Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/389

 Rh huge wooden palace was raised on an eminence on which the present Government offices now stand. Here, too, he built a cathedral on the model of that of the Assumption. But before long the Sloboda of Alexandrov took the gloomy despot's fancy, and held it.

This famous suburb was Ivan the Terrible's Plessis-les-Tours, just as Maliouta-Skouratov was his Tristan-l'Ermite. A. Tolstoï has given us a picturesque but purely imaginary description of the dwelling. The buildings of the present Monastery of the Assumption at Alexandrov are said to contain part of the ancient Palace, which has disappeared and left no visible trace behind. This monastery, like the Palace at Vologda, stands on an eminence over the river. The cathedral within its walls does appear to be of Ivan's date. We can still recognise a door brought from Novgorod after the sacking of that town, and the whole edifice looks like a reconstruction, into the composition of which elements originally intended for a quite different purpose have entered; the doors and windows are dotted about with no apparent meaning, and there are recesses in the walls which are quite unsuitable to modern requirements. The same peculiarities are noticeable in the Monastery of the Child Jesus at Tver, where St. Philip's cell has been turned into a chapel. At Alexandrov, apart from the cathedral, a block of masonry which certainly belonged to some other building still exists. Some persons have thought they recognised in this the site of the rooms once tenanted by Ivan and his associates. This conjecture would seem to be confirmed by the huge basements, with their mysterious recesses and subterranean passages plunging into unknown depths, out of which the visitor expects to see bloody phantoms rise.

But these walls, which may have seen and heard so many things, are dumb now, and local tradition is as dumb. To reconstitute the history of all that happened there—all that stood for so much in the life of a most remarkable man, and the story of a great country, we are fain to fall back on legends and on a few unreliable chroniclers. This suburb, the seat of a government, the centre of an administration, has slipped, as to both these memories, through the fingers of posterity, even that nearest to it; and those contemporaries who mention it at all consider it little better than a resort of brigands. Yet a verification of their narratives by comparison with some few more reliable documents and certain established facts may enable us to form some idea of what the dwelling, and the lives of those who dwelt in it, may have been.

I have already given my opinion as to the accusations brought against the Opritchnina. It was a revolutionary undertaking, and its natural consequence was a reign of terror,