“Fearful Majesty: The Life and Reign of Ivan the Terrible”, by Benson Bobrick

 

398 pages, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, ISBN-13: 978-0399132568

There are, perhaps, better biographies of Ivan the Terrible than Fearful Majesty: The Life and Reign of Ivan the Terrible by Benson Bobrick, and one of these days I should really go out and find one of ‘em…in the meantime, I have this. Ivan the Terrible refers to Ivan IV Vasilyevich, the Grand Prince of Moscow (from 1533 to 1547) and the first Tsar of Russia (from 1547 to 1584); his nickname comes from the Russian word grozny, which better translates to “fearsome” or “formidable” (think “terrible swift sword” from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, in which terrible is a good thing). So while there can be no doubt that Ivan IV was a son-of-a-bitch, he was a son-of-a-bitch with a purpose, as Bobrick shows throughout his book.

The author discusses the several disparate accounts of Ivan’s complex personality, described as he was at different times as intelligent and devout, but also prone to paranoia, rages and episodic outbreaks of mental instability that increased with age. His reign also saw the transformation of Russia from an insular, medieval state into a continental-wide empire under the new Tsar, though at immense cost to its people – and to even his own family; Ivan is popularly believed to have killed his eldest son and heir, Ivan Ivanovich, which left his other son, the politically ineffectual Feodor Ivanovich, to inherit the throne, which directly led to the end of the Rurikid dynasty and the beginning of the Time of Troubles, a civil war that lasted from 1598 to 1613 that killed upwards of 2 million people, or a third of Russia’s population. Whoops.

Ivan conquered the Kazan, Astrakhan and Sibir, which thence made Russia a multiethnic and multi-continental state, developed a bureaucracy to administer the new territories, and triggered the Livonian War which ravaged Russia and resulted in the loss of Livonia and Ingria, but allowed him to exercise greater autocratic control over Russia’s nobility. All this and more is discussed by Bobrick as he places Ivan within the context of his time and place. Medieval Russia was a hard place to live, as any concept of freedom of conscience or basic civil rights were unheard of (Russia was hardly unique in this, but was then – just like now – viewed by most of the world as being especially harsh in these respects), and Ivan Grozny was an even harder Tsar to live under.