Oprichnina in modern society is perceived as an extremely negative phenomenon - the result of the insanity of the king, who everywhere saw treason and conspiracy. Nevertheless, many Russian historians saw progressive tendencies in the oprichnina.
Emergency management mode
Before talking about the oprichnina, one should dwell on the era that gave birth to it. Ivan the Terrible's Russia is a country that has just begun expanding its borders and gaining power. In the meantime, these are the meager lands of the Non-Black Earth Region, lying in the northwestern part of Eurasia; a sparse and fragmented population that is difficult to manage; disgraced cities, where the center of unrest has ripened more than once; lack of access to the Baltic, Black and Caspian Seas, and, as a result, to world trade routes; devastating raids of nomads from the south and east, as well as incessant wars over territory with Sweden, Poland and Lithuania.
Ivan IV sincerely believed that only the unlimited power of the monarch would help to restore order in these harsh and vast lands. At the end of 1564, the tsar left for his residence in Alexandrov, from where he sent two letters to the capital. In the first, Ivan accuses the boyars of plundering the treasury and treason, which explains his refusal of power, in the second, addressed to Muscovites, the tsar complains of the boyar insults and assures that he does not hold any grudge against the people.
Less than two days later, a delegation headed by Archbishop Pimen arrived in Aleksandrov, which began to persuade Ivan Vasilyevich to return to managing state affairs. The tsar agreed, but immediately outlined his conditions: in the country it is necessary to introduce, in modern terms, a state of emergency, abolishing the previously existing legal norms: the only sovereign law will be the word of the monarch. So in Russia, the oprichnina was introduced, which officially existed from 1565 to 1572.
Looking for meaning
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It seems to us that the meaning of the oprichnina was best understood by the contemporaries of Ivan the Terrible. However, studying the written sources of those distant times, researchers do not find intelligible assessments of this significant phenomenon. Russian chronicles, although they reveal to us the full picture of the atrocities of the guardsmen, at the same time avoid openly denouncing the tsar. Whatever the sovereign was, in that era he was perceived exclusively as the anointed of God.
Beginning in the 18th century, not at all looking for excuses for the tsar's deeds, and even more so for the guardsmen, historians tried to give objective and balanced assessments of one of the most tragic episodes in Russian history. So Vasily Tatishchev in the establishment of the oprichnina saw the Tsar's intention to stop the betrayal of the boyars. For Sergei Solovyov, the oprichnina was the personification of the transition from "tribal" relations to "state" ones.
Corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences Sergei Platonov is one of those researchers who found many positive features in the oprichnina. The historian builds his conclusions on the fact that his contemporaries did not understand Ivan the Terrible. Meanwhile, the tsar, according to him, was guided in his actions by the existing threats emanating from the princely opposition.
Continuing the thought of Platonov, the modern historian Ruslan Skrynnikov defines the concept of oprichnina as a result of the collision of "the powerful feudal aristocracy and the rising autocratic monarchy."
Alexander Zimin, a researcher of the Russian Middle Ages, draws attention to the position of the Church as a large socio-political institution that prevented the centralization of the country. It was the oprichnina, according to Zimin, that managed to include the church in the state apparatus.
For Doctor of Historical Sciences Daniil Alshits, the oprichnina was not an accidental episode, but a necessary stage in the formation of autocracy, in other words, the initial form of the apparatus of supreme power. Thanks to the oprichnina, according to Alshits, autocracy appeared in Russia in the form we understand it today. Moreover, the historian claims that the oprichnina was not terminated in 1572, but existed until the end of Ivan the Terrible's life.
Revision of land tenure
Historians note that, in a broad sense, oprichnina was not a new phenomenon in Russian life, because that was the name given to the inheritance given to the prince's widow to “oprichnina” (besides) another land. In the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible, the land was already divided between the tsar's henchmen and the rest of the population - "zemstvo".
In the annals you can read that the king "hated the cities of his land" and in anger divided them and "as if he had created two faiths." For historians, this reaction of the chronicler is understandable, since the tsar did not consider it necessary to explain the decisions he made to the people. According to Platonov, Ivan the Terrible consistently included in the oprichnina, one after another, the internal regions of the state in order to revise the system of land tenure and to keep records of landowners.
In the future, the tsar removed to the outskirts of the people he did not like, and in return resettled reliable ones. The expelled landowners, according to Grozny's plan, could be useful for protecting the borders of the state. This operation took on the character of mass mobilization and, in the end, was supposed to replace large patrimonial land tenure by small local land use. However, as was often the case with Grozny, it was not without excesses, and the violent redistribution of land acquired the character of a mass disaster.
Vladimir Kobrin, an expert on the era of Ivan the Terrible, believes that the oprichnina did not change the structure of large property: both boyars and princely land tenure managed to survive the troubled years of political terror.
Fight against treason
The king was absolutely sure that traitors surrounded him on all sides. However, today it is impossible to establish exactly what was more guided by Ivan IV, who was spinning the flywheel of terror - painful suspicion or a real threat posed by his entourage.
According to Skrynnikov, the original plan of the oprichnina was to "protect the life of the tsar," and only then she had to put an end to the abuses of the boyars and other distortions in the state. However, having endowed the oprichniks with the broadest powers, the tsar actually blessed them for atrocities.
The oprichnina's tyranny reached its apogee in the winter of 1569-1570 during the campaign of Ivan the Terrible against disgraced Novgorod. But was this an act of cruel revenge by the insane tsar, as is often highlighted in Russian historiography? As the Russian Slavic historian Boris Florea notes in his book Ivan the Terrible, in the fall of 1569 the tsar received information about the ripening treason in the free cities of Pskov and Novgorod.
It was about a large-scale conspiracy among the order administration and the social elite, the purpose of which was the surrender of Pskov and Novgorod to the Lithuanian king. This conspiracy was not a figment of the sick imagination of the tsar, since at the beginning of 1569, the border Izborsk, a powerful almost impregnable fortress, had already passed to Lithuania in a similar way.
But there was another problem. 1568 and 1569 years became lean for the Novgorod Republic. The local elite, according to contemporaries, have concentrated significant grain reserves, thereby causing a sharp rise in the price of bread and condemning the population to starvation. Perhaps this food blockade had far-reaching plans of the Novgorod elite.
The reasons for the intervention of the king were more than serious. According to the researchers, if the conspiracy had succeeded, up to a third of Russia's territory could have gone to Lithuania. Instead of access to the Baltic, which Grozny sought during the Livonian War, Moscow could have a dangerous and powerful enemy at its side. And then the integrity of the state as such would be in question.
The campaign against Novgorod turned into a brutal pogrom and a large-scale trial of the conspiracy case. Condemning the atrocities that the guardsmen carried out by robbing and killing the townspeople, historians, nevertheless, note that the executions were preceded by thorough trials that lasted three weeks after the capture of Novgorod.
It is curious that the Novgorod pogrom did not escape the attention of the Russian rulers of subsequent eras. Thus, the always shrewd Catherine II noted that the reason for the tsar's anger was not at all the free rule of the Novgorod Republic, but “the reason was that Novgorod, having accepted the Union, surrendered to the Polish Republic, therefore, the tsar executed apostates and traitors, in which in truth to say the measures not found.