Ivan the Terrible

Ivan Vasilyevich was born on August 25, 1530, at Kolomenskoye, a royal estate on the Moskva River south of Moscow. His father was Vasili III, grand prince of Moscow, and his mother was Elena Glinskaya, a princess descended from a Lithuanian noble family. The birth of an heir after Vasili's long childless first marriage was greeted at court as a deliverance, and later chroniclers embroidered the event with storms and omens ^[1].

The child's security did not last. Vasili III died in 1533, when Ivan was three, and the boy inherited the title of grand prince under the regency of his mother. Elena governed with energy, completing a currency reform and fortifying Moscow, but she died suddenly in 1538, possibly poisoned, though the cause has never been established with certainty ^[2]. Ivan, aged seven, was left to the mercy of rival boyar clans, above all the Shuiskys and the Belskys, who fought for control of the regency.

Ivan later described his childhood as one of neglect and humiliation at the hands of these magnates, a portrait he painted vividly in his correspondence with the defector Prince Andrei Kurbsky. Historians treat those letters with caution, since Ivan wrote them decades afterward to justify his own severity, but the instability of the 1530s and 1540s is well documented ^[3]. The boy received a bookish education under church supervision and developed a lifelong absorption in scripture, liturgy, and sacred chant. His listed occupation as a raspevschik, a composer and arranger of Orthodox church chant, reflects this: several stichera attributed to Ivan survive in sixteenth century manuscripts ^[4].

On January 16, 1547, the sixteen year old Ivan was crowned in the Dormition Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin, taking for the first time in Russian history the title tsar, derived from the Latin caesar. The coronation, staged by Metropolitan Macarius, presented Moscow as heir to Byzantium and the tsar as an autocrat answerable to God alone ^[1]. Weeks later Ivan married Anastasia Romanovna Zakharyina-Yurieva, whose family would later give Russia the Romanov dynasty.

A catastrophic fire swept Moscow in June 1547, killing thousands and triggering riots in which members of the Glinsky family, Ivan's maternal relatives, were lynched by crowds. The shock appears to have pushed the young tsar toward reform. During the late 1540s and 1550s he governed with an informal circle of advisers that later writers called the Chosen Council, including the priest Sylvester and the courtier Alexei Adashev ^[2].

The reform years were productive. In 1549 Ivan convened what is often counted as the first zemsky sobor, an assembly of the land drawing on clergy, nobility, and townsmen. A new law code, the Sudebnik of 1550, tightened judicial procedure and limited the powers of provincial governors. Church reform followed at the Stoglav council of 1551, and military reorganization created the streltsy, a standing corps of infantry armed with firearms ^[5]. For anyone asking who was Ivan the Terrible in this first phase of his reign, the answer looks surprisingly like a conventional Renaissance state builder.

The conquest of the Volga khanates stands first among Ivan the Terrible achievements. After earlier failed campaigns, Russian forces stormed Kazan, capital of a Tatar khanate on the middle Volga, in October 1552 following a siege that used mines and mass artillery. Astrakhan, controlling the Volga delta and the Caspian trade, fell in 1556 ^[1]. These victories made Muscovy a multiethnic empire for the first time, extended its reach along the entire Volga, and opened the road east. To commemorate Kazan, Ivan ordered the construction of the Cathedral of the Intercession on the Moat on Red Square, the church known worldwide as Saint Basil's Cathedral ^[6].

Commerce and communication with western Europe also widened under Ivan. When the English navigator Richard Chancellor reached the White Sea in 1553, Ivan welcomed the connection, granted trading privileges to what became the Muscovy Company, and opened a durable Anglo-Russian relationship. He corresponded with Elizabeth I of England over trade and, according to some accounts, over the possibility of refuge or even marriage alliance ^[7]. The first dated Russian printed book, the Apostol of Ivan Fedorov, appeared in Moscow in 1564 with the tsar's backing.

Expansion continued to the end of the reign. In 1581 and 1582 the Cossack commander Yermak Timofeyevich, financed by the Stroganov merchant family and acting under the umbrella of Moscow's authority, defeated the khan of Sibir beyond the Urals. That campaign began the Russian absorption of Siberia, a process that would eventually carry the empire to the Pacific ^[5]. The westward gamble fared far worse: the Livonian War, launched in 1558 to win a Baltic coastline, dragged on for a quarter century against Poland-Lithuania and Sweden and ended in 1582 and 1583 with Russia surrendering nearly all its gains ^[2].

In December 1564 Ivan abruptly left Moscow for the fortified settlement of Aleksandrova Sloboda and announced his abdication, blaming boyar treason and clerical interference. Panicked delegations begged him to return, and he agreed on his own terms: the creation in 1565 of the oprichnina, a separate state within the state under his direct personal rule, with its own territory, revenues, and black clad corps of enforcers, the oprichniki ^[3].

What followed was a sustained assault on the old aristocracy and on anyone the tsar suspected. Landholders in oprichnina districts were dispossessed and deported. Executions reached into the highest circles: in 1568 Metropolitan Philip of Moscow, who had publicly rebuked the tsar, was deposed and later strangled in captivity, a killing traditionally attributed to the oprichnik Malyuta Skuratov ^[1]. The most notorious atrocity came in January 1570, when Ivan, convinced that Novgorod planned to defect to Lithuania, led a punitive expedition against the city. Contemporary accounts and the city's own memorial lists record mass drownings in the Volkhov River; estimates of the dead range from about two thousand to many more, and the city never recovered its former standing ^[2].

The experiment ended in humiliation. In 1571 the Crimean khan Devlet Giray broke through to Moscow and burned much of the city while the oprichnina forces failed to stop him. A combined Russian army did crush the Crimean invasion at Molodi in 1572, and in the same year Ivan formally abolished the oprichnina and forbade mention of its name ^[3]. Historians still argue over whether the institution served any rational purpose, such as breaking hereditary princely landholding, or whether it reflected the tsar's deepening paranoia. The Russian word grozny in his epithet, often rendered terrible, carries the older sense of awe inspiring or formidable, a nuance lost in the standard English translation ^[1].

Ivan married at least six and possibly seven times, an extraordinary record that repeatedly strained church rules limiting Orthodox Christians to three marriages. His first wife, Anastasia, bore him six children and by most accounts steadied his temperament; her death in 1560, which Ivan believed was caused by poison, marked a turning point toward suspicion and cruelty ^[2]. Modern forensic examination of her remains found high concentrations of mercury, though whether this indicates murder or contemporary medical treatment remains debated ^[8].

Later wives fared poorly. Maria Temryukovna, a Circassian princess, died in 1569. Marfa Sobakina died within weeks of her 1571 wedding. Subsequent unions were of doubtful canonical standing, and his final consort, Maria Nagaya, gave birth in 1582 to Dmitry, whose later death at Uglich would haunt Russian politics during the Time of Troubles ^[1].

The darkest episode of Ivan's family life came in November 1581 at Aleksandrova Sloboda, when the tsar struck his adult son and heir, Ivan Ivanovich, during a quarrel. The tsarevich died days later. The traditional account, drawn from contemporary and near contemporary sources including the papal envoy Antonio Possevino, holds that a blow from Ivan's iron tipped staff caused the death, and the scene became fixed in Russian memory through Ilya Repin's 1885 painting ^[3]. The killing, whatever its exact circumstances, left the succession to Fyodor, a devout but frail son with little capacity for rule.

The final decade of the reign was grim. The Livonian War consumed men and money as Stefan Batory, the soldier king of Poland-Lithuania, retook city after city and besieged Pskov in 1581. Ivan sought papal mediation, and the Jesuit Antonio Possevino brokered the Truce of Yam-Zapolsky in 1582, under which Russia abandoned its Livonian conquests; the Truce of Plussa with Sweden in 1583 cost access to most of the Gulf of Finland coast ^[2]. A quarter century of war had gained nothing on the Baltic and had exhausted the heartland, where flight of peasants from taxed and ravaged districts pushed the government toward restricting peasant movement, an early step on the road to serfdom ^[5].

Ivan's health collapsed in his early fifties. Contemporaries described him as prematurely aged, and the exhumation of his remains in 1963 by a Soviet commission led by the anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov revealed severe spinal disease and high levels of mercury in the bones, consistent with treatment for chronic pain, and possibly with poisoning ^[8]. In his last years the tsar compiled memorial lists, or sinodiki, of his victims and sent them with donations to monasteries so that monks would pray for the executed ^[3].

He died in Moscow on March 18, 1584. Jerome Horsey, an English merchant then in Moscow, reported that the tsar collapsed while preparing to play chess. Rumors of poisoning by courtiers circulated then and have never been proved. Ivan was tonsured a monk on his deathbed, taking the name Jonah, and was buried in the Cathedral of the Archangel in the Kremlin ^[7].

Few rulers divide historians so sharply. On one side of the ledger sit durable Ivan the Terrible facts of state building: the first tsarist coronation, the Sudebnik law code, the zemsky sobor, the conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan, the opening of Siberia, printing, and the English trade. On the other side sit the oprichnina terror, the sack of Novgorod, the ruin of the Livonian War, and the killing of his heir, which within fifteen years of his death helped extinguish the seven century old Rurikid dynasty and plunge Russia into the Time of Troubles ^[1].

His afterlife in Russian culture has been equally contested. Nineteenth century historians such as Nikolai Karamzin painted him as a tyrant corrupted by power, while Sergei Solovyov and later scholars stressed the logic of centralization behind the violence ^[2]. Stalin openly admired Ivan and pressed Sergei Eisenstein to portray him heroically; the second part of Eisenstein's film Ivan the Terrible, which showed the oprichnina in darker tones, was banned in 1946 and released only in 1958 ^[9]. In 2016 the city of Oryol unveiled the first public monument to Ivan in Russian history, an act that itself provoked national argument ^[10].

For readers weighing who was Ivan the Terrible, the fairest answer may be that he was both the maker of the Russian tsardom and the author of its first great catastrophe. He fixed the model of the autocrat in Russian political culture: a sovereign above law, sacred in office, and unbounded in punishment. That model outlived him by centuries, which is precisely why his reign still commands attention far beyond specialists in the sixteenth century ^[3].