Ivan the Terrible

Ivan the Terrible: The Tsar Who Built Russia and Wrecked It

On 19 November 1581 Ivan IV rebuked his pregnant daughter-in-law for dressing improperly. His eldest son and heir objected. Ivan struck the young man in the head with his pointed staff and killed him; the daughter-in-law miscarried within hours. In a single afternoon the first Tsar of All Russia destroyed his own succession. The throne passed instead to his second son Feodor, described by contemporaries as weak-minded, who died childless in 1598 - ending the Rurik dynasty and opening the Time of Troubles.

A Neglected Child in the Kremlin

Ivan was born on 25 August 1530 at Kolomenskoye and became Grand Prince at three, on his father Vasili III's death. His mother, Elena Glinskaya, ruled as regent until she died in 1538, possibly poisoned. The Shuisky and Belsky boyar clans then fought over the regency and left the boy and his brother Yuri to fend for themselves. He never stopped rehearsing the grievance; in his later correspondence he wrote that they had been brought up "like vagrants and children of the poorest." Everything he subsequently did to the Russian nobility can be read from that sentence.

The Crown of 1547

On 16 January 1547, aged sixteen, he was crowned in the Cathedral of the Dormition inside the Kremlin as Tsar of All Russia - the first Russian monarch to hold the title formally. The choice of word was deliberate and enormous. As the historian Janet Martin puts it, it "symbolized an assumption of powers equivalent and parallel to those held by the former Byzantine caesar and the Tatar khan." He was claiming two imperial inheritances at once. Two weeks later he married Anastasia Romanovna, who became Russia's first tsaritsa.

The Reforming Years

The first decade and a half was, by any measure, constructive. He issued the Sudebnik of 1550, a revised legal code; convened the zemsky sobor, the first Russian assembly of estates; created the streltsy, the first Russian standing army; assembled a Chosen Council of reformers drawn from nobility and clergy; standardised Orthodox ritual through the Council of the Hundred Chapters in 1551; and introduced local self-government in the rural northeast. In 1553 he established the Moscow Print Yard and Russia's first printing press, though traditional scribes burned it down and the printers fled to Lithuania. He also opened Russia to England, granting the Muscovy Company privileges after Richard Chancellor reached Moscow in 1553, and corresponded at length with Elizabeth I - proposing marriage, and requesting asylum should his rule collapse.

Kazan and Astrakhan

In June 1552 he moved on the Khanate of Kazan with roughly 150 cannon and foreign military engineers. The siege opened on 30 August and the city fell on 2 October, putting the entire Volga under Russian control. Astrakhan, at the river's mouth, followed between 1554 and 1556. Martin's assessment is that "the subjugation of the Muslim khanates transformed Muscovy into an empire and fundamentally altered the balance of power on the steppe." To mark Kazan he commissioned Saint Basil's Cathedral on Red Square.

The Livonian War

In 1558 he attacked Livonia to force a Baltic outlet. The war lasted twenty-five years and drew in Sweden, Lithuania, Poland and the Teutonic Knights. He lost Livonia and Ingria, lost Narva to the Swedes in 1581, and was beaten repeatedly by Stephen Bathory. The truces of Yam-Zapolsky in 1582 and Plussa in 1583 left Muscovy with no direct access to the Baltic at all.

The Oprichnina

After a serious illness in 1560, the death of Anastasia the same year and the defection of his adviser Andrey Kurbsky in 1564, Ivan turned on the nobility. On 3 December 1564 he withdrew to Aleksandrova Sloboda and announced his abdication, returning only on the condition of absolute power. He then carved out the oprichnina, a separate realm under his exclusive control, policed by a personal corps of a thousand oprichniki under Malyuta Skuratov. They purged boyar families wholesale, and stripped the peasantry so thoroughly that contemporaries recorded them paying "in one year as much as they used to pay in ten." Peasants fled, harvests failed, and grain prices rose roughly tenfold. In 1570, on unproven suspicion that Novgorod's nobles meant to defect to Lithuania, he sent the oprichniki into the city. The Third Novgorod Chronicle records five weeks of killing at five or six hundred a day, many by drowning in the Volkhov; estimates of the dead run from a few thousand to sixty thousand. Novgorod never recovered. Afterwards Ivan compiled lists of the Christian dead and sent them to monasteries so that each could be prayed for by name.

Why Ivan Is Called a Genius

One strand of the claim is literary and specific. Ivan was a poet and composer whose Orthodox hymn "Stichiron No. 1 in Honor of St. Peter" survived to be set to music by Rodion Shchedrin, and the scholar D. S. Mirsky called him "a pamphleteer of genius" on the strength of his correspondence with the defector Kurbsky - letters of such rhetorical force that a Harvard professor once argued they must be later forgeries, a claim most scholars reject. That is verbal invention of a rare order in sixteenth-century Russian.

The second strand is structural, and it is where the honest accounting gets hard. Ivan correctly identified the boyar clans as the obstacle to central authority and engineered an institution to break them; he took a title designed to inherit two empires; and he left behind a standing army, a legal code, an assembly, a press and a permanently altered constitution in which, as historians put it, tsarist autocracy and despotism now lay at the heart of the Russian state. But he then destroyed his own achievement. The Livonian War cost him twenty-five years and the Baltic; the oprichnina impoverished the country; he killed his heir. Martin's verdict is flat: "his subjects were impoverished, his economic resources depleted, his army weakened, and his realm militarily defeated... Muscovy was on the brink of ruin." Worse for the legend, the strategic-genius reading of Ivan was itself manufactured - Stalin instructed Soviet historians to celebrate him, and told Sergei Eisenstein: "Ivan the Terrible was very cruel. You can show that he was cruel, but you have to show why it was essential to be cruel." The defensible claim is narrow: Ivan was a genuinely gifted writer and an inventive institution-builder whose paranoia consumed both.

The Reckoning

He married at least six times, though the Church recognised only four, and had nine children. He was intelligent and devout by contemporary account, and also paranoid, rage-prone and increasingly unstable; the Soviet exhumation of 1963 found a man of 178 centimetres with severe bone disease who could barely move at the end. He died on 28 March 1584 in Moscow, of a stroke, while playing chess. His empire then stretched from the Caspian to western Siberia, and his state was close to collapse. Russia has never entirely settled the argument: the Orthodox Church has blocked attempts to canonise him because he executed Metropolitan Philip, while a monument raised in Oryol in 2016 still drew crowds.