Empires Apart by Brian Landers

fever. He demanded that the boyars swear an oath of allegiance to his baby son Dmitri, but most refused. Ivan recovered, but never forgave what he regarded as treachery.
    When Anastasia died seven years later Ivan relapsed violently into the ways of his youth. He launched an attack on the German knights to the west, and lost. In a fury he launched a reign of terror on his ownpeople. Like Stalin centuries later he saw conspiracies on all sides. Almost certainly Anastasia died of natural causes, but Ivan was convinced the boyars had poisoned her and he had many tortured and executed. The boyars were demonised in his mind, just as the kulaks would be later in the mind of Joseph Stalin.
    Ivan’s behaviour became erratic in the extreme, his moods swinging from violence to repentance, blasphemy to prolonged prayer. Around Christmas 1564 he suddenly announced his intention to abdicate and left Moscow. The populace called for his return, which he eventually agreed to, but only after making clear that he expected absolute power. The tool he used to exercise this power was the oprichniki, the forerunner of secret police everywhere; dressed in black and riding black horses, they created a climate of terror across the empire. Ivan founded a pseudo-monastic order with himself as the ‘abbot’ and the oprichniki as ‘monks’, and performed black masses that were followed by orgies and torture. He organised rituals in which men’s ribs were torn out with red-hot tongs. Afterwards the tsar collapsed prostate on the altar, before rising to preach wild sermons of repentance to the drunken oprichniki. Sadism was routine. Sir Jerome Horsey, Elizabeth I’s ambassador to Ivan’s court, described how one prince who had displeased the tsar ‘was drawn upon a long sharp-made stake, which entered the lower part of his body and came out of his neck; upon which he languished a horrible pain for fifteen hours alive, and spoke to his mother, brought to behold that woeful sight. And she was given to 100 gunners, who defiled her to death, and the Emperor’s hungry hounds devoured her flesh and bones.’ Ivan decided that the citizens of Novgorod were insufficiently respectful, and proceeded to sack the city and massacre its citizens in an orgy of torture, rape and burning. The Volkhov river reportedly burst its banks because of the number of corpses, as men, women and children were tied to sleighs and plunged into the icy waters. The city’s archbishop was sewn into a bearskin and then hunted to death by a pack of hounds.
    Like Stalin, Ivan frequently turned on his closest advisors: his treasurer was boiled alive and a councillor was strung up, while the oprichniki took turns hacking pieces off his body.
    Ivan died in 1584, but long before then had clearly become totally insane. In 1572 he dismissed the oprichniki and abdicated in favour of an obscure Mongol general. After a year in which he regularly visited Moscow to bow before the new tsar, Ivan took the throne back. In 1581 he had a row with his son’s pregnant wife, beating her because she wasn’t dressed appropriately. His son sprang to her defence, whereupon Ivan hit him with his iron-tipped staff; after several days in a coma his son died. Ivan was consumed by grief and remorse, repeatedly smashing his head against his son’s coffin, just as he had smashed his head against the floor when his first wife Anastasia had died. Such behaviour did nothing to restore his sanity, which was in any case exacerbated by his addiction to mercury and his almost certain syphilis. It was not surprising that the tsar had succumbed to the deadly new disease that had been brought back to Europe by Columbus’s sailors, given Ivan’s legendary carnal appetite for both sexes. Ivan boasted of the thousands of virgins he had deflowered and bastards he had fathered. It is therefore ironic that, although at the end he had to be carried everywhere in a litter