Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are opening
the file on a figure who is, I mean, he's basically
the archetype of the scary Russian ruler. Oh,
absolutely. You say his name and the immediate
mental image is almost cinematic. A deranged
old man, you know, clushing a staff, eyes bulging
with paranoia. We are talking about Ivan the
Terrible. It's a name that does a lot of heavy
lifting, doesn't it? It really does. You hear
Ivan the Terrible and you don't really need to
know the history to feel like you understand
the man. It suggests a cartoon villain, someone
who wakes up in the morning deciding who's Ed
to chop off before breakfast. That is the popular
perception. Yeah. But when I was going through
the source material for this deep dive, the Chronicles,
his personal correspondence, even the forensic
reports, it struck me that the villain label,
while certainly earned in many respects, it actually
obscures the mechanics of his reign. He wasn't
just a madman. He was the architect of the modern
Russian state. Precisely. If you strip away the
caricature, you find a highly complex political
operator. And interestingly, the caricature starts
with the name itself. We translate it as terrible,
which in modern English just means bad or horrific.
Right. But the Russian word grozny, it meant
something very, very different in the 16th century.
Right. Let's unpack the linguistics first, because
if we misunderstand the name, we sort of misunderstand
the entire intent behind his rule. Grozny doesn't
mean evil. It's an archaic term that's much closer
to formidable, powerful, or awe -inspiring. Awe
-inspiring. Yeah. It's the same root you would
use to describe a massive thunderstorm or the
wrath of God. It implies a power that is terrifying,
yes, but also magnificent. A much better translation
might be Ivan the Formidable or even... Ivan
the awe -inspiring. It's not a critique of his
morality. It's a description of his authority.
It's about the divine weight of the crown. Exactly.
It implies that he keeps his enemies in fear
and his subjects in strict obedience. For Ivan,
terror wasn't a flaw. It was a necessary instrument
of divine justice. But before he became the formidable,
he was a vulnerable child. And honestly, the
more you look at his childhood, the more the
later paranoia. It just makes a frightening amount
of sense. It really is the classic hurt people,
hurt people scenario, but on a geopolitical scale.
Ivan was born in 1530. His father, the Grand
Prince Vasily III, died when Ivan was only three
years old. So you have a toddler technically
on the throne, a complete power vacuum. And then
his mother, Elena Glenskaya, who was acting as
regent, dies suddenly when he's just eight. The
sources strongly suggest poison, correct? It
was heavily suspected at the time, and modern
analysis tends to support that theory. So at
eight years old, Ivan is an orphan in a court
filled with sharks. Right. This is the period
of the boyar rule. And you have to understand,
the boyars were the high nobility, specifically
the Shuski and Belski families, and they essentially
viewed the state as their personal piggy bank.
I was reading excerpts from the letters Ivan
wrote later in life to Prince Kerbsky, who was
a friend who later defected, and the bitterness
is just palpable. It drips off the page. He doesn't
sound like a prince recounting his youth. He
sounds like a neglected foster child. The detail
in those letters is startling. He explicitly
describes being treated like a vagrant or a beggar.
He talks about suffering from hunger, about not
having proper clothes for himself or his younger
brother, Yuri. So this isn't just him being dramatic.
This is real neglect. He recounts watching the
boyars lounging around his father's palace, putting
their feet up on the furniture, completely ignoring
the fact that the actual ruler of the land was
in the room with them. That image of the boyars
disrespecting the furniture, it seems like such
a small thing. But for a child who is told he
is divinely chosen, that must have been incredibly
disorienting. It fostered a deep pathological
resentment. He saw the nobility not as the pillars
of the state, but as... parasites who had stolen
his childhood and insulted his divine right,
he learned very, very early that power is the
only thing that keeps you safe. And that paranoia
gets baked in right from the start. Absolutely.
He never trusted them again. Which brings us
to 1547. Ivan turned 16, and he decides to formalize
that power in a way no one had ever done before.
He isn't crowned grand prince. No. He is crowned
czar of all Russia. This is a massive pivot point
in Russian history. I mean, it's impossible to
overstate. Before Ivan, the rulers of Moscow
were grand princes. So first among equals. The
sort of senior partner. Exactly. Czar is the
Russified version of Caesar, but it also carries
the weight of the Tatar Khan. By taking this
title, Ivan was elevating himself to a completely
different imperial status. He was telling the
boyars, I am not your colleague. I am your emperor.
I am answerable only to God. And to sell this
to the rest of Europe, he didn't just rely on
the title. He constructed this whole mythological
genealogy. I found this part fascinating. He
claimed descent from the Roman Emperor Augustus.
It was a brilliant piece of propaganda. The church
and court scribes, they concocted this lineage
where Rurik, the founder of the Russian dynasty,
was descended from a mythical figure named Prus,
who was supposedly the brother of Caesar Augustus.
So he's telling the courts of Europe, I'm not
just some northern duke. My great, great, great
uncle was Augustus. It was all about legitimizing
his claim to absolute autocratical power. And
initially, he used that power incredibly effectively.
This is what historians call the good years.
Right. And it's no exaggeration to say that if
Ivan had died in, say, 1560, we might remember
him as Ivan the Great or Ivan the Reformer. So
let's look at the mechanics of those reforms
because they weren't just administrative updates.
They seem to have a very specific political goal.
For example, he creates the Zemsky Sobor. On
paper, that looks like a parliament. It does.
So was Ivan actually trying to share power? Quite
the opposite. And this is the critical insight.
The Zemsky Sobor, which gathered representatives
from the church, the merchants and the lower
nobility, was a weapon. A weapon against the
boyars. Precisely. By bringing in these other
classes, Ivan was building a coalition against
the high aristocracy. He wasn't sharing power.
He was diluting the boyars' influence. He was
saying, I don't need the great families to run
this country. I have the support of the people.
He was crowdsourcing his legitimacy to bypass
the elites. That's clever. And he did the same
thing with the military, right? With the creation
of the Streltsy. Exactly. Before this, the army
was feudal. You had to rely on the nobles to
bring their peasants to fight. And you can never
be sure if they would actually show up or turn
against you. Right. Their loyalty was to their
local lord first. The Streltsy were a standing
army of musketeers, paid by the state, armed
by the state, and loyal only to the Tsar. It
meant Ivan possessed a monopoly on violence that
didn't depend on the goodwill of the princes.
It was a game changer. He also modernized the
legal code with the Sudebnik of 1550. And this
is a major cultural shift. He brought the printing
press to Russia. He established the Moscow print
yard. But this is where we see the friction between
Ivan's push for modernization and the very conservative
society he ruled. What happened? The scribes,
these are mumps who had spent their entire lives
copying books by hand. They were furious. They
viewed printing as heretical, or at the very
least, a direct threat to their livelihood. They
actually burned the print yard down, didn't they?
They did. The first printers, Ivan Fedorov and
Pyotr Mstislavits, had to flee for their lives
to Lithuania. It's a powerful reminder that Ivan
was dragging Russia into the future, sometimes
kicking and screaming. Speaking of expansion,
we have to discuss the conquest of Kazan in 1552.
This was the moment Muscovy really went from
a regional power to a true empire. But the logistics
of this campaign were arguably more impressive
than the actual fighting. Oh, it was a triumph
of engineering. The Kazan Kanate was a fortress
city, a remnant of the Golden Horde. Previous
Russian campaigns had failed because the supply
lines were just too long. You couldn't sustain
a siege. So how did Ivan solve that? Ivan's engineers
built a full -scale wooden fortress on the Sura
River, upstream from Kazan. They numbered every
single log, disassembled it. floated it down
the Volga River, and reassembled it right on
Kazan's doorstep in just four weeks. That is
essentially prefabricated warfare in the 16th
century. It is. The fortress, named Svjesk, gave
them the forward base they needed to bring in
heavy artillery and shatter the walls of Kazan.
And it worked. It worked perfectly. Kazan fell.
And this victory was monumental. It wasn't just
a military conquest. It was a religious one.
It opened the entire Volga trade route and symbolized
the triumph of orthodoxy over Islam. Which is
what St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow commemorates.
Exactly. It was built as a monument to that victory.
Now we have to touch on the myth. regarding St.
Basil's. The story goes that Ivan was so struck
by its beauty that he blinded the architect,
Postnik Yakovlev, so he could never build anything
to rival it. It's a great story, but does it
hold up? It does not. It's a Gothic legend that
was added much later to enhance his reputation
for cruelty. We know for a fact it's false because
Postnik Yakovlev shows up in official records
years later designing the walls of the Kazan
Kremlin. Right. It's kind of hard to draft blueprints
if you've been blinded. It is. But, you know,
there is a real visual symbol from this victory
that survives today. If you look at the crosses
on top of the domes of many Russian churches.
I think I know what you're talking about. The
crescent moon at the bottom. Yes. You'll often
see the Christian cross standing on top of a
crescent moon. In the context of the time, this
was a clear, unambiguous declaration. The cross
has conquered the crescent. It was a visual manifesto
of Ivan's holy war. So up to 1560, we have a
reformer. A conqueror, a state builder. But the
cracks were always there, weren't they? It's
not like you just woke up one day and decided
to be paranoid. The paranoia was the baseline.
It was his factory setting, you could say. But
two specific events triggered the avalanche.
The first was in 1553 when Ivan fell deathly
ill. He thought he was dying. Okay. And on his
deathbed, he demanded the boyars swear allegiance
to his infant son, Dimitri. And they hesitated.
Worse. Many of them flat out refused. They didn't
want another child ruler. They remembered the
chaos of Ivan's own childhood. They started jockeying
for a different cousin to take the throne instead.
Right in front of them. Right in front of the
man they thought was dying. But then Ivan recovered.
And he never, ever forgot that moment. To him,
it was absolute proof that his entire court was
filled with traitors just waiting for his heart
to stop beating. It confirmed his worst fears
from childhood. It did. And then... The final
straw, the event that truly broke him, was in
1560, the death of Anastasia Romanovna, his first
and most beloved wife. By all accounts, Anastasia
was the only person who could ground him, right?
She was his emotional anchor. She was. When she
died young, Ivan was absolutely convinced she
had been poisoned by the boyars. He just fell
apart. And was she? Is there any truth to that?
Well, this is fascinating. Forensic analysis
of her hair, which was performed in the 20th
century, did show incredibly high levels of...
mercury. Now, mercury was used as a medicine
at the time, so it's not definitive proof of
murder, but it certainly validates Ivan's suspicion.
In his mind, the boyars had come into his home
and murdered the love of his life. And that,
combined with the defection of his best friend
and top general, Andrei Kursky, to Lithuania.
It sent him into a complete spiral. Ivan's world
collapsed. The good years were over. And this
is where we enter the era of the opryknina. The
terror. And it began with one of the most manipulative,
brilliant political stunts in history, the Abdication
Bluff of 1564. It is an incredible piece of political
theater. I find this move so fascinating because
it shows he understood the psychology of his
people perfectly. He didn't just purge the court
immediately. He just left. He packed up his treasury,
his most important icons, his family, and moved
to a settlement outside Moscow. Then he sent
two letters back to the capital. One for the
nobles, one for the people. Exactly. One to the
boyars and the clergy, accusing them of treason
and embezzlement. And a second one to the common
people of Moscow, telling them, I have no quarrel
with you, you are blameless, but the elites are
forcing me to quit. He weaponized the peasantry
against the nobility. It's genius. It caused
absolute panic. The people believed the Tsar
was their direct link to God, their protector.
Without him, they were spiritually and politically
orphaned. They nearly rioted, forcing a delegation
of boyars and clergy to ride out to Ivan and
beg him to return on any terms he wanted. And
the terms he dictated fundamentally broke the
Russian state. He demanded two things. First,
the right to execute traitors without any interference
from the church or the council. Absolute power
over life and death. And the second part was
even more radical. He split the entire country
in two. One half, the Zemshina, would be run
by the boyars as normal. The other half, the
Oprechnina, was Ivan's personal property, his
private fiefdom. This wasn't just a geographic
split. It was a state within a state. Correct.
And of course, the Oprechnina included the wealthiest
towns, the best agricultural land, the most important
trade routes. And to police it, he created the
Oprechniki. These are the figures that haunt
Russian nightmares, the men in black. They weren't
just soldiers. They were a cult of personality.
They were. They dressed entirely in black, like
monks riding black horses. But the visual branding
that really sticks with you is what they tied
to their saddles. I read about this. A severed
dog's head in a broom. Yes. The symbolism was
blunt and absolutely terrifying. The dog's head
signified that they would sniff out treason and
snap at the heels of the czar's enemies. And
the broom. The broom signified that they would
sweep Russia clean of corruption and traitors.
Imagine the psychological impact of seeing a
thousand men riding into your village with rotting
dog heads hanging from their saddles. It was
state -sponsored terrorism. And the economic
impact was just as devastating. This wasn't just
about killing people. It was about looting. It
was organized plunder on a national scale. If
the Tsar decided a noble was a traitor, the Oproniki
would seize his lands, his wealth, everything.
They would then demand exorbitant taxes from
the peasantry on those lands, sometimes 10 years
worth of payment in a single year. It must have
just shattered the economy. It did. It decimated
the agricultural base of the country and led
to widespread famine. People fled their lands,
becoming vagrants. This all culminates in the
sack of Novgorod in 1570. And Novgorod wasn't
just another city. It was a historic rival to
Moscow, a proud republic with a tradition of
independence. That independence was exactly why
Ivan hated it. It represented an alternative
to his model of autocracy. Based on a very flimsy,
unproven rumor that Novgorod planned to defect
to Lithuania, Ivan marched the Oprichniki there.
And what followed wasn't a police action. It
was a massacre. It was pure butchery. The details
are gruesome. Men, women, and children were tied
to sleighs and run into the freezing Volkhov
River to drown. The city was systematically looted
for five weeks. What are the casualty numbers
on that? They vary wildly. The chronicles from
the time talk about... tens of thousands, maybe
up to 60 ,000. But the city's population was
probably smaller than that. Modern historians
think perhaps 2 ,000 to 3 ,000 people died. But
really, the numbers matter less than the intent.
Which was? Ivan wasn't just killing people. He
was killing the spirit of Novgorod. He was physically
and psychologically erasing the idea that there
could be any power in Russia other than his own.
But the terror eventually hit a wall. Right.
The Oprychniki were great at terrorizing unarmed
farmers and townspeople. But when a real army
showed up, they fell apart. That's the ultimate
irony of a police state. The Oprichniki were
bullies, not soldiers. In 1571, the Crimean Tatars
launched a major raid on Moscow. The Zemshchina
army was fighting elsewhere, so the job of defending
the capital fell to the Oprichniki. And they
failed. They failed spectacularly. They broke
and ran. The Tatars burned Moscow to the ground.
Ivan, hiding in a statehouse, realized his instrument
of internal terror had made the state completely
vulnerable to external threats. He abolished
the Oprichnina the very first time. next year.
So the internal war cools down, but the external
wars were still raging. And this brings us to
foreign policy. While Ivan was crushing Novgorod,
he was also trying to push west in the Livonian
War. This was the Vietnam of the 16th century
for Russia. It lasted for 24 years. Ivan was
absolutely desperate for direct access to the
Baltic Sea. Help us understand the stakes here.
Why burn 24 years of blood and treasure fighting
for a slice of the Baltic coast? Was it just
land hunger? It was about suffocation. Russia
was essentially landlocked. To trade with Europe,
they had to go through middlemen, the Poles,
the Lithuanians, the Swedes, who all taxed them
heavily and crucially blocked technology transfers.
They prevented weapons experts, architects and
engineers from reaching Moscow. Ivan knew that
if Russia didn't get a direct port, they would
always be a second rate technological power.
He was trying to break the bloc. And he failed.
Comprehensively. It was a disaster. He ended
up fighting Sweden, Poland, and Lithuania simultaneously.
The Polish king, Stephen Bathory, was a brilliant
commander who pushed the Russians back deep into
their own territory. Ivan had to sue for peace,
and he ended up actually losing historical Russian
lands in the process. A 24 -year war that left
him worse off than when he started. Exactly.
However, while the Western Front was a disaster,
there was this strange and fascinating relationship
developing with England. This is one of the most
bizarre subplots of his entire reign. English
merchants looking for a northern route to China
had accidentally discovered a route to Russia
via the White Sea, completely bypassing the Polish
Lithuanian blockade. So they found a back door.
They did. The Muscovy Company was formed. And
Ivan and Queen Elizabeth I became, well, they
became pen pals. But they were having two completely
different conversations in these letters, weren't
they? Elizabeth wanted trade deals. Ivan wanted
something much more. He wanted a full -blown
military alliance. And not just an alliance.
Ivan was so paranoid about his own boyars overthrowing
him that he actually proposed a secret asylum
treaty. He asked the Queen of England, if things
go south here, can I come live in your country?
The idea of Ivan the Terrible retiring to a cottage
in the English countryside is just, it's mind
-boggling. Can you imagine? Elizabeth was very
polite but very noncommittal. She agreed to grant
him asylum but stipulated he'd have to pay his
own way. She wasn't about to put the Russian
czar on the English public purse. And Ivan did
not like that. Ivan was furious. He felt she
was treating him like a merchant not a fellow
monarch. He wrote her a surprisingly rude letter
back famously telling her she acted not like
a sovereign but like a vulgar trading wench.
Calling Queen Elizabeth a vulgar trading wench
is certainly a diplomatic choice. It really shows
his complete inability to understand a monarch
who is accountable to a parliament or interested
in commerce. To Ivan, a ruler who cared about
trade margins wasn't a real ruler. We've covered
the West and the internal terror, but we have
to talk about the expansion east because this
is the moment Russia stops being a European state
and becomes a Eurasian empire. Right. We're talking
about Siberia. Right. But Ivan didn't send the
army to do this, did he? The whole thing started
very differently. No, it didn't. And this is
where the story sounds more like the East India
Company than a royal conquest. It was essentially
a corporate venture. Started by a single family.
The Stroganoff family. They were incredibly wealthy
salt merchants. They were effectively running
their own private fiefdom on the frontier near
the Ural Mountains. And they hired a man named
Yermak Timofeevich. Who was basically a river
pirate. A Cossack mercenary, yes. They hired
him to protect their investments in trading posts
from raids by the local Siberian tribes under
Khan Kuchum. So the conquest of Siberia, this
massive addition to the map, started as a private
security operation. It did. Yermak, with a small
band of Cossacks armed with muskets, went on
the offensive against the Khanate of Sibir. They
were vastly outnumbered, but had the technological
edge. They defeated Khan Kuchum's army. captured
his capital, and Euromax sent a messenger to
Ivan with a simple message. I offer you Siberia.
How did Ivan react to that? I didn't order this,
but thanks for the continent. Initially, he was
angry because the Stroganoffs had provoked a
war he didn't want or authorize. But once the
victory was secured, he was delighted. He pardoned
Yermak and sent reinforcements. It opened up
vast, unimaginable resources. Furs, minerals,
timber. It changed Russia's destiny. It did.
Even though Yermak himself eventually died in
an ambush drowned in a river because the suit
of armor Ivan sent him as a gift was too heavy,
the door to Asia was kicked wide open. Russia's
center of gravity shifted forever eastward. looked
at the map and we've looked at the politics.
But we can't finish this deep dive without looking
at the man himself in his final years. Because
the tragedy of Ivan isn't just political. It's
deeply, deeply personal. His personal life was
just chaotic. Church law allowed a maximum of
three marriages. Ivan had at least six or seven
wives, depending on how you count them. He was
collecting them. And discarding them. Some died
under mysterious circumstances. Some were forced
into convents. He was living in a state of constant
sin according to his own deeply held religious
beliefs. That must create a kind of psychological
dissonance. An extreme one. He would spend hours
banging his head on the floor in prayer, begging
God for forgiveness, and then turn around and
order another brutal execution. He even kept
a synodic, a book of lists of his victims, so
he could pay monks to pray for their souls. That
is a special kind of psychological torture. This
is the event that doomed the dynasty. Ivan Ivanovich
was 27 years old. He was capable. He was tough.
He had been trained his whole life to rule. He
was the only son who was prepared for the job.
What sparked the conflict? The sources say it
was something domestic. It started with a family
argument. Ivan confronted his son's pregnant
wife, Yelena, claiming she was dressed immodestly,
perhaps wearing only one layer of robes instead
of the traditional three. He began shouting at
her, maybe even beating her. And the son intervened.
Naturally. The Tsarevich, Ivan, rushed in to
protect his wife and their unborn child. The
argument escalated. The father and son were screaming
at each other, and Ivan, in a fit of uncontrollable
rage, swung his iron -tipped staff. The same
staff he always carried. The same one. It struck
his son in the temple. The famous Repin painting
catches the moment right after this. The horror
in the old man's eyes as he clutches his dying
son. Blood everywhere. He had killed his own
legacy. Instantly the rage was gone, replaced
by horror. He spent the next several days howling
in grief, pacing the palace, refusing to sleep.
Because he knew the remaining heir, his younger
son, Feodor, was completely unfit to rule. Feodor
was described as weak -minded. Right. Pious but
simple. Yes. He was gentle, very religious, perhaps
intellectually disabled. He had no interest in
power whatsoever. Ivan knew that by killing his
capable son, he had effectively signed the death
warrant for the Rurik dynasty, which had ruled
for over 700 years. And he was right. Fyodor's
reign was short, and it led directly to the time
of troubles, a decade and a half of civil war,
famine, and foreign invasion. Russia nearly ceased
to exist as a state. all because of that one
moment of rage. Ivan himself died three years
later, in 1584. How does the formidable Tsar
go out? Not in battle, not by an assassin's blade.
No, very quietly, over a game of chess. He was
setting up the board to play with a courtier,
Bogdan Belsky, when he just collapsed and died.
And the physical reality of his body tells a
story, too. You mentioned the 1963 exhumation
earlier. What did the Soviet scientists find
when they opened the tomb? They found a man who
was a physical wreck. He was only 53, but his
skeleton was that of a much older man. His spine
was fused with osteophyte -sharp, painful bone
spurs that would have made every single movement
agonizing. Which provides some context for the
constant rage. Living in chronic, screaming pain.
does things to the human mind. It certainly erodes
your patience and self -control. And the toxicology
report was the real shocker. It showed massive
concentrations of mercury in his bones. So was
he poisoned? Did the boyars finally get him in
the end? It's the eternal question. But the expert
consensus now leans toward iatrogenic poisoning,
meaning doctor -induced. Mercury was the standard
treatment for syphilis and, more relevantly here,
for severe joint pain in the 16th century. So
he was poisoning himself. It seems he was likely
poisoning himself slowly for years in a desperate
attempt to cure his own pain. A slow, painful,
toxic end to a toxic reign. It fits the narrative
almost too perfectly. So let's zoom out. We've
unpacked the man, the myth, the massacres, and
the modernization. What is the ultimate legacy
of Ivan the Terrible? It is profoundly dualistic.
On one hand, you can't deny that he created the
modern Russian state. He centralized power. He
crushed the feudal nobility. He expanded the
empire to the Caspian Sea and into Siberia. And
he established the absolute autocracy that would
define Russia for the next 400 years. Without
Ivan, there is no Russian empire as we know it.
But the cost? The cost was horrific. He ruined
the economy, decimated the population. his own
cities, instilled a culture of paranoia and denunciation
that echoes through Russian history. And he killed
the only heir who could have kept the state stable
after his death. He built a powerhouse, but he
left it on a foundation of sand. It's interesting
to look at how this is all viewed today. In 2016,
the first ever monument to Ivan the Terrible
was erected in the Russian city of Orel. And
it was hugely controversial. It sparked a nationwide
debate. I can imagine why. Supporters argue that
he was a strong, effective leader who defended
Russia against foreign encirclement and strengthened
the sovereignty of the state, a rehabilitation
that mirrors the way some people now view Joseph
Stalin. Opponents see him as a bloody tyrant
who murdered his own people and set Russia back
by decades with his paranoia and terror. It really
forces us to ask, what is the metric of a successful
ruler? Is it the size of the map or the well
-being of the people who live on it? That is
the eternal question of Russian history and perhaps
of political power in general. And that is where
we'll leave it for today. We've looked inside
the mind of the first czar and found a reformer
and a monster living in the exact same skin.
Here's a final thought for you to chew on. We
often judge historical leaders by the territories
they conquer or the buildings they construct
because stone and land last a long time. But
if the foundation of your empire is built on
the broken backs and the terrified silence of
your own citizens, how resilient is that structure
really? Ivan built a colossus, but it collapsed
the moment he was gone. So is true power about
control or is it about creating something that
can actually survive without you? A question
worth pondering. Thanks for diving deep with
us. We'll catch you on the next one.