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There is an interesting story behind the
town of Sviazhsk and how it began its existence. As part of his campaign
against the Tatars, Ivan the Terrible ordered that a fortified town be built
close to Kazan, the capital of the Tatars. The spot where the river Sviaga
joins the Volga, just about twenty miles up from Kazan, was chosen as the
location for the new town. To preserve the secrecy of the plan, the entire
town, including fortifications and a church, was built of log wood not far from
Uglich, some six hundred miles from Kazan. Then in the spring of 1551, as soon
as the ice began to move on the rivers, all buildings were disassembled, loaded
on barges and carried down the Volga. Hundreds of men worked for four weeks to
reassemble what was probably the first town ever to be shipped. Kazan was
captured the following year.
A brief review of the reign of Ivan the Terrible shows that he was primarily
concerned with the formation of a powerful and highly centralized state, and
that he did not hesitate to use cruel means to achieve this goal. Among his
contemporaries he qualified as one of the best educated and most literate men.
Ivan's correspondence with Prince Kurbskii proves this. His wit was remarkable,
though often used for biting remarks. He was very interested in the arts, and
particularly in architecture. During his reign hundreds of churches were built
throughout the country. Each county and almost each town wanted to imitate the
tsar's Moscow. The Kremlin's cathedrals served as models, but so did its pillar
less tower-shaped churches, the latter primarily for construction of bell-fries
in which the space on the ground floor or on the second tier was often used for
a church. Ivan was the fist to partly open a window on the West when, in 1553,
English ships reached Arkhangelsk as part of their attempt to discover new
trade routes to the far east. In Moscow Ivan openly received the leader of the
expedition, Richard Chancellor, and trade privileges were granted to England.
By the end of this rule there were several hundreds of foreign craftsmen,
architects, painters, teachers and even doctors and pharmacists in Moscow.
Special residential quarters were established for them in the outskirts of
Moscow, in a neighborhood which became known as Nemetskaya Sloboda (German
Suburb); the name was given by the simple Muscovites to whom all foreigners
were "Germans." Ivan was very zealous in his acts of worship and
seldom missed a daily mass. It did not waiver his sadistic tyrannical bloody
rage, at least until the Bolsheviks came to power and showed that they could
surpass him and could bring terror to a larger scale. Dumas rather
exaggeratedly says that if compared to Ivan, Caligula would appear to be a dove
and Nero, a lamb. He had obviously forgotten what happened during the French
revolution. There was no historian who condoned Ivan's crimes, and indeed he
was cruel, but at least he had the courage often to punish his adversaries
himself and not stay in the palace or hide behind executioners, as most rulers
and revolutionaries did. Ivan introduced the Oprichina,; the all-powerful
security police as historian Kliuchevskii defined it, which primarily
terrorized princes, boyars, Church prelates and those who were close tho the
tsar. He terrified everybody around him, killed his own son and was married
seven times; all this despite the laconic meaning of his name which translated
from the Hebrew, means "God's Grace."
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