Alexander Ivanov - The Tsars

On a gray day in October 2017, some thousand men and women - wearing black and carrying the white, gold, and black flags of Imperial Russia - gathered in the city of Oryol, about 220 miles southwest of Moscow, to celebrate the unveiling of a monument to Ivan IV, the first Tsar of all the Russias, who doubled his countrys size and transformed it from medieval darkness into a powerful empire. He was a saint, one man was quoted as saying, but few historians would agree: Ivan the Terrible was notorious during his fifty-one-year reign and throughout history for his sadistic butchery.

How had this ruthless man become ruler of this vast country? More importantly, how had he become so cruel?

Ivan Chetvyorty Vasilyevich was born on August 25, 1530, in the Terem Palace, the private residence of Russias tsars buried deep in the heart of Moscows Kremlin. Accounts of the day report that across the empire, terrifying storms shook the Earth.

Ivans parents were the cautious, sensible Grand Prince Vasily III and his second wife, the strong-willed and exuberant Elena Glinskaya, a Lithuanian princess. Glinskaya was the daughter of Prince Vasili Lvovich Glinsky and the Serbian Princess Ana Jaki, niece and ward of the powerful but controversial Prince Mikhail Glinsky, who had served in the court of Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian I. The nobles suspected Elenas loyalties lay closer to Lithuania than to her adopted land, but the people tolerated her because of her cheerful disposition and the joy she brought to an otherwise gloomy royal court.

Vasily had been previously married to Solomoniya Saburova, but after twenty years, she had not conceived a child. Desperate for an heir, he divorced her in November 1525, when she was forty-seven over strenuous objections from the clergy. Banished to a monastery in Suzdal, she lived out the rest of her years as a nun, cursing the man who had put her there.

By some accounts, an additional curse was placed on Vasily by Mark, the patriarch of Jerusalem. If you should do this evil thing, you shall have an evil son, he purportedly threatened. Your nation shall become prey to terror and tears. Rivers of blood will flow, the heads of the mighty will fall, your cities will be devoured by flames.

Vasily paid little heed to the curses of his ex-wife and the rantings of a holy man. On January 21, 1526, two months after he divorced Solomoniya, he married Glinskaya in a lavish ceremony. The bride wore a robe inlaid with jewels and sat on a chair covered with forty black sable skins. Vasilys attire was equally grand.

After three days of celebration, the couple consummated their marriage. When Glinskaya did not immediately conceive, however, the Russian people began to see her infertility as a sign that God disapproved of the marriage. There would be four years of national disappointment before the tsarina became pregnant.

Red-headed Ivan was christened on September 4 by a saintly monk known as Cassian the Barefoot at the fortress-like Troitsa-Sergeyevsky Monastery some fifty miles northeast of the city. A year later, on his birthday, Ivan made his first public appearance at a wooden church Vasily had ordered built just outside the Kremlin, and his father and mother proudly presented him to the people of Moscow. On his second birthday, the boy attended the consecration of another church, this one erected on the grounds of Kolomenskoye, a favorite country estate of the grand princes of Muscovy, built to commemorate the long-awaited birth of the new heir.

A little less than two months later, on October 30, 1532, Elena gave birth to a second son she and her husband called Yuri. No one would notice for some time that the child was deaf - an affliction that would make him ineligible ever to rule Russia.

Ivan and his mother suffered from a host of ailments. Elena complained of headaches and earaches, and Ivan was plagued by large boils that popped up on various parts of his body. Both the condition and the treatment were life-threatening; many patients died from blood poisoning after the boils were lanced. At one point, Vasily, while traveling, scolded Elena for not telling him of their sons condition: Thou hast written to me on Friday that Ivan became ill. Now thou writest that he is suffering from a boil on the nape of his neck... Why didst thou not tell me this before?... Thou shouldst write to me, telling me how God watches over him and exactly what it is that appeared on his neck.