Alexandrovo Sloboda

Today, Alexandrova is a two hour ride from Moscow by commuter train. That two hours does not exactly fly by; through the window, all you see is forest and the occasional little village. But if you listen hard to the rattle of the wheels, you can begin to understand what a remote place Alexandrova Sloboda must have been more than four hundred years ago, in the 16th century, when the fate of Russia was being decided here.

At first, this was just a village that sat amidst the favorite hunting grounds of Grand Prince Vasily III – it was he who ordered a palace built on the banks of the Seraya River. Time passed, and Vasily’s son, Ivan IV, ascended the throne of the Muscovite Principality. The boy became Grand Prince at the age of three. At that time, no one foresaw that he would become a bloody tyrant and the first Tsar of Russia, Ivan the Terrible.

We do not know how often the young Ivan visited the village. In any event, it is well known that he loved to hunt and he undoubtedly spent time there. Probably his anxious and troubled soul felt safe and secure in this place, nestled amidst dense forest. From his youngest years, Ivan lacked safety and security. As a child, he had lost his father at age three and his mother at eight.  As a small boy, he was forced to sit for hours as foreign ambassadors were received and pronounce words he could not understand. As a depraved adolescent, with no one in charge of his upbringing, he was surrounded by people trying to ingratiate themselves with him and not daring to stop him when he threw cats from the roof. At the age of thirteen, he ordered his first execution.

Later, the young tsar had burned indelibly on his imagination the sight of Moscow in flames and wild, riotous crowds. Still later, Ivan became the Reformer Tsar, who, over the course of ten years, in conjunction with wise counselors, completely restructured the system of government in the country. And yet, throughout it all, terror resided in Ivan – at first latent and then breaking through the surface with increasing frequency. There was the terror of the boyars, who, he was certain, had poisoned his mother, dooming him to a lonely childhood. There was the terror of conspirators, the conspirators who had killed his first-born, dropped into water by his nursemaid – surely no accident. There was the terror of evil-doers, the evil-doers who had driven his beloved wife, Anastasia Romanova, to her grave. Again, there was no evidence of this, but that made the sight of her in a coffin all the more sinister. There was the terror of the voyevods, the military leaders who were losing battles. There was the terror of friends and comrades in arms, of those who were helping him and, surely, dreaming of getting rid of him…

The only way to rid himself of that terror was to take all power into his own hands. But the greater his power, the more terrified he became, and the more frequent was the thrust of the dagger and the fatal potion. He could stand it no longer and so, in December 1564, he understood what he needed to do.

One terrible December day, the residents of Moscow learned with horror that the tsar had disappeared. For people of those times, life without the tsar was the same as death, and Muscovites understood that something dreadful was coming. Meanwhile, the Terrible One was on his way to Alexandrova Sloboda. This place was to shelter him, to help him find loyal followers. He ordered that his father’s palace be reconstructed and made into a luxurious residence. From here he sent word to Moscow that he was renouncing the throne. On the banks of the Seraya River he waited to see what would happen next…

Swarms of Moscow residents, including those very same boyars whom the tsar had accused of betrayal, made the long trip to the Sloboda (Russian for “settlement or village”), and got down on their knees, begging the tsar to return. This story is often pointed to as an example of Ivan’s hypocrisy. However, the tsar was more than serious about what was happening. During those days, he was deeply upset and it is known that he lost all of his hair from stress.

After receiving universal assurances of loyalty, Ivan announced that, all the same, he was handing his kingdom over to the boyars and leaving himself just a widow’s share – an oprichnina. This word, which had traditionally referred to the share of land a widowed Grand Princess would be left with after her husband’s death, took on a whole new meaning under Ivan. He put the lands around Alexandrova Sloboda under his total control, control exercised by his oprichniki, loyal servants of the tsar who dressed in black and rode with dog’s heads and brooms hanging from their saddles. The symbolism was clear: they would sniff out, gnaw at and sweep away betrayal.

Thus began the bloodiest seven years of Ivan’s rule, a period in which Alexandrova Sloboda held a prominent place. Here Ivan feasted – and his guests never knew whether they would return home with a rich reward or perish from a poisoned goblet. Here the feasts were interrupted by hours of prayer (there was a reason that during Ivan’s reign remarkable churches were either built or reconstructed in Alexandrova). Ivan Vasiliyevich liked to pray for the forgiveness of his sins together with his close associates and then descend into the palace’s depths with Malyuta Skuratov, the head of the oprichnina, to torture his unfortunate prisoners.

And it was here that the tsar, on deciding to marry yet again, arranged a viewing of two thousand boyar daughters, from among whom he chose Marfa Sobakina (the real-life, ill-fated heroine of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera, The Tsar’s Bride), who died two weeks later. And it was here that he married Princess Dolgorukaya and, the very next day, having concluded she was not a virgin, he put her in a carriage and ordered that the horses be driven into the river. And it was from here, from Alexandrova, that the tsar’s troops rode out to crush and destroy Veliky Novgorod, which to Ivan was a city of traitors.

Seven years later, in 1572, when Ivan understood that the oprichniki had acquired too much power, he began to fear them as well. He dismantled the oprichnina and forbid any mention of the word, on pain of death. Nonetheless, he continued to spend time in Alexandrova Sloboda. The high walls of the Alexandrova Kremlin must have still seemed trustworthy. And this was where the aging tsar committed one of his most dreadful crimes. Ivan struck his own son with a staff, mortally wounding him – he perished within a few days. After this, the tsar repented and spent a long time praying for forgiveness. Toward the end of his life, he visited the Sloboda less and less frequently. He was fated to die in Moscow, perhaps at the hands of conspirators after all.

The palace in Alexandrova Sloboda gradually sunk into disrepair. During the Time of Troubles, it was used as a fortress. Decades later, the palace was dismantled, the churches were rebuilt and a monastery was placed where the tsar’s residence had stood. Who knows? Perhaps here, in the monastery by the river, there were prayers of repentance for sins committed in the Sloboda… And across the river, in the area known as the posad, the settlement of merchants and artisans, there lived almost two thousand people. The posad gradually flourished and grew. By the end of the 18th century, it had earned the right to be called a city.

The main street here was – and remains – the road from Moscow. It had been a long time since the Tsar’s cortege traveled down it, although people still traveled it to buy the goods produced by Alexandrova’s skilled ironsmiths. At the end of the 19th century, a railway line past the city was completed and trade became even brisker. Today, it is not just Ivan the Terrible who is the subject of Alexandrova’s museums. You can visit a museum devoted to the daily lives of merchants and see the home of a prosperous 19th century resident and even enjoy tea served according to the customs of bygone days.

But Alexandrova never became a big industrial city. In 1913, when the Tsvetaeva sisters, one of whom was fated to become a great Russian poet, spent a summer in Alexandrova, what drew them there was the peace and quiet. Today, in the marvelously displayed, but, alas, dilapidated museum of Marina Tsvetaeva in Alexandrov (the town’s current name), you can breathe in the atmosphere of the pre-war and pre-revolutionary years.

Only the names of a few streets recall the times of Ivan the Terrible – Streletskaya (Musketeer) Street, Starokonyushennaya (Old Stable) Street, Hunting Meadow. You just have to pronounce these names and it seems that detachments of streltsy are marching through the streets of the quiet town, that horses are being led from the stables to the palace, where the tsar himself is whistling for his kennelman and galloping off to hunt…

Fortunately, in Alexandrova all is quiet.