Introduction

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 seven- teenth 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 appreci- ated 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.

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