This story was published in the 'Memoirs of the University of Kazan' in 1863.
The external influences thus entering the Muscovite world of the sixteenth century by all these various paths evoked reactions of divers kinds. In the upper classes of society, among those lettered boïars of whom Kourbski was the most eminent representative, they naturally gave birth to leanings such as those Louis XI. had had to put down in the preceding century. They brought with them a breath of liberty, a germ of independent development, and incited to a direct conflict with that autocratic system which, by virtue of the national atavisms, was gaining continuous and increasing strength. Very different was the impression produced on the mind of the representative of that system. All Ivan perceived in the lessons that came to him from the West was their practical teaching as to the reorganization of his Government on a more modern, but a by no means more liberal, basis. Forced into an expensive war, he realized all that he lacked, from the military, financial, and administrative point of view, to enable him to cope successfully with his European adversaries, so much better equipped than he, and when he tried to provide himself with their war machinery the whole of that bygone world of ancient rights and hereditary privilege and family precedence rose up in his path, and interfered, even on the battlefield, frustrating the movements of his troops, thinning their numbers, and disorganizing the highest commands.
Ivan was certainly no opponent of the family principle, to which he owed his own titles, to say nothing of his excessive pretensions. He was disposed to choose assistants of humble birth, because he needed men who would serve him and obey him. But when one of them fell into the hands of the Tartars and besought his help, he did not fail, when he sent the money demanded for his ransom—2,000 roubles—to write: 'Your likes were not worth more than fifty in the old days!' To serve, to obey, this is what the great boïars, now enrolled in the class of the sloojilyié loodi, knew not how to do, and did not care to learn.
The war in Livonia, with the general mobilization of all available forces it entailed, and the maintenance of that cumbersome organization its continuance involved, made a conflict—the continuation, under a new form, of the old struggle between Muscovite Russia and the Russia of the appanages—quite inevitable. The ancient Russia of the appanages was a confused agglomeration of principalities, large and small, within which the directing principle of politics was the contract between the Prince and the free man who took service with him, as and when he chose; hence no constraint, nothing
