The Massacre of Novgorod was an attack by tsarist forces on the city of Novgorod, Russia that lasted from about January 9 to February 12 1570.
The traditional view of the massacre is that Ivan the Terrible was under the belief that the elite of the city of Novgorod planned to defect to Poland-Lithuania, and led an army to Novgorod to stop them. The army arrived in Novgorod on January 2 and when the Novgorodian archbishop, Pimen, attempted to carry out the traditional blessing of the Tsar upon Ivan's entrance into the city, he was publically insulted by the tsar, physically abused - being paraded around the city on a mare while facing backwards and accompanied by skomorokhi (Russian folk minstrels, outlawed by the Russian church as hold-overs from paganism)- and arrested. The Cathedral of Holy Wisdom was also looted and the archbishop eventually removed first to Aleksandrovo Sloboda and finally to Tula where he died under uncertain circumstances.[1] Some sources claim that between 500 and 1,000 people were gathered every day by the troops, then tortured (monks were beaten on the shins to force them to reveal where treasures were buried, and people were thrown into the river if they could not pay a ransom of 20 rubles). A number were killed in front of Ivan and his son.[2]
There are several aspects of the massacre that remain unclear to historians. For one, there is no indication that Novgorod planned to defect to Poland-Lithuania. Novgorod's planned defection (as well as its alleged plan to convert en masse to Catholicism) had been used as part of Ivan III's justification to take direct control of the city in 1478, and it seems that Ivan IV copied his grandfather on this and several other occasions - fighting the same battle twice (and unnecessarily).[3] While in 1478, the archbishop and civil officials were elected locally, and a faction opposed closer ties to Moscow, by 1570, the archbishop was a Muscovite appointee and the city headed by a voevoda appointed by the Tsar. Thus the defection of the city was rather fantastical, although it fit in well with the Tsar's erratic thoughts, as he was given to such flights of fancy. The deathtoll of the massacre is also uncertain. According to the Third Novgorod Chronicle, the massacre lasted for five weeks. The First Pskov Chronicle gives the number of victims as 60,000. These sources are not impartial, however.[4] Western sources from the time give figures ranging from 2,700 to 27,000 killed; Modern researchers estimate the number of victims in a range from 2,500 up to 12,000. Ruslan Skrynnikov, reconstructing the sinodiki (prayer lists) of the Kirillov Monastery, found only 1,505 named victims of the massacre, although these were most likely elite citizens and lesser citizens were not listed. Based on these lists, Skrynnikov considers that the number of victims was two to three thousand.[5]
↑ Russell Zguta, ?Skomorokhi: The Russian Minstrel-Entertainers,? Slavic Review 31 No. 2 (June 1972): 298; Isabel de Madariaga, Ivan the Terrible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 246-247.
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