and in 1580, during an argument, he murdered his own
son Ivan.
Ivan’s military campaigns and his tyranny left his
country, once a prosperous region, a poor and serf-rid-
den state. His instability led to an illness that caused his
death on 18 March 1584, age 53, while he was preparing
to play a game of chess. He was succeeded by his crazed
son Feodor, who, when he died in 1598, was the last
member of the House of Rurik. Despite his cruel re-
gime, Ivan is fondly remembered in Russian history; the
Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein made two notable
early 20th-century films on Ivan’s life.
References: Waliszewski, Kazimierz, Ivan the Terrible,
translated by Lady Mary Loyd (Philadelphia: J. B. Lip-
pincott Company, 1904); Bobrick, Benson, Fearful Maj-
esty: The Life and Reign of Ivan the Terrible (New York:
Putnam, 1987); Graham, Stephen, Ivan the Terrible: The
Life of Ivan IV of Russia, Called the Terrible (London: E.
Benn Ltd., 1932); Yanov, Alexander, The Origins of Au-
tocracy: Ivan the Terrible in Russian History, translated by
Stephen Dunn (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1981); Perrie, Maureen, The Image of Ivan the Terrible in
Russian Folklore (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University
Press, 1987).
Ivanov, Nikolai Yudovich (1851–1919)
Russian general
Nikolai Ivanov was a loyal officer in the regime of Czar
Nicholas II who rose through the ranks of the Rus-
sian military and saw action in the Russo-Japanese War
(1904–05). Afterward, he helped to suppress a revolt of
Russian sailors at Kronstadt (1906). He served as com-
mander of the Russian garrison at Kiev from 1908 until
the start of the First World War in 1914, when he began
by mobilizing Russian forces in the Ukraine. Czar Nich-
olas then named him as commander of Russian forces in
that region on the southwestern front.
Unfortunately for Ivanov, his reluctance to take
the offensive against German forces in Galicia and
the Carpathian mountains through 1914 and in all of
1915 allowed the Germans to advance. When Gen-
eral Baron Viktor von Dankl of the Austro-Hungarian
First Army crossed into Galicia in August 1914, Ivanov
quickly withdrew his forces. It was left to Russian forces
under Generals Alexander Russki and Alexei brusi-
loV to hold the line against the invading Austro-Ger-
man force. Despite incredible losses on both sides, the
Russians were able to push the Germans and Austrians
back.
In April 1915, Ivanov decided to move his troops
back into Poland to counter another Austro-German of-
fensive. At Gorlice (also known as Gorlice-Tarnow, 2–12
May 1915), despite commanding numerically superior
forces, Ivanov’s army was cut down by a combined Ger-
man-Austrian force commanded by German marshal
Paul von hindenburg, resulting in some 200,000
Russians taken prisoner. Gorlice and its accompanying
towns of Ciezkowice and Przemy ́sl fell to the Germans
on 1 June. Brusilov tried to hold back the German of-
fensive by taking a stand on the Dniester River, but he
lost the cities of Lemberg and Warsaw. By the end of
August 1915, more than 1 million Russian troops had
been killed in this single campaign, leaving the Germans
in almost total control of Poland. The czar dismissed
Ivanov as commander and replaced him with Brusilov.
Historians continued to argue whether it was incompe-
tence or Ivanov’s extreme caution in an effort to avoid a
grinding battle against the Germans in Poland that cost
the Russians so many men. Whatever the reason, Ivanov
is almost universally blamed for the military disaster that
befell the Russians on the eastern front in the first two
years of the First World War.
Despite his responsibility for the disaster at Gorlice,
Ivanov was appointed as a senior czarist military adviser,
but he was ignored by the Russian army chief of staff,
Yevgeni Ivanovich Alekseyev (1843–1918). With the re-
volt against the czarist regime in February 1917, Ivanov
tried to hold the city of Petrograd (now St. Petersburg)
for the czar, but he was forced to relinquish his posi-
tion with the new government’s installation. That No-
vember, communist forces took control of the country,
and Ivanov sided with the anticommunists, or Whites.
Although a million men had died under his command,
Ivanov was given control over part of the White army.
During a clash in the Lower Don Valley in 1919, he was
slain in battle by Bolshevik, or Red, forces. Because of
his incompetence on the field of battle, Ivanov has been
all but forgotten by military and other historians.References: George Bruce, “Galicia” and “Gorlice,” in
Collins Dictionary of Wars (Glasgow, Scotland: Harper-
Collins Publishers, 1995), 94, 99–100. ivAnov, nikolAi yuDovich