Tsar recently and anciently

Rarely does a film lead to such an obvious split in society as Pavel Lungin’s film “The Tsar” with the original Mamonov in the role of Ivan the Terrible and the incomparable Yankovsky in the role of Metropolitan Philip. On the one hand - the laurels of film festivals, on the other - a video message from the writer Vyacheslav Manyagin to the President and his “Falsification Commission” with a request to ban the film’s distribution as slanderous and damaging to Russia.

Well, it’s clear: on the one hand, there are professional patriots like the same Manyagin or professor and deposed dean of the history department of St. Petersburg University I.Ya. Froyanov, and on the other - notorious liberals like TV presenter Svanidze. But there is the same split in the Orthodox Church: St. Petersburg priest Alexy Uspensky began a campaign in the press against this film, and another church figure, Hieromonk Simeon (Tomachinsky), posted a bright article on the Internet in defense of the film, with the subtitle “the view of a cleric.” Many zealots of Orthodoxy perceived the film as an apology for the idea of ​​the supremacy of the church over state power, and Orthodox journalist Vladimir Semenko in his article “The Big Lie of Pavel Lungin” opens their eyes: Lungin kills the Orthodox idea of ​​sin and repentance, insisting throughout the film that there is no sin that man is sinless, and the idea of ​​sinfulness only justifies tyranny and despotism.

The dispute between ultrapatriots and liberals is based on a fundamentally different assessment of the personality of Ivan the Terrible: a great sovereign who doubled the territory of the country and carried out progressive reforms, or a tyrant and torturer, after whom the population halved and the Troubles began. And accordingly - on a fundamental assessment of Russian history: bright and inspiring in all its episodes or bloody and terrible at least in some. Lungin's whistleblowers pull out many episodes that in reality looked wrong: Pskov was taken in the wrong years, Ivan did not personally deal with Metropolitan Philip, etc. The artists do not suit them: Mamonov is much older than Ivan was during the years of the introduction of the oprichnina, Yankovsky does not have enough holiness in his face.

I could also point out inaccuracies and artistic mistakes in the film: Tsarina Maria Temryukovna acts like a modern scandalous show business diva, the buffoon (Okhlobystin) perhaps overdoes it with his liberties. But overall, the film makes a strong impression, and there is no point in complaining about inaccuracies to the “Falsification Commission”: this is a work of art, not a dissertation or a history textbook. Demanding from him the accuracy of all the details is like studying the biography of Richelieu from The Three Musketeers. But the overall picture of the historical past must still be correct and the attitude towards it must be thoughtful.

In search of this reality and justice, defenders of Ivan the Terrible in every possible way downplay the number of victims (defining them according to Ivan’s synod of those killed) and refer to much larger numbers of deaths under Ivan’s Western contemporaries - on St. Bartholomew’s Night in France, etc. Well, firstly, references to Western atrocities do not justify those at home in the east, and secondly, the essence and horror of tyranny is not in the number of people killed (although this also mattered), but in the atmosphere of tyranny and terror that accidentally falls on anyone, in eternal suspicions, in unjust accusations that arose at the whim of the ruler, in his enjoyment of torture and executions. It’s easy to find an excuse when it comes to the torment of another, but if you yourself would end up on the rack or at the stake.

All the heated controversy surrounding the film is due to the fact that there is another, much more modern hero in it. The film, like “The Master and Margarita,” takes place in two eras. Only in Bulgakov’s novel and its film adaptation the eras change alternately (Soviet Moscow and ancient Jerusalem), but here everything is merged together and the modern hero is invisibly present in all scenes. This hero is Joseph Stalin. It is his participation that gives such topicality to the film about Ivan the Terrible, because all the accusations against Ivan of madness and atrocities are also addressed to him, Stalin, the paranoid and maniac. And all the arguments in favor of Ivan as a great sovereign are aimed at his, Stalin’s, defense. All the praises of Ivan sound in praise of this recent idol, who still owns the souls of a significant part of the population. The deceased pharaoh, still revered by his slaves.

I have long been interested in why such a person ended up at the head of our state. Moreover, this was not the first time. Ivan the Terrible is the undoubted prototype of Stalin. Both were autocratic and cruel, both carried out bloody terror, both tyrannized their loved ones, both lost their wives, both were involved in the death of their sons, both created an all-powerful guard - the guardsmen and the NKVD-KGB, both executed their closest associates more than once, both expanded the borders of their states, after both states were plunged into Troubles and collapse. Stalin was a seminarian in his youth, then an atheist, destroyed churches, shot priests, then flirted with religion for political purposes. More firmly than Stalin, Ivan the Terrible was committed to religion, he prayed fervently, and feared the Last Judgment, although this did not prevent him from slaughtering the top of the church from time to time.

It was no coincidence that Stalin felt sympathy for him. During my student years at the university, speaking to us in the assembly hall, the actor Cherkasov told how Stalin instructed him before playing the role of Ivan the Terrible. “Ivan had only one flaw: he was not cruel enough,” the leader instructed with a slight Georgian accent. “So, for example, it’s true that he slaughtered entire families of boyars, enemies of the state, but then he prayed and repented. Why, one might ask, repent?” I read with pleasure the wonderful play by A.K. Tolstoy’s “The Death of John” and recognized the atmosphere of his time. Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy, living in the second half of the 19th century, seemed to be copying from our century.

During my student years, I was more than once distracted from archeology by studying the history of Russia, the era of Ivan the Terrible. Reading the account of events, I saw that the analogies were not accidental: Stalin in our time did the same thing (in the social sense) that Ivan the Terrible did at his feudal level in Tsarist Russia.

Really, what did Ivan the Terrible do? Before him, the main layer of feudal lords consisted of patrimonial people - the Rurik princes, the boyars. Each of them inherited their estates and their serfs from their father and had to pass on their patrimony to their sons. Therefore, the patrimonial owners exploited their serfs sparingly in order to leave their sons with a working economy. The votchinniki had their own troops and were largely independent of the sovereign. We had to take their interests into account. Ivan, having established the oprichnina, dealt with the patrimonial people, took away their possessions and distributed them to his oprichniki in small plots. He placed them on these lands, and they began to be called landowners. How were they different from patrimonial owners? Because they were entirely dependent on the sovereign, he placed them on the lands, but he could also remove them. And he shifted it more than once. The sons did not receive their father's estate, but another one, depending on their service to the sovereign. The landowners were not interested in the prosperity of their peasants and tore their skins short, because it was unknown who would get these lands later, even after a few years.

Thus, the revolution did not occur: the form of exploitation remained the same, but the rate of exploitation increased sharply. The result was a significant strengthening of the autocracy of the sovereign (he could wage wars of conquest) and the enrichment of the feudal class due to the stunning impoverishment and extinction of the Russian peasantry. The consequences were the ruin of the country and the Troubles. And then, already under Peter and Catherine, the landowners gradually turned into patrimonial owners and won back their former class privileges.

Stalin inherited from Lenin a state that was in words revolutionary, democratic and socialist. But in reality? There was no trace of democracy. All power belonged to one party, or rather to its top, and since there was no democracy, it means there was no socialism, because socialism is public ownership of the means of production. If there is no democracy, it means that there is no opportunity for the people to manage their means of production. They do not belong to the people. The land was in words given to the peasants, but in reality it was controlled by the chairmen of collective farms and directors of state farms, subordinate through intermediate links to Moscow, the Central Committee, and the irremovable leader. This is who owned all the means of production in the country. That is, to one ruler - as in Ancient Egypt. And the peasants again turned out to be serfs - after all, it was impossible to leave the village: the peasants did not have passports. Surplus appropriation and tax in kind were typical quitrents, and workdays were corvée. Their difference from the previous corvee was only in their greater number per family. The peasant's main income came from his personal plot, as before, only the plot was now greatly reduced - to several hundred (in tsarist times it was no less than seven dessiatinas). And since workers could not leave the factories without permission from their superiors, we can say that there were also semi-serf workers.

Thus, the successes of 1861 were liquidated, the capitalist structure was crushed, and, as in the time of Ivan the Terrible, the leader led a feudal state (only with elements of a slave system, because the Gulag was based on slave labor).

So what did Stalin do in the village in a social sense? He liquidated numerous independent farms of the “kulaks” (and the landowners were swept away before him) and drove all the peasants into collective farms, where the “chairmen” appointed by him were in charge. Before that, the “kulaks” were interested in the development of their farms, because they hoped to pass them on to their sons, but now each chairman was only interested in fulfilling the plan issued from above for the delivery of products, to fulfill it at any cost. The state gained the opportunity to take away all products from the village completely to carry out its warlike plans. This is, in essence, the same thing that Ivan the Terrible did four hundred years earlier. These two historical characters are functionally similar in their role in history. Hence the great similarity between these historical figures and their actions in everything else - the oprichnina and the Cheka-NKVD-KGB, the mass executions of Ivan and Stalin’s “Great Terror”, reprisals against his closest collaborators, bloody dramas in their own families, sovereign power during life, Troubles and collapse after death.

In a word, what was common to both historical figures was what lay at the basis of their actions: in essence, the revolt of the state machine against the class that installed it, its complete defeat and its usurpation of its functions. But this calls into question the certification of the October Revolution of 1917 as a revolution. The February Revolution was truly a bourgeois-democratic revolution, and the Great October Revolution - what kind of revolution was it? The liquidation of all parties except one (which ceased to be a party and turned into an order of knighthood), the complete abolition of democracy and, as a crowning achievement, the “Great Turning Point” of 1929. This is not a revolution, but a counter-revolution, a coup d’état like the usurpation carried out by Ivan the Terrible. The exploiting class of the bureaucracy was in power.

It just so happened that I turned out to be not a historian, but an archaeologist, and did not develop this topic in detail. Before my memoirs, I had never published these thoughts anywhere. At first it was impossible, and when it became possible, it lost interest, at least for me. After the fall of Soviet power, I showed my old developments to Daniil Natanovich Alshits, a famous playwright, historian and specialist on Ivan the Terrible. He said it was a worthwhile idea, but it would take a lot of work to seriously develop it. I understood this myself, but I did not have time for such work - I was busy with other problems. But these thoughts were always with me, I bring them here because, firstly, they explain my actions, my choices, my life, and secondly, they give an idea of ​​my feelings when watching Lungin’s film “The Tsar”.

Recently and in ancient times, the same tectonic shifts were at work in Russia, raising similar rulers to the top. Artistically reviving on the screen the Russia of Ivan the Terrible, with oprichnina and tyranny, Lungin warns about the danger of a real revival of the Stalinist state, with the “Great Terror” and the Gulag, because the intoxication with the power of some and the devout servility of others remain in the souls of too many compatriots. "Where are my people?" - asks the king, who invited his subjects to a bloody feast. Lungin interrupts the story at this point, hoping that his subjects will not come. “And we are here!” - modern apologists of both tyrants readily answer. Fools! They will be the first to be strung up on the rack...