Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584):

Consolidating Russia, By Any Means Necessary

What becomes of a boy who is orphaned at seven, horribly neglected, uneducated, mistreated and reared in the throes of consecutive revolutions? Or better, what happens to the people he rules when he becomes Tsar?

The fifty-one year reign of Ivan Vasilyevich, better known as Ivan the Terrible, creates an interesting case study on Lord Acton's formulation that absolutely power tends to corrupt absolutely. He earned his nickname through iron-handed policies that were influenced by the paranoia and mental instability that plagued his later years. His rule can be divided into a period of stability verses a period of acute mental illness, and historians mostly concur that his more brutal policies against his enemies and his subjects began when his mental illness took full effect.

While his methods of rule have come under heavy scrutiny by historians, his effectiveness as a ruler has not. The Russia of Ivan IV's youth was known as the Dutchy of Moscow and had fewer than three million subjects. It still contended with the Muslim khanate successor states of Genghis Khan's empire and was continually at risk of its borderland subjects being captured in raids and sold in the Central Asian slave markets. Ivan left behind the Tsardom of Russia, nearly doubling the state's population in his lifetime, capturing Kazan, Astrakhan, and Siberia, giving him complete control of the Volga River, access to the Caspian Sea. Through these acquisitions, he turned Russia into a multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire. Perhaps foreseeing the growing global clout of Russia, Ivan declared himself “Tsar” when he assumed the throne at age 17, rather than the customary title of Grand Duke.

Ivan IV was the son of Vasily III Ivanovich by his second wife Helena Glinskaya. Vasily III served as grand duke of Muscovy, but died when Ivan was just three years old, thrusting the toddler into the middle of a contentious and ongoing grab for his power. His mother, Helena Gliskaya died when he was just seven and after her death, no one showed an interest in ensuring his well-being against the whims and self-serving needs of those surrounding him. A succession of boyars who ruled on his behalf until he was 14 years old created for Ivan IV a populace with a deep-seated resentment and mistrust of the ruling class.

Glimpses into his ugly rampage could be traced back to his time as a child when Ivan IV would stand at the top of the ramparts that surrounded the Kremlin and hurl cats and dogs from the roof. Or, as the legend goes, in later years when he had the eyes of the chief architect of St. Basil gouged out to prevent him from constructing anything that bested the structure in beauty. When he finally took his place as Grand Duke in 1544, his first order of business was to have the boyars around him executed. In 1546, he announced himself as the first Russian tsar and immediately chose for himself a wife, Anastasia Zakharina-Koshkina of the noble Romanov family.

During the first years of his rule as tsar, Ivan IV demonstrated a sudden and uncharacteristic commitment to morality. He was both transparent about and repentant for his former wrongs. In the first ever national assembly in 1550, the young Russian Tsar, who was by now only 20 years old, vowed that going forward, he would work to rule Russia justly and for a time he did. In 1553, Ivan fell deathly ill and eventually recovered. But in 1560, Ivan’s hand-picked trusted advisers Sylvester and Adashev left his charge. Not long after, his loving companion Anastasia died along with his son, Demetrius. And the final blow was his loss of his one true friend, Prince Kurbsky. It was at that point that Ivan’s wrath seemed to be kindled.

Some historians believe that somewhere around the year 1553, Ivan may have contracted a terminal illness. It was then that he began showing definite signs of mental deterioration. Losing those whom he trusted while grappling with his own mortality would certainly be enough for any 20-something to handle. For Ivan, that included an irrepressible fear that everyone was against him. In 1565, Ivan isolated himself from much of his empire and created what he referred to as the oprichina or "separate estate." The oprichina was a selection of specific territories within his domain whose revenues were reassigned to specifically underwrite his new lifestyle. He broke much of the remaining power of the Muscovite boyars, exiling many of them to Siberia.

His new estate, the oprichina, retained its own army and he had a specific selection of advisers called the oprichniki, with whom he spoke, though he did not particularly trust them. This group's primary goal was to retain Ivan's power, and they were allowed to loot, rape, torture, and kill with the permission of the tsar. The oprichniki would be responsible for many of the most notorious atrocities committed during Ivan's reign. The Russian council was still charged with the day to day administration of the empire, but those outside of the oprichina, the zemshchina, were not allowed to contact the tsar except in the most pressing of circumstances. Those who spoke against the oprichina were under the threat of execution and any who approached the paranoid ruler often were killed as well. Ivan’s isolation left members of the oprichniki with the freedom to do what they pleased to those outside of Ivan’s special circle of friends.

The Massacre of Novgorod is one of the most well-known demonstrations of Ivan’s mental instability, paranoia and brutality. In 1569, Ivan removed thousands of people from Novgorod and Pskov (the neighboring territory to the west) to eliminate the possibility of treason by siding with Poland, a rival state to the west that blocked Ivan's movements in that direction. He executed anyone that he even thought might pose a threat to his rule. He had taken a similar action the year before by executing more than 100 members of the boyar council and their families. However, sometimes he slaughtered in response to a threat that only existed in his mind. This may also have been the case in Novgorod.

Ivan and his oprichina launched an all-out attack on Novgorod in response to rumors of treason. On January 2, the tsar’s troops arrived and constructed a barrier around the city through which no one could escape. They also were instructed to retrieve any and all treasures from the monasteries surrounding the city and to beat and/or jail the clergy. When Ivan arrived on January 6, he had 1500 musketeers in tow. The next day all of the clergy who had been captured in the days before -- about 500 in all - were beaten to death by Ivan’s army. Next, the priests and deacons from local churches were rounded up and flogged from dusk until dawn. Their churches were looted. Over a five-week period, Ivan issued a daily round-up of the citizens of Novgorod and systematically slaughtered them. Ivan had the fields and crops of Novgorod and surrounding areas burned. The cattle were killed, the towns were destroyed and the churches, manor houses and warehouses were looted and left roofless. And when the few survivors left in Novgorod were finally allowed to begin rebuilding their homes, none of the accusations of treason had even been confirmed. A total of 60,000 died in the massacre.

In 1571 the Crimean Tatars, which had not been completely subdued after their conquest (a common problem with conquering semi-nomadic populations) raided Moscow. Many citizens were kidnapped and taken to the slave market, and much of the city was burned. Up to 80,000 Muscovites were killed as the Tatars had numbers of 40,000 while Moscow's garrison only held 6,000 troops due to Russia's ongoing Livonian war. Because Ivan's oprichniks failing to repel these forces, he abolished the oprichnina and officially disbanded his oprichniks.

For Ivan, things got worse personally when he inadvertently killed his son. During a fight with his daughter-in-law over a dress he didn’t like, Ivan beat her so badly that she miscarried. When his son tried to intervene, Ivan killed him as well. So wrought was he over the deaths of his successor and the would-be tsaravich that he fell into a deep depression, one from which his followers did not know if he could recover. A few short years later, in 1584, Ivan fell ill during a chess game. On his death bed he took up holy orders and was sworn in as a monk, perhaps as a late attempt to find propitiation for his sins.

Similar to many of the other brutal leaders in this book, Ivan committed many terrible acts, but his legacy is indissolubly connected with the modern nation that descended from his rule. He centralized the power of Russia's imperial center by marginalizing the boyars through the creation of the oprichnina. Through this mechanism he could elevate his common subjects, bypass the aristocratic system, and directly appoint political figures. His private guard that acted as a means of political control was a motif found in later Russian rulers such as Peter the Great, Lenin, and Stalin. Furthermore, a stronger, centralized rule enabled the Russian Empire to maintain control over its far-flung land holdings, which by the nineteenth century stretched to the Pacific Ocean, encompassed all of Central Asia, and went down into Eastern Europe. That Russian tsars could control such vast land holdings before railroads, modern communication and anything more than primitive technology would have been impossible without the political infrastructure created by Ivan.

But like many of the other rulers in the book, his brutality was only possible because he had the consent of his subjects. His violent acts were mainly committed against the aristocratic boyars, many of which exploited the peasants, and against the Tatars that threatened them with their frequent raids. As Waliszewski and Loyd explain in their biography of Ivan, as he stood, with all his faults, crimes, weaknesses and his failures, ultimately Ivan was popular, and all the popular sympathies were with him. When he indulged in savage acts of violence over the corpses of the vanquished Tatars, or handed one of his boyars over to the executioner on the merest hint of suspicion, the masses were on his side. They applauded the carnage, and rejoice in their master's joy. Even when they could not applaud, they shut their eyes respectfully, religiously, and cast a mantle of fictional decency over acts that were actually revolting.

Indirectly, the masses were complicit with Ivan's crimes.