Posted on 07/28/2002 11:37:32 AM PDT by Hacksaw
Ivan the Terrible
Stalin admired him. The rest of Europe believed he was mad. What is certain is that he was one of the most ruthless tyrants in history.
The name 'Ivan the Terrible' conjours up images of senseless cruelty and paranoia. Yet, for many in Russia, he is a national hero. Ivan appears to be a man of huge contradictions - a man of God who personally tortured his victims and beat his own son to death; a hardened despot who often behaved like a coward, asking his ally, Elizabeth I of England, for political asylum; a man who believed himself chosen to save the souls of his people, but who brutally put thousands to death in carefully orchestrated purges.
Born in 1530, Ivan was only three when he inherited the Russian throne following his father's death. At the age of seven, tragedy struck again when his mother was poisoned by nobles at court. By his early teens, he was already displaying some of his uglier traits. He would throw live animals from towers and appeared to derive pleasure from doing so.
Ivan was crowned Russia's first Tsar at the age of 17. Three weeks later he married, having chosen his bride in a national virgin competition. Virgins over the age of twelve were brought to the Kremlin to be paraded before him. He chose Anastasia, the daughter of a minor noble, and their marriage proved to be a very close one.
Ivan had huge ambitions for his new Imperial dynasty. He launched a holy war against Russia's traditional enemy - the Tartars - showing no mercy to these Muslim peoples and decimating their cultural heritage. Ivan's conquest of Kazan and later Astrakhan and Siberia gave birth to a sixteenth century personality cult glorifying him as the Orthodox crusader.
His wife Anastasia helped to hold his cruelty in check, but in 1560 she died. He accused his nobles of poisoning her, and became even more mentally unstable. Until recently, most scholars have dismissed Ivan's accusation of murder as evidence of his paranoia. But recent forensic tests on Anastasia's remains have revealed more than ten times the normal levels of mercury in her hair. It is likely, that Anastasia was indeed murdered, sending Ivan into a downward spiral of murder and cruelty.
He set up a bodyguard that has been described as Russia's first 'secret police' - the Oprichniki - as a religious brotherhood sworn to protecting God's Tsar. In reality, they became marauding thugs, ready to commit any crime in the Tsar's name. Ivan sentenced thousands to internal exile in far flung parts of the empire. Others were condemned to death; their families and servants often killed as well. Ivan would give detailed orders about the executions, using biblically inspired tortures to reconstruct the sufferings of hell. More than 3,000 people lost their lives in Ivan's attack on Novgorod alone. In a fit of rage, Ivan struck his son and heir dead with his staff. Mad with sorrow and guilt, he had a dramatic volte face, posthumously forgiving all those he'd executed and paying for prayers to be said for their souls. Before his death, Ivan was re-christened as the monk Jonah and buried in his monk's habit - in the hope of finding ultimate forgiveness.
Anastasia's full name was Anastasia Romanova, from which the Romanov Dynasty was to take its name (beginning with her grandnephew, Michael Romanov) and rule Russia for 300 years.
During Ivan's rule, Muscovy Russia (the center of power had since shifted north from Kiev to Moscow) laid claim to the title "Third Rome" after Byzantium (the Second Rome) fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Anastasia introduced Byzantine customs to the court and Ivan adopted the two-headed Byzantine eagle as the Russian seal--which has been reprised in post-Soviet Russia. Ivan really saw his rule as a continuation of the Eastern Roman Empire after Constantinople's demise.
The "Third Rome" Romanov Dynasty finally collapsed with the abdication and murder of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917. Oddly enough, Kaiser (also from "Caesar") Wilhelm abdicated less than a year later, in 1918. Of course, the German seal was also of a Roman imperial eagle, albeit one-headed.
Thus in the span of one year both the western and eastern conceits that lay claim to Roman Imperial authority and power lay in ruins; Rome had finally and utterly collapsed after persisting in bits and fractured pieces through almost two millennia.
Extract:
A monster by the standards of any age, Ivan inflicted unspeakable horrors upon his subjects. To give an idea of his awfulness, I will briefly describe some of his atrocities.
At one point during his reign, Ivan came to suspect that the citizens of Novgorod were no longer loyal to him. He moved on the city with an armed force, surrounded it with troops, and then entered it with an overpowering force of thousands. The Czar and his army met no resistance from the terrified civilian population. Jules Koslow describes what happened in Ivan the Terrible (Hill & Wang, 1961):
The next day the punishment of Novgorod began in earnest. A thousand or more inhabitants each day were executed, many of them in full view of Ivan and his son, who sat on a platform especially con structed for the occasion. Before them various diabolical instruments of torture and death, many of them ingenious inventions. The barbarity was almost unbelievable. Wives were forced to witness the quartering of their husbands; husbands were forced to see their wives roasted alive; babes in arms were put on execution blocks together with their mothers.
However, the formal executions proved too slow, and soon they were supplemented by mass drownings in the Volkhov River. The method was to tie a number of people to sleighs, and then run them into the river. Oprichina equipped with long poles stood on bridges or were deployed in boats to push under water any victim who managed to break his fetters. Other Oprichina stood on the banks farther down stream and shot those who tried... to make an escape.
After killing from 15,000 to 70,000 citizens (the estimates vary that widely), Ivan decided that too much was enough, and had the few remaining survivors assembled in front of him. Koslow quotes Ivan's incredible speech:
Men of Novgorod, surviving through the grace of the Almighty Lord God and the spotless Mother of God and all the saints, pray for our God-fearing rule as Czar, for our sons Ivan and Feodor, and for our enemies and adversaries, visible and invisible. But may God judge him who has betrayed us and you... May all the blood that has been shed fall upon them, and may the traitors be held accountable for it. But as for you, lament no more over all this, but live thankfully in this city.
By talking in this sanctimonious manner to the handful of survivors of the slaughter, the monster displayed the typical alcoholic ability to disconnect from the results of his own destructiveness. Ivan continued in this frame of mind and actually returned to Novgorod -- for his honey moon! The surviving residents were, understandably, terrified when they learned that the ogre was coming back, but he did them no harm on the return visit.
Like Alexander and Henry VIII, Ivan turned on those whom he had used as instruments of destruction. The Oprichina, the gang of thugs who had helped him destroy Novgorod and many other "enemies" inside Russia, was itself later eliminated in mass public executions. Although they were as horrific as the Novgorod atrocities, the murders of the Opri china did have a prelude of macabre humor. Ivan's reputation by this time was so fearsome that when he arrived in Red Square, the scene of the planned horror show, he found no one there: no audience awaited the coming spectacle. He then drove through the streets of Moscow, implor ing his cowed subjects to come out to see the show. He shouted at the house fronts that they had nothing to fear, that they should come quickly so that the fun could begin.
When the citizens of Moscow finally emerged from behind their curtains, they witnessed a display of unspeakable cruelty. The difference this time is that all the victims had been close associates of Ivan. Prince Ivan Viskovaty, the Czar's chancellor, was strung up by his feet and cut into little pieces. Founikov, Ivan's Treasurer, "... was placed repeatedly in iced water and then in boiling water until his skin 'came off him like an eel's.'" Others were roasted alive. Among the victims was Basmanov who had been the Czar's favorite. Ivan forced his son Feodor Basmanov to murder the father, promising to spare the son's life if he did so. Then, to the amusement of his immediate entourage, he told Feodor that since he had committed parricide, he too would be executed.
After a full day of torture and murder of men, Ivan and his son turned their attention to the women. Koslow describes what they did:
Ivan and his son went to the home of Viskovaty where Ivan had his widow tortured until she told him where the family treasure was hidden. Then he ravished her. The executed man's 15-year-old daughter was given to the Czarevich... Ivan and his son paid similar visits to the home of others who had been executed. Men were sent to other homes to seize treasure [and] violate wives and daughters of the dead... As a climax to the day's events, Ivan ordered eighty widows of the exe cuted... to be drowned.
After the murders and rapes and after ordering that the corpses be left in the street to rot, Ivan gave much of the money stolen from the dead to the church, and spent many days in fervent prayer.
He tortured and murdered throughout his reign. He enjoyed visiting the dungeons to watch his victims suffer. At alcohol-drenched banquets, he would set ferocious bears loose on human prisoners. He took to carrying a pointed staff and would stab at anyone who annoyed him. His murders became petty and habitual.
Ivan had seven wives. Upon the death of Anastasia, he accused two friends of killing her with witchcraft and had them imprisoned. He banished his fourth wife to a nunnery and murdered her entire family. He insisted that another wife had been poisoned, but was unmoved and unconcerned at her funeral. His unluckiest bride was Maria Dolgorukaya who made the mistake of telling Ivan she was a virgin. When Ivan discovered that she was not, he had the young woman "bound in a carriage and drawn by galloping horses to the river, where she was drowned."
I've already mentioned Ivan's lack of remorse for his murders, so it shouldn't surprise us that he was unmoved when his wives died. One death did effect him enormously, however. Ivan murdered his own son. The reason? His son's wife was wearing two petticoats instead of three. He struck his daughter-in-law, who was pregnant at the time, so violently that she miscarried. That night while his son was berating Ivan for his mad attack on his pregnant wife, Ivan lost his temper and stabbed him with his pike.
Ivan's putative grief over his son's death may actually have been remorse for having killed the only male heir to the throne over a silly argument. (His other son was an idiot). Ivan's twisted ego enabled him to torture and kill, without remorse, thousands, including persons close to him. He buried wives without showing grief. But by killing his only heir, Ivan hurt his own ego; he appeared monumentally foolish. Grief is out of character for an alcoholic, and Ivan's reaction was probably nothing of the sort.
The magnitude of Ivan's murders, the serial nature of his destruction, and the abuse of relatives (he had a father-in-law tortured, a sister-in-law murdered) are strong reasons to suspect alcoholism-created egomania. His biographers note the continuation of terror long past the point where it could be even remotely justified by power-seeking or power-retention. He killed those who were "not only loyal, but abject," and he became convinced of their guilt after he destroyed them.
Although much different in the degree of destruction, the lists of Ivan's victims (and Henry VIII's and Alexander's) are conceptually no different from the lists of Hemingway's victims, or Sinclair Lewis's, or Joe Mc Carthy's. Yesterday's victim can be vilified for the sake of ego inflation, but the ego continues to be battered by addiction. To compensate, the ego demands fresh blood -- especially innocents'.
Now for Ivan's drinking. One biographer, Henri Troyat, in Ivan the Terrible (Berkley Books, 1986), says that when Ivan was merely 17, "It was whispered that he drank too much and that alcohol was shattering his nerves... " His teenage drinking must have been spectacular, for Ivan, after all, lived in a country where "drunkenness was rampant at every social level." Troyat says that the middle-aged Ivan enjoyed the company of his son: "The two of them had long been united by love of wine, debauchery, and blood." [Emphasis added.] To Troyat, Ivan was "a heavy drinker."
The record shows Ivan became more furious as he got older. Koslow says "his unbridled temper, his moodiness, his self-pity, his maddening suspiciousness, his impulsiveness, and his lack of patience [all intensified with age.] His appetites, too, grew with the years... he ate to the bursting point, drank himself into insensibility, watched scenes of torture... and wallowed in sexual excess." [Emphasis added.]
According to Troyat, Ivan, like most alcoholics, was a hypochondriac.
Three biographers (Graham, Troyat, and Koslow) say Ivan aged prematurely. This, from Troyat: "According to all witnesses, the 34-year- old Czar had the appearance of an old man." He attributes the aging in part to "drinking bouts."
The physical signs, the heavy drinking throughout his adult life, and the years of serial destruction of innocents -- by a man who, according to his biographers, was intelligent and comparatively well-educated -- clinches it for me; Ivan was Terrible because Ivan was Alcoholic.
I just checked my memory against more permanent sources.
Muscovy Russia began to be known as the "Third Rome" late in Ivan the Great's (a.k.a. Ivan III, Ivan the Terrible's father) reign. More from this source:
"Ivan III (The Great), Grand Prince of Moscow from 1462 to 1505, continued the policy of former rulers to strenghten leadership of Moscow; he united the principalities surrounding Moscow into a single Russian State. In 1480 Ivan III publicly declared the end of Tatar yoke; he fought successfully against Poland, Livonia and Lithuania and enchanced the political prestige of Russia. He also published the first code of law. Ivan started to behave like a direct heir of Byzantine throne. About this time, a scholarly Russian monk developed in his writings the concept of a 'Third Rome,' which identified Moscow as a true capital of Christendom, in a line of succession through Rome and the recently fallen Constantinople. Ivan III adopted the term 'Tsar', a slavic contraction of the word 'Caesar', to refer [to] himself."
Another tradition has it that Ivan had the architect's eyes put out to keep him from designing anything as splendid for anyone else.
Knowing this family spurred my independent interest in Russian history, and I have often spoken to them about it. They told me the same thing: that Nicholas II was a good and decent man, but a poor and weak leader.
Russians seem accustomed to unspeakable brutality in their leaders. Their military tradition is marked by brutality. It just seems to be part of the warp and woof of the Russian mindset.
Thanks, Kevin. This makes a lot of sense.
I thought the Romanovs and the title Czar must have come from Constantinople or some connection with Constantinople.
Was Anastasia Romanova from Constantinople? If so, this explains it all.
Your explanation that
"in the span of one year both the eastern and western conceits that lay claim to Roman Imperial authority lay in ruins"is beautiful.
Thank you. --SB
It makes perfect sense.
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