Oprichnina

The oprichnina (Russian: опри́чнина, IPA: [ɐˈprʲitɕnʲɪnə]) was a state policy implemented by Tsar Ivan the Terrible in Russia between 1565 and 1572. The policy included institution of secret police, mass repressions, public executions, and confiscation of land from Russian aristocrats. The six thousand political police were called oprichniki, and the term oprichnina also applies to the secret police organization, to the corresponding period of Russian history, and to the territory in which, during that period, the Tsar ruled directly and in which his oprichniki operated.

The term oprichnina, which Ivan coined for this policy, derives from the Russian word oprich (Russian: опричь, apart from, except).

In 1558, Tsar Ivan IV started the Livonian war after the Livonian Confederation refused to pay tribute to Russia. A broad coalition, which included Poland, Lithuania and Sweden, were drawn into the war against Russia. The war became drawn-out and expensive. Raids by Crimean Tatars, Polish and Lithuanian invasions, famines, a trading blockade and escalating costs of war ravaged Russia.

In 1564, Prince Andrei Kurbsky, who had defected to the Lithuanians, led the Lithuanian army against Russia, devastating the Russian region of Velikiye Luki.

Tsar Ivan began to suspect that other aristocrats were also ready to betray him.

V.O. Klyuchevskii and S.B. Veselovskii explained the oprichnina in terms of Ivan’s paranoia and denied larger social aims for the oprichnina. However, historian Sergey Platonov argued that Ivan IV intended the oprichnina as a suppression of the rising boyar aristocracy. Professor Isabel de Madariaga has expanded this idea to explain the oprichnina as Ivan’s attempt to subordinate all independent social classes to the autocracy.

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