BY HANK REICHMAN

The image above is from an AI video that the GREAT (and demented) LEADER himself posted to social media.  It reminded me of an historical analogy I’ve been mulling over since I first saw videos of masked ICE thugs rampaging through neighborhoods, courthouses, and downtown squares, chasing down immigrants (documented or not) and citizens (mostly of the “wrong” skin tone) alike.  Trump and Trumpism have often been compared with analogues from the previous century — Mussolini and fascism, Hitler and Nazism — or from our own times — Orban and Orbanism, Modi and Hindutva, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, etc.  But a much older parallel also comes to mind.  Perhaps we might say that Trump is a 21st century American version of Ivan the Terrible and that the ICE gangs are his oprichniki.

Ivan the Terrible

Even if you never took a single class in Russian history, you’ve probably heard of Ivan the Terrible, although you’re likely unaware of what made him, well, so terrible.  (Actually, “terrible” is not a very precise translation of the Russian word groznyi, which can mean “stern” or “dread;” sometimes I’d tell students to think of him as something like “Ivan the Heavy Dude.”)  One way he earned his title was through his creation of the oprichnina, which Wikipedia defines (yes, it’s Wikipedia but it’s as accurate as any brief description) like this: “a state policy implemented by Tsar Ivan the Terrible in Russia between 1565 and 1572.  The policy included mass repression of the boyars (Russian aristocrats), including public executions and confiscation of their land and property.”

During these years the oprichnina referred to those extensive portions of the Muscovite state ruled directly by Ivan through his loyal troops (the oprichniki), with virtually untrammeled disdain for the traditional rights, privileges, laws, and customs of Muscovy.  To establish Ivan’s rule the oprichniki roamed the land, terrorizing both the boyars, those landed aristocrats who had traditionally formed the tsar’s princely court, and the wider population.  Lands, from large estates to smaller holdings, were seized, claimed by Ivan directly or redistributed to his loyalists.  Dissenters were tortured, executed, or, if lucky, merely impoverished.

Like all historical comparisons, this one is more evocative than precise.  But when I see ICE agents in operation, it’s hard not to see them as something like Trump’s oprichniki, even if the violence has not (yet?) reached Muscovite levels.  And does not our division into “red” and “blue” states, with Trump threatening punishments for the latter and rewards for the former (even if the reality is hardly so clear), evoke the image of Ivan’s division of his realm into a traditional zemshchina and a personal oprichnina?  Of course, in Ivan’s time his most loyal oprichniki gained wealth and power by personally terrorizing the tsar’s alleged opponents.  Today, by contrast, those oligarchs, fortune-hunters, and self-seekers (college and university trustees?) who gain most from the Trumpist regime are hardly drawn from the ranks of the wannabe gang-bangers recruited to Homan’s horde.  But, then again, the Muscovite boyars were also hardly lacking in amoral operators willing to kiss the feet of an impetuous and narcissistic autocrat.

Historians have long argued (see, for examples, here and here) about the causes and motivations behind Ivan’s oprichnina, much as I imagine future historians will debate the causes of Trumpism and the mixed (and sometimes conflicting) motives of both the movement and its leader.  But there is little argument that Ivan’s experiment was anything but a disaster for his country.  The oprichnina failed to pursue any coherent social motives — a pseudo-populist veneer of anti-boyar resentment and revenge notwithstanding — and instead launched a largely unfocused terror.  Ivan’s reign was followed by a succession crisis that in turn led to the first Russian “Time of Troubles” (Smuta), in which the Muscovite state all but collapsed in the face of social unrest, political division, and foreign invasion.  As Robert Crummey has argued, in the long run the division of large estates into smaller oprichnik holdings helped create a new itinerant population as state terror and seizure of estates forced peasants from their lands.  This increase in itinerants may have motivated the ultimate institutionalization of serfdom by the Russian throne after its reconstitution at the close of the smuta.

As the Russian historian Ruslan Skrynnikov argued in the 1960s (no doubt with a more recent Russian dictator also in mind),

Under conditions of mass terror, universal fear and denunciations, the apparatus of violence acquired an entire overwhelming influence on the political structure of the  leadership.  The infernal machine of terror escaped from the control of its creators.

What, we might then ask, will be the legacy of the Trumpist oprichnina?

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and chair of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019.  His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021; a second edition came out in March.