Ivan the Terrible in the Russian Historiography of the 19th-21st Centuries. Problems, Methodology, Opinions

1 The notion „Grozny studies“ (groznovyedenie) is not at all common in Russia . Quite the reverse, it is barely recognized and used . Still, we deem it promising (not only because the other possible names – The Terrible studies? Terriblistics? – sound like an academic joke) . Firstly, it enables to operate within an interdisciplinary field . Secondly, it describes a group of precisely stated problems connected with the key figure of the „Russian 16th century“ and is very convenient to use . Thirdly, the Russian historiography has already collected a huge body of literature about Ivan IV created by successive, intertwined and polemizing lines of study . Therefore, the Grozny studies have already become an important and notable field of the Russian historical thought and should be recognized as such . VLADIMIR PANOV

The notion "Grozny studies" (groznovyedenie) is not at all common in Russia . Quite the reverse, it is barely recognized and used . Still, we deem it promising (not only because the other possible names -The Terrible studies? Terriblistics? -sound like an academic joke) . Firstly, it enables to operate within an interdisciplinary field . Secondly, it describes a group of precisely stated problems connected with the key figure of the "Russian 16 th century" and is very convenient to use . Thirdly, the Russian historiography has already collected a huge body of literature about Ivan IV created by successive, intertwined and polemizing lines of study . Therefore, the Grozny studies have already become an important and notable field of the Russian historical thought and should be recognized as such .

VLADIMIR PANOV
Hardly any Russian ruler has been subjected to such contradictory handling or has inspired heated centuries-long arguments as Ivan IV the Terrible (Russian "Ivan Grozny") . During the last two centuries one could witness the rise of an interdisciplinary field of academic knowledge which can be called "the Grozny studies" (in Russian, groznovyedenie) . 1 Its main task could be stated as studying his personality and rule, often with the addition of adjoining problems and usually with the reflection on Ivan's role in Russian history . European historians of early modern period are also interested in that figure in no small part due to a milestone in the 16 th century European politics, the Livonian war that Ivan unleashed . That said, the Russian historiography of the whole field is still relatively unknown, so this paper is going to describe its main problems, concepts and opinions that have been forming since the 19 th century .

The 19 th Century and Ivan's Personality: Tsar's Paranoia as the Destiny of Russia?
Since the assessment of Ivan's personality and rule has always played an important role in the Grozny studies, we can safely say that three lines of studies emerged along these lines -"apologetic", "criticizing" and "objectivist" . The naming is somewhat arbitrary since those lines has never existed in their pure forms (they even rarely perceive their own existence .) In a paradigm of descriptive and politically tilted "history of reigns" that dominated the Russian historiography from the 18 th century, those lines studied mainly four categories of problems .
The first category embraces the personality of Ivan the Terrible which was long considered to be the key to his reign , hence the deep academic interest in his nature, mind and psyche (especially mental pathology), his religious and ecclesiastico-political beliefs, and lastly, in moral assessments of his rule .

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Methodology-wise, that contributed to deep psychological logic and background of the Russian national school of history . At the intersection of history and medical science there even emerged a so-called psychiatry sub-line 2 of the Grozny studies that explained Ivan's heavy use of terror solely by his paranoia . Although it never succeeded in tying up Ivan's policies to the greater historical context of his time and thus led to a dead-end, professional historians through all of the 19 th century customarily described Ivan the Terrible as a "maniac" 3 , "beast" 4 , "half-mad" 5 or "crowned psychopath" . 6 The second category embraced home policies of Ivan IV and his wars against the Tartars . Administrative reforms that led to monarchical consolidation of power hold their special place here, along with the conquests of Kazan and Astrakhan . In the late19 th century an academic interest in the shaping of Russian estates (landowning servicemen/nobility), socioeconomic 2 Here is one example of an author who was both a historian and a brilliant psychiatrist Pavel Kovalevsky, Ioann Grozny i Yego Dushevnoye Sostoyaniye [ Moscow 1898, p .5 . 7 The oprichnina (stemming from the Russian word "oprich" meaning "apart from/except for that") was a land and administrative reform of 1565-1572 that gave a large swath of Russia under direct control of Ivan IV and spawned a raider and punishing force (the oprichniks, oprichniki) comprised of the nobility, notorious by its bloody mass terror . See also Isabel de Madariaga, Ivan the Terrible: First Tsar of Russia, New Haven-London 2005 . history (the enslavement of peasants) and social conflicts swiftly arose .
This category adjoins to the third one, studying the oprichnina 7 and Ivan's terror that often formed a separate field of studies owing to its immense and unprecedented scale . As for the fourth and the last category of historiographic problems, it is formed by foreign policy of the early modern Russian state with the special place of the Livonian war in it . It should be noted that we arranged those categories in an order close to chronological, i .e . according to how early or late they got massive or focused attention of Russian historians, though in this contribution we are giving special consideration to the Livonian war .
Nikolay Karamzin (1766-1826), a founding father of the modern Russian historiography and the alleged founder of the objectivist line in Grozny studies, highlighted the tsar's personality and his home policies in their interrelatedness . It was he who established many of the It comes as no surprise that Karamzin gave high appraisal to Ivan's efforts of power consolidation, his legislative, judicial and administrative reforms and to his victories over the Tartars and colonization of Siberia . 9 Interestingly, he pays scarce attention to Ivan's coronation as a tsar at the same time, despite the fact that it was the first and the most noticeable political act of the monarch . The reason is that formally Ivan wasn't the first tsar of Russia and Karamzin knew it . 10 The political motive behind the coronation was pretty 8 Interestingly, Ivan's father and grandfather were also called "Grozny" (meaning "terrible", "formidable", "fearsome") . The tsar himself got it through folk songs of his time . As for the regnal number, during Karamzin's life he was officially called "Ivan the First" because he was the first ruling Russian tsar, not "Ivan IV" . 9 N . Karamzin, Istoriya, p . 1191 . 10 Ibidem, p . 932-933 . As Karamzin notes, the first coronation of a tsar in the history of Russia happened at the behest of Ivan's grandfather, Ivan III the Great, who crowned his grandson Dimitry back in 1498 . In 1547, when Ivan himself was crowned, the ritual was borrowed from precisely that coronation . Later his tsar's court decided to downplay the Dimitry's precedence for political reasons so that Ivan IV could call himself the first tsar of Russia . It worked well: Dimitry's tsardom was forgotten for years to come not only by his successors, but by some historians as well . Later this fact was highlighted by Solovyov who also gave scarce attention to Grozny's coronation Sergey Solovyov, Istoriya Rossii s Drevnyeyshikh Vremyon [History of Russia from the Earliest Times], Moscow 2001, p . 208 . 11 N . Karamzin, Istoriya, p . 1191 Ibidem, p . 1074 . clear: Ivan wanted to be treated as equal to other monarchs of Europe and Asia . 11 Conversely, Karamzin pays much more attention to the oprichnina, although he describes its campaign of mass terror more vividly than the land reform itself . Constantly citing Russian chronicles and historical stories (istoricheskiye povesti; both belonged to his most heavily used sources), Nikolay Karamzin covers Ivan's extermination of opposition in great detail . He considers exiles and execution to be mainly Ivan's bloody and morally unacceptable whims (and the author never hides his disgust .) In his eyes, the repressions were both historically aimless and fruitless and had nothing to do with the struggle against the real political opposition headed by Prince Vladimir Staritsky . The fact that later Ivan did had the prince killed only looks like another meaningless execution after all the bloodbaths in Moscow, Tver and Novgorod . 12 Lastly, it was also Karamzin who came up with the historiographic concept of "the dualized tsar", of two actors hidden in the same person . A far-seeing reformer and a successful general of 1550-1560s in the blink of an eye becomes a tyrant who alternates sadistic executions with public repentance . 13 Karamzin was opposed by the founder of apologetic line of the Grozny studies, Konstantin Kavelin (1818-1885) . The latter insisted that Ivan had laid the foundation for the whole political development of Russian since he fought both boyars and princes who undermined the young monarchy, and the Poles who tried to spread their influence in the north-eastern regions . 14 Kavelin's approach was pioneering: he called to study Ivan's rule in the context of politics of Muscovite dynasty and to consider him as a herald and defender of tsarist autocracy . 15 As for the terror of oprichnina, Kavelin describes it as fruitless but not meaningless . Rather, it was an alleged attempt to reach the right goal by the wrong means .
Sergey Solovyov (1820-1879), a wellknown follower of the objectivist line and the founder of so-called statist school of history, succeeded in separating the terror S . Solovyov, Istoriya Rossii, p . 214 . Solovyov's influential multivolume edition became a paradigmatic work and an example for the next generations of Russian hjistorians . 17 A . Kizevetter, Ivan Grozny, p . 15 . This Solovyov's framework, an evident offspring of Kavelin's, was later criticized by Kizevetter . The latter insisted that the boyars, in a strict sense, never formed well-established aristocracy whose economic oppression could be so tough that peasants would seek of oprichnina from other deeds of Ivan the Terrible . Solovyov was interested in Ivan's personality much less than in historical backbone of his reign . The main feature of Ivan's rule, the historian argued, was the end of centuries-long process: the system of feuding princely and boyar clans (rodovoye nachalo) gave way to a statist monarchical rule . Hence his emphasis on administrative reforms of Ivan the Terrible and his conquests of Kazan and Astrakhan, feats that Solovyov appreciated the most . The tsar secured a triumph for the whole Old Continent (that now "marched under the Christian colours of the ruler of Muscovy") and thus symbolically headed Europe . 16 That's how the study of Ivan's achievements in the European historical context little by little began .
Ivan the Terrible also attained Solovyov's appraisal as an educated tsar who had allegedly consolidated his power basing on will of the people . A democratic monarch of sort, Ivan got popular support in his struggle against the boyars who tried to stop Russia in her drift towards the autocratic rule . 17 That's why, OPERA HISTORICA • ROČNÍK 19 • 2018 • č. 1 in a radical departure from Karamzin's writings, Solovyov evaluates not only the moral side of Ivan's terror, but its political rationale as well . The tsar, he insists, was opposed by real, not imaginary foes whom Ivan IV nevertheless fought with horrible weapons . Morality-wise, the terror was even more horrifying and dangerous . Ivan's efforts to drown boyars and princes in their own blood, with the killing of common people by thousands along the way, eventually destroyed social institutions and ties, crushing the moral foundation on which the Russian society was resting upon . The result was the Time of Troubles (Smuta of 1598-1613) with its crises and unrest . 18 Not long before Solovyov wrote that, the criticizing line had emerged in the Grozny studies at the behest of Mikhail Pogodin (1800-1875) . It paid a lot of attention to Ivan's personality and psychopathological traits . Pogodin, a Karamzin's student and later a famous historian and archaeographer himself, insisted that every Ivan's reform and achievement, starting from coronation, was designed and put to life by the tsar's inner circle and in no way by Ivan himself . The tsar, as described by Pogodin, looked more like an unruly sadist whose mind and soul succumbed to humiliation, loneliness and scenes of tsar's defence to escape enslavement . Princes of Muscovy themselves enslaved peasants with the same vigor, though in different ways . 18 S . Solovyov, Istoriya Rossii, 2001, p . 666 . 19 It is no coincidence that one of the most detailed and cited Pogodin's works dedicated to Grozny handled personality and temper of the violence, all deeply rooted in his parentless childhood . 19 Later Pogodin's co-thinkers considered Ivan IV as a useless political figure in the Russian historical process at best and an utterly pernicious at worst, since his unfinished reforms, the Livonian war and utterly immoral and despicable repressions led straightly to the Time of Troubles . Problem-wise, the criticizers placed the emphasis on the terror of oprichnina, mass extermination of Novgorod population and massacre of apanage princes . It was noted that although Ivan hadn't been the first ruler of Muscovy who resorted to bloodbaths, he outmatched his own father and grandfather by the scale and uselessness of his terror .
A consistent and brilliant psychological narrative combining criticizing and objectivist approaches became the trademark of Vassily Klyuchevsky  . With the use of the same frequently cited Russian chronicles he managed to complete one of the key tasks of the 19 th century Grozny studies . Klyuchevsky highlighted the psychological background of Ivan's deeds while showing them in the context of political, social and religious history . He also opened new grounds in another field of studies . It was Klyuchevsky who looked at Russia "by the eyes of the others" and summarized an array of important primary OPERA HISTORICA • ROČNÍK 19 • 2018 • č. 1 sources -writings of foreigners about the 16 th century Russia . 20 Klyuchevsky called Ivan IV an overestimated politician who failed to act upon his own plans and thus became a hindrance in the way of Russia's development . Ivan allegedly wasn't' a distinguished statesman at all, rather he became an unnecessary, redundant actor in the Russian state-building of the early modern period . 21 That said, Ivan the Terrible was an eminent and well-educated political writer and thinker of his time, a spiritual father of the Russian tsarist autocracy .
Klyuchevsky was one of the first historians who looked at the oprichnina from the politico-administrative point of view and thus called it a mistake which "aimed to extinguish unrest but paved way to anarchy instead" . 22 It helped to cope with no state task but created social rifts, exhausted economy and thus became a prelude to the Troubled Times . In a way, the oprichnina could have served to Ivan IV only as a security tool amidst a number of treasons, mostly imaginary but sometimes real (for instance, when Prince Andrei Kurbsky fled to Lithuania after one of terror campaigns .) As we can see, Klyuchevsky once again underlines a psychological motive here . His student Alexander Kizevetter (1866-1933) conducted a somewhat deeper and more detailed study of the oprichnina origins . Kizevetter's aim was to prove that Ivan's personal drawbacks influenced only shape and scale of his terror campaigns but not the essence and implication of that old political practice of Muscovy . 23 According to Kizevetter, Ivan was fighting real and powerful foes, and those were not the boyars but the apanage princes . The mighty house of Muscovy fought them one generation after another, at the same time building its own ruthless tool of a state, a military and economical machine deprived of any freedoms for any societal class . 24 That's why Kizevetter tried to disprove what could be called "the Kavelin -Solovyov framework" of the age-old struggle between clan and monarchical elements that Ivan IV was said to successfully end in favour of monarchy . Kizevetter was proving that Moscow princes had been building not the all-Russian state but a regular apanage princedom (ud' elnoye knyazhestvo) from the very start . In times of Ivan the Terrible adjectives "Russian" and "Moscow" were not at all synonyms since the all-Russian national consciousness OPERA HISTORICA • ROČNÍK 19 • 2018 • č. 1 was in its infancy . As for Ivan's supposed position of an ideologue of autocracy, that doesn't make sense either because what he preached looks more like a God-blessed tyranny than like a typical autocracy . 25 To study not terror campaigns but the oprichnina land reform in its depth (and to separate the two) was the task of Sergey Platonov , one of the first Russian historians to tackle it . As an objectivist, he nevertheless called the oprichnina a meaningful measure and even more, a relatively progressive one . Its alleged aim was to "crash-change" the land-tenure system of the old apanage princedoms with a belt of economically effective lands . That should have placed high agricultural, trade and customs revenues under the tsar's control . 26 It is therefore evident that Platonov considered the oprichnina to be a successful weapon against old aristocracy . In his eyes it was mostly a weapon of economy, not of violence, in spite of terror waves that the historian never justified . 27 In due course we'll see how the Soviet historiography would develop that concept of the progressive oprichnina . Meanwhile the critical line in the Grozny studies almost came to an end in the end of 19 century . It culminated (and came to a dead-end at the same time) in writings of Nikolay Kostomarov (1817-1885) . It was not only terror that the historian was mostly keen to study, but also the process of shaping Ivan's personality and mind, although Kostomarov seemed to break no new grounds there . As for the tsar's policies, he described them as a string of failures (though he never studied most of them in great details .) In Kostomarov's view, Ivan the Terrible was a victim of childhood mental traumas that made him a deeply dependent, malicious person 28 and thus laid the groundwork for his whole rule . 29 Ivan was pictured as the incarnated evil . Kostomarov describes mass terror against the people of Novgorod and the old boyar and apanage prince families not even as a politically meaningless act (as Karamzin did), but rather as some sadistic sport, a bloody end in itself . 30  period, including the Livonian war, they showed much more depth and detail .

The Livonian War: the Apogee of the Russian Foreign Policy of 16 th Century
This quarter century-long conflict in the Baltic region, Ivan's main undertaking in foreign policy, was mentioned by every Russian historian, though Kostomarov was the first to explore it thoroughly . He used mostly German and Livonian chronicles and to a lesser extent, Russian chronicles and chronographs as primary sources . Ivan's terror campaign in Livonia . A large swath of study covers diplomacy and the foreign policy of Poland, Denmark, Sweden and the Holy Roman Empire . The account of events ends in 1562, so Kostomarov analyzed only the first period of the war which was successful enough for Ivan IV, although it provoked two more decades of not so victorious hostilities . It should be noted here that Russian historians started to explore the Livonian war within a wider paradigm of the so-called Baltic question only in late 19 th century, abandoning their habitual and relatively narrow regional-political context . 33 That new approach called for more detailed and in-depth study of European politics of the time . It was Konstantin Bestuzhev-Ryumin (1829-1897) who presented such a comprehensive story of war preparations and its diplomatic support using German and Livonian primary sources . According to the historian, Ivan IV started the conflict that proved to be pivotal for his reign because Livonia had been blocking Russo-European trade, while the conquest of Livonia itself was a secondary task for Moscow . 34 Note that similar causes of the war were highlighted earlier by Solovyov (Livonia was valued by Muscovy as both a western trade route and an easy prey 35 ) while Klyuchevsky emphasized what could be called a war for better trade . 36 No matter what exactly caused the conflict, Russia was unable to win owing to her structural weaknesses, forays of the Crimean Tartars and Ivan's lack of diplomatic and military talents, concluded Bestuzhev . As soon as those factors ceased to have impact, the same historical task was successfully completed by Peter the Great . 37 The last phase of the Livonian war (1570-1582) was explored by Witold Novodvorsky   the role of an individual in history in favour of classes and socioeconomic formations, personality, mental traits and religious beliefs of Ivan the Terrible meant nothing to them . That approach brought the whole layer of historical studies to a halt . Equally, Soviet academics lost almost any interest in Ivan's foreign policy, which they often oversimplified . Instead they wrote volumes about social and economic history, including social conflicts .
Relying on precisely that Marxist methodology and choice of themes, Mikhail Pokrovsky , the head of the Soviet historiography and the author of so-called theory of trade capitalism (that allegedly predated industrial capitalism), rewrote the whole course of Russian history . As a result, every character of early modern period was officially proclaimed a tool of a trading or a land-owning class, while the autocratic tsarist rule of 16 th century was downgraded to mere trade capital in Monomakh's cap . As an alleged servant to the trade capital Ivan IV conquered both the Tartars and Livonia to control trade routes . 40  This attitude was cemented by an official academic mouthpiece of the USSR, The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya, entry "Иван Грозный" (Ivan Grozny) by Militsa Nyechkina, Moscow 1932 .) It strikes the eye that the "Grozny's cult" emerged right before the start of the Stalin's terror campaign and meant liquidation of the Pokrovsky's school (including physical extermination .) Ivan the Terrible was now a historically progressive figure who was praised even more in the years of the World War II and the Cold war . That was a stone in the ideological foundation of the renewed Russian patriotism that Stalin's regime looked for and ultimately found . d'état, "the dictatorship of the nobility and merchantry" and a wave of class terror, to which Ivan was only a tool but not a mastermind . 41 Yet in 1936 the concept of trade capitalism was formally dethroned as a distortion of Marxism . The Soviet historiography saw an unexpected rise of positive-only appraisals of personality and policies of Ivan IV, probably for the first time since the 17 th century . The enslavement of peasants that originated from Ivan's rule was proclaimed his pivotal achievement that helped to abolish the moribund class of boyars . (As bad from the class viewpoint as it was, the enslavement was still treated as a historically progressive move on the way to higher socioeconomic formations .) Ivan was officially admitted to have some "psychopathological traits" 42 , but in the light of his class-specific policies that meant nothing . At that point the Soviet academia were using some ideas of a Russian émigré historian Robert Wipper  who had been developing his own apology of Ivan as early as in 1920s, and twenty years later replanted it to the Soviet soil .

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Wipper openly idolized Ivan the Terrible, claiming that accounts of his atrocities and paranoia were no more than exaggeration of foreign propaganda and of "some sentimental enlighteners" like Karamzin . 43 Wipper insisted that Ivan IV was managing the same historical tasks of power consolidation and international expansion as William of Orange or Queen Elisabeth I did . And since the tsar acted in much more severe conditions of chaos in a young state, he deserves much more praise than them . Needless to say that the oprichnina was justified while the Livonian war was described as a catastrophe not for only Russia but mostly for its ruler . Wipper's Ivan thus evolved from a politician responsible for the long and bloody Baltic gamble to its mere victim, a sort of tragic character . 44 A new approach to Ivan Grozny's historiography was secured by a set of generalizing works of the late 1940s . 45 As a rule, their authors preferred to describe Ivan's reign briefly but comprehensively, combining most of its politic, economic, social and even cultural aspects . The oprichnina was now regarded as an inevitable step of the struggle for autocracy following the unsuccessful reforms of 1550s that failed to limit the influence of the boyars . Ivan's cruelty was proclaimed inevitable too since the historians now saw the terror of oprichnina as a common political tool . That said, the repressions were now implicitly perceived as too large-scale because the authors made great lengths to defend them .
It's easy to see that the arid monographs of 1940-1950s developed the same concise and predetermined positive view of Ivan IV . Although cinema has nothing to do with the history studies, we must pay attention here to a famous document of the Soviet epoch, a film called "Ivan the Terrible" (by Sergei Eisenstein, 1945Eisenstein, , shot 1941Eisenstein, -1945 . It embodied the "Ivan's catechism" for every Soviet historian at the behest of no less than Josef Stalin who had ordered the film, corrected its screenplay and personally instructed Eisenstein . A rare academic casus: the official image of "Soviet Grozny" created in the Kremlin migrated to cinemas, reflecting the all-powerful historiographic dogma . 46 Ivan IV was now proclaimed a founder of the Russian centralized state, albeit the Soviet history counted its shaping from the 15 th century . In the Livonian war he opposed the collective West, while back OPERA HISTORICA • ROČNÍK 19 • 2018 • č. 1 at home he fought selfish and treacherous feudal lords who hindered the unification of Russia . Ivan embraced the image of a patriotic tsar who defended his people from the boyars' strife . What's more, he wasn't cruel and resolute enough in his cause, since the Troubled Times were now considered the result of a regrettably unfinished wave of terror . 47

Socioeconomic Trend in the Grozny Studies
Problems of social and economic history received much more of a deep and detailed coverage in the Soviet historiography . They were explored, among the others, by Stepan Vesselovsky (1876-1952), a representative of the prerevolutionary school of the Grozny studies and a criticizer (in the spirit of Klyuchevsky, not of Kostomarov) who considered oprichnina historically meaningless but used economic arguments that were irrefutable for Marxists . Vesselovsky, in his virtual debate with Platonov, argued that the oprichnina land fund comprised mainly of "new" manorial lands, 47 The concept was expressed and cemented in a famous saying of Joseph Stalin himself: "Ivan the Terrible's didn't have a chance to butcher five of the most prominent feudal families and that was a mistake.  , 1956, Nr . 8, p . 121-129 . not of "old" apanage princedoms . Thus it had nothing to do with so-called progressive struggle against the boyars but instead boiled down to indiscriminate terror . 48 The book was allowed for publishing only after Stalin's (and by chance Vesselovsky's) death .
After the Soviet communist party denounced Stalin's personality cult in 1956, the apologetic line in the Grozny studies abruptly came to an end . The criticizers prevailed again with their habitual academic focus on oprichnina . It was now proclaimed a meaningless terror campaign that caused the Times of Trouble but did nothing to promote consolidation of centralized state power, a process that was over before Ivan's rule . 49 Some historians went as far as to insist that the lost alternative to Ivan's reforms was parliamentary rule similar to that of England . 50 But soon the objectivistic line with its emphasis on social and economic problems came to the fore once again . Notably, Alexander Zimin  conducted a deep and thoughtful historic and economic analysis of the oprichnina and zemshchina lands . It was the last of socioeconomic researches of such scale and depth . 51 He was the first historian of Soviet training who used foreign literature within the approach he called pragmatic . To present the most detailed picture of establishing and liquidation of oprichnina the Soviet historiography ever produced, Zimin used the wide foundation of primary sources: chronicles, cadastres, monastery deposit books, lists and books lists and books of noble families, (razryadnye knigi), to name but a few . Like Platonov, he stated that the oprichnina had a clear objective, although he opposed Platonov's concept of "the relatively progressive oprichnina" useful for the building of the Russian state . According to Zimin, that measure was intended to break to backbone of feudal separatism, represented by the Staritsky princedom, the Russian Orthodox Church and Novgorod . Although Ivan accomplished his task, the oprichnina became dangerously prolonged and thus degraded to a fatal terror campaign . 52 Zimin thus separates the repressions from the land reform itself, an allotment of lands under the special administrative and sometimes economic management . As for the rest, he wrote of Ivan the Terrible as of a controversial but outstanding ruler whose 51 In 1950, when Stalin was still alive, Pavel Sadikov published his own work about the oprichnina . He was also exploring economy of the oprichnina lands, but Zimin's large-scale and balanced monograph written on the new stage of historiography overshadowed that book . main task was to overcome the feudal fragmentation of Russia . Other Soviet historians of 1970s also experimented with new approaches and gave more attention to foreign policy of early modern period using foreign primary sources and literature . Some of them put into practice the so-called method of horizontal time slices by Boris Porshnev who suggested studying Russian and foreign historical events in their entirety during limited time periods . 53

Ivan's Foreign Policy in the 20 th Century Historiography: the Baltic Question Prevails
Soviet historiography is known for its scarce attention to Ivan's foreign policy and the Livonian war in particular since home policy (and socioeconomic trends) always came to the fore . Still, when studied in the 20 th century, the conflict was always handled within a wider paradigm of the so-called Baltic question, usually from the viewpoint of the Russian government and its interests . A wider approach can also be noted which mentions the redefinition of Russia's role, place and interests in Europe (abandoned by Muscovy for centuries due to the Tartar yoke) among the reasons for war .
The one and only Soviet monograph dedicated to the Livonian war meets all of the mentioned requirements . It incessantly hailed Ivan the Terrible as a successful reformer, an opponent of the reactionary boyars and the mightiest of European monarchs . 54 The cause of war was the struggle for the Baltic shore convenient for trade . However, before taking up arms it would be prudent to solve the Crimean problem first and take into account the imminent opposition of Poland, Sweden and Denmark . 55 Ivan failed to do any of that, although Russia allegedly lost because of economic demise since the tsar didn't crush the opposition of princes and nobles in due course . 56 In context of Stalinist Grozny's historiography the message was unmistakably simple: the terror campaign was unleashed too late and waged not resolutely enough .
In the late 20 th century foreign policy problems start to come to the fore in the Grozny studies . Some of them were handled in monographs of Boris Florya (1937) that set new standards in the Grozny studies . They bridged the gap in research of the diplomatic aspects of the Livonian war and of the Russo-Polish relations of 16 th -17 th centuries in general . consideration of their "class content" (an important requirement of the Marxist methodology .) According to Florya, Russia and Poland, although competing for Belorussian and Ukrainian lands, were steadily moving towards a feudal quasi-federation and military-political alliance . Among their common aims there were settling "the Baltic issue" and opposing the Ottoman Empire together . However, in the late 16 th century those plans were scrapped due to presumably aggressive stance of the Poles who intended to impose an unequal union on Moscow . 57 Florya explored the Livonian war again in his another influential book, a biography of Ivan the Terrible where he covered the topic within the traditional paradigm of the "trade breakthrough to the Baltic sea" and long Russian struggle against the Livonian Order . Nevertheless, he assesses the hostilities and results of the conflict from a fresh perspective . Florya underlines an inextricable connection between the war, political development of Russia itself and shaping of Ivan's ruthless regime of unchallenged power . He ties the tsar's military failures, stemming from his efforts to simultaneously defeat Livonia and the Crimean Khanate, directly to the establishing of oprichnina . Both the war and the oprichnina had the same two points of no return . The first one was passed when Ivan disbanded the inner circle of councilors and confidants headed by Alexei Adashev and metropolitan Sylvester . The second was the removal of the noblest boyar families from power, a coup d'état of sort . At that point Ivan assumed full personal responsibility for the subsequent home and foreign policy of Moscow . 58 The foreign-policy problems of early modern period gained fresh perspectives of the newly emerged Russian military history studies, historical anthropology and history of mentalities after the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991 . The Livonian war, scarcely explored before, became the subject of a dozen of books . 59 Monographs of Alexander Filyushkin (1970) stand there in the league of their own by their scale and methodology . 60 His approach is strikingly fresh since what Filyushkin described were not hostilities and diplomatic contacts but a history of perception of the Livonian war from the 16 th century and up to our day . His academic style is a fusion of heuristic research, cultural anthropology, military history and history of mentalities . The so-called perception of the other, a look at people of different cultural, religious and ethnic background, becomes a full-fledged topic of exploration along with political events . Using a wide range of Russian, German, Polish primary sources, the historian compares Russian records and opinions with that of Europeans, their understanding of their own roles in history, and also explores different discourses of the war .
Some notable novelties should be underlined here in greater detail . Filyushkin questions both the notion of the Livonian war itself (he writes about a string of several interconnected conflicts 61 ) and the paradigm of fifteen-decade Russian fight for the Baltic . The latter, as Filyushkin argues, looks more like a historical discourse than like a valid political stimulus of the Russian government because Moscow did have its own stripe of Baltic shore both before and after the Livonian war . What was much more important, continues the author, is the first large-scale conflict OPERA HISTORICA • ROČNÍK 19 • 2018 • č. 1 of Russia and the West as two different cultures and civilizations .
A prominent medievalist Anna Khorosh kevitch  diligently explored 16 th century Russia's role and place on the international scene, showing why and how Moscow came back to European power game using political connections and matrimonial relations . 62 It should be noted though that in spite of those stimulating researches and the refreshed interest in the 16 th century Russian foreign policy, post-Soviet historians haven't produced a single book about Russian and European (Habsburg in particular) diplomacy yet . The reason may lie in a traditional dominance of home policy subjects along with the high politicization of foreign relations that many historians tend to avoid .

Post-Soviet Historiography: A Plethora of Problems, Methodologies and Opinions
In the twilight years of Soviet academia new approaches in the Grozny studies were already on the move, while historians' interest shifted mostly from Ivan's foreign policy to home policy . Ruslan Skrynnikov   Later he turned to writing of an objectivist biography of Ivan the Terrible 64 (a genre which was relatively new for the Soviet Grozny studies) . Although Skrynnikov denied Ivan IV's military talent, he repeated a historiographic cliché of praising the tsar for defeating the Tartars (a necessary victory from historic perspective), colonization of the Black Earth Belt (Chernozemie), Siberia and the Urals . He also noted Ivan's efforts to step up the international relations (which was not so typical in the USSR .) Apart from that, Skrynnikov underscores that economic demise caused by the Livonian war belonged to the main results of Ivan's reign . The economic crisis was therefore once again understood as the result of military defeat, not as its cause . The historian argues that establishing a new administrative apparatus wasn't the primary task of the tsar's rule, centered on the war against Ivan's own nobility . Skrynnikov was the only Soviet historian who wrote about the so-called second oprichnina, meaning repressions that followed after the establishing of the "tsar's manor" (tsarsky udyel) in 1575 . He insisted that the manorial system of land tenure had finished its shaping during the reigns of Ivan's grandfather and father, so Ivan the Terrible should not be credited with its establishing . On the contrary, his repressions and the resulting strife among the nobility catapulted Russia OPERA HISTORICA • ROČNÍK 19 • 2018 • č. 1 directly to the Times of Trouble . Overall, the viewpoint that the oprichnina was a tool of terror that led to the catastrophe of Smuta instead of Ivan's personal dictatorship became common knowledge in the Russian historiography of the early 1990s . 65 The more so, as Skrynnikov noted, since the tsar's unchallenged rule put the brakes on the estates-shaping along the lines of the Central Europe, depriving Russia of any "auxiliary" mechanisms of governance . 66 The latter conclusion is largely accepted by Boris Florya who also shines some light on the shaping of the Russian estates in his aforementioned Ivan the Terrible's biography . Among the results of Ivan's reign he mentions a fundamentally new kind of relationships between the nobility and the state . 67  to a tsar, a process that was momentous for Russia for centuries ahead . 68 The early 1990s saw an unprecedented number of problems and research methods in the Grozny studies together with the pluralistic approach to Ivan's reign and personality, this time in the psychological and sociocultural context of early modern period . 69 For example, terror of oprichnina is now being studied as a product of criminal law and non-codified punishment practices as well . 70 As for the regent period of Ivan's reign (1530-1547), historians turned it into an independent subject of studies . It is now explored not only as the tsar's traumatic formative years, but also as a string of unexamined political crises of the 1530s' as well . 71 Research of administrative matters and estates-shaping are growing in numbers . A separate shelf of literature is being devoted to state-serving nobility, including high military commanders (voyevodas .) 72 Interest arises in the problems that were irrelevant or outright prohibited

Religion and Beliefs in the New Russia: a Foundation of the New Apologetics
So-called Orthodox renaissance and methodological diversity of 1990s gave life to unprecedented interest in faith and religious beliefs of the 16 th century Russian society and in Ivan the Terrible's religious life in particular . His Orthodox background, theological writings and disputes are being actively examined together with Russian spirituality of the time in general . Historians are keen to use the methods of historical anthropology, philology and religion studies . For one, a religious studies scholar Alexander Dvorkin (1955) went back to Ivan's personality to examine it through the lens of the tsar's faith and theological OPERA HISTORICA • ROČNÍK 19 • 2018 • č. 1 now a favourable name) is seen as a defender of Russia and its Orthodox faith who introduced the oprichnina as a radical but lawful measure against The Council of the Chosen (Izbrannaya Rada, an informal circle of Ivan's friends and councilors of unclear membership) . Repressions were presumably aimed at reversing of administrative reforms that limited Ivan's autocracy and thus allegedly pushed Russia at the brink of political catastrophe . 84 Curiously, some tendencies of the Stalinist "Grozny's cult" are clearly seen again in the beginning of the 21 st century . Among them there is biased conceptual framework and language, along with the paradigm of never-ending conflict between Russia and the collective West (not merely a fight for strategic or geopolitical reasons but a clash of "right" and "wrong" faiths and ideologies .) For example, Ivan's brutalities are claimed to be exaggerated by Western propaganda in its war of ideological subversions against the Orthodox Christian state of Russia . 85

Conclusion
The 19 th century Grozny studies were dominated by narrative, descriptive manner and well-established psychological logic that served different purposes, from Karamzin's educational writings full of moral lessons to Klyuchevsky's 84 I . Froyanov, Groznaya oprichnina, p . 559 . 85 Ibidem, p . 531 . Note the word "heresy" as the synonym for the Reformation, the constant use of "Saint Rus" instead of just "Russia" and the handling of the collective West as an eternal enemy of Russia: "It is from the West engulfed by heresies of the Reformation that those heretics, corrupting Russian people with their Anti-Christian teachings, came to us" . 86 It should be noted that archives lack many records even of key acts and deeds of Ivan IV . For example, decrees and other manuscripts dedicated to the establishing of the oprichnina are almost non-existent in numbers . deep and multifaceted researches . Those methods quickly started to influence the style of writing, helping historians to compensate for sometimes scarce base of primary sources and the weaknesses of other academic methods . 86 Moreover, it was widely understood that Ivan's rule couldn't be explained properly without the means of psychology and sometimes even psychiatry . As many 19 th century historians implicitly had it, Ivan the Terrible's state was the embodiment of his personality . In some ways, he was literally the state .
Psychology influence the historians' language itself, so the often use of epithets like "beast" or "maniac" wasn't accidental at all . The roots of oprichnina terror and the reforms (that Ivan was never able to properly finish) were searched for in his childhood traumas and harmful influence of his mentors and dignitaries . Still, the authors of the late 19 th century were already studying Ivan's repressions and brutalities in the context of wider task of home politics that started to thematically dominate the research . The more the principles of historicism were strengthening, the more historians were keen to study the building of the 16 th century state institutions (most of all the birth of absolutism) by unfortunate means of oprichnina . Note the fresh academic interest in reforms of state apparatus