Not a Muchitel’?: Ivan the Terrible’s Image in Muscovy

• In Event: Exploring Images and Perceptions of Rulers and Religious Ideals in Muscovy

Abstract

This paper addresses Ivan IV’s images in Muscovy, beginning during his lifetime through the end of the seventeenth century, divided into three periods: Ivan’s lifetime, the reign of his son Tsar Fedor Ivanovich, and after 1598. Sources about Ivan can be classified as favorable, apologetic, and unfavorable. The continued generation of both favorable and unfavorable images of Ivan in Muscovy reflects the essential ambivalence of Muscovite views of the Terrible Tsar. Muscovite authors who describe Ivan as a classic muchitel’, tormentor, either in the narrow sense of a hagiocide or the broader sense, especially during the second half of the seventeenth century, a tyrant, seem to have been extremely reluctant to label him a muchitel’, a pattern that requires explanation.

Author

• Charles J. Halperin, Independent Scholar