17c: Ivan the Terrible

Grand Prince Vasily III, son of Ivan the Great, died in 1533. His widow, Yelena Glinskaya, served as regent for their three year old son, Grand Prince Ivan IV. A strong personality by all accounts, Yelena was an active regent. But her gender and her Serbian-Lithuanian descent offended the boyar families. The boyars had suffered under the autocratic rule of Ivan III and Vasily III. The powerful Shuisky family took the lead in making life miserable for Yelena and her family. Including, apparently, poisoning her in 1538. The Shuiskys would likely have killed young Ivan IV too, but they could not bring themself to harm the descendant (supposedly) of Rurik. So instead they killed Ivan's family friends, including one poor soul who was skinned alive in a Moscow square. By age 13, however, young Ivan resolved to take command of his own life. At his command, the boyar Andrei Shuisky, who had once placed his muddy boots on Ivan's bed, was thrown into a cell full of hungry dogs. On January 16, 1547, Ivan had himself crowned at the Cathedral of the Dormition, not as Grand Prince of Moscow, but as Tsar of all the Russias. The seventeen-year-old with the sad upbringing would rule his country on his own terms: total domination. This he did to such an extent he became known as Ivan Grozny - Ivan the Awesome, or even Ivan the Terrible.

For someone who had endured such a wretched childhood, and who would become one of history's greatest despots - Ivan started his reign on a positive note.  In 1547, he married a boyar's daughter named Anastasia Romanova, whom he loved and honored to her dying day. In 1549 Ivan flirted with democracy by summoning the first zemsky sobor, an assembly of nobility, clergy, and townsmen. Although Ivan intended the zemsky sobor as a mere rubber stamp for his plans, even listening to the people was more than his predecessors ever did. In 1550, he revised the code of laws, or Sudebnik, instituted by his grandfather Ivan the Great. On the whole, the reforms were a positive step for everyone but the poor peasants, who now found it even harder to leave the land they worked. In 1551 Ivan began to show a conservantive streak, calling a council of the Russian Orthodox Church to purify the religion of external influences. In 1559 he published the "Domostroi," a restrictive guide on every aspect of proper Russian family conduct.

Ivan also furthered the family tradition of gathering others' lands. Early in the 1550s he established the streltsy or "shooters," a body of highly trained gunmen recruited from the lower classes which served as Russia's first standing army. The streltsy played an important part in Ivan's two great conquests: the khanate of Kazan (1552) and the khanate of Astrakhan (1556). So pleased was Ivan with the first of these victories that he ordered the building of the Cathedral of the Intercession on the Mound - better known even in Ivan's day as St. Basil's Cathedral. Saint Basil was a wandering holy man of the era who shoplifted each day his daily bread and once dared to rebuke the Tsar himself for not paying attention during church. It was even said that Ivan had the architect blinded so that he would never again create anything so beautiful; to this day St. Basil's Cathedral is probably the world's most familiar Russian church.  Tradition also has it that the Russian people gave Ivan the nickname "Grozny," meaning in this case "the Awesome" after his victory over Kazan. In 1558, Ivan started the Livonian War in a vain attempt to get a port on the Baltic Sea, but this effort bogged down into a long, bloody draw.

At some point in the 1550s Ivan began to turn into Ivan the Terrible. In 1553 he was desperately ill; fearing he was about to die, he asked the boyars to swear loyalty to his baby son. The boyars refused, no doubt recalling what a wonderful little kid Ivan had been. When Ivan recovered, he convinced himself that the boyars had wanted him to die and put his cousin on the throne. In 1560 his beloved wife Anastasiya Romanova died. Ivan convinced himself that the boyars had poisoned her as they had poisoned his mother, and began to torture and execute certain boyars. He had some boyars tortured and executed; even some of his closest advisors fell under suspicion. In the early winter of 1565, Ivan crossed the line into madness. Suddenly leaving Moscow, he announced he was abdicating the throne. But the masses wanted Ivan to remain Tsar, and the boyars were afraid to get in the way. Ivan agreed to remain Tsar provided he was free to reform the state as he pleased. His instrument of reform was Russia's first secret police organization - the Oprichniks. Recruited from Ivan's followers and other hardened criminals, the Oprichniks roamed Russia on horseback, wearing black robes, carrying their unique emblems: a broom and the head of a dog. Any disloyalty to Ivan, real or imagined, was punished by death. Entire cities were put to death, including in 1570 the city of Great Novgorod. The Volkhov River literally ran red with the blood of slaughtered Novgorodians. This was a wretched time for Russia: her first, but unfortunately not its last, reign of terror.

Ivan the Terrible wasn't Russia's only problem. A plague ravaged Russia in 1570. The Lithuanians and Swedes swooped in from the north and west, as did the Tatars (that is, the old Mongols) and the Ottoman Turks from the south. The Tatars even succeeded in burning Moscow down in 1571. These shocks brought Ivan to his senses, at least temporarily. He disbanded the Oprichniks in 1572 and resumed taking his responsibilities seriously. The Livonian War dragged on, the treasury was in ruins, and Ivan had remarried so many times that the Russian Orthodox Church no longer considered his marriages legal. In 1581 he got angry with his pregnant daughter-in-law and when his son, the Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich stepped in to protect his wife, Ivan killed him.  He lived in and out of madness from that point until his death in 1584. Legend has it that he was either strangled or poisoned by his advisors, including his in-law, the boyar Boris Godunov. Despite the damage Ivan did to Russia domestically, his conquests had made Russia into a true empire. The Tatars of Kazan and Astrakhan were not forced to adopt the Russian language, convert to Russian Orthodoxy, or even dress like Russians. Their lands were not taken away and awarded to Russians. In fact Tatar nobles intermarried with the Russiansas if nothing much had happened. Toward the tail end of Ivan's reign, enterprising Cossacks even began to explore Siberia. The Russian Empire would be multi-ethnic, multilingual, and multi-confessional. Compared to the attitudes of contemporary Western conquerors like Cortez and Pizarro, Ivan the Terrible was amazingly humane.

17a: Muscovy becomes Russia
17b: Gathering the Lands
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17d: Time of Troubles
17e: Conclusions