Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible, Ivan Vasilievich Grozny)
(1530–1584) czar of Russia
Ivan Vasilievich Grozny was born on 25 August 1530 in
Kolomenskoe, a village near Moscow, the son of Vasili
III Ivanovich, whom he succeeded as the grand duke of
Moscow upon his father’s death when he was only three
years old. On 16 January 1547, when he was 16, he was
crowned czar of Russia, the first to use that title. Ivan
initiated a series of reforms, including updating the law
code, and established a standing army for the first time
(since previously there had been no army that served
during peacetime). He also opened his nation to trade
from Europe and set up the Zemsky Sobor, or council of
nobles, to advise him.
Despite his introduction of reformist measures and
institution of a series of laws that led to the subjugation
of serfs for more than 400 years, Ivan is best known for
a number of wars that he launched to expand the small
duchy of Russia into the empire it later became. Start-
ing in 1552, he initiated hostilities against the Kazan
khanate, which his armies conquered after a campaign
of six weeks; two years later, he occupied the khanate
of Astrakhan. After he annexed the Kazan khanate to
Russia, he ordered the construction of St. Basil’s Ca-
thedral to honor the addition to his country. The two
victories enabled Russia to control the entire length of
the highly important Volga River. Starting in 1557, Ivan
commenced the long, drawn-out Livonian War in an ef-
fort to win a trade port on the Baltic Sea. Russian armies
swept across the Baltic, but a series of defeats by the
Poles and Swedes forced Ivan to sign the Peace of Zapoli
in 1582, shutting off any hope of a Russian trade route
through the Baltic.
Historians believe that the deaths of Ivan’s wife and
son in 1560 drove him insane, and after those events
he was no longer a stable ruler. Fearing for his personal
safety, he established the oprichina (separate estate), by
which certain towns and districts became his personal
property, controlled only by himself. Privileged residents
called the oprichniki, were granted far-reaching powers to
use force to protect the czar from enemies, real or imag-
ined. History records the intense cruelty and disregard
for human rights that the oprichniki used, and Ivan was
held personally responsible for their actions. In 1570,
the oprichniki heard that certain elements in the city
of Novgorod were conspiring against the czar, and on
this rumor alone, Ivan and his armies marched into the
city and, in an orgy of murder and destruction, sacked
the town and leveled it, leaving perhaps 30,000–40,000
dead. In 1569, when Turks under Selim II invaded As-
trakhan to dig a canal from the Don River to the Volga,
Ivan sent troops to shore up the Russian garrison, and
they routed the Turks. Ivan remarried, but he feared that
his wife and her three successors were out to harm him,