Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/416

 392 intellectual, social, and more especially political—in the struggle between the future and the past. He brought in a few new ideas, but more particularly some new weapons, of his own. Ivan III. had fought in silence, with an axe. Ivan IV., true to his own period, did not, indeed, put the axe back into its bear-skin sheath, but he supplemented the labours of the executioner by the action of his economic reforms and of the power of speech. Was he not bound to speak, since men's tongues were wagging all round him? Silence was to fall once more, when the theory of the absolute and despotic power had triumphed, and the Empire was subject to its rule; and no faint echo of Kourbski's bold clamour was to rise till Europe witnessed the coming of another epoch of revolutionary disturbance, and heard the voice of Radichtchev. But Ivan, in the sixteenth century, could do no less than follow the impulse which prompted every intellectual being, even in Russia, to discourse.

Yet, contrary to the general opinion, he proved himself much stronger in practice than in theory; for though within the borders of his own country he maintained his adopted programme against every Kourbski of them, and carried it to its logical conclusion, and though, outside them, he yielded to nothing but Batory's genius and the good fortune which attended it, his ideas, both as to politics and religion, frequently strike us as vague, confused, and unsettled, and his powers of reflection by no means correspond with the power of his instinct, which is extraordinarily sure, as a rule. He is instinctively inclined to depend on the masses of the population, and yet he gives over his peasants to be squeezed by his 'men who serve.' Devout as he is—a fortnight after his marriage in 1547 he makes a pilgrimage to the Troïtsa, and goes the whole way on foot, in spite of the bitter cold—and deeply convinced of the excellence of his form of religion, as his discussions with Possevino and Rokita prove, he frequently gives vent to sallies savouring strongly of free-thought. On other occasions he shows a tolerance which does not seem to be founded on any principle, for it is intermittent and opportunist. The Protestants had an experience of this when they were first permitted to build two churches at Moscow, and then vilely maltreated after they were built. After the taking of Polotsk in 1563, the Tsar was present at a general drowning of the Jews in the river Dvina. Just at that moment there was an interdict on all Jewish trading in Muscovy; but Ivan gave a very singular explanation to the Polish envoys when they complained of this edict. 'The Jews,' he said, 'were turning his subjects away from the Christian faith, and, further, they were addicted to guilty attempts to kill with poisoned herbs.'