Giorgio Agamben. They have theorized that“sacred violence”is the exclusive right
of sovereigns (or sovereign states) to wield violence even unto death to maintain or
restore social stability. In other words, sovereign authority uses violence in a
ritualized or regularized manner—regular rituals of sacrifice, just war, capital
punishment in the criminal justice system. But Ivan’s violence was outside of the
norm, arbitrary, short-lived, and fundamentally destabilizing.“Sacred violence”as
theory does not apply here. An intriguing insight into Ivan’s life was provided by
inspection of his skeleton in the 1960s; Ivan was found to have suffered from a
painful disease of the spine and to have taken mercury, traces of which were evident
in the bones. Mercury is intoxicating and harmful, causing brain damage. Ivan’s
body was malformed; he probably limped. Whether the mercury affected him,
whether one can draw a causal connection between his pain and suffering and the
Oprichnina, has been hotly debated, but this evidence certainly complicates our
understanding of his complex behavior. Irrationality of some sort is the best
solution to the puzzle of Ivan’s terribleness, but no analytical framework has yet
satisfactorily explained the tremendous violence, destruction, and futility of the
Oprichnina years.
*****A few points might be made in conclusion about Russia’s imperial imaginary and its
relationship to politics on the ground. First of all, Muscovy’s ideal image of politics
embodied in art, ritual, architecture, and political practice did not envision politics
as institutions, but as practices and relationships between ruler and people and ruler
and elite. The ruler’s power was envisioned as unlimited in theory, like that of a
father in a family, but moderated in practice. Like a patriarchal fatherfigure, the
ruler was to be stern but fair, merciful and forgiving, constrained by piety and
Christian kindness. He led his people to salvation by his own pious example. He
dispensed“politics”as personal favor and mercy. Not institutions but practices of
liturgy, ceremony, and advice taking kept the ruler on the righteous path and the
political system in balance.
Second, the intrinsicflexibility of this ideology allowed it to serve all the ruler’s
varied subjects. He provided justice, order, and providential blessing upon his
people and his realm. Within that umbrella, political practices were shaped tofit
the varied circumstances of empire, in a way that Jane Burbank has called an
“imperial regime of rights.” All groups in society could claim the autocrat’s
protection and benevolence, but each group’s“rights”were defined differently,
according to religion, ethnicity, and class. The presumption that the ruler would
accommodate his people, in the affinitive groups to which they belonged, enacted
the ideology of patrimonial, pious ruler.
Third, political reality was hardly as serene and harmonious as this ideal, but the
ideal corresponded to the real and shaped it. The political world was organized
around clans, marriage, kinship, and clientage. Elite families were well taken care of
(land, serfs, gifts, status) and did not need (or have a vocabulary with which) to seek
legal guarantees of rights or institutions. We see in practice a taboo of killing the
154 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801