Vasily III. Ivan IV (the Terrible) (Ivan IV)

Vasily III

Ivan's son Vasily (Vasily III), who came to the throne in 1505, greatly strengthened the monarchy. He completed the annexation of Russian territories with the absorption of Pskov (1510) and Ryazan (1521) and began the advance into non-Russian territories (Smolensk, 1514). Faced with a continuing Lithuanian war and with the breakdown of his father's Tatar policy, Vasily carefully temporized in order to avoid uniting his enemies. Once he had secured peace in the west, he was able to deal directly with the khan of the Crimean Tatars. In the end, however, much of what Vasily accomplished was undone by his failure as a procreator: divorcing his first wife for her apparent barrenness, he married Yelena Glinskaya, who bore him only two children—the retarded Yury and the sickly Ivan, who was three years old at Vasily's death in 1533.

Ivan IV (the Terrible) (Ivan IV)

Vasily had been able to appoint a regency council composed of his most trusted advisers and headed by his wife Yelena, but the grievances created by his limitation of landholders' immunities and his antiboyar policies soon found expression in intrigue and opposition, and the bureaucracy he had relied upon could not function without firm leadership. Although Yelena continued Vasily's policies with some success, on her death, in 1538, various parties of boyars sought to gain control of the state apparatus. A decade of intrigue followed, during which affairs of state, when managed at all, went forward because of the momentum developed by the bureaucracy. Foreign policy was moribund, in spite of considerable opportunities presented by the continuing decay of the khanate of Kazan, and domestic policy vacillated so wildly that scholars cannot agree upon an appraisal of its main directions.

Toward the end of the 1540s, however, there emerged a strong coalition of Muscovite boyars. Apparently inspired by a common awareness of the needs of the state, they ended the debilitating intrigues and embarked upon a thoroughgoing program of reform. The first important step was the reestablishment of the monarch—for the first time to be officially designated tsar—accomplished through the coronation of the 16-year-old Ivan (Ivan IV) in unprecedented solemnity and pomp. Shortly afterward he was married to Anastasia Romanovna Zakharina of a leading boyar family.

Although there is a voluminous literature devoted to Ivan, almost nothing is known of his personality, his political views, or his methods of rule. There is little reliable biographical information about him aside from the facts of his six marriages, his lifelong ill health, and his mercurial temper. It is not even known when he began to rule in fact or which of the policies of his reign can be considered his.

Ivan was doubtless a puppet in the hands of the leading politicians long after his coronation. The major reforms of the middle 1550s, which produced a new law code, a new military organization, a reform of local government, and severe restrictions on the powers of hereditary landowners (including the monasteries), were probably the work of the bureaucrats and boyars, their objective being to modernize and standardize the administration of the growing state. The immediate goal was to strengthen the state and military apparatus in connection with major campaigns (the first undertaken in 1547) against the khanate of Kazan and to prepare for the major colonization of the new lands that the conquest and others were expected to secure. Toward the end of the 1550s, Ivan seems to have gained the support of certain groups opposed to these policies and to have seized control of the government. The issue was evidently foreign policy. The planned conquest of the Volga and steppe region had been delayed in execution, and the Kazan campaigns had been enormously costly. By 1557, when the campaigns against the Crimea began, there was much opposition in the highest military circles. Ivan took the dissidents' part and for the first time emerged as an independent figure.

Ivan was a disastrously bad ruler, in part because no one had ever anticipated that he would rule. His poor health and the mental failings of his brother made it quite natural for the regency and the politicians to ignore him and to neglect his education. In adulthood he contracted a painful and incurable bone disease, from which he sought relief in alcohol and in potions provided by a succession of foreign doctors and quacks. Once he had acquired full power, he set about destroying those who had ruled during the interregnum, as well as the machinery of government they had built up.

Ivan established his famous oprichnina, an aggregate of territory separated from the rest of the realm and put under his immediate control as crown land, in 1564; this was the device through which he expressed his rejection of the established government. As it was his private domain, a state within the state, he took into it predominantly northern and commercial territories that had enjoyed a special prosperity in preceding decades. Specific towns and districts all over Russia were included in the oprichnina, their revenues being assigned to the maintenance of Ivan's new court and household. He established a new, much simplified officialdom and a court composed of sycophants and mercenaries, prone to rule through terror, accompanied by persecution of precisely those groups that had contributed so much to the modernization of the state. As trained statesmen and administrators were replaced by hirelings and cronies, the central government and military organization began to disintegrate. The destructiveness of the oprichnina was heightened by Ivan's involvement in the costly and ultimately disastrous Livonian War (1558–83) throughout this period (indeed, some historians have viewed the oprichnina as a device for the prosecution of that lengthy war's taxing campaigns). Even before the war ended, Ivan was forced by the utter incompetence of his special oprichnina army to reintegrate it (1572) with the regular army and to revert, in theory at least, to the previous institutions of government. By the time he died, in 1584, the state that he had wanted to reclaim from its makers was in ruins.