Original subtitles

Mid-sixteenth century Russia - formerly known as Muscovy.

Its leader, Ivan IV,

rules using terror and violence.

Ivan was, by far,

the most bloodthirsty ruler that country has had to endure.

Also known as Ivan the Terrible,

he tears his enemies limb from limb and feeds them to the dogs.

Not even those closest to the Tsar

can escape his killer instincts.

The tale is he killed his own son.

This is the absolute example

of the rage taking over.

But questions arise: was this tyrant truly evil

or did madness motivate his murderous ways?

Even people at the time were saying,

'We don't really think you need to be this paranoid.'

Did Ivan the Terrible die naturally, or was he poisoned?

Using groundbreaking AI imagery

to show his world as never before,

we examine the myths that launched the mystery?

Can new evidence help reevaluate

the Tsar's brutal reputation?

As a child he was abused

by the people charged with taking care of him.

Rulers come and go,

but what legacy will the sands of time leave behind?

Ivan the Terrible: is he truly...

a Killer King?

For five centuries, Ivan IV has cast a long shadow

over the story of Russia.

He's always been a figure of fascination ever since his time.

Back in his bloody day,

no-one was safe from his arbitrary assassinations.

A list Ivan drew up himself

of executions he ordered shows just how common.

He put together a list that has some 3,000 names on it.

He trampled on, and completely disregarded,

a lot of the previous rule of law.

He ordered the executions of hundreds,

possibly thousands of people on an industrial scale.

One town, Novgorod,

would suffer his rage like no other.

It spread to the whole of the town: nobody was safe.

10,000 would die.

It takes hundreds of years after he had ordered the death of so many

that he acquires the title Ivan the Terrible.

But is the judgement of history truly fair, accurate and balanced?

Perhaps, in a literal sense,

Ivan IV was not so terrible after all?

Dr Monica White is a Russian and Slavic Studies academic

at Nottingham University in England.

The word that gets translated as 'terrible'

is a not very accurate translation

of a Russian word, which is 'Grozny'.

A better way to translate it into modern English

would be something like 'the dread'.

And the thing about that is it was not considered...

negative at the time, so there are...

some writings which address Ivan,

urging him to rule in a 'Grozny' way:

in a sort of awe-inspiring way.

And this was the idea that the ruler should be strong

and...

not put up with any messing around.

Ivan IV: a strong leader...

or a torturing, merciless Killer King?

The man himself can tell us with words written by his own fair hand.

What we know is what Ivan recounted

in letters that he wrote later to a political enemy called Kurbsky.

In 1564, General Kurbsky had defected from Russia,

criticising Ivan's murderous regime.

The Tsar responds with poison pen letters.

Ivan was trying to justify a lot of his actions

and talk about how put upon he was.

What truth can be established

about Ivan the Terrible?

What actually shaped him?

As the shifting sands of history are washed away,

what is the true picture of a man

whose creation of an army to serve him,

and his ambitions to expand ever westward,

might be seen as laying down a marker

for future Russian leaders?

It seems the seeds of Ivan's brutal reign...

are sown in an abusive childhood.

Everything was unbefitting my tender years.

They began to feed us as though we were foreigners

or the most wretched menials.

What sufferings did I endure through...

lack of clothing or hunger?

As a young boy, Prince Ivan and his brother Georgi

had been imprisoned in the palace tower.

The modern definitions of child abuse,

I'm sure would apply to him.

Emotional abuse, possibly physical abuse,

I think is almost certain to have happened.

Ivan's only possible response to this

would have been to completely desensitise himself

to any traces of human feeling,

any traces of sentiment at all.

And we see this emerging...

in the acts that he then reputedly carries out.

There are tales of Ivan throwing cats,

throwing dogs out of tower windows to see what happens.

This is somebody who has been completely...

desensitised to any normal human emotion,

even at a very young age.

The abuse is not meted out by Ivan's parents...

but by a shady noble elite

entrusted to watch over him: the Boyars.

The Boyars were the highest rank of the nobility.

The Boyars were all from very ancient families

who could trace their roots back centuries.

Ivan's father, Vasili III, had died in 1533.

The Boyars were brought in to advise the young Prince

as he inherited the throne.

They had to set up a regency council.

His mother was still alive,

and she seems to have been fairly powerful within the regency council.

But she was not the only factor.

So the Boyars were continually jockeying for control

over this very young Prince.

Ivan was a bit of a prisoner of this power struggle

Dr Anton Hauk is an expert on medieval Slavic History.

Five years later, as the Boyars vie for control,

young Ivan was dealt another blow.

Thus by God's will did it come to pass that our mother,

the pious Tsaritsa Elena,

went from the earthly kingdom to the heavenly.

And we and our brother Georgiy remained as orphans,

receiving no human care from any quarter.

He was in a very vulnerable state,

and especially after their mother died, he was only eight years old.

He felt responsible for his disabled younger brother.

And he had these very powerful men...

making his life miserable.

Whilst the Prince is too young to rule,

the Boyars become de facto leaders.

He accuses them of mismanaging his affairs.

What of the treasures inherited by me from my father?

With their cunning scheme, they seized it all.

They took it all for themselves for their own profit.

To add to his rage,

young Ivan learns that his mother was poisoned.

Rumours reveal the perpetrator is one of the Boyars:

Prince Andrey Shuysky.

This death happened under suspicious circumstances.

At the time, Muscovy was part of a culture of high intrigue,

high stakes and a lot of violence.

It was the kind of environment where people...

would have poisoned each other.

So what we've got with Ivan is somebody who...

is suffering these incredible losses as a very young child.

The idea that it was done deliberately

will have engendered within him

an absolute hatred of humanity.

These acts seem to have been done...

by the very people that he was now dependent upon

as his caregivers,

will have had an enormous psychological effect

on this very small boy,

making him feel... unsafe, threatened.

Making him, I think, not to depend upon anyone.

As Ivan hits his teens, he wreaks his revenge

on his tormentor-in-chief, Prince Andrey Shuysky.

The Shuysky family had been controlling affairs

for all of Ivan's childhood,

and Ivan was now a little bit older.

He was asserting more control,

and he seems to have been very fed up with this family

ordering him around and not treating him very well.

We know that Andrey was thrown to the dogs.

A more brutal, painful,

excruciating murder.

I think this ordering of the execution at the age of 13

was absolutely a definitive act.

It happened at the psychological stage

at which people are beginning to form their identities.

And I think this act represents an absolute choice

on the part of Ivan to not trust anyone

to fight against his destiny,

rather than to passively accept it in a victim-type role.

The young teen has had his first taste of blood.

Now he's hungry for more.

Then we have another tale of Buturlin,

somebody who, in the court, who said an impolite word,

Ivan ordered his tongue to be cut out.

We know that we're talking about times that were barbaric.

But nonetheless, they are incredibly sadistic acts.

The first signs of mental illness...

or a simple but brutal assertion of power?

They are about Ivan trying to obliterate...

...the vulnerable, sensitive little boy who lost his parents,

who felt so exposed and powerless.

They are him trying to show,

to himself as much as to the world,

that that little boy no longer exists:

that he is now Ivan the Terrible.

The treachery of the Boyar nobility

has left mental scars on the teenage Prince.

We hear of episodes of Ivan banging his head against the wall,

foaming at the mouth, being silent and still for hours.

There is no doubt that his thinking was psychotic

in the sense of being divorced from reality in some way.

Now, this is all consistent with this idea

of the emotions producing...

a very abnormal human state.

With his coming of age at 16, Ivan can get his revenge

when he's finally crowned Tsar and Grand Prince of all Moscow.

The brakes are off on his power.

He was the first ruler of Moscow to be crowned Emperor, or Tsar.

He very much felt like there was nothing he could do that was wrong.

One thing that tends to get overlooked...

is Ivan's belief in his divine right:

that he was appointed by God,

and that nobody could tell him what to do.

Maybe that feeling was strengthened

because of his years of being so powerless

He took his role as God's anointed very seriously.

In his own writings, he refers to his subjects as his slaves,

and anything he might do to them is fine,

because he is appointed by God.

It does go some way toward explaining how he acted.

The young Tsar's first mission is to see off his old enemy.

He was able to shake off the Boyars

and bring in inner circle.

And these were new people whom Ivan brought in to start his reign.

And he came in with a lot of ambition and a lot of energy

despite his traumatised childhood.

He set about very energetically putting things in place.

On the throne, Ivan could be a very successful,

very productive, constructive leader.

A new law code, reform in the Orthodox Church

to raise the level of education and morality of the clergy.

The reforms were intended to benefit...

large swathes of the country,

and mostly, people seem to have gone along with it

and supported all of what he was trying to do.

But just a year into Ivan's reign

comes his first real test:

a huge fire sweeps Moscow, killing 4,000 of his subjects.

The finger points at the young Tsar's family using witchcraft,

and there's a mass uprising on the streets of the capital.

He was showing signs of being vengeful

and possibly paranoid.

But in the early years,

he was surrounded by a pretty positive...

and supportive group of people, who might have made up a bit for that.

The promise of marriage

also seems to temper Ivan's vengeance.

He selects his bride-to-be, Anastasia Romanova,

from 1,500 hopefuls.

It seems that the marriage was a happy one,

and he personally chose her rather than it being an arranged marriage.

A lot of historians draw on court chronicles that were being kept.

But in his first decade of rule,

Ivan rides high on a wave of popularity,

one which also sees him create Russia's first standing army -

the Streltsy - which provided Ivan with a bodyguard...

and more.

Ivan had some early military successes,

conquering Kazan and Astrakhan to the southeast of Muscovy.

This was a huge success. It was really celebrated in Moscow.

Anastasia produces two potential heirs to the throne:

Ivan junior, and later Feodor.

During his marriage to Anastasia,

there was a period of relative calm.

And then she is suddenly murdered...

...in suspicious circumstances.

Rumours swirl around the palace of yet another poisoning.

To have her taken away from him,

in what appears to be...

very similar circumstances as his mother,

would have triggered his paranoia, his hatred once again,

but this time, to a new level.

It will have unleashed a new level of terror

After remarrying a year later,

what will happen next gives rise to one of Ivan's most infamous legends.

By now, those he had loved had died more than they had survived.

Is he forever deeply damaged as events unfold?

The cathedral on Red Square - called St Basil's, popularly -

it was built to commemorate the victory in Kazan.

Ivan was so moved by the beauty of the cathedral

and wanted in to ensure that it couldn't be replicated.

There is a rumour or legend that...

Ivan blinded the Architect...

...so that he couldn't create anything else so amazing.

I think, psychologically,

Ivan would have been very troubled by the emotion,

by this hint of humanity,

that the beauty of the cathedral sparked within him.

And he needed to eradicate it immediately,

because any sense of this

fights against his power, reduces his power.

It's much more about obliterating

his own vulnerability at all costs.

But this notorious Ivan the Terrible tale

has been dissected by historians.

To them, his actions are par for the medieval Russian course.

These kinds of stories seem to have circulated at that time,

but there's no specific evidence about it in that case.

The tide now starts to turn against the once-popular Tsar.

In 1564, Ivan was feeling very paranoid,

feeling like everyone was against him.

Earlier Ivan began to have ideas about looking to the West,

and getting, especially, a foothold into the Baltics.

But that didn't go so well.

Ivan, like many Russian leaders before and since,

had begun looking westwards,

greedily eyeing the lands of others.

He'd set his sights on Livonia:

now present-day Latvia and Estonia.

Livonia was an old crusader state

that Ivan thought he could just swoop in

and more or less take it over,

and then have a great bit of Baltic coastline to use for ports

that were ice-free year-round, which Muscovy didn't have.

Livonia itself was not a strong state,

but it had strong neighbours,

including Sweden and Poland.

And they were not keen on...

having Muscovy show up next door.

So it...

turned into a real mess.

The Livonian War was going badly.

It got bogged down very quickly,

became a bit of a quagmire.

Things just seemed to be going from bad to worse.

He blamed the Boyars.

And he...

pulled a move that has caused a lot of controversy since then.

It is December 1564

when the embattled Tsar makes a high-stakes gamble.

Ivan flees 80 miles north to Alexandrov,

leaving no-one in charge at the capital.

In a typically calculated move,

he has created a power vacuum at the heart of the country.

He declared that he was leaving the throne:

because the Boyars were so treacherous,

he couldn't deal with them any more, and he had had enough.

But the wily Tsar has another trick up his sleeve.

Ivan floods Moscow's streets with his loyal fanbase

and pays them to rally the crowds demanding his return.

The fact that he's sending out these people

to try and engender sympathy,

to try and generate some positive emotion towards him:

psychologically speaking, this is very interesting,

because these are all indications...

of a touch of vulnerability remaining.

This was a very calculated move.

He knew that the court would be so horrified and shocked

that they would then beg him to come back...

which he did... but on certain conditions.

He wanted to implement a new legal framework,

which allowed him to root out traitors:

effectively establish his own secret police force.

This elite force, the oprichniki,

would answer to Ivan and Ivan alone.

They would grow to become his own personal death squad,

used to strike fear into any enemy.

Which makes the evil that he was then able to perpetrate

all the more... terrifying.

Ivan the Terrible has a sinister band of enforcers,

the oprichniki, to seek out his enemies.

Ivan seems to have been really fascinated by monastic life.

And a lot of elements of the oprichniki

were weird imitations,

including their black costume.

They would dine communally

and have someone acting kind of in the role of the abbot.

They must pledge absolute loyalty to him

and renounce their families, their relatives,

their lives beyond that entirely.

And then the symbols that they had with them were the broom,

to sweep out... any kind of sedition.

And the dog's head.

The canine head is attached to their horses

as the oprichniki prepare their missions of terror.

I've heard different explanations for the dog's head,

and one is that it shows

that they were the loyal guard dogs of the sovereign.

Another is that it symbolised the bite of the Oprichnina.

Ivan took a lot of the most central and productive land

and called it the Oprichnina.

So that became a state within a state, I guess you could say,

which had its own institutions, and its own secret police.

Certainly a forerunner of the Tsar's Okhrana,

and then Lenin's Cheka, their job was to root out the enemy within:

traitors, real or imagined.

Their job was to go and find traitors,

and Ivan seems to be feeding names to them.

Ivan gives his mobsters a licence to kill,

and to assassinate anyone who stands in his way.

We have tales of people fleeing villages for their lives,

and that terror would have spread like a wildfire.

So his main psychological mechanism...

of maintaining his power was terror.

Terror is the one emotion...

that Ivan knows only too well,

because this is the one emotion

that I think will have dominated his emotional landscape as a young boy.

Thousands of innocent subjects

are caught up in the slaughter.

But it's Ivan's old enemy the Boyars

who bear the brunt of his brutal landgrab.

The Boyars were given other lands

that were further away and less desirable.

And if a Boyar land was in the Oprichnina, the Boyar had to move,

and then his land would be taken over by an oprichnik.

The fury, the hatred, the paranoia:

these are phenomenally exhausting emotions for any human being,

however desensitised they have become.

They are absolutely draining.

But Ivan's paranoia is not just imaginary.

In 1567, he uncovers a Boyar plot

in collusion with the King of Poland,

Sigismund II, to overthrow him.

A lot of the executions were about humiliating the victim.

You know, dismembering, prolonged torture,

and also denying them a Christian burial,

which was, in some ways, worse for someone at the time.

So he was definitely fascinated with torture and humiliation

more than the body count.

Ivan's unrelenting barbarity soon causes a rift

with the head of the Orthodox Church.

The Metropolitan of Moscow, Philip II,

bravely squares up to the Tsar.

And so Philip kept speaking out,

and the rest of the clergy

did not back him up because they were terrified.

For Ivan,

who believed he had been deprived of anyone he had ever loved,

the idea that God was now disappointed in him

was too much to bear.

And Ivan finally decided he had had enough.

It prompted him to exile the leader of his church,

whom he had known since he was a boy, and then,

once he was safely out of sight, to have him assassinated.

Philip's assumption that he could rely on his childhood friendship

to protect him was the big mistake.

He misunderstood: he failed to realise that...

Ivan was not somebody who...

has any comprehension...

of loyalty or honour at all.

He trusts no-one.

He would've been the first to say that the church also has corruption,

and the church also needs correction:

who better to do it than me?

With the fear of more rebellion,

within the year, Ivan plans another violent purge.

But this requires bloodshed on a scale never before seen.

Novgorod had been a very independent city in the far north.

It was also the second-largest city in the country, in Muscovy.

Ivan supposedly heard rumours that...

the Novgorod elite was plotting against him.

And not just plotting against him

but planning to replace him with his cousin Prince Vladimir Andreyevich.

The brutal dictator has a terrifying solution.

He went up there with a whole army of the oprichniki

and spent about six weeks just massacring...

anything that moved

Even the city's churches are no longer safe.

All of the church's property was confiscated,

all of the movable wealth was taken back to Moscow:

so any wealth, any independence,

any separate culture was expropriated.

Ivan was able to maintain his fury:

to maintain this tyranny,

for weeks on end and with no exceptions.

It speaks again to the way

that his character was formed so early.

It wasn't just a facet of his personality,

it was his whole being.

Before that time, you know, Muscovy had rule of law,

so what he did was not normal.

But this is not the end of Ivan IV's bloodletting.

These abnormally out-of-control episodes of rage,

and this being divorced from reality,

produces somebody who is not fully in control.

Now having ruled Russia for over two decades,

an increasingly unstable Tsar is lashing out,

even to those closest to him.

On a whim, Ivan disbands his loyal oprichniki

and executes its leaders.

He then marries for a third time,

but his wife Marfa mysteriously dies of poisoning...

just days after their wedding.

The only psychological response to that

is to develop an ever-ready state of vigilance:

a state of almost complete paranoia.

You have to be suspicious.

You have to be alert to the next thing that could come to hit you.

As Ivan's court descends into chaos,

in 1575, the mercurial Tsar makes another strange move.

He puts a Tatar Prince on his throne

from one of Muscovy's largest Turkic minorities:

Simeon Bekbulatovich.

It's a very mysterious episode.

This was another occasion when Ivan apparently abdicated power.

The vacuum that's left of some of the barbaric acts he's carried out

will have just left him an empty shell of a man.

He was tired,

and felt he had run out of ideas,

and couldn't carry on.

Also, he may have just been going a bit crazy.

A tired Ivan the Terrible

hasn't lost his capacity for violence.

Legend has it that he then marries and is widowed a further two times

in as many years,

with his seventh wife, Maria Dolgorukaya,

dispatched by drowning.

This eradication...

what appears to be murder, is a definitive act.

But modern-day historians question whether...

wife Maria is, in fact, just a myth:

a character created in later centuries by the Russian Empire.

Ivan's marriage allegedly legitimises later claims

that medieval Rus combined Kyiv Rus, AKA modern-day Ukraine,

as one kingdom with Russia.

Ivan's mythical wife Maria is said to be the descendant

of Yury Dolgoruky - the Grand Prince of Kyiv,

who also founded Moscow.

He's believed to be buried here in Kyiv,

and the legend has been used through the centuries

to support expansion from Muscovy,

AKA Russia, to the West.

But myth or legend, a brutal miscalculation by the tyrant in 1581

would rock his entire dynasty.

The most popular account,

which comes from the English envoy at the court,

is that Ivan encountered his daughter-in-law.

She was pregnant and not dressed properly,

and he started berating her, possibly hit her.

Her husband came to her defence,

and the father and son started fighting.

And Ivan hit his son.

It ended up being a fatal blow to the head.

There's some accounts of the time of...

him being absolutely...

inconsolable with grief.

My sense is that this will have been...

a murder committed not almost in a fully conscious state:

this is the absolute example of...

the rage taking over.

And the moment the act is done, the sense of normality creeps in.

But did the Moscow tyrant really kill his eldest son?

To some historians, it's a mere fable.

His oldest son, Ivan Ivanovich,

definitely did die in 1581.

It's possible that Ivan killed him.

And there are a number of accounts from the time

that say Ivan killed him.

But there are also very different accounts of what happened.

The accusation perhaps came from the Tsar's enemies

as a ruse to add to his already terrible reputation.

Whatever happened to the younger Ivan

was in the very inner private apartments

of the imperial family,

and nobody else was around, and so...

there's no actual firm evidence... one way or the other.

Wracked with grief and guilt in his twilight years,

the tyrant makes a final unexpected gesture.

Ivan put together a memorial list

of... maybe not all, but quite a large number of his own victims.

He seems to have been overcome with guilt about this.

He wanted the church to pray for the souls of the people he had killed.

We're looking at huge numbers of people.

But nothing can save Ivan the Terrible from the inevitable.

On 28th March 1584,

he dies of a stroke... whilst playing chess.

Or did he?

He was exhumed in the 1960s by Soviet archaeologists, and...

they found a very high level of mercury in his bones.

There could be a less cloak-and-dagger explanation.

It might have been from medicine that he was taking,

because his spine had a deformity,

which probably caused a lot of pain.

And he may have been taking medicine with mercury in it.

High levels of mercury may have caused him to act erratically,

and people wouldn't have understood that at the time.

The Tsar's mysterious demise

continues to cause debate and intrigue.

Even in 2024, Ivan went viral when scientists from Brazil

recreated his face using measurements of his skull

and the latest in forensic facial reconstruction software.

There are no firm conclusions on how the dictator died.

But there is no doubt about the mess...

that he created of his country.

Muscovy was not in a great state at that time, for various reasons.

They had negotiated an end to the Livonian War

but not on favourable terms.

They had had to make some territorial concessions.

They just used up a lot of resources.

They had to do a lot of extraordinary taxation

to fund the war, so all of that had come off of people's incomes.

And the country had completely exhausted itself.

And then he left a succession crisis,

because he had killed his oldest and only capable son.

There's something ironic about the fact that at his own hands...

that his significance, his place in history is killed.

Ivan's younger son Feodor cannot step up to the plate.

He wasn't capable of ruling,

and it's not entirely clear why not.

He may have had some kind of learning disability.

So the real ruling ended up being done by Feodor's brother-in-law,

who was called Boris Godunov,

who was doing the real ruling behind the throne.

Fourteen years later, Prince Feodor mysteriously dies,

severing the final link between Ivan's Rurik dynasty

and the Russian throne.

One of the many, many terrible things about... Ivan and his legacy

is that through his actions,

he brought an end to his own princely line.

It was one of the most successful dynasties

that had been in power for 700 years or so in that part of the world.

Despite the bulging case file of killings,

it seems Ivan IV is soon forgiven.

The country was absolutely bereft.

It's hard to describe how attached the people of Muscovy

was to this particular family.

It wasn't just that they could go find another...

a Boyar family or something, and bring them in.

It had to be this particular family.

The revolving door of leaders that follows

plunges Russia into an era coined the 'Time of the Troubles':

reportedly even more chaotic than the reign under Ivan the Terrible.

There are thousands on his death list,

but does Ivan deserve his nickname and reputation?

I think among his contemporaries in Europe,

Ivan was by far the worst and most bloodthirsty ruler...

that country has had to endure.

So... plain bad?

Or was this Killer King just mad?

How will the sands of time treat his legacy?

That paranoia... even people at the time were saying,

'We don't really think you need to be this paranoid.'

Someone who was capable of committing horrific, barbaric acts:

I'm often asked, 'Are they mad? Are they bad or just misunderstood?'

For me, Ivan the Terrible...

fits most closely the mad.

People have diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia,

some modern label: I don't think that works very well.

He would have seen his repressions of the people as...

him doing his job to...

raise the moral standards of the country.

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