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The Privy Domain of Ivan Vasil'evich Edward L. Keenan What we might call the character of Charles I is the product of powerful ideologies of rule and of church governance, but also of the emotions of a small boy who spent his childhood alternately neglected and plagued by his fa ther and brother, always in pain, and deformed because of his chronic rickets. The latter is just as well documented as the former. - Diane Purkiss, "What We Leave Out," TLS, 13 October 2006, p. 11. I am happy on this occasion to offer to our honorand a tribute based upon observations stimulated in part by two of his own publications in our field1 """1..,, Colorful prose has been written, since Ivan's own time, to describe his alleged creation, in December 1564, of "a state within a state," commonly designated in English by the untranslated Russian term oprici1l1ina. This ungraceful diction, like so much of our perception of Ivan, originated with the reports of early or contemporary European adventurers: Heinrich von 5taden (b. 1542), who had a good ear and a rough-and-ready Middle-German phonetic spelling, usually w rote "aprisna" or "aprisnay" - a remarkably faithful German (s = P2o€> How and why did Ivan decide to establish a Privy Household in late 1564? We must preface any discussion of this matter with a word or two about the culture in which Ivan found himself17 He was a member-the most emblemic and, in consequence, culture-bound member-of a hereditary caste of 14The phrase was probably intended to mean "a man of/from the outer darkness"; d. "kromeshniaia t'uw." The text is in GeorgE Zakharovich Kuntsevich, ed., Sochineniia kniazia Kurbskago, vol. 1, Sochilleniia origi'IOI'nye (St. Petersburg: Imp. Arkheograficheskaia komissiia, 1914) (~ Russkaia istoricheskaia Biblioteka, vol. 31.), 269. NB: apparently complete proofs of a planned second volume, Sochineniia perevodnye, ready in 1917 but never published, are to be found in the archive of the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, f. 276, no. 30. Oprich' already required a gloss (krame) for Russian readers in the early 18th century. Aleksandra Petrovna Aver'ianova and Boris Aleksandrovich Larin, eds., Rukopisnyi leksikoll pervoi poloviny XVIII veka (Leningrad: Leningradskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1964), 244. 15As we have seen (above, n. 4), Schlichting called the opricimiki "fautores tirannidis suae quasi siccarii" (Schlichting, Graham ed., 217n48). 16Cf. Stalin's reported reproach to Sergei Eizenshtein: "You have shown the oprichnina incorrectly. The oprichnilla was the army of the king. It was different from the feudal army which could remove its banner and leave the battleground at any moment- the regular army, the progressive army was formed. You have shown this oprichnina to be like the Ku-Klux-Klan." Grigorii Borisovich Mar'iamov, "Zapis' besedy s S. M. Eizenshteinom i N. K. Cherkasovym po povudu fil'ma Ivan Craznyi, 26 fevralia 1947," in Mar'iamov, Kremlevskii tsenzor: Stalin s1110trit kino (Moscow: Konfederatsiia soiuzov kinematografistov "Kinotsentr," 1992), 84-86. It bears mentioning, however, as will be seen below, that the later Muscovite chronicles, which will be cited repeatedly below, are strikingly "documentary," or convey other biases. The earliest known definition of the opricimina known to me is to be found in the Piskarevskaia letopis': "uchillisha [siel] opris/minu: razdelellie zemli i grndom." Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei (hereafter, PSRL), 41 vols. to date (St. Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad-Moscow: Arkheograficheskaia komissiia, Nauka, and Arkheograficheskii tsentr, 1841- 1995), 34: 190. 17Readers of my "Muscovite Political Folkways" (The Russian Review 45 [1986]: 11581 ) or participants in the Ivan Groznyi International Quatracentenary Conference organized by Prof. Richard Hellie at the University of Chicago in March 1984 may find that some of what follows is familiar. 78 EDWARD L. KEENAN cavalrymen who in the 14th and 15th centuries constructed a uniquely successful military-political, clan-based, "shame-and-honor" society in the midst of a sea of culturally quite different communal agriculturalists. Much of the success of their system lay in those warriors' ability to suppress open warfare among themselves by means of a number of forms of obligatory behavior: rigid observance of kinship relations, especially birth order; laboriously contrived marriage relations; and ritual murder1 8 Ivan, however, was trapped in the one Muscovite lineage that had come to practice strict primogeniture, rather than the more common shared (collateral ) inheritance-that is, only one (the oldest living) son of a reigning Grand Prince could succeed him on the throne. In consequence, Ivan was in some important human respects the least...

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