{"title":"“S” is for “Seriously?” The Staritskii Plots as “Disorienting Defense”","authors":"A. Kleimola","doi":"10.30965/18763316-04701005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-04701005","url":null,"abstract":"The role of the succession question in court politics during the reign of Ivan iv has been a recurrent theme in Muscovite historiography, with particular focus on the “dynastic crisis” of 1553 as the first in a series of plots by Ivan’s cousin Vladimir Staritskii to gain the throne. But the true instigator, according to our sole source (interpolations in the Tsarstvennaia kniga segment of the Illuminated Chronicle), was Vladimir’s mother Evfrosin’ia. Somehow she was behind all the treasonous plots involving her son, and indirectly a guiding force behind all Ivan’s problems with disloyalty among the Muscovite elite. How she managed this is not at all clear, given the circumscribed role of women in Muscovy and her own absence from the capital. But the internal logic of the narrative clearly had a powerful appeal, and her image as the wicked witch of Muscovite domestic politics became the basis of “alternative facts” that have deflected historians from considering other explanations of Ivan’s dealings with his court.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48983240","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Oprichnina as a Carnival of Violence: Ivan the Terrible and Muscovite Popular Culture","authors":"Maureen Perrie","doi":"10.30965/18763316-04701009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-04701009","url":null,"abstract":"This essay takes issue with Charles Halperin’s assertion, in his book on Ivan the Terrible, that the state terror imposed by the tsar in the period of the oprichnina bore no relation to the concept of carnival employed by Mikhail Bakhtin. The reviewer argues that, on the contrary, Ivan’s behaviour was heavily influenced by aspects of the “comic world” of early Rus’ identified by D.S. Likhachev and A.M. Panchenko as the Muscovite equivalent of the Western European “carnivalesque”. She examines the deposition and ritual humiliation of Metropolitan Filipp of Moscow and Archbishops Pimen and Leonid of Novgorod, and the murder of the boyar I.P. Fedorov-Cheliadnin, and shows that these had much in common with forms of popular culture. Similarly, the oprichniki themselves in some respects resembled mummers, and their monastery at Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda was carnivalesque. The oprichnina terror displayed some of the gruesome rituals of retribution found in popular uprisings of the period: this suggests that the tsar had internalized much of the imagery of popular culture; and his appropriation of its idioms may have helped to gain popular support for his public executions.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78349632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma: Ivan the Terrible","authors":"C. Halperin","doi":"10.30965/18763316-04701011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-04701011","url":null,"abstract":"Nine of the ten articles in this Forum critique and/or expand upon themes, conclusions, or interpretations in Charles J. Halperin’s Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish (2019), albeit in greatly varying proportion. The tenth addresses how to teach from the book. The quality of the articles speaks for itself. The range of the themes addressed speaks to the scope of Ivan’s reign. All the contributions to the Forum constitute valuable contributions to scholarship on Ivan, but to further discussion the remarks below concentrate on areas of disagreement. Much research remains to be done, but it is doubtful that historians will ever fully understand Ivan the Terrible and his reign. Ivan will always remain “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” and consensus among historians will forever remain an elusive dream.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84437028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ransoming Russians from Tatars: Justification and Practice","authors":"D. Ostrowski","doi":"10.30965/18763316-04701008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-04701008","url":null,"abstract":"The early modern Russian government and Russian Orthodox Church identified as one of their main duties the ransoming of Russian Christians from Muslim Tatar captors. The process of ransoming could be an involved one with negotiations being carried on by different agents and by the potential ransomees themselves. Different amounts of ransom were paid on a sliding scale depending upon the ransomee’s social status, gender, and age. One of our main sources for the justification of this practice was the Stoglav (100 Chapters) Church Council in 1551, which discussed the issue of ransom in some detail. The Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649 specifies the conditions and amounts to be paid to redeem captives. Church writers justified the ransoming of Christian captives of the Muslim Tatars by citing Scripture, and they also specified that the government should pay the ransom out of its own treasury.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43585974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ivan the Terrible and Historians Testing the Limits of a Sixteenth-Century Biography","authors":"M. Krom","doi":"10.30965/18763316-04701006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-04701006","url":null,"abstract":"This essay focuses upon the limitations to Ivan iv’s biography set by the extant sources. Due to these limitations, some important episodes of the tsar’s life, including his participation in the administrative reforms carried out during his reign, remain unknown. Moreover, these lacunae cannot be filled in with mere logical conjectures. However, the situation is not totally hopeless. For instance, Ivan’s major concerns during the oprichnina can be revealed with the help of the marginal notes in the Royal Archive’s inventory which fixed the tsar’s uses of the documents. Apart from careful reexamination of the available sources, hopes for further insights into Ivan’s biography and reign are pinned on the applying of the emic approach, history of concepts and historical comparison.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77053385","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Trojan War at the Court of Ivan the Terrible","authors":"Paul Bushkovitch","doi":"10.30965/18763316-04701003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-04701003","url":null,"abstract":"The Illustrated Chronicle Compilation, one of the great projects of Ivan the Terrible’s reign, included a full Russian translation of the History of the Destruction of Troy by the thirteenth century Sicilian judge, Guido delle Colonne. A prose version of a French romance of chivalry, the text fits poorly with our conceptions of sixteenth century Russian culture. Was it history or fiction? Was it secular, or is that term not useful? Partial answers come from references to the text by the boyar V. M. Tuchkov, Ivan himself, and the use of the text by later authors after the Time of Troubles.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86619159","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Where is Russia Headed, and What is to Be Done? Anders Åslund’s New Book on Russian Political Economy","authors":"S. Sokhey","doi":"10.1163/18763316-04604007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18763316-04604007","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In Russia’s Crony Capitalism, Åslund focuses on Putin’s political and economic strategy in the 2000s. The book draws on Åslund’s deep expertise on Russian politics, detailing the role of Putin’s close associates and businesspeople in establishing the economic system we see in the 2000s in Russia. While making an important contribution to our understanding of Russian political economy, the book overlooks the important issue of economic inequality and variation across the regions of Russia. Åslund sometimes offers policy recommendations that, while perhaps admirable in principle, are unlikely to be politically feasible in the near term in Russia. Nonetheless, Åslund’s perspective is one of the best informed on Russian politics today and a vital part of the ongoing discussion about how, when, and why the Putin era of Russian politics will continue to work and how it will come to an end.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/18763316-04604007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46312827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Out of the Deep Woods and Into the Light: The Invention of Snegurochka as a Representation of Russian National Identity","authors":"Ludmila Piters-Hofmann","doi":"10.1163/18763316-04604004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18763316-04604004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The character of Snegurochka [Snow Maiden] has her origin in Russian folktales and is now part of an annual national tradition. The article considers her popularity as a result of different processes of inventing and reinventing national identity and the reflection on cultural heritage initiated through the Russian intelligentsia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since her breakthrough as the main character of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Snegurochka (1882), based on Alexander Ostrovsky’s play in verse of the same name (1873), the amalgamation of different artistic interpretations facilitated her transformation into a representation of national identity, perceived as a product of national community and therefore of the people.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/18763316-04604004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48818989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Artistic Communities and Educational Approaches in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Russia","authors":"Ludmila Piters-Hofmann, Isabel Wünsche","doi":"10.1163/18763316-04604001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18763316-04604001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/18763316-04604001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46004928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}