Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ivan Vasilyevich drew his first breath on the 25th of August in Moscow as the eldest son of Vasili III and Elena Glinskaya. His father died when Ivan was three years old from blood poisoning caused by an abscess on his leg.
Ivan IV revised the legal code by issuing the Sudebnik of 1550 and established a standing army known as the streltsy to protect the realm. He convened the Zemsky Sobor which served as the first Russian parliament of feudal estates and created the Chosen Council to advise him on matters of state.
Ivan left Moscow for Aleksandrova Sloboda on the 3rd of December 1564 to announce his abdication due to alleged embezzlement by the aristocracy before returning with absolute power to execute traitors without interference. He decreed the creation of the Oprichnina as a separate territory within Russia mostly located in the former Novgorod Republic where he held exclusive power while the Boyar Council ruled the rest of the land known as the Zemshchina.
Modern researchers estimate the number of victims to range between two thousand and three thousand since the population had likely not exceeded twenty thousand after previous epidemics. The massacre lasted for five weeks according to the Third Novgorod Chronicle and involved men women and children being tied to sleighs and run into the freezing waters of the Volkhov river.
The Livonian War concluded in 1583 with the Truce of Plussa ending Muscovy's presence in Livonia after lasting for twenty-four years from 1558. The prolonged war devastated the Russian economy and severely disrupted governance alongside internal turmoil caused by the oprichnina leaving the realm strategically encircled by dominant powers to the west and south.
Ivan IV himself died from a stroke while playing chess with Bogdan Belsky on the 18th of March 1584 at the age of 52. Chemical analysis of his remains disproved earlier suggestions that he suffered from syphilis or was poisoned by arsenic and showed he had developed various bone diseases due to excessive mercury concentration in his body.