[Ivan IV and his advisers] left behind few programmatic statements of their intentions as re formers. The very word ''reform'' would probably have rung strangely in their ears. Nevertheless, a regime that stages the first coronation of the ruler with an imperial title, is sues a new law code, and conducts a comprehensive review of the state of the church intends to inspect and, if necessary, repair the institutional and ideological foundations of society. Moreover, there seems to have been a widespread perception within the ruling elite that changes had to be made. Reform began during the "boyar rule" of Ivan's childhood and continued through Ivan's life-threatening illness in 1553 to about 1560. Finally, the reforms to a considerable extent form a coherent pattern in that many of the government's measures are clearly interrelated.

The concrete objectives of Ivan and his advisers in making reforms, judging by their actions, were primarily to bring consistency and order to the church and royal courts, strengthen the army, and make the royal administration more efficient and less corrupt. Within these broad rubrics, we can distinguish several general types of reform measures.

First, in the early 1550s, Ivan's government made a number of detailed technical reforms that might be characterized as "housekeeping" in state and church. In putting its house in order, Ivan's government issued a new law code (sudebnik) in 1550. The act of promulgating a legal codex symbolized the regime's determination to assert its authority over its subjects by systematizing legal norms and procedures....

In a similar vein, the Stoglav ("Hundred Chapters") church council of 1551 was the centerpiece of a campaign, supported by the tsar's government, to bring greater order and discipline to the liturgical and moral life and administration of the Eastern Orthodox church and to set limits to its acquisition of lands.

Second, in mobilizing for an all-out assault on Kazan', Ivan's government gave highest priority to strengthening the army. In no sense did its reforms involve a systematic restructuring of the tsar's forces; they consisted instead of piecemeal attacks on specific problems....

In preparation for the assault on Kazan', Ivan's government created a new military force with concentrated firepower that comple mented the noble cavalry. In 1550, Ivan IV or dered the formation of six companies of musketeers (strel'tsy), who fought primarily on foot with the latest firearms. In a certain sense, these units amounted to a small standing army since the men served throughout the year and received a salary from the royal treasury....

At about the same time, Ivan's government attempted to provide lands near Moscow for one thousand military servitors. The idea behind the proposal was reasonable enough. Estates near the capital were at a premium since they allowed a servitor to live on his lands within easy ride of Moscow or alternately in the city, provisioned by his nearby peasants. Whether Ivan's officials were actually able to find enough land suitable for distribution under these conditions is a subject of intense de bate among historians. Whatever its concrete achievements, the government's motive was clear—to strengthen the upper echelons of the service nobility.

The "decree on service" in 1556 set norms for the nobles' military obligations. According to its provisions, the owner of any estate— whether held on hereditary or pomest'e (conditional on service) tenure—had to appear for muster himself and bring with him one fully equipped cavalryman for every one hundred chetverti (about four hundred acres) of good land which he owned. As with so many of Ivan's reforms, the measure gave concrete expression to a well-established assumption— that all members of the traditional warrior caste of Muscovy were obligated to fight for the sovereign when summoned.

In short, the military reforms addressed specific problems of the army. Judging by the army's performance in battle, the results were mixed. Kazan' and other eastern outposts fell to Ivan's troops, but after decades of alternat ing victories, setbacks, and stalemates, the Muscovite armies that invaded Livonia suffered bitter defeat. The social implications of the reforms were also ambivalent; they made clear the government's concern for the well being of the noble cavalrymen who made up most of the army while simultaneously telling them bluntly that they had to serve at its convenience.

Third, in Ivan's early adult years, the central administration grew and assumed more distinct organizational forms. Since the fifteenth century, a small number of officials had served at the Muscovite court in essentially non-military functions; however, according to a num ber of historians, not until the 1550s did the proto-bureaucratic chanceries ( prikazy) take shape. Certainly, a number of the most important chanceries in the bureaucratic system of the seventeenth century ... were already in place in Ivan's lifetime. These administrative offices, consisting of a director and his staff of clerks, kept increasingly elaborate records of the government's most important activities and thus considerably increased its control over the country and its resources, above all the tsar's military servitors and the estates that supported them.

Last, and perhaps most significant of all, was the reform of the local administration of justice and tax collection. Banditry flourished in many parts of the country in sixteenth-century Muscovy, and the governors (namestniki)~ sent out from Moscow were unable or unwilling to put an end to it. The urgency of the problem must have been obvious, since the government took the first steps to deal with it in 1539 in the midst of the political struggles of Ivan's minority. Beginning in that year, the royal government issued charters to the population of particular districts, . . . instructing them to select elders . . . who were to be responsible for assembling posses and on their own authority arresting and hanging highwaymen and other notorious characters. Rather than reporting to the provincial governor, the district elders were to be accountable directly to the appropriate officials in Moscow.

These ruthlessly simple arrangements worked above all to the advantage of the royal administration in the capital. Its officials undoubtedly increased their ability to supervise the administration of justice in the provinces since the district elders were strictly account able to them. The reform placed the elders in an ambivalent position. On the one hand, they gained sweeping powers to deal with troublemakers and were presumably happy to have the central administration's support in doing so. At the same time, as their oath of office made clear, their responsibilities were onerous. For their part, the great nobles of the court who served as provincial governors can hardly have regretted losing functions that brought them little but trouble.

Ivan's government clearly saw the advantages of the new system for, over the next decades, it introduced district elders to more and more areas of the country. The idea that the royal government would function more effectively if it made local elites responsible for their own fate produced an even more sweeping re form of the local administration within a few years. In the mid-1550s, a series of decrees created a new group of officials (the zemskie starosty), drawn primarily from the merchants and prosperous peasants, to serve as tax collectors....

Once again, apparent decentralization served to increase the effectiveness of the central bureaucracy. Unlike the old governors, the local merchants or peasants who received the onerous job of collecting taxes from their fellow citizens had little to gain from cheating the royal exchequer under whose supervision they functioned....

Parallel with the new system of local administration were new modes of establishing national priorities with the support of social elites. In Ivan's reign, as before, the tsar and his inner circle of boyars constituted the nerve center of the government. In the first years of his majority—beginning in 1549 according to one version—he and his advisers summoned assemblies of his leading subjects, known in later generations as the zemskii sobor or "assembly of the land," to gain their support for governmental policy. Over the course of the next century, the zemskii sobor met at irregular intervals, when summoned by the tsar. Its composition was equally unpredictable. Sometimes it consisted only of the boyars and the leaders of the church; on other occasions, the government reached out to include members of the lesser nobility who happened to be in Moscow and perhaps even merchants and artisans from the capital.

Even though at the height of its development this institution bore a rough resemblance to the parliaments or national estates of the monarchies of western Europe, it would be a mistake to view it as an embryonic representative institution. With rare exceptions in the early seventeenth century . . . the zemskii sobor served not as the authentic voice of Muscovy's leading citizens but as a means by which the government mobilized the support of its leading servitors. Even the most widely representative zemskii sobor of Ivan's reign, the assembly of 1566, did not meet to decide whether to continue the war with Poland; instead, it was called to lend its support to decisions that the tsar and his advisers had already made.

As a result of Ivan's reforms, the so-called middle classes of Muscovite society—the provincial nobles and merchants—undeniably played a more prominent role in public life than before. At the same time, it would be a mistake to see their participation in the zemskii sobor and the local administration as the germ of representative government. The modern word which is most applicable to these institutional arrangements of the mid-sixteenth century is "mobilization." Nobles and merchants were invited to support the government and work for it, not to help it make basic decisions about the future development of government and society. Participation had its price.

For these reasons, it is misleading to look to Ivan's reforms for signs of political modernization or convergence with emerging western European patterns of representative government or civil rights. The institutional scope, legal implications, and social impact of the reforms of the 1540s and 1550s were quite limited. Although a veritable golden age in comparison with the horrors to come, the reform period of the reign was a time of freedom only in the most relative sense. The creation of institutions of political mobilization went hand in hand with the increasingly rigid codification of ecclesiastical ideology and the repression of religious dissenters.

However we interpret the period of reforms, the oprichnina (1565-72) represents some thing dramatically different. Where it fits in a discussion of political reform is not easy to determine. The narrative sources describing the dramatic scenes Ivan IV staged in the first weeks of 1565 demonstrate that he intended to make radical changes in his mode of governing. Nevertheless, the word "reform" seems a singularly inappropriate characterization of the oprichnina for at least two reasons. The tsar's statements and gestures—and his subsequent actions—showed that he intended to make not gradual but sudden and dramatic changes in the body politic. Moreover, the changes he made can scarcely be interpreted as steps to improve the administration of the realm or better the lot of downtrodden groups in society....

From the beginning, Ivan made clear that, in order to escape from the clutches of the boyars and chancery officials and the leaders of the church whom he collectively accused of treason, he intended to create for himself a separate administration, court, and army. To support himself and the men who would serve in these new institutions, the tsar took direct personal control of substantial areas of the country, selected primarily for their promise as sources of tax revenues. In the oprichnina lands in central Muscovy, Ivan undertook a re view of the nobility. Those who satisfied him of their loyalty joined his private army; those who failed the test had their lands confiscated and were forced to find new estates outside of the oprichnina's boundaries.

Oddly enough, Ivan arranged for the Boyar Council to administer the zemshchina (the areas of the country outside of his private principality) and report to him only the most important matters of state. Thus, Muscovy suddenly found itself with two administrations, two armies, and two separate groups of territories, one ruled directly by Ivan IV and the other by the aristocrats of his old court.

The oprichnina's most notorious feature was a reign of terror designed to purge those whom Ivan regarded as his enemies. On a number of occasions during the course of the seven-year experiment, groups of prominent courtiers and officials were executed on charges of treason, often with bloodcurdling brutality. Many times the victims were not only men of prominence but also their more obscure male kin and, on some occasions, their retainers and servants.

The roster of Ivan's victims included prominent aristocratic courtiers—both princes and non-titled servitors—leading chancery officials; Metropolitan Filipp, the head of the church; other prominent clergy; and Vladimir Andreevich of Staritsa, head of the only cadet branch of the ruling dynasty. Most startling of
the victims was an entire city—Novgorod— which oprichnina troops occupied and sacked with great loss of life after Ivan accused its population of treasonous negotiations with the Poles. Finally, as students of more recent reigns of terror have come to expect, the oprichnina devoured its own leaders; Ivan's most prominent advisers and officials mounted the scaffold in their turn....

If the oprichnina cannot be viewed as "reform," even by the most elastic use of that word, was it a "counterreform"? Use of the latter term is justified only if we regard the reforms of the 1550s as steps toward political modernization in a Western sense. Moreover, "counterreform" implies that the reforms were reversed or that the oprichnina was directed against the middle classes of Muscovite society who presumably benefited from the earlier changes. Most recent historians would accept the general proposition that, in the oprichnina, the tsar and his inner circle of advisers were aiming at the same goal they had pursued earlier—more effective control over the population and lands of the realm. In addition, the new institutions created in the re form period continued to do their work. The district elders functioned well into the seventeenth century, and the zemskii sobor went on meeting intermittently. Indeed, the liveliest assembly of the sixteenth century took place in 1566 in the midst of the oprichnina.

The social impact of Ivan's experiment was extremely ambiguous. Some lesser nobles suffered death or loss of their lands, while others thrived. The experience of the merchants was equally complex. At one extreme, Ivan favored the wealthy northern regions with their mer chant and peasant population by including them in his private principality. On the other, he ravaged Novgorod, the wealthiest trading city of his realm, and executed many of its people.

These observations in no way undermine the common sense judgment that there was a world of difference between the reforms of the 1550s and the oprichnina. The differences lie, however, not so much in the objectives of royal policy or their social implications as in the impatience and brutality with which the oprichnina regime pursued them and in the devastating consequences of its actions.

The indiscriminate and often sadistic methods of the oprichnina regime appear to reflect more than anything else the complex and troubled personality of its leader, Ivan IV. A number of historians have suggested that Ivan suffered from paranoia in the oprichnina years. Some of his actions during the period, including his request for a guarantee of polit ical asylum in England, dramatically testify to his exaggerated concern for his own safety. At times, burdened by his fears and chronic ill ness, he seems to have been obsessed with the need to escape from the dangers of leadership in one way or another.

To put it bluntly, the meaning of the oprichnina is to be sought above all in the realm of psychology. Ivan IV created the oprichnina to keep himself and his realm safe from enemies, real and imagined. Individual paranoia begot social pathology; the tsar's desperate search for security destroyed his subjects' confidence in the order and predictability of life. Years of absurd denunciations, sudden arrests, and horrifying executions left Muscovite society numb and made Ivan IV the terrible and awe-inspiring figure of literature and legend.

However real the substance of Ivan's fears, the social, economic, and political results of the oprichnina were a genuine disaster. Al though it did not revolutionize social relations in Muscovy or destroy the princely aristocracy or any other social group, it killed off a wide variety of Russians, ranging from aristocrats to the poorest artisans, peasants, and domestics. One can easily imagine the demoralization and shock of those who survived the whirl wind. Moreover, the oprichnina's operations contributed to the economic decline and social dislocation of much of Muscovy,  particularly the Novgorodian lands. The sack of the great trading city contributed significantly to its rapid decline into a run-of-the-mill provincial town. The depredations of Ivan's body guards, combined with natural disasters and rising taxes to feed the war in Livonia, forced thousands of peasants to flee from their ancestral homes to the remote forests, the open steppe, or the estates of the wealthiest land lords who could offer them minimal protection  and support. Their action, in turn, forced the government to set legal limits on their movement in order to protect the interests of the poorer service nobles and the royal treasury. The enserfment of the peasantry was in sight.

  As a program of political reform or enforced social change—if it was ever intended as such—the oprichnina was a dismal failure.