II.

Early Reign

In 1547 the head of the Russian Orthodox Church arranged an elaborate coronation for Ivan that added the title tsar (from the Roman imperial title caesar) to the traditional title of grand prince. Ivan was the first Russian prince to take that title, which was intended to convey the exalted image of the ruler as the representative of God. The idea that a Russian monarch derived the right to rule directly from God was developed in the early 1500s by the Russian Orthodox abbot Joseph of Volokolamsk, who advocated the divine right of kings. Shortly after he was crowned, Ivan married Anastasia Romanovna, the first of his seven wives.

From 1547 to 1560 Ivan is believed to have governed with the aid of a talented group of advisers dubbed the Chosen Council. It is unknown who wielded more power, Ivan or the council. During those years a number of reforms were instituted to bring stability to Muscovy after the chaos of Ivan’s minority (the years before he was crowned). The Sudebnik, the country’s law code, was expanded in 1550 and widely used. An infantry corps, known as the streltsy, was created. Armed with long guns, the streltsy bolstered the strength of the Muscovite army. Muscovy forcibly annexed Kazan’, a Tatar (a people of Turkic origin) khanate (a state ruled by a khan) on the Middle Volga in 1552, and Astrakhan’, a Tatar khanate on the Lower Volga, in 1556. These annexations removed all military threat to Muscovy’s eastern flank and cut the Turkic world in two. They also removed a major barrier to Muscovy’s eastward expansion to the Ural Mountains and into Siberia, begun by Cossack raiders under Yermak in 1581.

In the 1550s the corrupt system of provincial administration underwent major reform. Since the 1300s, governors had been sent from Moscow (the seat of the Muscovy government) to govern the provinces. Not accountable to the territories they were assigned, these governors wrung money and food from the populace while often providing little in the way of good government in return. Reform began in the 1490s when local officials were appointed to oversee the rebuilding of Muscovy's fortresses and then given other assignments. In the 1530s local police officials were appointed to try to stamp out crime, which was rampant during the disorder of Ivan’s minority years. Then in 1552, Moscow, needing revenue to invade Kazan’, embarked on a plan to sell what was left of provincial administration to the locals. This was so successful that the sale of provincial civil administration was completed in 1556 to raise funds for the Astrakhan’ campaign. The tsar’s treasury benefited, but the Russian people benefited also, as locally elected officials replaced the exploitative governors sent from Moscow. These officials were still responsible to the central government, to which they had to submit semiannual reports.

Ivan also expanded a program to increase government ownership and control of land, while bolstering his army and weakening the nobles’ power. In this program, begun by his grandfather Ivan III in the 1480s, the government confiscated privately held land in annexed principalities or set aside state property and turned it over to cavalrymen who pledged continual service to the tsar. (In some cases, land was also seized in Muscovy from princes deemed treasonous.) In 1556 Ivan exerted control over the boyars and princes who still held private lands in Muscovy by requiring them and their personal slave soldiers to serve in the cavalry as well. By forcing them into the “service class,” Ivan took away the Russian nobility’s independence. The country’s vast lower class, the peasants, also saw their lot worsened during Ivan’s reign. Much of the land turned over to the military servicemen had been state land worked by free peasants. With the introduction of a landholder, burdened himself by military obligations to the tsar, the peasants met with more restrictions and demands. The system gradually turned many peasants into serfs, bound to the land they tilled. In 1581 Ivan even issued an edict forbidding some peasants on service lands from moving.

The first big mistake of Ivan IV's reign was the Livonian War (1558-1583). After the annexation of the Volga, Muscovy had two expansionist alternatives: either to conquer and annex the Crimean khanate, which was ceaselessly raiding Russia and Poland for slaves; or to reconquer Slavic lands to the west which had been annexed by Livonia, Lithuania, and Poland. Adopting a defensive posture toward Crimea (which Russia proved unable to annex until 1783), the Russians plunged into an unsuccessful war against the Livonians on the western front that ultimately contributed to widespread ruin in Russia during Ivan’s reign.

Defeats in the Livonian War aggravated Ivan’s unstable psychological condition. He had begun to show irrational suspicion of those around him in 1553, when he fell ill and the boyars refused to take an oath of allegiance to his infant son, Dmitry. Recalling the feuds of Ivan’s minority years, they preferred an adult successor. Ivan viewed their refusal as treason. When his wife Anastasia died in 1560, Ivan believed she had been poisoned in a plot by the boyars and members of the Chosen Council, and had the council members exiled. Setbacks in the Livonian War led to the defection of some military commanders fearful of the tsar's wrath.