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“AUTOCRACY, BY GOD’S WILL”
Timeline
| 1462 | Ivan III the Great becomes Prince of Moscow |
| 1480 | Great Stand on the Ugra River: end of Golden Horde vassalage |
| 1497 | Adoption of the Sudebnik legal code |
| 1533 | Ivan IV the Terrible crowned Grand Prince at age of three |
| 1547 | Ivan IV crowned tsar |
| 1549 | First Zemsky Sobor |
| 1550 | New Sudebnik, formation of the streltsy |
| 1551–3 | Conquest of Kazan Khanate |
| 1565–72 | Oprichnina |
| 1584 | Death of Ivan |
| 1605–13 | Time of Troubles |
| 1613 | Mikhail Romanov selected as new tsar |
Detail of Ilya Repin’s Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on Friday 16 November 1581 (1885)
Public domain
It’s always hard living down an embarrassing parent—ask any teenager. For Russia, though, it is awkward to admit but impossible to ignore that so much that defines it today, from the institutions of the state to its expansion south and east, can be traced back to the reign of Ivan IV, known as Ivan the Terrible. Admittedly, a better translation of the Russian Grozny would be Ivan the Dread, or even Ivan the Awesome, however much this makes him sound like a Californian surfer. By any standards, he was an extraordinary figure who built the foundations of the modern Russian state, created a country-within-a-country, unleashed terror on his own people and even offered Queen Elizabeth I of England his hand in marriage (it was an offer she could refuse).
Ilya Repin’s harrowing picture captures the moment in 1581 when, in a fit of rage, Ivan hit his son on the head, killing him. The brooding master of all the Russias is reduced to dumbstruck horror, his wide-eyed gaze evoking the cycles of paranoia and remorse into which he had become locked in his later years. More than just a personal tragedy, this left the fragile and reclusive Fyodor as his only heir, and thus triggered a series of events that would plunge Russia into a maelstrom of rebellion, invasion, coup and chaos.
From this “Time of Troubles” would emerge the new Romanov dynasty that would rule Russia until 1917, but while many histories of Russia see this as the crucial turning point, in fact the real transition of post-Mongol Russia from a fractious collection of principalities into the Muscovite state took place earlier. Ivan III (r. 1462–1505) began the process, but it was his grandson, Ivan IV (r. 1533–84), who shaped the future of Russia, first as a state-builder, and then as a state-breaker.
The Gathering of the Russian Lands
Everyone stands on the shoulders of others, and Ivan could only be Awesome because his predecessors had been smart, ruthless and focused. Previous Grand Princes such as Ivan I Kalita had started the process of the “Gathering of the Russian Lands” into Moscow’s hands, and Dmitry Donskoi did much to assert the dynasty’s claim to leadership. His son, Ivan III, acquired the soubriquet “the Great,” not least for the massive expansion of Moscow’s realm. Dynamic and unyielding, he unified the Russian lands through conquest, diplomacy and bribery. Novgorod was finally broken, forced in 1478 to abase itself to its old rival and surrender more than three-quarters of its territories. In 1480, his armies faced down the forces of the Great Horde along the Ugra River, finally ending even the fiction of subordination to the Mongol-Tatars. To the west, he sparred with the Swedes and took cities from the Lithuanians.
At least as important were the changes Ivan III brought to the ideology and institutions of power at home. In 1453, Constantinople had finally fallen to the Ottoman Empire. Moscow’s claim to be the “Third Rome,” the last bastion of true Orthodox Christianity, became conviction. Ivan, whose second wife was the Byzantine princess Sophia Paleologue, built from this a claim also to be the political heir of the Eastern Roman Empire. Never a man to suffer much from self-doubt and humility, he became increasingly autocratic. The double-headed eagle of Constantinople was appropriated as Muscovy’s, and Byzantine court etiquette began to creep into use. Despite overtures from Rome, Ivan slammed the door on any accommodation and the Orthodox Church thrived, with monasteries and cathedrals popping up across the country like mushrooms after rain. With this came a new conservatism. Previously there had been rare examples of women playing serious roles—cosmopolitan Novgorod even had a female mayor, Marfa Boretskaya—but by the sixteenth century, boyars were banishing their sisters, wives and daughters to the seclusion of the terem, separate quarters away from the public gaze and the unchaperoned company of men.
Ivan spent lavishly making Moscow, already almost twice as large as Prague and Florence, a fit successor to Tsargrad. He invited Italian architects to expand the Kremlin fortified complex, and to build towers and cathedrals with the tribute now flowing in from his new subjects. Symbolism reflected shifts in real power. Traditionally, the Grand Prince was expected at least to make a show of consulting the boyars, the great lords of the land, but Ivan took to treating them simply as subjects. Although it would be his grandson, Ivan IV, who first formally took the title of tsar—emperor—nonetheless this was when the term started to creep into use.
In 1497, the various territories of Muscovy acquired their first standardized legal system with the Sudebnik, or Code of Laws. Its subtext was unsubtle and unavoidable: the ever-stronger grip of the Grand Prince on everyone from local officials, who now had less latitude, to peasants, who were now only allowed to move to a new village and master in the two weeks every November on each side of St. George’s Day.
When he seized Novgorod’s lands, Ivan took the opportunity to create a whole new class of landholding soldiers, the pomeshchiks, to whom he assigned small estates off which they could live, in return for military service. Indeed, this became the model for the whole ruling elite, who became bound into the complex hierarchies of the system called mestnichestvo (there is no real translation: in effect, it means “place-ism”), which linked status to service to the Grand Prince. A mess of separate and often competing noble families was—in theory—turned into a single service aristocracy. Even princes of subject cities were now not considered royal, their territories no longer theirs to bequeath to their heirs. Autocracy had arrived in Russia, and all those inconvenient traditions of local self-rule and princely independence were consigned to history.
Rising Tsar
Vasily III (r. 1505–33) consolidated his father Ivan III’s successes, but his death in 1533 left his son and heir, Ivan, named Grand Prince at the tender and vulnerable age of three. His father’s death was only the first in a series of traumas that would shape, or perhaps warp, the man who would become Russia’s first tsar. His mother, Yelena Glinskaya, initially ruled as regent in his name, but she died from what was widely assumed to be poison five years later. The regency became a political prize over which the great boyar families of the Shuiskies, Belskies and Glinskies squabbled and feuded, and the neglected child prince by his own account haunted what was meant to be his palace, forced to raid the kitchen for scraps to eat.
In later letters—whose authenticity has, in fairness, been questioned—he railed against the way he and his brother Yuri (who was deaf and thus ineligible for the throne) were treated “like vagrants and children of the poorest.” This was a difficult and even dangerous environment, and certainly contributed to a lifelong quest for zones of security, whether physical, political or moral, and an equal lifelong inability ever to feel that sense of ease. On the other hand, it was also a hothouse in which the young prince learned the brutal arts of Muscovite politics fast and well. In 1541, the Khanate of Kazan to the south invaded Muscovy, supported by Ottoman troops. The 11-year-old Grand Prince played no meaningful role in the subsequent Russian victory, but the regents used him as a figurehead and virtual mascot, and thus he also gained some of the credit for success. In a time when omens were seen as very real signs of God’s favor (or anger), such symbolic triumphs mattered.
At court, Ivan was beginning to come into his own. The Shuiskies had become dominant, and they tried to sideline the young prince by surrounding him with rowdy companions keen to distract him with drink and hunting and violent aristocratic pursuits of every kind. He certainly participated, but he did not lose sight of what the arrogant and corrupt Shuiskies were meanwhile doing in his name. In December 1543, while still only thirteen, Ivan ordered the arrest of Prince Andrei Shuisky, and had his kennel-men beat him to death. It was a stark display of the power of the legitimate Grand Prince, and of his determination to rule. The next few years saw Ivan and the boyars in an awkward, often bitter relationship. He needed them to govern his country for him, but mistrusted them, and his erratic swings from denunciation and arrest to conciliation reflected this fundamental tension. He needed some new basis for rule to consolidate his hold on them and—Ivan’s perennial quest—bring him security. He found a possible answer in taking his grandfather’s reforms one momentous step further.
In 1547, the Grand Prince was crowned Tsar of All the Russias, a symbolic elevation marked with the use in the ceremony of the Cap of Monomakh, a crown that was supposed to have been presented by the Byzantine emperor Constantine IX Monomachus to his grandson, Vladimir Monomakh, founder of Vladimir. This is, of course, myth: Constantine and Vladimir were eleventh-century rulers, and the crown was only made in the thirteenth century. As ever, though, facts take second place when it comes to building narratives of power and authority. Grand princes, for all their wealth and power, had been first among equals, and a robust tradition of egalitarianism had survived the age of the veche. Now, the ruler of Russia was to be considered no mere prince or king, but emperor, and with that came a divine mandate, as both defender of the true Orthodox faith and also the Russian people’s intercessory with God. Peasant or boyar, soldier or priest, they were all to be subject to a single authority, and one backed by the promise of Heaven and the threat of Hell.
Building a State
Yet Ivan did not rely purely on terror, regalia and a new title, and nor did he necessarily see power as purely an end in itself. This violent and unpredictable man was genuinely pious, and did not take his new role lightly. In the years of regency and boyar infighting, the power of Moscow over the country had waned, and mismanagement had led to local revolts. From the nobility, through the urban traders and crafters, down to the peasants, there seems to have been a general sense of the need for reform, for order, and an end to the kind of cannibalistic competition and exploitation that had become the norm.
He embarked on a series of reforms that were to reshape Russia, ruthlessly but effectively bringing together the processes started by his predecessors. Under him, the foundations of the Russian state bureaucracy were laid, the laws were codified further, and relations between church and crown defined. In 1549, Ivan addressed a gathering of aristocrats and the church’s Sacred Council. He denounced the boyars, but in the name of reconciliation, he reassured them that he would not punish them for past misdeeds. The threat of what he would do if they challenged him in the future, though, hung over them like the headsman’s ax. He announced the start of a wide-ranging program of reforms to strengthen and regularize the state. The very next day, he reduced the powers of the namestniks, governors who had become virtual local tyrants during his minority. The next year, an updated law code was issued that introduced tougher scrutiny of officials by a royal chancellery. This meant the creation of a central civil service apparatus, virtually from scratch. Here are the roots of the modern Russia state; Ivan’s Banditry Office was the forefather of the modern Interior Ministry, for example, while Ivan Viskovaty, founding head of the Ambassadorial Office, is reckoned by today’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to be the country’s first foreign minister.
The church did not escape Ivan’s reforming zeal. In 1551, religious leaders from across the country met in what became known as the Council of a Hundred Chapters. Reflecting both his wider political agenda and his new status as divinely anointed ruler, Ivan set the agenda with a list of questions as to how they could address abuses by the clergy. The outcome was a document that brought new unity to the Russian Orthodox Church, but bought that by affirming ever more strongly its commitment to the institution of the tsar.
His reforms undoubtedly modernized the country. The boyars were increasingly forced into direct state service and challenged by a new generation of secretaries and pomeshchiks. The old practice of allowing officials to sustain themselves by kormleniye—“feeding,” in other words extorting payments from those under them, whenever and however they felt like it—was banned, and replaced by salaries or, more often, an expansion of the pomestiye system of granting land for office. Bit by bit, a fractious and prideful nobility was being forced into becoming a service gentry dependent on the state.
On the basis of Ivan III’s earlier efforts, Ivan IV was creating a new kind of monarchy, one that derived its legitimacy from heredity and divine right, yet its power from its ability to represent and balance different estates in society: the boyars, the pomeshchiks, the church, the townspeople, the peasants. All were represented in the Zemsky Sobor, the Assembly of the Land, which under him, at least, was little more than a rubber-stamp parliament. He was also ambitious and energetic, eager to use the fruits of this campaign to secure the country’s borders, and extend them. The irony is that it would be his very success in doing so that would bring whole new threats to Russia’s door.
A Creeping Empire
Part of Ivan’s vision of a stronger state meant turning a feudal military based on mustering aristocrats’ retinues, and thus dependent on their loyalty and efficiency, into a monarchical one. To this end, in 1550 he founded the streltsy (literally “shooters”), a force of soldiers beholden to the crown. While the nobility still fought on horseback, the streltsy were infantry, armed with harquebuses, early handguns, along with the traditional Russian poleax called a berdysh. More to the point, they were neither conscripts nor aristocrats born to their role, but originally volunteers from the towns and the countryside. In due course, service within the streltsy would become a hereditary and lifelong right, and their salaries would be supplemented with small plots of land and the right to carry out trade and crafts when not training or on campaign.
On the one hand, this was an expression of Ivan’s constant need to try and create security for himself, a military force to guard his Kremlin and police Moscow that was independent of the boyars. However, it also substantially increased Russia’s military capabilities, facilitating the expansion of the country’s borders in ways both planned and unplanned. The first campaign in which they were used was the successful conquest of the Khanate of Kazan in 1552. Ivan had not forgotten that the Khanate had sought to invade during his minority, and he was determined to deal with this long-running threat once and for all. Russia’s traditional skills at woodworking came to the fore with the construction of a fort at Sviyazhsk on the Volga in 1551 in just four weeks from components made in Uglich upstream and floated downriver. Next summer, Ivan launched his offensive, sending an army to besiege Kazan, batter it with fully 150 cannon, and then storm it. The city’s chronicle (a possibly questionable source) reported 110,000 killed and more than 60,000 Russian slaves freed.
The south was Ivan’s, with the remaining Astrakhan Khanate being annexed in 1556, but he presumably did not appreciate the true significance of this expansion. First of all, it marked the beginning of Russia’s transformation from being an essentially homogenous nation, drawn from a single compound ethnicity and sharing the same faith. As it expanded, it came to embrace new peoples, new cultures and new religions, such as the Turkic Muslims of the Khanates. It also brought Russia into direct conflict with the Ottoman Empire, which had its own imperial ambitions in the lands between the Black and Caspian Seas. In 1569, in the first of what would be a centuries-long series of Russo-Turkish wars, the Ottomans launched an abortive attack on Astrakhan. Believing themselves to be facing an imminent Russian threat and under the Ottomans’ protection, in 1571 the last remaining Khanate, the Crimean, launched an attack that made it all the way to Moscow’s walls. In short, Ivan had looked to end a threat—and made an enemy.
Likewise, to the west, Russia found itself in contention with Sweden, Lithuania, Poland and Denmark over access to the Baltic Sea and its lucrative trade routes. The Livonian War of 1558–83, actually a scrappy, on-off series of campaigns and wars between Russia and one or more of its western rivals, ended in a truce, an uneasy stalemate, and no real victory. Quite the opposite, Russia had lost thousands of men, uncounted treasure and small portions of its territory. More to the point, the rise of the Russian state and the fact that it could contemplate serious military adventures in northern Europe meant that, from being a relatively ignored backwater, it was now considered a serious player and thus a serious threat by some of the heavy-hitting European powers of the age. Ivan had started building an empire—and made himself a threat.
The true expansion of Russia at this time was to the east, into the forests and the steppes loosely claimed by the Siberian Khanate but seen by Moscow as ripe for exploitation. This was essentially subcontracted to ambitious adventurers, most notably the wealthy Stroganov family, which funded a series of expeditions to seize land and set up forts in pursuit of “soft gold”—furs—and the profits in taxing and controlling the trade. Just as with the European conquest of the New World, empire, business, exploitation and taxation advanced together, bureaucrats following the adventurers, as the initial need to enforce tax collection would lead to the need somehow to administer this expanding territory. For now, though, this was the open frontier attracting all manner of renegades and fugitives, mercenaries and explorers, privateers and profiteers. Every year over the next century, Russia would grow by an estimated 35,000 square kilometers (13,500 square miles) on average, roughly equivalent to today’s Netherlands or the state of Maryland. Ivan had hoped to find some profit—and found an accidental empire.
Terror and Paranoia
Personalized traditions of rule sat uncomfortably with the new, more European styles of war and governance, though, and Ivan would slip into a murderous state that led to the interregnum of civil strife and invasion known as the “Time of Troubles.” For whatever reasons—his traumatic early life, the pain caused by the bone diseases that were slowly crippling him, clinical paranoia—his quest for security would take increasingly erratic and destructive forms.
In 1560, his first wife, Anastasia Romanovna, died, removing a moderating influence on him; Jerome Horsey, a trader with the English Muscovy Company, observed that “she ruled him with admirable affability and wisdom.” Ivan appears to have suspected she was poisoned, like his mother. Meanwhile, the Livonian War was going badly, resistance to reform was continuing and, in 1564, one of his closest advisers, Prince Andrei Kurbsky, defected to Lithuania. The tsar’s childhood-deep suspicion of the nobility metastasized.
So Ivan decamped to the fortified township of Aleksandrova Sloboda and in effect announced his abdication, blaming the boyars for their “treasonous deeds” and corruption, and the church for covering up their sins. This was a daring challenge to the elites, who had no alternative ruler to replace him and faced the anger of the Muscovites. Fearing invasion from abroad, lynching at home and the country’s descent into civil war, they capitulated and begged Ivan to return. He agreed—but his price was the unfettered right to punish whomever he considered a “traitor.” In effect, he demanded and was granted absolute power.
Ivan was not going to rely on the boyars’ promises, though. He decreed the creation of a state-within-a-state, known as the Oprichnina (“Exception”). Largely drawn from the territories of the former Novgorod Republic in the north, he took it as his personal realm. The rest of Russia, known as the Zemshchina (“the Land”), he left in the stewardship of the Boyar Council. Within his new territory, Ivan raised a force called the Oprichniks to be his personal guards and enforcers. The Oprichniks would be unleashed into the Zemshchina to purge noble clans who aroused Ivan’s anger and even conduct a month-long orgy of massacre and rape in Novgorod in 1570.
The Oprichniks wore black monastic robes (Kurbsky called them “children of darkness”) and bore a dog’s head and a broom, symbolizing that they were the tsar’s hounds and would sweep away his foes. They were as ruthless and exploitative as any private army could be. Increasingly, the tsar himself could hardly control them, and they raided and plundered with enthusiasm and impunity. Peasants fled the lands they controlled or attacked, leading to food shortages and a trade crisis, and the tsar himself began to feel prisoner of the very force meant finally to protect him.
When, in 1572, the Crimean Khanate’s forces almost took Moscow, it brought home the risks inherent in dividing the country in two. Given that he was already concerned that the Oprichniks were out of control, Ivan abolished the Oprichnina as suddenly as he had created it, and returned to rule from Moscow. Hopes of a return to the old balance between tsar and boyars were soon dashed, though. He continued to rely on cronies rather than aristocrats, to see plots and treason on every side, and to suppress them as bloodily as ever. His victims were hanged and beheaded, cut to pieces or sewn into bearskins and ripped apart by dogs, but still Ivan saw yet more plotters on every side.
Ivan’s reign closed in crisis and confusion. He so mistrusted his commanders that, in the last years of the Livonian War, he attached his own representatives to shadow each of them, like distant harbingers of the Soviets’ political commissars. Suspicion and desperation divided the aristocracy. The economy was shattered by war, taxation, banditry and depopulation. Fertile land was going unplowed because of a lack of farmers, who had starved or fled south and east, out of Moscow’s reach. So great was the need for peasants that landlords would kidnap them from each other’s lands. Meanwhile, the death of Prince Ivan at his father’s hand in 1581 had left as heir young, churchy Prince Fyodor, a man manifestly without what it would take to bring this country together—after Ivan the Terrible, Russia would get Fyodor the Bellringer.
This state of affairs could not endure. Venetian diplomat Ambrogio Contarini had been amazed at the markets that sprang up on the frozen Moskva River during the long, harsh winters. He was especially struck by the spectacle of butchered livestock stacked by stalls, deep frozen for weeks or even months. “It is curious,” he wrote, “to see so many skinned cows standing upright on their feet.” By 1584, the system Ivans III and IV had put time and blood into creating seemed much like one of those cows: dead, skinned, still standing because it was frozen, but ready meat for the butcher’s ax.
The Time of Troubles and the Rise of the Romanovs
© Helen Stirling
In 1584 Ivan died, laid low by a stroke in the middle of a game of chess. Pious, naive Fyodor (r. 1584–98) was duly crowned, but real power was in the hands of the Romanov and Godunov families, and especially Fyodor’s brother-in-law, Boris Godunov. Once again, the court became a battlefield between clans. Godunov purged the rival Belsky family in 1584, then the Shuiskies and the Nagoi in 1587. Meanwhile, Tsar Fyodor occupied himself with visiting churches across the country and organizing bellringing.
The country lurched from crisis to crisis. In 1590, Godunov started a war with Sweden, hoping for some quick gains. Five years later, the Treaty of Tyavzino left Russia with little to show for the cost. Peasants continued to try to flee the land, and agrarian collapse led to a vicious circle of banditry and scarcity. When Fyodor died in 1598, childless, the Ryurikid dynasty was over. Godunov seized the opportunity and his ally Patriarch Job nominated him to the Zemsky Sobor as successor. Whether out of fear or genuine conviction, they approved him unanimously.
Godunov (r. 1598–1605) was crowned as new tsar. A former Oprichnik, he was smart and ambitious, ruthless and competent. But he had been elevated not by God, but by men, and all his qualities seemed to count for little compared with that handicap. It did not help that his reign was marked by famine, interpreted as a sign of divine disfavor, and an associated peasant rising. In 1604, a pretender claiming to be Dmitry, Fyodor’s half brother—who had actually died in 1591—led a Polish-backed attempt to seize the throne, and Russians, excited by the thought that maybe the Ryurikid dynasty had survived, flocked to his ranks. “Fake news” was already destabilizing governments in the sixteenth century.
When Godunov died in 1605, his 16-year-old son Fyodor II reigned as tsar for just two months before being murdered. After all, without divine right, one candidate’s claims were just as good as another’s. The next eight years are known as the Time of Troubles. The False Dmitry was acclaimed as tsar and himself soon killed. There were coups and intrigues, rebellions and risings, another False Dmitry and a Polish invasion.
Ultimately, this was the culmination of three, long-term processes. It was a dynastic crisis: having established a notion of a sacral ruler legitimated by heavenly mandate, the system could not accommodate a dynastic break, especially as a willful and ambitious aristocracy were emboldened by this in their struggle against an emerging centralized autocracy. It would take the Time of Troubles to break them. It was also a socio-economic crisis, as hereditary boyars squared off with the service gentry, and the flight of peasants from the land undermined them both. It would take the Time of Troubles to force the regime to address these challenges squarely, in effect making both servants of the state. Finally, it was a geopolitical crisis. As Russia rose, it found itself facing new and more formidable threats: Crimean Tatars and Ottomans to the south, and above all the Poles and the Swedes to the west. It would take the Time of Troubles to turn Russia into the kind of modern tax-raising and army-building machine that was emerging in Europe.
Scratch a Russian, Find a...Byzantine?
There is much scholarly debate on whether or not the political culture and institutions of Russia at this time were Mongol-Tatar ones, lightly gilded with a veneer of Byzantine pomp and pageantry. How far does that really matter, though? Russian Orthodox saints were often pagan gods given a halo and a new backstory. Track the family trees of Russia’s great families and they were typically a mix of Slav, Varangian and Tatar. The traditional veche, the city assembly, was derived from ancient Slavic practice, but merged with the thing gatherings familiar to the Vikings. The point is not where different ideas and practices came from, but how they were conceived, what meaning people took from them, and how they developed a life of their own, shaping the country and its people in the future.
Before, Russia had been a canvas on which successive cultures had written their ideals and intentions. Some of these cultural inscriptions lasted, were embellished and emphasized by later generations; others were soon painted over. But the point was that until the rise of Muscovy, the Russians’ role in this process had largely been reactive, even passive. Now, though, they were actively seeking to define themselves, and for that they looked abroad.
Tsar. The new title emulated that of the Roman emperors, and it was the double-headed eagle of Eastern Rome that the ruler took as his symbol. Like the notionally divine emperors of Rome and Constantinople, the tsar was a sacral sovereign, subject only to the God who also gave him his mandate. As Ivan put it in one of his intemperate letters to Prince Kurbsky, the defector, Russia now had “autocracy, by God’s will,” and he was “the Orthodox, truly Christian autocrat.”
Austrian diplomat Baron Sigismund von Herberstein wrote of Ivan the Terrible that the boyars, “being either moved by the grandeur of his achievements or stricken with fear, became subject to him.” The latter was more likely the case, but fear of an individual can be a flimsy basis for lasting power. The two Ivans created the ideological, institutional, even aesthetic basis for divine-right autocracy in Russia, but it would take the comprehensive complex of crises of the Time of Troubles to make Russians, from peasants to boyars, gratefully accept such a ruler, as the alternative to chaos, hunger and invasion.
Eventually, in 1613, the Zemsky Sobor offered the crown to 16-year-old Mikhail Romanov. They wanted a tsar, needed a tsar, and ended up having to create one. His main qualifications, after all, appeared to be that he was unobjectionable, from a family able to trace its history back to the days of the Kievan Rus’, and the son of the formidable Patriarch Filaret. But the truth was that an exhausted Russia demanded a stable future and Mikhail was able to provide that, reigning until 1645 and ushering in the dynasty that would rule Russia until 1917.
Further reading: Andrei Pavlov and Maureen Perrie’s Ivan the Terrible (Pearson, 2003) and Isabel de Madariaga’s book of the same name (Yale University Press, 2006) are the best biographies of this complex man. Robert O. Crummey’s The Formation of Muscovy 1304–1613 (Longman, 1987) is a dense read, but rich in detail. For a change of pace and tone, Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2011) is a short, scatological science-fiction book that imagines the Oprichniks once again ascendant in a near-future tsarist Russia.