As Ivan the IV’s reign continued, he began to lose himself
to paranoia. He was brought up in a very
turbulent time, and during his reign there was a real threat to his power from
other boyars and foreign influences so he was rightly paranoid. In 1564, Prince
Andrei Kurbsky defected to the Lithuanians and led their armies into
Russia. This deeply hurt Ivan, who
already mistrusted noblemen, and led him to cleverly give up the throne. Realizing the boyars could not lead the
country alone he waited until they came to him and begged him to take the
throne back. He accepted on the
condition that he would be given the right to execute and take the lands of those
he considered treasonous, without interference from the boyar council. This marked the creation of the oprichnina,
a domestic system where the Tsar took massive amounts of land from around the
Novgorod area, and kept it directly under his control. He forcibly moved boyars off of the
oprichnina land and created the oprichniki. The oprichniki would become a police force
and ministers of the new oprichnina.
They were terrifying figures meant to strike fear into the hearts of
traitors. They dressed in black robes,
rode black horses, and carried a broom and a dog’s head. The broom represented “sweeping away” traitors,
and the dog’s head represented how the Tsar and his forces were biting at the
heels of his enemies.
The Tsar picked most of the oprichniki from lower classes
and lower members of the military. By
this time he had a deep distrust of the boyars or any type of nobility. He allowed the men to “tax” the areas within
the oprichnina. This tax really equated
to the soldiers swiftly riding into a town and plundering it. If villagers refused, they could be
mercilessly whipped, or simply put to death.
Ivan would also call upon these troops when he became suspicious of
treason in specific cities. For example,
The Massacre of
Novgorod occurred after the Tsar suspected treason in the city. He sent the oprichniki to plunder and loot
the village and at least 1,500 citizens of Novgorod (a large amount of them
noblemen) were murdered. The Tsar was a
deeply religious man, and he wanted to make sure each man of noble birth
confessed of his traitorous sins before he was executed. To get the confessions he required, the
oprichniki would use torture tactics such as dipping a man in boiling water, or
tying each of his limbs to a different horse then ordering them to ride in
different directions.
It
seems that Ivan the IV wanted to create a new powerful class that was loyal to
him alone. During the oprichnina, Ivan
spread his control to eight central districts.
There were 12,000 nobles in the area, about 600 of them were made into
oprichniki and the rest were expelled.
They were given vast lands and power, but eventually they were forced to
enter a real battle.
During
the Lithuanian War in 1572, the oprichniki were sent to battle against an
organized force. However, they proved to
be completely ineffective when they weren’t harassing unarmed citizens. This, mixed with the fact that the oprichniki
were having terrible effects on the population of Russia caused the Tsar to
disband them in 1572. He even went as
far as to make it a capital offense to even mention the oprichniki, even though
he created them in the first place. They
had a lasting effect; many powerful boyars were either stripped off all power
or moved to locations where they could not be as influential. Ivan the IV also was able to consolidate the
power of the autocracy by striking not only fear but terror into the heart of
anyone considering treason.
No comments:
Post a Comment