Replies

More details and a different diagnosis here.

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.