Ivan the terrible

Some years after the Ivan who married the heiress Constantinople came another Ivan, called the Terrible, who assumed the title of Tsar, crushed the nobles, conquered Siberia, and extended his dominion to the Pontific. “All histories are spotless in comparison with that of Moscow under him – a creature of unparalleled ferocity and inconceivable wickedness. He went to the torture-rooms with joy, and came away from its fiendish practices invigorated, refreshed, and gay”.

This was the age of Shakespeare and Bacon in England.

Ivan slew his oldest son with his own hand in a fit of rage. His greatest crime was the sacking and destruction of the ancient city of Novgorod, whose infidelity he suspected. “The Tsar and his son went to an enclosure specially reserved for the torture of their victims, and with their lances prodded those who were not quickly enough dragged to the place of torment. Chronicles say that from 500 to 1000 were slain in cold blood before him each day of his stay. Some were burned, some racked to death, others drowned in the Volkhof, run in on sledges or thrown in from the bridge – soldieries in boats spearing those who swam. Infants were impaled before the eyes of their mothers, husbands butchered along with their wives. Novgorod, at that time larger and greater commercial importance than Moscow, was so injured that she never since acquired the rank of even a third-rate town”.

But in spite of his cruelty and superstition, Ivan was in many respects a successful ruler, reducing the Tatar kingdom and extending the Russian dominions to the Pacific by the help of a freebooter. Yermak, who swept the Siberian steppers as clean of Russian foes as Drake at the same time was clearing the seas for England. A hundred years before Peter the Great, Ivan “opened the Russian window to the West” – brought in the printing press and welcomed English sailors to his court. His ambassador, Nepeia in London, at the festival of the Garter, sat beside the Queen. “Never,” the Russian historian Karamzin naively says, “had the Russian name been honored to such a degree”.

But after him came the whirlwind – years of greater misery and shame to the Russians than any they had yet experienced: a weak-minded ruler, interminable civil wars, a royal decree forbidding the peasants to leave the lands, thus reducing them to serfs or slaves; an impostor who actually seized and held the throne for one year, and the most appalling famine that ever devastated the capital of a nation. “Men were entrapped into dwellings, and killed and eaten. Pies made of human flesh were openly sold in the market. One hundred and twenty-seven thousand corpses remained for days unburied in the streets, and an eyewitness relates that 500 000 persons were carried off by the awful visitation.”

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14