In the French encyclopedic dictionary Larousse (1903), one of the articles begins as "Ivan IV the Terrible - Russian Tsar (1530-1584), nicknamed for his cruelty Vasilyevich." This example illustrates the level of propaganda clichés that have become entrenched in the West both in relation to Russia in general and in relation to this character in particular.
Of course, Ivan the Terrible was not a sinless and kind ruler. But turning him into a fiend of hell is unfair. Dry statistics indicate that the number of real and imaginary enemies executed by his order is not only comparable, but also inferior to the number of those executed in the same era in the course of internal political and religious repression in France, England or the Holy Roman Empire. But the French and English monarchs are reproached only for excesses and immediately make allowances for the harsh customs of the era.
Deadly resentment
There are no discounts for Ivan Vasilyevich branded as a "tyrant". Although, unlike his European colleagues, more often he nevertheless exterminated the enemies of external, and not his own subjects. The problem is that these external enemies were not only Asians, but also representatives of "enlightened Europe", which already at that time perfectly mastered not only the techniques of conventional war, but also the conduct of information war.
The claim that Moscow should become an independent center of power was made by 17-year-old Ivan IV in 1547, when he was crowned king.
According to the medieval European tradition, independent statehood began with the fact that the European monarch received the crown from the emperors of either Byzantium or the Holy Roman Empire, not by washing, but by rolling.
Ivan IV did not ask anyone for the crown and was married to the kingdom himself, referring to the fact that the Catholic Holy Roman Empire of Orthodox Russia was not a decree, but the Orthodox Byzantine Empire was destroyed by the Turks. Patriarch Joasaph II of Constantinople recognized the procedure as legal and there was nothing to object to Europe, which the Russian tsar in fact simply ignored. But the mortal insult, of course, remained.
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Grunting and scandalous, Western monarchs nevertheless recognized the title. The first - the British in 1555, for which they received a trade monopoly for their Moscow company. But the disputes with Poland ended only after the Time of Troubles.
For Poles-Catholics, Moscow was a competitor in the struggle for hegemony in Eastern Europe, although Protestant Sweden was also happy to intervene in these showdowns.
The prize in the struggle of the three powers was to be the Livonian Order. Today's Western historians represent this stub of the Teutonic Order "eaten" by the Poles as a harmless, advanced and democratic state. In reality, the knights-crusaders squeezed the juices out of the Baltic peasants, and the local German merchants parasitized on the trade route that linked Muscovy with Northern Europe.
Ivan IV avoided conflicts with his western neighbors, considering it more urgent to fight the fragments of the Golden Horde - Kazan, Astrakhan, Crimean and Siberian Tatars.
He began his independent rule with successful internal reforms, trying to modernize not only the public administration system, but also the economy.
Livonian "plug"
Having barely been crowned king, Ivan instructed the German merchant Hans Schlitte to recruit in Europe "masters and doctors who know how to go after the sick and treat them, book people who understand Latin and German letters, craftsmen who know how to make armor and shells, mining craftsmen who know the methods processing of gold, silver, pewter and lead ore, people who know how to find pearls and precious stones in water, goldsmiths, gunsmiths, bell casters, building craftsmen who know how to build stone and wooden cities, castles and churches, field doctors who know how to heal fresh wounds and who are versed in medicine, people who know how to bring water to the castle, and paper craftsmen."
Schlitte recruited three hundred such specialists. The first group of Livonians was arrested in Wenden, held in prison for five years, and then assigned to serve the order. The second group tried to get to Russia through Lubeck, but this city was part of the Hanseatic League, whose interests coincided with the interests of the Livonian Order. Schlitte was put in jail on a trumped-up charge, and the passage to Moscow was blocked for other specialists. A certain artisan Gantz set out on the road at his own peril and risk and was executed by the Livonian knights.
Ivan, absorbed in the campaign against Kazan, endured this slap in the face, which in Europe was perceived as evidence of weakness. And in 1554 the Swedes, who did not seem to have any territorial claims to the Muscovite kingdom, decided to forcefully "move" the border in the Nevye region. The unprovoked attack was repulsed by the forces of one Novgorod governorship and nearly cost the attackers the loss of Vyborg. Ivan, however, agreed to preserve the "status quo", but the peace was signed not by him, but by the same Novgorod governor, which seemed to indicate to the Swedes their more than modest place.
By this time, Kazan and Astrakhan had already been conquered, and the tsar decided to present an invoice to the Livonian Order. He did not raise the story with Hans Schlitte, because, for all the cynicism of the actions of the Livonians, they did not violate international or bilateral treaties. But he recalled the story of the so-called "Yuriev's tribute" - an indemnity that the order pledged to pay annually under the peace treaties of the times of Ivan III and Vasily III. Payments were not made for more than 50 years, and, taking into account interest, the amount managed to run up a hefty one.
Overlooking the sea
The Livonians began the first negotiations in a boorish tone, but quickly realizing that the case smelled like a real war, they ended with pleas for a new reprieve. The tsar did not agree to a postponement, since he intended to conquer all of Livonia in order to trade directly with Europe. Moscow already had access to the Baltic through the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland, but the lands were deaf, and in order to build a port on them, large investments were required, and even additional efforts to pull trade flows from Narva. In general, having such a convenient reason, Ivan IV decided to take all of Livonia by force.
And he did it. In 1561 the order was defeated. The Muscovy received a convenient exit to the Baltic through Narva, as well as the east of present-day Estonia and Latvia. It also got two new opponents.
The last Livonian master Gotthard Kettler, entrenched in the south-west of Latvia, announced the creation of the Duchy of Courland, a vassal to the Polish crown. Sweden also got involved in the struggle, deciding to lay its paws on western Estonia with Revel (Tallinn).
Ivan tried to occupy these territories by organizing a puppet Livonian kingdom headed by the Danish prince Magnus, although his partner was extremely unreliable and deceitful.
The Danes who were at war with the Swedes turned out to be those still allies. For example, Captain Carsten Rode, who entered the Russian service, captured 22 enemy ships as a privateer. But, when in 1570 the Danish king began negotiations with the Swedes on a separate peace, the ships seized by the "corsairs of Ivan the Terrible" were confiscated, and Carsten Rode himself was arrested. The Tsar was left with such behavior of the allies "to be very surprised." He could not act more actively against external enemies, since in Moscow itself it was necessary to tame the boyar opposition. And it was not just a fight with phantoms.
Honest traitors
The Moscow nobility traditionally looked askance at Poland and Lithuania, where the aristocracy spun monarchs. How far the boyars can go, Ivan IV understood from the episode with a friend of his youth, Andrei Kurbsky, who, before his escape to Poland (1564), conveyed information to the enemy that led to the loss of the Gel-honey castle and the defeat of the Russian troops at Chashniki. It was after Kurbsky's escape that the tsar unleashed the oprichnina terror, unleashing it on the right and the guilty.
It is believed that the guardsmen who carried out the terror were selected mainly from ignorant boyars, but a significant stratum among them was also foreign mercenaries.
And here it is worth paying attention to contemporaries, from whose stories in Europe the image of the king - a sadist and a psychopath was formed. Who are they, these noble and crystal honest people?
A nobleman from Pomerania, Albert Schlichting, was captured by Russian during the capture of the Lithuanian fortress Jezerische. In Moscow, he served as a translator and secretary for Ivan IV's personal physician Arnold Lindzey. Having left for Poland in 1570, he wrote, in essence, a frankly propagandistic essay "about the life and tyranny of Tsar Ivan."
Former subjects of the Livonian Order Elert Kruse and Johann Taube, having been captured, also did not hesitate to swear allegiance to the Russian Tsar, were assigned by spies to Prince Magnus, but played their own game, leaking secret information to the enemy. When the threat of exposure became obvious, they tried to revolt in Dorpat Partu), failed and barely took their feet to the Poles. In general, they are twice traitors, like Heinrich von Staden.
This adventurer, having failed in commercial operations, joined a detachment of Polish marauders, with whom he quarreled over loot, after which he passed into Russian citizenship. Joined up as an interpreter in the Ambassadorial Prikaz. He took part in the oprichnina pogrom of Novgorod (1570), where he plundered to his heart's content, as well as in the campaign against the Crimean Tatars, where he fled from the battlefield (1571).
Having earned a lot of money in distilling, he returned to Germany in 1576, where he correctly caught the current situation. The new Polish king Stefan Batory was preparing a large-scale campaign against Moscow, preceding it with a powerful information campaign. Brochures depicting the crimes of the Moscow tsar were distributed throughout Europe in large print and supplied with primitive illustrations. But it was a crowd product.
Staden issued "goods" for the elite, advocating that Rudolph II, the Holy Roman Emperor, should help the Polish king in his struggle against the "barbarians".
It was for him that the author painted how the occupied Muscovy could be ruled. Local residents should have been driven into castles and cities, from where they were sometimes taken to work, "but not otherwise than in iron shackles, filled with lead at their feet." Definitely, Hitler had something to be inspired by.
These "European partners"
When foreign authors did not fulfill Russophobic orders, the tonality of their works changed radically.
For example, Michalon Litvin wrote about Ivan IV: “He protects freedom not with a soft cloth, not with shiny gold, but with iron, his people are always with weapons, fortresses are equipped with permanent garrisons, he does not look out for peace, he reflects strength by force, he opposes the abstinence of the Tatars to people, sobriety - sobriety, art - art."
The Venetian ambassador Lippomano represented Ivan the Terrible as a righteous judge and did not mention any atrocities. The Ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire Daniel von Buchau left a similar review.
Probably, such reviews influenced the decision of Rudolf II not to go into the Russian adventure, although, most likely, the emperor was more worried about the Turkish threat, for the fight against which the Russians could come in handy.
Critically, but benevolently, the Englishmen Chancellor, Adams, Jenkinson assessed the Moscow tsar, especially noting that he enjoyed the love of the common people.
True, in 1570 the tsar was offended by the refusal of Queen Elizabeth to conclude between the two countries "eternal end" on a close military-political alliance, as well as on mutual asylum in the event of a revolt of subjects. Ivan took away part of the privileges from the Moscow company, but then returned them back. The parties realized that they had gotten excited, and the clever Queen Elizabeth learned to deal in correspondence with the tsar without the snobbery characteristic of the British.
Ivan the Terrible lost the Livonian War because of the betrayal of Magnus and the military successes of Stefan Batory. True, Batory could not take Pskov in 1581, which did not prevent the artist Jan Matejko from portraying him as a triumphant, looking down on the humiliated Russian ambassadors. The tsar had to abandon the Livonian lands and access to the Baltic Sea. However, access to the Baltic was returned already under his son. And in general, during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the territory of the Muscovite kingdom has doubled.
Having rested in the West against a blank Polish-Swedish-German wall, Russia expanded eastward. And, probably, if only threats were not heard from behind this wall and the "armed forces of the united West" did not come in every century, Muscovite Russia would become an Asian power. For better or for worse - it's hard to judge.
Magazine: Mysteries of History №23. Author: Dmitry Mityurin