Early Foreign Views of Russia

In 1992, in his last dispatch from Russia, British ambassador Rodric Braithwaite, who had been friendly with both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, suddenly recalled the words of his sixteenth-century compatriot, the poet George Turberville, who served as secretary in the embassy of Queen Elizabeth I to Russia’s Ivan IV. As Turberville put it, the Russians were “a people passing rude, to vices vile inclined” and their land was “such a savage soil, where laws do bear no sway, but all is at the king his will to save or else to slay.” Braithwaite expressed the hope that such a state of affairs would remain a thing of the past. Today, alas, Turberville’s description feels painfully familiar.  

What was it that brought this Oxford graduate and scion of a distinguished Dorsetshire family (rumored to have been the model for the D’Urberville family of Thomas Hardy fame), as well as translator of Latin, including Ovid, to this cold, distant, and mysterious land? The answer is banally simple: debts and the need to urgently improve his fortune. Money makes the world go round, and it was straitened finances that led Turberville to traverse the treacherous waters of the northern seas, the same seas that just fourteen years earlier had doomed his fellow countryman, the explorer and “discoverer” of Muscovy, Richard Chancellor, who perished in a shipwreck as he and his son were returning from their second Russia expedition. After the sea voyage, Turberville spent a month under a sort of house arrest in a northern village, endured a long journey to Moscow, followed by another three-month imprisonment. This was 1568, the height of what would give Ivan his “Terrible” moniker: the oprichnina, a reign of terror during which lives were violently cut short (especially among the noble boyar class), lands were confiscated, and Ivan’s brutal oprichnik henchmen rode roughshod over the population.

All this must have been quite terrifying for Turberville, but in the end, the mission with which he and ambassador Thomas Randolph had been charged was accomplished, and the rights and privileges of England’s Muscovy Trading Company (founded by the aforementioned Richard Chancellor) were significantly expanded. Perhaps this is not surprising, given Ivan’s strong interest in an alliance with England and its queen, with whom he conducted a lengthy correspondence.

While in Moscow, Turberville began sending verse to friends and relatives back home, poetic commentaries on Russia that he published upon his return home in 1569 as a separate book. Alas, no copies of this book have survived, but history was left with three epistles from it that were included in the 1589 accounts of the English explorer Richard Hakluyt. Turberville’s reports-in-verse are stunningly vivid and vehement. They have been dismissed as “pamphleteering” and their author has been accused of Russophobia, but credit should be given where credit is due. Was there really anything to praise in Russia’s oprichnina period? And there is more to these somewhat clumsy, querulous, but frank poems than condemnation.

Turberville’s poetic gifts were quite modest, but his Muscovy poems have been reprinted, studied, and translated for more than four centuries now. He succeeded in “carving out” a window onto sixteenth-century Russian life that revealed peasants with their families and livestock, townspeople with their birchbark spoons and knives carried in their belts, along with their powdered, rouged, and high-heeled daughters. We sit at the table and drink kvas and mead (the former is still the Russian’s favorite beverage, while the latter has largely been replaced by fortified wine).

Such licour as they have, and as the countrey gives,
But chiefly two, one called Kuas, whereby the Mousike lives,
Small ware and waterlike, but somewhat tarte in taste,
The rest is Meade of honie made, wherewith their lippes they haste.
And if he goe unto his neighbour as a guest,
He cares for litle meate, if so his drinke be of the best.

We warm ourselves against bitter cold in a warm Russian peasant hut (one of the few things about which the poet waxed ecstatic), and we look into a window of mica he describes in detail. We learn such Russian words as muzhik (or rather mousike in his spelling, a peasant man), kolpak (a high-crowned conical cap), armyak (a long, warm cloth coat), shuba (a fur coat), rubashka (shirt), portki (trousers), and many others.

Finally, he leads us in pondering the future of this exotic kingdom. Here, alas, it must be admitted that Turberville’s predictions as to the dreary fate awaiting a country with such an unjust social order have proven all too accurate. It was specifically the reign of Ivan the Terrible that set Russia on a path to its Time of Troubles. As pamphleteering goes, pretty accurate.