Titans of History

IVAN THE TERRIBLE

1530–84

You shut up the Kingdom of Russia … as in a fortress of hell.

Prince Kurbsky, letter to Ivan IV

Ivan IV of Russia, known as the Terrible, was a tragic but degenerate monster, terrorized and damaged as a child, who grew up to be a successful empire-builder and shrewd tyrant. Ultimately he deteriorated into a demented, homicidal sadist who killed many thousands in a frenzied terror, impaling and torturing his enemies personally. By murdering his son, he hastened the demise of his own dynasty.

Ivan was declared the Grand Prince of Muscovy when he was just three years old, after the early death of his father. Five years later his mother too died. With both parents gone, the task of caring for Ivan fell to the boyar Shuisky family—members of whom also served as regents for the remainder of the prince’s minority. The boyars formed a closed aristocratic class of around 200 families; Ivan complained that they bullied him, terrorized him, neglected him and were attempting to usurp his birthright.

Ivan’s coronation took place in January 1547, and the early years of his reign were characterized by reform and modernization. Changes to the law code were accompanied by the creation of a council of nobles and local-government reforms. Efforts were also made to open up Russia to European trade and commerce. Ivan oversaw the consolidation and expansion of Muscovite territory. In 1552 he defeated and annexed the Kazan khanate, and the storming of the city of Kazan itself was followed by the slaughter of over 100,000 defenders. More military successes followed, and further territories, including the Astrakhan khanate and parts of Siberia, were brought under Russian sway. He built the gaudy St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square to celebrate the conquest of Kazan.

After a near-fatal illness in 1553, Ivan’s personality appeared to undergo a transformation, and from that point he became ever more erratic and prone to bouts of rage. In 1560 his wife, Anastasia Romanovna, died from an unknown disease, an event that appears to have caused Ivan to suffer a breakdown. He convinced himself that the boyars had conspired to poison him—and he may have been right. If so, the plot led to the death of his beloved wife. He decided that the boyars would have to be punished and their power eradicated. The defection of one of his grandees, Prince Kurbsky, intensified his insane paranoia.

The result, on the one hand, was further administrative reform, aimed at augmenting the power of locally elected officials at the expense of the nobility. Such moves appeared to point the way toward a more rational and more competent form of government. Yet at the same time Ivan unleashed a vengeful terror against the unsuspecting boyars, and a wave of arrests and executions followed. Ivan devised peculiarly horrible deaths for some of them: Prince Boris Telupa was impaled upon a stake and took fifteen agonizing hours to die, while his mother, according to one chronicler, “was given to a hundred gunners, who defiled her to death.”

Worse was to come. In 1565 Ivan designated an area of Russia—dubbed the Oprichnina (meaning apart from)—within which the lands were to be directly ruled by the tsar. Oprichniki squads crisscrossed the territory to implement Ivan’s will. Dressed in black cloaks that bore the insignia of a severed dog’s head and a broom (on account of their role in “sniffing out” treason and sweeping away Ivan’s enemies), the oprichniki set about crushing all alternative sources of authority. The boyars were singled out for especially harsh treatment.

Ivan embarked on an orgy of sexual adventures—both heterosexual and homosexual—while destroying his imagined enemies. He personally killed and tortured many. Ivan’s savagery was shockingly varied in nature: ribs were torn out, people burned alive, impaled, beheaded, disemboweled, their genitals cut off. His “sadistic refinement” in a public bout of torturing in 1570 outdid all that went before and most of what came after.

In 1570 the tsar’s agents perpetrated a frenzied massacre in the city of Novgorod, after Ivan suspected that its citizens were about to betray him to the Poles. Some 1500 nobles were murdered—many by being drowned in the River Volkhov—and an equal number of commoners were officially recorded as dead, though the death toll may have been far higher. The archbishop of Novgorod was sewn up in the skin of a bear, and a pack of hounds was set loose on him.

As the harsh internal repression took its toll on Russia’s people, Ivan’s fortunes went into steep decline. During the 1570s the Tartars of the Crimean khanate devastated large tracts of Russia with seeming impunity—even managing to set fire to Moscow on one occasion. At the same time, the tsar’s attempts at westward expansion across the Baltic Sea succeeded only in embroiling the country in the Livonian War against a coalition that included Denmark, Poland, Sweden and Lithuania. The conflict dragged on for almost a quarter of a century, with little tangible gain. And all the while the oprichniki continued to engage in their wild bouts of killing and destruction; their area of operation, once the richest region of Russia, was reduced to one of the poorest and most unstable.

In 1581 Ivan turned his destructive rage against his own family. Having previously assaulted his pregnant daughter-in-law, he got into an argument with his son and heir, also called Ivan, and killed him in a fit of blind rage. It was only after Ivan the Terrible’s own death—possibly from poisoning—that Russia was finally put out of its long agony.

Ivan’s second son, Fyodor, proved far less talented than the original heir apparent. In 1598 a former adviser to Ivan, Boris Godunov, seized control, and Ivan’s bloodline was brought to an end.

The oprichniki inspired a later Russian tyrant, Josef Stalin, and served as a prototype for his secret police, the NKVD. His own terror was based on that of Ivan, whom he often called “teacher.” “Who now remembers the boyars wiped out by Ivan the Terrible?” he once said. “His mistake was not to kill all the boyars.” Ultimately, Ivan the Terrible was mad as well as bad. As his best biographer, Isabel de Madariaga, wrote: “Ivan was not like God, he tried to be God. His reign is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. His cruelty served no purpose … He is Lucifer, the star of the morning who wanted to be God and was expelled from the Heavens.”