Titans of History

The result, on the one hand, was further administrative reform, aimed at augmenting the power of locally elected officials at the expense of the nobility. Such moves appeared to point the way toward a more rational and more competent form of government. Yet at the same time Ivan unleashed a vengeful terror against the unsuspecting boyars, and a wave of arrests and executions followed. Ivan devised peculiarly horrible deaths for some of them: Prince Boris Telupa was impaled upon a stake and took fifteen agonizing hours to die, while his mother, according to one chronicler, “was given to a hundred gunners, who defiled her to death.”

Worse was to come. In 1565 Ivan designated an area of Russia—dubbed the Oprichnina (meaning apart from)—within which the lands were to be directly ruled by the tsar. Oprichniki

squads crisscrossed the territory to implement Ivan’s will. Dressed in black cloaks that bore the insignia of a severed dog’s head and a broom (on account of their role in “sniffing out” treason and sweeping away Ivan’s enemies), the oprichniki set about crushing all alternative sources of authority. The boyars were singled out for especially harsh treatment.

Ivan embarked on an orgy of sexual adventures—both heterosexual and homosexual—while destroying his imagined enemies. He personally killed and tortured many. Ivan’s savagery was shockingly varied in nature: ribs were torn out, people burned alive, impaled, beheaded, disemboweled, their genitals cut off. His “sadistic refinement” in a public bout of torturing in 1570 outdid all that went before and most of what came after.

In 1570 the tsar’s agents perpetrated a frenzied massacre in the city of Novgorod, after Ivan suspected that its citizens were about to betray him to the Poles. Some 1500 nobles were murdered—many by being drowned in the River Volkhov—and an equal number of commoners were officially recorded as dead, though the death toll may have been far higher. The archbishop of Novgorod was sewn up in the skin of a bear, and a pack of hounds was set loose on him.

As the harsh internal repression took its toll on Russia’s people, Ivan’s fortunes went into steep decline. During the 1570s the Tartars of the Crimean khanate devastated large tracts of Russia with seeming impunity—even managing to set fire to Moscow on one occasion. At the same time, the tsar’s attempts at westward expansion across the Baltic Sea succeeded only in embroiling the country in the Livonian War against a coalition that included Denmark, Poland, Sweden and Lithuania. The conflict dragged on for almost a quarter of a century, with little tangible gain. And all the while the oprichniki continued to engage in their wild bouts of killing and destruction; their area of operation, once the richest region of Russia, was reduced to one of the poorest and most unstable.

In 1581 Ivan turned his destructive rage against his own family. Having previously assaulted his pregnant daughter-in-law, he got into an argument with his son and heir, also called Ivan, and killed him in a fit of blind rage. It was only after Ivan the Terrible’s own death—possibly from poisoning—that Russia was finally put out of its long agony.

Ivan’s second son, Fyodor, proved far less talented than the original heir apparent. In 1598 a former adviser to Ivan, Boris Godunov, seized control, and Ivan’s bloodline was brought to an end.

The oprichniki inspired a later Russian tyrant, Josef Stalin, and served as a prototype for his secret police, the NKVD. His own terror was based on that of Ivan, whom he often called “teacher.” “Who now remembers the boyars wiped out by Ivan the Terrible?” he once said. “His mistake was not to kill all the boyars.” Ultimately, Ivan the Terrible was mad as well as bad. As his best biographer, Isabel de Madariaga, wrote: “Ivan was not like God, he tried to be God. His reign is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. His cruelty served no purpose … He is Lucifer, the star of the morning who wanted to be God and was expelled from the Heavens.”

ELIZABETH I

1533–1603

I thank God that I am endowed with such qualities that if I were turned out of my realm in my petticoat, I were able to live in any place in Christendom.

Elizabeth I, addressing Parliament (November 5, 1566)

Elizabeth I, known as Gloriana, was England’s greatest queen. During her reign England began to emerge as a modern nation and a seafaring power. She kept her country’s religious divides in check, presided over an unprecedented artistic flowering, and inspired her people to resist the aggression of England’s mightiest enemy, Catholic Spain. And it was under Elizabeth that England’s empire began to be built, with the New World’s Virginia being named after the redoubtable Virgin Queen.