind eye to all the actions of the guardsmen; When confronted with a zemstvo man, the guardsman always came out on the right. The guardsmen soon became a scourge and an object of hatred for the people, but the tsar believed in their loyalty and devotion, and they truly unquestioningly carried out his will; all the bloody deeds of the second half of Ivan the Terrible’s reign were committed with the indispensable and direct participation of the guardsmen.

N. Nevrev. Oprichniki (Murder of Boyar Fedorov by Ivan the Terrible)

Soon the tsar and his guardsmen left for the Alexandrovskaya Sloboda, from which they made a fortified city. There he started something like a monastery and recruited 300 people from the guardsmen. brethren, called himself abbot, Prince. Vyazemsky - cellarer, Malyuta Skuratov - paraclesiarch, went with him to the bell tower to ring, zealously attended services, prayed and at the same time feasted, entertained himself with torture and executions; made visits to Moscow, where executions sometimes took on a horrific character, especially since the tsar did not encounter opposition from anyone: Metropolitan Athanasius was too weak for this and, after spending two years at the see, retired, and his successor Philip, who boldly spoke truth to the king, he was soon deprived of his dignity and life (see). The Kolychev family, to which Philip belonged, was persecuted; some of its members were executed on Ivan's orders. At the same time, the Tsar’s cousin Vladimir Andreevich (see) also died.

N. Nevrev. Metropolitan Philip and Malyuta Skuratov

In December 1570, suspecting the Novgorodians of treason, Ivan, accompanied by a squad of guardsmen, archers and other military men, moved against Novgorod, plundering and devastating everything on the way. First, the Tver region was devastated; The guardsmen took from the residents everything that could be taken with them and destroyed the rest. Beyond Tver, Torzhok, Vyshny Volochok and other cities and villages lying on the way were devastated, and the guardsmen beat the Crimean and Livonian captives who were there without mercy. At the beginning of January, Russian troops approached Novgorod and the guardsmen began their reprisals against the residents: people were beaten to death with sticks, thrown into the Volkhov, put on the right to force them to give up all their property, and fried in hot flour. The beating continued for five weeks, thousands of people died. The Novgorod chronicler says that there were days when the number of those killed reached up to one and a half thousand; days on which 500-600 people were beaten were considered happy. The tsar spent the sixth week traveling with guardsmen to plunder property; Monasteries were plundered, stacks of bread were burned, cattle were beaten. Military detachments were even sent into the depths of the country, 200-300 miles from Novgorod, and there they carried out similar devastation.

From Novgorod, Grozny went to Pskov and prepared the same fate for him, but limited himself to the execution of several Pskov residents and the robbery of their property and returned to Moscow, where searches and executions began again: they were looking for accomplices of the Novgorod treason. Even the tsar’s favorites, the guardsmen Basmanov father and son, Prince Afanasy Vyazemsky, the printer Viskovaty, the treasurer Funikov, etc., were accused. Together with them, at the end of July 1570, up to 200 people were executed in Moscow: the Duma clerk read the names of the condemned, the executioners-oprichniki they stabbed, chopped, hung, doused the condemned with boiling water. The tsar himself took part in the executions, and crowds of guardsmen stood around and greeted the executions with cries of “goyda, goyda.” The wives, children of those executed, and even their household members were persecuted; their estate was taken away by the sovereign. Executions were resumed more than once, and subsequently they died: Prince Peter Serebryany, Duma clerk Zakhary Ochin-Pleshcheev, Ivan Vorontsov, etc., and the tsar came up with special methods of torture: hot frying pans, ovens, tongs, thin ropes rubbing the body, etc. .

In 1575, Ivan IV placed the baptized Tatar prince Simeon Bekbulatovich, who had previously been the prince of Kasimov, at the head of the zemshchina, crowned him with a royal crown, went to bow to him, styled him “Grand Duke of All Rus'”, and himself “Sovereign Prince of Moscow” . On behalf of Grand Duke Simeon of All Rus' Some letters were written, however, not important in content. Simeon remained at the head of the zemshchina for no more than two years: then Ivan the Terrible gave him Tver and Torzhok as his inheritance. The division into oprichnina and zemshchina was not, however, abolished; oprichnina existed until the death of Ivan the Terrible (1584), but the word itself fell out of use and began to be replaced by the word yard, and the guardsman - in a word yard; instead of “cities and governors of the oprichnina and zemstvo” they said “cities and governors of the courtyards and zemstvo.” Solovyov tries to comprehend the establishment of the oprichnina, saying: “the oprichnina was established because the tsar suspected the nobles of hostility towards him and wanted to have completely loyal people with him to him. Frightened by Kurbsky's departure and the protest that he filed on behalf of all his brothers, Ivan became suspicious of all his boyars and grabbed a means that freed him from them, freed him from the need for constant, daily communication with them. " S. M. Solovyov's opinion is shared by K . N. Bestuzhev-Ryumin. V. O. Klyuchevsky also finds that the oprichnina was the result of the tsar’s struggle with the boyars, a struggle that “had not a political, but a dynastic origin”; neither side knew how to get along with one; another and how to get along without each other. They tried to separate, to live side by side, but not together. An attempt to arrange such a political cohabitation was the division of the state into the oprichnina and the zemshchina, as E. A. Belov stated in his monograph: “On the historical significance of the Russian. boyars until the end of the 17th century." an apologist for Grozny, finds in the oprichnina a deep state meaning. Karamzin, Kostomarov, D.I. Ilovaisky not only do not see a political meaning in the establishment of the oprichnina, but attribute it to the manifestation of those painful and at the same time cruel eccentricities that The second half of Ivan the Terrible's reign is complete. See Stromilov, "Alexandrovskaya Sloboda", in "Readings of Moscow. General History and Ancient." (1883, book II). The main source for the history of the establishment of the oprichnina is the report of the captured Lithuanians Taube and Kruse to the Duke of Courland Kettler, published by Evers in “Sammlung Russisch. Geschichte” (X, l, 187-241); see also "Tales" book. Kurbsky, Alexander Chronicle, "Complete Collection of Russian Chronicles" (III and IV). Literature - see Ivan IV the Terrible.

N. Vasilenko.

Encyclopedia Brockhaus-Efron

V. O. Klyuchevsky - Oprichnina

Circumstances that prepared the oprichnina

I will outline in advance the circumstances under which this ill-fated oprichnina appeared.

Having barely emerged from childhood, not yet 20 years old, Tsar Ivan set about the affairs of government with extraordinary energy for his age. Then, on the instructions of the smart leaders of Tsar Metropolitan Macarius and Priest Sylvester, from the boyars, who were divided into hostile circles, several efficient, well-meaning and gifted advisers came forward and stood near the throne - the “elected council,” as Prince Kurbsky calls this council, which obviously received actual dominance in the boyars. Duma, generally in the central administration. With these trusted people, the king began to rule the state.

In this government activity, evident from 1550, bold external enterprises went hand in hand with broad and well-thought-out plans for internal change. In 1550, the first Zemsky Sobor was convened, at which they discussed how to organize local government, and decided to review and correct the old Code of Laws of Ivan III and develop a new, better procedure for legal proceedings. In 1551, a large church council was convened, to which the tsar proposed an extensive project of church reforms, which had the goal of putting the religious and moral life of the people in order. In 1552, the kingdom of Kazan was conquered, and immediately after that they began to develop a complex plan for local zemstvo institutions, which were intended to replace the crown regional administrators - “feeders”: zemstvo self-government was introduced. In 1558, the Livonian War began with the goal of breaking through to the Baltic Sea and establishing direct relations with Western Europe, taking advantage of its rich culture. In all these important enterprises, I repeat, Ivan was helped by employees who concentrated around two persons, especially close to the tsar - priest Sylvester and Alexei Adashev, the head of the Petition Order, in our opinion, the Secretary of State for accepting petitions in the highest name.

Various reasons - partly domestic misunderstandings, partly disagreement in political views - cooled the king towards his elected advisers. Their flaring hostility towards the queen’s relatives, the Zakharyins, led to Adashev and Sylvester moving away from the court, and the tsar attributed the death of Anastasia, which happened under such circumstances in 1560, to the grief that the deceased suffered from these palace squabbles. “Why did you separate me from my wife?” Ivan Kurbsky painfully asked in a letter to him 18 years after this family misfortune. “If only my youth had not been taken away from me, there would have been no crown sacrifices (boyar executions”).” Finally, the flight of Prince Kurbsky, his closest and most gifted collaborator, caused a final break. Nervous and lonely Ivan lost his moral balance, which is always shaky for nervous people when they remain alone.

The Tsar's departure from Moscow and his messages.

With the tsar in this mood, a strange, unprecedented event happened in the Moscow Kremlin. Once at the end of 1564 a lot of sleighs appeared there. The king, without telling anyone, got ready with his entire family and some courtiers for a long journey somewhere, took with him utensils, icons and crosses, clothes and his entire treasury and left the capital. It was clear that this was neither an ordinary pilgrimage nor a pleasure trip for the king, but a whole resettlement. Moscow remained perplexed, not knowing what the owner was up to.

Having visited Trinity, the tsar and all his luggage stopped in Alexandrovskaya Sloboda (now it is Alexandrov - a district town in the Vladimir province). From here, a month after leaving, the tsar sent two letters to Moscow. In one, having described the lawlessness of the boyar rule in his youth, he laid down his sovereign’s anger on all the clergy and boyars on all servants and clerks, accusing them without exception of not caring about the sovereign, the state and all Orthodox Christianity, from their enemies they were not defended, on the contrary, they themselves oppressed Christians, plundered the treasury and the sovereign's lands, and the clergy covered up the guilty, defended them, interceding for them before the sovereign. And so the king, the letter read, “out of great pity of heart,” unable to tolerate all these betrayals, left his kingdom and went to settle somewhere where God would show him. It’s like abdicating the throne in order to test the strength of one’s power among the people. To the Moscow common people, merchants and all the tax-paying people of the capital, the tsar sent another, a letter, which was read to them publicly in the square. Here the tsar wrote so that they should not have doubts that the tsar’s disgrace and anger were not with them. Everything froze, the capital instantly interrupted its usual activities: the shops were closed, the orders were empty, the songs fell silent. In confusion and horror, the city screamed, asking the metropolitan, bishops and boyars to go to the settlement and beat the sovereign so that he would not leave the state. At the same time, ordinary people shouted for the sovereign to return to the kingdom to defend them from wolves and predatory people, but they did not stand for the state traitors and scoundrels and would destroy them themselves.

Return of the Tsar.

A deputation of the highest clergy, boyars and officials headed by the Archbishop of Novgorod Pimen went to the settlement, accompanied by many merchants and other people who went to beat the sovereign with their foreheads and cry, so that the sovereign would rule as he pleased, according to his entire sovereign will. The tsar accepted the zemstvo petition, agreed to return to the kingdom, “and take back our states,” but on the terms that he promised to announce later. Some time later, in February 1565, the tsar solemnly returned to the capital and convened a state council of boyars and higher clergy. They didn’t recognize him here: his small gray, penetrating eyes went out, his always lively and friendly face was drawn and looked unsociable, only remnants of his former hair remained on his head and beard. Obviously, the king spent two months of absence in a terrible state of mind, not knowing how his undertaking would end. In the council, he proposed the conditions under which he would take back the power he had abandoned. These conditions were that he should put opals on his traitors and disobedient people, and execute others, and take their property into the treasury, so that the clergy, boyars and officials would put all this at his sovereign will, and would not interfere with him in this. It was as if the tsar had begged a police dictatorship from the State Council - a unique form of agreement between the sovereign and the people!

Decree on oprichnina.

To deal with traitors and disobedient people, the tsar proposed establishing an oprichnina. It was a special court, which the tsar formed for himself, with special boyars, with special butlers, treasurers and other managers, clerks, all sorts of clerks and courtiers, with a whole court staff. The chronicler strongly emphasizes this expression “special court”, the fact that the king sentenced everything in this court “to be done to himself in a special way.” From the service people, he selected a thousand people for the oprichnina, to whom in the capital, in the suburbs outside the walls of the White City, behind the line of the current boulevards, streets were allocated (Prechistenka, Sivtsev Vrazhek, Arbat and the Nikitskaya side to the left of the city) with several settlements to the Novodevichy Convent; the former inhabitants of these streets and settlements, servicemen and clerks, were evicted from their homes to other streets of the Moscow suburb. For the maintenance of this court, “for his daily use” and his children, princes Ivan and Fyodor, he allocated from his state up to 20 cities with districts and several separate volosts, in which the lands were distributed to the guardsmen, and the former landowners were removed from their estates and estates and received land in neoprichny districts. Up to 12 thousand of these deportees in winter, with their families, walked on foot from the estates taken from them to the remote empty estates allotted to them. This oprichnina part, separated from the state, was not an entire region, a continuous territory, but was made up of villages, volosts and cities, even only parts of other cities, scattered here and there, mainly in the central and northern districts (Vyazma, Kozelsk, Suzdal, Galich, Vologda, Staraya Rusa, Kargopol, etc.; later the Trade side of Novgorod was taken into oprichnina).

“Their own Moscow state,” that is, the entire rest of the land subject to the Moscow sovereign, with its army, court and administration, the tsar ordered the boyars to be in charge and to do all sorts of zemstvo affairs, whom he ordered to be “in the zemstvo,” and this half of the state received the name Zemshchina. All central government institutions remaining in the zemshchina, orders, were supposed to operate as before, “repair the government in the old way”, turning on all important zemstvo matters to the duma of zemstvo boyars, which ruled the zemstvo, reporting to the sovereign only about military and most important zemstvo affairs.

So the entire state was divided into two parts - the zemshchina and the oprichnina; the boyar duma remained at the head of the first, the tsar himself became the head of the second, without giving up the supreme leadership of the duma of the zemstvo boyars. “For his rise,” that is, to cover the costs of leaving the capital, the tsar exacted from the zemshchina, as if for an official business trip on its business, lifting money - 100 thousand rubles (about 6 million rubles in our money). This is how the old chronicle described the “decree on the oprichnina” that has not reached us, apparently prepared in advance in Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda and read at a meeting of the State Council in Moscow. The Tsar was in a hurry: without hesitation, the very next day after this meeting, using the authority granted to him, he began to put disgraces on his traitors, and to execute others, starting with the closest supporters of the fugitive Prince Kurbsky; on this one day, six of the boyar nobility were beheaded, and the seventh was impaled.

Life in the suburbs.

The establishment of the oprichnina began. First of all, the Tsar himself, as the first guardsman, hastened to leave the ceremonial, decorous order of the sovereign's life established by his father and grandfather, left his ancestral Kremlin palace, moved to a new fortified courtyard, which he ordered to build for himself somewhere among his oprichnina, between the Arbat and Nikitskaya, at the same time ordered his oprichnina boyars and nobles to build courtyards in the Alexandrovskaya Sloboda, where they were to live, as well as buildings for government places intended for managing the oprichnina. Soon he himself settled there, and began to come to Moscow “not for a great time.” Thus, a new residence arose among the dense forests - the oprichnina capital with a palace surrounded by a moat and rampart, with outposts along the roads. In this den, the tsar staged a wild parody of the monastery, selected three hundred of the most notorious guardsmen who made up the brethren, he himself accepted the title of abbot, and prince Af. Vyazemsky ordained the rank of cellarer, covered these full-time robbers with monastic robes and black robes, composed a community rule for them, he and the princes climbed the bell tower in the morning to ring for matins, read and sang in the church on the choir and made such prostrations that from the forehead his bruises did not go away. After mass at the meal, when the cheerful brethren ate and got drunk, the tsar read the teachings of the church fathers about fasting and abstinence at the lectern, then dined alone, after dinner he liked to talk about the law, dozed off or went to the dungeon to witness the torture of the suspects.

Oprichnina and Zemshchina

At first glance, the oprichnina, especially with such behavior of the tsar, seems to be an institution devoid of any political meaning. In fact, having declared all the boyars in his message to be traitors and plunderers of the land, the tsar left the management of the land in the hands of these traitors and predators. But the oprichnina also had its own meaning, albeit a rather sad one. It is necessary to distinguish between territory and goal. The word oprichnina in the 16th century. was already an obsolete term, which the then Moscow chronicle translated into the expression special courtyard. It was not Tsar Ivan who invented this word, borrowed from the old specific language. In specific times, this was the name given to special allocated estates, mainly those that were given full ownership to princesses-widows, in contrast to those given for lifelong use, from subsistence. The oprichnina of Tsar Ivan was a palace economic and administrative institution in charge of the lands allocated for the maintenance of the royal court. A similar institution arose in our country later, at the end of the 18th century, when Emperor Paul, by the law of April 5, 1797 on the imperial family, allocated “special real estate estates from state possessions” in the amount of over 460 thousand souls of male peasants, who were “in the state calculation under the names of palace volosts and villages" and received the name of specific ones. The only difference was that the oprichnina, with further additions, captured almost half of the entire state, while the appanage department of Emperor Paul included only 1/38 of the then population of the empire.

Tsar Ivan himself looked at the oprichnina he established as his private possession, a special court or appanage, which he separated from the state; he assigned the zemshchina after himself to his eldest son as a king, and the oprichnina to his younger son as an appanage prince. There is news that a baptized Tatar, the captive Kazan king Ediger-Simeon, was installed at the head of the zemshchina. Later, in 1574, Tsar Ivan crowned another Tatar, the Kasimov Khan Sain-Bulat, in the baptism of Simeon Bekbulatovich, giving him the title of Sovereign Grand Duke of All Rus'. Translating this title into our language, we can say that Ivan appointed both Simeons as chairmen of the Duma of Zemstvo boyars. Simeon Bekbulatovich ruled the kingdom for two years, then he was exiled to Tver. All government decrees were written in the name of this Simeon as a real all-Russian tsar, and Ivan himself was content with the modest title of sovereign prince, not even a great prince, but simply a prince of Moscow, not of all Rus', went to bow to Simeon as a simple boyar and in his petitions to Simeon called himself as the Prince of Moscow Ivan Vasiliev, who beats his forehead “with his children,” with the princes.

One might think that not everything here is a political masquerade. Tsar Ivan opposed himself as an appanage prince of Moscow to the sovereign of all Rus', who stood at the head of the zemshchina; By presenting himself as a special, oprichnina prince of Moscow, Ivan seemed to recognize that the rest of the Russian land was part of the department of the council, consisting of the descendants of its former rulers, the great and appanage princes, who made up the highest Moscow boyars, who sat in the zemstvo duma. Afterwards, Ivan renamed the oprichnina into the yard, the boyars and service people of the oprichnina - into the boyars and service people of the yard. The tsar in the oprichnina had his own duma, “his own boyars”; The oprichnina region was governed by special orders, similar to the old zemstvo ones. National affairs, how to say imperial affairs, were conducted by the Zemstvo Duma with a report to the Tsar. But the tsar ordered other issues to be discussed by all the boyars, zemstvo and oprichnina, and the “boyars wallpaper” put forward a common decision.

The purpose of the oprichnina.

But, one might ask, why was this restoration or this travesty of fate necessary? To an institution with such a dilapidated form and such an archaic name, the tsar assigned a hitherto unprecedented task: the oprichnina received the significance of a political refuge, where the tsar wanted to hide from his seditious boyars. The thought that he should flee from his boyars gradually took possession of his mind and became his incessant thought. In his spiritual, written around 1572, the king very seriously portrays himself as an exile, a wanderer. Here he writes: “Because of the multitude of my iniquities, the wrath of God has spread upon me, I was expelled by the boyars for their arbitrariness from my property and am wandering around the countries.” He was credited with a serious intention to flee to England.

So, the oprichnina was an institution that was supposed to protect the personal safety of the tsar. She was given a political goal, for which there was no special institution in the existing Moscow state structure. This goal was to exterminate the sedition that nested in the Russian land, mainly among the boyars. Oprichnina received the appointment of the highest police in cases of high treason. A detachment of a thousand people, enlisted in the oprichnina and then increased to 6 thousand, became a corps of watchmen for internal sedition. Malyuta Skuratov, i.e. Grigory Yakovlevich Pleshcheev-Belsky, relative of St. Metropolitan Alexy, was, as it were, the chief of this corps, and the tsar begged himself from the clergy, boyars and the whole land for a police dictatorship to combat this sedition. As a special police detachment, the oprichnina received a special uniform: the oprichnina had a dog's head and a broom tied to the saddle - these were the signs of his position, which consisted in tracking down, sniffing out and sweeping out treason and gnawing the sovereign's seditious villains. The oprichnik rode all in black from head to toe, on a black horse in black harness, which is why contemporaries called the oprichnina “pitch darkness”, they said about it: “... like night, dark.” It was some kind of order of hermits, like monks who renounced the land and fought with the land, like monks fight the temptations of the world. The very reception into the oprichnina squad was furnished with either monastic or conspiratorial solemnity. Prince Kurbsky in his History of Tsar Ivan writes that the tsar from all over the Russian land gathered for himself “nasty people and filled with all sorts of evils” and obliged them with terrible oaths not to know not only their friends and brothers, but also their parents, but to serve only him and for this forced them to kiss the cross. Let us remember at the same time what I said about the monastic order of life, which Ivan established in the settlement for his chosen oprichnina brethren.

Contradiction in the structure of the state.

This was the origin and purpose of the oprichnina. But, having explained its origin and purpose, it is still quite difficult to understand its political meaning. It is easy to see how and why it arose, but it is difficult to understand how it could have arisen, how the very idea of ​​such an institution could have come to the king. After all, the oprichnina did not answer the political question that was then on the agenda, and did not eliminate the difficulties that caused it. The difficulty was created by the clashes that arose between the sovereign and the boyars. The source of these clashes was not the contradictory political aspirations of both state forces, but one contradiction in the political system of the Moscow state itself.

The sovereign and the boyars did not irreconcilably disagree with each other in their political ideals, in plans for state order, but only came across one incongruity in the already established state order, which they did not know what to do with. What was the Moscow state really like in the 16th century? It was an absolute monarchy, but with aristocratic governance, i.e., government personnel. There was no political legislation that would define the boundaries of the supreme power, but there was a government class with an aristocratic organization that was recognized by the government itself. This power grew together, simultaneously and even hand in hand with another political force that constrained it. Thus, the character of this power did not correspond to the character of the governmental instruments through which it was supposed to act. The boyars imagined themselves to be powerful advisers to the sovereign of all Rus' at the very time when this sovereign, remaining faithful to the view of the appanage patrimonial landowner, in accordance with ancient Russian law, granted them as his courtyard servants the title of the sovereign's slaves. Both sides found themselves in such an unnatural relationship to each other, which they did not seem to notice while it was developing, and which they did not know what to do with when they noticed it. Then both sides felt in an awkward position and did not know how to get out of it. Neither the boyars knew how to settle down and establish state order without the sovereign power to which they were accustomed, nor did the sovereign know how to manage his kingdom within its new borders without the boyars’ assistance. Both sides could neither get along with each other nor do without each other. Unable to either get along or separate, they tried to separate - to live side by side, but not together. The oprichnina was such a way out of the difficulty.

The idea of ​​replacing the boyars with the nobility.

But this solution did not eliminate the difficulty itself. It consisted in the inconvenient political position of the boyars as a government class for the sovereign, which constrained him.

There were two ways out of the difficulty: it was necessary either to eliminate the boyars as a government class and replace them with other, more flexible and obedient instruments of government, or to separate them, to attract the most reliable people from the boyars to the throne and to rule with them, as Ivan ruled in the beginning of his reign. He could not do the first soon, the second he was unable or did not want to do. In conversations with close foreigners, the tsar inadvertently admitted his intention to change the entire government of the country and even exterminate the nobles. But the idea of ​​transforming government was limited to dividing the state into zemshchina and oprichnina, and the wholesale extermination of the boyars remained an absurd dream of an excited imagination: it was tricky to isolate from society and destroy an entire class that was intertwined with various everyday threads with the layers that lay underneath it. In the same way, the tsar could not soon create another government class to replace the boyars. Such changes require time and skill: it is necessary for the ruling class to get used to power and for society to get used to the ruling class.

But undoubtedly, the tsar was thinking about such a replacement and saw preparations for it in his oprichnina. He took this thought from childhood, from the turmoil of boyar rule; She also prompted him to bring A. Adashev closer to himself, taking him, in the tsar’s words, from the stick insects, “from the rot,” and putting him in contact with the nobles, expecting direct service from him. So Adashev became the prototype of the guardsman. Ivan had the opportunity to become acquainted with the way of thinking that later dominated the oprichnina at the very beginning of his reign.

In 1537 or so, a certain Ivan Peresvetov left Lithuania for Moscow, counting himself among the family of the monk hero Peresvet, who fought on the Kulikovo Field. This native was an adventurer-condottieri, who served in a mercenary Polish detachment for three kings - Polish, Hungarian and Czech. In Moscow, he suffered from big people, lost his “sobinka,” the property acquired by his service, and in 1548 or 1549 he submitted an extensive petition to the tsar. This is a harsh political pamphlet directed against the boyars, in favor of the “warriors,” that is, the ordinary military-service nobility, to which the petitioner himself belonged. The author warns Tsar Ivan against being caught by his neighbors, without whom he cannot “exist for an hour”; There will be no other such king in all the sunflowers, if only God would keep him from “catching the nobles.” The king's nobles are thin, they kiss the cross and cheat; the tsar “lets open an internecine war on his kingdom,” appointing them as governors of cities and volosts, and they become richer and lazy from the blood and tears of Christians. Anyone who approaches the king through grandeur, and not through military merit or other wisdom, is a sorcerer and a heretic, he takes away the happiness and wisdom of the king, and he must be burned. The author considers the order established by Tsar Makhmet-saltan to be exemplary, who will raise the ruler high, “and he will choke his neck,” saying: he did not know how to live in good glory and serve the sovereign faithfully. It is fitting for the sovereign to collect income from the entire kingdom for his treasury, to gladden the hearts of soldiers from the treasury, to let them come close to him and to trust them in everything

The petition seemed to have been written in advance to justify the oprichnina: so its ideas were in the hands of the “artful devils,” and the tsar himself could not help but sympathize with the direction of Peresvetov’s thoughts. He wrote to one of the guardsmen, Vasyuk Gryazny: “Because of our sins, what happened, and how can we hide it, that our father and our boyars taught us to cheat and we, the sufferers, brought you closer, expecting service and truth from you.” These oprichnina sufferers, noble people from the ordinary nobility, were supposed to serve as those children of Abraham made of stone, about whom the tsar wrote to Prince Kurbsky. Thus, according to Tsar Ivan, the nobility was supposed to replace the boyars as the ruling class in the form of the oprichnik. At the end of the 17th century. this change, as we will see, took place, only in a different form, not so hateful.

The aimlessness of the oprichnina.

In any case, in choosing one way or another, one had to act against the political situation of an entire class, and not against individuals. The tsar did exactly the opposite: suspecting the entire boyars of treason, he rushed at the suspects, tearing them out one by one, but left the class at the head of the zemstvo administration; not being able to crush the government system that was inconvenient for him, he began to exterminate individual suspicious or hated individuals.

The guardsmen were not placed in the place of the boyars, but against the boyars; they could, by their very purpose, not be rulers, but only the executioners of the earth. This was the political aimlessness of the oprichnina; caused by a clash whose cause was order, not persons, it was directed against persons, and not against order. In this sense, we can say that the oprichnina did not answer the question that was next in line. It could only have been instilled in the tsar by an incorrect understanding of the position of the boyars, as well as his own position. She was largely a figment of the king’s overly fearful imagination. Ivan directed her against the terrible sedition that allegedly nested among the boyars and threatened with the extermination of the entire royal family. But was the danger really that bad?

The political power of the boyars, even in addition to the oprichnina, was undermined by the conditions directly or indirectly created by the Moscow gathering of Rus'. The possibility of a permitted, legal departure, the main support of the boyar's official freedom, had already disappeared by the time of Tsar Ivan: there was nowhere to leave except Lithuania, the only surviving appanage prince Vladimir Staritsky undertook by treaties not to accept any princes, boyars or any people leaving the tsar. The service of the boyars from free became mandatory, involuntary. Localism deprived the class of the ability for friendly joint action. The land shuffling of the most important service princes, carried out under Ivan III and his grandson through the exchange of ancient princely estates for new ones, moved the princes of Odoevsky, Vorotynsky, Mezetsky from dangerous outskirts, from where they could establish relations with foreign enemies of Moscow, somewhere on the Klyazma or the upper Volga , into an environment alien to them, with which they had no connections. The noblest boyars ruled the regions, but in such a way that by their governance they acquired only the hatred of the people. Thus, the boyars did not have a solid foundation either in the administration, or among the people, or even in their class organization, and the tsar should have known this better than the boyars themselves.

A serious danger threatened if the incident of 1553 was repeated, when many boyars did not want to swear allegiance to a child, the son of a dangerously ill tsar, with the intention of elevating the appanage Vladimir, the prince’s uncle, to the throne. The tsar, barely overcome, directly told the sworn boyars that in the event of his death, he foresaw the fate of his family under the tsar-uncle. This is the fate that usually befell rival princes in Eastern despotisms. Tsar Ivan's own ancestors, the princes of Moscow, dealt with their relatives who stood in their way in the same way; Tsar Ivan himself dealt with his cousin Vladimir Staritsky in exactly the same way.

The danger of 1553 was not repeated. But the oprichnina did not prevent this danger, but rather intensified it. In 1553, many boyars took the side of the prince, and the dynastic catastrophe might not have taken place. In 1568, in the event of the death of the tsar, his direct heir would hardly have had enough supporters: the oprichnina united the boyars instinctively - with a sense of self-preservation.

Judgments about her by contemporaries

Without such danger, boyar sedition did not go further than thoughts and attempts to flee to Lithuania: contemporaries do not talk about conspiracies or attempts on the part of the boyars. But if there really was a rebellious boyar sedition, the tsar should have acted differently: he should have directed his blows exclusively at the boyars, and he did not beat only the boyars and not even the boyars primarily. Prince Kurbsky in his History, listing the victims of Ivan’s cruelty, numbers over 400 of them. Foreign contemporaries even counted it at 10 thousand.

When carrying out executions, Tsar Ivan, out of piety, entered the names of those executed in memorial books (synodics), which he sent to monasteries to commemorate the souls of the deceased, enclosing memorial contributions. These memorials are very interesting monuments; in some of them the number of victims rises to 4 thousand. But there are relatively few boyar names in these martyrologies, but here were listed courtyard people who were killed by the masses and who were not at all guilty of boyar sedition, clerks, huntsmen, monks and nuns - “deceased Christians of the male, female and child ranks, whose names you yourself, Lord, weigh “, as the synodik mournfully laments after each group of those beaten by the masses. Finally, the turn came to the very “utter darkness”: the tsar’s closest oprichnina favorites—Prince Vyazemsky and the Basmanovs, father and son—perished.

In a deeply depressed, restrained indignant tone, contemporaries talk about the turmoil that the oprichnina brought into minds unaccustomed to such internal upheavals. They portray the oprichnina as a social strife. The tsar, they write, instigated internecine sedition, in the same city he unleashed some people against others, called some oprichninas, made them his own, and called others zemshchina and commanded his part to rape another part of the people, put them to death and plunder their houses. And there was intense hatred against the king in the world, and bloodshed and many executions took place. One observant contemporary portrays the oprichnina as some kind of incomprehensible political game of the tsar: he cut his entire power in half, as if with an ax, and thereby confused everyone, thus playing with God’s people, becoming a conspirator against himself. The tsar wanted to be a sovereign in the zemshchina, but in the oprichnina to remain a patrimonial landowner, an appanage prince. Contemporaries could not understand this political duplicity, but they understood that the oprichnina, while eliminating sedition, introduced anarchy, protecting the sovereign, shook the very foundations of the state. Directed against imaginary sedition, it prepared for the real one. The observer, whose words I have just quoted, sees a direct connection between the Time of Troubles, when he wrote, and the oprichnina) which he remembered: “The great split of the entire earth was created by the king, and this division, I think, was the prototype of the current all-terrestrial discord.”

This course of action by the king could be the result not of political calculation, but of a distorted political understanding. Faced with the boyars, having lost all confidence in them after the illness of 1553 and especially after the escape of Prince Kurbsky, the tsar exaggerated the danger and became afraid: “... I became for myself.” Then the question of state order turned for him into a question of personal safety, and he, like an overly frightened man, closed his eyes and began to strike right and left, without distinguishing between friends and enemies. This means that in the direction that the tsar gave to the political conflict, his personal character is largely to blame, which therefore receives some significance in our state history.

V. O. Klyuchevsky. Russian history. Full course of lectures. Lecture 29

S. F. Platonov - What is oprichnina?

Scientists have worked hard on the question of what the oprichnina of Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich is. One of them rightly and not without humor noted that “this institution has always seemed very strange, both to those who suffered from it and to those who studied it.” In fact, no original documents on the establishment of the oprichnina have survived; the official chronicle talks about this briefly and does not reveal the meaning of the institution; Russian people of the 16th century, who spoke about the oprichnina, do not explain it well and do not seem to know how to describe it. Both clerk Ivan Timofeev and noble prince I.M. Katyrev-Rostovsky see the matter as follows: in rage at his subjects, Grozny divided the state into two parts - he gave one to Tsar Simeon, took the other for himself and ordered his part to “rape that part of the people.” and put to death." To this Timofeev adds that instead of “well-meaning nobles” who were beaten and expelled, Ivan brought foreigners closer to himself and fell under their influence to such an extent that “his entire interior fell into the hand of the barbarian.” But we know that Simeon’s reign was a short-lived and later episode in the history of the oprichnina, that although foreigners were part of the oprichnina, they had no significance in it, and that the ostentatious purpose of the institution was not at all to rape and beat the sovereign’s subjects, but in order to “create a special court for him (the sovereign) and for his entire daily life.” Thus, we have nothing reliable for judging the matter, except for the chronicler’s brief record of the beginning of the oprichnina, and individual mentions of it in documents not directly related to its establishment. There remains a wide field for guesses and conjectures.

Of course, the easiest way is to declare the division of the state into oprichnina and zemshchina “ridiculous” and explain it as the whims of a timid tyrant; that's what some do. But not everyone is satisfied with such a simple view of the matter. S. M. Solovyov explained the oprichnina as an attempt by Grozny to formally separate himself from the boyar government class, which was unreliable in his eyes; The new tsar's court, built for such a purpose, in fact degenerated into an instrument of terror, distorted into a detective agency for cases of boyar and any other treason. It is precisely this detective institution, the “highest police for cases of high treason,” that V. O. Klyuchevsky presents to us as the oprichnina. And other historians see in it a weapon in the fight against the boyars, and, moreover, a strange and unsuccessful one. Only K.N. Bestuzhev-Ryumin, E.A. Belov and S.M. Seredonin are inclined to attach great political meaning to the oprichnina: they think that the oprichnina was directed against the offspring of appanage princes and was intended to break their traditional rights and advantages. However, this view, in our opinion, close to the truth, has not been revealed with the desired completeness, and this forces us to dwell on the oprichnina in order to show what its consequences were and why the oprichnina influenced the development of unrest in Moscow society.

The original decree establishing the oprichnina has not survived to this day; but we know about its existence from the inventory of the royal archives of the 16th century. and we think that the chronicle contains a not entirely successful and intelligible abbreviation of it. From the chronicle we get only an approximate idea of ​​what the oprichnina was like at its beginning. It was not just “the recruitment of a special corps of bodyguards, like the Turkish Janissaries,” as one of the later historians put it, but there was something more complex. A special sovereign court was established, separate from the old Moscow court. It was supposed to have a special butler, special treasurers and clerks, special boyars and okolnichi, courtiers and service people, and finally, special servants in all kinds of “palaces”: food, fodder, grain, etc. To support all this people were taken there were cities and volosts from different places of the Moscow state. They formed the territory of the oprichnina interspersed with lands left in the old order of management and received the name “zemshchina”. The initial volume of this territory, determined in 1565, was increased in subsequent years so much that it covered a good half of the state.

For what needs was this territory given such a large size? The chronicle itself offers some answer to this in the story about the beginning of the oprichnina.

Firstly, the tsar started a new household in the oprichnina palace and, according to custom, took over the palace villages and volosts. For the palace itself, a location was initially chosen in the Kremlin, the palace services were demolished and the estates of the Metropolitan and Prince Vladimir Andreevich, which burned in 1565, were taken over by the sovereign. But for some reason, Grozny began to live not in the Kremlin, but on Vozdvizhenka, in a new palace, where he moved in 1567. Some streets and settlements in Moscow itself were assigned to the new oprichnina palace, and in addition, palace volosts and villages near Moscow and in the distance from her. We do not know what caused the choice of certain localities for the oprichnina, and not others, from the general reserve of the palace lands proper; we cannot even imagine an approximate list of volosts taken into the new oprichnina palace, but we think that such a list, even if it were possible , would not be of particular importance. In the palace, as you can guess, the palace lands themselves were taken to the extent of economic need, for the establishment of various services and for the dwellings of the court staff performing palace duties.

But since this court and service staff in general required security and land allocation, then, secondly, in addition to the palace lands themselves, the oprichnina needed patrimonial lands and estates. In this case, Grozny repeated what he himself had done 15 years before. In 1550, he immediately placed “a thousand people among the landowners of the children of the boyars’ best servants” around Moscow. Now he also chooses for himself “princes and nobles, children of boyars, courtyards and policemen, a thousand heads”; but he places them not around Moscow, but in other, mainly “Zamoskovny”, districts: Galitsky, Kostroma, Suzdal, also in the Zaotsky cities, and in 1571, probably in the Novgorod Pyatina. In these places, according to the chronicle, he exchanges land: “He ordered the votchinniks and landowners who were not in the oprichnina to be taken out of those cities and ordered the land to be given to that place in other cities.” It should be noted that some letters certainly confirm this chronicle testimony; patrimonial owners and landowners were indeed deprived of their lands in oprichnina districts and, moreover, by the entire district at once or, in their words, “with the city together, and not in disgrace - as the sovereign took the city into oprichnina.” For the lands taken, service people were rewarded with others, wherever the sovereign would grant them, or where they themselves would find themselves. Thus, every district taken into oprichnina with service lands was condemned to radical destruction. Land ownership in it was subject to revision, and the lands changed owners, unless the owners themselves became guardsmen. There seems to be no doubt that such a revision was caused by political considerations. In the central regions of the state, for the oprichnina, precisely those areas were separated where land ownership of princes, descendants of the ruling princes, still existed in the ancient appanage territories. The oprichnina operated among the ancestral estates of the princes of Yaroslavl, Belozersk and Rostov (from Rostov to Charonda), the princes of Starodub and Suzdal (from Suzdal to Yuryev and Balakhna), the princes of Chernigov and other southwestern ones on the upper Oka. These estates gradually became part of the oprichnina: if we compare the lists of princely estates in the well-known decrees about them - the Tsar’s in 1562 and the “Zemsky” in 1572, we will see that in 1572 only the Yaroslavl and Rostov estates remained under the jurisdiction of the “Zemsky” government , Obolensky and Mosalsky, Tver and Ryazan; all the rest, named in the “old sovereign code” of 1562, had already been relegated to the oprichnina. And after 1572, both the estates of Yaroslavl and Rostov, as we have already indicated, were taken into the sovereign’s “yard”. Thus, little by little, the old appanage lands, whose original owners aroused the anger and suspicion of Ivan the Terrible, were almost completely gathered into the oprichnina administration. It was these owners who were to bear the full brunt of the revision of land ownership initiated by Ivan the Terrible. Some of them were torn from their old places by Ivan the Terrible and scattered to new distant and alien places, while others were brought into the new oprichnina service and placed under his strict direct supervision. In Ivan the Terrible's will we find numerous indications that the sovereign took "for himself" the lands of the serving princes; but all these and similar indications, unfortunately, are too fleeting and brief to give us an accurate and complete picture of the upheavals experienced by princely landowners in the oprichnina. We can judge comparatively better the state of affairs in the Zaotsk cities along the upper Oka. There were descendants of appanage princes, the princes Odoevsky, Vorotynsky, Trubetskoy and others, on their ancestral possessions; “Those princes were still on their appanages and had great fatherlands under them,” says Kurbsky’s famous phrase about them. When Ivan the Terrible invaded this nest of princes with the oprichnina, he took some of the princes into the oprichnina “a thousand heads”; Among the “governors from oprishnina” were, for example, princes Fyodor Mikhailovich Trubetskoy and Nikita Ivanovich Odoevsky. He gradually brought others to new places; thus, Prince Mikhail Ivanovich Vorotynsky, a few years after the establishment of the oprichnina, was given Starodub Ryapolovsky instead of his old patrimony (Odoev and other cities); other princes from the upper Oka received lands in the districts of Moscow, Kolomensky, Dmitrovsky, Zvenigorod and others. The results of such events were varied and important. If we remember that oprichnina administration included, with few and insignificant exceptions, all those places in which old appanage principalities previously existed, then we will understand that the oprichnina subjected to a systematic breakdown of the patrimonial land tenure of the serving princes in general, throughout its entire territory. Knowing the true dimensions of the oprichnina, we will be convinced of the complete validity of Fletcher’s words about the princes (in Chapter IX), that Ivan the Terrible, having established the oprichnina, seized their hereditary lands, with the exception of a very insignificant share, and gave the princes other lands in the form of estates that they own, as long as it pleases the king, in areas so remote that there they have neither popular love nor influence, for they were not born there and were not known there. Now, adds Fletcher, the highest nobility, called appanage princes, are compared with the rest; Only in the consciousness and feeling of the people does it retain some significance and still enjoys outward honor in ceremonial meetings. In our opinion, this is a very accurate definition of one of the consequences of the oprichnina. Another consequence arising from the same measures was no less important. On the territory of the old appanage estates, the ancient orders still lived, and the old authorities still acted alongside the power of the Moscow sovereign. "Service" people in the 16th century. Here they served from their lands not only to the “great sovereign”, but also to private “sovereigns”. In the middle of the century in the Tver district, for example, out of 272 estates, in no less than 53 the owners served not the sovereign, but Prince Vladimir Andreevich Staritsky, the princes Obolensky, Mikulinsky, Mstislavsky, Rostovsky, Golitsyn, Kurlyatev, even simple boyars; from some estates there was no service at all. It is clear that this order could not be maintained despite the changes in land ownership brought about by the oprichnina. Private authorities wilted under the threat of the oprichnina and were removed; their service people became directly dependent on the great sovereign, and the general revision of land ownership attracted them all to the sovereign's oprichnina service or took them outside the oprichnina. With the oprichnina, the “armies” of several thousand servants, with WHICH the princes had previously come to the sovereign’s service, should have disappeared, just as all other traces of the old Appanage customs and liberties in the field of official relations should have been eradicated. Thus, seizing ancient appanage territories into the oprichnina to accommodate his new servants, Ivan the Terrible made radical changes in them, replacing the remnants of appanage experiences with new orders, ones that made everyone equal in the face of the sovereign in his “special everyday life,” where there could no longer be appanage memories and aristocratic traditions. It is curious that this revision of ancestors and people continued many years after the beginning of the oprichnina. The Terrible himself describes it very graphically in his famous petition on October 30, 1575 addressed to the Grand Duke Simeon Bekbulatovich: “So that you, sir, show mercy, free the little people to sort out, boyars and nobles and children of boyars and courtyard little people: others if freed to send, and you would grant others to accept; ... and you would free to choose and accept from all sorts of people, and those we do not need, and you would grant us those, sir, to free to send away...; they would want to come to us, and you, sir, would show mercy to free them to be with us without disgrace and would not order them to be taken from us; they will teach you to leave us, I didn’t accept the complaint.” Under the feigned self-deprecation of the Tsar “Ivanets Vasiliev” in his address to the newly installed “Grand Duke” Simeon, hides one of the usual decrees for that time on the revision of service people with the introduction of the oprichnina order.

Thirdly, in addition to the palace patrimonial and local lands, many volosts, according to the chronicle, “the sovereign received a fed payout, from which the volosts received all kinds of income for his sovereign household, the salaries of the boyars and nobles and all of his sovereign’s courtyard people who would be with him in the oprichnina." This is a correct, but not complete indication in the chronicle of income from the oprichnina lands. The fed payback is a special fee, a kind of redemption payment to volosts for the right of self-government, established in 1555–1556. We know that it was not limited to the income of the oprichnina. The oprichnina received, on the one hand, direct taxes in general, and on the other, various kinds of indirect taxes. When the Simonov Monastery was taken into the oprichnina, he was ordered to pay "all sorts of taxes" to the oprichnina ("both yam and notable money for the policeman, for the zasechnoye and for the yamchuzhnoye business" - the usual formula of that time). When the Trade side of Veliky Novgorod was taken into the oprichnina, the oprichnina clerks began to be in charge of all customs duties on it, determined by a special customs charter of 1571. Thus, some cities and volosts were introduced into the oprichnina for financial reasons: their purpose was to deliver to the oprichnina separate from "Zemstvo" income. Of course, the entire territory of the oprichnina paid the “tributes and quitrents” that had existed in Rus' from time immemorial, especially the volosts of industrial Pomerania, where there were no landowners; but the main interest and importance for the oprichnina tsarist treasury were the large urban settlements, since their population and markets received varied and rich collections. It is interesting to see how these commercial and industrial centers were selected for the oprichnina. In this case, a simple acquaintance with the map of the Moscow state can lead to some seemingly indisputable and not without significance conclusions. Having mapped the most important routes from Moscow to the borders of the state and marked on the map the places taken into the oprichnina, we will make sure that all the main routes with most of the cities located on them were included in the oprichnina. One can even say, without the risk of falling into exaggeration, that the oprichnina had control over the entire space of these routes, with the exception, perhaps, of the most bordering places. Of all the roads connecting Moscow with the borders, perhaps only the roads to the south, to Tula and Ryazan were left unattended by the oprichnina, we think, because their customs and other income was small, and their entire length was in troubled places in southern Ukraine.

The observations we have outlined on the composition of the lands taken into the oprichnina can now be reduced to one conclusion. The territory of the oprichnina, which was formed gradually, in the 70s of the 16th century. was made up of cities and volosts located in the central and northern regions of the state - in Pomorie, Zaotsk and Zaotsk cities, in the Obonezh and Bezhetskaya areas. Resting in the north on the “great sea of ​​oceans,” the oprichnina lands crashed into the “zemshchina,” dividing it in two. In the east, behind the zemshchina there remained the Perm and Vyatka cities, Ponizovye and Ryazan; in the west, border cities: “from the German Ukraine” (Pskov and Novgorod), “from the Lithuanian Ukraine” (Velikie Luki, Smolensk, etc.) and the cities of Seversk. In the south, these two strips of “Zemshchina” were connected by Ukrainian cities and a “wild field”. The oprichnina owned the north of Moscow, Pomorie and the two Novgorod Pyatina areas undividedly; in the central regions, its lands were mixed with zemstvo lands in such a striped pattern that it is impossible not only to explain, but also simply to depict. Of the big cities, it seems, only Tver, Vladimir, and Kaluga remained behind the zemshchina. The cities of Yaroslavl and Pereyaslavl Zalessky, it seems, were taken from the “zemshchina” only in the mid-70s. In any case, the vast majority of cities and volosts in the Moscow center moved away from the zemshchina, and we have the right to say that the outskirts of the state were ultimately abandoned to the zemshchina. The result was something opposite to what we see in the imperial and senatorial provinces of ancient Rome: there the imperial power takes direct control of the military outskirts and fetters the old center with a ring of legions; here the tsarist government, on the contrary, separates the internal regions into oprichnina, leaving the military outskirts of the state to the old administration.

These are the results the study of the territorial composition of the oprichnina led us to. Established in 1565, the new court of the Moscow sovereign in ten years covered all the internal regions of the state, made significant changes in the service land tenure of these regions, taking over the routes of external communications and almost all the most important markets of the country and quantitatively equaled the zemshchina, if only it did not outgrow it. In the 70s of the 16th century. This is far from being a “detachment of the royal bodyguards” and not even an “oprichnina” in the sense of an appanage court. The new court of the Terrible Tsar grew and became so complicated that it ceased to be an oprichnina not only in essence, but also in its official name: around 1572 the word “oprichnina” disappeared in the categories and was replaced by the word “court”. We think that this is not an accident, but a fairly clear sign that in the minds of the creators of the oprichnina it has changed its original form.

A number of observations outlined above put us at a point of view from which existing explanations of the oprichnina do not seem to fully correspond to historical reality. We see that, contrary to popular belief, the oprichnina did not stand “outside” the state at all. In the establishment of the oprichnina there was no “removal of the head of state from the state,” as S. M. Solovyov put it; on the contrary, the oprichnina took into its own hands the entire state in its root part, leaving boundaries to the “zemstvo” administration, and even strived for state reforms, for it introduced significant changes in the composition of the service land tenure. Destroying his aristocratic system, the oprichnina was directed, in essence, against those aspects of the state order that tolerated and supported such a system. It acted not “against individuals,” as V. O. Klyuchevsky says, but precisely against order, and therefore was much more an instrument of state reform than a simple police means of suppressing and preventing state crimes. In saying this, we do not at all deny the disgustingly cruel persecution to which the Terrible Tsar subjected his imaginary and real enemies in the oprichnina. Both Kurbsky and foreigners talk a lot about them and believe them. But it seems to us that the scenes of atrocity and debauchery, which horrified everyone and at the same time occupied them, were like dirty foam that boiled on the surface of the oprichnina’s life, covering up the everyday work taking place in its depths. The incomprehensible bitterness of Ivan the Terrible, the gross tyranny of his "kromeshniks" much more affected the interest of contemporaries than the everyday activities of the oprichnina, aimed at "sorting out the little people, the boyars and nobles and the children of the boyars and courtyard little people." Contemporaries noticed only the results of this activity - the destruction of princely land ownership; Kurbsky passionately reproached Ivan the Terrible for him, saying that the tsar destroyed princes for the sake of estates, acquisitions and belongings; Fletcher calmly pointed out the humiliation of the "appanage princes" after Ivan the Terrible seized their estates. But neither one nor the other of them, and indeed no one at all, left us a complete picture of how Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich concentrated in his hands, in addition to the “zemsky” boyars, the management of the most profitable places of the state and its trade routes and, having his oprichnina treasury and oprichnina servants, gradually “sorted through” the service people, tore them away from the soil that nourished their inconvenient political memories and claims, and planted them in new places or completely destroyed them in fits of his suspicious rage.

Perhaps this inability of contemporaries to discern behind the outbursts of the tsar’s anger and behind the arbitrariness of his oprichnina squad a certain plan and system in the actions of the oprichnina was the reason that the meaning of the oprichnina became hidden from the eyes of posterity. But there is another reason for this. Just as the first period of reforms of Tsar Ivan IV left few traces in the paperwork of Moscow orders, so the oprichnina with its reform of service land ownership was almost not reflected in the acts and orders of the 16th century. When transferring the regions to the oprichnina, Grozny did not invent any new forms or a new type of institution to govern them; he only entrusted their management to special persons - “from the court”, and these persons from the court acted side by side and together with persons “from the zemstvo”. That is why sometimes the name of the clerk alone, who sealed this or that document, shows us where the document was given, in the oprichnina or in the zemshchina, or only by the locality to which this or that act relates, we can judge what we are dealing with, with whether by oprichnik order or with the zemstvo. The act itself does not always indicate exactly which governing body in this case should be understood, zemstvo or courtyard; it simply says: “Big Palace”, “Grand Parish”, “Discharge” and only sometimes an explanatory word is added, like: “from the Zemstvo Palace”, “courtyard Discharge”, “to the courtyard Grand Parish”. Equally, positions were not always mentioned with the meaning of which order, oprichnina or zemstvo, they belonged to; sometimes it was said, for example, “with the sovereign, the boyars from the oprichnina”, “Butler of the Great Zemsky Palace”, “court voivodes”, “deacon of the Order of the courtyard”, etc., sometimes persons who obviously belonged to the oprichnina and “to the court”, are named in documents without any indication. Therefore, there is no way to give a definite image of the administrative structure of the oprichnina. It is very tempting to think that the oprichnina did not have administrative institutions separate from the “zemshchina”. There was, it seems, only one Order, one Big Parish, but in these and other public places, different clerks were entrusted with affairs and areas of zemstvo and courtyards separately, and the procedure for reporting and solving those and other cases was not the same. Researchers have yet to resolve the question of how things and people were demarcated in such a close and strange neighborhood. Now it seems to us that the enmity between the zemstvo and oprichnina people is inevitable and irreconcilable, because we believe that Ivan the Terrible commanded the oprichniki to rape and kill zemstvo people. Meanwhile, it is not visible that the government of the 16th century. considered courtyard and zemstvo people as enemies; on the contrary, it ordered them to act jointly and concordantly. So, in 1570, in May, “the sovereign ordered to speak about the (Lithuanian) borders to all the boyars, zemstvo and from the oprichnina... and the boyars, zemstvo and from the oprishnina, spoke about those borders; the sovereign ordered about the (Lithuanian) borders speak to all the boyars, zemstvo and oprishnina... and the boyars, zemstvo and oprishnina, talked about those borders" and came to one common decision. A month later, the boyars made the same general decision regarding the unusual “word” in the title of the Lithuanian sovereign and “for that word they ordered to stand strong.” Also in 1570 and 1571. on the “shore” and in the Ukraine there were zemstvo and “oprishninsky” detachments against the Tatars, and they were ordered to act together, “wherever the zemstvo governors happened to meet with the oprishninsky governors.” All such facts suggest that the relationship between the two parts of his kingdom was not built by Ivan the Terrible on the principle of mutual hostility, and if the oprichnina, according to Ivan Timofeev, caused “a great split in the whole land,” then the reasons for this lay not in the intentions of Ivan the Terrible, but in the ways of their implementation. Just one episode with the enthronement of Simeon Bekbulatovich in the zemshchina could contradict this, if serious significance could be attached to it and if it clearly indicated the intention to separate the “zemshchina” into a special “great reign.” But it seems that this was a short-term and not at all sustained test of power division. Simeon had the opportunity to sit in the rank of Grand Duke in Moscow for only a few months. Moreover, since he did not bear the royal title, he could not be crowned king; simply, according to one discharge book, the sovereign “placed him on a great reign in Moscow,” perhaps with some ritual, but, of course, not with the rite of a royal wedding. Simeon had one shadow of power, because during his reign, along with his letters, letters from the real “Tsar and Grand Duke of All Rus'” were also written, and the clerks did not even unsubscribe to the letters of “Grand Duke Simeon Bekbulatovich of All Rus'”, preferring to answer only to the “sovereign” Prince Ivan Vasilyevich of Moscow." In a word, it was some kind of game or whim, the meaning of which is not clear, and the political significance is negligible. Simeon was not shown to foreigners and they spoke about him confusedly and evasively; if real power had been given to him, it would hardly have been possible to hide this new ruler of the “zemshchina”.

So, the oprichnina was the first attempt to resolve one of the contradictions of the Moscow political system. It crushed the landownership of the nobility as it existed in ancient times. Through a forced and systematically carried out exchange of land, she destroyed the old connections of the appanage princes with their ancestral estates wherever she considered it necessary, and scattered the princes, suspicious in the eyes of Grozny, to different places of the state, mainly on its outskirts, where they turned into ordinary service landowners. If we remember that along with this land movement there were disgraces, exiles and executions, directed primarily at the same princes, then we will be convinced that in the oprichnina of Grozny there was a complete defeat of the appanage aristocracy. True, it was not exterminated “all the people”, without exception: this was hardly part of Grozny’s policy, as some scientists are inclined to think; but its composition thinned out significantly, and only those who knew how to appear politically harmless to Ivan the Terrible, like Mstislavsky and his son-in-law “Grand Duke” Simeon Bekbulatovich, were saved from death, or they knew how, like some princes - the Skopins, Shuiskys, Pronskys, Sitskys, Trubetskoys, Temkins - to earn the honor of being accepted into service in the oprichnina. The political significance of the class was irrevocably destroyed, and this was the success of Ivan’s policy. Immediately after his death, what the boyar-princes were so afraid of during his time came true: the Zakharyins and Godunovs began to own them. Primacy in the palace passed to these simple boyar families from a circle of people of the highest breed, broken by the oprichnina.

But this was only one of the consequences of the oprichnina. Another was the unusually vigorous government-led mobilization of land ownership. The oprichnina moved service people in droves from one land to another; lands changed owners not only in the sense that instead of one landowner another came, but also in the fact that palace or monastery land turned into local distribution, and the estate of a prince or the estate of a boyar’s son was assigned to the sovereign. There was, as it were, a general revision and a general reshuffling of ownership rights. The results of this operation were of undeniable importance for the government, although they were inconvenient and difficult for the population. Eliminating the old land relations in the oprichnina, bequeathed by allotment time, the government of Grozny, in their place, everywhere established monotonous orders that firmly linked the right of land ownership with compulsory service. This was required both by the political views of Ivan the Terrible himself and by the more general interests of state defense. Trying to place “Oprichnina” service people on the lands taken into the oprichnina, Grozny removed from these lands their old service owners who did not end up in the oprichnina, but at the same time he had to think about not leaving without lands and these latter ones. They settled in the "zemshchina" and settled in areas that needed a military population. Political considerations of Grozny drove them away from their old places, strategic needs determined the places of their new settlement. The clearest example of the fact that the placement of service people depended simultaneously on the introduction of the oprichnina and on circumstances of a military nature is found in the so-called Polotsk scribal books of 1571. They contain data on the children of the boyars who were brought to the Lithuanian border from Obonezhskaya and Bezhetskaya Pyatina immediately after these two Pyatins were taken into the oprichnina. In the border places, in Sebezh, Neshcherda, Ozerishchi and Usvyat, Novgorod servicemen were given lands to each in full at his salary of 400–500 chieti. Thus, not accepted among the guardsmen, these people completely lost their lands in the Novgorod Pyatina and received a new settlement on the border strip that had to be strengthened for the Lithuanian war. We have few such expressive examples of the influence that the oprichnina had on the turnover of land in the service center and on the military outskirts of the state. But there is no doubt that this influence was very great. It intensified land mobilization and made it anxious and disorderly. The mass confiscation and secularization of estates in the oprichnina, the mass movement of service landowners, the conversion of palace and black lands into private ownership - all this had the character of a violent revolution in the field of land relations and was inevitably bound to cause a very definite feeling of displeasure and fear in the population. The fear of the sovereign's disgrace and execution was mixed with the fear of being evicted from his native nest to the border wasteland without any guilt, “with the city together, and not in disgrace.” It was not only landowners who suffered from involuntary, sudden movements, who were forced to change their patrimony or local settlement and abandon one farm in order to start another in an alien environment, in new conditions, with a new working population. This working population suffered equally from the change of owners; it suffered especially when, together with the palace or black land on which it sat, it had to fall into private dependence. Relations between land owners and their peasant population were already quite complicated at that time; the oprichnina was supposed to complicate and muddy them even more.

But the question of land relations in the 16th century. takes us to a different area of ​​Moscow social difficulties...

S. F. Platonov. Lectures on Russian history

The word “oprichnina” takes its roots from the Old Russian “oprich”, which translates as “except”, “special”. In the 16th century, this term was used to describe territories that were already in the personal use of the sovereign and his inner circle.

If we talk about domestic politics, then the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible is briefly a policy of repression against rebellious boyars, aimed at strengthening autocratic power and centralization of the state, which lasted from 1565 to 1572. Its essence was to pacify the then quite strong boyar class at any cost, in particular, physical reprisals, confiscation of land holdings and all property in favor of the state, and forced relocation of people to other territories became widespread.

This time went down in history as a time of bloody massacres, rampant tyranny and lawlessness committed by the king and his entourage. In order to understand what happened, it is necessary to know the causes and consequences of this phenomenon.

The Tsar's guardsmen

The reasons for oprichnina can be listed as follows:

• Unsuccessful foreign policy (losses in the West in the Livonian War, started by the tsar in 1558 for territories on the Baltic coast, the tsar blamed everything on the boyars, their reluctance and inability to act decisively, as well as disrespect for the tsarist authority; raids of the Crimean Tatars);
• The death in 1560 of Ivan the Terrible’s beloved wife Anastasia (who was one of the few who could restrain the unbridled temper of the tsar; she was probably poisoned), in 1563 the death of Metropolitan Macarius, the tsar’s spiritual mentor. The fall of the Elected Rada (it was created from associates tsar, carried out a number of reforms, but disagreements between the tsar and its leader Alexei Adashev in the field of foreign policy, as well as the tsar’s dissatisfaction with the slow pace of reforms led to the dissolution of the Elected Rada in 1560);
• The betrayal in 1563 of the military leader Prince Andrei Kurbsky, who was part of the Chosen Rada and fled to hostile Lithuania (after this, the already suspicious tsar begins to see a conspiracy everywhere, and is convinced of the boyars’ disloyalty to him).

These and other reasons gave rise to such a phenomenon as the oprichnina. Oprichnina politics began in 1565, when Ivan the Terrible left Moscow, moving to Alexandrovskaya Sloboda, and dividing the territory of the state into “oprichnina” (part of Moscow, and the counties closest to it, vast territories in the west and south of the state) and “zemshchina” (all remaining land).

From Alexandrovskaya Sloboda, Ivan the Terrible writes and sends 2 letters to the capital, the first was addressed to the new metropolitan and the boyars, the second to the people. The letters said that Ivan Vasilyevich was refusing his rule because of the conspiracies of the boyars, betrayal and disobedience of their royal power, but he did not hold grudges against the common people.

At the behest of the sovereign, Basmanov-Pleshcheev (a representative of the royal family) creates an oprichnina army - the personal guard of the tsar, the servicemen who were part of it were endowed with privileges, and essentially unlimited power (the tsar turned a blind eye to the lawlessness committed by the guardsmen, and often encouraged them, he himself participating in bloody fun).

The guardsmen sat astride black horses, with a broom and a dog's head attached to the saddles. These symbols said that the guardsmen were ready to sweep away, like rubbish, from the borders of the country everyone who did not agree with the power of the tsar and dared to resist him. And they are faithful to him like dogs. The initial number of the oprichnina army was 1000 people, which subsequently increased significantly.

So, we have looked at the reasons, now let’s move on.

Zemshchina was subject to taxes in favor of the oprichnina; boyars and their associates who were unfaithful to the tsar were forcibly resettled there, having previously been deprived of property, land holdings and ranks. In the oprichnina, bloody executions of boyars and princes began. From Aleksandovskaya Sloboda, Ivan the Terrible regularly makes visits to Moscow to punish traitors to the state and his personal enemies. Almost everyone who dared to stand in his way, to resist the lawlessness that was happening, soon died.

In 1569, Ivan the Terrible, not unreasonably, decided that Novgorod was dissatisfied with what was happening and a conspiracy was brewing against him and his policies. The Tsar gathers large forces and goes with them to Novgorod, reaching it in the winter of 1570. The atrocities in Novgorod lasted 1.5 months, during which time mass beatings of people, 500-600 people, took place every day. Robbery of local residents, arson, and murder of civilians became widespread. Only 5th part of the population remained alive. Thus, all possible resistance in Novgorod was broken.

Next, the bloody movement headed to Pskov. A significantly increased army of guardsmen entered the city. At first, Ivan the Terrible wanted to organize bloody massacres in Pskov, similar to those in Novgorod, but only a few boyars were executed, and their property was confiscated to the state treasury.

After Pskov, the tsar and his army return to Moscow, frozen with fear, in order to find and eradicate the infection of the Novgorod conspiracy. The Moscow massacres became the highest point in the chaos of the oprichnina. According to experts, approximately 200 people from the top of the boyar class were executed, including people close to the tsar. The consequences of such a massacre, the mass extermination of representatives of ancient clans, had a painful impact on the state of internal politics and the perception of what was happening inside and outside the country.

The failure of the oprichnina policy and its disastrous consequences for the country (its defense capability in particular) became visible in 1571 during the invasion of Moscow by the Crimean Tatars led by Khan Devlet-Girey. Then the oprichnina troops, accustomed to robbery and robbery, spoiled by the weak resistance of the townspeople, were unable to defend Moscow; many simply did not show up on the battlefield.

Soon the tsar abolished the oprichnina policy, disbanded the oprichnina, and even executed several, but Ivan the Terrible’s close retinue existed in this form until his death, only changing its name from oprichnina to court.

We examined the reasons and course of the oprichnina policy. What were its consequences and results for the country?

The consequences and results of the oprichnina policy were as follows:

1. The Boyar Duma lost its role as a governing body (during the years of the oprichnina it was never convened); it remained rather as a tribute to tradition.
2. Tens of thousands of people died. According to calculations, for every executed boyar there were several service people and up to a dozen peasants and artisans. People were confused and disoriented.
3. The country was on the verge of an economic crisis, up to 90% of arable land was not cultivated, and famine set in.
4. Strengthening serfdom (Ivan the Terrible abolished St. George's Day, now peasants could not move to other lands or change owners.)
5. Russia lost the 25-year Livonian War with the Polish-Lithuanian state, lost all access to the Baltic Sea and lands in the Gulf of Finland, which went to the Swedes, who took advantage of the situation.
6. The unstable situation associated with the dynastic crisis (Ivan Vasilyevich did not leave behind a direct heir to the throne and power), social tension in all layers of society led Russia to the sad and tragic times of the Time of Troubles and impostors.

On his deathbed, the tsar “forgave” all the disgraced boyars - “traitors” who were executed during the oprichnina by his decree.