Ivan Groznyi’s Sinodik opal’nykh Reconsidered

Abstract

Boris Morozov has contributed very valuable archival studies and manuscript findings to research about the period of Ivan the Terrible. Therefore, I am contributing to his Festschrift a study about one of the most significant texts about Ivan IV’s Oprichnina, the Sinodik opal’nykh. This work, unique even among other Old Russian sinodiki, has been analyzed with the help of digital tools available on the internet (www.voyant-tools.org). As it turns out, the available manuscripts of the sinodik are so diverse that they cannot have originated from a single prototype; this new insight challenges most 20th-century scholarly reconstructions. The compilation and existence of the manuscripts found since the 17th century need to be re-evaluated. The existing so-called reconstructions corroborate nothing of the known history of the Oprichnina.