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Religious conservatism, which harked back to the Great Schism of the Christian Church in the twelfth century, implied cultural isolation. It was not compatible with the social and technological advances of the Renaissance age. The issue of beards, which symbolized the tension between the modernizers and traditionalists, was not to be resolved for almost two centuries, and even then the tension did not entirely disappear. The problem touched on identity, patriotism and, ultimately, the nature of Russian nationalism. Russians knew who they were: Christians. Every peasant defined himself as such. And their idea was quite compatible with the centralized state that Ivan III had created. But if the cosy womb of Orthodoxy were to be breached, its customs and values challenged, what would a Russian be? And if it were not and Russians were trapped in the past and the isolationism that that implied, how could Russia become an empire?

5Ivan IV and the First Imperial Expansion

ON 16 JANUARY 1547, at a glittering ceremony in the Kremlin’s Cathedral of the Assumption, the sixteen-year-old son of Vasilii III was solemnly invested with a bejewelled cross and collar, with the cap of Vladimir Monomakh, which had been brought from Constantinople, and with a cloak of imperial purple. In this way young Ivan IV became the first tsar, as well as autocrat, of Russia. The long-sought imperial title had finally been approved by the supreme head of the Orthodox Christian Church, the Patriarch of Constantinople, who for Russians was the only legitimate ecclesiastical authority. It may seem ironic that Ivan, who was to parade his piety as a most Christian monarch, should have received his imperial dignity from a subject of the Muslim Ottoman sultan. But the title was to be justified by temporal events.

As the investiture ceremony made clear, more than titles were involved -more even than demonstrations of legitimacy - for the ceremony linked Ivan’s Russia with the Roman Empire. The country’s new imperial status was proclaimed in the blessing: ‘Grant [Ivan] long life … Seat him on the throne of righteousness … [and] bring all the barbarian peoples under his power.’ ¹

The reign of Ivan IV is one of the great climacterics of history. It marks the emergence of an imperial power in fact as well as aspiration, and Ivan justified Russia’s use of the double-headed eagle by ordering expansionist drives southwards into the Caucasus, and westward to the Baltic, launching a third, into Siberia, for good measure. The new imperial status was also supported by a fresh, and violent, effort to make government autocratic in practice as well as in theory, by the emergence of a colonial administrative system, and by the systemization of Russia’s foreign relations.

The hectic period saw a series of other innovations and changes. The first printing press was set up in Moscow; the laws were to some extent reformed and an attempt was made to codify them; new technology was applied to both the army and its armament; and the revolution was capped by institutional developments of lasting importance: the establishment of a system of granting landed estates on condition of service to the state, and of modern, absolutist, practices of government. It is curious, however, that Ivan — who is associated with Russia’s emergence as a great European power - should also be held responsible for its subsequent collapse, and doubly paradoxical that historians should claim that his own actions both undermined the empire he had created and helped to ensure its longer-term recovery However, the crucial changes of his tumultuous reign can hardly be understood without reference to the man himself in all his eccentric brilliance.

Ivan’s image is clouded by controversy He is both an object of hate and a folk hero. Since his own time he has been regarded as an ogre in the West, but his epithet ‘the Terrible’ is a misleading translation of the Russian Groznyi, ‘the Dread’— bestowed by his propagandists for his punishing of wrongdoers — and he is still revered by many of his own people as a truly Christian ruler. One of his successors was to find it necessary to atone posthumously for Ivan’s sins; yet his image was to be resurrected as a morale-booster when Russia was beleaguered during the Second World War.