TSAR IVAN IV 

Tsar Ivan IV, also known as Ivan the Terrible, was the most prominent Russian ruler in the second half of the 16th century. 

Vasily the Third, the Grand Prince of Muscovy, was dying. To the torture of his disease were added worries for Ivan, his eldest son and heir to the throne. What would happen to him if trouble broke out? Summoning the boyars, the country’s top aristocracy, Vasily said:

“You know well that our realm goes back to the Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev. We are your born rulers; you are our boyars for all time. I enjoin you, stand fast so that my son may rule when the time comes; so that justice may reign on in our land and no discord come between you; be united, guard my son and act in accord.” 

Vasily’s fears proved well founded. No sooner had the funeral been over than various groups of boyars started a latent fight for power, a fight that the Grand Princess Yelena Glinskaya, the mother of the three-year old Ivan, who ruled the country because of Ivan’s small age, prevented from bursting out into the open. But Yelena, a young woman and a picture of health, ruled for a mere four years when she suddenly died. She was said to have been poisoned. Her death rekindled the boyars’ strife and made Russia impossible to govern altogether. It was in that kind of troublesome atmosphere that the future Tsar Ivan IV grew up. That’s the way he described that period of his youth many years later.

“My brother Georgy and I were left orphans when our mother died. Our senior subjects forgot about us. Completely engrossed in a struggle for wealth and power, they did nothing for us. They were consumed with hatred against one another. They did no end of evil things and murdered many of our father’s well-wishers. They also plundered his treasury. My brother and I were brought up as aliens or paupers. We sorely lacked food and clothing and were allowed no freedom at all. In short, we did not receive the treatment that’s due to children.” 

Ivan retained the bitter memories of his orphaned childhood to the end of his days. Endowed with a good brain and a thoughtful, rather humorous, nature, he soon had them warped and soured by the circumstances he was growing up in, by the outrageous scenes of boyar violence. He became suspicious and embittered. 

Living as he did among people alien to him, in the midst of constant struggle, he grew quickly and matured early. Once, when he was 16, he stopped playing some childish game to discuss his marriage with the boyars. But first, he said, he wished to be crowned. The boyars were touched by his well though-out considerations and political prudence, by the conclusions he had reached without help from anyone. He was still quite young when he began to think of himself as the ruler of Moscow and the power it represented. He said to the boyars:

“We were born and grew up to be the rulers of our own territory, not of any stolen land. It is we, the Russian autocrats, not the boyars or noblemen, who have owned our realms since the very outset.” 

It is his early realization that he was an autocratic ruler that largely determined Ivan’s further rule. Ivan was crowned in 1547 at the age of 17, the first Russian Prince to take the title of a tsar, to receive the sacrament of anointment. He was anointed with the holy myrrh (a special fragrant oil), a procedure that, according to the Holy Scripture, grants the Tsars Grace they need to cope with their burdensome royal performance. Ivan IV gave rise to the ceremony that all subsequent Russian Tsars and Tsarinas went through when being crowned for as long as Russia remained a monarchy. 

The rule of the boyars ended when Ivan IV became Tsar. He shouldered the burden of responsibility for the people and the country and got down to organizing state management. He surrounded himself with clever and educated people, of whom he singled out priest Silvester and Alexei Adashev, and sought their advice to run the country. 

Medieval Russia probably knew no other ten-year period like the one between 1550 and 1560, of which the main development was the seizure of Kazan in 1552. The Kazan Tatar khanate, which had been making forays into Russian lands to plunder and ravage them, had long been the plague of Muscovy. When Russian troops captured Kazan, the troop commander Prince Vorotynsky notified the Tsar of the victory through a courier and asked about further orders. “Sing the praise of the Almighty,” came the reply.

It was after the capture of Kazan that Ivan IV came to be called “Terrible”, or perilous to the adherents of different faiths, enemies and all those who hated Russia. 

The Tsar made a wise decision on the Tatars, namely he ordered a Russian archbishop to Kazan to spread Christianity among Muslims but warned that Tatars should by no means be made to baptize, that they should join the Christian Church of their own free will. He invited wealthy and influential Tatars to serve him in Moscow and left some of his warlords in Kazan. This wise policy helped turn Kazan into a Russian city in just 20 years. 

The capture of Kazan secured Muscovy’s eastern borders against enemies and made it possible for Russians to assimilate the rich lands beyond the Volga, in Central Urals and Siberia. 

But the Kazan campaign did not prevent Ivan IV from carrying out numerous reforms to improve the state administration system, the legislation, the church, in short, all aspects of government that the Tsar sought to make more effective. 

Ivan IV’s successful moves to reform state administration were cut short by a heavy illness. But even worse than that became intense mental suffering inflicted by those he had trusted most. The dying Ivan saw boyars engaged in power-sharing. The Tsar demanded that they should swear allegiance to his small son Dmitry, but they refused, even his closest counselors Silvester and Adashev. What’s more, they named an alternative ruler, - the Tsar’s cousin Prince Vladimir. The country had again found itself on the verge of an internecine strife. 

Ivan IV recuperated from his illness, and his recuperation seemed to have breathed new life into Russia. In 1556 Russian troops seized the khanate of Astrakhan, thereby dashing the Tatars’ hopes for restoring their state and military power in the East. Once he settled the problems in the East, Ivan IV turned his gaze to the West. He decided to force his way to the Baltic Sea to gain a foothold there. But the barrier in his way were the lands of the Livonian Order, which had always been hostile to Russians. The war for the Baltic lands that broke out in 1558 came to be known as the Livonian War. 

The Tsar’s inner circle of boyars opposed the war and insisted that Ivan should continue fighting the Tatars, this time in the Crimea. But the Monarch showed firmness, and even gave up his closest counselors Silvester and Adashev. The first was ordered to a monastery, while the second to the active army. The 30-year-old Tsar started fighting with a sure hand and secured major success at the initial stage. The Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin made this description of Ivan IV’s portrait. 

“Both Russians and the foreigners who were in Moscow at that time portray the Russian Tsar as an example of a pious and wise monarch, seeking the glory and good fortune of their country. The English merchants who traded with Russia said that Ivan had outshone his predecessors both in might and virtue; he had numerous enemies and subdued them. Lithuania, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, the Livonian Order, the Crimea were horror-stricken by his name. His attitude towards his subjects was a mixture of condescension and affability: he often talks to them and even invites them to dinner parties at his palace, yet he is quite authoritative. If he tells a boyar “Off you go!”, the boyar goes running away. If he shows his annoyance with a grandee, the latter keeps a low profile or goes into hiding in utter despair, grows long hair to show his grief until the Tsar says he is pardoned.

In short, no people in Europe is more faithful to their sovereign than Russians. They fear and love their Tsar in equal measure. Ivan IV is up to his ears in hearing and responding to complaints, he is ready to go into every detail and settle all problems, he’s got a lot to do and has no time for catching wild animals or listening to music. He is busy thinking of two things: how to serve God and wipe out the enemies of Russia!”

We’ve already mentioned the fact that the Tsar, when still quite young, had decided that all the boyars were no more than his subjects. But the boyar-princes wouldn’t accept it. They sought a leading role to play in the country and tried to limit his powers. They saw him as a balance-wheel that could maintain stability in the country. Although the number of the highest-born families did not exceed 200 or 300, they played a very important role in running state affairs. In their relentless pursuit of power the boyars were engaged in endless political intrigues against the Tsar. 

In 1560 Ivan’s wife Anastasia died of some unknown disease. The Tsar had serious grounds to believe that she had been poisoned. It came as a terrible shock to him. Extremely sensitive to any sign of encroachment on his authority, Ivan suspected his inner circle of conspiring against him. Yet, he abstained from taking reprisals against them that time. Things came to a head when the boyars started to openly betray him by defecting to his enemies. The Englishman Gorsey, who was in Moscow at the moment, wrote in his diary that, “unless Ivan did not rule with an iron hand, he would not have lived that long. Conspiracies were continually organized against him, yet he invariably uncovered them.” 

This kind of situation took away a lot of Ivan’s energy and prevented him from consolidating his grip on power and the country in general. The situation was growing critical, and this prompted the Tsar to eradicate the opposition. But first he had to secure the people’s support, to find out if they were ready to have him as their Tsar and serve him without thinking of acquiring wealth, of personal ambitions and without engaging in feuding. To get an answer to the question, Ivan left Moscow in early winter 1564, accompanied by the people who were loyal to him. He made a tour of the nearby monasteries and decided on the Alexandrovskaya sloboda, a Moscow suburb. The people took the Tsar’s departure from Moscow as an ill omen. 

The people of Moscow sensed serious problems. But when they learnt that the Tsar had left the Kremlin and Moscow, they were terrified, especially because no one was aware of the reason and of how long he was going to stay away. Exactly one month later Ivan sent two edicts to Moscow. The first, addressed to the boyars, listed the illegal acts and treachery they committed during his childhood. “As a result,” he wrote, “I have left the state with great heartache and gone where God willed.” In the second edict, addressed to the people, he wrote that he harboured no ill-will against them. 

The people were terrified. “How can we live without a Tsar? They cried the flock will perish without its shepherd.” The boyars, the clergy and the merchants sent envoys post-haste to the Tsar with pleas to come back to Moscow. He could rule as he pleased, they said, if only he took up the reins of government again. The Tsar agreed to return. He realized that the people had made their choice. 

Ivan IV was barely recognizable when he returned to Moscow. His small penetrating grey eyes were now dull. His face, which had formerly worn a lively and friendly look, was now pinched and unsociable. Also, little remained of the hair on his head. It clearly took him a lot of emotional struggle to decide on burning out sedition. He knew he was in for a lot of hard work, one that would call for making a Herculean effort.

Ivan IV began by establishing the “Oprichnina”, a special administrative elite, to wipe out the boyar opposition. The idea was to grant the highest-born and therefore the more influential and dangerous noblemen estates in far-away regions of Russia, to make them settle there and thus leave their patrimonies which were handed over to oprichniks, or members of the “Oprichnina”, who were the Tsar’s loyal servants. To force the boyars out, the Tsar resorted to both coercion and terror. 

It was only tested and reliable people, irrespective of their social origin and material wealth, who were allowed to join the “Oprichnina”. Initially the force numbered 1,000, but eventually it turned into a real army of 6,000 oprichniks. 

Once the “Oprichnina” was established, Ivan changed his lifestyle. He formed his inner circle of 300 loyal oprichniks and went to live in Alexandrovskaya sloboda near Moscow. He led a monastic life, with the oprichniks wearing monastic garments and living just as ascetically, in compliance with strict church rules. Ivan IV himself rang the bells calling together his bodyguards to attend the prime, he read and sang in the choir. The oprichinks were a brotherhood of the Tsar’s zealous servants. They rode on horseback with a dog’s head and a broom attached to their horse saddles, to show that they gnawed at the Tsar’s enemies and swept treachery out of Russia. The oprichniks helped uncover conspiracies and neutralize the conspirators in Novgorod and Pskov. Ivan IV punished and pardoned. The thought that Lord is the God of those repenting and the Saviour of the sinners restrained him at times from meting out severe punishment. That was the case in Pskov. 

While on a punitive expedition from Novgorod to Pskov, Ivan put up at a village near the city. He did not sleep at night and was praying when he heard the ringing of church bells, calling the believers together for the prime. He was moved as he imagined repenting criminals, expecting severe punishment and praying to God for saving them from the royal wrath. He felt himself softening towards those people and he decided not to punish them. As he went out of the house, he said quietly: “Everybody is trembling with fear in Pskov, but they needn’t, since I will do them no evil.” What’s more, he met the local “God’s fool” Nicholas when entering the city. Nicholas, with a stick between his legs and pretending he rode on horseback, the way children use hobby-horses, kept saying in front of the mounted Tsar: “Ivan! Dear Ivan! Have some bread and salt, for you mustn’t have had enough of human flesh in Novgorod!” Ivan took the “God’s fool’s” denunciation for the voice of God and left Pskov. 

The “Oprichnina” reached the purpose it was set up for, it did smash the opposition. The Tsar consolidated his grip on autocratic power. But as he rooted out treachery and treason among the boyars, Ivan IV did not flatter himself with expectations that his contemporaries would speak highly of his reign. He said: “I was waiting for someone to come and grieve with me, but no one came to console me, they repaid good with evil and love with hatred.” The enemies of the Tsar portrayed him as a blood-sucker and tyrant who did not even spare his own son and killed him in a fit of temper by hitting him hard in the temple with his staff. The enemies of the Tsar saw to it that this image went down in history. Incidentally, it was the Tsar’s sworn enemy, Jesuitical monk Antonius Possevin, who started the ball rolling by spreading the story of the murder of Prince Ivan. But when researchers uncovered the sepulchres of Ivan IV and of his son Ivan in the Moscow Kremlin’s Archangel Cathedral back in 1963, they established the presence of mercury in their bones, with the concentration of the metal well above normal. Besides, Prince Ivan’s skull was not fractured. This is evidence of that both had been poisoned. It is opportune to recall what the Englishman Gorsey said about Ivan IV, namely that if he didn’t rule with an iron hand, he would not have lived long. 

Unlike historians, the people of Russia realized what kind of person Ivan IV had been and venerated his memory. Ordinary people kept coming to his sepulchre in the Kremlin until the bolshevik revolution of 1917 to hold requiem services and thus pay tribute to Russian Tsar Ivan IV’s outstanding achievements.  
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Illustrations:

N.Orlova, “Russian History. Tsars and Emperors”, Moscow, Bely Gorod, 2001