It was precisely the adventurous adventure novel by Badigin “The Corsairs of Ivan the Terrible” that opened for me the Russia of the 16th century. Few people know this, but in fact corsairs were truly in the service of the Russian tsar. The Danish admiral Carsten Rode, who entered Russian service, kept the Baltic in fear and contributed greatly to the successes of the Russian army in the Livonian War.
The novel features many historical figures: the famous Russian commanders Vorotynsky and Khvorostinin, the Crimean Khan Davlet-Girey, the head of Russian diplomacy, a senior clerk Shchelk a lov. And the action unfolds in Moscow and in Crimea, among the Cossacks in Little Russia and in the Baltics, in Poland and in Russia’s northern territories. You can feel that the author wrote as an experienced historian: the events and even many everyday details of that time are conveyed with maximum accuracy—while many small touches make it possible to vividly sense the flavor of that harsh era.