Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/262

 238 broom, hung at their saddle-bow, and whose watchword was murder and pillage. Soaked with blood, laden with plunder, they made their way home, donned a monk's frock, to add profanation to their other crimes, and with their master, himself disguised as a prior, plunged into the vilest orgies. These were the Opritchniki.

But other and later historians have applied themselves to the same task, and their inquiry into the same facts, and scrutiny of the same individuals, has led them to a different view of the same drama, and another interpretation of the strange riddle it presents. Behind that terrifying scene and its horrible surroundings they have discovered an idea; under the deceptive appearances of a sanguinary madness they have thought they perceived a carefully-digested plan, carried out with as much tenacity as vigour; they have discerned the existence of huge projects of reform, political, social, and economic, put into action by means that were reprehensible, indeed, but which may have been necessary to some extent. The riddle has not been entirely solved. It still holds out against its interpreters' efforts. But one fact is certain: in their manner of interpreting and representing the Opritchnina, the historians of the old school have fallen into a three-fold error. They have mistaken appearances for realities, accessories for essentials, and a part for the whole.

I shall explain myself better by taking one example. Imagine a history of the French Revolution—and this, perhaps, is not an entirely gratuitous supposition—cut down to the evocation of a few scenes and characters culled from the Jacobin Club, the Temple prison, and the Place de la Nation. This would be the equivalent of what was given us for a lengthened period as the foundation and essence of ten years of the political existence of the reign of Ivan the Terrible. And this cannot be wondered at, when we consider that the document most indispensable to an understanding of the episode, the decree which constitutes the Opritchnina, though preserved in the archives, has remained unpublished, and continues inaccessible, even in our own day. Other documents have either been lost or have also remained unknown. I now proceed to the facts we do possess.

Kourbski's flight, which was preceded and followed by similar attempts, some successful and others continually threatening to become so, had placed Ivan in a position calculated to render his future most perplexing and uncertain. To accomplish the tasks he had set himself, at home and abroad, one necessitated by the other—for his internal reforms supplied the necessary instruments for his external enterprises—many men and large sums of money were needful.