Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/245

 Rh fixed, nothing eternal. Muscovite Russia was a centralized State, based on universal and obligatory service, on the division of the population into classes bound to perform definite tasks—forced labour in the lower ranks, employed in commerce or in manual toil, and all feeding the State treasury; 'men who served' in the upper ranks, employed in the State army or in administrative service, and obliged, from childhood till they drew their last breath, to give the State their whole life's labour. All of these, whether descended from the free comrades or the free peasants of the old days, were now turned into the living straps and wheels of the Government machine—voiévodes, starosts, for criminal or land affairs—set like so many suction pumps over the very springs of the national life. Wherefore, at every step, liberty was strangled utterly, and duty, regulation, slavery, reigned supreme.

Already, towards the middle of the preceding century, Ivan's grandfather had found himself obliged to crush two of the great families, the Riapolovski and the Patrikiév. This blow only strengthened the resistance which had its focus in the cell of Maximus the Greek. The twofold current, religious and intellectual, of that period corresponded, indeed, with the antagonism in politics. While Joseph Volotski and his followers, the Iosiflianié, were popularizing the Byzantine doctrine of absolute power, the partisans of the old system of freedom found sympathizers among the monks 'from beyond the Volga.' The two oppositions, political and religious, joined hands on the question of the division of power and the legitimate influence to be exercised over the Sovereign. One claimed the boïar's right to sit on the council, and the other that of the Church to intercede.

Ivan's attitude with regard to the problems thus put forward strikes us as being partly in close conformity with his historical precedents, and, as to another part, quite peculiar to himself. He cannot be taken to be the first autocrat, nor even the first terrorist, Russia had ever known. From the fifteenth century onwards, terrorism had become an habitual weapon of government in the hands of the Russian monarchs.

Was Ivan the Terrible the representative and champion of a powerful and strongly-centralized monarchy, which he had received with all its ancient traditions, but which he sought to renovate; the disappointed idealist imagined by some Slavophils, who in his despair, so they assert, struck with his own hand at what he had failed to transform, grew wilder and wilder as the ruins thickened round his feet, and ended at last in a very madness of murder and destruction? This seems a somewhat hasty conclusion, which must not be unquestioningly accepted.