Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/292

 268 men, women, and children, whose names are known to God,' to His mercy. In the obituary lists at the monastery of Sviajsk we find the names of 'the Princess-nun Eudoxia, the nun Maria, and the nun Alexandra,' all three of them drowned in the Cheksna, which flowed into the White Lake (Biélooziéro). Princess Eudoxia was Ivan's 'Welsh aunt,' Alexandra had been betrothed to him, and Maria was one of Vladimir's sisters. The Terrible did not spare his own kinsfolk, and if any caprice or calculation moved him to spare a particular individual, he struck at those nearest to him. 'Why should I wreak my vengeance on a monk?' he wrote, of Chérémétiév, to the abbot of the Monsey of St. Cyril. 'Have I not all his relations under my hand?'

The Opritchnina was all this—or all this, at all events, was part of the Opritchnina. But according to one of the King of Poland's agents (Schlichting, Scriptores rer. pol., i. 145–147), Ivan could not have maintained himself upon the throne unless he had employed these terrorizing methods. When he struck Ivan Petrovitch Chouïski—with a dagger-thrust dealt, so Schlichting asserts, by his own hand—the Tsar had a document in his possession according to which this boïar, with many others, undertook to give his master's person up to the King of Poland as soon as that monarch had set his foot within the Muscovite borders. Some people have denied the existence of any struggle between the Tsar and the defenders of the old system. But if the preparation of such attempts does not constitute a struggle, there is no meaning in words! The struggle—a fierce and obstinate one—was carried to extremes by both parties: all feeling of duty and honour was forgotten on one side, all pity on the other.

Yet all the eagerness and violence of the fray did not eradicate that resignation to accomplished facts and submission to superior strength which are an unalterable feature in the national character. When Prince Sougorski, whom Ivan had despatched to the Emperor Maximilian, was stopped on his way by a serious illness, he bewailed himself: 'If only I was able to get up! My life is nothing so long as the Tsar is well. …' 'How can you show so much zeal for so great a tyrant?' inquired the Duke of Courland. And Sougorski answered: 'We Russians are devoted to our Sovereigns whether they are cruel or kind.' And he added, to prove the fact, that a boïar who had been impaled by the Tsar's orders some time previously, for some comparatively trifling fault, had endured his hideous torments for four and twenty hours, and never ceased talking to his wife and children, constantly repeating, 'Great God, protect the Tsar!' This fact is chronicled by Karamzine (ix., chap. iv.).