Ivan IV
Ivan IV was the first ruler of Russia to be crowned tsar, doubled the state, and spent his last twenty years destroying it. He came to the throne at three and grew up among boyar factions that murdered each other around him; he was crowned tsar in 1547 at sixteen, taking a title that claimed the inheritance of the Byzantine emperors rather than the Mongol khans. The first half of the reign is a programme of reform that any state would claim: a new law code, an assembly of the land, a standing musketeer corps, reform of local administration, and the conquest of Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556, which opened the whole Volga to Russian settlement and turned a landlocked principality into a multi-ethnic empire. Then his wife died, he came to believe the boyars had poisoned her, and the Livonian War he began in 1558 for a Baltic port went wrong. In 1565 he divided the country in two and took half of it, the oprichnina, as his personal domain, policed by a corps in black on black horses who answered to nobody. What followed was seven years of confiscation, deportation and public execution, culminating in the sack of Novgorod in 1570 - his own second city - on a forged accusation of treason, where the killing went on for five weeks. Combined with war, plague and famine, it depopulated the centre of the country. He killed his own heir with a staff in 1581. The dynasty ran out with his surviving son, and the Time of Troubles followed. He was an accomplished writer, and his correspondence with the defector Prince Kurbsky is among the earliest sustained political argument in Russian. He also opened trade with England after an English ship looking for the north-east passage reached the White Sea, and proposed marriage to Elizabeth I. The English word terrible translates grozny badly: it means awesome or formidable rather than dreadful.
- Lived: 1530 CE – 1584 CE
- Nationality: Russian
- Roles: ruler, military
