saw in the betrayals and rebellions of the feudal nobility. Ivan the Terrible was confident in the need for strong autocratic power, the main obstacle to which was the boyar-princely opposition. Under these conditions, he goes to establish a regime of terror.
The decision of Ivan the Terrible was preceded by a number of events on the internal political scene of the state:
- Death of Ivan IV's wife Anastasia, who was allegedly poisoned;
- Failures in foreign policy, failures in the Livonian War, successful raids of the Crimean Tatars on Russian lands;
- The flight of the prince to Lithuania.
These events served as the reason for the tightening of the internal policies of Ivan IV and the introduction of the oprichnina. In January 1565, Ivan IV left Moscow for Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda. From the settlement he sends two messages. One was sent to the metropolitan and the boyar duma, the second to the townspeople. The tsar said that he was renouncing royal power because of boyar betrayals, but had no complaints against the common people.
Muscovites went with an embassy to Ivan the Terrible several times. The Tsar eventually agreed to return to Moscow, but on the condition that he would be provided with:
- full right of extrajudicial reprisal against traitors;
- the king will be given a personal inheritance;
- A special army of thousands of selected nobles and boyars will be recruited for the king.
The oprichnina was established in 1565. The oprichnina of Ivan IV is a system of measures aimed at strengthening the autocracy and further enslaving the peasantry. The territory of the country was divided into oprichnina lands, the income from which went to the sovereign treasury. The oprichnina included the most fertile lands of the state, cities with large suburbs and Pomeranian cities. In these areas, princely and boyar estates were confiscated, their former owners were evicted to the surrounding areas, where they received land on the basis of local law.
The new owners of the oprichnina lands were the nobles who were part of the oprichnina army. These innovations led to the redistribution of land, to the weakening of large feudal-patrimonial land ownership and the elimination of its independence from the central government. Ivan the Terrible carried out all his transformations with particular cruelty. Metropolitan Philip was killed, and the last appanage prince, Vladimir Staritsky, was poisoned. Entire cities were destroyed.
The consequences of the oprichnina were as follows. Its main goal was to destroy the remnants of feudal fragmentation and was successfully accomplished. But having eliminated fragmentation, the oprichnina bled the people dry, demoralized the people, and led to an aggravation of internal political contradictions. The ruin and terror of the oprichnina years (1565 - 1572) became one of the main reasons for the deep crisis experienced by Russia at the end of the 16th century.
- Increasing social instability in the conditions of the dynastic crisis led the Russian state to tragic events: the emergence of impostors,
- invasion of foreign troops,
- economic decline
- impoverishment of the people
- degradation of the state.
In 1564, the Tsar unexpectedly left Moscow for Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda, as if abdicating the throne. At the request of the clergy, boyars and all sorts of people, Ivan the Terrible agreed to return to the kingdom, but on the condition of establishing oprichnina to deal with traitors and disobedient people. It was a special court, which the tsar formed for himself, with special boyars, a butler, 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, Ivan the Terrible selected 1000 people into the oprichnina, who were assigned streets with several settlements in the capital, outside the walls of the White City, behind the line of the current boulevards; 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 counties 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 neo-oprichnaya 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.
The oprichnina separated from the state was not an entire region, a continuous territory, it was made up of villages, volosts and cities, even only parts of other cities, scattered here and there, mainly in the central and northern counties (Vyazma, Kozelsk, Kargopol, etc.). “The state is its own Moscow,” i.e. All the rest of the land subject to the Moscow sovereign, with its army, court and administration, the tsar ordered the boyars, who were ordered to be “in the zemstvo”, to be in charge of and do all sorts of zemstvo affairs, and this half of the state received the name Zemshchina. And the central government institutions remaining in the zemshchina, orders they had to act 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.
Oprichniki. The murder of boyar Fedorov by Ivan the Terrible. Painting by N. Nevrev
At first glance, the oprichnina appears to be an institution devoid of any political meaning. In fact, having declared all the boyars traitors, Tsar Ivan the Terrible left control of the land in the hands of these traitors. But the origin of the oprichnina is closely connected with the political clash that caused it. Term oprichnina borrowed from specific time: in princely charters of the 14th century. Oprichnina were the names given to the estates of princesses-widows. The oprichnina of the tsar was, as it were, a special inheritance that he allocated to himself from the state, from Zemshchina. But Ivan the Terrible gave this institution a previously unprecedented task, which was to exterminate the sedition that nested in the Russian land, mainly among the boyars. Thus, the oprichnina acquired the significance of the highest police force in cases of high treason. A detachment of a thousand service people, enlisted in the oprichnina and then increased to six thousand, became a corps of watchmen for internal sedition.
This was the origin and purpose of the oprichnina. But it did not answer the political question that caused it, and did not resolve the dispute between the Moscow sovereign and his boyars. The dispute was aroused by one contradiction in the political system of the Moscow state. This is a state in the 16th century. became an autocratic monarchy, but with aristocratic government, headed by noble and demanding boyars. This means that the nature of the new power of the Moscow sovereign did not correspond to the nature of the government bodies through which it was supposed to act. Both sides then felt in an awkward position and did not know how to get out of it. The difficulty lay in the inconvenient political position of the boyars for the sovereign, as a government class that constrained him. Therefore, 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, or to attract the most reliable people from the boyars to the throne and rule with them, as Ivan had already ruled at the beginning of his life. reign
A. Vasnetsov. Moscow dungeon during the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible
The king thought about both; but he couldn’t do one thing, and he couldn’t do the other or didn’t want to. He could not soon create another government class sufficiently familiar and capable of governing. 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. Ivan did the opposite: suspecting the entire boyars of treason, he rushed at the suspects, tearing them out with the hands of the guardsmen one by one - but left the class at the head of the zemstvo administration. Unable to crush the system of government that was inconvenient for him, he began to exterminate individual people he hated. This was the political purposelessness of the oprichnina: caused by a clash, the cause of which 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 caused it.
Based on materials from the works of the great Russian historian V. O. Klyuchevsky
Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible
Oprichnina is a state policy of terror that reigned in Rus' at the end of the 16th century under the reign of Ivan 4.
The essence of the oprichnina was the seizure of property from citizens in favor of the state. By order of the sovereign, special lands were allocated, which were used exclusively for the royal needs and the needs of the royal court. These territories had their own government and were closed to ordinary citizens. All territories were taken from the landowners with the help of threats and force.
The word "oprichnina" comes from the Old Russian word "oprich", which means "special". Also called oprichnina was that part of the state that had already been transferred to the sole use of the tsar and his subjects, as well as oprichniki (members of the sovereign's secret police).
The number of oprichnina (royal retinue) was about a thousand people.
Reasons for introducing the oprichnina
Tsar Ivan the Terrible was famous for his stern disposition and military campaigns. The emergence of the oprichnina is largely connected with the Livonian War.
In 1558, he started the Livonian War for the right to seize the Baltic coast, but the course of the war did not go as the sovereign would have liked. Ivan repeatedly reproached his commanders for not acting decisively enough, and the boyars did not at all respect the tsar as an authority in military matters. The situation is aggravated by the fact that in 1563 one of Ivan’s military leaders betrays him, thereby increasingly undermining the tsar’s trust in his retinue.
Ivan 4 begins to suspect the existence of a conspiracy between the governor and the boyars against his royal power. He believes that his entourage dreams of ending the war, overthrowing the sovereign and installing Prince Vladimir Staritsky in his place. All this forces Ivan to create a new environment for himself that would be able to protect him and punish everyone who goes against the king. This is how oprichniki were created - special warriors of the sovereign - and the policy of oprichnina (terror) was established.
The beginning and development of the oprichnina. Main events.
The guardsmen followed the tsar everywhere and were supposed to protect him, but it happened that these guards abused their powers and committed terror, punishing the innocent. The Tsar turned a blind eye to all this and always justified his guardsmen in any disputes. As a result of the outrages of the guardsmen, very soon they began to be hated not only by ordinary people, but also by the boyars. All the most terrible executions and acts committed during the reign of Ivan the Terrible were committed by his guardsmen.
Ivan 4 leaves for Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda, where he creates a secluded settlement together with his guardsmen. From there, the tsar regularly makes raids on Moscow in order to punish and execute those whom he considers traitors. Almost everyone who tried to stop Ivan in his lawlessness soon died.
In 1569, Ivan begins to suspect that intrigues are being woven in Novgorod and that there is a conspiracy against him. Having gathered a huge army, Ivan moves into the city and in 1570 reaches Novgorod. After the tsar finds himself in the lair of what he believes are traitors, his guardsmen begin their terror - they rob residents, kill innocent people, and burn houses. According to the data, mass beatings of people took place every day, 500-600 people.
The next stop of the cruel tsar and his guardsmen was Pskov. Despite the fact that the tsar initially planned to also carry out reprisals against the residents, in the end only some of the Pskovites were executed, and their property was confiscated.
After Pskov, Grozny again goes to Moscow to find accomplices of the Novgorod treason there and commit reprisals against them.
In 1570-1571, a huge number of people died in Moscow at the hands of the Tsar and his guardsmen. The king did not spare anyone, not even his own close associates; as a result, about 200 people were executed, including the most noble people. A large number of people survived, but suffered greatly. The Moscow executions are considered the apogee of oprichnina terror.
The end of the oprichnina
The system began to fall apart in 1571, when Rus' was attacked by the Crimean Khan Devlet-Girey. The guardsmen, accustomed to living by robbing their own citizens, turned out to be useless warriors and, according to some reports, simply did not show up on the battlefield. This is what forced the tsar to abolish the oprichnina and introduce the zemshchina, which was not much different. There is information that the tsar’s retinue continued to exist almost unchanged until his death, changing only the name from “oprichniki” to “court”.
Results of the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible
The results of the oprichnina of 1565-1572 were disastrous. Despite the fact that the oprichnina was conceived as a means of unifying the state and the purpose of the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible was to protect and destroy feudal fragmentation, it ultimately led only to chaos and complete anarchy.
In addition, the terror and devastation carried out by the guardsmen led to an economic crisis in the country. The feudal lords lost their lands, the peasants did not want to work, the people were left without money and did not believe in the justice of their sovereign. The country was mired in chaos, the oprichnina divided the country into several disparate parts.
Oprichnina is a very complex phenomenon in the history of Rus'. Oprichnina was not the result of psychosis (paranoia) of Ivan IV; Nor was it “the highest police in cases of high treason,” as V. O. Klyuchevsky once claimed. The oprichnina had great political meaning, but very little is known about this extremely important phenomenon. The original documents about the establishment of the oprichnina have not survived. The circumstances surrounding the establishment of the oprichnina are only briefly described in the chronicle. Not everything can be trusted by such narrators as Prince Kurbsky, who suffered from the oprichnina.
The emergence of the oprichnina
The circumstances of the establishment of the oprichnina are as follows. In December 1564, Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich, along with his wife and sons, left Moscow. After living for two weeks in the village of Kolomenskoye, the tsar went to the Trinity-Sergius Monastery, and from there to Alexandrov Sloboda. The clergy, boyars and all the officials were “bewildered and despondent”, not understanding what was happening. A month later, the tsar sent two letters to Moscow. One was addressed to Metropolitan Afanasy and contained a list of “betrayals” of boyars, governors and all sorts of officials who had fallen into disgrace. Another letter was addressed to merchants and “all Orthodox Christians,” who were told that they “should not hold any doubts,” since there was no royal wrath or disgrace against them.
On the same day, a delegation of boyars and higher clergy was sent to the tsar in the settlement. The Tsar received the delegates and agreed to return to power on the condition that he establish an oprichnina. To support the oprichnina court, the tsar took a number of cities and volosts, from which patrimonial owners and landowners who were not included in the oprichnina should be removed. The rest of the state constituted the zemshchina and was supposed to be under the control of the boyars. Zemstvo boyars were supposed to report to the tsar only about military and major matters. Grozny returned to Moscow and then began the practical implementation of the oprichnina.
The guardsmen were not just a special corps of bodyguards like the Turkish Janissaries. In the oprichnina we see the same boyars and the same court ranks that existed in the zemshchina. Mostly the middle and petty nobility were taken into the oprichnina. The oprichnina was also supported by the posad. The oprichnina was directed against the noble boyar nobility and those who were in one way or another connected with it. The oprichnina included cities and districts in the center of the Russian state (Mozhaisk, Rostov, Yaroslavl, etc.), as well as part of Moscow. Later, the territory of the oprichnina was expanded by the annexation of Staritsa, Kostroma, the trade side of Novgorod, etc. The votchinniki and landowners who were not part of the oprichnina were evicted to the outskirts, and oprichniki were settled in their places. These operations were carried out on a large scale. In the central regions of the Russian state, the lands of the descendants of appanage princes passed into the oprichnina. Thus, a radical breakdown of patrimonial land ownership occurred. Instead of their lands, the princes and boyars received lands under local law in other places, on the outskirts of the state.
Thus, the oprichnina included all the main cities of the Russian state. The zemshchina received only the outskirts under its jurisdiction. The territory of the oprichnina was formed gradually and during the ten years of the existence of the oprichnina it increased significantly.
Goals and objectives of the oprichnina
By bringing the nobility to the fore, the oprichnina made significant changes in the composition of the service land tenure. Thus, it was directed not against individuals, but against former feudal privileges, being by its nature a matter of great national importance.
Sources report that the guardsmen were dressed in black caftans, wore a black hat, and rode black horses. Tied to their belts was an image of a dog's head and a small short-handled broom - emblems of the dog's loyalty to the king in the pursuit of treason. The capital of the oprichnina became Alexandrova Sloboda, where a kind of monastery was organized. The abbot of this clownish monastery was Ivan the Terrible himself. In the intervals between long services, torture and execution of persons suspected of treason took place in the dungeons of the Alexander Palace. However, the manifestations of atrocity and debauchery that contemporaries noted in the oprichnina are only a bloody, dirty scum, but not the essence of the oprichnina as a socio-political phenomenon. The oprichnina detachment was headed by Malyuta Skuratov (Grigory Belsky). In 1574, Grozny appointed a special person over the zemshchina with the title of Grand Duke - Tsar Simeon Bekbulatovich. But Simeon only had to spend a few months in the rank of Grand Duke in Moscow. It can be argued that the role of Simeon Bekbulatovich was insignificant, and neither the tsar himself nor the Moscow boyars and officials attached importance to him.
The end of the oprichnina
The boyars and princes did not react passively to the introduction of the oprichnina, but fought against it in different ways. The boyars tried to use the church to fight the oprichnina. Metropolitan Philip, from the family of Kolychev boyars, upon his election to the metropolitan throne, insisted on the destruction of the oprichnina, but in the end, he agreed not to interfere in its affairs. The Metropolitan urged the Tsar to stop executing the boyars. Philip's enemies reported on the Metropolitan's “inappropriate” speeches addressed to the Tsar. At the request of Ivan IV, the church council deprived Philip of the metropolis, exiling him to captivity in the Tverskaya Otroch Monastery, where he was subsequently strangled by Malyuta Skuratov.
In 1569, the government received a denunciation of alleged treason in Novgorod, where a group of supporters of joining the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had been created. Grozny launched a campaign against Novgorod and Pskov. Along the way, Tver and other cities were ravaged by the guardsmen. Ivan the Terrible arrived in Novgorod with his son and guardsmen (1570) and carried out reprisals against the Novgorod clergy, merchants and officials for over a month. Scribe books on the Novgorod district, compiled shortly after the events described, noting desolate villages and individual peasant households, repeatedly explain this sad phenomenon with the words: “and the courtyards were empty of the oprichnina people,” “and the villages were burned by the oprichnina people,” etc. Less suffered. from the Tsar and the guardsmen of Pskov, which occupied a border position and was the most important fortress on the northwestern Russian borders. The defeat of Novgorod was aimed at weakening the still existing tendencies towards Novgorod separatism. History of glass
Glass is a solid, amorphous in structure. Glass can be natural or artificial, made by man. Since ancient times, man has learned to use natural glass as a tool... 
The main natural wealth of swamps is peat, an organic rock containing no more than 50% minerals, formed as a result of the death and incomplete decay of plants in conditions of high humidity and lack of oxygen. . .
The main goal of the oprichnina was to establish absolutely unlimited power of the tsar, close in nature to eastern despotism. The meaning of these historical events is that in the middle - second half of the 16th century. Russia is faced with an alternative for further development. The beginning of the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the huge role played at that time by the Elected Rada, the reforms being carried out, the convening of the first Zemsky Sobors could lead to the formation of a softer version of development, to a limited representative monarchy. But, due to the political ideas and character of Ivan the Terrible, another option was developed: an unlimited monarchy, autocracy close to despotism.
Ivan the Terrible strove for this goal, stopping at nothing, without thinking about the consequences.
Oprichnina and Zemshchina
In December 1564, Ivan the Terrible, taking with him his family, “close” boyars, part of the clerks and nobles, as well as the entire treasury, left Moscow on a pilgrimage to the Trinity-Sergius Monastery, however, after being there for a week, he went on and stayed in the village of Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda. From there, in January 1565, a messenger arrived in Moscow with two messages, which were announced publicly. The letter addressed to the boyars, clergy, nobles and children of the boyars said that the tsar was putting “disgrace” on all of them for their “treason,” the theft of the sovereign’s treasury and lands, and for their unwillingness to protect him from external enemies. Therefore, he decided to renounce the throne and settle “where God will guide him, the sovereign.” The second letter was addressed to merchants and townspeople, it said that he did not hold any grudge against them.
The king, of course, did not intend to abdicate the throne. He contrasted the feudal lords with ordinary people, presenting himself as the defender of the latter. As was calculated, the townspeople began to demand that the boyars persuade the tsar not to leave the kingdom and promised that they themselves would destroy the sovereign’s enemies. When the delegation arrived in Alexandrov Sloboda, the tsar agreed to return to the throne with the condition of establishing an “oprichnina” - giving him the right to execute “traitors” and confiscate their property at his discretion.
The term “oprichnina” was known before. This was the name of the land that the prince bequeathed to his widow in addition to the rest of the territory. Now this word has been given a new meaning. The entire territory of the Russian state was divided into two parts. The first is the oprichnina, a kind of inheritance that belongs only to the sovereign of all Rus' and is taken under his control. The second part is the rest of the land - zemshchina. The feudal lords accepted into the oprichnina constituted a special “sovereign court”, became the tsar’s personal servants, and were under his special protection. Both the oprichnina and the zemshchina had their own Boyar Duma and orders. Princes I. Belsky and I. Mstislavsky were placed at the head of the zemshchina, who were supposed to report to the tsar on military and civil affairs.
In addition, Ivan the Terrible created a special personal guard, the oprichnina. The guardsmen dressed in black and tied a dog's head and a broom-shaped hand to the saddle as a sign that they, like devoted dogs, would gnaw at treason and sweep it out of the state. No matter what the guardsmen did, people from the zemshchina could not resist in any way.
When the land was divided into the oprichnina, volosts and counties with developed feudal land tenure were taken: central, part of the western and northern. At the same time, the tsar warned that if the income from these lands was not enough, other lands and cities would be taken into the oprichnina. In Moscow, an oprichnina part was also allocated, the border ran along Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street. Feudal lords who lived in the oprichnina lands and were not part of the oprichnina had to be evicted, giving them land elsewhere in the zemshchina; usually those evicted received land on the estate instead of estates. A complete resettlement from the zemshchina to the oprichnina lands did not happen, although it was quite massive.
The tsar’s reprisal against the “enemies” of him and the state began. Frequent pretexts for this were denunciations, signed and anonymous, and the denunciations were not verified. Upon denunciation, the oprichnina army was urgently sent to the estate of the person against whom the denunciation was received. Anyone suspected of treason could face anything: from relocation to another territory to murder. Property was given to the oprichniki, the land went to the oprichnina, and the informer, if he was known, was entitled to a certain percentage of the property of the person subjected to execution.
Cancellation of the oprichnina
formidable reform oprichnina
The division of the state into oprichnina and zemshchina, constant disgraces and executions weakened the state. It was dangerous, since at that time the most difficult Livonian War was going on. “Traitors” were blamed for the failures of military operations. Türkiye took advantage of the weakening of the country. Turkish and Crimean troops besieged Astrakhan in 1571, and then the Crimean Khan Devlet-Girey went to Moscow. The guardsmen, who were supposed to hold the barrier on the banks of the Oka, for the most part did not show up for duty. Devlet-Girey set fire to a Moscow suburb, a fire started, and the city burned down. The Tsar fled from Moscow, first to Alexandrov Sloboda, then further to Beloozero. The following year, the khan repeated the raid, hoping to capture the king himself. But this time Ivan the Terrible united the oprichnina and zemstvo troops, placing the disgraced Prince Vorotynsky at their head. In July 1572, in a battle near the village of Molodi, 50 km. from Moscow, the army of Devlet-Girey was defeated.
In the same year, the tsar abolished the oprichnina, some of the victims were given back their lands, the word “oprichnina” was banned, but the terror did not stop, everything continued as before.
Oprichnina results
As a result of the Livonian War and the oprichnina, the land was devastated. Peasants fled to the Don and Volga, many boyars and nobles became beggars. A land census taken at the end of the century showed that approximately half of the previously cultivated land had become wasteland. This played an important role in the next stage of enslavement of the peasants.
