Ivan 'the Terrible' IV Vasilyevich: The Wolf in the Crown on Mosher Mag

The annals of history are stacked with tyrants.

Men who killed for power. Men who hid behind politics, religion, or madness.

But Ivan IV did not hide.

He thrived in his terror.

He made his tyranny visible, tangible, ritualistic.

Like a bishop holds up the Eucharist, Ivan held up severed heads. Not as warning, but as sacrament.

He was not simply a man who ruled.

He was a man who transfigured suffering into divine order.

And now we go, deeper, slower, into the bones of his story.

Ivan was born into shadows.

Born in 1530 to the Grand Prince Vasili III and his second wife Elena Glinskaya, herself a noblewoman wrapped in occult rumors and suspicion.

When his father died, Ivan was only three years old.

The throne was his in name, but not in power.

That belonged to the boyars: corrupt aristocrats with a taste for politics and poison.

So the child grew up in the rotting entrails of the Kremlin, surrounded by sycophants, snakes, and silver daggers. He watched men fight for control of him like dogs over a corpse.

His mother, perhaps his only shield, was murdered when he was eight, possibly poisoned by nobles who feared her ambition.

Imagine the Kremlin in winter. Not the red-brick postcard you know, but a feudal dungeon filled with spies and killers and whispers like spider silk.

Within it. A child.

Barefoot. Cold. Alone.

This is young Ivan.

He lived in luxury and neglect, surrounded by greedy boyars who looted the empire while ignoring the child they claimed to serve. They let him starve. They beat him for amusement. They tortured animals in front of him to test his reaction.

They created a monster, and then prayed it wouldn’t turn on them.

Spoiler: It did.

At age 13, he’d had enough.

He ordered his first execution, one of the most powerful boyars, torn apart by hunting dogs at Ivan’s command. The boy smiled.

He was learning how power felt.

At sixteen, Ivan declared himself not just Grand Prince, but Tsar of All Russia. Why?

Because “Tsar” meant divine monarch. Caesar. A title forged in imperial Rome, soaked in blood, and carried like a sword of heaven.

The coronation was held in Moscow’s Cathedral of the Dormition, and it was opulence baptised in blood.

He wasn’t just a ruler.

He was God’s chosen weapon.

And he wore it like a shroud made of fire.

His early reign was almost paradoxically benevolent. He reformed government. Standardised laws. Commissioned the St. Basil’s Cathedral. Encouraged trade with the West.

He married Anastasia Romanovna, his first and most beloved wife. For a moment, the world saw something near human in him. He opened libraries. Encouraged diplomacy. Wrote sermons and political treatises. He was cultured. Brilliant.

Haunted.

But even then, there were cracks in the glass.

He would slip away from meetings to wander the streets in disguise, eavesdropping on the peasants. He would weep at altars, then accuse his advisors of heresy. He kept wolves in the throne room of his soul, waiting for the signal to rip flesh.

And that signal came.

Anastasia Romanovna was his queen, and perhaps the only human tether Ivan had to the world outside his mind.

She was graceful, educated, politically astute, and most importantly, she soothed him.

But in 1560, she fell violently ill and died.

Convulsions. Vomiting. Skin turning black. A death straight out of hell.

Ivan was certain she’d been poisoned, by the boyars, by his enemies, by God Himself.

Her death wasn’t just grief. It was a shattering.

Whatever semblance of stability he had disintegrated.

He began to punish the land for his loss.

Enter the Oprichnina, a black-robed, axe-wielding priesthood of terror.

They were his personal executioners, his inquisitors, his choir of loyal beasts.

They rode black horses with dog’s heads nailed to the saddles, symbols of their duty to sniff out and destroy treason.

Their methods were not precise. They were ritualistic.

They rode through towns and villages like horsemen of the apocalypse, seizing lands, executing entire families, boiling nobles alive, burning monasteries, flaying skin into banners.

Whole families were dragged from their homes. Fathers tortured while sons were forced to watch. Mothers raped before being drowned. Villages razed. Monasteries defiled. The earth itself was taught to fear him.

They’d arrive unannounced, at dawn, like a plague.

And by nightfall, they were gone, leaving only silence and smoke.

The Oprichnina was not law enforcement.

It was cleansing. Exorcism. A campaign to root out not just betrayal, but doubt.

The city of Novgorod, suspected of harboring loyalties to Lithuania, became Ivan’s greatest “miracle.”

In January 1570, he and his Oprichnini entered the city and began a massacre that defied logic.

Over the course of five weeks, Ivan personally supervised the destruction of 60,000 lives.

He ordered thousands drowned in the icy Volkhov River.

Children torn from mothers.

Churches looted.

Clergy impaled.

Entire neighborhoods reduced to ash.

Nobles were stripped naked and frozen to death.

Clergy were tied together and hurled into rivers.

Pregnant women’s bellies were slit open in the market square.

Children were nailed to monastery doors.

Corpses were stacked like lumber.

He would walk the streets after the executions, hands behind his back, humming softly.

This was not rage. This was ritual.

A holy opera in which he was both composer and conductor.

Let’s return to the most infamous of Ivan’s sins.

His eldest son, Ivan Ivanovich, was groomed to be Tsar. He was everything his father wasn’t, calm, composed, respected. A man of promise.

In 1581, in a fit of volcanic rage, Ivan struck his pregnant daughter-in-law for dressing too immodestly. His son, his heir, his namesake, rushed to defend her.

They fought. Screamed. The chamber echoed with centuries of unresolved blood.

And then came the scepter.

Ivan struck his son with such force that his skull split open. He bled for hours.

Ivan wept beside the dying boy, crying out:

"I have killed my child! My hope! My empire!"

But it was too late. The prince died. The future died.

And with it, any chance of salvation.

The Tsar’s screams echoed through the halls of the palace.

He cradled the boy’s broken body, sobbing, blood soaking into his robes.

There’s a painting, Ilya Repin’s "Ivan the Terrible and His Son" that captures this moment. Ivan’s eyes wide with horror. His fingers clutching the boy’s head. It’s not a portrait of a tyrant.

It’s the image of a man who has finally realised what he’s become.

In his last years, Ivan became a shadow wearing a crown.

He wandered the Kremlin halls in monk’s robes, muttering psalms backwards.

He demanded his enemies’ bones be exhumed and tried posthumously.

He commissioned torture manuals bound in human skin.

He married and discarded multiple wives.

One was drowned. Another imprisoned in a convent. One he allegedly had strangled on their wedding night.

He feared the devil, yet claimed divine right.

He built cathedrals and filled them with corpses.He exiled friends and wrote them poetry.

In 1584, during a quiet evening game of chess, Ivan collapsed.

His heart, so used to pounding with rage, simply stopped.

They say his body was so toxic from years of exposure to mercury and poison that it had turned green.

When they opened his tomb in the 1960s, they found high concentrations of arsenic in his bones.

The death he gave to others, he drank himself.

Ivan the Terrible didn’t just change Russia.

He etched himself into its psyche. Into its folklore. Into its political DNA.

He left behind a broken empire. A trail of bones that led to the rise of Romanovs, of Rasputin, of Stalin.

Peter the Great learned from him. Stalin worshipped him.

He became the model for the strongman, the sacred tyrant who protects his people by destroying them.

The saint of suffering. The tsar of torment.

You can still hear his name in the dirt.

In the eyes of czars. In the gulags.

In the paranoia that bled into Russian identity like an old wound that never closes.

He wasn't terrible because he was mad.

He was terrible because he was divinely convinced.

He thought himself God’s chosen wrath. A holy flame in human form, sent to purge the sinful and enthrone the sacred.

Even now, in Russian orthodoxy, Ivan is debated as a potential saint.

A man who murdered tens of thousands, and yet may one day wear a halo.

Because power is like fire. Those who burn with it long enough become something else. Something unholy. Something divine.

For the freaks, by the freaks.

Thanks for reading. Stay strange.

✦ moshermag.com