In 1885, Ilya Repin finished a painting that the Tsar Alexander III immediately moved to suppress. The canvas shows Ivan IV kneeling on the palace floor, clutching his eldest son and heir Ivan Ivanovich, who is dying from a blow to the head the Tsar has just struck in a fit of rage. Blood pools across the stone. Ivan’s face is one of the most convincing portraits of horror in European painting - not the horror of an enemy, but of a man who has just destroyed the thing he spent decades building: an heir, a future, a dynasty. The Romanov Tsar who tried to ban it understood something about what the image implied about rulers who cannot govern themselves. He was right to be uncomfortable.
It had all begun, officially, on 16 January 1547, in the Cathedral of the Dormition inside the Moscow Kremlin. Ivan Vasilyevich, sixteen years old, was dressed in the ceremonial barmas, handed the Cross of the Life-Giving Tree, and crowned not as Grand Prince - the title his predecessors had carried - but as Tsar of All Russia. The title was not merely ceremonial. In Russian usage, “tsar”, derived from “Ceasar”, was the word applied to the Byzantine emperor and the Tatar khan, both rulers whose empires had since collapsed. By claiming the title, the boy on the Kremlin throne was declaring himself their successor: a divine ruler, appointed by God, answerable to no earthly authority. He was sixteen, and the ceremony had just made him, in theory, omnipotent.
The word usually attached to his name is a mistranslation. “Grozny” - Ivan Grozny in Russian - does not mean terrible in the modern English sense of defective or wicked. It means formidable. Awe-inspiring. The kind of terrible that implies power, danger, and the fear that keeps enemies in check. Anti-Russian propaganda during his later wars filled in the rest, shaping a Western image of an oriental tyrant that conveniently served the interests of his enemies in Poland and Livonia. The name as we use it is as much a product of those wars as of his actual conduct. Though his actual conduct gave the propagandists more than enough material.
His early life had produced someone capable of becoming both the reformer and the monster that followed. His father Vasili III died when Ivan was three. His mother Elena Glinskaya governed as regent and died - probably poisoned - when Ivan was eight. The boyar clans of the Shuisky and Belsky families spent the years that followed fighting each other for control of the court, using the child Tsar as a figurehead. In letters attributed to Ivan, he recalled being treated like an orphaned beggar, left in want of basic necessities by the noble families nominally in his service. Whether the letters are genuine - historians disagree - the political education of a childhood spent watching powerful men treat their sovereign as a puppet left a mark that shaped the next thirty years.
The first decade of his actual rule was, by most accounts, one of genuine achievement. He reformed the legal code with the Sudebnik of 1550. He convened the Zemsky Sobor, something approaching a feudal parliament. He created the streltsy, Russia’s first permanent standing army, equipped with firearms. In 1552, he took Kazan from the Tatar khanate in a major campaign, placing the full length of the Volga under Russian control and beginning the process that would eventually make the Muscovite state an empire. He had Saint Basil’s Cathedral built on Red Square to commemorate it. He opened trade with England through the White Sea and corresponded - at considerable length, and with proposals of marriage that Elizabeth I politely refused - with the English queen. He looked, in these years, like the kind of ruler who might actually drag a medieval state into the early modern world.
The turning point came in 1560. His first wife, Anastasia Romanovna, died. Ivan was convinced she had been poisoned by the boyar nobility. Whether she had been or not, the belief remade him. 1564 brought another personal blow - his closest military commander, Andrey Kurbsky, defected to Lithuania and immediately took command of forces raiding Russian territory. Ivan left Moscow without warning and retreated to Aleksandrova Sloboda, from where he sent two letters back to the city announcing his abdication on the grounds of the nobility’s treachery. The boyar council, unable to govern without him and terrified of the crowd in Moscow, sent envoys begging him to return. He returned on conditions: absolute power to condemn and execute traitors and confiscate their estates, without interference from the council or the church. The conditions were accepted.
What followed was the strange institute of oprichnina. Ivan carved out a separate state within Russia under his exclusive control, and recruited a personal force - the oprichniki - to administer it. They rode with dogs’ heads and brooms fastened to their horses’ saddles, representing the sniffing out and sweeping away of the Tsar’s enemies. In practice they were a terror apparatus answerable to no one. According to contemporary accounts, they extracted from the peasantry “in one year as much as they used to pay in ten.” In 1570, Ivan sent them into Novgorod on the basis of an alleged conspiracy that modern historians believe never existed. Some 500 to 600 people were killed or drowned each day for five weeks. Estimates of the total dead run from 2,000 to 3,000, in a city whose population may not have exceeded 20,000 after the famines of the previous decade. The archbishop was hunted to death. Once proud and afluent Novgorod never recovered its former prominence.
A year later, in 1571, while the oprichniki were occupied with internal terror, Devlet I Giray of the Crimean Khanate led some 40,000 men into the Moscow region. The capital was defended by roughly 6,000 troops. The Tatars burned it to the ground. Estimates of the dead range from 10,000 to 80,000. Ivan’s personal terror force, which had proved capable of massacring unarmed civilians in Novgorod and elsewhere, could not defend Moscow against an actual army. In fact, most of them didn’t even show up to fight the tatars. The Tsar abolished the oprichnina the following year.
He also started the Livonian War in 1558 and kept it running for twenty-five years. It ended in 1583 with Russia losing access to the Baltic, ceding Ingria to Sweden, and surrendering Livonia to Poland-Lithuania. The war that was meant to make Russia a Baltic trading power achieved the opposite. It exhausted the treasury, disrupted agriculture, and, combined with the oprichnina’s devastation, left the country - in the flat assessment of one historian - “on the brink of ruin” by the time Ivan died.
On 19 November 1581, Ivan struck his pregnant daughter-in-law during an argument about what she was wearing. His son and heir, Ivan Ivanovich, intervened. Ivan beat him in the altercation, striking him in the head with his iron-tipped staff. The heir died four days later. Repin painted the moment of realisation on the Tsar’s face. Alexander III tried to ban the painting because it showed what everyone already knew: that unchecked autocracy is as dangerous to the dynasty it creates as to anyone else.
Ivan died in March 1584, mid-chess game, of a stroke. His surviving son Feodor - described by contemporaries as weak-minded, and confirmed as such by events - inherited the throne and died childless in 1598, ending the Rurik dynasty that had ruled Russia since the ninth century. Boris Godunov, a close advisor to Ivan and Feodor’s chief minister, governed briefly and not without competence, but without the dynastic legitimacy a Rurikid heir carried. His rule also coinsided with major harvest failures throughout the country. After Godunov’s death in 1605, Russia descended into the Time of Troubles: fifteen years of civil war, famine, Polish occupation, and pretenders to a throne that no one could convincingly claim. Ivan had killed his heir in a rage. The rest followed.
The rehabilitation of his reputation in Russia is instructive. Stalin commissioned Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in the 1940s and told the director that Ivan’s error was not his cruelty but that he “didn’t finish off the five major families.” The film’s second part, which showed the Tsar tormented by remorse over his victims, was suppressed until 1958. In 2016, the first public statue of Ivan was erected in Oryol, Russia. There is an ongoing movement to have him recognised as a saint; the Russian Orthodox Church has declined, on the reasonable grounds that he had Metropolitan Philip strangled. The effort to rehabilitate Ivan Grozny as a great Russian ruler is not a historical argument. It is a political one, and it says something specific about those making it.
Grozny: formidable, awe-inspiring, the fear that keeps enemies in line. Repin’s painting - the one that shows what the unchecked Tsar looks like when there are no enemies left to frighten, only a dying son on the floor and the man who put him there - has been hanging in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow since 1913. Alexander III’s ban did not hold. Neither, in the end, did any of Ivan’s arrangements. The dynasty ended. The country nearly followed. The name stuck.