The Russian Empire 1450–1801

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to produce a male heir, reignited tensions and by autumn boyar clans had read the
handwriting on the wall. Avoiding violence, they trekked out to swear loyalty to
Peter at his place of refuge, the Trinity-St. Sergii Monastery. Peter deposed Sofiia,
Ioann endured as co-ruler until his death in 1696, and the Naryshkin faction
ousted the Miloslavskie. Despite this crescendo of violence and factional struggle,
succession by primogeniture was fairly regular from thefifteenth century to 1689,
with crises over Ivan IV’s marriage (1533–47) and disputes between factions in
tsarist in-laws in 1682.
Otherwise, violenceflared up rarely in this political system; in this regard one
might mention the infamous Oprichnina of Ivan IV. From 1564 to 1572, Ivan
carved out a physical territory for himself and his“Oprichnina”army as a sort of
“widow’s bench,”a place to retire to, leaving the rest of the realm to be ruled by the
boyars as“the Land.”From 1564 to 1572, Ivan ruled the state from the Oprichnina
court at Aleksandrov, while he acted out a facade of living in an appanage. He set
up the Oprichnina territory with its own administration and army that grew to
6,000, recruited from non-boyar lines of established clans as well as from lower
families. His new men were granted lands (confiscated from established princely
and gentry families) with generous immunities at a time when appanages, and to a
lesser extent immunities, were being phased out. Later, continuing the appanage
analogy, in 1575 Ivan transferred his tsar’s title to the Chinggisid tsarevich Semeon
Bekbulatovich for a year in 1575,“retiring”from rule.
The Oprichnina was exceedingly violent, even taking into account the literary
luridness of non-witness foreign accounts: elite families were dispossessed of their
lands and many high ranking men murdered; Oprichnina troops killed indiscrim-
inately. Memorial records cite up to 4,000 losses, including hundreds in the sack of
Novgorod in 1570. But no method has been found in Oprichnina madness: no
single institution, region, or social class was targeted; suffering fell on all with no
discernible social or political goals. No new institutions or political practices were
established, although some new Oprichnina families endured in elite status. Once it
was over, Russia reverted to the same institutions of government, the same ideologies,
the same boyar clans in charge, with a larger elite, a ravaged economy (the Livonian
War was afiasco, taxes had skyrocketed), and undoubtedly a deep psychological
wound in individuals and groups. The impact of the violence can be sensed in part by
efforts of the next several regimes (Boris Godunov, Mikhail Romanov) to avoid
violence with the elite, as Andrei Pavlov has stressed, and also by an unprecedented
emergence of history writing focusing on tyranny and legitimacy.
In the failure of rational explanations of the Oprichnina, historians now focus on
Ivan himself, positing a range of irrational motivations, for example, that Ivan was
paranoid and fearful of boyar disloyalty in a time of war; indeed several grandees did
try toflee the realm (although plans to depose Ivan cannot befirmly identified).
Some, such as Richard Hellie, argue he was insane, while others interpret his
violence as inspired by a messianistic image of himself as inflicting“sacred violence”
in an era of apocalyptic expectation. The latter argument would seem to rationalize
his behavior in a millenarian time. But the theory of“sacred violence”evoked by
these authors does notfit the model established by scholars such as René Girard and


Broadcasting Legitimacy 153
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