Books: Sorrow & Terror

IVAN THE TERRIBLE (421 pp.]—Hans von Eckardt—Knopf ($5).

“Czar Ivan now betook himself … to an open space in the suburbs [of Great Novgorod] and ordered his men to bring before him all the boyars, commercial magnates, and elders whom they had arrested, together with their wives and.’children; and here, before his eyes [they] were burnt with red-hot instruments of torture, and then . . . bound to horses and sleighs, dragged to the river . . . and thrown into the water. Women and children . . . were tied together and likewise thrown [in] . . . The streltsy (sharpshooters) followed the victims, borne by the current along the shore and down the middle of the stream, and any who came to the surface were forcibly drowned . . . ‘And so . . . for five weeks, or even more, [says an old chronicle] a thousand persons a day were cast into the water; but we were thankful for every day on which no more than five or six hundred persons were [drowned].”,’

“National Unity.” The fate of Great Novgorod, whose crime was the independence and rebelliousness of its inhabitants, belongs in the long and bloody list of massacres perpetrated by tyrants in the name of “national unity.” When Ivan the Terrible came to the throne in 1547, Russia was still a collection of semi-independent states; when he died 37 years later, in the midst of a quiet game of chess, the central authority of the Czar in Moscow was recognized even by those whose powers of recognition had been burnt from their eye-sockets with red-hot irons.

“This epoch is of quite exceptional interest to the historians of the Soviet Union,” notes Biographer Eckardt, who is a professor of political science at the University of Heidelberg. Like the Soviet historians, Eckardt goes over Ivan’s matted reign with a fine-tooth comb; unlike them, he refrains from minimizing the diabolical cruelties of a despot who made even such a hard-faced operator as Cesare Borgia look like a cherubic innocent. Nonetheless, Eckardt does his best to follow the rule he paraphrases from Philosopher Benedetto Croce: “Not to insist upon a description of horrors in history [but] to find in sorrow and terror the starting-point of a new development.”

Objective Best. The result is a painstaking, broad-viewed and valuable study of a vital period in Russian development, throughout which Historian Eckardt does his objective best to separate Ivan into two Ivans: 1) the Personal Sadist, 2) the Unifier, born out of his time, caught in the inexorable process of history. Though the method doubtless deserves respect, its limitations are never so clear as in a book on Ivan.

Perhaps the best new development that could occur in history-writing would be one in which it could again be taken for granted that tyrants are under no inexorable, historical obligation to massacre their subjects.