As marauding horsemen, garbed head to toe in terrifying black, they hung from their saddles the severed head of a dog (emblematic of the oprichnikis’ constant vigilance over the country), and a broom (for sweeping away the enemies of the czar). These police, chosen from six thousand nobles, were personally handpicked by Ivan and had free rein to plunder and ravage at will, uprooting wealthy families at their whim and appropriating their real estate. During the particularly cold winter of 1565, Ivan’s oprichniki displaced some twelve thousand landowners and their families, creating an army of homeless.
The oprichniki were responsible for carrying out Ivan’s judicial assassinations in whatever form he ordered them to take place. In one such instance, Prince Simeon Rostovsky, who had long been a thorn in the czar’s side for several reasons, including his opposition to Ivan’s first marriage, was taken to the frozen Vetluga River, where a hole was dug in the ice. One of the oprichniki leaned down from his horse and, with a single swipe of his saber, beheaded the prince, dumping the body into the hole and returning the head to Ivan. The czar wagged his finger at the decapitated appendage, scolding, “Head, head—you with your crooked nose—you were very thirsty for blood while you were still alive, but now that you are dead, you will quench your thirst in water!” He gave the prince’s head a swift kick and commanded that it be dumped into the river.
The oprichniki also brought Ivan’s victims to Alexandrova. As a small boy, Ivan had learned how to treat captives from observing the way his mother dealt with her enemies. She would have been proud of her son’s modus operandi at Alexandrova. A German translator of the era explained that “a man invited by the tyrant to Alexandrova sets out feeling that the Day of Judgment has arrived because no one returns from there.” At Alexandrova, Ivan devised particularly brutal, albeit creative forms of torture and execution: flaying the skin off a man’s back by boiling him alive; roasting him in a giant frying pan; subjecting victims to the knout (a long horsewhip particular to Russia); plucking off one’s nails with pincers; sawing a naked body in two by friction from a length of rope; and various other methods of hacking and dismemberment. For after-dinner sport, Ivan’s favorite oprichnina executioner, Maliuta-Skuratov, would round up some serving women, have them stripped naked and publicly whipped, and then sent into a pit to run after squawking chickens while his oprichniki shot arrows at them. Most of the women had already been raped.
It was commonly believed that Ivan once sewed a man into a bearskin and tossed him into an arena, where he was set upon by hungry hunting dogs. The czar was also known to send his victims into the arena gladiator-style—dispatching seven monks armed with spears to fight against seven bears. Needless to say the score was bears 7, Russians 0.
Eyewitnesses noticed that the odors of roasting and rotting flesh, of blood and urine and excrement emitted under the most gruesome circumstances, gave the czar a perverse, almost sexual thrill. Ivan would take a break from gourmandizing and washing down the numerous courses with wine, vodka, and kvass to instigate a little torture session. Afterward, flushed with satiety and “beaming with contentment,” he would “talk more cheerfully than usual,” before heading off to church where he, a true believer, would pray devoutly, utterly free of guilt or compunction for the mutilation and murders he had just witnessed or participated in.
One eyewitness, Albert Schlichting, spent considerable time observing Ivan’s behavior in the dungeons of Alexandrova Sloboda. According to Schlichting, “The tyrant habitually watches with his own eyes those who are being tortured and put to death. Thus it happens frequently that blood spurts onto his face. He is not in the least disturbed by the blood but on the contrary he is exhilarated by it and shouts exultantly: ‘Goida! Goida!’ [Hurrah] and then all those around him shout: ‘Goida! Goida!’ But whenever the tyrant observes someone standing there in silence, he immediately suspects that he is sympathetic to the prisoner, and asks why he is sad when he should be joyful, and then orders him to be cut to pieces. And every day people are killed at his orders.”
Schlichtling counted about twenty judicial murders a day in Alexandrova Sloboda and also remarked that Ivan intentionally left the corpses unburied, because the stench itself was a deterrent to others.
To visiting foreign ambassadors Ivan showed an entirely different face: courtly, cultured, and charming. A modern FBI profiler would probably peg him as a textbook psychopath. Yet for all his brutality, Ivan must have had a conscience, because he didn’t sleep well, employing three blind men to tell him bedtime stories every night until he drifted off into the Land of Nod.
In 1567, the thirty-seven-year-old Ivan, who had become something of an Anglophile, conceived of the idea of espousing himself to England’s thirty-four-year-old Virgin Queen, although he was still married to the czarina Maria. Elizabeth I prevaricated, as she did whenever the topic of her marrying was raised by anyone. Although privately she considered Ivan a nutcase, Elizabeth refused to refuse him outright because she was just as interested as Ivan was in negotiating a trade agreement between England and Russia.
Ivan cheerfully considered putting Maria aside to marry Queen Elizabeth, but that issue was mooted on September 1, 1569, when Maria died. Ivan suspected poisoning. Again. Needing a scapegoat to blame for her death, he executed his own cousin Prince Vladimir Andreyevich and his entire family. Ivan trumped up a conspiracy in which some of his minions bribed a palace cook to accuse Vladimir of attempting to poison him. Ivan then fed poison to the prince; his wife, Eudoxia; and their two young sons and blithely watched them convulse and die. Then he ordered Vladimir’s mother, Princess Euphrosyne, to be removed from the convent where he had previously banished her and had her drowned in the river.
After learning that the king of Sweden had been overthrown by his people, Ivan began to fear for his own throne. He wrote to Queen Elizabeth and asked her to grant him asylum in England, if it became necessary for him to flee Russia. And he surrounded himself with additional bodyguards. His paranoia increasing, Ivan would stab anyone who displeased him with the bayonetlike point of his metaltipped staff. When a peasant’s horse bolted and ran across the road in front of him, followed by the distraught owner, Ivan had them both chopped up into pieces and tossed into a swamp. He listened to informants of all stripes and acted on their tips, regardless of whether the intelligence was genuine or invented. According to his German translator, Ivan delighted “in listening to informers. He does not care whether their information is true or false if it provides him with an opportunity to destroy people.”
As one might expect, all this mental instability led to Ivan’s sabotaging his own ability to rule effectively. For one thing, he was executing some of his most skilled military commanders with scant evidence of wrongdoing. And in the absence of qualified leadership, Russia suffered some of its greatest defeats in the Livonian wars.
In 1570, the losses in Livonia triggered Ivan’s greatest single act of brutality. He accused the leaders of the city of Novgorod of treason and sacked the city. Ivan’s death squad, the oprichniki, slaughtered thousands, subjecting the citizens to slow deaths by myriad forms of torture: flogging with the knout or whip; hacking off limbs and ears; slitting noses; castrating; disemboweling; boiling or roasting people alive; as well as tying their freezing bodies to sleighs and dumping them into the icy river. Entire families were murdered together; the czar’s butchers never spared women and children. Between fifteen and eighteen thousand souls perished, and the Volkhov River was choked with dismembered corpses and bits of human remains.
While Novgorod’s embers still smoldered, in February 1570 Ivan’s army decided to attack the nearby city of Pskov, stationing themselves outside the city walls. When Ivan entered Pskov, he was confronted by a starets, or holy man, one of the ascetic hermits whose spirituality and clairvoyance was given great credence by Russians of all social castes. This particular starets, named Mikula, verbally attacked Ivan from the safety of his house, shouting, “Ivan! Ivan! How much longer will you shed innocen
t blood? Enough. Go home! Or great misfortune will befall you!”
Ivan entered the starets’s dwelling, where Mikula offered him a piece of meat.
Ivan declined it. “I am a Christian. I do not eat meat during Lent,” he insisted.
The holy man responded, “You do much worse! You feed upon human flesh and blood, forgetting not only Lent, but God himself!”
According to legend, the skies darkened and the air resounded with thunder. Taking it as a religious omen, Ivan spared the residents of Pskov, ordering his troops to withdraw.
On July 25, 1570, Ivan celebrated his return to Moscow by setting up a spectacular torture arena in the Kremlin’s Red Square. Seventeen gallows were erected along with an enormous frying pan suspended over a pile of logs that would provide the fuel for a massive human parboil. Ivan staged another bloodbath, viciously executing some three hundred of his former favorites, including many of his comrades in debauchery, having falsely accused them of giving the inhabitants of Novgorod advance warning of the attack. Some men had their skin flayed off like an eel’s, by alternate immersions in boiling and freezing water. Others were hanged, had their throats slit, or were hacked to pieces or impaled on spears. Additional murders were conducted indoors: When the widow of one of Ivan’s victims refused to reveal where her late husband stored his treasure, the oprichniki stripped her naked and made her sit astride a thick rope, which tortured her into submission. Prince Telepnev suffered an agonizingly slow death while being forced to watch the murderers rape his mother. The wives of eighty of Ivan’s prisoners were drowned in the Moskva River while their husbands’ corpses lay rotting in the sun, suffering the added indignity of being denied a Christian burial.
This litany merely scratches the surface of Ivan’s cruelty; it is beyond the scope of this chapter to enumerate all of the murders he ordered or committed or to describe every method of torture he devised.
By 1571, it was clear that the unchecked brutality of the oprichniki had done far more harm than good. The lands they had seized had gone unworked, resulting in unemployment, crop failure, and starvation, and with them came epidemics of cholera and bubonic plague. The invading Tartars (this time an army of forty thousand) had help from Ivan’s many enemies within Russia. His disorganized forces could not stave them off. Many soldiers simply gave up, retreating from Alexandrova to Moscow. They joined the ranks of thousands of refugees who had taken to the roads leading into the capital. Ivan prepared to flee north to the White Sea with a cadre of his most trusted bodyguards.
The enemy reached the gates on May 24, 1571, and the Crimean khan, Devlet, torched the capital. Within six hours, the entire city of Mosow had been reduced to piles of smoking rubble. The Tartars returned to the Crimea with thousands of Russian captives.
The following year, Ivan combined the forces of his two regions, the oprichnina and the zemschina, and managed to repulse the Tartars’ annual invasion. But in the fall of 1572 he finally disbanded the oprichniki. As cruel in their repudiation as he had been in their support, Ivan made it an offense punishable by a public whipping to even mention the word.
With his own brand of whimsy, Ivan decided in 1575 to abandon his throne again, appointing Simeon Bekbulatovich, a Christian Tartar, as his successor. Simeon never received the czar’s crown, however. The reason for this odd power shift might be explained by Ivan’s belief in the prediction that he would die that year. However, his rationale behind selecting the unknown and untested Simeon is anyone’s guess. Ivan began referring to himself by his proper name, Ivan Vasilyevich, or by the nickname “Little Ivan of Moscow,” and made a grand show of humbly petitioning Simeon anytime he wanted something.
But the fortune-tellers were wrong; Ivan survived, and the following year he was back on his throne. Simeon was given a plum administrative job and retreated into the annals of history.
The 1570s were inauspicious years for Ivan. The Livonian war dragged on. Sweden joined forces with Lithuania and Poland to repel any Russian onslaughts. The combined forces were led by the charismatic Stephan Báthory (the uncle of the “Blood Countess,” Elizabeth, or Erzsébet, Báthory, whom we’ll meet in a later chapter). Short and stocky, with a low forehead, high cheekbones, and a long, pointed nose, the forty-three-year-old Stephan had begun his political career in obscurity, rose to become the voivode, or military commander (often translated as a prince or duke) of Transylvania. He was crowned king of Poland and Lithuania on December 12, 1575, through popular election by Polish nobles. Ivan had always detested (as well as distrusted) him. If a king could be elected, what did that bode for an autocracy? Not only that, Báthory refused to call Ivan “czar,” referring to him as the “grand prince” in his correspondence.
Stephan Báthory began winning the Livonian War. He tormented Ivan after the czar complained that Báthory was denigrating the corpses of his Russian soldiers, writing, “You accuse me of abusing the dead. I do not abuse them. You, however, torture the living. Which is worse?” Báthory asked rhetorically.
The lengthy Livonian War exacted a huge price from Russia. To afford it, Ivan borrowed from the nobles. They in turn worked the peasants even harder to increase production so they could afford to fund the conflict. Exhausted and starving, many of them ran away from their overlords, taking to the roads. According to an Italian visitor at the time, “No one lives in [the villages]. The fields are deserted and the forest growth over them is fresh.”
The peasants’ desertion caused the predictably furious Ivan to enact new laws governing their existence. Instead of quitting the farms after the harvest every November in order to seek new employment, as of 1581 their rights to leave a landowner were restricted by the czar. The peasants would become serfs, enslaved to the land in perpetuity. Serfdom would not be abolished until 1861.
Ivan added Siberia to his empire in 1583 after negotiating with the leader of the Stroganovs, a family of wealthy Russian landowners who organized an army of cutthroats to invade Siberia. He threatened to execute the Stroganovs, but was persuaded to change his mind by the outlaws’ leader, who showed the czar a passel of stunning furs and offered him Siberia if he would specifically spare the Stroganovs. Ivan accepted the deal.
Ivan’s distrust of everything on two legs extended to his relationship with his own heir. Although by then the czarevitch (twenty-seven years old in 1581) wasn’t exactly a child, his father mistrusted him as well as all of his friends. The younger Ivan was well educated, intelligent, charming, popular, and as much of a psychopath as his papa. He also dared to openly disagree with his father. The czarevitch reveled in brutality and debauchery, and yet he devoted many of his leisure hours to writing a life of the gentle Saint Anthony. But his interest in a mildmannered martyr did not make the younger Ivan a nice guy, by any means. The czarevitch remained in every way the polar opposite of his younger brother Feodor—a sweettempered young man with none of the psychotic quirks of the two Ivans. Unfortunately, Feodor was developmentally disabled or “simple,” and therefore was considered unfit to rule.
Depending on the scholar, there are discordant versions of the demise of the czarevitch. In one iteration, the two Ivans were sitting in the Kremlin palace on the evening of November 14, 1581, along with the czarevitch’s very pregnant spouse, Elena. Things came to a head when the czar decided to criticize his daughter-in-law for not being properly dressed. Elena was the czarevitch’s third wife, the first two having been dispatched to convents; evidently she was wearing only one dress instead of the traditional three—and it was a flimsy garment at that. In his outrage, Ivan smacked Elena so hard with the back of his hand that she fell over backward in her chair. Her husband took her side, although it’s not clear whether he saw the attack or confronted his father after hearing that the czar had dared to strike his pregnant wife. The czar became so enraged at his son’s temerity that he brained him with his metaltipped walking staff. The czarevitch crumbled to the floor in a bloody heap, the victim of a cracked skull. Doctors could not save him and he died fi
ve days later on November 19. Not too long afterward, Elena miscarried, expiring soon after that—although that’s only one version of the story. In a conflicting recitation of events, after Elena miscarried, she retired to a convent and was awarded the income of an entire town in perpetuity, living out her days with this undesired largesse.
Nevertheless, a single moment of rage had cost Ivan the Terrible his entire dynasty. The czar “tore his hair and beard like a mad man, lamenting and mourning,” according to an unnamed witness. He clawed at the walls with his fingernails and cried out his son’s name.
This act of infanticide profoundly changed Ivan. Focusing on the carnage he had wrought during his reign, he began to make a list of all the people he had executed or had otherwise caused to be murdered. Sometimes he didn’t even know (or remember) the names of his victims, so he wrote “with his wife,” or “with his sons,” or “names known only to God.” The list ran to more than three thousand names. He pardoned each of the people postmortem, sent copies of the list to monasteries, and asked the monks to pray for his victims.
In 1582, while Ivan was married to Maria Nagaya, his eighth wife, he revisited the notion of espousing an Englishwoman, and became fixated on a distant relation of Queen Elizabeth’s named Mary Hastings, the daughter of the Earl of Huntingdon. First, however, he required proof of her beauty in the form of a portrait. Depending on the source, Elizabeth and Mary either seriously considered Ivan’s proposition and his assurance that he would cheerfully put aside his present wife, as she was only a commoner’s daughter, or the two Brits never remotely conscienced the idea of packing Mary off to Moscow to wed a bloody tyrant. What is certain is that Queen Elizabeth dithered and delayed as usual, claiming that Mary was recuperating from smallpox and was therefore unfit to sit for a portrait. For years afterward, Mary’s friends mockingly called her the “Empress of Muscovy.”
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