What is oprichnina in ancient Rus'. Judgments about her contemporaries. History of the term "oprichnina": a brief introduction

Oprichnina was a sharp change in domestic policy from reform to repression. Historians of the 19th century looked for the reasons for this turn in the character of the king and his relations with his inner circle. Soviet historians have long tried to present these reasons as a conscious desire to do away with the boyar aristocracy.

The modern interpretation of the oprichnina is based on the fact that it was the tsar's struggle against any political opponents for the establishment of autocracy.

Skrynnikov considers it to be an apex coup with the aim of establishing unlimited rule.

Florya is a political coup.

Reasons for the oprichnina

1. The inability to fully implement the reforms, especially the military one, due to the lack of land for distribution.

2. Political jealousy of the tsar for his inner circle as an obstacle to his autocracy.

3. The desire to weaken the influence of the princely-boyar aristocracy on public policy.

4. Failures in foreign policy. In 1564, the inevitability of war both in Livonia and with the Crimea became obvious.

Since it was a war of an Orthodox state with a Protestant and Muslim one, by blaming the negligent boyars for another way of waging the war, the tsar got the opportunity to accuse them of treason not only to the sovereign, but to all of Orthodox Christianity.

Background of the oprichnina

1. Personality of the king.

2. His belief that faithful servants can only be of poor birth.

3. His conviction that he should rule with autonomy.

4. The king's confidence that, as the viceroy of God on earth, he must save the souls of sinful subjects.

5. The state of war made it easy to accuse political enemies of treason.

Oprichnina preparation

In 1560, Empress Anastasia died and the collapse of the elected Rada began. Adashev fell into disgrace. Sylvester was sent to the Cyril Monastery to the north.

In 1561, Ivan 4 married Maria Temryukovna (Kabardian princess Kuchenya).

After that, the sons from the first marriage stood out in a special court. In the will, just in case, a list of boyars-guardians was provided in case Prince Ivan inherited the throne as a child. Prince Mstislavsky was at the head of the seven boyars. The Zakharins, maternal relatives, took four places on this list. More aristocratic families - Staritsky, Belsky, Sheremetyev, Morozov and others were offended.

In 1562, some aristocratic families were forbidden to inherit estates without the knowledge of the king, and the female line was excluded. The Vorotyn, Suzdal, Shuisky, Yaroslavl, and Starodub princes suffered. In terms of political weight and local account, they were higher than other service princes.

Then the accusation of treason began against Adashev's relatives, acquaintances and neighbors ("Starodub case").

Then the Sheremetyevs suffered. Kurbsky fled to Lithuania.

In 1564, Danila Romanovich Zakharyin died, and it became obvious that this family was losing its political weight.

Gradually, a new environment for the king is taking shape.

The place of the closest adviser was taken by Alexei Basmanov-Pleshcheev, boyar, voivode ("silovik"). His son Fyodor became Ivan's favorite.

The place of confessor Sylvester was first taken by Metropolitan Macarius, and then by Athanasius, who indulged the king.

Behind Basmanov, the convoy governor Afanasy Vyazemsky and the nobleman Petrok Zaitsev got into the tsar's entourage. + characteristic of the boyars-princes of Cherkasy.

But the Boyar Duma is dissatisfied and it is impossible to force it to reconcile by traditional means.

Extraordinary measures are needed. Departure of Ivan 4 in December 1564 to Alexandrov Sloboda. He was accompanied by the nobles. He has enough boyar children and governors. On the eve of the clash with the nobility, the tsar managed to secure the support of a number of boyars and clerks, members of the sovereign's court. It was the presence of such support that allowed the king to take an independent position.

In January 1565, a message to the metropolitan that he left his state, as he was expelled by his own serfs - the boyars. The accusation concerned not only the boyar Duma. But the entire ruling stratum, since they supported the boyars, compiling manual records. The accusation was supposed to remind the society what awaits the country if there is no king in it.

The Boyar Duma asks the tsar to lay down his anger from them and rule the state as he “pleases”. The townspeople were afraid that without the king, the nobles could force merchants and artisans to do everything for nothing, the mob is on the side of the sovereign.

Klyuchevsky wrote that "the Tsar seemed to beg for himself a police dictatorship from the State Council."

Boyar children could not be raised to war to protect the rights of a narrow circle of advisers to the sovereign and higher hierarchs. And there are no wars without privates. → it is “suitable” for him to demand the creation of an oprichnina. The elite was not psychologically ready for war with the "natural" king, who had recently been crowned king and conquered the Muslim kingdoms. The only Orthodox tsar in the world.

Initially, it was a territory with a separate administration. A little later, the word will be perceived as a symbol of politics.

The Muscovite state was called Zemshchina and remained under the control of the Boyar Duma. But the oprichnina was placed, as it were, above the zemstvos.

The territories taken under the control of the king were called oprichnina. To manage them, he received unlimited powers. In fact, it turned out to be the lot of the king.

Territory

1) palace volosts;

2) northern territories with active trade. Vologda, Ustyug + course of the Northern Dvina and access to the White Sea;

3) salt-making centers. Kargopol, Galician Salt, Vychegodskaya Salt, a kind of salt monopoly;

4) Suzdal, Mozhaisky, Vyazemsky counties.

Then the area expanded.

Finance

Taxes from the oprichnina lands + property of the disgraced (and the boyar had it in the zemshchina → and their king).

Oprichnaya Boyar Duma

Formally headed by the tsarina's brother Mikhail Cherkassky. The Basmanovs and their friends were really in charge.

A new duma rank has been introduced = - duma nobleman for those who are completely ignorant. The Duma included the old Moscow boyars Pleshcheevs, Kolychevs, Buturlins.

Oprichnaya army

Recruited from the poor nobles who did not know the boyars. The boyars received positions not according to the local account, but according to the will of the tsar. Land salaries are higher than in the zemshchina. Those who did not enter the troops of the sovereign could not count on the preservation of tribal property.

In order to actually find the lands, they were confiscated from everyone who was not enrolled in the oprichnina army (including nobles, and not just princes and boyars). So the nobility was divided. Oprichniki retained their estates located in zemstvo districts. Their lands were freed from a number of taxes and duties.

It was for the confiscation of land that such a large army was required (a vicious circle).

In the case of the participation of guardsmen in hostilities, the oprichny governors were considered higher than the zemstvos.

Discipline in the army due to the oath of personal loyalty to the king and the opportunity for the poor to curry favor.

The army has a guarantee of impunity in actions against the enemies of the king.

Thus, the oprichnina is a full-fledged state within a state.

Zemshchina

Manages the seven boyars headed by I.P. Chelyadnin (groom).

The Zemsky Boyar Duma was headed by the princes Belsky and Mstislavsky.

The orders continued. Despite the partition, the solution of all important issues relating to this territory and the entire state as a whole continued to remain in the hands of the king.

Oprichny terror

1564–1565

Ivan 4 and his entourage understood that their policy was detrimental to the interests of many, did not enjoy the support of wide circles of the nobility and could meet with resistance → terror was supposed to frighten those who disagree and deprive them of the will to resist.

1567-1570 - mass terror.

First, the disgraced nobility was exiled to the Kazan lands and endowed them with estates. Kazan governors (!) P.A. Kurakin and A.I. Katyrev-Rostovsky, with a salary of one thousand quarters of arable land, received dachas of 120 quarters of fallow land. 12 princes Gagarins received one village for all, etc.

The Suzdal nobility suffered the most (after all, Moscow was the city of the Rostov-Suzdal principality, and not vice versa).

The decree on the oprichnina marked the beginning of the "great migration" of landowners of all categories in the old Moscow lands.

In 1566, some of the disgraced were returned back and even given land, including tribal ones (but not all). The king is free to execute and pardon.

But no compromise has been reached. The old Moscow boyars and the zemstvo nobility feared disgrace and began to express dissatisfaction with the policy of the tsar + rumors about the Staritsky conspiracy. It was possible to cope with their opposition only by turning to mass terror.

The king felt insecure.

The territory of the oprichnina was expanded → the army was already 1.5 thousand. New oprichny fortresses are being built in Moscow opposite the Kremlin and in Vologda.

Mass terror is judged mainly by the "Synodicus" of Ivan the Terrible. 3-4 thousand people were destroyed, of which at least 700 nobles (without family members).

Many members of the Zemstvo Boyar Duma were executed, princes and boyars returned from exile in Kazan. But untitled victims prevailed.

Malyuta Skuratov (Grigory Lukyanovich Belsky) appeared in the tsar's entourage. The rank of duma nobleman in the oprichnina was received by the executioner Vasily Gryaznoy.

After the death of Tsaritsa Maria in 1569, the Cherkasskys, Basmanovs, and Vyazemskys were repressed.

In 1570, the oprichnina pogrom of Novgorod and Pskov intimidated the townspeople and replenished the oprichnina treasury. Novgorod is taken to the oprichnina.

In Moscow, the top of the Zemshchina was executed, including a printer
I. Viskovaty, treasurer Nikita Funikov, chief clerks of orders (! And the bureaucracy got it).

By the end of 1570, the terror had exhausted itself. The top leadership, including the one that established the oprichnina, has been eliminated, the mob is intimidated.

Young people from zemstvo and disgraced families - Shuisky, Trubetskoy, Odoevsky, Pronsky - got into the new oprichnina duma. The real leaders were Skuratov and Gryaznoy. Skuratov died in the war in 1572.

1571 - Crimean Tatars burned Moscow.

The tsar had to gradually erase the difference between the administration of the oprichnina and the zemstvo. Equalized land salaries. Consolidated treasury. More and more often united troops are sent.

The text of the decree on the abolition of the oprichnina is not known to specialists. He might not have been.

Reasons for the collapse of the oprichnina

1. It is impossible to create a new environment without Zemstvo (since in the oprichnina its creators are either in power or eliminated, but there are no others).

2. The absolute power of the tsar has increased and he actually decides matters both in the oprichnina and in the zemshchina.

3. Fear of disobedience of the taxed population, which condemned terror.

The consequences of the oprichnina

1. Political:

1) Stabilization of the regime of the personal power of the king with the strengthening of despotism.

2) Limitation of the competence of the Boyar Duma in internal management.

3) The growth of the political weight of the service bureaucracy (duma nobles, clerks).

4) Unconditional unification around the king of all landowners.

5) Strengthening the relationship between the church and the royal power (objectionable churchmen are also victims of terror).

6) The prospect of consolidation of the nobility in the struggle for the expansion of their rights is excluded.

2. Social

1) The personal, but not the social composition of the large landowners changed (the boyars and princes remained).

2) Weakened the combat capability of the army.

3) The self-government of the townspeople was finally liquidated.

4) The exploitation of the tax-paying population and the dependent population has intensified.

3. Economic

1) The desolation of the old-tillage center (the departure of the population, the reduction of plowing)

2) Tax arrears.

3) The inability of the landowners to keep the dependent population (especially the petty nobles).

Deep crisis, demoralization of society.

State Polar Academy

Department of French Language and Literature

By discipline

"National history"

Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible: its background and consequences

Performed

student of group 201

Moroz E.S.

supervisor

cand. ist. Sci., Assoc. Portnyagina N.A.

St. Petersburg 2010

Introduction

1. Background

1.1.1Birth of Ivan the Terrible

1.1.2Childhood

1.2. The beginning of the reign of Ivan the Terrible

1.3 Foreign policy

2. Oprichnina

2.1 Definition

2.2 The beginning of the oprichnina

2.3 The essence of the oprichnina

3. Background of the oprichnina

4. Consequences of the oprichnina

historical sources

Introduction

Ivan IV (1533-1584) is a bright personality in Russian history, but few of us perceive him as a positive person, and yet he contributed to the development of his country, in particular, he took the first steps in creating a class-representative monarchy in Russia. And what is so darkened his reputation?

8. Oprichnina: its causes and consequences.

- One of the main reasons is the policy of the oprichnina. And although it cannot be called ill-conceived, it was still not far-sighted. It is noteworthy that in the opinion of a modern person, the main quality of this policy is cruelty. However, we must not forget that it took place more than 5 centuries ago and the temperament of the people of that time was strikingly different from the present: many things related to the oprichnina were completely tolerable for that time, nevertheless, some contemporaries of the king were shocked by the atrocities taking place at that time. It is also surprising how much the policy of the oprichnina contradicts that time of the reign of Ivan the Terrible, when the Elected Rada was created and the Zemsky Sobor was convened. Compared with the first period of the reign of Ivan IV, the oprichnina cannot be called a policy that works for the benefit of the inhabitants of the state. And now many generations of people are asking the question: What are the reasons for choosing such a tough policy? Could it subsequently become the cause of the crisis that engulfed Russia in the late 16th and early 17th centuries? Undoubtedly, the answers to these questions should be sought not only in the political situation of that time, but also in the life of the king himself. All these aspects will be considered in this essay.

Purpose: to determine why Ivan the Terrible decided to introduce the oprichnina and why this policy halted.

Objectives: to analyze the contradictory actions of the tsar, to trace the formation of his character, to understand how the personal aspect of his life influenced his political activity, what consequences his actions during the oprichnina period led to.

1. Background

1.1 The period of life of Ivan IV before the coronation

Since the personality and character of the king has no small influence on his political actions, it is worth paying attention to the conditions in which his personality was formed.

1.1.1 Birth of Ivan the Terrible

Ivan was born on August 25, 1530. Already at this time there were signs of the degeneration of the royal family: the brother of the future king was born a deaf and dumb idiot. “The descendants of “old Igor”, the Kyiv prince of Varangian origin, for seven centuries married in their own circle. Moscow Rurikovichs chose brides from families of Tver, Ryazan princes and other Rurikoviches. Ivan IV received from his ancestors a heavy heredity. ”(2.1) His son, Fedor, suffered from dementia, and Dmitry was stricken with epilepsy from infancy. It is possible to assume that poor heredity could also affect Ivan's psychological health: At the end of his life, pronounced features of foolishness and buffoonery become noticeable in Grozny's behavior (D.S. Likhachev). With amazing ease, Tsar Ivan moved in his writings from humility to pride and anger, which humiliated and destroyed the interlocutor. The king was not averse to starting a verbal duel with the victim at the moment when the executioner had already prepared the ax.

1.1.2 Childhood

After the death of Vasily III, the throne was taken by his three-year-old son Ivan. In fact, his mother Elena Glinskaya ruled the state, although traditions did not allow women to participate in government affairs, Vasily told his wife before his death: “I blessed my son Ivan with the state and the great reign, and to you I wrote in my spiritual letter, as in the previous spiritual letters of our fathers and forefathers according to their heritage, as to the former Grand Duchesses.

The Grand Duchess died on April 3, 1538 (there are suggestions that she was poisoned). Power passed to the surviving members of the Seven Boyars.

1.1.3 The boyhood and youth of the king

Ivan grew up in an atmosphere of palace coups, the struggle for power between the boyar families Shuisky and Belsky, who were at war with each other. “Being members of one of the most aristocratic Russian families, the Shuiskys did not want to share power with those who gained influence due to the personal location of Vasily III. The discord between the "princes of the blood" (as the Shuiskys were called by foreigners) and the old advisers of Vasily III (the boyars Yuryev, Tuchkov and the Duma clerks) was resolved by turmoil. Six months after the death of the ruler, the Shuiskys captured the close clerk Fyodor Mishurin and put him to death ”(2.1).

Therefore, it was believed that the murders, intrigues and violence that surrounded Ivan contributed to the development of suspicion, secrecy and cruelty in him. S. Solovyov, analyzing the influence of the mores of the era on the character of Ivan IV, notes that he “did not realize the moral, spiritual means for establishing the truth, or, even worse, having realized, forgot about them; instead of healing, he intensified the disease, accustomed him even more to torture, bonfires and chopping blocks.

The boyars, trying to get the favor of the young tsar, encouraged his “pranks” in every possible way: “Then important and proud gentlemen raised him, competing with each other, flattering and pleasing him in his voluptuousness and lust, to themselves and their children in trouble. And when he began to grow up, at the age of twelve, I’ll omit everything that he used to do, I’ll only tell you this: at first he began to shed the blood of animals, throwing them from a great height ... to do many other worthless things as well ..., and the educators flattered him, allowing this , praising him, teaching the child to his misfortune ”(1.1) At the age of fifteen, he already began to“ throw people ”, more and more showing in himself, developed by boyar flattery, cruelty.

According to A.M. Kurbsky (from the “story of the Grand Duke of Moscow”), when Ivan IV was seventeen years old, senators began to use him in the fight against people they did not like: this is how the “bravest strategist” Ivan Belsky was killed. Some time later, the tsar himself "ordered the murder of another noble prince named Andrei Shuisky", two years later he killed three more noble people. And only with the advent of Sylvester, “a man in the rank of priest,” Ivan’s rampage was more or less pacified, “severely conjuring him with the formidable name of God and, in addition, revealing miracles to him and, as it were, signs from God,” Sylvester corrected the “corrupted” temper of the king and instructed him on Right way. And then Aleksey Adashev, who was useful to the state, entered into an “alliance” with him.

1.2 The beginning of the reign of Ivan the Terrible

At the age of 16, Ivan first expressed a desire to marry the kingdom, this can be explained from two points of view: Skrynnikov and Kostomarov believe that this was facilitated by Metropolitan Macarius and the tsar's relatives on the maternal side, acting in their own interests, and the historian V. O. Klyuchevsky suggested that Ivan of his own free will made such a decision - this was a pronounced desire for power in him. January 16, 1547 Ivan Vasilyevich became a full-fledged king.

After a period of "boyar rule", Ivan the Terrible needed to strengthen his power. The Russian nobility was especially interested in carrying out the reforms that were proposed by I.S. Peresvetov. The idea of ​​strong royal power, curbing boyar arbitrariness, relying on "service people" (nobles) were approved by the tsar. The Elected Rada was created, which included A.M. Kurbsky, A.F. Adashev, priest Sylvester, M.I. Vorotynsky, I.M. Viscous. She began to play the role of the boyar duma. The fall of the Chosen Rada is assessed by historians in different ways. According to V.V. Kobrin, this was a manifestation of the conflict between the two programs of centralization of Russia: through slow structural reforms or rapidly, by force. Historians believe that the choice of the second path is due to the personal nature of Ivan the Terrible, who did not want to listen to people who disagree with his policies. Thus, after 1560, Ivan takes the path of tightening power, which led him to repressive measures. A number of transformations were prepared in the Chosen Council: Zemstvo reform, Lip reform, transformations in the army. In 1549, the first Zemsky Sobor was convened, and in 1550 a new judicial code was created, etc.

However, the temper of Ivan the Terrible made itself felt even at that time. Political persecution did not stop, which became the subject of correspondence between Grozny and Kurbsky. Kurbsky complained about the injustice of repression against the boyars, to which the tsar replied that he was punishing not “well-wishers, but traitors, and that the boyars suffered from him much less than he did from them” (2.2) The tsar wrote about the suffering that he endured during of his orphan childhood through the fault of the boyars, described his resentment against Sylvester and Adashev. Soon Adashev's resignation took place, which had no explanation, this was the reason for the sovereign's desire to revise the Tsar's Book. The largest postscript to the text of this book is devoted to “the story of the conspiracy of the boyars and Prince Staritsky during the illness of the king in March 1553” (2.2) Almost all participants in the rebellion were severely punished: Staritsky was executed, and the tsar’s aunt (a rather young woman) was imprisoned in a monastery .

The royal book: "... and henceforth there will be enmity between the great sovereign and Prince Volodimer Ondreevich." It cannot be said that the excessive incredulity and secrecy of Ivan IV was groundless. Perhaps having originated in him in childhood, she was constantly "fueled" by subsequent conspiracies against the royal power: Synodal list: "... and from that time there was enmity between the sovereign and the people"

Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible.

Oprichnina- this is one of the periods in the history of Russia, between 1565 and 1572, marked by extreme terror in relation to the subjects of Tsar Ivan IV. Also, this concept was called a part of the country with a special management system, which was allocated for the maintenance of guardsmen and the royal court. The word itself is ancient Russian in origin and has the meaning "special".

Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible assumed repression, confiscation of property, forced relocation of people. It included the central, western and southwestern counties, partly Moscow and some northern regions, sometimes entire settlements fell under the oprichnina.

Reasons for the appearance of oprichnina.

Reasons for the oprichnina still not exactly named, perhaps it was just the desire of the king to strengthen power. The introduction of the oprichnina was marked by the creation of an oprichnina army of 1000 people, who were assigned to carry out royal decrees, later their number increased.

Oprichnina as a feature of state policy was a huge shock for the country. Implementing extreme measures to confiscate the property of feudal lords and lands for state benefit, the oprichnina was aimed at centralizing power and nationalizing income.

Goals of the oprichnina

The phenomenon was aimed at eliminating the feudal fragmentation of the principalities and its purpose was to undermine the independence of the boyar class. Introduced in 1565 oprichnina became the desire of Ivan IV, tired of the betrayals of the boyars, to execute the unfaithful nobles at his own will.

The consequences of the introduction of oprichnina

Oprichnina Ivana 4 almost completely eliminated the owners, who could become the basis of civil society in the country. After its implementation, the people became even more dependent on the existing government and the absolute despotism of the monarch was established in the country, but the Russian nobility found itself in a more privileged position.

Background and consequences of oprichnina

Establishment of the oprichnina worsened the situation in Russia, in particular, in the economy. Some villages were devastated, the cultivation of arable land stopped. The ruin of the nobles led to the weakening of the Russian army, of which they formed the basis, and this became the reason for losing the war with Livonia.

The consequences of the oprichnina were such that no one, regardless of class and position, could feel safe. In addition, in 1572, the tsar’s army could not repel the attack of the Crimean Tatar army on the capital, and Ivan the Terrible decided to cancel the existing system of repressions and punishments, but in fact it existed until the death of the sovereign.

The second stage of Ivan's reign is the introduction of the oprichnina in Russia.

In January 1565 ᴦ. from the royal residence near Moscow, he left for Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda.

From there he turned to the capital with two messages.

Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible: causes and consequences

In the first, sent to the clergy and the Boyar Duma, Ivan IV reported on the renunciation of power due to the betrayal of the boyars and asked for a special inheritance - the oprichnina.

In the second message, addressed to the townspeople of the capital, the tsar reported on the decision made and added that he had no complaints against the townspeople.

It was a well-calculated political maneuver.

Using the faith of the people in the tsar, Ivan the Terrible expected to be called back to the throne. When this happened, the tsar dictated his conditions: the right of unlimited autocratic power and the establishment of an oprichnina.

The country was divided into two parts: the oprichnina and the zemshchina. Ivan IV included the most important lands in the oprichnina. It included Pomeranian cities, cities with large settlements and strategically important, as well as the most economically developed regions of the country.

Nobles who were part of the oprichnina army settled on these lands.

Oprichnina- this is the internal policy of Ivan the Terrible from 1565 to 1572, the purpose of which was to strengthen the personal power of the tsar and fight against the boyars.

Ivan IV, fighting the rebellions and betrayals of the boyar nobility, saw them as the main reason for the failure of his policy.

Due to the constant betrayals of Ivan, he sought to strengthen his power. His goal is to exterminate any betrayal. In the life of Ivan the Terrible there was a period when he became very ill

The center and north-west of the Russian lands, where the boyars were especially strong, were subjected to the most severe defeat.

At the same time, the king canceled the oprichnina, which in 1572 ᴦ. was transformed into the royal court.

Oprichnina results:

Strengthening the personal power of the king

Social crisis, depopulation and deteriorating condition of the people

State crisis (some lands were about 70% uncultivated)

Further processes of registration of serfdom. 1581 - Decree on the Protected Years.

Oprichnina is a period in the history of Russia from 1565 until the death of Ivan the Terrible, marked by state terror and a system of emergency measures.

In 1572, the oprichnina actually stopped - the army showed its inability to repel the attack of the Crimean Tatars on Moscow, after which the tsar decided to cancel it.

Question 19.

The best that history gives us is the enthusiasm it arouses.

Goethe

The oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible is considered briefly by modern historians, but these were events that had a great influence both on the tsar himself and his entourage, and on the whole country as a whole. During the oprichnina of 1565-1572, the Russian tsar tried to strengthen his own power, the authority of which was in a very precarious position. This was due to the increased cases of treason, as well as the mood of the majority of the boyars against the current king. All this resulted in massacres, largely because of which the tsar received the nickname "Terrible." In general, the oprichnina was expressed in the fact that part of the lands of the kingdom was transferred to the exclusive rule of the state. The influence of the boyars was not allowed on these lands. Today we will briefly consider the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible, its causes, the stages of the reform, as well as the consequences for the state.

Reasons for the oprichnina

Ivan the Terrible remained in the historical view of his descendants a suspicious person who constantly saw conspiracies around him. It all started with the Kazan campaign, from which Ivan the Terrible returned in 1553. The tsar (at that time still the Grand Duke) fell ill, and greatly fearing the betrayal of the boyars, ordered everyone to swear allegiance to his son, baby Dmitry. The boyars and court people were reluctant to swear allegiance to the "diaper", and many even completely evaded this oath. The reason for this was very simple - the current king is very sick, the heir is less than a year old, a large number of boyars who claim power.

After recovery, Ivan the Terrible changed, becoming more cautious and angry with others. He could not forgive the betrayal of the courtiers (refusal of the oath to Dmitry), knowing full well what caused it. But the decisive events that led to the oprichnina were due to the following:

• In 1563, Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow dies. He was known for having a huge influence on the king and enjoyed his favor. Macarius restrained the aggression of the king, instilling in him the idea that the country was under his control and there was no conspiracy. The new metropolitan Athanasius took the side of the discontented boyars and opposed the tsar. As a result, the king only strengthened in the idea that there were only enemies around him.
• In 1564, Prince Kurbsky left the army and went to serve in the Principality of Lithuania. Kurbsky took with him many military commanders, and also declassified all Russian spies in Lithuania itself. It was a terrible blow to the pride of the Russian Tsar, who after that became completely convinced that there were enemies around him who could betray him at any moment.

As a result, Ivan the Terrible decided to eliminate the independence of the boyars in Russia (at that time they owned land, maintained their own army, had their assistants and their court, their own treasury, and so on). It was decided to create an autocracy.

The essence of the oprichnina

At the beginning of 1565, Ivan the Terrible leaves Moscow, leaving behind two letters. In the first letter, the tsar addresses the metropolitan, saying that all the clergy and boyars are involved in state treason. These people only want to have more land and plunder the royal treasury. With the second letter, the tsar addressed the people, saying that his reasons for his absence from Moscow were connected with the actions of the boyars. The tsar himself went to Alexander's settlement. There, under the influence of the inhabitants of Moscow, the boyars were sent in order to return the tsar to the capital. Ivan the Terrible agreed to return, but only on the condition that he receive unconditional power to execute all enemies of the state, and also to create a new system in the country. This system is called the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible, which is expressed in the division of all the country's lands into:

1. Oprichnina - lands that the tsar seizes for his own (state) administration.
2. Zemshchina - the lands that the boyars continued to control.

To implement this plan, Ivan the Terrible created a special detachment - guardsmen. Initially, their number was 1000 people. These people made up the king's secret police, which was directly subordinate to the head of state, and which brought the necessary order to the country.

Part of the territory of Moscow, Kostroma, Vologda, Mozhaisk and some other cities were chosen as oprichnina lands. Local residents who were not included in the state program of the oprichnina were forced to leave these lands. As a rule, they were given land in the most remote hinterlands of the country. As a result, the oprichnina solved one of the most important tasks that was set by Ivan the Terrible. This task was to weaken the economic power of individual boyars. This limitation was achieved due to the fact that the state took some of the best land in the country into its own hands.

The main directions of the oprichnina

Such actions of the king were met with sincere discontent of the boyars. Prosperous families, which previously actively expressed their dissatisfaction with the activities of Ivan the Terrible, now began to wage their struggle even more actively to restore their former power. To counter these forces, a special military unit "guardsmen" was created. Their main task, by order of the king himself, was to "gnaw" all traitors and "sweep" treason from the state. It was from here that those symbols that are directly related to the guardsmen went. Each of them carried a dog's head at the saddle of his horse, as well as a broom. The guardsmen destroyed or sent into exile all the people who were suspected of treason to the state.

In 1566 another Zemsky Sobor was held. On it, the tsar was given an appeal with a request to eliminate the oprichnina. In response, Ivan the Terrible ordered the execution of all those who were involved in the transfer and in the compilation of this document. The reaction of the boyars and all the dissatisfied followed immediately. The most indicative is the decision of the Moscow Metropolitan Athanasius, who resigned his clergy. Metropolitan Philip Kolychev was appointed in his place. This man also actively opposed the oprichnina and criticized the tsar, as a result of which, just a few days later, Ivan's troops sent this man into exile.

Main blows

Ivan the Terrible sought by all means to strengthen his power, the power of the autocrat. He did everything for this. That is why the main blow of the oprichnina was aimed at those people and those groups of people who could really claim the royal throne:

• Vladimir Staritsky. This is the cousin of Tsar Ivan the Terrible, who enjoyed great respect among the boyars, and who was very often named as the person who should take power instead of the current king. To eliminate this man, the guardsmen poisoned Vladimir himself, as well as his wife and daughters. It happened in 1569.
• Velikiy Novgorod. From the very beginning of the formation of the Russian land, Novgorod had a unique and original status. It was an independent city that obeyed only itself. Ivan, realizing that it is impossible to strengthen the power of the autocrat without pacifying the recalcitrant Novgorod is impossible. As a result, in December 1569, the king at the head of the army went on a campaign against this city.

  Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible 1565 - 1572

  On their way to Novgorod, the tsarist army destroys and executes thousands of people who in any way showed dissatisfaction with the actions of the tsar. This campaign lasted until 1571. As a result of the Novgorod campaign, the oprichnina army established the power of the tsar in the city and in the region.

Cancellation of the oprichnina

At a time when the oprichnina was being asserted by a campaign against Novgorod, Ivan the Terrible received news that Devlet Giray, the Crimean Khan, had raided Moscow with an army and almost completely set fire to the city. Due to the fact that almost all the troops that were subordinate to the tsar were in Novgorod, there was no one to resist this raid. Boyars, refused to provide their army to fight the royal enemies. As a result, in 1571 the oprichnina army and the tsar himself were forced to return to Moscow. To fight the Crimean Khanate, the tsar was forced to temporarily abandon the idea of ​​the oprichnina, uniting his troops and the zemstvos. As a result, in 1572, 50 kilometers south of Moscow, the united army defeated the Crimean Khan.

One of the most significant problems of the Russian land of that time was on the western border. The war with the Livonian Order did not stop there. As a result, the constant raids of the Crimean Khanate, the ongoing war against Livonia, internal unrest in the country, the weak defense of the entire state contributed to the fact that Ivan the Terrible abandoned the idea of ​​​​oprichnina. In the autumn of 1572, the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible, which we briefly reviewed today, was canceled. The tsar himself forbade everyone to mention the word oprichnina, and the guardsmen themselves became outlaws. Almost all the troops that were subordinate to the king and brought the order he needed were later destroyed by the king himself.

The results of the oprichnina and its significance

Any historical event, well, especially such a massive and significant one as an oprichnina, carries certain consequences after itself, which are important for posterity. The results of the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible can be expressed in the following main points:

1. Significant strengthening of the autocratic power of the king.
2. Reducing the influence of the boyars on state affairs.
3. The strong economic decline of the country, which came as a result of the split that has emerged in society because of the oprichnina.
4. The introduction of reserved years in 1581. The protected years, which prohibited the transition of peasants from one landowner to another, were due to the fact that the population of the central and northern parts of Russia fled en masse to the south. Thus, they were saved from the actions of the authorities.
5. Destruction of large boyar lands. One of the first steps of the oprichnina was aimed at destroying and taking away their property from the boyars, and transferring this property to the state. This has been successfully implemented.

Historical score

A brief narrative about the oprichnina does not allow us to accurately understand the whole essence of those events. Moreover, it is difficult to do even with a more detailed analysis. The most indicative in this regard is the attitude of historians to this issue. Below are the main ideas that characterize the oprichnina, and which indicate that there is no single approach to assessing this political event. The main concepts boil down to the following:

• Imperial Russia. Imperial historians presented the oprichnina as a phenomenon that had a detrimental effect on the economic, political and social development of Russia. On the other hand, many historians of imperial Russia said that it was in the oprichnina that one should look for the origins of autocracy and the current imperial power.
• The era of the USSR. Soviet scientists have always described the bloody events of the tsarist and imperial regimes with particular enthusiasm. As a result, in almost all Soviet works, the oprichnina was presented as a necessary element that shaped the movement of the masses against the oppression of the boyars.
• Modern opinion. Modern historians speak of the oprichnina as a pernicious element, as a result of which thousands of innocent people died. This is one of the reasons that allow you to accuse Ivan the Terrible of bloodshed.

The problem here is that the study of the oprichnina is extremely difficult, since there are practically no real historical documents of that era left. As a result, we are not dealing with the study of data, nor with the study of historical facts, but very often we are dealing with the opinions of individual historians, which are not substantiated by anything. That is why oprichnina cannot be assessed unambiguously.

All we can talk about is that at the time of the oprichnina inside the country there were no clear criteria by which the definition of “oprichnik” and “zemstvo” took place. In this regard, the situation is very similar to the one that was at the initial stage of the formation of Soviet power, when dispossession took place. In the same way, no one had even a remote idea of ​​what a fist was, and who should be considered a fist. Therefore, as a result of dispossession as a result of the oprichnina, a huge number of people who were not guilty of anything suffered. This is the main historical assessment of this event. Everything else fades into the background, because in any state the main value is human life. Strengthening the power of the autocrat at the expense of the destruction of ordinary people is a very shameful step. That is why, in the last years of his life, Ivan the Terrible forbade any mention of the oprichnina and ordered the execution of practically people who took an active part in these events.

The rest of the elements that modern history presents as the consequences of the oprichnina and its results are very doubtful. After all, the main result, which all historical textbooks talk about, is the strengthening of autocratic power. But what kind of strengthening of power can we talk about if after the death of Tsar Ivan a troubled time came? All this resulted not just in some riots or other political events. All this resulted in a change in the ruling dynasty.

Oprichnina

Territories that fell into the oprichnina

Oprichnina- a period in the history of Russia (from to 1572), marked by state terror and a system of emergency measures. Also, "oprichnina" was called a part of the territory of the state, with special administration, allocated for the maintenance of the royal court and guardsmen ("Tsar's oprichnina"). An oprichnik is a person in the ranks of the oprichnina army, that is, the guard created by Ivan the Terrible as part of his political reform in 1565. Oprichnik is a later term. In the time of Ivan the Terrible, guardsmen were called "sovereign people."

The word "oprichnina" comes from the Old Russian "oprich", which means "special", "Besides". The essence of the Russian Oprichnina is the allocation of part of the land in the kingdom exclusively for the needs of the royal court, its employees - the nobles and the army. Initially, the number of guardsmen - "oprichnina thousand" - was one thousand boyars. Oprichnina in the Principality of Moscow was also called the inheritance allocated to the widow when dividing her husband's property.

background

In 1563, one of the governors who commanded the Russian troops in Livonia, Prince Kurbsky, betrayed the king, who betrayed the king's agents in Livonia and participated in the offensive actions of the Poles and Lithuanians, including the Polish-Lithuanian campaign on Velikiye Luki.

The betrayal of Kurbsky strengthens Ivan Vasilyevich in the idea that there is a terrible boyar conspiracy against him, the Russian autocrat, the boyars not only want an end to the war, but also plot to kill him and put his obedient cousin Ivan the Terrible on the throne. And that the metropolitan and the Boyar Duma stand up for the disgraced and prevent him, the Russian autocrat, from punishing traitors, therefore, emergency measures are required.

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 the traitors of the king. The tsar looked through his fingers at all the actions of the guardsmen; in a collision with a zemstvo man, the oprichnik always came out on the right. The guardsmen soon became a scourge and an object of hatred for the boyars; all the bloody deeds of the second half of the reign of the Terrible were committed with the indispensable and direct participation of the guardsmen.

Soon the tsar with guardsmen left for Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda, from which he made a fortified city. There he started something like a monastery, recruited 300 brethren from the guardsmen, called himself hegumen, Prince Vyazemsky - a cellar, 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 raids on Moscow and the tsar did not encounter opposition from anyone: Metropolitan Athanasius was too weak for this and, having spent two years in the department, retired, and his successor Philip, a courageous man, on the contrary, began to publicly denounce the lawlessness committed by order king, and was not afraid to speak against Ivan, even when he was extremely furious at his words. After the metropolitan defiantly refused to give Ivan his metropolitan blessing in the Assumption Cathedral, which could cause mass disobedience to the tsar as the tsar - the servant of the Antichrist, the metropolitan with extreme haste was removed from the pulpit and during the campaign against Novgorod (presumably) killed (Philip died after personal conversation with the envoy of the tsar Malyuta Skuratov, according to rumors - strangled with a pillow). The Kolychev clan, to which Philip belonged, was persecuted; some of its members were executed on John's orders. In 1569, the tsar's cousin, Prince Vladimir Andreevich Staritsky, also died (presumably, according to rumors, by order of the tsar, they brought him a bowl of poisoned wine and an order that Vladimir Andreevich himself, his wife and their eldest daughter drink the wine). A little later, the mother of Vladimir Andreevich, Efrosinya Staritskaya, who repeatedly stood at the head of boyar conspiracies against John IV and was repeatedly pardoned by him, was also killed.

John the Terrible in Al. settlement

Campaign against Novgorod

Main article: Campaign of the oprichnina troops to Novgorod

In December 1569, suspecting the Novgorod nobility of complicity in the "conspiracy" of Prince Vladimir Andreevich Staritsky, who had recently committed suicide on his orders, and at the same time intending to turn himself over to the Polish king, Ivan, accompanied by a large army of guardsmen, marched against Novgorod.

Despite the Novgorod chronicles, "Synodikon disgraced", compiled around 1583, with reference to the report ("fairy tale") Malyuta Skuratov, speaks of 1505 executed under the control of Skuratov, of which 1490 were cut off shanks from squeakers. The Soviet historian Ruslan Skrynnikov, adding to this number all the Novgorodians named by name, received an estimate of 2170-2180 executed; stipulating that the reports might not be complete, many acted "regardless of Skuratov's orders," Skrynnikov admits a figure of three to four thousand people. V. B. Kobrin considers this figure to be extremely underestimated, noting that it proceeds from the premise that Skuratov was the only or at least the main organizer of the murders. In addition, it should be noted that the result of the destruction of food supplies by the guardsmen was famine (so cannibalism is mentioned), accompanied by a plague epidemic that was raging at that time. According to the Novgorod chronicle, in a common grave opened in September 1570, where the surfaced victims of Ivan the Terrible were buried, as well as those who died from the subsequent famine and disease, 10 thousand people were found. Kobrin doubts that this was the only burial place of the dead, however, he considers the figure of 10-15 thousand to be the closest to the truth, although the total population of Novgorod then did not exceed 30 thousand. However, the killings were not limited to the city itself.

From Novgorod the Terrible went to Pskov. Initially, he prepared the same fate for him, but the tsar limited himself only to the execution of several Pskovites and the confiscation of their property. At that time, as the popular legend says, Grozny was staying with a Pskov fool (a certain Nikola Salos). When it was time for dinner, Nikola handed Grozny a piece of raw meat with the words: “Here, eat, you eat human meat,” and after that he threatened Ivan with many troubles if he did not spare the inhabitants. Grozny, having disobeyed, ordered to remove the bells from one Pskov monastery. In the same hour, his best horse fell under the king, which made an impression on John. The tsar hurriedly left Pskov and returned to Moscow, where searches and executions began again: they were looking for accomplices of the Novgorod treason.

Moscow executions of 1571

"Moscow dungeon. The end of the 16th century (Konstantin-Eleninsky gates of the Moscow dungeon at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries), 1912

Now the people closest to the tsar, the leaders of the oprichnina, fell under repression. The tsar's favorites, the guardsmen Basmanovs - father and son, Prince Afanasy Vyazemsky, as well as several prominent leaders of the zemstvo - printer Ivan Viskovaty, treasurer Funikov and others were accused of treason. 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 convicts, the executioners-guardsmen stabbed, chopped, hung, poured boiling water over the convicts. As they said, the tsar personally 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, even their household members, were persecuted; their estate was taken over by the sovereign. Executions were resumed more than once, and subsequently died: Prince Peter Serebryany, Duma clerk Zakhary Ochin-Pleshcheev, Ivan Vorontsov and others, and the tsar came up with special methods of torment: hot frying pans, stoves, tongs, thin ropes grinding the body, etc. Boyarin Kozarinov-Golokhvatov, who accepted the schema, in order to avoid execution, he ordered to blow up a barrel of gunpowder, on the grounds that schemas are angels, and therefore must fly to heaven. The Moscow executions of 1571 were the apogee of the terrible oprichnina terror.

The end of the oprichnina

According to R. Skrynnikov, who analyzed the memorial lists, the victims of repression throughout the reign of Ivan IV became ( synodics), about 4.5 thousand people, but other historians, such as V. B. Kobrin, consider this figure to be extremely underestimated.

The immediate result of the desolation was “easiness and pestilence”, since the defeat undermined the foundations of the shaky economy of even the survivors, depriving it of resources. The flight of the peasants, in turn, led to the need to forcibly keep them in their places - hence the introduction of “reserved years”, which gradually grew into the institution of serfdom. In ideological terms, the oprichnina led to a decline in the moral authority and legitimacy of tsarist power; from a defender and legislator, the king and the state personified by him turned into a robber and rapist. The system of government built over decades has been replaced by a primitive military dictatorship. Ivan the Terrible's violation of Orthodox norms and values ​​and the repression of young people made senseless the self-accepted dogma "Moscow is the third Rome" and led to a weakening of moral guidelines in society. According to a number of historians, the events associated with the oprichnina were the direct cause of the systemic socio-political crisis that swept Russia 20 years after the death of Ivan the Terrible and was known as the Time of Troubles.

The oprichnina showed its complete military inefficiency, which manifested itself during the invasion of Devlet Giray and was recognized by the tsar himself.

Oprichnina approved the unlimited power of the tsar - autocracy. In the 17th century, the monarchy in Russia became virtually dualistic, but under Peter I, absolutism in Russia was restored; this consequence of the oprichnina, thus, turned out to be the most long-term.

Historical score

Historical assessments of the oprichnina can radically differ depending on the era, the scientific school to which the historian belongs, etc. To a certain extent, the foundations of these opposite assessments were laid already in the time of Grozny himself, when two points of view coexisted: the official one, which considered the oprichnina as an action to combat "treason", and unofficial, which saw in it a senseless and incomprehensible excess of the "terrible king".

Pre-revolutionary concepts

According to most pre-revolutionary historians, the oprichnina was a manifestation of the tsar's morbid insanity and his tyrannical inclinations. In the historiography of the 19th century, this point of view was held by N. M. Karamzin, N. I. Kostomarov, D. I. Ilovaisky, who denied any political and generally rational meaning in the oprichnina.

Looked similarly at the oprichnina and V. O. Klyuchevsky, who considered it 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 do without each other. They tried to separate, to live side by side, but not together. An attempt to arrange such political cohabitation was the division of the state into oprichnina and zemshchina.

E. A. Belov, being in his monograph “On the historical significance of the Russian boyars until the end of the 17th century,” an apologist for Grozny, finds a deep state meaning in the oprichnina. In particular, the oprichnina contributed to the destruction of the privileges of the feudal nobility, which prevented the objective tendencies of the centralization of the state.

At the same time, the first attempts are being made to find the social, and then the socio-economic background of the oprichnina, which became mainstream in the 20th century. According to K. D. Kavelin: “Oprichnina was the first attempt to create a service nobility and replace the family nobles with them, in place of the clan, the blood principle, to put the beginning of personal dignity in public administration.”

In his Complete Course of Lectures on Russian History, Prof. S. F. Platonov sets out the following view of the oprichnina:

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 over the entire state in its root part, leaving the “zemstvo” administration to its borders, and even strove for state transformations, because it introduced significant changes in the composition of the service land ownership. Destroying his aristocratic system, the oprichnina was directed, in essence, against those sides of the state order that tolerated and supported such a system. It acted not “against persons,” 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.

S. F. Platonov sees the main essence of the oprichnina in the vigorous mobilization of land ownership, in which land ownership, thanks to the mass withdrawal of the former votchinniks from the lands taken into the oprichnina, was separated from the former specific patrimonial feudal orders and associated with compulsory military service.

Since the late 1930s, the point of view of the progressive nature of the oprichnina prevailed in Soviet historiography without an alternative, which, according to this concept, was directed against the remnants of fragmentation and the influence of the boyars, seen as a reactionary force, and reflected the interests of the service nobility, who supported centralization, which, in ultimately identified with the national interest. The origins of the oprichnina were seen, on the one hand, in the struggle between large patrimonial and small estate ownership, on the other hand, in the struggle between the progressive central government and the reactionary princely-boyar opposition. This concept went back to pre-revolutionary historians and, above all, to S. F. Platonov, and at the same time was planted in an administrative way. The setting point of view was expressed by I. V. Stalin at a meeting with filmmakers about the 2nd series of Eisenstein's film "Ivan the Terrible" (as you know, banned):

(Eisenstein) portrayed the guardsmen as the last brats, degenerates, something like the American Ku Klux Klan ... The troops of the oprichnina were progressive troops that Ivan the Terrible relied on to gather Russia into one centralized state against the feudal princes who wanted to fragment and weaken his. He has an old attitude towards the oprichnina. The attitude of the old historians towards the oprichnina was grossly negative, because they regarded the repressions of Grozny as the repressions of Nicholas II and were completely distracted from the historical situation in which this took place. Nowadays, a different look at it"

In 1946, the Decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was issued, which spoke of the "progressive army of guardsmen." The progressive significance in the then historiography of the Oprichny army was that its formation was a necessary stage in the struggle to strengthen the centralized state and was a struggle of the central government, based on the service nobility, against the feudal aristocracy and specific remnants, to make even a partial return to it impossible - and thereby ensure the military defense of the country. .

A detailed assessment of the oprichnina is given in the monograph by A. A. Zimin “Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible” (1964), which contains the following assessment of the phenomenon:

The oprichnina was a tool for defeating the reactionary feudal nobility, but at the same time, the introduction of the oprichnina was accompanied by an intensified seizure of peasant “black” lands. The oprichnina order was a new step towards the strengthening of feudal ownership of land and the enslavement of the peasantry. The division of the territory into “oprichnina” and “zemshchina” (...) contributed to the centralization of the state, because this division was directed against the boyar aristocracy and the specific princely opposition. One of the tasks of the oprichnina was to strengthen the defense capability, therefore, the lands of those nobles who were not serving military service from their estates were selected for the oprichnina. The government of Ivan IV carried out a personal revision of the feudal lords. The whole of 1565 was filled with measures to enumerate land, breaking up the existing ancient land tenure. In the interests of wide circles of the nobility, Ivan the Terrible carried out measures aimed at eliminating the remnants of former fragmentation and, restoring order in the feudal disorder, strengthening the centralized monarchy with strong royal power at the head. The townspeople also sympathized with the policy of Ivan the Terrible, interested in strengthening the royal power, eliminating the remnants of feudal fragmentation and privileges. The struggle of the government of Ivan the Terrible with the aristocracy met with the sympathy of the masses. The reactionary boyars, betraying the national interests of Rus', sought to dismember the state and could lead to the enslavement of the Russian people by foreign invaders. The oprichnina marked a decisive step towards strengthening the centralized apparatus of power, combating the separatist claims of the reactionary boyars, and facilitating the defense of the borders of the Russian state. This was the progressive content of the reforms of the oprichnina period. But the oprichnina was also a means of suppressing the oppressed peasantry; it was carried out by the government by strengthening feudal serf oppression and was one of the significant factors that caused the further deepening of class contradictions and the development of class struggle in the country.

At the end of his life, A. A. Zimin revised his views towards a purely negative assessment of the oprichnina, seeing in "The bloody glow of the oprichnina" an extreme manifestation of feudal and despotic tendencies as opposed to pre-bourgeois ones. These positions were developed by his student V. B. Kobrin and the latter's student A. L. Yurganov. Based on specific studies that began even before the war and carried out in particular by S. B. Veselovsky and A. A. Zimin (and continued by V. B. Kobrin), they showed that the theory of the defeat of patrimonial land ownership as a result of the oprichnina is a myth. From this point of view, the difference between patrimonial and estate ownership was not as fundamental as previously thought; the mass withdrawal of patrimonials from the oprichnina lands (in which S.F. Platonov and his followers saw the very essence of the oprichnina), contrary to the declarations, was not carried out; and the reality of estates was lost mainly by the disgraced and their relatives, while the "trustworthy" estates, apparently, were taken into the oprichnina; at the same time, precisely those counties were taken into the oprichnina, where small and medium landownership prevailed; in the very cause there was a large percentage of the tribal nobility; finally, allegations about the personal orientation of the oprichnina against the boyars are also refuted: the boyar victims are especially noted in the sources because they were the most prominent, but in the end, primarily ordinary landowners and commoners died from the oprichnina: according to S. B. Veselovsky, on for one boyar or a person from the Sovereign's court, there were three or four ordinary landowners, and for one service person - a dozen commoners. In addition, terror fell upon the bureaucracy (deaconry), which, according to the old scheme, should supposedly be the backbone of the central government in the fight against the "reactionary" boyars and appanage remnants. It is also noted that the resistance of the boyars and the descendants of the specific princes to centralization is generally a purely speculative construction, derived from theoretical analogies between the social system of Russia and Western Europe in the era of feudalism and absolutism; sources do not give any direct grounds for such assertions. The postulation of large-scale "boyar conspiracies" in the era of Ivan the Terrible is based on statements emanating from Grozny himself. Ultimately, this school notes that, although the oprichnina objectively resolved (albeit by barbaric methods) some urgent tasks, primarily the strengthening of centralization, the destruction of the remnants of the appanage system and the independence of the church, it was, first of all, an instrument for establishing the personal despotic power of Ivan the Terrible.

According to V. B. Kobrin, the oprichnina objectively strengthened centralization (which “The Elected Rada tried to do by the method of gradual structural reforms”), did away with the remnants of the appanage system and the independence of the church. At the same time, oprichnina robberies, murders, extortion and other atrocities led to the complete ruin of Rus', recorded in census books and comparable to the consequences of an enemy invasion. The main result of the oprichnina, according to Kobrin, is the establishment of autocracy in extremely despotic forms, and indirectly also the establishment of serfdom. Finally, oprichnina and terror, according to Kobrin, undermined the moral foundations of Russian society, destroyed their sense of dignity, independence, and responsibility.

Only a comprehensive study of the political development of the Russian state in the second half of the XVI century. will allow to give a reasonable answer to the question about the essence of the repressive regime of the oprichnina from the point of view of the historical destinies of the country.

In the person of the first Tsar Ivan the Terrible, the historical process of the formation of Russian autocracy found a performer who was fully aware of his historical mission. In addition to his publicistic and theoretical speeches, this is clearly evidenced by the precisely calculated and successfully carried out political action of the establishment of the oprichnina.

Alshits D.N. Beginning of autocracy in Russia...

The most notable event in the assessment of the oprichnina was the work of art by Vladimir Sorokin " The Day of the Oprichnik". It was published in 2006 by the Zakharov publishing house. This is a fantasy dystopia in the form of a one-day novel. Here life, customs and technologies of abstract “parallel” Russia in the 21st and 16th centuries are intricately intertwined. So, the heroes of the novel live in Domostroy, have servants and lackeys, all ranks, titles and crafts correspond to the era of Ivan the Terrible, but they drive cars, shoot from beam weapons and communicate via holographic videophones. The protagonist, Andrey Komyaga, is a high-ranking guardsman, one of the close "Bati" - the main guardsman. Above all stands the Sovereign-autocrat.

Sorokin portrays the "guardsmen of the future" as unprincipled marauders and murderers. The only rules in their “brotherhood” are loyalty to the sovereign and to each other. They use drugs, engage in sodomy for reasons of team building, take bribes, do not disdain dishonest rules of the game and violations of the law. And, of course, they kill and rob those who fell out of favor with the sovereign. Sorokin himself assesses the oprichnina as the most negative phenomenon that is not justified by any positive goals:

Oprichnina is bigger than the FSB and KGB. This is an old, powerful, very Russian phenomenon. Since the 16th century, despite the fact that it was officially under Ivan the Terrible for only ten years, it strongly influenced Russian consciousness and history. All our punitive bodies, and in many ways our entire institution of power, are the result of the influence of the oprichnina. Ivan the Terrible divided society into people and oprichniki, made a state within a state. This showed the citizens of the Russian state that they do not have all the rights, but all the rights of the oprichniki. To be safe, one must become oprichny, separate from the people. What have our officials been doing for these four centuries. It seems to me that the oprichnina, its perniciousness, has not yet been truly considered, not appreciated. But in vain.

Interview for the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper, 22.08.2006

Notes

1. "Textbook" History of Russia ", Moscow State University. M. V. Lomonosov Faculty of History 4th edition, A. S. Orlov, V. A. Georgiev, N. G. Georgieva, T. A. Sivokhina»>
2. Skrynnikov R. G. Ivan the Terrible. - S. 103. archived
3. V. B. Kobrin, "Ivan the Terrible" - Chapter II. Archived from the original on November 28, 2012.
4. V. B. Kobrin. Ivan groznyj. M. 1989. (Chapter II: "The Path of Terror", "The collapse of the oprichnina". Archived from the original on November 28, 2012.).
5. The Beginning of Autocracy in Russia: The State of Ivan the Terrible. - Alshitz D.N., L., 1988.
6. N. M. Karamzin. History of Russian Goverment. Vol. 9, chapter 2. Archived from the original on November 28, 2012.
7. N. I. Kostomarov. Russian history in the biographies of its most important figures Chapter 20. Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich the Terrible. Archived from the original on November 28, 2012.
8. S. F. Platonov. Ivan groznyj. - Petrograd, 1923. From 2.
9. Rozhkov N. Origin of autocracy in Russia. M., 1906. C.190.
10. Spiritual and contractual letters of the great and specific princes. - M. - L, 1950. S. 444.
11. Footnote error? : Invalid tag ; no text for plat footnotes
12. Vipper R. Yu. Ivan groznyj . Archived from the original on November 28, 2012.. - c.58
13. Korotkov I. A. Ivan the Terrible. military activity. Moscow, Military Publishing House, 1952, p. 25.
14. Bakhrushin S. V. Ivan the Terrible. M. 1945. S. 80.
15. Polosin I.I. Socio-political history of Russia in the 16th beginning of the 18th century. P. 153. Collection of articles. M. Academy of Sciences. 1963 382 p.
16. I. Ya. Froyanov. Drama of Russian history. S. 6
17. I. Ya. Froyanov. Drama of Russian history. S. 925.
18. Zimin A. A. Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible. M., 1964. S. 477-479. Cited. on
19. A. A. Zimin. Knight at the Crossroads. Archived from the original on November 28, 2012.
20. A. L. Yurganov, L. A. Katsva. Russian history. XVI-XVIII centuries. M., 1996, pp. 44-46
21. Skrynnikov R. G. The reign of terror. SPb., 1992. S. 8
22. Alshits D.N. The Beginning of Autocracy in Russia... P.111. See also: Al Daniel. Ivan the Terrible: known and unknown. From legends to facts. SPb., 2005. S. 155.
23. Assessment of the historical significance of the oprichnina at different times.
24. Interview of Vladimir Sorokin to the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper, 08/22/2006. Archived from the original on November 28, 2012.

Literature

• . Archived from the original on November 28, 2012.
• V. B. Kobrin IVAN THE TERRIBLE. Archived from the original on November 28, 2012.
• World History, vol. 4, M., 1958. Archived from the original on November 28, 2012.

Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible and its consequences for the Russian state.

Introduction________________________________________________3

1. Introduction of the oprichnina __________________________________________4

2. Causes and goals of the oprichnina ________________________________6

3. Results and consequences of the oprichnina ______________________ 9

Conclusion _____________________________________________ 13

List of used literature ____________________________ 15

Introduction.

The central event in the history of Russia in the 16th century is the oprichnina. True, only seven years out of 51 years that Ivan the Terrible spent on the throne. But what seven years! The “fire of ferocity” that flared up in those years (1565-1572) claimed many thousands, and even tens of thousands of human lives. In our enlightened time, we are accustomed to consider the victims in the millions, but in the rude and cruel XVI century. there was neither such a large population (only 5-7 million people lived in Russia), nor those perfect technical means of exterminating people that scientific and technological progress brought with it.

The time of Ivan the Terrible is of great historical significance. The policy of the king and its consequences had a huge impact on the course of national history. The reign of Ivan IV, which was half of the 16th century, contains the key moments in the formation of the Russian state: the expansion of the territories controlled by Moscow, the changes in the centuries-old ways of internal life, and, finally, the oprichnina - one of the bloodiest and greatest historically significant acts of Tsar Ivan the Terrible. It is the oprichnina that attracts the views of many historians. After all, there is no exact information about why Ivan Vasilyevich resorted to such unusual measures. It is officially considered that the oprichnina existed for 7 years from 1565 to 1572. But the abolition of the oprichnina was only formal, the number of executions, of course, decreased, the concept of "oprichnina" was eliminated, it was replaced in 1575 with the "sovereign's court", but the general principles and procedures remained untouched. Ivan the Terrible continued his oprichnina policy, but under a different name, and with a slightly changed leadership, practically without changing its direction.

The purpose of the work is to study the oprichnina policy of Ivan the Terrible, what were its reasons, what goals was it aimed at and what objective results did it lead to?

The introduction of the oprichnina

So, December 1564, the last pre-oprichny month. The situation in the country was alarming. The foreign policy situation is not easy. Even during the reign of the Chosen Rada, the Livonian War began (1558) - against the Livonian Order that ruled in the Baltic states on the territory of modern Latvia and Estonia. During the first two years, the Livonian Order was defeated. A significant role in the victories of the Russian troops was played by the Tatar cavalry from the Kazan Khanate conquered in 1552. But it was not Russia that took advantage of the fruits of the victory: the knights came under the patronage of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which launched military operations against Russia. Sweden also spoke, not wanting to lose its stake in the Baltics. Two strong opponents instead of one weak one faced Russia in this war. At first, the situation was still favorable for Ivan IV: in February 1563, after a long siege, they managed to take the important and well-fortified fortress of Polotsk. But, apparently, the tension of forces was too great, and military happiness began to betray Russian weapons. Less than a year later, in January 1564, in the battle near the Ula River, not far from Polotsk, Russian troops suffered a severe defeat: many soldiers were killed, hundreds of service people were captured.

Such was the eve of the oprichnina. On December 3, 1564, a rapid development of events began: on this day, the tsar, with his family and close associates, went on a pilgrimage to the Trinity-Sergius Monastery, taking his entire treasury with him, and the numerous accompanying persons selected in advance were ordered to go with their families.

Having lingered near Moscow because of the sudden onset of mudslides, having prayed at the Trinity, the tsar by the end of December reached Alexandrova Sloboda (now the city of Alexandrov, Vladimir Region) - a village where both Vasily III and Ivan himself rested and "amused" hunting more than once IV. From there, on January 3, 1565, a messenger arrived in Moscow, who brought two letters. In the first, addressed to Metropolitan Athanasius, it was reported that the tsar laid his wrath on all bishops and abbots of monasteries, and disgrace - on all service people, from boyars to ordinary nobles, since service people drain his treasury, serve poorly, change, and church hierarchs they are covered. Therefore, “out of great pity of the heart, not even to endure their changeful deeds, he left his state and went where to settle down, where God will guide him, sovereign.” The second letter was addressed to the entire urban population of Moscow; in it, the tsar assured the simple Moscow people, “so that they don’t hold any hesitation for themselves, there is no anger at them and disgrace.”

It was a brilliant political maneuver of a talented demagogue: the tsar spoke in the toga of a guardian for the interests of the lower classes, against the feudal lords hated by the townspeople. All these proud and noble nobles, in comparison with whom a simple city dweller is a third-class person, turns out to be vile traitors who angered the tsar-priest, brought him to the point that he abandoned the state. And the “townsman peasant”, artisan or merchant is the support of the throne. But what about now? After all, the state is the state that is headed by the sovereign. Without a sovereign, “to whom shall we resort and who will have mercy on us and who will save us from finding foreigners?” - so, according to the official chronicle, the people of Moscow interpreted after listening to the royal letters. And they resolutely demanded that the boyars beg the tsar to return to the kingdom, "and whoever will be the sovereign's villains and traitors, and they do not stand for those and they themselves will consume them."

Two days later, the deputation of the clergy and the boyars was in Alexander Sloboda. The tsar had mercy and agreed to return, but under two conditions: “traitors”, including those who were only “in what they, the sovereign, were disobedient”, “put their disgrace on them, and execute others”, and in secondly, "perpetrate him in your state for yourself an oprishna."

In the oprichnina (from the word "oprich", "except" the rest of the "land" - hence - zemshchina or zemstvo), the tsar singled out part of the counties of the country and "1000 heads" of boyars and nobles. Those enrolled in the oprichnina were supposed to have lands in the oprichnina uyezds, and from the zemstvos, those “who would not be in the oprichnina”, the tsar ordered to take away estates and estates in the oprichnina uyezds and give others in the zemstvos in return. The oprichnina had its own Boyar Duma (“boyars from the oprichnina”), their own special troops were created, headed by the governors of the “is oprichnina”. The oprichnaya part was also allocated in Moscow.

From the very beginning, the guardsmen included many offspring of noble and ancient boyar and even princely families. Those who did not belong to the aristocrats, however, even in the pre-oprichny years, were mainly part of the "yard children of the boyars" - the top of the feudal estate, the traditional support of the Russian sovereigns. Sudden rises of such low-ranking, but "honest" people have repeatedly happened before (for example, Adashev). The point was not in the supposedly democratic origin of the guardsmen, because they allegedly served the tsar more faithfully than the nobility, but in the fact that the guardsmen became the personal servants of the autocrat, who, by the way, enjoyed the guarantee of impunity. Oprichniki (their number has grown approximately four times in seven years) were not only the personal guards of the king, but also participants in many military operations. And yet, the executioner functions for many of them, especially for the top, were the main ones.

Causes and purposes of the oprichnina

What were its causes, what goals was it aimed at, and what objective results did it lead to? Was there any sense in this bacchanalia of executions and murders?

In this regard, it is necessary to dwell on the question of the relationship between the boyars and the nobility, and the political positions of these social groups of the feudal class. All historians are unanimous that the entire government policy of the XV-XVI centuries. was aimed at centralizing the country, and it was embodied in decrees and laws, formalized as "sentences" of the Boyar Duma - the highest government institution. The aristocratic composition of the Duma is known and firmly established; it is sometimes considered a kind of council of the nobility, limiting the power of the monarch. So, it is the boyars who take measures aimed at centralization.

Economically, the boyars were not interested in separatism, rather the opposite. They did not own large latifundia, located compactly, "in the same boundary." A large landowner had estates and estates in several - four or five, and even in six counties. The borders of the counties are the borders of the former principalities. The return to specific separatism seriously threatened the landed possessions of the nobility.

The titled boyars, the offspring of the old princely families that had lost their independence, gradually merged with the untitled nobility. Fragments of the princely patrimonies proper, where their rights were still in the first third of the 16th century. bore some traces of the former sovereignty, constituted an ever smaller part of their possessions, located just as interspersed as those of the untitled boyars.

There was no significant difference in the social composition of the landowners and votchinniki: among both of them we meet aristocrats, middle-ranking service people, and "small fry". It is impossible to oppose the patrimony and the estate as hereditary and non-hereditary possessions: and the patrimony could be confiscated in disgrace, for official misconduct or for a political crime, and the estates were actually inherited from the very beginning. And the size of estates and estates does not give grounds to consider the estate large, and the estate small. Along with large estates, there were many small and even the smallest ones, where the landowner, along with the exploitation of the labor of dependent peasants, was forced to plow the land himself. At the same time, along with small estates (but initially there were no such microscopic ones as small estates), there were also very large ones, not inferior in size to large estates. All this is very important, because it is precisely the opposition of a large “boyar patrimony” to a “small noble estate” that is the main support of the concept of the confrontation between the boyars and the nobility, the struggle of the boyars against centralization.

The oprichnina was not anti-boyar either. And the point here is not only that the resettlements, in which they saw the main social meaning of this event, were not so massive and comprehensive. S. B. Veselovsky carefully studied the composition of those executed under Ivan the Terrible. Of course, there were many boyars among the dead: they stood closer to the sovereign, and therefore the royal wrath fell upon them more often. “Who was close to the Grand Duke, he burned himself, and who remained far away, he froze,” wrote Heinrich Staden. And the execution of a noble boyar was much more noticeable than the death of an ordinary son of a boyar, not to mention a peasant or a "townsman peasant." In the Synodic of the disgraced, where, on the orders of Tsar Ivan, his victims were recorded for church commemoration, the boyars are named by name, and people from the lower strata of society are often numbered with the addition: “you, Lord, you yourself know their name.” And yet, according to Veselovsky’s calculations, for one boyar or person from the sovereign’s court “there were three or four ordinary landowners, and for one representative of the class of privileged service landowners there were a dozen people from the lower strata of society.” Clerks and clerks, ignoble state officials are the basis of the emerging apparatus of state administration, the pillar of centralization. But how many of them died during the years of the oprichnina! “Under Tsar Ivan,” wrote Veselovsky, “service in the clerk’s apparatus was no less life-threatening occupation than service in the boyars.”

So, the spearhead of the oprichnina terror was directed not only and not even mainly against the boyars. It has already been noted above that the composition of the guardsmen themselves was no less aristocratic than the composition of the Zemshchina.

Thus, destroying the aristocratic system of service landownership, the oprichnina was directed, in essence, against those sides of the state order that tolerated and supported such a system. She did not act “against individuals,” as V.O. Klyuchevsky, namely against order, and therefore was a much whiter instrument of state reform than a simple police means of suppressing and preventing state crimes.

Results and consequences of the oprichnina

The path of centralization of the country through the oprichnina terror, which Grozny took, was ruinous and even disastrous for Russia. Centralization has moved forward, but in forms that simply cannot be called progressive. The point here is not only that the moral feeling protests (which, by the way, is also important), but also that the consequences of the oprichnina had a negative impact on the course of national history. Let's take a closer look at its political implications:

One of the political consequences of the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible was an unusually energetic mobilization of land ownership, led by the government. Oprichnina masses moved service people from one land to another; lands changed owners not only in the sense that another landowner came in place of one, 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 son was unsubscribed to the sovereign. It was as if a general revision and a general shuffling of property rights took place.

The years of the oprichnina were a new stage in the history of the anti-feudal struggle of the peasantry. In contrast to the previous time, the arena of class battles was already widely covered not by individual villages and villages, but by the whole country. The voice of spontaneous protest was heard in every Russian village. Under the conditions of the oprichnina terror, the growth of sovereign and sovereign taxes, and other completely unexpected disasters (pestilence, famine), the main form of struggle became the mass exodus of peasants and townspeople, which led to the desolation of the central regions of the country. Of course, this form of peasant resistance to the feudal lords was still passive, testifying to the immaturity of the peasantry, crushed by want and ignorance. But peasant escapes played a huge and not yet fully appreciated role in the subsequent history of Russia. Settling in the north and “behind the stone”, in distant Siberia, in the Volga region and in the south, fugitive peasants, artisans and serfs mastered these territories with their heroic labor feat. It was they, these obscure Russian people, who ensured the economic recovery of the Russian outskirts and prepared the further expansion of the territory of the Russian state. At the same time, fugitive peasants and serfs made up the main contingent of the emerging Don, Yaik and Zaporozhye Cossacks, which became at the beginning of the 17th century. the most organized active force of the peasant war.

The senseless and cruel beatings of the innocent population made the very concept of oprichnina synonymous with arbitrariness and lawlessness.

The gradual dispossession of peasants, the transition of black-soil lands into the orbit of exploitation by secular and spiritual feudal lords was accompanied during the years of the oprichnina by a sharp increase in taxes levied by the state and land rent in favor of secular and spiritual landowners. During the years of the oprichnina, serious changes took place in the forms of feudal rent. The process of development of the corvée, which was outlined already in the middle of the 16th century, intensified.

The ruin of the peasantry, burdened with double oppression (the feudal lord and the state), was complemented by the strengthening of the arbitrariness of the landlords, which prepared the way for the final triumph of serfdom.

One of the most important consequences of the oprichnina is that the relationship between the central government and the church became very complex and tense. The church found itself in opposition to the regime of Ivan the Terrible. This meant a weakening of the ideological support for the royal power, which at that time threatened with serious consequences for both the king and the state as a whole. As a result of the oprichnina policy, the independence of the church in the Russian state was undermined.

Oprichnina was a very complex phenomenon. The new and the old intertwined in it with an amazing quirkiness of mosaic patterns. Its peculiarity was that the centralization policy was carried out in extremely archaic forms, sometimes under the slogan of a return to antiquity. Thus, the government sought to achieve the liquidation of the last appanages by creating a new sovereign appanage - the oprichnina. While asserting the autocratic power of the monarch as an immutable law of state life, Ivan the Terrible at the same time transferred full executive power in the zemshchina, i.e. the main territories of Russia, into the hands of the Boyar Duma and orders, actually increasing the share of the feudal aristocracy in the political system of the Russian state.

The end of 1569 - the summer of 1570 became the culmination of the oprichnina terror. Probably, in the summer of 1569, the tsar received a long-desired denunciation. Novgorod the Great, a city that had always been under suspicion, decided to change: the king of lime, put the staritsky prince Vladimir Andreevich in his place and be transferred under the authority of the Polish king (in 1569 the kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania turned a personal union into a state one, creating a united state - Rzeczpospolita). Before that, in September 1569, he summoned Vladimir Andreevich with his wife and youngest daughter and forced them to take poison. On the way to Novgorod, guardsmen staged bloody pogroms in Tver and Torzhok. Many inhabitants died, and the Livonian and Lithuanian prisoners held there were destroyed. In January 1570, a pogrom began in Novgorod, which lasted more than a month. From three to four thousand people died (according to the estimates of R. G. Skrynnikov) to 10-15 thousand people (as the author of this essay believes). Novgorod churches were robbed. In the villages and villages of the Novgorod land, robber gangs of guardsmen raged, devastating both landlord estates and peasant households, killing residents, forcibly taking peasants to their estates and estates. Several thousand people died in Pskov. The oprichnina degenerated from a gloomy punitive mechanism into a gang of murderers with princely and boyar titles.

Thus, during the punitive campaigns of Ivan the Terrible, large trade and craft centers of the country were ruined, which undermined the economy and trade of the state. It should also be noted that their economic independence was destroyed. Novgorod, after the pogrom of 1570, turned from a rival of Moscow into an ordinary city of the Russian centralized state, wholly subordinate to the Moscow administration.

Note that Ivan IV, fighting the rebellions and betrayals of the feudal nobility, saw them as the main reason for the failure of his policy. He firmly stood on the position of the need for a strong autocratic power, the main obstacles to the establishment of which were the boyar-princely opposition and boyar privileges. The question was how the struggle would be fought. Ivan the Terrible dealt with the remnants of feudal fragmentation by purely feudal methods.

Internal upheavals could not but affect foreign policy. The Livonian War (1558-1583) was lost. There are several reasons for the defeat in this war, including miscalculations in choosing the main direction in foreign policy, but the main reason, I think, is the exhaustion of the forces and means of the Russian state, the economic backwardness of Russia, which was caused by the oprichnina policy of Ivan the Terrible. Russia could not successfully withstand a long struggle with strong opponents. The country's economy was undermined to a large extent as a result of punitive campaigns against the trade and craft centers of the country. Suffice it to say that in the entire Novgorod land only a fifth of the inhabitants remained in place and survived. Under the conditions of the oprichnina, the peasant economy lost stability: it lost its reserves, and the very first crop failure led to famine. “Because of a piece of bread, a man killed a man,” Staden wrote. In addition, the Muscovite state, subjected to oprichnina terror, turned out to be practically undefendable. As a result, in 1571 the central regions were set on fire and plundered by the Crimean Khan Devlet Giray. Russia's international prestige has also fallen.

Conclusion

Oprichnina is forced centralization without sufficient economic and social prerequisites. Under these conditions, the authorities are trying to compensate for their real weakness with terror. It does not create a clearly functioning apparatus of state power that ensures the implementation of government decisions, but an apparatus of repression that envelops the country in an atmosphere of fear.

One of the significant consequences of the oprichnina was that it contributed to the establishment of serfdom in Russia. Serfdom cannot be considered a progressive phenomenon. The point is not only that our morality is not able to recognize as progress the transformation into slaves (or at least semi-slaves) of more than half of the country's population. It is no less significant that serfdom preserved feudalism, delayed the emergence and then the development of capitalist relations, and thus became a powerful brake on progress in our country. Its establishment, perhaps, was some kind of immune reaction of the feudal society of Eastern European countries to the development of capitalism in neighboring states.

The barbaric, medieval methods of Tsar Ivan's struggle with his political opponents, his unrestrainedly cruel character, left an ominous imprint of despotism and violence on all the events of the oprichny years.

The edifice of the centralized state was built on the bones of many thousands of workers who paid a heavy price for the triumph of autocracy. The strengthening of feudal serf oppression in the conditions of the growing ruin of the country was the most important condition that prepared the final enslavement of the peasants. The flight to the southern and eastern borders of the state, the desolation of the center of the country were also tangible results of the oprichnina, which testified that the peasants and townspeople did not want to put up with the increased requisitions and "rights" of arrears. The struggle of the oppressed against the old and new masters from the oprichnina gradually and continuously intensified. Russia stood on the eve of a grandiose peasant war that broke out at the beginning of the 17th century.

The Oprichnina terror and its consequences are of great historical value, which should serve as an edification for future generations. In order to know in the future what such radical methods that Ivan the Terrible once used could lead to.

Bibliography

1. Zimin A.A. Oprichnina. M., Territory, 2001. - 448 p.

2. Kobrin V.B. Ivan the Terrible: Chosen Rada or Oprichnina? / History of the Fatherland: People, Ideas, Decisions. Essays on the history of Russia IX - early. 20th century comp.: Kozlov. M., Publishing house of political literature, 1991. - 536 p.

3. Platonov S.F. Lectures on Russian history. SPb., Crystal. 1997. - 396 p.

4. Skrynnikov R.G. Ivan groznyj. - M.: Nauka, 1975. - 499 p.

5. Solovyov S. M. On the history of ancient Russia. Volume 1. M., Moscow, 1992 - 544 p.

Faces a wide coalition of enemies, which include the Kingdom Sweden, the Kingdom Poland, the Grand Duchy Lithuania. In fact, the vassal of the Ottoman Empire, the Crimean Khanate, which ravages the southern regions of Rus' with regular military campaigns, also participates in the anti-Russian coalition. The war takes on a protracted and exhausting character. Drought and famine, plague epidemics, Crimean Tatar campaigns, Polish-Lithuanian raids and a naval blockade carried out by Sweden devastate the country.

Reasons for the introduction of oprichnina

According to Soviet historians A. A. Zimin and A. L. Khoroshkevich, the reason for Ivan the Terrible’s break with the Chosen Rada was that the latter’s program was exhausted. In particular, an "imprudent respite" was given to Livonia, as a result of which several European states were drawn into the war. In addition, the tsar did not agree with the ideas of the leaders of the "Chosen Rada" (especially Adashev) about the priority of the conquest of the Crimea compared to military operations in the West. Finally, "Adashev showed excessive independence in foreign policy relations with Lithuanian representatives in 1559." and eventually retired.

It should be noted that not all historians share such opinions about the reasons for Ivan's break with the Chosen Rada. In the 19th century, N. I. Kostomarov, a well-known critic of centralization, saw the background of the conflict in the negative features of the character of Ivan the Terrible, and, on the contrary, highly appreciated the activities of the Chosen One. V. B. Kobrin also believed that the personality of the tsar played a decisive role here, however, at the same time, he linked Ivan's behavior with his commitment to the program of accelerated centralization of the country, opposing the ideology of gradual changes of the Chosen One. Historians believe that the choice of the first path is due to the personal nature of Ivan the Terrible, who did not want to listen to people who disagree with his policies. Thus, according to Kobrin, after 1560, Ivan embarked on the path of tightening power, which led him to repressive measures.

According to R. G. Skrynnikov, the nobility would easily forgive Grozny for the resignation of his advisers Adashev and Sylvester, but she did not want to put up with an attempt on the prerogatives of the boyar Duma. The ideologist of the boyars, Kurbsky, protested in the strongest possible terms against the infringement of the privileges of the nobility and the transfer of management functions to the hands of the clerks (clerks): “ the great prince strongly believes in Russian clerks, and elects them neither from the gentry family, nor from the noble, but more from the priests or from the simple nation, otherwise the haters create their nobles» .

New discontent of the princes, according to Skrynnikov, was caused by the royal decree of January 15, 1562, on the restriction of their patrimonial rights, even more than before, equalizing them with the local nobility. As a result, in the early 1560s, among the nobility, there was a desire to flee from Tsar Ivan abroad. So, I. D. Belsky twice tried to escape abroad and twice was forgiven, Prince V. M. Glinsky and I. V. Sheremetev were caught while trying to escape and forgiven. Tension was growing among the encirclement of Grozny: in the winter of 1563, the boyar Kolychev, T. Pukhov-Teterin, and M. Sarokhozin defected to the Poles. He was accused of treason and collusion with the Poles, but after that the governor of the city of Starodub V. Funikov was pardoned. For an attempt to leave for Lithuania, the Smolensk governor, Prince Dmitry Kurlyatev, was recalled from Smolensk and exiled to a remote monastery on Lake Ladoga. In April 1564, Andrei Kurbsky fled to Poland in fear of disgrace, as Grozny himself later points out in his writings, sending an accusatory letter to Ivan from there.

According to the doctor of historical sciences I. Ya. Froyanov, the sources of the oprichnina go back to the reign of Ivan III, when the West unleashed an ideological war against Russia, throwing the seeds of the most dangerous heresy on Russian soil, undermining the foundations of the Orthodox faith, the Apostolic Church and, therefore, the emerging autocracy . This war, which lasted for almost a century, created such a religious and political instability in the country that threatened the very existence of the Russian state. And the oprichnina became a kind of form of his defense.

Device

The oprichnina was established by the tsar on the model of the monastic order, which was directly subordinate to him. Alexandrovskaya Sloboda (Vladimir region) became its spiritual center. The ideological meaning of the oprichnina was the “sifting of Russian life” to separate the “good seeds of Orthodox catholicity” from the “chaff of heretical sophistication, foreignness in morals”.

The initial number of guardsmen was equal to a thousand people. Then the staff of the oprichniki expanded, oprichnina governors and heads appeared. Attire, the guardsmen resembled monks (black skullcaps and cassocks), but unlike them, they had the right to carry and use weapons. The greeting of the guardsmen was the cry "goyda!". Each oprichnik took an oath of allegiance to the tsar and pledged not to communicate with the zemstvo. As an oprichnina "abbot", the king performed a number of monastic duties. The cellar Athanasius Vyazemsky was considered second after the abbot. The sexton was Malyuta Skuratov. So, at midnight everyone got up for the midnight office, at four in the morning - for matins, at eight mass began. The tsar set an example of piety: he himself rang for matins, sang in the kliros, prayed fervently, and read the Holy Scripture aloud during the common meal. In general, the service took about 9 hours a day.

Oprichniki were divided into the sovereign regiment (guards) and four orders, namely: Bed, in charge of maintaining the premises of the palace and household items of the royal family; Bronny - weapons; Konyushenny, which was in charge of the huge horse farm of the palace and the royal guard; and Sytny - food.

As the Livonian nobles Taube and Kruse stated, “Oprichniks (or the chosen ones) should have a well-known and noticeable difference while riding, namely the following: dog heads on the neck of the horse and a broom on the whip. This means that they first bite like dogs, and then they sweep all that is superfluous out of the country. Among scientists there is no single point of view, whether it was about real dog heads, their symbolic images, or just a metaphor. A review of the literature and opinions on this subject is given by Charles Halperin (he himself tends to take the head reports literally). The broom, on the other hand, could symbolize a wonderful weapon that strikes the enemy to death.

History

Course of events

At the same time, there is evidence that orders for executions and torture were often given in the church. Historian G.P. Fedotov believes that “ without denying the tsar's repentant mood, one cannot fail to see that he was able, in well-established everyday forms, to combine atrocity with church piety, defiling the very idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe Orthodox kingdom» .

In 1569, the tsar's cousin, Prince Vladimir Andreevich Staritsky, died (presumably, according to rumors, by order of the tsar, he was brought a bowl of poisoned wine and an order that Vladimir Andreevich himself, his wife and their eldest daughter drink the wine). Somewhat later, the mother of Vladimir Andreevich, Efrosinya Staritskaya, who repeatedly stood at the head of boyar conspiracies against Ivan IV and was repeatedly pardoned by him, was also killed.

In the Tver Otrochy Monastery in December, Malyuta Skuratov personally strangled Metropolitan Philip, who refused to bless the campaign against Novgorod. The Kolychev family, to which Philip belonged, was persecuted; some of its members were executed on Ivan's orders.

Formation of the oprichnina

The beginning of the formation of the oprichnina army can be considered the same year 1565, when a detachment of 1000 people selected from the "oprichnina" counties was formed. In the future, the number of "guardsmen" reached 6,000 people. The Oprichnina army also included detachments of archers from the Oprichnina territories. Since that time, service people began to be divided into two categories: boyar children, from the zemstvo, and boyar children, “yard and city”, that is, those who received the sovereign’s salary directly from the “royal court”. Consequently, the Oprichny army should be considered not only the Sovereign Regiment, but also service people recruited from the oprichny territories and served under the command of the oprichny (“yard”) governors and heads.

Schlichting, Taube and Kruse mention 500-800 people of the "special oprichnina". These people, if necessary, served as trusted tsar's envoys, performing security, reconnaissance, investigative and punitive functions.

A special staff of housekeepers, cooks, clerks, etc. was appointed in the palaces of Sytny, Kormovoi, and Khlebenny; special detachments of archers were recruited. Special cities (about 20, including Vologda, Vyazma, Suzdal, Kozelsk, Medyn, Veliky Ustyug) with volosts were assigned to maintain the oprichnina. In Moscow itself, some streets were placed at the disposal of the oprichnina (Chertolskaya, Arbat, Sivtsev Vrazhek, part of Nikitskaya, etc.); the former inhabitants were relocated to other streets. A thousand specially selected nobles, children of the boyars, both Moscow and city, were also recruited into the oprichnina. The condition for accepting a person into the oprichny army and the oprichny court was the absence of family and service ties with noble boyars. They were given estates in the volosts assigned to the maintenance of the oprichnina; the former landowners and estate 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, the boyar Duma proper, and put Prince Ivan Dmitrievich Belsky and Prince Ivan Fedorovich Mstislavsky at the head of its management. All matters had to be decided in the old way, and with big cases it was necessary to turn to the boyars, but if military or most important zemstvo affairs happen, then to the sovereign. For his rise, that is, for a trip to Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda, the tsar exacted 100 thousand rubles from the Zemsky order (for that time, an absolutely fantastic amount).

According to Academician S. F. Platonov, the government ordered the oprichny and zemstvo people to act together. So, in May 1570 " the sovereign ordered about the (Lithuanian) borders to speak to all the boyars, zemstvo and from the oprishna ... and the boyars wallpaper, zemstvo and from the oprishna, they talked about those boundaries and came to a common decision.

According to Academician S. F. Platonov, after the establishment of the oprichnina, the land ownership of the large feudal nobility, boyars and princes, was quickly destroyed, who for the most part were relocated to the outskirts of the state, where there were constant hostilities:

Oprichnina was the first attempt to resolve one of the contradictions of the Moscow state system. She crushed the land ownership of the nobility in the form in which it existed from antiquity. By means of a forced and systematic exchange of lands, she destroyed the old ties between the specific princes and their patrimonial estates wherever she considered it necessary, and scattered the princes, suspicious in the eyes of Grozny, in different places of the state, mainly along its outskirts, where they turned into ordinary service landowners.

Critics of Platonov's approach point to the inconsistency of his concepts with the realities of the time, in particular, the exaggeration of the role and influence of feudal landowners. As the Soviet historian S. B. Veselovsky noted, even the grandfather of Ivan the Terrible, Ivan III, deprived the specific feudal lords of almost all rights and privileges, including independence from local grand princely volostels, in addition, mainly lands that had never previously belonged to large boyar and princely families. In his own words:

Thus, the orientation of the oprichnina against the old landownership of the former specific princes should be recognized as a complete misunderstanding<…>[There is] another statement by S. F. Platonov, which is also aimed at comprehending and rehabilitating the oprichnina. I have in mind his characterization of the former appanage princes as powerful feudal lords who retained some of the rights of semi-dependent sovereign sovereigns, and constituted in the class of privileged service landowners a special category of persons with interests in many respects hostile to the interests of other titled and non-titled landowners. For the time of Tsar Ivan, such a view of the princes should be recognized as a hundred years belated.

Campaign against Novgorod (1569-1570)

In December 1569, suspecting the Novgorod nobility of complicity in the "conspiracy" of Prince Vladimir Andreevich Staritsky, who had recently been killed on his orders, and at the same time intending to turn himself over to the Polish king, Ivan, accompanied by a large army of guardsmen, marched against Novgorod.

Despite the Novgorod annals, "Synodidic disgraced", compiled around 1583, with reference to the report ("fairy tale") of Malyuta Skuratov, speaks of 1505 executed under the control of Skuratov. The Soviet historian Ruslan Skrynnikov, adding to this number all the Novgorodians named by name, received an estimate of 2170-2180 executed; stating that the reports might not have been complete, many acted "regardless of Skuratov's orders," Skrynnikov admits a figure of three to four thousand people. V. B. Kobrin considers this figure to be extremely underestimated, noting that it proceeds from the premise that Skuratov was the only or at least the main organizer of the murders. In addition, it should be noted that the result of the destruction of food supplies by the guardsmen was famine (so cannibalism is mentioned), accompanied by a plague epidemic that was raging at that time. According to the Novgorod chronicle, in a common grave opened in September 1570, where the surfaced victims of Ivan the Terrible were buried, as well as those who died from the subsequent famine and disease, 10 thousand people were found. Kobrin doubts that this was the only burial place of the dead, however, he considers the figure of 10-15 thousand to be the closest to the truth, although the total population of Novgorod then did not exceed 30 thousand. However, the killings were not limited to the city itself.

From Novgorod the Terrible went to Pskov. Initially, he prepared the same fate for him, but the tsar limited himself only to the execution of several Pskovites and the confiscation of their property. Ivan the Terrible ordered the removal of the bells from a Pskov monastery. At the same time, his best horse fell under the king, which impressed Ivan. The tsar hurriedly left Pskov and returned to Moscow, where searches and executions began again: they were looking for accomplices of the Novgorod treason. From this case, only a description has survived in the Census Book of the Ambassadorial Order: “A pillar, and in it an article list from the detective from the treasonable case of the 78th (1570) year on Archbishop Pimin of Novgorod, and Novgorod clerks, and clerks, and guests, and sovereign clerks, and boyar children, and clerks, as they referred to Moscow (were in connection with Moscow; further - the list)... that Archbishop Pimin wanted to give them Novgorod and Pskov to the King of Lithuania, and they wanted to kill the tsar and Grand Duke Ivan Vasilyevich of All Russia with malicious intent, and put Prince Volodimer Ondreevich on the state; and in that case, under torture, many spoke about that betrayal against Archbishop Pimin of Novgorod and his advisers and at themselves, and in that case, many were executed by death by executions, while others were sent to prisons, but the matter did not come to that, and they were released, and others are complained"; then comes an important note: “... but really, that article list was written out, not found, but a sentence ... and a list for a deacon’s litter, which, as it were, was much dilapidated and tattered, but a large article list was dilapidated”; that is, there are no original documents here either, as S. F. Platonov repeatedly points out. A number of persons were captured who set the tone in affairs after the dispersal of the Chosen Rada: A. D. Basmanov with his son Fedor, the clerk of the Ambassadorial order I. M. Viskovaty, the treasurer N. Funikov-Kurtsev, the oprichny cellar (supplier) A. Vyazemsky and others (all of them were killed, some in a particularly savage way: for example, Funikov was alternately doused with boiling water and cold water, his wife, having undressed, was put on a stretched rope and dragged along it several times, meat was cut from Viskovaty alive). In Alexandrova Sloboda they were drowned in the river. Gray household members of the executed (about 60 women and children). In total, 300 people were sentenced to death, but the king pardoned 187 of them.

Moscow executions of 1570‒1571

Now, the people closest to the tsar, the leaders of the oprichnina, fell under repression. The tsar's favorites, the guardsmen Basmanovs - father and son, Prince Afanasy Vyazemsky, as well as several prominent leaders of the zemstvo - printer Ivan Viskovaty, treasurer Funikov, etc. were accused of treason. 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 convicts, the executioners-guardsmen stabbed, chopped, hung, poured boiling water over the convicts. As they said, the tsar personally 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, even their household members, were persecuted; their estate was taken over by the sovereign. Executions were resumed more than once, and subsequently died: Prince Peter Silver-Obolensky, Duma clerk Zakhary Ochin-Pleshcheev, Ivan Vorontsov and others, and the tsar came up with special methods of torment: hot frying pans, stoves, tongs, thin ropes grinding the body, etc. Boyarin Kozarinov-Golokhvatov, who accepted the schema, in order to avoid execution, he ordered to blow up a barrel of gunpowder, on the grounds that schemas are angels, and therefore must fly to heaven. The Moscow executions of 1570‒1571 were the apogee of the oprichnina terror.

The end of the oprichnina

The victims of repression throughout the reign of Ivan IV were, according to R. Skrynnikov, who analyzed the memorial lists ( synodics), about 4.5 thousand people, but other historians, such as V. B. Kobrin, consider this figure to be extremely underestimated.

The immediate result of the desolation was "easiness and pestilence", since the defeat undermined the foundations of the shaky economy of even the survivors, depriving it of resources. The flight of the peasants, in turn, led to the need to forcibly keep them in place - hence the introduction of "reserved years", which gradually grew into the institution of serfdom. In ideological terms, the oprichnina led to a decline in the moral authority and legitimacy of tsarist power; from a defender and legislator, the king and the state personified by him turned into a robber and rapist. The system of government built over decades has been replaced by a primitive military dictatorship. Ivan the Terrible's violation of Orthodox norms and values ​​and repressions against the church made senseless the self-accepted dogma "Moscow - Third Rome" and led to the weakening of moral guidelines in society. According to a number of historians, the events associated with the oprichnina were the direct cause of the systemic socio-political crisis that swept Russia 20 years after the death of Grozny and is known as the "Time of Troubles".

The oprichnina showed its complete military inefficiency, which manifested itself during the invasion of Devlet Giray and was recognized by the tsar himself.

Oprichnina approved the unlimited power of the tsar - autocracy. In the 17th century, the monarchy in Russia became virtually dualistic, but under Peter I, absolutism in Russia was restored; this consequence of the oprichnina, thus, turned out to be the most long-term.

Historical score

Historical assessments of the oprichnina can radically differ depending on the era, the scientific school to which the historian belongs, etc. To a certain extent, the foundations of these opposite assessments were laid already in the time of Grozny himself, when two points of view coexisted: the official one, which considered the oprichnina as an action to combat "treason", and unofficial, which saw in it a senseless and incomprehensible excess of the "terrible king".

Pre-revolutionary concepts

According to most pre-revolutionary historians, the oprichnina was a manifestation of the tsar's morbid insanity and his tyrannical inclinations. In the historiography of the 19th century, this point of view was adhered to by N. M. Karamzin, N. I. Kostomarov, D. I. Ilovaisky, who denied any political and generally rational meaning in the oprichnina.

V. O. Klyuchevsky looked at the oprichnina in a similar way, considering it 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 do without each other. They tried to separate, to live side by side, but not together. An attempt to arrange such political cohabitation was the division of the state into oprichnina and zemshchina.

E. A. Belov, being in his monograph “On the historical significance of the Russian boyars until the end of the 17th century.” apologist for Grozny, finds in the oprichnina a deep state meaning. In particular, the oprichnina contributed to the destruction of the privileges of the feudal nobility, which prevented the objective tendencies of the centralization of the state.

At the same time, the first attempts are being made to find the social, and then the socio-economic background of the oprichnina, which became mainstream in the 20th century. According to K. D. Kavelin: “The oprichnina was the first attempt to create a service nobility and replace the family nobles with them, in place of the clan, the blood principle, to put the beginning of personal dignity in public administration.”

In his Complete Course of Lectures on Russian History, Prof. S. F. Platonov sets out the following view of the oprichnina:

In the establishment of the oprichnina, there was at all no “removal of the head of state from the state,” as S. M. Solovyov put it; on the contrary, the oprichnina took over the entire state in its root part, leaving the “zemstvo” administration to its borders, and even sought state reforms, because it made significant changes to the composition of the service land ownership. Destroying his aristocratic system, the oprichnina was directed, in essence, against those sides 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.

S. F. Platonov sees the main essence of the oprichnina in the vigorous mobilization of land ownership, in which land ownership, thanks to the mass withdrawal of the former votchinniks from the lands taken into the oprichnina, was separated from the former specific patrimonial feudal orders and associated with compulsory military service.

Since the late 1930s, the point of view of the progressive nature of the oprichnina prevailed in Soviet historiography, which, according to this concept, was directed against the remnants of fragmentation and the influence of the boyars, seen as a reactionary force, and reflected the interests of the service nobility, who supported centralization, which, ultimately account, was identified with the national interests. The origins of the oprichnina were seen, on the one hand, in the struggle between large patrimonial and small estate ownership, on the other hand, in the struggle between the progressive central government and the reactionary princely-boyar opposition. The setting point of view was expressed by I. V. Stalin at a meeting with filmmakers about the 2nd series of the film "Eisenstein" "Ivan the Terrible" (as you know, banned):

(Eisenstein) portrayed the guardsmen as the last brats, degenerates, something like the American Ku Klux Klan ... The troops of the oprichnina were progressive troops that Ivan the Terrible relied on to gather Russia into one centralized state against the feudal princes who wanted to fragment and weaken his. He has an old attitude towards the oprichnina. The attitude of the old historians towards the oprichnina was grossly negative, because they regarded the repressions of Grozny as the repressions of Nicholas II and were completely distracted from the historical situation in which this took place. Nowadays, there is a different way of looking at it.

This concept went back to pre-revolutionary historians and, above all, to S. F. Platonov, and at the same time was planted in an administrative way. However, it should be noted that not all Soviet historians followed the official line. For example, S. B. Veselovsky wrote:

S. F. Platonov lost sight of the fact that the Sudebnik of 1550 specifically forbade boyar children who had not received full resignation from entering the service of lords and private individuals.<…>in the same year, 1550, a decree was passed forbidding the metropolitan and bishops to accept boyar children into their service without special permission from the tsar. And in the coming years, in connection with the Code of 1556 on feeding and service from the land, service from the land became mandatory and all landowners lost the right not to serve anyone or to serve the princes, boyars and other large landowners. This great blow to the remnants of feudalism was made long before the oprichnina<…>In general, the oprichnina had nothing to do with these really important state reforms.

In 1946, the Decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was issued, which spoke of the "progressive army of guardsmen." The progressive significance in the then historiography of the Oprichny army was that its formation was a necessary stage in the struggle to strengthen the centralized state and was a struggle of the central government, based on the service nobility, against the feudal aristocracy and specific remnants, to make even a partial return to it impossible - and thereby ensure the military defense of the country. .

A detailed assessment of the oprichnina is given in the monograph by A. A. Zimin “Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible” (1964), which contains the following assessment of the phenomenon:

The oprichnina was a tool for defeating the reactionary feudal nobility, but at the same time, the introduction of the oprichnina was accompanied by an intensified seizure of peasant “black” lands. The oprichnina order was a new step towards the strengthening of feudal ownership of land and the enslavement of the peasantry. The division of the territory into “oprichnina” and “zemshchina” (...) contributed to the centralization of the state, because this division was directed against the boyar aristocracy and the specific princely opposition. One of the tasks of the oprichnina was to strengthen the defense capability, therefore, the lands of those nobles who were not serving military service from their estates were selected for the oprichnina. The government of Ivan IV carried out a personal revision of the feudal lords. The whole of 1565 was filled with measures to enumerate land, breaking up the existing ancient land tenure. In the interests of wide circles of the nobility, Ivan the Terrible carried out measures aimed at eliminating the remnants of former fragmentation and, restoring order in the feudal disorder, strengthening the centralized monarchy with strong royal power at the head. The townspeople also sympathized with the policy of Ivan the Terrible, interested in strengthening the royal power, eliminating the remnants of feudal fragmentation and privileges. The struggle of the government of Ivan the Terrible with the aristocracy met with the sympathy of the masses. The reactionary boyars, betraying the national interests of Rus', sought to dismember the state and could lead to the enslavement of the Russian people by foreign invaders.

The oprichnina marked a decisive step towards strengthening the centralized apparatus of power, combating the separatist claims of the reactionary boyars, and facilitating the defense of the borders of the Russian state. This was the progressive content of the reforms of the oprichnina period. But the oprichnina was also a means of suppressing the oppressed peasantry, it was carried out by the government by strengthening feudal serf oppression and was one of the significant factors that caused the further deepening of class contradictions and the development of class struggle in the country. .

At the end of his life, A. A. Zimin revised his views towards a purely negative assessment of the oprichnina, seeing in "The bloody glow of the oprichnina" an extreme manifestation of feudal and despotic tendencies as opposed to pre-bourgeois ones. These positions were developed by his student V. B. Kobrin and the latter's student A. L. Yurganov. Based on specific studies that began even before the war and carried out in particular by S. B. Veselovsky and A. A. Zimin (and continued by V. B. Kobrin), they showed that the theory of the defeat of patrimonial land ownership as a result of the oprichnina is a myth. From this point of view, the difference between patrimonial and estate ownership was not as fundamental as previously thought; the mass withdrawal of patrimonials from the oprichnina lands (in which S. F. Platonov and his followers saw the very essence of the oprichnina) contrary to the declarations was not carried out; and the reality of estates was lost mainly by the disgraced and their relatives, while the "reliable" estates, apparently, were taken into the oprichnina; at the same time, precisely those counties were taken into the oprichnina, where small and medium landownership prevailed; in the very cause there was a large percentage of the tribal nobility; finally, allegations about the personal orientation of the oprichnina against the boyars are also refuted: the boyar victims are especially noted in the sources because they were the most prominent, but in the end, primarily ordinary landowners and commoners died from the oprichnina: according to S. B. Veselovsky, on for one boyar or a person from the Sovereign's court, there were three or four ordinary landowners, and for one service person - a dozen commoners. In addition, terror fell upon the bureaucracy (deaconry), which, according to the old scheme, should supposedly be the backbone of the central government in the fight against the "reactionary" boyars and appanage remnants. It is also noted that the resistance of the boyars and the descendants of the specific princes to centralization is generally a purely speculative construction, derived from theoretical analogies between the social system of Russia and Western Europe in the era of feudalism and absolutism; sources do not give any direct grounds for such assertions. The postulation of large-scale "boyar conspiracies" in the era of Ivan the Terrible is based on statements emanating from Grozny himself. Ultimately, this school notes that, although the oprichnina objectively resolved (albeit by barbaric methods) some urgent tasks, primarily strengthening centralization, destroying the remnants of the appanage system and the independence of the church, it was, first of all, an instrument for establishing the personal despotic power of Ivan the Terrible.

According to V. B. Kobrin, the oprichnina objectively strengthened centralization (which “The Elected Rada tried to do by the method of gradual structural reforms”), did away with the remnants of the appanage system and the independence of the church. At the same time, oprichnina robberies, murders, extortion and other atrocities led to the complete ruin of Rus', recorded in census books and comparable to the consequences of an enemy invasion. The main result of the oprichnina, according to Kobrin, is the establishment of autocracy in extremely despotic forms, and indirectly also the establishment of serfdom. Finally, oprichnina and terror, according to Kobrin, undermined the moral foundations of Russian society, destroyed their sense of dignity, independence, and responsibility.

Only a comprehensive study of the political development of the Russian state in the second half of the XVI century. will allow to give a reasonable answer to the question about the essence of the repressive regime of the oprichnina from the point of view of the historical destinies of the country.

In the person of the first Tsar Ivan the Terrible, the historical process of the formation of Russian autocracy found a performer who was fully aware of his historical mission. In addition to his journalistic and theoretical speeches, this is clearly evidenced by the precisely calculated and successfully carried out political action of the establishment of the oprichnina.

Attempts to "revive" the oprichnina

Activists of the Eurasian Union of Youth, who appeared in 2005 and opposed attempts to commit an orange revolution in Russia, called themselves "new guardsmen". The ideologist of the "new oprichnina" Alexander Dugin interpreted the oprichnina image of "dog heads" ("cynocephaly") as a defense of the ideal of the "great Eurasian project" against wolves (including those in "sheep's clothing") attacking Holy Rus'.

Another form of revival of the oprichnina was Shchedrin-Kozlov’s “Oprichnina Brotherhood”, which perceived the oprichnina as a parallel (separate, internal) church with the king-high priest, a kind of “Orthodox freemasonry”. This organization is sometimes classified as a pseudo-Orthodox sect, where the icons of Ivan the Terrible and Grigory Rasputin are revered.

Oprichnina in works of art

• Oprichnik - opera by P. I. Tchaikovsky based on the tragedy of the same name by I. I. Lazhechnikov.
• "Day oprichnik" and "Sugar Kremlin" - fantastic works by V. G. Sorokin.
• The Tsar is a 2009 historical film by Pavel Lungin.
• "Prince Silver" - a historical novel by A. K. Tolstoy
• "According to the royal command" - a story by L. A. Charskaya

Notes

1. Oprichnina// Great Soviet Encyclopedia .
2. V. S. Izmozik. Gendarmes of Russia. - Moscow: OLMA-PRESS, 2002. - 640 p. - ISBN 5-224-039630.
3. "Textbook" History of Russia ", Moscow State University. M. V. Lomonosov Faculty of History 4th edition, A. S. Orlov, V. A. Georgiev, N. G. Georgieva, T. A. Sivokhina»>
4. Yegor Gaidar Foundation "Oprichnina:  terror or reform?" Public conversation with the participation of historians Vladislav Nazarov and Dmitry Volodikhin
5. Russia time Ivan the Terrible. - M., 1982. - S. 94-95.
6. Skrynnikov R. G. Decree. op. - S. 66.
7. Zimin A. A., Khoroshkevich A. L. Russia time Ivan the Terrible. - M., 1982. - S. 95.
8. Kostomarov N. Personality of Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich the Terrible. - M., 1990.
9. Kobrin V. B. Ivan groznyj . - M., 1989.
10. Kobrin V. B. Ivan groznyj . - M., 1989.
11. Skrynnikov R. G. Ivan groznyj. - S. 75.
12. Sat. RIB. T. XXXI. - S. 114-115.
13. Skrynnikov R. G. Decree. op. - S. 78.
14. Walishevsky K. Decree, op. - S. 252-253.
15. Zimin A. A., Khoroshkevich A. L. Decree, op. - S. 99-100.
16. PSRL. T. 13. - C. 258.
17. Kurbsky A.M. Legends. - S. 279.
18. Skrynnikov R. G. Ivan groznyj. - S. 86-87.
19. Veselovsky S. B. Studies on the history of the oprichnina. - S. 115.
20. Khoroshkevich A. L. Russia in the system of international relations in the middle of the XVI century. - S. 348.
21. Skrynnikov R. G. Decree. op. - S. 79.
22. Skrynnikov R. G. Ivan groznyj . - M. : AST, 2001.
23. , - T. 6. - Ch. four. .
24. Kostomarov N.I. Russian history in the biographies of its main figures. Chapter 20. Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich the Terrible
25. Kobrin V. B. Ivan groznyj
26. N. M. Karamzin. History of Russian Goverment. T. 9, chapter 2 (indefinite) .

The years 1569-1570 became the peak of the development of the oprichnina. The cruelty shown by the associates of Ivan the Terrible in these years became a symbol of terror and disgrace for many years.

Initially, the oprichnina army of the king included

A sharp rejection of such a radical policy was expressed to the king and the church. Metropolitan Philip, recently elevated to the rank, refused to bless the tsar's campaign against Novgorod and delivered a speech full of criticism, denouncing the oprichnina. By order of Ivan the Terrible, Philip was deposed, that is, deprived of the rank of head of the Orthodox Church, and imprisoned in the Otrochi Monastery near Tver. During a campaign against Novgorod, Malyuta Skuratov, Grozny's closest associate, strangled Philip in his cell with his own hands.

Novgorod campaign

In the autumn of 1569, the tsar received a message that the Novgorod nobility was planning to transfer the lands of Novgorod under the patronage of Poland, while at the same time removing Ivan himself from the throne. The king, according to the data received, was to be Prince Vladimir Staritsky. A few days later, the prince himself, his wife and eldest daughter committed suicide, according to the generally accepted version, by drinking poisoned wine on the orders of Ivan IV. Most historians are sure that the denunciation received was false and became only an excuse to pacify the lands that were too free, according to Grozny. In December 1569, having gathered a large army, the tsar set out against Novgorod.

The massacre of the Novgorodians, according to the chroniclers, was extremely cruel. Looted houses, farmsteads and even monasteries, burned cattle and all supplies, killed and tortured people - according to chronicles, during the six weeks of their stay in Novgorod lands, the guardsmen executed 10-15,000 people.

However, modern researchers question this figure. Malyuta Skuratov himself, who led the executions in Novgorod, in his report speaks of 1505 victims. Historians give different numbers - from 2000 to 3000 people. Considering that the population of the city at that time was hardly 30,000 people, the figure of 15,000 seems somewhat exaggerated. However, due to the destroyed supplies in the winter of 1570, famine broke out in Novgorod, and researchers consider the victims of the oprichnina and all those who died of starvation and disease that year.

The end of the oprichnina

Returning from the Novgorod campaign, the king continued the policy of terror. However, the victims of the close attention of Ivan the Terrible were now people from his inner circle, those who stood at the origins of the new policy. All the organizers and active figures of the oprichnina were executed - the princes Vyazemsky, Cherkassky, Basmanov. Opals escaped only the new favorite of the king Malyuta Skuratov. Zemshchina leaders were also executed on various charges - the total number of victims, according to some sources, exceeded 200 people. The years 1570-71 were marked by mass executions in Moscow.

The reason for the dissolution of the oprichnina army was the invasion of Moscow by the Crimean Khan Devlet Giray. The zemshchina put up 5 full-fledged regiments to fight the invader, but the guardsmen, for the most part, did not come to the war - the tsarist army was recruited for hardly one regiment. Such an open demonstration of a complete inability to defend was the reason for the official abolition of the oprichnina.

The consequences of the oprichnina

Historians do not give an unambiguous assessment of such a large-scale political act of Ivan the Terrible. Someone considers the oprichnina a real disaster for the Russian state, the cause of the ruin of lands, someone, on the contrary, sees in it the driving force of centralization and strengthening of power. Such conflicting opinions are due, among other things, to the lack of historical material for an objective study of the oprichnina as a state political phenomenon.

Cons of the oprichnina . Perhaps the most significant consequence of such a harsh version of domestic policy can be considered the ruin of many lands. The counties and destinies, through which a wave of punitive detachments of guardsmen rolled, lay in ruins - mass executions of both the rulers of the lands and the ordinary peasantry did not contribute to prosperity. The economic crisis caused by the reduction in the area under crops - and Russia was still a predominantly agricultural country - caused famine in the central and northwestern parts of the country. Hunger, in turn, forced the peasants to move from the inhabited areas, and soon the resettlement turned into an outright flight. The state tried to fight the depopulation of the lands by adopting the first acts of serfdom, such as the decree on reserved years. So the oprichnina became the reason for the enslavement of the peasants, strengthening out of dependence on the will of the landowners.

This policy had its impact on the ongoing Livonian war at that time. Partially, the oprichnina became the reason for the defeat of Russia during the hostilities. Fearing accusations, military leaders were in no hurry to take the initiative in conducting military operations. In addition, insufficient funding also affected the armament of the troops - due to the devastation of the central lands in the last years of the oprichnina, the state treasury received less of a significant part of taxes.

Advantages of the oprichnina . Despite sharp criticism from most historians of both the 18th-19th centuries and modern ones, the oprichnina also had positive aspects, which cannot be ignored.

First of all, the policy of terror served for the benefit of the centralization of the country. The ruin of princely destinies, death, forced land exchanges and the resettlement of representatives of the highest boyar-noble class significantly weakened land-kinship ties between opponents of the supreme power. The consequence of this was the strengthening of the influence of the king and the centralization of the state.

The formation of a new style of government, without regard to the boyar duma, also became possible thanks to the introduction of the oprichnina. And although the autocracy did not always go well, for the new state, which had just united from disparate lands, a single power became a system-forming factor. According to many historians, the formation of a great state is impossible without harsh measures - albeit as cruel as the oprichnina. Terror in the time of Ivan the Terrible could be the only form of assertion of the central government, the only way to unite the lands.