But the most important event which distinguished this period of the reign of Ivan was the discovery of Siberia, an empire of extraordinary magnitude, producing the richest furs, and studded with inexhaustible mines of salt, copper and silver. The discovery was accidental, and caused at first so slight a degree of attention, that it was suffered to be forgotten until another accident, some years afterwards, recalled it to the consideration of the government. A body of men, who had been sent across the mountains of Ingermanland by the czar, penetrated as far as the banks of the Oley; but the discoveries they reported were either so imperfect, or so ill-described, that they were passed over in silence. It subsequently occurred, however, that a merchant of the name of Strogonov, who was the proprietor of some salt mines on the confines of Siberia, had his curiosity stimulated by several persons who traded with him, and whose strange costume and foreign manners excited in him a desire to become acquainted with the interior of the country from whence they came. Accordingly he commissioned a few of his people to return with them into Siberia, and to collect such information respecting it as their opportunities might enable them to acquire. These people, having explored the unknown districts, which they found to be inhabited by a race of Tatars, who possessed a capital called Sibir, returned to their employer charged with a history of wonders, and a quantity of costly furs, which promised to open a new source of gain to the diligent merchant. Strogonov, however, resolved not to keep the knowledge he had thus attained exclusively to himself, and immediately communicated all he knew to the court. In the mean time, Iermak, a Don Cossack adventurer, who, at the head of a gang of those lawless robbers, infested the roads, plundering the inhabitants and travellers in that part of Russia, happened to come, accidentally, to the merchant’s dwelling, on his flight from some Russian troops that had been sent in search of him. While he remained there, he learned by chance, from Strogonov, of the newly discovered land; and he and his band, being persons who had nothing to lose, and who subsisted solely by desperate predatory practices, resolved to enter the strange country, and seek in its unknown retreats a source of safety and support. The resistance this adventurer experienced from the Siberians greatly thinned the ranks of his daring troops, but the forlorn character of the expedition inspired them with reckless valour; and, after many exhausting conflicts, they finally overran the country, and made themselves master of the capital. Iermak now bethought him of what he should do with his perilous conquest; and seeing that he possessed no means of accumulating sovereign power, or even of possessing by tribute, or otherwise, so vast a territory, he threw himself at the feet of the czar, tendered to him the territory he had won, and solicited in return a full pardon for all the delinquencies he and his followers had committed. Ivan readily granted the pardon, and took possession of his new acquisition. The work of annexation went rapidly forward. Several commodious towns were built, strong forts were constructed, the mines were garrisoned, and that great expanse of desert and mountains, which was afterwards destined to become the convict settlement of Russia, was formally and permanently consolidated in the dominions of the autocrat.
THE RESTRAINING INFLUENCE OF ANASTASIA
The civil and social improvement of the empire kept pace with the armed progress. A number of celebrated artists were engaged from the dominions, and by the permission, of Charles V; the art of letterpress printing was introduced, and the first type that ever was seen in Russia was imported by Ivan; the northern parts were opened to a new mercantile intercourse; and Archangel was established. The laws were revised; and the fees of the governors of the provinces who administered justice, paying themselves by pecuniary mulcts on the suitors, were abolished, and in their place gratuitous justice was administered, and a general assessment levied, which was collected by officers appointed by government. The grasping demands of the clergy were restrained, their revenues placed upon a more equitable basis, and their morals improved by mild but decisive restrictions.
Such were the fruits of the influence of Anastasia, which procured a hearing for the wisdom of Alexis and Sylvester. While that amiable and enlightened lady lived, Ivan pursued a course of just and wise measures that reflected honour upon his name, and conferred extensive benefits upon his country. But the latent nature was not extinguished: it only slept, hushed into slumber by the sweet influences before which his savage dispositions were subdued. An old bishop, who had formerly been banished from the court on account of his crimes, and who was one day consulted by Ivan, replied to the czar in some memorable words which were ever afterwards cherished in his memory, and were not without their power over his subsequent life. “If you wish,” exclaimed the bishop, “to be truly a sovereign, never seek a counsellor wiser than yourself; never receive advice from any man. Command, but never obey; and you will be a terror to the boyars. Remember that he who is permitted to begin advising, is certain to end by ruling, his sovereign.” Ivan, kissing the old man’s hand, is said to have answered, “My own father could not have spoken more wisely!” This remarkable advice—similar to that which is attributed to a celebrated cardinal of modern times, on his death-bed—seems to have governed the conduct of Ivan from the moment that the death of the princess Anastasia released him from the embarrassment of her counsels. She died in 1560.
IVAN’S ATROCITIES
[1560 A.D.]
The incarnate fiend, relieved from the oppressive presence of virtue, resumed at once his original nature. If the narrative of his crimes could be spared from the page of history, it would rescue us from a series of details, the very relation of which must sicken the least susceptible mind. But there was a passion so unearthly in this paragon of monsters—he was so elevated in atrocity, and reached so sublime a height in the perpetration of cruelties—that his life, incredible and disgusting as it is, fills too great a space in the annals of despotism to be passed over lightly. One of his historians charitably supposes him to have been a lunatic.
The first act of Ivan was to banish his prudent advisers, the men who had hitherto preserved him from the worst calamities. Those persons were replaced by others, who studiously laboured to destroy their predecessors by false stories of their treachery to the czarina, whose death was unequivocally laid to their charge. That weakness, or superstition, which is an inherent quality in all savage natures, led Ivan to believe, or to fancy, that he believed those absurd accusations; and he acted with promptitude upon the miserable excuse which they afforded him. He hunted the partisans of the late ministers wherever they could be detected; some he put to the most disgraceful deaths, others he imprisoned or banished, varying the monotony of their solitary lives by the infliction of exquisite tortures. One prince, who refused to join in the lascivious pleasures of the court, was poinarded at prayers in the church; and another was stabbed to the heart by the czar’s own hand, because he had the presumption to remonstrate with one of the new favourites. The prince Andrew Kurbski, a noble who, both in the cabinet and the field, had rendered the most important services to the government and the country, received intimation that a similar fate awaited him; and, indignant at the prospect of such an unworthy return for his devotion to the throne of the czars, he retired into Lithuania, and united himself with Sigismund, the king of Poland, and, at that time, one of the most formidable enemies of Russia. This revolt maddened Ivan beyond control; and his exasperation was increased by the receipt of a letter from the prince, in which he boldly charged the czar with all the miseries that were entailed upon their common country, with having shed the blood of Israel’s elders in the temples of the Lord; and wound up by threatening him with the vengeance of that tribunal before which he must one day answer to the accusations of the spirits of the murdered. The messenger who was daring enough to present this epistle to the czar suffered for his temerity. Ivan, on learning from whence he came, struck him across the legs with an iron rod which he usually carried in his hand; and while the blood flowed copiously from the wounds, leaned unconcernedly upon his rod to read the rebellious letter. The correspondence that ensued upon this occasion, like all the correspondence of Ivan’s which has come down to us, is remarkable for the most blasphemous presumption and arrogant hyperbole. He wrote all his letters with his own hand, and was proud of his literary attainments, which, had they been directed into worthier channels, might have rendered him a distinguished ornament of his age.
THE POLISH INVASION
The consequence of the disaffection of Kurbski was the enrolment of a Polish army with a view to a descent upon Russia, and an invasion of the southern provinces by the Tatars at the instigation of Sigismund. This demonstration increased the rage of the czar: he treated everybody around him as if they were the creatures of Kurbski: he distrusted everybody; and put numbers to the rack and to death on the bare suspicion of their guilt, and was overheard to lament that he could not find victims enough to satisfy his wrath. He charged the boyars indiscriminately with harbouring secret designs against the welfare and happiness of the state; he dispossessed many of them of their private fortunes; and in a letter which is still extant, he urged against them as crimes, all the benefits which the sane portion of his rule had conferred upon Russia. In this delirium of the fever of despotism, the clergy remonstrated with some firmness; and, in order to obtain a fresh excuse for making new victims, he adopted an expedient as unexpected as it was singular. He caused a report to be spread on a sudden, that he was about to leave Moscow; but the point of his destination, or the reason of his withdrawal were preserved as profound secrets. The mystery of this announcement created a panic at Moscow. The people knew not what was to come next, whether the tyrant was about to put some scheme of universal destruction into execution, or whether it was merely a prelude to some extravagant exhibition of superstitious credulity, which always assumed in their eyes the aspect of religious devotion. Agreeably to this vague announcement of the czar’s design, one morning in December, at an early hour, the great square of the Kremlin was filled with travelling sledges, some of which contained gold and silver, others clothes, and not a few crosses, images, and the relics of saints. These preparations attracted crowds of astonished gazers, who looked on in stupid wonder at the extraordinary sight. In a few minutes the czar, followed by his family, was seen to descend from the palace, with the officers of his household, and a numerous retinue. From the palace he passed on to the church of the Assumption; and, having ordered the metropolitan to celebrate mass, he prayed with great devotion, and received the blessing of Athanasius. Returning from the church, he held out his hand to the assembled multitudes, that they might satisfy themselves with a farewell kiss; and then, having in silence, and with unusual solemnity, walked through the groups that beset his path, he mounted his sledge, and drove off accompanied by a regiment of horse. The inhabitants of Moscow, astonished and terror-struck by the scene, were lost in conjecture. The city was without a government. Ivan had so dexterously contrived to impress them with an idea that he derived his sovereignty from God, that he found no great difficulty ultimately in confounding to the imagination of an enslaved and uninstructed people the distinction between God and the sovereign; and in every crisis of disaster that occurred, the people fell back upon their fanaticism, and looked to the czar for that succour which could alone come from heaven. Deserted at this moment by Ivan, they began to believe that they were deserted by Omnipotence.