Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/288

 264 represented the Opritchnina as the work of a capricious despot, the Neronian fancy of an artist in crime. When, at a more recent period, Bestoujev-Rioumine followed Soloviov's lead in the second volume of his 'History of Russia,' he fell under the bitter criticism of Kostomarov (Messager de l'Europe, 1871, No. 10) and Ilovaïski ('Russian Archives,' 1889, p. 363), both of them strong supporters of Karamzine's view. Even in Kourbski's business, the last-named critic only perceived a consequence, not a cause, of Ivan's sanguinary excesses, and far less an excuse for them.

These verdicts, pronounced at various times, and all of them too sweepingly severe, have evoked a reaction, which, being excessive, as most reactions are, has swept the authors affected by it into attempts at apology not less sweeping, and by no means easy to accept. Biélov, in a study published in the Review of the Ministry of Public Instruction, (1886), has drawn his inspiration from an argument lately much in vogue among German theorists on political law. He has asserted that the Novgorod butcheries were justified, objectively, by a certain general excitement of men's minds, and that Philip's martyrdom was rendered legitimate by that prelate's interference in political matters. This road, once entered on, may lead the traveller far, and one of Kourbski's biographers, Gorski (Kazan, 1858), has gone the length of supporting the pronouncing of sentence on Sylvester and Adachey without hearing the accused persons' plea—'They certainly would not have confessed their misdeeds!' With regard to that Prince Pronski whose execution I have already mentioned—he was drowned, according to Kourbski's report, and cut in pieces, according to Taube and Kruse—Gorski draws the following conclusion: that he died in his bed! Concerning Leonidas, Archbishop of Novgorod, he has to admit that he was thrown to the dogs after having been sewn up in a bearskin. But as he was guilty, Ivan only acted 'in conformity with fair justice.' These inversions of judgment and failures of moral consciousness are sad to witness. The Terrible's apologists and his detractors would have spared them us, no doubt, if they had made a really objective study of the great subject, submitted all its elements to a more exact process of analysis, and more thoroughly realized the historical conditions of the phenomenon under discussion.

They would have noted, in the first place, that even Ivan's foreign contemporaries were far from regarding him indiscriminately as a monster of cruelty, or even as a merely cruel Prince. I do not here refer to the friendly testimony brought by Forsten ('The Baltic Question,' i. 467) from Lubeck—accommodating witnesses, indeed, if such there ever