Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/260

 236 that appearance, Kourbski's crowned adversary is not, and never has been, the persecutor of innocence oppressed. He is, and always has been, 'the destroyer of treason on Russian soil.' That is the one thing the Russian people has perceived and understood in the drama in which itself played the part of the ancient chorus, together with the fact that when the Tsar massacred or ill-used his boïars he did it in defence of the humble and the weak.

This needs explanation, and for that purpose, Kourbski's career may serve. Most of Ivan's historians have refused to admit that the people sided with the despot. What did he offer the mass of the peasants, husbandmen yesterday, half-serfs to-day, and soon to be utterly enslaved—to these beings whose backs were bent in never-ending labour, bound to the soil, and more and more ground down, more mercilessly cheated, as the needs of the State increased? Yet the facts speak for themselves. Ivan has been sung, lauded, extolled, by the population of helots whose slavery and misery he deepened. When suffering has reached a certain pitch, any change, even if it should increase the torture, is a benefit. In 1582, the peasants of one of the Polish properties bestowed on Kourbski made a complaint against their new master. They had known others, who had not made their life any too easy, but this one they could not endure! The complaint was admitted to be well founded, and my readers may imagine in what fashion Kourbski had been in the habit of treating the unhappy moujiks on his Russian vottchina. There were thousands of Kourbskis in Russia, and this one was a liberal, a man of progress! The hatred all these men inspired built up Ivan's popularity.

The exile died at Kovel in 1583. His family, which had embraced Catholicism in Poland, returned to Russia and to the Orthodox faith, and died out in 1777. In the struggle between the old régime and the new order of things, Kourbski, the most illustrious of the champions of the past, was, taking him all in all, neither a hero nor a martyr. And for this reason, before we plunge into the heart of that battle, where the bloody phantom of the Opritchnina awaits them, I have desired to show him to my readers, as an example of the kind of adversaries with whom Ivan had to deal.