Introduction

Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Groznyi, Ivan IV, Ivan Vasil′evich, born 1530, reigned 1533–84) is in many ways Russia’s albatross. Ivan’s reign was so significant that Russians cannot avoid his role in Russian history. In domestic affairs Ivan was the first ruler of Russia crowned as tsar. His reign wit- nessed significant reform in central and local government. Changes in Russian Orthodox Church practices resulted in the schism of the seventeenth century. Literature, painting, and architecture flourished. In foreign affairs Muscovy conquered the Tatar khanates of Kazan′ and Astrakhan′, signaling Muscovy’s transition from a kingdom to an empire, and lost the Livonian War (1558–83) against Livonia, Poland-Lithuania, Sweden, and Denmark in an attempt to gain territorial access to the Baltic Sea. Although unsuccessful, this war solidified Muscovy’s entrance into the European state system. Yet Ivan’s reign of terror, the oprichnina,1 and the atrocities attributed to him, including responsibility for the death of his son Tsarevich Ivan, together with an economic depression, famine, and epidemic, cast a pall over his reign.2 The paucity of evidence about Ivan IV’s reign—certainly compared to that about Russia’s history in the following century—permits multiple interpretations, as what evidence we do have does not and cannot definitively resolve major questions about Ivan’s personality and rule. Historians disagree on the reliability, even authenticity, of many of the key sources about his reign. As a result Russians cannot agree about Ivan. Indeed, they have never agreed about him. He is the subject of a vast, highly polemical, and partisan historiography, which originated while he was alive

1 Theoprichnina was the separate appanage Ivan established in 1565 and abolished in 1572, which became his instrument for imposing a reign of terror on Russia. 2 Charles J. Halperin, Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). x Introduction

with non-Muscovite and anti-Muscovite German and Polish propaganda during the Livonian War, and which continued through Russia’s imperial and Soviet periods. On the one hand, some historians have denounced the tsar’s wanton executions and torture of innocent Russians falsely accused of treason as barbaric and politically senseless. The most florid prose expressing this position can be found in the history of Russia by the early nineteenth-century writer Nikolai Karamzin.3 In late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russia, psychologists and psychiatrists went beyond arguing that Ivan was evil to propose that he was seriously mentally ill, a conclusion advocated by Pavel Kovalevskii.4 On the other hand, some historians have defended Ivan’s admitted “excesses” as necessary to strengthen the Russian state against real domestic traitors and foreign foes. The politicization of Ivan’s image reached its apex under Joseph Stalin with the perpetration of what has been called a “cult” of Ivan. Stalin’s death in 1953 and Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization speech in 1956 unleashed a wave of publications about the tsar in the Soviet Union. Both imperial Russian5 and Soviet historiography6 on Ivan have been well-studied. The flood of publications about Ivan in Russia unleashed by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, has not been examined in full.7 This book provides as comprehensive an analysis of everything published in Russia about Ivan since 1991 as possible. It would appear that Russians, or at least the Russian book-buying and journal-reading public, remain fascinated by Ivan. The creation of private enterprise publishing since 1991 which uses sensationalism to sell books and the abolition of censorship permitted the appearance in print of interpretations of every possible hue. However, the profusion of publications

3 Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin, Istoriia gosudarstva Rossiiskago, vols. 8–9, ed. P. N. Polevoi (St. Petersburg: Izdanie Evgeniia Evdokimova, 1892). 4 Pavel Kovalevskii, “Ivan Groznyi. Psikhiatricheskii eskiz,” in Ivan Groznyi, ed. Ivan Pankeev (Moscow: OLMS-PRESS, 1999), 337–48. 5 For example, G. H. Bolsover, “Ivan the Terrible in Russian Historiography,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 7 (1957): 71–89. 6 Maureen Perrie, The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Robert O. Crummey, “Ivan the Terrible,” in Windows on the Russian Past: Soviet Historiography since Stalin, ed. Samuel H. Baron and Nancy S. Kollmann (Columbus OH: American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, 1977), 57–74. 7 The brief remarks in Sergei Bogatyrev, “Ivan Vasil′evich Receives a Profession: Studies of Ivan the Terrible in Post-Soviet Russia,” Russian Studies in History 53 (2014): 3–12 are very useful. Introduction xi cannot be attributed solely to the tsar’s prominence in Russian historical memory. The quantitative and qualitative limitations of the sources about Ivan’s reign not only underlie the lack of consensus among Russian historians about him, but also permit the projection of contemporary Russian cultural anxieties onto him. The level of those anxieties rose precipitously after 1991 because of the trauma of economic disaster, imperial collapse, and political chaos, developments that encouraged conspiracy theories, scapegoating, xenophobia, and bigotry. I will indicate in passing some of the connections between Russian culture and images of Ivan, but proper consideration of that particular historiography must be left to cultural historians. Marielle Wijermars has made a significant contribution to work on Ivan from that perspective.8 She concludes that the very deep disagreements among historians about the tsar have made “the memory of Ivan . . . so volatile that only those on the margins of the political debate dare employ it.” In every case he became a weapon to criticize the existing regime, from the left as well as the right. Thus he served divergent political agendas from democratiza- tion to restoration of the monarchy to recreating the Soviet Union. Ivan’s place in Russian historical memory remains unstable.9 I had not appreciated the extent to which the tsar, despite his ambiguous legacy, became, ironically, an antiestablishment figure. The subversive potential of Ivan’s image requires further study. Wijermars also raises, without attempting to answer, the question of the impact of different interpretations of Ivan on the Russian public. I will return to this question in the conclusion. Scholarly publications about Ivan, whose audience is professional historians, inspire and influence all other genres of books about the tsar, including textbooks for secondary and university students, surveys of Russian history for the general, educated public, and primarily political books. By and large, these publications do not make original contributions to historical knowledge of Ivan’s personality or reign. Yet they are also part of the Russian historical memory of him. Works with an axe to grind often manipulate the historical evidence to advance a predetermined agenda. Simply dismissing seemingly fantastic theories about Ivan does not suffice.

8 See Marielle Wijermars, Memory Politics in Contemporary Russia: Television, Cinema and the State (London: Routledge, 2018), especially chapter 6, “Ivan the Terrible and the Oprichnina: Subversive Histories” (164–206). The historical validity of the images of Ivan she studies falls outside the scope of her monograph. 9 Ibid., 165 (framework of choice), 205, 224 (“volatile”). xii Introduction

Their distortions should be refuted by specialists. For this reason, all published works on Ivan, both professional and popular, should be considered together, which would not be appropriate in a study of international scholarship on him.10 Not only “serious” works but all works about Ivan should be taken into account, because even theories that professional historians in Russia, let alone outside Russia, consider ludicrous still constitute part of the cultural environment that influences, even if subconsciously or negatively, scholarly research on the tsar in Russia. Moreover, as will be discussed in greater detail below, there is no consistent distinction between the views of academics and amateurs. Some amateurs have historical training and chan- nel the conclusions of professional historians. Some professional historians espouse views that seem “amateurish” in their partisan use of history for polemical purposes. Ivan’s persona is so powerful that it sometimes dis- torts the scholarship it inspires, and those distortions become maximized in popular works, not just by amateurs. All the more reason, therefore, to examine scholarly and popular works together. My goal in this book was to cover the broadest possible spectrum of nonfiction publications in Russia on Ivan, in scholarly and non-scholarly monographs, textbooks, trade book surveys, and works of political advocacy. I did not develop any great principles of inclusion or exclusion. Unavoidably, what books I read depended upon what books I could access. Fortunately, the generous assistance of colleagues in Russia aided me immeasurably. My choice of reading material, while contingent, was not totally haphazard. I deliberately sought out publications which expressed different interpretations, and omitted even academic works, regardless of their contribution to the substantive history of sixteenth-century Russia, which contributed nothing original to an analysis of images of the tsar. Ivan the Terrible in Russian Historical Memory since 1991 may be best appreciated as a musical piece structured around a theme and variations. The resulting mosaic, to mix metaphors, does not convey a coherent or consistent image because the various publications discussed disagree so much. All published material, however, derives from the same problematic

10 For a selective overview of the entire historical field of study of Ivan the Terrible, see Charles J. Halperin, “Ivan IV the Terrible, Tsar of Russia,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Margaret King (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195399301/ obo-9780195399301-0099.xml. Introduction xiii source base and acknowledges the contested nature of Russia’s historical memory of Ivan. Part 1, about published books and articles, contains ten chapters. Chapters 1 and 6 through 10 deal with works by scholars, chapters 2 through 5 with works by amateurs, but the sequence of chapters is some- what arbitrary. Chapter 1 sets the stage by conceptualizing the variety of judgments of Ivan currently in circulation primarily in scholarly historical works in Russia. The spectrum of opinions of him is organized into five rubrics: apologetic, positive, conflicted, critical, and hostile. Some of the works discussed recur in later chapters. Sadly, it was impossible to explore every theme about the tsar’s reign that would interest specialists in sixteenth-century Muscovite history, let alone even mention every work published in Russia since 1991. Each of the succeeding chapters in part 1 examines books from a specific political, intellectual or ideological perspective, or from a unique genre, or on a different historical theme. Chapter 2 discusses an amateur alternative history school, the New Chronology, that exploits the contradictions in the sources about the tsar’s personality and policies which inspired the polarized views of professional historians discussed in chapter 1 to argue that in the seventeenth century the Romanovs masterminded a total revision of sixteenth-century Russian history by subsuming the reigns of four rulers under the umbrella of a sin- gle “the tsar Ivan IV.” Chapter 3 examines the publications that lobbied for and against the canonization of Ivan by the Russian Orthodox Church, adduced in less detail under the apologetic rubric in chapter 1. The campaign to have the tsar canonized failed but the apologies for his actions and whitewashing of his character it generated continue to flourish. Chapter 4 highlights two contrasting interpretations of Ivan, one positive, the other negative, but both equally unreliable in their manipulation of history to make their points. This chapter serves to critique the simplistic assumption that only his defenders take liberties with the historical record. Oftentimes his critics are just as sloppy historically. Comparisons of Ivan to Stalin cut both ways: some authors praise the tsar for being like Stalin while others damn him for the same reason. By doing so, both camps politicize Ivan because they assume that historical judgments about him should be patriotic. xiv Introduction

Chapter 5 discusses publications that share the pro-Stalin interpreta- tion of Ivan discussed in chapter 4 but that advance a secular neo-Stalinist apologetics different from the religious apologetics of chapter 3. Its authors uniquely advocate the recreation of the tsar’s oprichnina as the solution to Russia’s current problems. To do so they denude the oprichnina of all historical context. The next three chapters deal with textbooks and surveys. Chapter 6 examines high school and university textbooks and surveys of Russian history intended for a general audience. It is no surprise that textbooks and trade books ignore the imaginative conclusions of the New Chronology and the one-sided partisanship of the canonize-Ivan movement. But it is a surprise that the range of interpretations of him found is them is signifi- cantly narrower than that adumbrated in chapter 1. Textbooks and surveys eschew any idealization of Ivan. Instead, their points of view run from crit- icism that is balanced, to severe, to over-the-top. Russian history writing has not escaped the imperial turn in recent historiography. Chapter 7 sheds light on this development, by comparing two representative books: the first book is an innovative Russian interpreta- tion of Ivan from an imperial perspective;11 the second is a recent American version of the same.12 The two books define “empire” differently. In both, however, the weight of traditional images of the tsar is so great that it over- whelms the imperial perspective on his reign, which precludes explaining this phenomenon in the Russian study by the particular physiognomy of Russian historiography since 1991 alone because it also occurs in American historiography. Unlike the other chapters in part one, chapter 8 does not examine Ivan’s reign from the point of view of Russian history. It analyzes textbooks and surveys that deal with his reign from the point of view of Tatar history, an important approach because of Ivan’s conquest of the Tatar khanates of Kazan′ and Astrakhan′, which are still part of the Russian Federation. These authors, all writing in Russian but not all ethnic Tatars, judge the tsar criti- cally because he was a Russian imperialist. These authors largely eschew the kinds of criticisms of Ivan’s personality typical of authors of the critical and hostile rubrics in chapter 1.

11 Gerasimov et al., Novaia imperskaia istoriia. 12 Nancy Shields Kollmann, The Russian Empire 1450–1801 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Introduction xv

The final two chapters in part 1 address specialist research addressed to professional audiences as published in two anthologies. Chapter 9 examines how some historians finesse the highly polemical competing images of Ivan delineated in chapter 1 by sticking to narrowly specialist topics and not drawing wider conclusions, much as some historians of integrity did during the Soviet period to avoid Marxist theory and its political ramifica- tions. This chapter addressesEpokha Ivana Groznogo, the two-volume pub- lication of the papers presented at a scholarly conference held at the first “capital” of the oprichnina, Aleksandrov, the location of the only museum in Russia devoted to Ivan. The contributions cover a large range of issues and have great scholarly value. However, the price for maintaining academic objectivity seems to have been downplaying his personal role in his reign altogether. His presence is notably absent from the anthology. Chapter 10 addresses the issue of the Russian army during Ivan’s reign, a topic that, considering how much of that reign was devoted to warfare, is often overlooked. A two-volume anthology contains critiques of many presentations and replies by the original authors, which gives readers an opportunity to observe how Russian historians at their best engage in a scholarly debate.13 While these volumes are very valuable, the high level of expertise on display elides argument about many of the broader problems of the military history under the tsar. Part two contains three chapters on film. The first two deal with Sergei Eisenstein’s classic Ivan the Terrible. Part 1 was released in 1944, part 2 was not shown publicly until 1958, and only the script and scattered still shots survive from part 3. No historical film ever made in Russia even approaches Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in influence. Because it is a work of genius it is the only cultural product of Stalin’s “cult” of Ivan to outlive that cult. It con- tinues to inform and mislead the Russian public about the tsar to this day. It can safely be assumed that every author discussed in this book has seen the film. Therefore, a study of Russian historical memory of Ivan since 1991 cannot ignore this movie. Specialists on Eisenstein and Ivan the Terrible disagree about whether the film presents a positive or a negative image of the tsar. Some studies finesse that polarity by arguing that part 1 is positive and part 2 negative. In the texts known to me Eisenstein is either praised for criticizing him or criticized for praising him, as if the question of the

13 Russkaia armiia v epokhu Ivana Groznogo: Materialy nauchnoi diskussii k 455-letiiu nachala Livonskoi voiny (St. Petersburg: Shiko-Sevastopol′, 2015), http://www.milhist. info/spec_1. xvi Introduction

tsar’s historical role had been definitively and unequivocally answered in the negative. Film specialists often prefer to avoid historical evaluations of Ivan. Regardless, Eisenstein’s film remains highly relevant to Russian historical memory of Ivan. A monograph by an American historian about a Soviet film would seem to be an even less appropriate topic for a chapter in this book. Chapter 11 discusses the recent analysis—an instant classic—of the film by Joan Neuberger. Just as Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible casts a giant shadow over historical memory of the tsar in Russia, Neuberger’s book has become and will continue to be the starting point of studies of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible for the foreseeable future. This book could not legitimately disre- gard it. Neuberger concludes that the “surface narrative” of both parts of the film praise Ivan, but that Eisenstein also subverts any praise and criti- cizes the tsar throughout. Chapter 12 examines a topic about Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible that Neuberger did not address—Eisenstein’s treatment of religion and the Russian Orthodox Church in the film. I propose that Eisenstein portrays Ivan, his supporters, and his opponents as religious, but all clerics and men affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church as enemies of Russia. If cor- rect, my conclusion would explain the hostile view of the film held by the advocates of the tsar’s canonization discussed in chapter 3, who seem to share Stalin’s view, that in part 2 of the film Eisenstein maliciously maligns the protagonist. Chapter 13 discusses Pavel Lungin’s Tsar′, a film highly critical of the tsar. Lungin’s film is a refutation of the supposedly positive image of Ivan in Eisenstein’s film. In crafting his image of Ivan, Lungin relied exclusively upon critical conceptions of the tsar’s personality and reign discussed in chapter 1, and thus also earned the vehement enmity of the apologists discussed in chapter 3. The conclusion addresses, if briefly, why historical studies of the tsar have become such a popular vehicle for expressing cultural concerns, and calls attention to the influence, once again, of the historical sources for Ivan’s reign. It closes by suggesting areas for future research in Russian historical memory of him by enumerating additional types of relevant evidence beyond nonfiction print works. Such evidence must be taken into consideration in order to arrive at a comprehensive multidisciplinary and multime- dia appreciation of Ivan the Terrible’s place in Russian culture today.