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10. Terribly Pragmatic: Rewriting the History of Ivan IV’s Reign,
- University of Wisconsin Press
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Terribly Pragmatic Rewriting the History of Ivan IV’s Reign, – D B K M. F. P The idiosyncratic valorization of Ivan the Terrible in Stalinist public life has long intrigued scholars concerned with Soviet historical mythology. Their work has illustrated how the first Russian tsar and his Muscovite domain were represented as glorious antecedents to Stalin and Soviet society.1 Indeed, this historical parallel is emphasized so frequently that ascribing to Stalin some sort of perverse fascination with the sixteenth-century tsar has become something of a sine qua non for commentary on Soviet high politics.2 Perhaps because of the audacity of Ivan IV’s rehabilitation, its contextualization within the ideological currents of the time has often been neglected .3 Disputing the facile reduction of Ivan the Terrible’s rehabilitation to a mere symptom of Stalin’s cult of personality,4 this chapter examines the campaign from the perspective of the period’s russocentric etatist ideological line. In so doing, our investigation into the agenda behind the campaign uncovers the pragmatic rationale behind Stalin’s rehabilitation of the Terrible Tsar. If the notoriety surrounding Ivan IV made him a problematic hero at best for Russian historians before , he—like most other tsarist-era political figures—was thoroughly marginalized by early Soviet materialist historians who were committed to a conception of the historical process in which individual actors had limited significance.5 As this understanding of history gave way to a broad rehabilitation of the role of the state, individual, and the Russian people as a whole during the early to mid-s, official views on prominent pre-revolutionary personalities began to change markedly. In line with the party hierarchy’s emerging preoccupation with statebuilding and legitimacy, a number of figures previously denigrated as representatives of the old regime were even popularized as models of decisive leadership. Along with Peter the Great and Aleksandr Nevskii, Ivan IV was discussed as a possible candidate for rehabilitation in light of his status as one of the most recognizable figures within the USSR’s potential Muscovite political lineage. M. Gor’kii speculated in at the First Conference of the Soviet Writers’ Union that folkloric investigations of Ivan the Terrible might temper tsarist historiography’s disdainful treatment of the leader.6 In the following year, A. N. Tolstoi considered a reappraisal of the sixteenthcentury tsar as an outgrowth of his work on Peter.7 In , historians participating in the editing of new elementary school history texts voiced a variety of views on Ivan, some of which assessed his policies and historical legacy quite positively.8 Yet official statements during the early stages of the Stalinist rehabilitation of the tsarist past indicate that the line concerning Ivan’s historical legacy remained primarily negative.9 Although the cancellation of Bulgakov’s sixteenth-century satire Ivan Vasil’evich may have hinted at a change of policy in regard to Ivan, the initiative necessary for a profound revision of the official interpretation appears to have arisen somewhat later under rather peculiar circumstances. While leafing through a manuscript of A. V. Shestakov’s Short Course on the History of the USSR in early , Stalin struck out a reproduction of I. E. Repin’s classic painting Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, apparently believing it to be prejudicial.10 Following Stalin’s cue, another passage was quickly cut from the draft textbook: As a child, Ivan grew up among despotic boyars, who insulted him and fostered all his character flaws. As a youth, Ivan would ride through Moscow on horseback, scaring and running down peaceful residents for amusement; he sentenced one of his closest boyars, Andrei Shuiskii, to be torn apart by dogs. In , at the age of seventeen, Ivan proclaimed himself “tsar-autocrat.” He was the first of all Muscovite rulers to do so. From this time on he began to rule the state by himself, not consulting with the boyars.11 Shortly thereafter, A. A. Zhdanov picked up his red pencil and rewrote other portions of the same textbook in an explicit endorsement of Ivan IV. Zhdanov made the following cuts in an intermediate copy of the textbook’s page proofs concerning the siege of Kazan’: Ivan the Terrible But [then] Kazan’s defenders became exhausted. Ivan IV’s troops—some , of them—overwhelmed the Tatars. Kazan’ was sacked and burned ; on his orders, they killed all the residents of Kazan’.12 Commentary on the oprichnina was also revised: For the battle...
