Talk:Oprichnina

Oprichniki vs. Oprichniks

I personally beleive it should be oprichniki because that is the Russian plural. Why would we use English rules of grammar on a word that is not even English? Anyway, hopefully the person who keeps changing it back will explain himself here and either convince me or be convinced. Alexandre-Jérôme — Preceding undated comment added 04:25, 28 February 2007

• I can't read minds, but three good reasons would be
  1. Nearly all of our readers know virtually nothing about Russian, and to them the i on the end sounds more like a change of part of speech than a change of grammatical number, making it confusing and misleading.
  2. There are in English plenty of Slavic loan words that end in -ik, and a number of words that borrow the -nik ending. I'm pretty sure i've never heard "Chetniki" (Rdr to the plural Chetniks!), or "wikt:nudniki", or "apparatchiki" (tho our article lists only the i-ending plural, "wikt:apparatchik" lists both plurals and has only the s-ending one as a blue lk) and i've heard "Bolsheviks" much more than "wikt:Bolsheviki"; "wikt:peaceniki" and "Vietniki" would be horribly affected neologisms. Your preference is unnatural to our readers' ears but the other is natural to them.
  3. Oprichnik is a perfect candidate for a new loan word, if it is not already an established one: there's no natural and well known English word to substitute for it -- just as with Blitzkrieg when we started to need to deal with the concept. I've gone places in Germany where i had to do business with monolingual Germans, but i would say wikt:blitzkriegs rather than Blitzkriege when speaking English; i'm pretty sure i've never heard "soufflés" pronounced in English with with the s silent, and i think i'd do a double take if i did.

I strongly support keeping Oprichniks.
--Jerzy•t 10:11, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Well, an example of a word that has been widely adopted is apparatchik, for which apparatchiks is the English plural. The "i" (transliterated) Russian plural is not required. —PētersV (talk) 05:34, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Lead sec'n reads like a bad Dab page

I'm copying the lead as i found it onto this talk pg, to encourage topic-experts to check for my having left out something whose pertinence i don't yet appreciate:

The Oprichnina (Russian: Опричнина) may refer to

• The domestic policy, introduced by Ivan the Terrible that included first political police in the history of Russia (the notorious organization of six thousand Oprichniks) , mass repressions, public executions and confiscation of land from Russian aristocrats.
• The portion of Russia ruled directly by Ivan the Terrible where his oprichniks operated
• The corresponding period of Russian history.

The term derives from the Russian word "опричь" (oprich), meaning apart from, except of.

A lead section must start with a to-be sentence, usually a dict-def. If the "core" title is ambiguous among topics that should be separate articles, Dab'g can be accomplished by a highly structured HatNote, or assigning the core title to the Dab page instead of to a primary topic for that title. For an article to look like this one, tho, one of three things must be the case:

1. None of the topics is yet ready to be more than a stub.
2. Someone has welded together a bad Dab page and the articles that used to be its targets.
3. The article was written with neither an appropriate analysis of how the topic should be organized, nor responsiveness during writing to the emerging demands that the material was presenting as the draft developed.

In this case the solution is so clear that it's tempting to imagine that it demonstrates a law of thought: if the title has multiple senses too intertwined to be split into separate articles, the most comprehensive sense is the topic, and the other senses are sub-topics within that. (In reality, i don't doubt that one of the first dozen readers of this will come up with a killer counterexample, but i'm satisfied that this article is not such a counterexample, and i'm embarrassed to have spent this long talking about it before doing it.)

Here's my plan:

The Oprichnina (Russian: Опричнина) is the period of Russian history between Czar Ivan the Terrible's 1565 initiation, and his 1572 disbanding, of a domestic policy of political police, mass repressions, public executions, and confiscation of land from Russian aristocrats.

The term Oprichnina, which Ivan coined for this policy, derives from the Russian word "опричь" (oprich), meaning apart from, except of. The six thousand political police enforcing the policy were called oprichniks, and the term Oprichnina was further applied to the territory in which the Czar ruled directly and his oprichniks operated.

I've detatched the two footnotes from the text, since they need not appear in the lead secn, as long as they appear further on to document a more thoro treatment of the same matters.
--Jerzy•t 10:11, 24 November 2008

References

Suppressed material from "Disbandment" and "Legacy" sections

On 16 May 2007 an editor commented out most of one 'graph and all of two more. The most visible discussion was this edit summary:

In the 1560s the very poor harvests, plague, Polish and Tatar raids devastated Russia. Under these circumstances the existence of two systems of authority only strengthened disorganization.

which is a decent summary of the single paragraph that was added in the edit. The remainder of the edit was unsummarized, and consisted of hiding existing material in comments, and adding commentary in the comments on that material.

1. The first sent of the first 'graph of "Disbandment" was left intact and visible:

   The Oprichnina was a total failure and Ivan was forced to disband it in autumn of 1572.

   Hidden in a comment the editor gave their opinion of the (newly hidden) material that follows that opinion:

   Bosh. Moscow was lost because of strange behavior of boyars. Bosh. Together with troops the boyars were covered in city instead of battling against Tatars near city.

   The editor added quotes around the remainder of the former 'graph, likewise hidden in the comment (and added a {{fact}} tag, left expanded bcz of being inside the comment):

   "He had several of its leaders executed, however, the remaining oprichniki, about 600 men, continued to plunder Russia without the consent of the tsar. When, in 1571 the Crimean Tatars marched on Moscow, the garrison of oprichniki did nothing and the city was plundered."

2. Another 'graph, immediately following it was also hidden (but since removed and at least partly refactored); the editor opined within the comment:

   Many regions of Russia have been ruined by the very poor harvests (the period called little ice age), the plague and the war. Oprichnina itself did not cause the devastation.

   Again, the comment-hidden previous material was placed in quotes:

   "What had once been Russia's best and most fertile areas had been devastated and had fallen well below the rest of the country. Those that had not been killed by the oprichniki or forcefully deported often fled into other areas of Russia on their own. Tax revenues had not increased as the tsar had hoped, and Russia quickly lost all of its gains in the war for Livonia. Although the Oprichnina was successful in instilling a fearfully submissive view towards the tsar in Russians across the kingdom, it ultimately posed as no tangible improvement if not a detriment to the economy and stability of Russia."

3. In the section "Legacy" the editor opined:

   Bosh. Peter did not make "purges".

   Again, the old material was places inside quotes and left hidden; a {{fact}} tag was also inserted :

   "Years after the reign of Ivan the Terrible, tsar Peter the Great of Russia and even Stalin, himself, based their own purging schemes on the 'terrible, blood thirsty' Oprichnina."

   No comment remains in this case, but the following related text appears, followed by a ref to the same source cited twice elsewhere in the article ("Philip Longworth, Russia: The Once and Future Empire (New York, 2005), pp. 98-105"):

   Years after the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the oprichnina continued to affect Russia. Stalin, himself, based many of his own purging schemes on the 'terrible, blood thirsty' Oprichnina, and the position of tsar was forever after shrouded with a great sense of terrifying power.

   Note that the reference to Peter -- apparent target of the fact tag -- is gone, and there is new text:

   and the position of tsar was forever after shrouded with a great sense of terrifying power.

My interest in this (as one who remembers Ivan, Peter, boyars, and the Crimean Tatars, but little else) is that it involved dreadful procedure regarding material that is sensitive because of its relation to nationalist and political PoVs. After-the-fact comment on this talk page, regarding the quality of the suppressed material, would be desirable.
--Jerzy•t 20:38, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Number of deaths

In the Organization section (a title, by the way, that does not fit its section), I find this sentence:

The Russian historian Ruslan Skrynnikov estimated the number of victims to have been between two and three thousand . . .

It's not clear whether this refers just to Novgorod, or to the entire Oprichnina (which would seem to be a gross underestimate). Also, we ought to mention somewhere the wholesale slaughter of high government officials in 1570. Elphion (talk) 16:47, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

Causes

From what I've read, the main reason for the start of the Livonian War is not their failure to pay tribute. Swyilk (talk) 02:57, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

Merging Oprichnik page

I propose merging the poorly-cited Oprichnik page into this one. There's no need to have both articles. The only section from that page that would add useful content to this one is the section Appearances in modern media, which could be combined with cultural depictions.--cel25 (talk) 01:18, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

• I support this. LahmacunKebab (talk) 11:56, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose, @Cel25: the other article exists in multiple other language versions of Wikipedia. The problem is that in the English edition the article contains pretty much the same content, but if we expand it from say material that can be found on the Russian wiki the two articles can and should be very different in their content. Also, the two sources you cite are pretty bad. The first isn't even about oprichina, its about russo-polish wars and naturally mentions oprichnina, basically, in passing, whereas the second one describes itself as a comprehensive study of russian security forces from medieval times to present day, was written not by a professional historian, but by a KGB defector who is well known for his claims about the Soviet Union creating hard rock, and who regulary calls oprichnina a secret police in his book,. which is an anachronism at the very least and not a good sign in any case Openlydialectic (talk) 11:09, 28 July 2018 (UTC)

Closing, given the uncontested opposition. Klbrain (talk) 21:55, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

"dog head motif"

This appears towards the end, with no indication of what it is. Should be explained. --2607:FEA8:FF01:4B63:616C:468A:C31:55BC (talk) 14:38, 9 January 2022 (UTC)