Ivan IV, known as Ivan the Terrible 1530-84
Tsar of Russia from 1533

Ivan IV was the grandson of Ivan III Vasilyevich (Ivan the Great), and was only three years old at the death of his father, Grand Prince Vasili. Following a period when authority was in the hands first of his mother Elena, and then, following her murder in 1537, in the hands of the Russian boyars, Ivan assumed power in 1547, becoming the first ruler of Russia to adopt the title of 'tsar'.

He proceeded steadily to reduce the power of the upper nobility (princes and boyars) in favour of the minor gentry. He summoned a legislative assembly in 1549, inaugurating a period of reform in both State and Church that continued for the next decade, establishing a new code of law and a system of local self-government. In 1552 he wrested Kazan from the Tartars and in 1554 captured Astrakhan. In 1558 he invaded Livonia, capturing the important Baltic port of Narva. In 1565, suspecting that a boyar rebellion was imminent, he offered to abdicate, but he was brought back by popular demand with sweeping powers to take drastic measures against those who had opposed him. This led to a prolonged spate of arrestsand executions.

In 1570 he ravaged the free city of Novgorod. In 1571 the Crimean Tartars invaded Russia and fired Moscow, but Ivan was able to inflict a punishing defeat upon them the following year. In the last years of his reign, he rehabilitated posthumously many of the victims of his middle years, but in a fit of anger in 1581 accidentally killed his own eldest son, so that the throne passed on his death to his sickly and feeble-minded second son, Fyodor, who ruled from 1584 to 1598.

Bibliography: Benson Bobrick, Fearful Majesty: The Life and Reign of Ivan the Terrible (1987); Henri Troyat, Ivan the Terrible (1974, trans by Joan Pinkham); Steven Graham, Ivan the Terrible (1933).