Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/253

 Rh chronicler, and here is another and an instructive proof of the degree of confidence of which Kourbski himself is worthy. Amongst the friends of Sylvester and Adachev involved in their disgrace he mentions, together with Prince Dmitri Kourliatev and other less prominent members of the group, dozens of whom were massacred or exiled, a certain Prince Michael Vorotynski. This gentleman, a valiant soldier, who had won glory on many a battlefield, was sent to Biélooziéro for the first time in 1559, sent back there soon after his recall from exile in 1564, and passed on this second occasion through the torture-chamber, we are assured. After being roasted over a slow fire in the presence of Ivan, who himself raked the hot cinders under his body with his staff, he is said to have died on his return journey. Now, as to this person's first exile, we have official and documentary evidence, and it proves him to have enjoyed a considerable amount of comfort. He complains that he has not been sent the Rhenish and French wines to which he has a right, and asks for various supplies—fresh fish, dried raisins, lemons, prunes—for himself, his family, and his twelve servants, all kept at the Tsar's expense in a prison which would seem to have been by no means a Gehenna. Can it be that people so well treated within the prison walls were thus cruelly handled before being sent there? ('Historical Documents,' 1841, i., No. 174).

The only absolutely convincing documents we find among the records of the many trials connected with that of Sylvester and Adachev contain no reference either to torture or to execution. These prosecutions generally arose out of some plan to go abroad, imputed to one boïar or another, and invariably ended in mere precautionary measures; the culprits, whether acquitted or pardoned, had to undertake not to leave the country, and to find security to that effect. This occurred in the case of Prince Vassili Mikhaïlovitch Glinski in 1561, and in that of Prince Ivan Dmitriévitch Biélski in the following year; on this last occasion, nine-and-twenty prominent men, for whom 120 others went security, gave their signatures.

It will be noticed that this form of procedure implied an acknowledgment of the right claimed by the interested parties. Theoretically, indeed, this right remained unaffected. It had formerly been exercised as between one appanage and another, and the reason of its existence had passed away now Russia was a unified whole; yet it still subsisted as the counterpart of that freedom claimed, without the smallest regard for frontier lines, by the nomad peasants themselves. But since the fifteenth century, a twofold current of emigration, affecting every class, had been flowing with increasing strength between Muscovy and Poland.