Ivan the Terrible

• 1. Introduction

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  Ivan the Terrible died on the 18th of March 1584 while sitting at a chessboard, pieces still arranged in mid-game. He had just struck his own son dead three years earlier in a fit of rage. He had ordered the drowning of a city. He had asked a foreign queen to take him in as a refugee. The man who built Saint Basil's Cathedral, established Russia's first parliament, and brought the entire Volga River under Moscow's control was also the man who reduced Russia, by the assessment of at least one historian, to "the brink of ruin" before his final breath. His name was Ivan IV Vasilyevich, and from 1547 until his death he carried the title no Russian ruler had ever held: Tsar of all Russia. How did a three-year-old orphan grow into the most powerful and feared monarch in Russian history? And what exactly did his name mean? The word translated into English as "terrible" is the Russian grozny, a term that in older usage meant formidable, awe-inspiring, a keeper of enemies in fear. It was not an insult. It was a boast. The questions that follow are harder. Was this a man of genuine vision who fell apart, or was the cruelty baked in from the start? And what did the reign of one sixteenth-century tsar leave behind in the bedrock of a country that still grapples with his inheritance today?

• 2. A Boy Among Wolves

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  Ivan was born on the 25th of August 1530, and received his name in honor of Saint John the Baptist, whose feast of beheading falls just four days later. His father, Vasili III, died when Ivan was three years old, from an abscess on his leg that turned to blood poisoning. His mother, Elena Glinskaya, came from the Tatar Glinski clan rooted in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; her family claimed descent from the Mongol ruler Mamai. She took the regency but died in 1538 when Ivan was eight, and many at the time believed she had been poisoned. What followed was a childhood unlike any other in Russian history. Rival boyar families, the Shuiskys and the Belskys chief among them, competed for control of the regency and, by extension, control of the young heir. In a letter to his one-time general Andrey Kurbsky, Ivan later recalled the experience: "My brother Iurii, of blessed memory, and me they brought up like vagrants and children of the poorest. What have I suffered for want of garments and food!" The Harvard scholar Edward Keenan has questioned whether those letters are authentic, but the ferocity of the boyar rivalries during those years is well documented regardless. On the 16th of January 1547, when Ivan was sixteen, he was crowned at the Cathedral of the Dormition in the Moscow Kremlin. The metropolitan placed the Cross of the Life-Giving Tree, the barmas, and the cap of Monomakh upon him and anointed him with myrrh. Two weeks after the coronation, Ivan married Anastasia Romanovna, a member of the family that would eventually give Russia its next dynasty.

• 3. Reformer and Builder

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  The early years after Ivan's coronation look, in retrospect, like a different reign entirely. Working with a circle of advisers known as the Chosen Council, Ivan revised the legal code with the Sudebnik of 1550, convened the Zemsky Sobor as a new assembly of feudal estates, and established the streltsy as Russia's first standing army. Through the Council of the Hundred Chapters in 1551, he standardized rituals and ecclesiastical law across the Russian Orthodox Church. He introduced forms of local self-government in rural areas, particularly in the northeastern regions populated by state peasants. In 1553, Ivan ordered the establishment of the Moscow Print Yard, bringing the first printing press to Russia. During the 1550s and 1560s, several religious books in Church Slavonic were printed there, marking the beginning of Russian movable-type printing. The technology was met with fierce resistance from traditional scribes; the Print Yard was eventually destroyed in an arson attack, and the printers Ivan Fyodorov and Pyotr Mstislavets fled to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Printing resumed in Moscow in 1568 under Andronik Timofeevich Nevezha and his son Ivan. Ivan also commissioned Saint Basil's Cathedral on Red Square to mark the conquest of Kazan. A legend holds that he had the architect Postnik Yakovlev blinded afterward so he could never equal the work. The legend is false. Yakovlev went on to design more churches for Ivan and the walls of the Kazan Kremlin in the early 1560s. In 1553, Ivan fell gravely ill and appeared likely to die. He asked the boyars to swear loyalty to his infant son. Many refused, calculating that the tsar was too far gone to recover. Ivan survived. He did not forget.

• 4. The Volga Campaigns

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  While Ivan was still a child, armies from the Kazan Khanate repeatedly raided northeastern Russia, carrying away captives and disrupting trade across the Volga basin. In December 1540, the Khan of Kazan, Safa Giray, launched an invasion toward Murom and was only checked by Qasim Tatars fighting on Moscow's side. That failure of Safa Giray's marked a shift: Muscovite military pressure on the khanate intensified through the 1540s and early 1550s. To prepare the decisive blow, Ivan dispatched envoys to the Nogai Horde in 1551 to secure their neutrality, and several local groups along the Volga frontier acknowledged Muscovite authority in the same period. That same year, Russian engineers assembled a wooden fortress called Sviyazhsk at Uglich and floated it in sections down the Volga to a site near Kazan, providing a fortified base of operations. On the 16th of June 1552, Ivan led a large army toward the city. The siege of Kazan began on the 30th of August. Prince Alexander Gorbaty-Shuysky commanded a force that employed battering rams, a siege tower, underground mining, and an artillery train of around 150 cannons, along with foreign military engineers who helped breach the walls. On the 2nd of October 1552, Kazan fell. Thousands of Russian prisoners and slaves held in the city were freed. Four years later, in campaigns in 1554 and 1556, Russian troops took the Astrakhan Khanate at the mouth of the Volga. Moscow now controlled the entire river from the Caspian steppe to the northern forests. The historian Janet Martin wrote in 2007 that "the subjugation of the Muslim khanates transformed Muscovy into an empire and fundamentally altered the balance of power on the steppe." Ivan then ordered the crescent placed beneath the Orthodox cross on the domes of churches in the conquered lands.

• 5. The Oprichnina

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  On the 3rd of December 1564, Ivan abruptly left Moscow for a fortified estate called Aleksandrova Sloboda and sent back two letters announcing his abdication, citing embezzlement and treason by the aristocracy and the clergy. The boyar court panicked. Citizens of Moscow feared the vacuum his departure would leave. A delegation of boyars rode out to beg him to return. Ivan named his price: absolute power, the right to execute traitors and confiscate their estates without interference from the boyar council or the Church. He returned and decreed the creation of the oprichnina. The oprichnina was a separate territory within Russia, carved mostly from the former Novgorod Republic in the north. Ivan ruled it personally. The rest of the country, the zemshchina, was nominally governed by the Boyar Council. To police his territory, Ivan recruited a personal guard called the oprichniki, originally numbering 1,000 men and headed by Malyuta Skuratov. One documented member was a German adventurer named Heinrich von Staden. The oprichniki owed their status to Ivan alone, not to hereditary rank or local ties. Of the 12,000 nobles assessed when the oprichnina was extended to eight central districts in 1566, only 570 became oprichniki; the rest were expelled from their lands. Contemporary accounts describe the oprichniki seizing nearly everything peasants possessed, forcing them to pay in one year what they had previously paid in ten. The resulting flight from the land contributed to a roughly tenfold rise in grain prices. In 1570, Ivan grew convinced that the nobility of Novgorod was planning to hand the city to Lithuania. A citizen named Petr Volynets fed him the rumor, which modern historians believe was fabricated. Ivan ordered the oprichniki to raid the city. The Third Novgorod Chronicle records that the massacre lasted five weeks; victims were bound to sleighs and driven into the freezing Volkhov River. Casualty estimates range from a few thousand to 60,000 in the most extreme contemporary sources. The oprichnina itself did not outlast its most spectacular atrocity for long. During the Russo-Crimean campaigns of 1571 and 1572, the oprichniki performed poorly against regular Tatar forces. Ivan formally dissolved the system in 1572 and reintegrated its territories into the regular state.

• 6. The Long War in the West

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  In 1558, Ivan launched the Livonian War, aiming to break through to the Baltic Sea and its trade routes. The conflict drew in Sweden, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Kingdom of Poland, and the Teutonic Knights. Twenty-four years later, when the war finally ended, Russia had nothing to show for it. The Union of Lublin in 1569 fused Lithuania and Poland into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and a new king, Stephen Bathory, proved a formidable military opponent. By the 1570s, Russia was strategically encircled, under pressure from Poland-Lithuania to the west and the Ottoman Empire to the south. Bathory struck hard. In his 1579 campaign, he retook Polotsk with a force of approximately 22,000 men. In 1580, he seized Velikiye Luki with around 29,000. In 1581, he besieged Pskov with an army reportedly numbering around 100,000. In the same year, Sweden recaptured Narva in what is now Estonia. Meanwhile, in 1571, a Crimean-Ottoman army of about 40,000 men had exploited Russia's commitment to the Livonian front, entering Moscow virtually unopposed and burning much of the city. Contemporary and modern estimates of the dead range widely, from 10,000 to 80,000. The Russian army, defending against Devlet I Giray's second raid in 1572 under Prince Mikhail Vorotynsky, was half the size of the Crimean force but held a strong defensive position near the village of Molodi. On the 2nd of August, Vorotynsky flanked the attackers and dealt a decisive blow, forcing the Tatars to flee. Ivan had watched from distant Novgorod. The following year, he had Vorotynsky killed. The Livonian War concluded in 1582 with the Truce of Yam-Zapolsky with Poland-Lithuania, and in 1583 with the Truce of Plussa with Sweden. Russia lost its foothold on the Baltic entirely, and the economic damage contributed directly to the political collapse known as the Time of Troubles that followed the death of Ivan's son Feodor.

• 7. The Man Behind the Reign

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  D. S. Mirsky called Ivan "a pamphleteer of genius" in 1958, and the letters attributed to Ivan and Andrey Kurbsky remain some of the most vivid documents of sixteenth-century political thought in any language. Whether Ivan actually wrote them is still contested: Edward Keenan argued in 1971 that they are seventeenth-century forgeries, while John Fennell and Ruslan Skrynnikov maintained their authenticity. A 1987 study by Morozov of a manuscript dated to 1594-95 or the 1620s was said to have strengthened the case for authenticity; skeptics noted that Morozov later accepted the later date and never produced the follow-up study he had promised. Ivan also wrote Orthodox liturgical music. His hymn "Stichiron No. 1 in Honor of St. Peter" and fragments from his letters were set to music by the Soviet composer Rodion Shchedrin, and the resulting recording, the first Soviet-produced CD, was released in 1988 to mark the millennium of Christianity in Russia. In person, the ambassador Daniel Prinz von Buchau described Ivan in 1567 as very tall, broad-shouldered, with large, restlessly moving eyes and a reddish-black beard. Ivan Katyryov-Rostovsky, son-in-law of Tsar Michael I, noted a long crooked nose and an unpleasant face. When Soviet scientists excavated Ivan's grave in 1963, chemical analysis of his remains showed elevated mercury levels, which researchers attributed to ointments used to treat his deteriorating joints. By the end of his life he stood 178 cm tall and weighed 85-90 kg, but could barely move. The bones showed extensive osteophytes far beyond what was typical for his age. Ivan died playing chess with Bogdan Belsky.

• 8. Shadow Over Russia

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  The historian Nikolay Karamzin, writing before 1917, called Ivan a "tormentor" of his people and dated the collapse of his character to 1560, the year his first wife Anastasia Romanovna died amid suspicions of poisoning. Karamzin's account shaped how educated Russians thought about Ivan for generations. Then Joseph Stalin read a 1922 biography by Robert Wipper that praised Ivan as a monarch who loved ordinary people. Stalin decided that Soviet historians should celebrate strong leaders who expanded Russia. Alexei Tolstoy was set to work on a stage play about Ivan's life. Sergei Eisenstein began a three-part film tribute. Both were personally supervised by Stalin. He read Tolstoy's script and the screenplay for Eisenstein's first part together after the Battle of Kursk in 1943, praised Eisenstein's version and rejected Tolstoy's. It took Tolstoy until 1944 to write a version Stalin accepted. When Eisenstein's second film, The Boyar's Revolt, portrayed Ivan tormented by conscience, Stalin was furious. He told Eisenstein: "Ivan the Terrible was very cruel. You can show that he was cruel, but you have to show why it was essential to be cruel. One of Ivan the Terrible's mistakes was that he didn't finish off the five major families." The film was suppressed until 1958. In post-Soviet Russia, efforts to seek Ivan's canonization as a saint were blocked by the Russian Orthodox Church, which cited his execution of Metropolitan Philip, who had himself been canonized in 1652. In 2016, the first statue of Ivan the Terrible was unveiled in the city of Oryol, officially to mark the 450th anniversary of its founding. Oryol has a population of around 310,000 and was originally built as a fortress to defend Moscow's southern frontier, a fortress Ivan would have ordered.