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I am thinking of writing a book with short biographies of some of Russia's most colorful leaders throughout history. Here is one I wrote a couple of months ago about Ivan grozny---Ivan The Dread.
Ivan was born in the Moscow Kremlin, at six in the evening on August 25, 1530. At that moment, Capricorn was in the ascendant, and the Sun and the moon were in conjunction in Virgo. Legend has it that a terrible thunderstorm raged as the mother labored to give birth to the new prince, and mystics were seeing terrible omens. Ivan was destined to be the first Tsar of Russia, and among history’s most notorious figures. His life would be one of almost supernatural evil. Before his birth, his father, Grand Prince Vasily III, had married a woman in a ceremony not sanctioned by the Russian Orthodox Church. The Patriarch of Jerusalem had warned him that his child would be unholy, and would bring chaos, terror and death on a vast scale to Russia, but Vasily ignored him. He needed a male heir, and he was going to get it. And this cursed child would now be that heir to the throne of Moscow’s empire. It was not a promising start. It would be over 50 years later, but this same boy would hold his own dead son in his arms, in the Moscow Kremlin, not far from where he was born, and he would be begging god for forgiveness for his many crimes. It would be too late. The Karmic law of retribution went into effect. Ivan would soon die, his dynasty would collapse and Russia would be thrown into anarchy, war and famine.
Ivan’s grandfather, Grand Prince Ivan III ( ruled 1462-1505), had restored Moscow to greatness after years of being subordinate to the Tartars, who had conquered Russia in the 13th Century. But the zenith of Tatar domination of Moscow was long past. Ivan III’s armies had met the Tartars on the field of battle, but the Tartars fled. After this, Moscow was able to be free of foreign domination. Ivan III was also the first to use the title Tsar, meaning Caesar, but it was not official. But Ivan did lay the foundations for the total autocracy, where the whole of the land was subservient to one man, him. He also strengthened the institution of serfdom, which was similar to chattel slavery. Ivan III’s other major achievements included his defeat of Novgorod, in 1471, which added over 3 million acres of land to Muscovy.
His son, Vasily III (1505-1533) had also done much to strengthen Moscow. He defeated Lithuania in battle and annexed territory, including the area now around Smolensk. He also continued the long fight against the Tartars in the Crimea and Kazan. Vasily also cemented links between the Sovereign and the Church. In exchange for the Grand Prince to protect the Church’s interests, the Russian Orthodox Church would support him. This was very important for both, as the Ivan III had seized lands belonging to the Church and the Church had a unique way of legitimizing rulers in the eyes of the superstitious peasantry. He also needed them in his struggle against plotting nobility and bureaucrats, called Boyars.
Between Ivan III and Vasily III, the two rulers had more than tripled the size of Moscow’s empire. But Vasily could not produce an heir. He decided to divorce his first wife, against the wishes of the church and marry again. This time he married Yelena Glinskaya, a princess of Tartar blood. She finally produced him an heir, in 1530, Ivan Vasilyevitch. But the Grand Prince never lived to see his child grow up. He died of a blood infection in December 1533.
Ivan’s childhood would be very unhappy and full of trauma. His mother served as regent for a time. At this time the Kremlin was ripe with murder, plotting and treachery. Ivan’s uncles and various boyars were scheming to control the throne. Yelena had the two uncles imprisoned, and then got rid of her own perfidious uncle as well. But she was to die in 1538, possibly after being poisoned by boyars.
Now the power of the state was up in the air. Several factions of boyars struggled for the crown. The conflict was characterized by wanton cruelty as different groups seized and fell from power. Ivan witnessed much of this inhumanity, and it made an impression on him. He was taken to torture chambers, witness to executions and given animals to brutalize. Armed groups of mercenaries and palace guards were forever present. Rumor has it that his favorite game was throwing maimed or skinned animals off the walls of the Kremlin. His handlers, being savage men themselves, got perverse pleasure from watching little Ivan delight in barbarity.
Ivan would forever be filled with hatred for boyars as a result of this depravity he witnessed as a youth. At age 13, he began to use his authority as the Crown Prince for vengeful purposes. He had his personal manager, Andrei Shuisky, one of the feuding boyars, devoured by wild dogs. Now the management of the kingdom fell onto his mother’s family, the Glinskys. But the Glinskys would not last long—after a fire, peasants revolted and killed them.
At age 16, he married and was crowned as Tsar, the Caesar, the first in Russia’s history. His wife was from a family called Romanov, a family that would come to dominate Russian history for 300 years. But now, the Romanovs were a non-noble boyar family. His wife, Anastasia Romanova Zakharyina-Yureva was devoted to Ivan and Ivan to her. She produced him a viable male heir, Ivan Ivanovitch. In his life of terror and tragedy, she became one of the few moderating and benevolent influences that he would know.
In the first few years of his rule, Ivan was somewhat of a reformer. He began with rooting out the corrupt and despotic boyars and forming new legal codes. The Tsar also began to appoint officials based on personal qualities rather than on their hereditary standing. He limited the often tyrannical powers of provincial governors, and set out new regulations for taxation. He also limited the Orthodox Church’s ability to appropriate lands, even though the Church put up substantial opposition. But the policies of serfdom still existed and Ivan did not do anything to really protect this great mass of the peasantry from oppression.
With the influence and power of the Tartars now very weak, Ivan decided to strike. The Tartar fortress of Kazan seemed to him to be worth conquering. The Khanate of Kazan was full of fertile lands and was a route to the lands of the east. In 1552, the Tsar’s armies attacked and laid siege to the Tartar fortress at Kazan. The fall of the city was among the greatest triumphs of Ivan’s reign, and to celebrate it he had St. Basil’s Cathedral constructed in Red Square. (St. Basil’s is probably the single most recognizable structure in Russia.) He also became known as Ivan Grozny, meaning literally Ivan the Dread, which has often been translated as Ivan the Terrible. Over the next few years, the Tartar territories of Kazan and Astrakhan were subdued and annexed. During the 1550s, Ivan also started a war with the small kingdom of Livonia, which his armies sacked. Then the conflict spread with Sweden, Lithuania and Poland intervening. It lasted 25 years, with Russia gaining little permanently, and losing much treasure. But in the east, against the Tartars, he was gaining vast territory. In fact, Ivan enlarged Russia’s size so much, it is estimated he added an average of almost 50 square miles a day to the empire.
But Ivan’s triumphs and glory were all brought to a halt in 1560, when his beloved wife Anastasia died of an illness. Ivan Vasilyevitch would never be the same again. His paranoia and hatred grew by the day, as his mental health declined. He suspected that Anastasia was poisoned like his mother and he thirsted for vengeance. He began to have boyars arrested and executed by the dozens, often by hideous means and in public, to set examples. One of Ivan’s closest confidants, Prince Andrei Kurbsky, a military hero who helped take Kazan, defected to Poland, one of Ivan’s most bitter enemies. He wrote a savage letter to Ivan calling him a despot and a murderer. This only fueled the blackness brewing inside Ivan’s soul.
At Christmas, 1564, Ivan abdicated his throne. He wrote two letters to the people of Moscow. He claimed that the boyars, the priests and the ‘little princes’ had been undermining his rule, and Russia. They had been creatures of vice and corruption and cruelty. He listed their crimes and treachery. In another letter he wrote, he told the Russian people how much he loved them. The populace immediately went to the streets and demanded that Ivan return. Eventually, the boyars had to relinquish their power totally to Ivan to get him to return. Now Ivan was a total autocrat, with one of the largest kingdoms in history.
In 1565, Ivan created the Oprichnina, which were a black robed sect of Imperial enforcers, who were tasked to eliminate treason from the kingdom. The Oprichniki were given no restrictions on conduct and had legal immunity. They carried dog’s heads and brooms, symbolizing both wiping out treason and the traitor himself. They rode across the countryside, inflicting terror and mayhem at a whim. The Oprichniki did not just kill their victims. They also killed their families and friends, to prevent anyone from saying prayers for the soul of their victims. That was considered to be the ultimate punishment. They inflicted both random and targeted violence, and were given extra incentive to kill, as half the property of their victims would be turned over to them.
The most notorious incident of the Oprichnina reign of terror was the sacking of Novgorod. Ivan led a force of hundreds of his Oprichniki from Moscow to Novgorod in 1570, accompanied by the Crown Prince Ivan. On the route to Moscow was Klim, which Ivan and the Oprichniki stopped and destroyed. The Oprichniki went around the town cutting, burning and raping the inhabitants while Ivan stayed in a Monastery for several days in a religious delirium. Then they marched on to Novgorod.
Novgorod had been conquered by Ivan III after a long history of independence from Moscow. Ivan now suspected that the boyars of Novgorod were plotting with his foreign enemies. He let loose his Oprichniki to force the city to do penance for it’s perceived crimes. They destroyed the city in an orgy of violence that lasted over a month. On a daily basis they rounded up hundreds of victims for torture and rape, followed by mass burnings, castrations, and beheading. Whole families were tied together and thrown into frozen waters. One day it all ended. Ivan got up, met some survivors, shook their hands and sent them home. Then he marched his forces back to Moscow. Somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 people were killed in Novgorod.
Ivan’s mental state had deteriorated considerably. He had moved into a fortress in Alexandrovskaya Sloboda outside of Moscow due to his fears of plots against his life. 300 Oprichniki lived there as well. He created monasteries and torture chambers in the same building. Ivan was also having religious delusions. He and his Oprichniki formed a religious cult, with Ivan as the leader. They would have frenzied religious ceremonies where Ivan often would engage in self mutilation or beat his head against the altar until he was senseless. This was a habit of penance that Ivan had done on occasion since childhood, but became all the more common in this period. When he went into this state, he believed God would tell him who his enemies were. This strange religious fervor was alternated with periods of sin, vice and brutality. Ivan and his Oprichniki would follow a period of prayer with drunken binges and orgies. They also spent a considerable amount of time experimenting in new ways of torture in their dungeons, where the Oprichniki would bring prisoners. It is said that on more than one occasion, Ivan used hot pokers to rip the ribs out of living men.
In the dungeons of Alexandrovskaya Sloboda, some of Ivan’s most notorious murders occurred. The Oprichniki arrested Prince Boris Telupa and had him impaled, with his mother being forced to watch. Then they gang raped Telupa’s mother until she died. Then they fed her to wild dogs. Even those closest to Ivan’s court were brought there. His Imperial Treasurer was reportedly boiled alive in Ivan’s basement of horrors.
Not all was going well in the kingdom, either. In 1571, the Tartars raided Moscow and set it on fire. Only the Kremlin was left untouched. The Tsar stayed in Alexandrovskaya Sloboda. In 1572, the Tartars returned, but a small force of Russia’s army under Prince Vorotnysky deployed to meet them and routed them outside of the city. Ivan took credit for the victory and later saw to it that the popular war hero Vorotynsky was killed. After this, Ivan disbanded the Oprichnina. They had become a liability to his image abroad, and with his confidence in his army’s loyalty restored, he felt safe to stay within Moscow again.
Ivan married a total of seven times in his life. Several of his wives died, and several he had banished after he tired of them. His first three wives had died, and the Orthodox Church relented and allowed him to marry again. He sent his fourth to a convent after she proved to be infertile. Then he married three more women against the wishes of the Church. During his life he had a total of eight children. Several died as children. In the end, he had only one truly viable male heir, Ivan Ivanovitch, his eldest surviving son from his first marriage. His other surviving son from this marriage, Feodor, was mentally handicapped. His only hobby seemed to be ringing church bells.
Ivan’s male heir, also named Ivan, was now expecting a child of his own. In 1582, Ivan confronted his daughter in law because she was not dressed properly, not up to his standards. He then struck the pregnant woman. Ivan’s son became enraged and a struggle ensued. When it was over, Ivan had beaten his own son to death with his walking stick. He had now killed his heir, and his daughter in law miscarried. In one afternoon, Ivan destroyed his dynasty.
Ivan was never the same again. He became repentant, and prayed for the souls of those he had killed. His physical condition had also become unbearable. He could hardly walk, due to severe arthritis and his skin was covered with infections and sores. Apparently his genitalia swelled and became infected as a result of venereal disease. Ivan compounded his plight by taking drugs that were made from mercury.
In 1584, he was clearly dying. He was only in his 50s, but physically he had deteriorated far beyond his age. He summoned astrologers to his apartment and asked them when he would die. They made their calculations and told him he would die on the 18th of March, 1584. Ivan warned them if they were wrong, they would be punished. They were adamant.
On March 18, Ivan awoke and felt better than usual. He asked for the astrologers to be informed that if he did not die, then they would be killed. The astrologers informed the court that the day was not over yet. He took a bath and settled down for a game of chess, and then collapsed. Ivan the Terrible was dead. The first Tsar of all the Russias was no more. For thirty years after his death, Russia would have no real ruler, a series of civil wars compounded by famines and plagues. It would be known as the Time of the Troubles in Russian history.
Ivan was a pivotal figure in Russian history. Not only was he the first Emperor, but he laid
the foundations for the autocracy that has so dominated Russian life and politics. For centuries, as other nations made the transition towards more open and liberal governments, Russia, and the USSR remained harshly totalitarian. Only after an Ivan could a country produce the kind of horrors that Russia has. Many consider him to be a model for modern totalitarian rule. His Oprichnina were the middle ages equivalent of the Nazi SS or Stalin’s NKVD. Stalin even attempted to have Ivan made into a hero and commissioned several films about the tyrant. His purges and witch hunts are a common feature in 20th Century dictatorships. For better or worse, Russia still lives in the shadow of it’s first Emperor.
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