SUMMARY:

Chapter 5 of the history course A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia is titled “Modern Times: The Problem of Defining Sovereignty and Its Borders in the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, 15th−16th Centuries.” It covers much of the fifteenth century and sixteenth centuries and is focused on the process of reinventing Muscovy as a sovereign polity, a legitimate heir to grand states of the past. While highly inventive and productive, this process of political innovation was largely pursued through direct political practices and experiments, as the sphere of abstract reasoning (rhetoric and pamphlet-writing) was all but nonexistent in Muscovy. It culminated during the reign of Ivan IV the Terrible, who attempted to find the essence of a true imperial power (as visibly distinctive from the “regular” authority of a king or grand duke), and expressed his experiments in political theory and ideology in the language of terror and institutional reforms (including the peculiar institution of oprichnina).