Oprichnina without Justifications or Explanations: Why was there no Pro-oprichnina Narrative?

This article explores the reasons why the oprichnina was scarcely reflected in national narrative sources from the time of Ivan the Terrible. The oprichnina turned out to be a “figure of silence”. This fact requires explanation. In 1541–1542, the concept of confrontation between the monarch and the boyars was created in the Voskresenskaya Chronicle. The boyars were declared traitors, guilty of embezzlement, abuse of power, and treason in favour of foreign powers. Since Ivan IV, at the age of 11, could hardly have come up with such a concept of Russian history and included it in the chronicle, its author was another person. The paper hypothesises that it was Metropolitan Macarius, who was transferred to Moscow from Novgorod in 1542, or someone from his inner circle. It first appeared in the Novgorod Chronicle of 1539. This concept justified repressions against the aristocracy. It was developed in the Chronicle of the Beginning of the Tsardom (1552) and the Book of Degrees compiled in 1556–1563. It was the idea of the government’s struggle against “boyar treason” that formed the basis of the ideological legitimation for the oprichnina in 1565. However, the paradox is that the oprichnina narrative that would legitimise and justify the oprichnina policy was never created. Its elements are present in the First Letter of Ivan the Terrible to Prince Andrei Kurbsky (1564) and in the Tsar Book (the last volume of the Litsevoi Letopisnyi Svod, circa 1576 – early 1580s). There, the theme of “boyar treason” was developed, right up to the accusation of usurpation of power and the criminal removal of Ivan IV from it. However, these versions related to the description of Russian history from 1533–1554 and were not extended to the history of the oprichnina in 1565–1572. The chronicles and other narrative sources are simply silent about it until the death of Ivan the Terrible in 1584. The reasons for this are not clear. The author of the article offers two possible explanations, i. e. technical and conceptual. The former implies that after the death of Macarius in 1563, there were no competent performers who could create a pro-oprichnina narrative that the tsar would like, while the latter implies that the oprichnina had a hidden, possibly eschatological meaning, which the scribes of the sixteenth century could not talk about in the official chronicle.