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The purge was not the whim of a half-crazed paranoiac, which is the line of one popular genre of literature about Ivan. His plan was to eliminate opposition to his exercise of autocracy, which he deemed essential if Russia were to fulfil its imperial potential. ²⁶ He justified this in a letter to the defector Kurbskii, who had upbraided him for abusing his authority. In it he accused Kurbskii of calumny and of advocating ‘the rule of servants over the heads of their masters [whereas he, Ivan, was trying] zealously to lead people to the truth … so that they may know the one true God … and … cease from internecine strife … which causes kingdoms to crumble … If a tsar’s subjects do not obey him they will forever be at war with one another.’ ²⁷This was written in the same spirit as Thomas Hobbes was to write Leviathan a century later. What Ivan was advocating was closely related to what came to be known in western Europe as absolutism.

Ivan’s method, however, was not simply to appropriate the estates of the wealthy hereditary aristocracy and deprive the aristocrats of influence, as some popular histories have suggested. The aristocracy was to remain wealthy and powerful. Rather, he wanted to disperse its landholdings, to render the aristocrats incapable of mobilizing a power base against their ruler, which they could have done if their estates had remained concentrated. It was, in fact, a safeguard for the state and for good order. In neighbouring Poland-Lithuania, by contrast, the magnates were in fact able to mobilize against the king, and this ability was soon to be transformed into a legal right to rebel — a tradition which was to render the country ungovernable.

The reign of terror had the effect of transforming the old hereditary aristocracy — the princes descended through so many genealogical lines from Riuruk and the so-called ‘non-titled’ aristocrats, scions of those families who had distinguished themselves through service to ruling grand princes through the generations - into a service aristocracy. From now on Russian noblemen, high as well as low, needed the tsar’s approval, or at least his toleration, and it became the convention for younger aristocrats to serve at court and seek the ruling tsar’s patronage. ²⁸ In order to assuage the feelings of the old nobility and to encourage the new service class, a new practice called mestnichestvo was tolerated by the state. According to this, appointments to commands were allotted partly on the basis of the family’s past association with those commands, so that they tended henceforth to be perpetuated in particular families. But the noble class, which in any case had no autonomous corporate tradition, became the servants of the tsar. The revolution was not accomplished overnight. But Ivan succeeded in establishing the principle, and it is curious that the devices used by Louis XIV to counter localism at his grand court at Versailles had been initiated over a century earlier at the other end of Europe

Ivan ensured that Russia would be able to administer an empire. However, he used draconian means. The image of his black-cowled oprich-niki sweeping through a locality in an orgy of killing — and there were such occasions — draws attention to the purpose of that singular institution the oprichnina. On the one hand it was an instrument of permanent purge, a means of maintaining tension and fear of the Tsar; on the other hand it was a means of overcoming the convention which regarded all Church endowments as sacrosanct and hence untouchable by the secular power. Given the practice of pious (and increasingly prosperous) Russians making over large gifts to monasteries for the salvation of their souls, huge resources were going to the Church which might otherwise have produced revenue for the Tsar. The government’s concern about this had been evident as early as 1551, when a general review of all charters granting property to monasteries had been carried out. ²⁹ However, no way had been found to obviate the problem by legal means. In England the problem had been solved by the dissolution of the monasteries, but in Holy Mother Russia such a Protestant solution was unthinkable.