Twenty years of marriage, but no offspring. This is a disaster for any royal couple, and Grand Duke Vasily III of Moscow was convinced of this. His wife, the beautiful Solomonia Yurievna, went on pilgrimages, asked witch doctors, anointed her crotch with a mixture of honey and oil, and still nothing. And the Prince’s eyes watered when he looked at birds’ nests while riding in the forest. “The birds are happier than me, at least they have children! Who will be my successor, for my brothers are not worthy.”
Not that his conscience was particularly burning, he ordered his wife to go to a monastery. She resisted, saying that after so many years of marriage, she really did not deserve such a punishment. So he ordered her to be taken by force to a monastery in Suzdal. While she was being dressed in her nun’s habit and shorn, she resisted fiercely, shouting, “God sees me and will take vengeance on my persecutors!”
Meanwhile, Vasily tried to persuade the Patriarch of Constantinople to allow him to remarry, even though according to the rules of the Orthodox faith he could not remarry while his first wife was still alive. The Patriarch was a stubborn and unyielding man and immediately refused Vasilios’ request: “Vasilios, if you marry another, you will have an evil son, your country will be overwhelmed by violence and tears, your blood will flow in streams, and your cities will be consumed by flames.”
But Vasily was also stubborn, shrugged his shoulders and said, “We will do without his blessing.” Meanwhile, he was already frowning at Jelena Glinska, whose father was a Lithuanian refugee. Jelena was beautiful, smart and passionate, and brought up more “German”, so she was very different from her Russian peers.
The wedding ceremonies lasted three days. Before the church ceremony, the newlyweds sat at a table with a plate of bread and salt, and eighty skins of black kuna covered their seats to ward off evil spirits. But it was some years before Jelena became pregnant, and evil tongues said that the child had not been fathered by a prince at all, but by the Queen’s friend Obolensky-Telepnyov. But so what, Vasily was sure that he would become a father and on 25 August 1539 a child was born who was named Ivan.
The grateful Father was drunk with happiness and showered churches with gifts, opened dungeons and pardoned those who deserved his mercy. Far from Moscow, a Kazan canon heard the news of Ivan’s birth and sighed: “A ruler has been born who already has two teeth. With one he will crush us Tartars, with the other he will crush you.”
Two years later, Jelena gave birth to another son, who was named Yuri. The grateful prince made a pilgrimage to the Holy Trinity Monastery, but suddenly he felt a sharp pain in his side and a foul-smelling substance began to ooze from his pus. He was very weak and the purulent ooze was increasing. He felt that the end was near and wanted to die in the capital by all means. It was with difficulty that they made their way to snowy Moscow, where the courtiers were waiting for them, as the rumour had already spread that the ruler was dying.
Candles were burning in front of the dying man’s bed, monks were murmuring prayers and the ruler was dictating his will in a weak voice. He appointed the three-year-old Ivan as his heir, his mother Elena and the most influential boyars as his guardians until he was fifteen. Many did not like having a foreigner as regent and a child as ruler, but they complied.
On the fourth of December 1533, no one was asleep in Moscow at midnight. Snow was falling when the Kremlin bells announced the death of Prince Vasily III.
Elena mourned, but quickly got down to the business of ruling. She was helped by her sweetheart Obolensky-Telepnyov. Fearing that her husband’s brothers, Yuri and Andrei, would try to seize the throne, she imprisoned the former to starve to death, the latter, who tried to stir up a rebellion against a foreign woman, was strangled, and thirty other rebels were hanged from the gallows.
On 3 April 1538, Elena died in terrible pain and rumours began to spread at court that she had been poisoned. Eight-year-old Ivan and his brother Yuri were left motherless, both uncles were imprisoned and no one cared for them in these turbulent times.
After the death of the Regent, the warriors began to raise their heads. The first to speak up was Prince Vasily of Shu, who was hungry for the throne. Next, he unmasked the lover of the late regent, Telepnov, and threw him into the dungeon, where he starved to death. But some other warriors also wanted to seize the empty throne, and ferocious fighting and killing began.
Young Ivan witnessed this as he was claimed by rivals for the throne. He witnessed bloody events and soon he too, a boy of only 14, was gripped by a passion for torture. He plucked out the feathers of birds and gouged out their eyes, parched their bellies and took his fill, throwing puppies from the tower into the depths.
Ivan the Terrible later recalled: ‘My brother and I were treated like beggars, we were not allowed any freedom, we were deprived of clothing and food. We were afraid they would kill us.”
Ivan hated the boyars, but was convinced that his princely birth placed him under God’s protection. One evening, emboldened, he addressed the boyars gathered for dinner and reproached them for taking advantage of his youth. He reminded them that there were many culprits among them, but that he would have the greatest of them, the one responsible for the chaos in the country, Prince Shuja, executed.
Then he was frightened by his own words. Will anyone obey him, or will they just throw him in prison? The soldiers were stunned by the young man’s firm words. Finally, someone who wants to restore order. The guards grabbed Shuisky and threw him to the hungry hounds, who ate him alive.
A young ruler becomes Tsar
But that was not the end of the turmoil in Russia. Ivan was still too young to rule alone, and one or another boyar was always creeping up on him. Only now did his strange nature come to the fore. His favourite pastime was bear hunting, and as the drunken gang rampaged through the forests, attacking villages, beating peasants and raping girls, Ivan enjoyed the sight of the debauchery.
His half-bearded brother Yuri ignored this, toys and good food were enough for him. But Ivan was not stupid, he read books by candlelight at night, he was interested in theology and history. He voraciously drank in knowledge, asking questions and demanding answers. He wanted to know his country, so he travelled it, visited monasteries, bowed before icons and asked for blessings.
He was not yet interested in events outside Russia’s borders, where the Tatars of Kazan and Crimea were gaining strength and going on raids and marches through Russian villages. It was only when they started attacking monasteries, beheading monks, cutting ears and ripping out tongues, raping nuns, gouging out eyes and piling people on stakes, that Ivan, already 16 years old, came to his senses and with great difficulty drove the Tatars across the Volga.
It was also then that he began to realise how small his principality of Russia was, stretching only from the northern reaches of the Volga to the Dnieper and from the North Sea to the Don. Beyond that were the vast Siberian steppes, the Kazan and Crimean Khanates, the Duchy of Lithuania and the lands of the Baltic. He hoped that the nearby lands would be easy prey and that he would extend the boundaries of the principality.
At that time, Moscow already had 40,000 houses clustered around the Kremlin Fortress. The houses were made of wood, the roads were muddy at the slightest rain, and in the Kremlin courtyard there was a fairground where government decrees were proclaimed, but no one heard them in the general din. At night, all agreements to enter the Kremlin were closed, and a crowd of guards looked after the Prince’s safety.
The Duma, or Boyar Council, also met in the Kremlin. The noblemen-combatants, all from distinguished families, considered it almost an honour to be ruled and commanded by the milk-toothed Ivan, and thought of ways to get rid of him. Russia was a distinctly backward country at that time. Merchants, who made their fortunes trading in Central Asia and the Far East, had a special privileged position on the social ladder, with some Russian merchant caravans even venturing as far as Beijing.
But the richest was the church, which was exempt from all taxes. Women, of course, as emissaries of the devil, were an oppressed class. “The prettier she is, the more dangerous she is”, the priests claimed, so women were almost impossible to see in public. Only the husband had access to them.
When Ivan was 17, he decided to get married. He had enough experience with women, maids and villagers, but he wanted something better. The priests doubted that a foreign princess would want to come to a land of violence and disorder, so they suggested that he look around for local girls.
But before he married, he demanded to be crowned Tsar. When he read books, he saw that the most eminent rulers had always been tsars. Why should he not also be Tsar, heir to Byzantine Rome, and Moscow, as the third Rome, supplant Constantinople?
The boyars nodded obediently, and so on 16 January 1547, the coronation took place in Moscow according to the old Byzantine rite. The Metropolitan blessed the monarch in a solemn procession, placed the crown on his head, thrust the sceptre and the globe into his hands and spoke: “Long live the holy, God-crowned Tsar, the Grand Prince of Vladimir and Moscow, autocrat of all Russias.”
Later, for a hefty sum of money, Ivan was recognised as Tsar of Russia by the Greek Patriarch in Constantinople. Now it was the turn of the wedding, and heaps of noble maidens were brought to the Kremlin to meet the new Tsar. The Emperor looked them over, spoke a few words to them and finally walked up to Anastasia Romanovna and handed her a handkerchief studded with gold and pearls.
The wedding took place just two weeks after his coronation as Tsar, and the ceremony was exactly as it had been for his father and mother all those years ago. A few days after the wedding night, Ivan and his wife dressed up as pious pilgrims and set off on foot in the snow to the Holy Trinity Monastery, where they fasted.
She was very pious and understanding, but Ivan was haughty over others, overwhelmed by unlimited power and ignored administrative work. He felt that the day-to-day administration of the country should be handled by the Glinski family, which was therefore increasingly hated as a symbol of violence, dishonesty and corruption.
But there was no point in complaining about what the Glinskis and their cronies were doing. But when a messenger informed him that the Kremlin’s great bell had fallen from the bell tower for no good reason, the beleaguered Tsar thought that this was a bad omen for the future, as it was not the first time that this had happened.
On 12 April 1547, a fire destroyed many houses in the central Moscow district of Kitaygorod. In late spring, another fire destroyed the houses of craftsmen. A strong wind blew the blaze away and wooden buildings collapsed in bundles of sparks, the flames reached beyond the Kremlin walls to the churches and mansions, the flames licked icons and relics, and then a violent explosion blew apart the ammunition stores. People turned into living torches fled through the streets.
The Tsar and Tsarina took refuge in a village near Moscow and watched the fire from there. It was burning continuously, as there was no organised fire-fighting. Towards evening, the fire died down. It was rumoured that there were hundreds of victims and rumours spread among the people that the fire had not broken out by accident. “The clay people are to blame for it. The old princess Anna of Glinska ripped the hearts out of the dead, soaked them in water and sprinkled it on the streets. That’s why Moscow was burning.”
Meanwhile, Princess Glinskaya was at her estate in Rzhev, but her other son Yuri remained in Moscow, frightened by the rumours and took refuge in the church. The enraged townspeople, now homeless and without anything, went after him and strangled him in front of the altar, dragging the body to Kremlin Square. The frenzied crowd demanded the death of the remaining members of the Glinskaya family and went to them.
But Tsar Ivan thought enough was enough. He will be the one to order who should be punished, not the crowd. He had some demonstrators shot, some were hanged and peace was restored. Instead of the Glinskii, he set up a new council, composed of nobles and clergy, to advise him in administrative matters, but which merely took note of the Tsar’s decisions.
But Moscow burnt down and had to be rebuilt. Soon the city was bustling with workers. All Russia had to contribute to the rebuilding of Moscow, and the country was groaning under the taxes. He had removed all the Glinskys from high office, but were they the only ones who were getting rich at his expense? No, was his conclusion, the wealth accumulated by others is actually his wealth. So he accused the boyars: “Those who have usurped high positions and honours in my name, enriched themselves unjustly and extorted the people, let them fear.”
But Tsar Ivan, despite his dissolute life, was a clever young man of twenty and saw that the country needed some reforms. The authorities were now required to apply the same laws throughout Russia, and judges elected by the communes had to sit in the courts alongside civil servants. He ordered flogging for minor offences, and the death penalty for repeat offences, blasphemy, murder and arson. The judge also had to give reasons for his judgement. Torture was, of course, allowed.
They call him Ivan the Terrible
Ivan wanted to unite the country under a single rule and put new people from non-tribal families in high positions. Russia should know that it is no longer ruled by noble boyars, but by the Tsar and his assistants. The people were astonished and could hardly believe how much Ivan had changed in a few years into a determined ruler.
But the determined ruler had to defend his borders, especially against the Tatars, who were encroaching from Kazan. If the first battle against the Tatars failed in midwinter, that was no reason why Ivan and his troops should not have camped outside the walls of Kazan in 1550. 60,000 Russian soldiers stormed the walls, broke into the city through a breach and massacred all the inhabitants, but still failed to take the central fortress.
Now the weather had changed, the rain was falling incessantly, the gunpowder was wet, the food routes to the hinterland had been cut, and Ivan, who was at the head of the army, decided to retreat with gritted teeth. He set up a post on a fortified position in enemy territory, which was to be the starting point for the second marches of the war. In Moscow, it was rumored that Tsar Ivan had actually been defeated because, as a young man, he was not yet fit to be a warlord.
This angered Ivan, and he set off again against the Tartars. In front of the Kazan fortress, he unloaded the cannons and prepared the timber for the siege towers, and the soldiers approached what seemed to be an empty city. The inhabitants had taken refuge in the central fortress.
Then the gates of the fortress opened, Tartars rushed out with swords and the Russians retreated in panic. A few more attacks on the fortress were unsuccessful, and then German engineers dug a tunnel under the fortress, filled it with gunpowder and threw part of the fortress into the air. A bloody confrontation broke out and the Russians killed all who stood in their way.
On 2 October 1552, the Russian flag flew over Kazan. The Kazan ruler bowed to Ivan, acknowledged him as his master and promised to be Christianised in Moscow.
All Russia celebrated, and the old Metropolitan Makarios, the clergy and nobles fell on their knees before Ivan and worshipped him. The Tartar threat was eliminated, and Tsar Ivan ordered the Church of Vasily Blazhenski, with its many onion domes, to be built next to the Kremlin to commemorate the event. It took ten years to build and was paid for by the Kazan people.
But the joy did not last long, the Tatars began to rebel and refused to pay their taxes, the plague raged in Pskov and Tsar Ivan fell so ill that those around him were convinced he was dying. Ivan dictated his will, stipulating that his son Dimitri, who was only a few months old and still in his cradle, should succeed him. In doing so, he ignored his brother George, who was of weak mind.
But to recognise the power of the baby and accept the regency? The scheming warlords did not want that and have already hatched a conspiracy. But the unborn Tsar-baby Dimitri suddenly died of a cold and Tsar Ivan was desperate. Only when the Tsar gave birth to another son, Ivan, nine months later, was his grief forgotten.
He made short work of the rebellious Tatars. Not only did he again subdue the Kazan Khanate, but Russian troops penetrated further south and subdued the Astrakhan Khanate, giving Russia an outlet to the Caspian Sea.
But Tsar Ivan had another worry. He was told that in August 1553, a foreign ship had landed in the north, at the mouth of the Dvina River, where a few dozen years later the city of Arkhangelsk would be built, with sailors speaking an unknown language. This ship was the remnant of an English expedition to discover a northern passage to India.
Ivan invited the English to Moscow and they told him that there were powerful and powerful empires to the west of Russia, eager to trade with Russia. Ivan thought better of it and hesitantly allowed English merchants to come with their goods to Russia. But England was far away and did not worry him. The Tsar was more concerned about Lithuania and Poland, which denied him access to the ice-free Baltic ports. Military forays into this part of Europe were not always successful.
Anastasia gave birth to his second living son, Fyodor. The succession was once again assured. But the sixth birth exhausted Tsarina Anastasia, prayers and various healing lotions did not help, and she died on the morning of 7 August 1560. Ivan’s despair bordered on madness. He was self-absorbed, trying to understand why God had punished him so.
When Anastasia died, something changed in him and all the low instincts of his childhood came out. He discovered that he was alone, with only conspirators around him. He started drinking and looking for mistresses. But first he had to eliminate all the enemies who had betrayed him and thus disgraced him. Those who took it best had to take refuge forever in a monastery by the cold North Sea. Others, guilty or innocent, ended up in prison, where they slowly starved to death.
But that was not enough. All those who opposed him had relatives, and they had descendants. So away with them. He no longer threw them in prison, but ordered them to be killed. So he had a mother and her five sons murdered, who had been a friend of his opponent decades before. The once pious Tsar now ignored the fast and mocked the pious. In such an atmosphere, even the most innocent boyars began to wonder whether they might not be culprits in the eyes of the Tsar.
Now Tsar Ivan’s favourite job was to receive and question the leaders, because even a small denunciation could turn out to be a perfidious conspiracy. He immediately ordered an investigation and dispatched spies. The judges were terrified, as the verdict now depended on the whim and good or bad will of the Tsar. The people around him tried to dissuade him from the bloody violence that had become his much-needed pleasure. They warned him that a Tsar without a Tsaress is not a perfect Tsar, and Ivan listened to them.
He knew he had to remarry, but to whom. The sister of the King of Poland refused, so he later invaded Poland. Finally, he chose the beautiful daughter of a Circassian prince. The marriage took place, but Ivan soon regretted his choice. The Circassian was illiterate, quarrelsome and could not forget her Asiatic habits.
The Tsar was furious when he heard this new insult. The sister of the King of Poland, who had rejected him, accepted the marriage of the heir to the Swedish throne. Tsar Ivan could not bear this insult, gathered an army of half Circassians and Tatars, placed his cousins Andrei of Kursk and Vladimir Andreyevich at its head and invaded Lithuania. At the head of the army they carried a coffin in which the body of the King of Poland was to be buried.
Ivan’s army plundered, killed and burned, and Lithuania soon resembled a moonscape. But as soon as they heard that Cherkessina had borne him a son, Vasily, the soldiers rushed back to Moscow. But his joy was short-lived, as little Vasily died only a few weeks later.
Why was God punishing him like this, Ivan wondered, after his ill-advised brother George had died, and in a fit of rage he killed his modest and pious wife Juliana. He also killed someone just like that, and after each crime he would run to the confessional, where he would accuse himself of being “a stinking dog and a bloody murderer”. Some people now call him Ivan the Terrible.
No one was safe from the Tsar’s frenzied outbursts, and many fighters took refuge abroad, mainly in Poland, or even under the wing of the Turkish Sultan. One of the most famous boyars who sought the protection of King Sigismund Augustus of Poland was undoubtedly Andrei Kursk, a descendant of an old royal family. He won many battles and lost only one, and feared for his life. In the dark of night, he bade farewell to his family, saddled up his horse and took refuge with the Poles, who were naturally eager to welcome him.
Ivan the Terrible was mad again, because it was a spit in his face. He immediately had the fugitive’s mother, wife and son thrown into prison, and they all died a few years later. But the Tsar did not stand still, he sent letters to Kursky, accusing him of terrible mistakes and crimes, and he did not spare even himself:
“What you say about my atrocities is a brazen lie. I only speak out against traitors. Are they being spared anywhere? I confess my sins, but God’s mercy is infinite and will save me. You, on the other hand, think about your actions. I am writing to you not out of pride, but out of Christian charity, that this admonition may help you to reform and save your soul.”
But Kurski did not remain indebted to him, writing back to him and accusing him in his letters. This correspondence lasted from 1564 to 1579. Kurski hated his Tsar so much that he incited the Tatars against him and persuaded the King of Poland to invade Lithuania with his troops.
Russian troops repulsed both incursions and this double victory should have pleased Ivan. But no, he was haunted by the feeling that the boyars were plotting against him. When they spoke to him and bowed down to him, they were undoubtedly lying to him, because you could see it in their faces. Even though they were silent, they were up to something, he was sure.
The Tsar’s “handrails”
That’s why Tsar Ivan decides to take radical action. One day, he ordered the sleighs to be closed, the entourage to be supplied with the bare necessities – including icons, furs and gold – and set off into the unknown with his two sons in full view of the seething Muscovites. No one knew where he was going or when he would return.
People panicked. What will they do now without the Tsar? A month later, the Tsar’s letter arrived from a monastery north of Vladimir. In it, he accused the nobility and high-ranking officials of treason, plundering the state treasury and collaborating with the enemy. On the other hand, the Tsar did express his sympathy for the little people and the poor.
The little people were seized by rage, anger at the combatants and the officials. A crowd of citizens gathered in groups to storm the Kremlin and punish the boyars. They were frightened, but the priests were even more frightened and decided to march to the Tsar and beg his forgiveness with tears in their eyes. This seemed to them much better than to give in to the anger of an angry mob.
Tsar Ivan received them angrily, and was only mollified when the priests acknowledged his divine supremacy. The Church has publicly renounced its right to plead for the innocent or even the guilty if they are worthy of mercy. The Tsar will now be able to punish traitors at will and plunder their property, regardless of the opinion of the clergy.
Tsar Ivan returned to Moscow on 2 February 1565, where he was greeted by a crowd of people. But the sight of the Tsar shocked them. He had aged very much, his skin was withered, his hair thin, his back bent and his chest sunken, and he was only 34 years old.
Ivan declared that the country would now be divided into two parts; the “oprichina” – that is, his personal property – and the rest of the territory, which would also be under his control, but this part would retain the boyar council and its officials. He also quickly defined what would be his personal property; a few Moscow districts, 27 Russian towns, 18 districts and all the road territory.
Of course, this now needs to be precisely defined and demarcated, and the Tsar has entrusted this task to the “watchmen” – a kind of personal militia. Now it has dawned on the boyars: the Tsar is taking their villages, their peasants and their property in order to crush them. So they have to give up their hereditary estates, and are given much inferior land as compensation. 12,000 noble families have to move, and they will lose influence and property.
The Tsar hoped to consolidate his influence. In place of the shameless boyars, he put the newly-recruited nobility, made up of his officials, as a privileged caste, answerable only to him. From among the officers he chose 6 000 young men, all roots and brutes, to serve as his bodyguards. They were dressed in black uniforms, with a dog’s head and a broom on their saddle, signs that their task was to chase and persecute.
The oppressors were thus given a great deal of power, and they took advantage of it. They could fine, torture men, rape women, gouge out children’s eyes, burn villages, and no one could accuse them of anything, because they were encouraged to do so by Tsar Ivan himself, who was convinced that the oprichniki were loyal to him if the people feared and hated them.
The oprichniki immediately began executions, which were carried out in the Kremlin’s main square. Among the first victims were Prince Alexander of Shu, the hero of the capture of Kazan, and his son. Both were accused of wanting to kill the Tsar. When the prince’s head was cut off, his son picked it up and kissed it gently, and then he too put his head on the soapbox.
On the same day, six more soldiers were beheaded and a seventh was impaled on a stake. He died for 24 hours, all the time singing praises to God. The other warriors were driven into monasteries, expelled from the country, or demanded to pay bail. Nevertheless, Ivan’s morbid fear kept him awake. He counted down the beats of the Kremlin clock as if it signalled his death. He grew sick of Moscow and moved to the Aleksandrovskoye Sloboda mansion.
The mansion was gloomy, the rooms equally so, some lavishly furnished, others monastically modest, with prison cells in the basements. All the houses in the settlement were reserved for the jailers. Tsar Ivan dreamed of founding a new monastic order and therefore indulged in excessive piety. He prayed, bowed down and banged his forehead on the floor, dressed in a sackcloth cloak and with a wooden cross on his chest. When he had finished praying, he went to the cellar, where he enjoyed the blood spurting, the bones cracking and the howls of the martyrs, and felt the sweetness of a love spasm.
In the evening, there was drinking and revelry. Sometimes women of low status were brought in for the drinking, stripped, whipped and raped, and most were eventually killed. Then the Tsar went to bed. While he lay in bed, the monks would read him devotional stories and he would think about who else he should kill. He got out of bed, fell on his knees, folded his hands in prayer and gave his colleagues the cruel orders for the next day.
Rumours of the Tsar’s strange behaviour soon spread beyond Russia’s borders, and many were convinced that the Tsar had gone mad. In his brighter moments, Tsar Ivan the Terrible was also involved in affairs of state. For example, he granted English merchants the privilege of trading with Russia. He also admired and supported skilled German craftsmen. But he still had a thirst for blood and pondered the plots that the boyars would hatch against him.
It was now the turn of the three Princes of Rostov to go to the afterlife. One of them was surrounded by guards in Nizhny Novgorod, stripped naked and taken to the Volga. There one of them beheaded him and took his head to the Tsar. The other was roasted over a broken slab and stuck with needles under his fingernails. A third was simply dismembered.
But Tsar Ivan the Terrible was also troubled by the new Metropolitan Philip, a pious ascetic from a monastery in the Solovetsky Islands on the White Sea, who advised him to abolish the abbey and unite Russia into a single entity. “Silly old man, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Ivan laughed at the time.
But when Tsar Ivan came to Mass, dressed in a kerchief and covered with a high hood, Metropolitan Philip refused to give him the blessing, saying, “In this strange dress I do not recognise my ruler. I no longer recognise him in his works. How wilt thou come before the court of God sprinkled with the blood of the righteous? I speak to you as a pastor of souls, and I fear God alone.”
Tsar Ivan turned pale with anger and decided that the punishment for such talk would come later. In November 1568, the oprichniki broke into the church where Metropolitan Philip was celebrating Mass, read the sentence of disqualification, tore off his clerical vestments and sentenced him to life imprisonment.
Something else was troubling Tsar Ivan. The arrogance and wealth of the cities of Novgorod and Pskov. Rumours also reached his ears that both cities were ready to submit to King Sigismund Augustus of Poland. A forged letter confirmed this intention. He immediately set off with his army of oprichniki, first for Novgorod. He invaded the town and set about killing the townspeople, who were guilty of nothing more than being inhabitants of Novgorod.
They flogged men with a whip, tortured them in front of their wives, cut their tongues and noses, castrated and burned their bodies, and then took the mutilated men and their families to the river in sledges, killed them and threw them into the water. Their march was fatal for more than 15,000 victims. All the churches were plundered, all the houses looted.
The Tsar then went on to Pskov, but changed his mind and went to Moscow, where a five-month-long criminal trial against the allegedly guilty and still living citizens of Novgorod and Pskov was about to begin. The detention and torture centres did not even stop working.
In July 1570, more than ten vespas were set up in the spacious Kremlin Square and a large cauldron of boiling water was lit. A drumming announced the arrival of the Tsar and his son, but the square was empty. The Muscovites took cover, having had enough of the horrors. The riot police rode through the streets and herded the townspeople into the square.
In an act of generosity, the Tsar pardoned a few dozen of those sentenced to death, but the rest had to die. The main prisoner was Prince Ivan Viskovati, accused of wanting to cede Novgorod to the Poles. They gagged him, hanged him by the legs and cut his skin into strips. Others were immersed in cold and boiling water so that “their skin peeled off like an eel’s”. The rest were piled on stakes, hung and quartered. Within four hours, the oppressors had killed around 200 convicts.
Moscow is burning
Tsar Ivan’s physical appearance was deeply marked by his all-round debauchery. He was only 40 years old, but he was all greasy, his hair and beard were greying, and he was still at his best among the oprichniki. He did not care about the devastation caused by the ophthalmia. Many fields were uncultivated, the harvest was very poor, and in winter there was famine, and in some places there was even human slaughter. The famine was followed by a plague and the Tsar ordered the roads leading to the capital to be closed.
But the disasters that have struck Russia are not over yet. At the beginning of 1571, one hundred thousand Tatars invaded southern Russia. Tsar Ivan knew that he could not successfully resist them, as he had most of his army in the west, where he was threatened by the Poles. Moscow would have to be sacrificed and his troops retreated to the vicinity of the capital.
On May 24th 1571, the Tatars were already burning houses in the Moscow suburbs, and the fire spread into a fiery hurricane. The Muscovites fled from it and sought refuge in the Kremlin fortress. They banged on the iron gates, but they remained closed. The fire caught them helpless and people burned like torches. Some jumped into the Moskva River and drowned. Moscow became a heap of smoking rubble and charred corpses.
Tsar Ivan was nowhere to be seen, having taken refuge in Rostov. The Tatars did not dare to attack the fortified Kremlin and went to their steppes. Only now did Tsar Ivan order the inhabitants to rebuild the city. First the dead had to be removed and they were quickly swept into the Moskva River. But there were so many that the river had almost stopped flowing. The stench was disgusting, the rotting corpses were poisoning the wells, and the people no longer dared to drink the water and were dying of thirst.
Despite problems with the Tatars, who now demanded that he return Kazan and Astrakhan to them, Tsar Ivan entertained the idea of remarrying after the death of his second wife, Maria, and of marrying his son, 17-year-old Ivan, at the same time. The two weddings took place in October and November 1571, but three weeks after the wedding, Marfa, the Tsar’s third wife, fell ill and died. Perhaps she had been poisoned, the Tsar wondered.
This did not extinguish his desire for a married family, although according to the rules of the Orthodox faith, he should not have married more than three times. “The first marriage is marriage, the second marriage is permissiveness, the third marriage is a violation of the law, and the fourth marriage is impiety, or something like what we know in animals,” the monks instructed him.
But Tsar Ivan refused. “I had no physical contact with my third wife because she was ill and remained untouched. A third marriage is therefore pointless,” he argued, looking menacingly at the clerics. They bowed their heads and Tsar Ivan married a fourth time.
It seemed that fortune favoured Ivan the Terrible. In 1572, King Sigismund Augustus of Poland died without a male heir, and the Russian Tsar flirted with the idea of usurping Poland with a ruler favourable to him, or even by becoming Polish ruler himself.
The Tatars were also defeated along the Volga, and the prestige of the Russian army increased immeasurably. From now on, Ivan was sure, the soldier would be his support, because he no longer needed the oppressors who had rampaged through the land for seven long years. He renounced them and proclaimed: “In a public place, whoever speaks the word ‘opprobrious’ will be flogged.”
It is strange that the oprichniks bowed to the will of the ruler without a word and became ordinary nobles again, without any special privileges. Tsar Ivan also chose new advisers and the star of Boris Godunov, a distant relative of his first wife, began to rise. He was a young man of imposing stature and shrewd mind, who advised the Tsar to exercise moderation in his rule.
However, Tsar Ivan’s Polish succession fell through. The Polish Electoral Assembly chose a Frenchman, Henry, Duke of Valois, as the new King. Poland thus eluded him, and the Tsar sent his congratulations to the new Polish King with gritted teeth.
Tsar Ivan was 45 years old, but despite the hopes of the fighters, he still had not calmed down. He had become poor and was rapidly wasting away, but he was sexually insatiable. He soon tired of his fourth wife and sent her to a monastery. His bed was warmed by a peasant girl, but she too soon died, and Tsar Ivan took the beautiful Vasilisa Melentyeva as his companion. But it was not many weeks before Vasilisa, caught in the act of adultery, had to watch her lover being impaled on a stake, and she ended up in a monastery.
The Tsar soon chose a new wife, but when he realised on their wedding night that she was no longer a virgin, he went mad with rage. The unfortunate woman was tied to horses, dragged to the river and drowned. The Tsar was fed up with life and with ruling. He decided to stop being Tsar and to leave the reigns to the young Tartar prince Simeon, who signed orders with a trembling hand and received envoys as Ivan asked him to do.
This comedy could have lasted a year, but Ivan dismissed Simeon and resumed his reign. It was about time, because the Poles were once again without a king. The French did not like it in Poland and returned to France instead. But even this way, the Poles crossed Tsar Ivan off the list of possible Polish kings and elected Stephen Bathory, Prince of Hungary.
Tsar Ivan was once again green with anger and war with Poland was almost inevitable. Towns were again burned, dead men were piled up, impalement on stakes became a common punishment, all virgins were raped, villages burned and church treasures plundered.
In the autumn of 1577, Tsar Ivan returned from a military campaign to his favourite residence, Aleksandrovska Sloboda. He was still not at peace with the thought that he was surrounded by enemies who were after his life. He was suspicious of Prince Mikhail Vorotinsky in particular, who had exiled him as early as 1560 and never forgave him, despite the fact that Vorotinsky had proved himself to be loyal to the Tsar over the years and knew that he was considered a rival of the Tsar.
And indeed he was accused of witchcraft, arrested and brought before the Tsar, who ordered him to be tied to a beam over a burning ember. The Tsar himself pushed the glowing embers under the Prince’s body. The half-burnt body was then taken to a nearby monastery, but the Prince died on the way. Tsar Ivan the Terrible – now quietly known by all in Russia – was a person with an incredible imagination when it came to torture methods.
The Abbot of Dogs was ground with millstones, the Archbishop of Novgorod was sewn into a bearskin and thrown to the starving vipers to be torn apart. In the midst of all this, Ivan the Terrible was overwhelmed by triumph at having succeeded in taking revenge on his enemies and by the feeling that he was acting in accordance with divine judgement.
But Russia was again threatened by the Poles under Stefan Bathory, and the Russian army suffered defeat after defeat, its troops ill-equipped and ill-trained, and its Polish army, though small in number, organised in a modern, Western European way.
Killer of your own son
At that time, the Tsar’s only joy was his son Ivan. The Tsar’s first wife Anastasia bore him three sons; Dimitri died when he was a few months old, Fyodor was sickly and dreamy, but Ivan was the very image of his father. In 1581 he was already 27 years old and a true gentile, with a sharp mind and a violent character. With his father, he took part in the torture of opponents in the Tsar’s residence, Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda. They tied the Tsar’s physician, Dr Bomelius, to a spit and burned him under it, dislocating his arms and legs to force a confession of guilt from him.
But Ivan the Terrible suspected that his own son was trying to take the throne from him, and was furious at the slightest criticism from his son. In a fit of rage, he punched his son’s heavily pregnant wife, Elena, so hard in the stomach that she miscarried. When his son Ivan saw this, he rushed to his father and hurled insults at him.
The Tsar’s eyes glazed over with anger, he accused his son of plotting against him, grabbed a long stick and began to beat him with it, so that he soon collapsed with a hole in his temple. Ivan the Terrible looked at his son, who lay motionless on the floor, with wide-open eyes. He fell to his knees in front of him, trying to stop the blood pouring from his skull. “Wretch, I have killed my son!” he screamed, crying for help.
Boris Godunov, who was present at the scene, rushed to get the doctor, who just shook his head.
But the Tsarevich was still alive, but almost unconscious. For days Ivan the Terrible hoped for a miracle, crawling before icons, praying and promising God that he would live a saint’s life. But the Metropolitan conferred the last sacraments on the Tsarevich and he died on 19 November 1581. Ivan the Terrible sat by the corpse for several days. He was unrecognisable, for he had become a real old man.
The funeral procession headed towards Moscow, with Ivan the Terrible, dressed like the greatest pauper, standing behind his son’s coffin, weeping and wringing his hands. His grief soon turned to frenzy. At night, he wandered the rooms looking for the son he had killed. He often fainted, and when he came to, he began to howl like a wounded beast. Only slowly did he calm down, but even the new tortures of his supposed adversaries did not bring him the pleasure he had once enjoyed. He was also fed up with the constant fighting with Poland, so he made peace with her, although he had to cede some territory.
With Russia at peace in the west, Ivan the Terrible turned his attention eastwards, to the endless steppes and forests of Siberia. At that time, the Stroganov family, with Ivan the Terrible’s permission, already administered some areas of Siberia. When Siberian tribes began to plunder Russian outposts, Simeon Stroganov called on the help of two Cossack chieftains – Yermak and Koltsoy. With a small army of a thousand men, Yermak now set out across the Urals and quickly routed the Tatar prince’s troops, armed only with bows and arrows.
Ivan the Terrible was uneasy about what was happening in Siberia, uninterested in its sparsely populated landscapes, but interested in its mineral wealth and furs. But he was unaware that Yermak was conquering a new empire for him. It was only when messengers brought him beautiful sable and Arctic fox skins to Moscow that his face cleared up. Incidentally, he was married again, this time to the daughter of a boyar, Maria Naga, who bore him a healthy son.
But he was already an old man, going through his memoirs and making lists of those he had tortured and killed, and they were endlessly long. With a clumsy hand he wrote on the parchment the names and the ways in which they had died. There were several of these lists, and on each list were thousands of names. He was worried that he had forgotten a name.
He moved out of his residence because the rooms reminded him of the crime he had committed against his own son. He was back in the Kremlin, wandering the rooms on sleepless nights, thinking. One night, as he slept, he was informed that a comet had appeared in the sky, its tail in the shape of a cross. Ivan the Terrible opened his eyes in a half-sleep and ordered that he be taken to the terrace. The night was very cold, the sky perfectly clear with plenty of stars. He looked at the comet with frightened eyes and muttered, “It won’t be long now before I die.”
In 1584, his body began to swell and an unbearable stench spread from him, which no ointments or perfumes could overcome. He feared the coming of night, because that was when the murdered appeared to him. His son also “visited” him and wanted to talk to him. He was worried that God would not accept him and allow him to come before Him. So he donated untold sums of money to the monasteries and told them to pray for him.
In his distress, he made a new will and reluctantly appointed his ailing son Fyodor as his heir, to be governed by a special commission. Ivan the Terrible was now most pleased to be taken to the Treasury in the Kremlin, where he viewed the wealth he had acquired. Diamonds, rubies of every size and sapphires of every colour were crawling under his fingers, and he looked at them and caressed their cool surfaces. He was still hoping for a cure. ” The fortune-tellers told me I was going to die, but I can see my strength returning. The blind men should prepare to die.”
A chess board was put on the table because he wanted to play a game of chess with someone but couldn’t move the pieces. Suddenly, he stuttered, his arms hung limply by his body, and his head was bent over the chessboard. Doctors arrived, started rubbing his body with herbal extracts, but it was all in vain. The Metropolitan came and said a prayer, and Ivan the Terrible was washed and dressed in a monk’s cowl, and a cross and a holy icon were placed on his chest. It was 18 March 1584.
Rumours quickly spread that the Tsar had been poisoned by Boris Godunov and that the ailing Fyodor would be a mere plaything in his hands. The boyars were relieved that their nightmare was over.
Ivan the Terrible’s death was not announced until the next day, when all the necessary arrangements for the succession had been made. The people were allowed to mourn him and Ivan the Terrible was buried next to the son he had killed. His crimes were quickly forgotten, as the people were convinced that the Tsar was the representative of the Almighty on earth and that he already knew what he was doing. His whip and wrath were thus felt mainly by the boyars, who were disliked by the people. Fyodor reluctantly took the throne and Boris Godunov soon ruled in his name.
