Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/390

 366 attended by inevitable excesses. The fellow-workers to whom Ivan found himself obliged to appeal, some of them drawn from the lowest strata of society, and all incapable of understanding the nature and real object of his enterprise, were even more inclined than he himself to confuse violence with energy. And, docile instruments and complaisant courtiers as they were, they flattered and increased the taste for coarse debauchery which the Sovereign owed to his education, and to certain cruel instincts, inherent, no doubt, in his temperament. The chroniclers have preserved the names of these fellow-workers to us. First of all, and in the front rank, came the boïar Alexis Basmanov and his son Feodor; Prince Athanasius Viazemski; Vassili Griaznoï, Archimandrite of the Monastery of Tchoudov; Levkiï; and, fiercest and most illustrious of them all, Gregory Loukianovitch Maliouta-Skouratoy. At a later period, Bogdan Biélski, who, with Basmanov and several others, was reported to be the Tsar's mignon, and Boris Goudounov, Skouratov's son-in-law, and himself to be Tsar one day, were paramount in the Sovereign's favour and confidence.

In this inner circle, legend assigns the highest place to Anastasia's brother, Nikita Romanovitch Zakharine, a personage with whom we have already made acquaintance. Relying on I know not what or which appearances or realities, it has endued him with virtues—a generous and loyal heart, and a pure and upright mind—which strike one as being somewhat incompatible with such surroundings. Taking it all together, I am inclined to think Ivan, in that particular phase of his life, at all events, could not have put up with a comrade of this sort, and that Zakharine has reaped the benefit of a deliberate process of idealization applied to the historical origin of the whole of his family, once it had become the ancestor of an Imperial house.

In principle, indeed, the Sloboda of Alexandrov was anything but a home of debauchery. Ivan, as we know, always affected a great inclination towards the monastic life, and certain monastic tendencies were frequently allied, in his case, with a looseness of morals really by no means foreign to the cloistered rule of those days. We have seen, too, that he was anxious to work a reform which would have brought back the monastic world to a stricter observance of the rules, all too often broken, of the religious life. The idea of setting a personal example in this respect certainly swayed the conception of the system he adopted, and applied, for many years, to the internal arrangements of his Court at Alexandrov. The chief features of the constitution of the Opritchnina already endued it with certain of the characteristics of