Empires Apart by Brian Landers Page A

while his skin peeled, his hair fell out and his body stank, the symptom that history remembers is that ‘the Emperor began grievously to swell in his cods’.
    Attempts have been made to argue that Ivan’s terror was not unusual. One of the nearest comparisons occurred three hundred years earlier on the opposite side of Europe. Edward I of England was brought up a prisoner of over-powerful lords, and when his beloved wife died he went on a frenzy of territorial expansion in Wales and Scotland, unleashing a storm of massacre and terror upon Scottish cities like Berwick every bit as monstrous as Ivan’s assault on Novgorod. But Edward was already entwined by the principles of Magna Carta and the nascent stirrings of parliament. Another English example was a contemporary of Ivan’s; while Ivan was sewing Novgorod’s archbishop into a bearskin, Henry VIII was making the Abbot of Glastonbury ride naked through the streets before his execution. It is true that the violence and terror of Tudor England has largely been written out of history books, with the dissolution of themonasteries usually presented as nothing more than a few land transfers, but Ivan’s sadism was on an altogether different scale.
    Ivan’s lust for blood and land exceeded Henry VIII’s, as did his lust for women – although that comparison is closer. After Anastasia, Ivan married another noted beauty but soon tired of her. His third wife died two weeks after the wedding and his fourth he sent to a convent. His fifth marriage was also short lived. His sixth wife was found to have a lover: he was impaled below her window and she was sent to a convent. She was lucky: wife number seven was discovered not to be a virgin, and Ivan immediately had her drowned. His eighth wife managed to survive three years of marriage and thereby outlived him. Ivan cast his net wide when looking for a wife. In 1567, when he was faring badly in the Livonian Wars, Ivan approached the representative of the Muscovy Company, Anthony Jenkinson, to see if the English queen, Elizabeth I, would marry him and provide a refuge if he had to flee the country. She had other ideas.
    One area in which a comparison with England, and in particular with Henry VIII, is valid is the degree to which Ivan achieved a redistribution of wealth. Henry took away the wealth of the Church, Ivan the wealth of the boyars.
    The short period in which the oprichniki were active had a profound influence on the development of Russia, not only because of its terror but because of the economic transformation it created. Their primary targets were the old boyar families in the Muscovy heartland, whose land was seized; many of those not killed were deported to more remote regions. Many market towns that had previously been owned by boyars and run as their private property now became the tsar’s. From then on the great ‘landowners’ were not landowners at all; they rented their estates from the tsar in return for service and tax, and he could end their lease whenever he wished. The power of the boyars was destroyed, and in their place Ivan placed the dvoriane, the imperial bureaucrats who were sons and grandsons of royal servants and even slaves. The dvoriane were given enormous local power, which they exploited ruthlessly to enrich themselves, but Ivanmade sure that the power they exercised never became a threat to him. None of the provincial governors was allowed to stay in post for more than two years, and one was the norm, while governors were never appointed to areas where they themselves held estates.
    Ivan IV gave Russia an imperial autocracy controlling every aspect of life. Nobody else had a shred of effective political or economic power. The empire Ivan bequeathed to his genetically challenged son Fyodor became one of the world’s most powerful.
Russia after Ivan
    The death of Ivan IV released his people from a tyranny of insane terror. His reign might be