Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/287

 Rh take the measure of the absolute power, as it were, and try it on a people to whom years of tyranny, foreign and domestic, had taught an endless patience and a boundless resignation.

And this farce, as some persons have supposed, may have been connected with the negotiations Ivan was then carrying on with England. As I shall soon have to show, the Terrible, in his great desire for an alliance with Elizabeth, was ready to cross the seas if so he might insure it. At certain moments he seems to have thought of asking the Queen to grant him temporary shelter as well. For the interim government which would then have become a necessity, Simeon's personality offered a valuable guarantee. Ivan would not have run any risk of finding his place permanently filled when he returned. The Tsar was a nobody: he had no connections, and nobody cared for him. In 1576, when Ivan's hopes as to Elizabeth faded and the arrival of Maximilian's envoys calmed his anxieties, he probably came to the conclusion that the farce had lasted long enough.

On the throne, Simeon had been nothing but a puppet. As the chief of an administration, he had no time to prove his capacity, and, indeed, the documents in which his name appears only refer to matters of quite secondary importance. Once he departed, things seem to have returned to their ordinary course, except that during the eight years of the reign subsequent to this episode there were only occasional repetitions, at more and more distant intervals, of the Tsar's bloody chastisements. Did the Opritchnina outlive the farce? We know not. The Terror had spoken its last word.

But the last word of history concerning the Opritchnina has not yet been spoken, and the duty of reviewing the testimonies and opinions connected with this confused and confusing chapter of a dim past still lies before me.

Though Soloviov adopted Karamzine's general point of view, he made an attempt to discover some political meaning inthe series of events which his fellow-historian had taken to be nothing but a succession of horrors and acts of insanity. In the closing pages of the sixth volume of his 'History of Russia,' at all events, the leader of the Opritchnina appears under the guise of a reformer. Kaveline ('Works,' i., 'Sketch of the Judicial Conditions of Ancient Russia') made the same endeavour. But Pogodine ('Fragmentary Studies, Historical and Critical,' Moscow, 1846), George Samarine ('Works,' v. 203), and even C. Akssakov himself ('Works,' i.), though in more measured fashion, have followed Karamzine's lead, and