Ivan the Terrible | The Sources of Evil

"Ivan the Terrible would execute someone and then spend a long time repenting and praying. God got his way in this matter. He ought to have been still more deci-sive!"

- Joseph Stalin -

Two men stood in a large room shouting at one another, raging over family and war or accusing each other of incompetence and cowardice. A third man stood nearby, servant of one and friend to both. In a corner, a young woman cowered with her face bruised and her body shaking. Anger swirled around the pair as words grew ever more harsh. And then, the older man swung his scepter, the symbol of God's might wielded through him on earth, and it crashed into the temple of the younger man. Blood poured from the wound as the youth crumpled to the ground. And then, as if a veil had been lifted from his eyes, the Tsar of all Russia's knees gave out. He cradled his victim in his arms and howled to the heavens, "May I be damned! I've killed my son!"

Ivan IV’s long reign was among the most consequential for the Russian empire. His early reforms seemed to indicate that Russia was on the brink of a new age, only for it to fall into darkness as the tsar descended into paranoia and madness. The world soon gave him a new name as war and repression became ways of life under the man history knows as Ivan the Terrible.

A Promise of Hope

The lands of far-eastern Europe were wild and unknown to most in the West during the late Middle Ages. The people lived in small city-states whose authority spread slowly across hundreds of miles of empty space. By the 13th century, the Novgorod Republic had become the most powerful state in the endless tracts of "Rus-land," but a small city called Moscow was rising to challenge it. Prince Ivan III, who reigned from 1462 to 1505, expanded his lands to the north and east, and his courtiers established legal and civil codes that made Moscow a center of power and progress in the region. His son, Vasili III, conquered small neighboring cities, which set the stage for more conflict in the future. The Rus collectively faced threats in the south, particularly from the Mongol successor-states in Crimea and along the Volga River, as well as more distant rivals like the Ottoman Turks, the Swedes, and rising powers in Eastern Europe.

Ivan Vasilyevich was born to Prince Vasili and his second wife Elena Glinskaya in Moscow in August 1530. As the eldest son, he was born to rule, but his father's early death in 1537 placed his future in jeopardy. The Glinskaya family was a powerful force in the Muscovite court with many ruthless rivals. Princess Elena served as head of a regency court for her seven-year-old son, and her popularity with the people of Moscow led other families in the city to consider replacing her and Ivan with someone from their ranks. Elena died only a year later, probably poisoned by the Shuisky family since they took control of the council for the next nine years. The loss of his parents at such a young age certainly impacted the young prince.

The coronation ceremony for Ivan IV in January 1547 was a majestic display of Church and state power. Moscow had become the center of the Orthodox Church since the fall of Constantinople a century earlier, and the Church's authority was total in much of Rus-land. Now sixteen years old, the young ruler moved quickly to cement his power over Moscow and its lands. He removed the Shuiskys from power, declared publicly that he would rule in his own right and not be manipulated by couriers or churchmen, and formally assumed a title his grandfather had used only in private correspondence: Tsar of all Russia. The court in Moscow adopted imperial customs and traditions, with visitors seeing the tsar on a carven ivory throne wearing the Kazan Crown, taken in battle when Moscow conquered that city in 1552. It was clear to all who met Ivan IV that he was a new sort of Russian ruler.

As Prince of Moscow, Ivan's first responsibility was to protect the city and its people from danger. He left most of this task to his courtiers but did take direct responsibility on two occasions, both involving fire. Shortly after his coronation, a fire broke out in the center of Moscow and spread quickly to the Kremlin armories, which were destroyed in a massive explosion. Over two thousand people died in the inferno. The devastation set off a brief rebellion against the tsar, who blamed it on his mother's family, the Glenskayas, rather than the ruling Shuiskys. Swift measures quelled the uprising, and Ivan spent the next two years rebuilding the city. This work included the construction of St. Basil's Cathedral, the iconic church in the center of Red Square that still frames the Moscow skyline today. A quarter-century later, in 1571, a Tartar-Turkish army marched on Moscow and deliberately set fire to its suburbs, and again the city burned. Much had changed in the tsar's life and attitude toward others, however, and reconstruction efforts stalled for decades.

Probably the defining moment in Ivan IV's life was his marriage to Anastasia Romanovna. The pair grew incredibly close and loved each other deeply despite the political nature of their union. Anastasia bore the tsar six children, but only two survived into adulthood, his sons Ivan and Feodor. The tsaritsa also encouraged her husband to implement reforms to better the lives of everyday Muscovites. Ivan altered the city's legal code in 1550 to establish independent judicial courts and ruling councils in local government; both of these were centuries earlier than similar re-forms in more progressive Western European states. He also expanded Moscow after the first fire and built new houses for peasants and granaries to store food. Most importantly, he convened the Council of the Hundred Chapters, which worked to streamline the teachings of the Orthodox Church. Ivan and the Moscow patriarch both feared a schism like the Protestant Reformation, which was already tearing Europe apart in a religious war, and the synod's reforms codified doctrinal changes that immunized the Orthodox Church from similar violent splits. Tragically, Ivan's re-forming spirit perished with Anastasia in 1560. She may have been poisoned, and the tsar sank into a deep depression. He became more tyrannical in his rule after his wife’s death, which had disastrous consequences for his people and his family.

A New Power Rises

Few rulers in the capitals of Europe showed much interest in Russia during the 16th century, and there was almost no cultural contact or trade with far-off Moscow. The Rus had no ice-free ports on the Baltic Sea at a time when ocean vessels carried most commercial goods, and the sheer distance between the Russian economic centers and the rest of Europe made overland trade impossible. But this began to change slowly thanks to two developments in European history: the discovery of the New World and the outbreak of Catholic-Protestant warfare. England, another distant minor power in the minds of most Europeans, began to search for passages through the New World to China, and it also sent ships north of Scandinavia looking for a "Northeast Passage" to reach the Far East. English ships thus made contact with the Muscovites in the tiny village of Archangel on Russia's northern coast in the 1550s. Moscow soon sent furs to London, while the English brought Western goods and knowledge to Ivan's city. Contact with the outside world accelerated the Rus' development as a modern society.

But trade was a minor part of Ivan's foreign policy; he wanted to expand Moscow's control of all Russian lands west of the Ural Mountains. To that end, he forged a lasting and historic alliance with the Cossack horse-lords of the Caspian Sea basin, and these warriors became the backbone of the imperial army. He then waged war against the Tartar khanates in Kazan and Astrakhan and expanded his rule south toward the Caucuses Mountains. The conquest of Astrakhan at the northern edge of the Caspian Sea brought him into conflict with the Ottoman Turks, and the first Rus-so-Turkish War of 1568-70 led to three centuries of sporadic warfare between those two empires. Ivan's troops swept across the flat plains northeast of the Black Sea and drove the Ottomans back with stunning success—some of the only Christian victories over the mighty Turkish empire in those days. By the close of his third decade on the throne, the tsar controlled the largest contiguous realm in Europe. But he wanted more.

Russia's drive west toward the European heartlands began when Ivan declared war on the Crimean Khanate shortly after his victory over the Turks. This last bastion of Tartar strength held firm thanks to its excellent defensive geography, and its armies were responsible for the burning of Moscow a year into the war. Ivan realized he could not capture the Crimean Peninsula and sued for peace, but his efforts brought the Russians into what is now Ukraine for the first time and set a long (and continuing) precedent of conflict in that part of the world.

As Ivan's reign drew to its close, his armies marched toward the Baltic Sea to capture warm-water ports for more trade with the West. Livonia, modern-day Latvia, beckoned as a new jewel for the Russian crown since several northern European countries had been fighting each other for control of the region. In 1562, Russia invaded Livonia, then under Lithuanian control, and crushed the garrisons defending it. Its armies then fought off small expeditions from Sweden and Denmark-Norway, and victory seemed to be at hand. But the stubborn Lithuanians refused to concede; their leaders were at work forging an alliance with the powerful Kingdom of Poland, which culminated in the 1569 Treaty of Lublin and creation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This military superpower marched on Livonia and drove Ivan's forces back, then continued into the Russian motherland. The war soon devolved into a stalemate, but Moscow could not negotiate a peaceful settlement with the Poles and Lithuanians. The crown's ministers had no direction from the throne, whose occupant was now interested only in himself.

Hope Becomes Terror

Ivan married his second wife, Maria Temryukovna, in 1561, and the new tsaritsa was partly responsible for Ivan's descent into evil. As a power behind the throne, Maria convinced her husband that enemies were inside his court, which fed his own paranoia and recalled the losses of his past. Maria then urged Ivan to establish a secret police organization answerable only to the tsar, the oprichnina. The first of many clandestine services to threaten Russians' lives, the oprichnina sought out opponents of the tsar's rule and inspired terror across the country. Their first target was the boyars, minor Russian noblemen who owned land and serfs around Moscow, and many were imprisoned and murdered or sent across the Urals into Siberia with only the clothes on their backs. Those who survived were subject to mass resettlement in lands far from the capital where they could not threaten the tsar, and Ivan redistributed their property to loyal nobles or even the peasants who had sat in juries and convicted their former masters.

In 1570, the oprichnina arrived in the city of Novgorod, the historic center of Russian culture, after reports reached Moscow that its boyars were conspiring with churchmen to break away from Orthodox control. There were also rumors that Nov-gorod might defect to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was now besieging the nearby city of Pskov. Ivan's oprichniki agents entered the city in force days before Ivan arrived with an army and began taking names of accused traitors. The city's leaders met their tsar with a declaration of friendship, which Ivan rejected; he then ordered his soldiers to attack. The people were unprotected, and both soldiers and oprichniki alike swarmed through the streets and looted or burned entire city blocks. Not even the churches were spared—priests and monks were dragged down the stairs and beaten or flayed alive as their parishioners watched. The oprichnina then set up courts to try the accused boyars, who were always declared guilty after horrific tortures. The condemned and their families, down to newborn infants, were then thrown into the Volkhov River as soldiers watched and laughed while spearing anyone who emerged from the water with lances and boat hooks. The middle-class townsfolk and peasants from outside the walls then faced Ivan's wrath. They were usually locked in their homes and burned alive or exiled to Siberia to face starvation and slow, icy death. Historians debate the number of lives lost to Ivan's wrath at Novgorod, but estimates range between three- and twelve thousand—many of whom were innocent of all charges.

The ongoing war with Poland-Lithuania gnawed at the tsar daily, as did any criticism of his leadership of the empire. His right-hand man in his final years was Boris Gudonov, who rose through the ranks to serve as chief minister and de facto head of the army. Another source of frustration was the tsar's son, Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich. The heir had married a woman his father deemed unsuitable, and the tsar sent her to a convent a year later because she could not give him a grandson. Her husband was outraged at Ivan's treatment of his beloved, and he married a second time—only to have the tsar send her away after five years with no grandson. Now a grown man with his own views on how Russia ought to be governed, Ivan Ivanovich began to consult with Gudonov and the military leaders about how to win the war, which his paranoiac father believed was tantamount to betrayal and treason. Rurik family tension reached its peak in 1581 when Ivan Ivanovich demanded that his father give him command of the troops trying to retake Pskov from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

In November 1581, the 27-year-old Ivan Ivanovich confronted his father in Moscow in person. The tsar had shouted horrific abuse at Ivan's third wife, Yelena, who was pregnant and wearing light clothing that, though comfortable, was too revealing. Historians debate what happened next, as the two surviving eyewitnesses gave contradictory accounts. As the tale goes, Ivan IV was so enraged at his daugh-ter-in-law's immodesty that he struck her repeatedly, leading Ivan Ivanovich to intervene and screaming that his father had already sent two of his wives into exile and now threatened the life of his third and their unborn child. The argument then turned to politics and war, with Ivan denouncing his son as a traitor for conspiring against him and Ivan Ivanovich mocking his father's failure to relieve Pskov. Ivan then raised his scepter and struck his son, as well as Boris Gudonov when he tried to stop the attack. Ivan Ivanovich fell bleeding from a wound to his temple, the victim of all the rage and paranoia his father had built up for decades. Ivan then fell to his knees weeping that he had killed his son, a scene captured in a haunting painting by Ilya Repin centuries later that recalls Mary cradling Jesus in the Pieta statue. Ivan Ivanovich briefly regained consciousness and apologized to his father before slipping into a coma; he died four days later. Heartbreakingly, Princess Yelena suffered a miscarriage around the same time.

The last three years of Ivan IV's life were dominated by the end of the Livonian War. Russia could not retake its former conquests, but it did relieve Pskov and drive the Polish-Lithuanian armies from its lands. The treaty that ended the war in 1583 divided Livonia among the combatants with Sweden getting most of the land and Russia left with very little. Death came for Ivan a year later while he played chess with a friend. His doctors said he had a stroke, and the throne passed to his only surviving son Feodor, who ruled for fourteen years but died without an heir. After Feodor I, the Rurik dynasty came to an end. Russia fell under the sway of various rulers who claimed the title "tsar," and the country endured twenty years of what became known as the "Time of Troubles." Famine devastated the population and killed as many as one in three Russians, and the Swedes and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth invaded again and occupied Moscow for nearly a decade. The Time of Troubles ended in 1613 with the ascension of Mikhail Romanov to the throne, the first in a new dynasty that would rule for three centuries until the empire endured another troubling time known as the First World War and the Russian Revolution.

A Cause of Evil

Prince Ivan III of Moscow became known as "Ivan the Great" for his wise rule, but his grandson received a different moniker: "Ivan the Terrible." The Russian word grozny is controversial among historians, and many insist its translation of "terrible" is in the more archaic sense of "inspiring fear," "dangerous," or "powerful." Many Russian authors, especially during the Soviet era, accused Western propaganda both during Ivan's life and in the Cold War as the source of what one called a "slanderous misinterpretation of another Great Ivan." Those who studied Ivan the Terrible in the centuries after his death tried to find reasons for his many crimes, especially the Massacre of Novgorod and the alleged murder of his son. Interestingly, thanks to some Soviet medical experts, we might now know the cause of his evil deeds.

In the 1960s, the Soviet government allowed scientists to exhume the body of Ivan the Terrible from its resting place in a Moscow cathedral and conduct inquiries into how he lived and died. They confirmed many accounts of his physical appearance—deep-set Asiatic eyes, tall and strong at the height of his power, a long nose and bushy beard. But when they examined his body to find a cause of death, they found evidence that the first Tsar of all Russia had suffered from a degenerative muscular ailment that probably left him paralyzed at the end of his life. This malady had two important side effects. The first was epileptic seizures, one of which was probably the cause of his death rather than a stroke. The second was a temporal lobe disorder that affected the reasoning centers of his brain. The experts published their findings, and historians have begun to reevaluate Ivan the Terrible in the light of new science. Is it possible that Ivan's descent into madness and evil was the result of a mental illness, one that he could not control and of which doctors knew nothing? Does that perhaps excuse some of the acts he took to remove threats from his court and nation? Can evil be explained away medically, and does illness absolve individuals of their crimes? We leave that to you.

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