Иван Грозный. Со старинной немецкой гравюры на дереве. XVI в.
The image of the "Terrible Tsar" struck the imagination of his contemporaries with such force that it continued to tower in Russian consciousness until quite recent times. In chronicles and tales, folk songs and stories, and in historiography from Karamzin on, Ivan IV remained alive, more vivid even than Peter the Great. And the impact was not restricted to Russians; beginning with the Dutch, English, Italians, Danes, and Germans - adventurers, diplomats, merchants, prisoners, mercenaries, who visited the Russia of Ivan IV - the Tsar left an impression in West European minds such that today men who know nothing about Russia or its history will know the name of Ivan the Terrible.
The essence of the image seems to be conveyed by the epithet earned by Ivan. Certainly in modern Western Europe der Schreckliche, the Terrible, the Dread, le Terrible, or il Terribile evokes endless executions, tortures, arbitrary and overwhelming terror, a historical landscape bathed in blood and ruled by a monstrous tyrant. And, in the final analysis, for Russian historians, too, Groznyi meant the same things. Debate and discussion about the significance and direction of Ivan’s policies, and of his reign in general, are still going on, more vigorously than ever before, but from Karamzin in 1818 to Veselovskii and Zimin today the historians have tended to stumble over this epithet and then hold on to it; whatever one fails to explain about Ivan or any of his actions, there is always that personal epithet to fall back on, the epithet which symbolizes sadism, or pathological fear, or sheer madness - but in any event, the irrational, beyond or outside cultural or social patterns.
It would be foolish to argue that the personality of Ivan IV is irrelevant for an understanding of his reign, that is, his actions and policies. Recently, in fact, we have come into possession of very concrete evidence which may explain the monstrous aspects of Ivan’s personality: the results of the study of Ivan’s skeleton, removed from the tomb in the Arkhangel'skii Cathedral some three years ago, show that he must have suffered horribly for many years from osteophytes, which virtually fused his spine. But the personality of Ivan does not explain sufficiently the image of the "Terrible Tsar", for at least two reasons. First, the epithet Groznyi, the Terrible, did not have the meaning which is assigned to it now. And, second, Ivan the Terrible seems to have lived in an age of "terrible" rulers: Richard III and Henry VIII in England, Louis XI in France, Philip II in Spain, Sigismondo Malatesta in Rimini, Cesare Borgia and his father Pope Alexander VI, Christian II of Denmark; all of them were monstrous and terrible, and all of them, virtually at the same time, seem too much of a coincidence.
