Malyuta Skuratov

Hardly any figure in Russian medieval history seems more repulsive—and, seemingly, less suitable for the book series “The Life of Remarkable People”—than Malyuta Skuratov, in documents known as Grigory Lukyanovich Skuratov-Belsky. The most famous of Ivan the Terrible’s oprichniks, he became famous almost exclusively for his cruelty, and for his loyalty to his ruler, whose every word he was ready to carry out by tearing apart anyone the sovereign pointed to. A monster, a killer, a torturer—none of these epithets seems excessive when it comes to him. The number of his victims is counted in hundreds, though to leave such a black mark on history, it would have been enough to have only one—Metropolitan Philip, the Moscow saint, whom he strangled in person in the cell of the Tver Otroch Monastery.

And yet his biography reliably draws attention—not only from lovers of history, but also from lovers of “hot” stories, those craving historical sensations or looking in our past for confirmations of their own claims about the alleged endless Russian people’s attraction to the knout and the rack. So what was Malyuta really like? What is truly known about him? And what lessons can one learn by reading his biography? About this tells the author of the book, historian Dmitry Mikhailovich Volodihin, who meticulously studied all surviving evidence about both Skuratov-Belsky himself and Russia of his time.