“Scratch a Russian, Find a Turk”

Abstract

In this first-rate monograph, Cornelia Soldat confirms earlier impressionistic assertions that the portrayal of Ivan iv as a tyrant and the Muscovites as barbarians in German-language pamphlets (Flugschriften) written as propaganda during the Livonian War (1558–1582), are simply projections onto the Muscovite discourse of the motifs of the anti-Ottoman discourse that originated in the fifteenth century after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Therefore the pamphlets have no value whatsoever for the study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Muscovite history. These conclusions have wider significance for the interpretation of the historical reliability of two other source genres beyond the scope of Soldat’s monograph, Livonian chronicles and defector German travel accounts written by Germans who served Ivan iv but then fled Muscovy to write scurrilous denunciations of him as a tyrant.