The Livonian campaign was fought in the area of what are now Estonia and Latvia, and was well timed. The region had long been ruled by the Knights of the Teutonic Order and the Knights of the Sword, displaced crusaders whose raison d’être had long been questioned, and whose hold was now undermined by the popularity of Lutheranism and by military threats from Sweden and Denmark as well as Russia. Nor were the Russians any longer at a technological disadvantage, as once they had been; they attacked in force, deploying large numbers of soldiers and hauling a large siege train with them. They were assisted to some degree by native Letts who hated their German masters and did what they could to sabotage their operations. Stronghold after stronghold submitted without a fight. Narva fell in May, Derpt in July, and then Wesenberg. Wesenberg was soon recaptured, but the Russians held on to Narva and Derpt as well as many other strong-points. As was the case with the newly acquired territories in the south, Muscovite governors were immediately installed, backed by government clerks.
18
But then success became more elusive, and its price higher. The German Knights of Livonia and the former autonomous Hansa cities of the region soon recognized that they could not withstand the might of Russia’s army alone, and so they sought the protection of other powers. Reval submitted to Sweden, Riga and the Duchy of Courland to Poland-Lithuania; another part of Livonia fell to Denmark. Hostilities dragged on from months to years, the area of operations broadened, and the war became more intense.
In 1563, when Ivan’s troops, opening up a new front, stormed the Polish city of Polotsk, it was said that they ordered ‘twenty thousand people, first to have their arms and legs chopped off, and then to be strangled … No words can express the outrages they committed among Matrons, Maidens and Children … [Then the victims] were stripped naked and … led chained into captivity … [This] created an exceeding terror into the whole of this province.’
19 Terror had long been used as a means of scaring an enemy into headlong retreat, but this account is reminiscent of descriptions of the Mongol terror in central Europe three centuries earlier, and it may have repeated conventional literary tropes. Nevertheless, well founded or not, hate literature concerning Russia and the Russians was gaining wide currency in the West, especially in Germany.
Though locked into this war in the west, Ivan also needed to maintain a strong military establishment in the south, to safeguard earlier successes and contain the Crimean khan and his mighty overlord, the Ottoman sultan. The strains of this huge effort in two directions eventually precipitated a crisis for the Russian state. The crisis was associated with the creation by Ivan early in 1565 of a seemingly weird institution. Known as the oprichnina,
20
which suggests something apart or separate, it was a kind of state outside the state, owning extensive properties and run by Ivan’s trusties, who wore black cowls and carried brooms and dogs’-heads at their saddle-bows.
The oprichnina is associated with a reign of terror. This strange and bloody episode in Russia’s history has been attributed to Ivan’s paranoia -to his belief that many of the elite, including ministers, former trusties and prelates of the Church, were plotting against him. On the other hand, proponents of Ivan have adduced evidence of plots, and the Tsar is commonly, and accurately, portrayed as lashing out angrily against those who stood in his way Even so, the psychological and political interpretations are not entirely satisfactory
It is only when account is taken of the financial demands of war and the determined opposition of vested interests to Ivan’s exercise of personal power, not least within the court itself, that the oprichnina and the terror become explicable in rational terms. The cause of strife had little to do with personalities, but a great deal to do with the state’s attempt to extend its fiscal base and secure suffient income for all the servicemen it needed.
21It also had to do with the primitive character of Russian social institutions. Other states could use or mould existing institutions to serve its needs. Russia often had to create them. Even such apparently quintessentially Russian institutions as the liquor-house (kabak), notorious haven of the heroic Russian drunk, and the village commune (mir or obshchina), fabled proof that Russians were natural democrats, were the inventions of Ivan’s state.
22 The first was a means of exploiting the state’s monopoly of spirits in the most profitable way; the second was a means of imposing a collective obligation to pay taxes.
