by Dylan Moir
Russian history is marred with violence and revolution. We all know about the Bolshevik Revolution and the nasty work Stalin did on the Soviet Union, but initially, things weren’t all that bad…discounting the extreme fucking cold and complete lack of any arable land.
But seriously, in the glory days of Kiev and Novgorod the law codes stressed fines as the main form of punishment and the feudal system hadn’t been fully developed. That’s right, peasants could actually go vacation in the Baltic if they had the luxury of knowing what that was. Torture was for the most part an unfortunate cost of getting your sorry ass kicked in all-out warfare. So naturally, things couldn’t get much worse, right?
Wrong. Wrong. Fucking WRONG. Ivan IV Vasilyevich, or as some of his fans (*cough* Stalin *cough*) lovingly refer to him, Ivan the Terrible, came and kicked the shit out of Russia. This dude came to power as Grand Prince of Moscow and Tsar of all Russia. Actually, he was the first person to use the latter title. His parents died when he was very young, which some say had a severe impact on his mental faculties. Since there was no ruler at the time, the boyar elite (they’re essentially nobles) ruled in his stead until he was old enough to take the throne, something that would bother Ivan endlessly during his reign.
A few years before taking the throne, Ivan’s first wife, Anastasia Romanovna, died. This tragedy was said to have an equally, if not more significant impact on Ivan’s mental faculties than the death of his parents. During the Boyar rule, Ivan was heavily neglected by the nobles, bring us to his first badass political move. Basically, he faked an abdication of the throne and left Moscow, but before he left Ivan made sure to tell the Muskovites that he wasn’t mad at them and that the Boyars were to blame for everything. Naturally, the masses came flocking back to him, and in a heroic gesture, he swooped the people off their feet and implemented the oprichnina, which effectively stripped the Boyar elite of their power and prowess.
Over the years of the oprichnina, Ivan did some pretty horrible things. One of these was the massacre of Novgorod. Supposedly, a rumor was flying around that Novgorod was getting pretty sick of Ivan’s shenanigans, so he took his huge fucking army of oprichniki, and tore the shit out of Novgorod’s financial district. Oops.
During the final years of Ivan’s reign, things started unraveling. The oprichnina created class conflicts between the oprichniki and the boyar elite, and redistribution of land throughout Russia, as well as disease, left a lot of peasants more or less dead. Furthermore, Ivan allegedly killed his oldest son and heir to the throne (his younger son liked to ring church bells as a hobby) in a fit of rage. Thus, when Ivan died his dynasty shattered into a million little Russian shards. Oh yeah, did I mention that he died while playing chess?
Ivan the Terrible gets 5 bloody limbs out of 5
