Kurbskii, Andrei

Born 1528; died 1583. Russian political and military figure; writer and publicist. One of a line of Yaroslavl princes.

Kurbskii received a good education (he studied grammar, rhetoric, astronomy, and philosophy); Maksim the Greek exerted a great influence on the formation of his world view. In the 1540’s and 1550’s he was one of the individuals closest to Ivan IV Vasilievich. He occupied the highest administrative and military offices, was a member of the Selected Council, and participated in the Kazan campaigns of 1545–52. In connection with military failures in Livonia, the tsar in 1561 placed Kurbskii in charge of the Russian troops in the Baltic area; Kurbskii soon scored a number of victories over the Teutonic Knights and the Poles, after which he became voevoda (military commander) in Iur’ev (Dorpat).

Kurbskii, fearing disgrace after the fall of the government of A. F. Adashev, with whom he was close, fled from Iur’ev to Lithuania on Apr. 30, 1564; the Polish king granted him several estates in Lithuania (including the city of Kovel’) and in Volyn’, and he was accepted as a member of the royal council. In 1564 he headed one of the Polish armies in a war against Russia. Between 1564 and 1579 he sent Ivan IV three letters (initiating the famous correspondence between himself and the tsar), in which he accused him of cruelty and unjustified executions. In 1573 he wrote the History of the Grand Prince of Moscow, a political pamphlet that reflected the ideology of the big aristocracy, which opposed the strengthening of autocratic authority. This work represents at the same time the testimony of a contemporary regarding the 1547 uprising in Moscow, the taking of Kazan, the work of A. F. Adashev’s government (which Kurbskii called the Selected Council), the Livonian War, and other events. His writings are a valuable historical source and are outstanding for their high literary merit.