Books: Butchery

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Ivan was undone in a manner that smacks of Shakespearean irony. At age 50, when he was looking forward to passing the crown to his son, Ivan struck the young man during a quarrel and killed him. The Tsar spent the last three years of his life insane with remorse, prowling his palace on sleepless nights, haunted by the ghosts of his many victims. He died during a chess game with an aide, possibly poisoned by his ambitious son-in-law Boris Godunov, but more likely felled by a gastrointestinal ailment.

An appropriate ending to a monstrous career. But was Ivan all that terrible? Or was he merely symptomatic of a cruel age? After all, even in more enlightened parts of Europe, Catholics and Protestants were slaughtering each other by the thousands, and sovereigns of all sorts ruled with vicious caprice. A whole school of historians believes that Ivan's accomplishments—unifying Russia, linking it with Europe, securing its eastern borders—outweigh his evil. Troyat declines to take sides, but his graphic accounts of imperial butchery are damning: Ivan was a beast that only a Mother Russia could love. Troyat does concede that the Tsar was revered by his people then and for centuries after. "In Russia the favor of the oppressed masses has always gone to the strongest personalities," says the biographer. "By the very terror he inspires, the tyrant keeps his hold on his people's hearts." Exactly 400 years after his death, Ivan IV retains his hold on the darker part of the Russian imagination.

—By Donald Morrison