Ivan the Terrible

“The Tormentor John” tells of the agonizingly long years of rule of the first Russian tsar— the one whom later generations would call Ivan the Terrible, and whose contemporaries would call John the Tormentor. From his youth, he understood this: only unrestrained power and fear can make subjects obey. But, as everyone knows, power corrupts, and absolute power—unquestioningly. A whirlwind of contradictory feelings of a willful ruler crashes onto the country like a ninth wave, leaving not a single untouched place on the tortured land. Like any despot, Ivan saw treason everywhere and punished it indiscriminately, hacking with the “oprichny ax,” without distinguishing loved ones from enemies. In a search for a supposed plot by the boyars, with his “faithful servants” he tortured, racked, and executed not only boyars, but also their wives, children, and even their household retainers.

Having believed a slanderous denunciation, the maddened tsar staged an unprecedented devastation of Great Novgorod: by his order, daily about a thousand people were impaled. Infants were tied to their mothers and drowned in the river. In the six weeks of Novgorod’s slaughter, 60,000 people died. This became the great Era of the Execution of Everything Living— without measure and without respite—right up until the death of the “righteous Job.” And through this hell, unexpectedly, an intense, vivid parallel emerges of another autocrat, Ivan—religious to the point of frenzy, loving to the point of blindness, repentant to the point of madness…

Also, don’t miss the audiobooks in the series “History in Faces”: “The Theater of the Times of Nero and Seneca,” “The Tormentor John,” “The Love Follies of Giacomo Casanova,” “A Few Meetings with the Late Mr. Mozart,” “Walks with the Executioner,” “Koba.”