MUSCOVITE RUSSIA, 1480–1689 - Russia: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present - page 16

continued his father's policies of considering the boyars exclusive servitors of
Moscow. Service to the Muscovite prince was required; service to any other
prince was considered equivalent to treason and a valid reason to take over that
individual's lands.
Although the Mongol threat had subsided after 1480, it did not completely
disappear. In 1521 the khan of the Crimean Tatars engineered the downfall of
the pro-Muscovite khan of Kazan, and then, with the support of Lithuania,
attacked Moscow, devastating large areas of the principality. Disaster threat-
ened as several princes conspired with the Mongols to attempt separation of
their lands from Muscovy. Vasili stifled the conspiracy, but discontent lingered
on in the higher circles of the aristocracy, particularly after the czar divorced
his first wife, a daughter of an old boyar family, in 1525, on the grounds that
she was incapable of bearing him children. Before the discontent was entirely
stilled, Vasili died suddenly in 1533, instructing his second wife, Elena, to begin
a regency working with the boyar Duma, until their son Ivan came of age.
Thus, by 1533, the Muscovite state had emerged as a significant power in
eastern Europe. Its religious claim to being the Third Rome went hand in hand
with its military and political strength. Meanwhile great changes had taken
place within Russia itself. The independent appanage states that had prolifer-
ated in the final years of Kievan Rus and during the early decades of Mongol
rule had been brought under control by Moscow. A new group of nobles, the
service gentry, based upon land grants from the czar, existed side by side with
the traditional boyar class. More ominously for the future development of Mus-
covite and Russian society, the peasantry was increasingly hemmed by restric-
tions imposed by the state, which would almost a century later lead to the
formal institutionalization of serfdom, a feature of Russian society that would
survive until 1861.
The infant son of Vasili, Ivan IV (r. 1533-84), would come to dominate 16th-
century Russian history and, known as Ivan the Terrible, leave a large imprint
on the Russian historical consciousness. A complex and violent individual, Ivan
brought major changes to Russian life. Like rulers elsewhere in Europe at this
time, he solidified the power of his monarchy by striking brutally at high-rank-
ing members of his country's aristocracy. His attacks on the boyars and his
establishment of a personal tool of repression, the oprichnina, made Russia's
ruler more of an autocrat than ever before. The oprichnina 's seven-year reign of
terror (1565-72) left a trail of death and destruction before ending with Ivan's
destruction of the very own vehicles of that terror, an experience that observers
would later notice paralleled Joseph Stalin's own terror campaign of the 1930s.
Ivan displayed equally grand ambitions toward the outside world. His attacks
on the khanates opened the way for Russian expansion eastward and south-
ward, and individuals such as the Stroganovs soon pushed forward into Siberia.
On the other hand, Ivan was far less successful in his attempts to expand Mus-
covite power toward the Baltic, embroiling his country in the long Livonian
War (1558-82).
The reign of Ivan's oldest surviving son, Feodor (Theodore) (r. 1584-98), gave
Muscovy some much-needed internal peace. Physically weak and extremely