Oprichnina

What does the word mean?

Russian oprich (опричь) is an archaic word for "apart from," "separately." An oprichnina was originally an old legal term for the widow's portion set apart from a deceased prince's estate. Ivan IV revived the word in 1565 as the name for the portion of the realm he set apart for himself. One word therefore covers three overlapping things: the territory the tsar carved out as his personal domain, the regime built on that territory, and the period during which it ran.

A single member of the guard corps that served the domain is an oprichnik; the Russian plural is oprichniki. The rest of the land was called the zemshchina and remained under the traditional boyar duma, the council of the hereditary high nobility.

Why was it created?

In the sixteenth-century Muscovite state the boyar and princely clans held hereditary estates and fixed precedence in office, and the tsar had to share power with them. As the Livonian War (begun in 1558) for access to the Baltic dragged on through defeats and deepening suspicion, Prince Andrei Kurbsky, once a close adviser, defected to Lithuania in April 1564 and took command of enemy troops.

That December Ivan left Moscow without warning for Aleksandrova Sloboda and sent back two letters: one announcing his abdication because of the treason of the nobles and officials, the other assuring the common people that his anger was not with them. Moscow, unable to imagine the state without a tsar, begged him to return, and in February 1565 he did, on two conditions: the right to punish traitors at his own discretion, and the right to establish a domain of his own within the realm. The oprichnina thus began with the outward form of a legal settlement.

What did it do?

The northern trade routes, wealthy towns and part of Moscow itself were taken into the domain, and the hereditary lords of those lands were dispossessed and resettled on the frontiers. The corps began with a thousand men and grew to about six thousand. The oprichniki dressed in black and hung a dog's head and a broom from their saddles, tokens that they would bite the tsar's traitors like dogs and sweep them out of the land.

The purges widened by stages. Metropolitan Philip of Moscow, who condemned the oprichnina publicly, was deposed in 1568 and killed in 1569 in the Otroch monastery in Tver by the oprichnik Malyuta Skuratov. The same year Ivan's cousin Vladimir of Staritsa, spoken of as an alternative candidate for the throne, was forced to take poison. Early in 1570 the whole city of Novgorod, accused of plotting treason, became the object of a punitive expedition whose death toll estimates range from several thousand upward. That summer dozens of high officials, among them Ivan Viskovaty, head of the tsar's chancery for foreign affairs, were publicly executed in Moscow. The oprichnina was not safe from itself: most of its early leadership perished in the purges that followed.

How did it end?

In May 1571 the Crimean khan Devlet Giray drove through to Moscow and burned the city. The oprichnina army charged with its defense failed, and the force that crushed the Crimeans at Molodi the next year was a combined army of zemshchina and oprichnina troops under the zemshchina commander Prince Vorotynsky. In the autumn of 1572 Ivan abolished the oprichnina, returned part of the confiscated estates, and, according to contemporary reports, forbade the very word to be spoken. Some scholars hold that he nevertheless kept a separate personal apparatus under the name of the "court" (dvor) until his death.

How have later ages judged it?

In the early nineteenth century Karamzin painted the oprichnina as senseless slaughter born of a tyrant's madness. Soloviev's state school and, in the early twentieth century, the historian S. F. Platonov read it instead as a purposeful policy for breaking the landed power of the hereditary aristocracy and building the centralized state.

Official Soviet historiography and art of the 1940s pushed this second reading to its limit. Ivan the Terrible was recast as a forerunner of national unification, and the oprichnina as a progressive regular army serving the tsar, unlike a feudal host that could furl its banners and leave the war at any moment. The most direct document of this line is the Kremlin conversation on Ivan the Terrible of 26 February 1947, in which Stalin summoned Sergei Eisenstein and Nikolai Cherkasov, told them that "the oprichnina was a royal army," and objected that Part Two of the film had shown the oprichniki like the Ku Klux Klan; the film stayed banned until 1958. The Russian habit of naming an era of state violence after its executor continued in later words such as yezhovshchina.

Postwar scholarship went back to the sources. Skrynnikov's tally of the victims and Kobrin's studies undermined the very premise that the oprichnina was a coherent campaign against the boyar class: most of those executed were not nobles, the structure of landholding was largely restored after the abolition, and what remained was less an institution than a trail of destruction. In Russian today, oprichnik is a common noun for a regime's violent henchman, with no tie to any one century.