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However, one school of thought considers the oprichnina itself to have been modelled on a monastic order, with a rule laid down by the Tsar himself. Funded initially by a huge allocation of 100,000 rubles from state funds, it eventually came to absorb the revenues of a large part of his realm. Its assets enjoyed the same protection as did the Church’s property, and were subject to no taxes. All other property continued to be administered by the normal agencies and was taxed to provide income for the state, but Ivan’s ‘separate realm’ was his own, untrammelled by any institution, including his own bureaucracy The foundation of the oprichnina proved to be the first of several attempts by Russia’s rulers to bypass normal channels and find a more direct, efficient instrument of asserting their will. From this perspective the black-cowled oprichniki were merely the first of the state’s special agents.

The oprichniki themselves included many leading members of the old elite, and they were organized as a quasi-monastic community. The Tsar was its abbot; its headquarters was the surburb of Alexandrova, to which Ivan had moved in 1564 shortly before founding the order, and its rule derived in part from that of the Basilian Order and was influenced, apparently, by the Dominicans (whose coat of arms also features a dog). Curiously enough, the unicorn adopted for the oprichnina’s coat of arms was also the symbol of the Jesuits. ³⁰ Ivan was nothing if not eclectic.

The ruthless depredations of the oprichniki are proverbial. In effect they represented government by terror; and all the while the ruinous war for Livonia continued. Ivan invoked the people in support of his purpose, and in 1566 the first representative ‘Assembly of the Land’ (Zemskii Sobor) endorsed the continuance of his policy The only opposition came from the Church. That same year Metropolitan Afanasii resigned after an incumbency of only two years. His successor was sacked after only two days, and his successor, Filipp, was deposed two years later by a synod at the Tsar’s insistence (and was murdered within months by a leading oprichnik). Filipp’s successor, Pimen, was himself to be deposed in 1570. The times were fraught, the struggle desperate.

By the Union of Lublin of 1569, Lithuania formally merged with Catholic Poland. Lithuanian noblemen were now eligible for the same legal and political privileges as their Polish counterparts, provided they were, or became, practising Catholics. From that point on the Orthodox elite of Lithuania began to desert to Catholicism in increasing numbers. The same year King Erik XIV of Sweden was deposed in a coup, altering the political balance in the Baltic region, and the citadel of Izborsk fell. The fact that Izborsk was well defended, and the force that captured it small, suggested treason. Rumour reached the Tsar that Archbishop Pimen of Novgorod was preparing to hand Novgorod and Pskov to the Polish king, and that all sectors of the Novgorod population were involved in the plot. If true, it would not have been surprising. Novgorod had been squeezed very hard for taxes in recent years; Muscovite officials had replaced local men, and so many peasants had fled that there was a labour shortage too.

Once again, then, a tsar’s fears of holding the line in the west centred on Novgorod, and so in 1570 the oprichniki descended on the city, sacked it, and butchered as many as 30,000 of its inhabitants. A huge number of hereditary estates were taken over, the surviving owners being banished to other parts of Russia and the land which was once theirs redistributed to state servitors. ³¹ Two years later, however, in the autumn of 1572, the Tsar abolished the oprichnina. It may have served its original purpose, but as a seven-year experiment in government by tension it had been an expensive disappointment. An experiment bred of desperate impatience, designed to strengthen the state, turned out to have wasted its resources and dissipated its strength. Its assets were returned whence they had come. The revolution, if revolution it was, was over.