Butchery

By Donald Morrison

IVAN THE TERRIBLE by Henri Troyat Dutton; 283 pages; $18.95

Ivan IV, Tsar of Russia from 1533 to 1584, was not, strictly speaking, terrible. That cognomen came from a mistranslation of the Russian word grozny, which means something closer to "awe inspiring." Yet in just about every other sense, Ivan was ghastly enough.

No biographer has painted the tumult and suffering of Russia's past more vividly than Henri Troyat, whose previous subjects include Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy and Catherine the Great. A master of the purposeful anecdote, the graceful accretion of detail that helps explain motive and madness, Troyat finds the key to Ivan's character in the ruler's early life. The heir to the throne of Muscovy was orphaned at seven, and he grew up amid endless scheming by Russia's landed aristocracy, the boyars. "Observing the brutal treatment that grown men inflicted on their fellows, he made ready to imitate them by tormenting animals," writes Troyat. "Standing on the ramparts of the Kremlin fortress, he would whirl young dogs above his head and hurl them down to the courtyard to break their bones. Their plaintive yelps satisfied an obscure need for revenge, as if these were hateful boyars he was putting to death." At 13, he no longer needed symbols. Toward the end of a banquet, he stood and ordered a boyar arrested. To the surprise of his guests, the guards obeyed, and the man was torn apart in the street by hunting dogs. By the time he was formally crowned four years later, the adolescent firmly controlled the throne.

Young Ivan set about codifying laws, establishing schools and unifying his fractured domain. But his imperial dreams soon drowned in his own appetites. He married eight times and ordered at least one of his wives murdered. The Tsar found he enjoyed killing and torture almost as much as sex and prayer. With his sadistic elder son, also named Ivan, he would turn wild bears loose in the public square and watch them maul passersby. Suspecting that the elders of Novgorod were making overtures to Poland, father and son spent five weeks supervising the slow deaths of as many as 60,000 of the city's inhabitants. All along, Ivan felt that he was doing heaven's work. "Having beaten, flayed, pincered, quartered and roasted, [he] plunged into a woman or into God with renewed vigor," observes Troyat. "After each series of executions, Ivan and his son were to be found in church again, in a calm and pious mood."

Though Ivan IV liked to deliver his mayhem personally, much of it was meted out by the oprichniki, his 6,000-member guard of thugs who terrorized the country for seven years until the Tsar abolished the group. In a fit of contrition late in his life, Ivan made a list of more than 3,000 opponents he had executed. He sent the names, along with generous sums, to monasteries for memorial prayers to be recited.

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