IVAN IV, the Terrible. - Born in 1533, died in 1584, he was crowned tsar by his metropolitan Macarius (v.) in 1547 without the prior permission of the Byzantine patriarch, who only in 1562 recognized his coronation as valid. The reign of I. marks the acme of the Russian Middle Ages under the influence of the school of Joseph of Volokolamsk. The "Domostroj" (a code regulating the daily life of the laity) and the "Stoglav" (which does the same for the clergy), published under I., constituted an undisputed norm of life.
I. further gathered the state laws then in force into a new codification that bore the name sudebnik carskij (1549). Under the reign of I. a new kind of chronicle was also published, namely the Book of the Steps by which the ruling family in Russia advanced through the centuries. I. introduced the art of printing into Russia, but on account of the resistance of the people he later had to dismiss the printer, who emigrated to Poland.
I. unconditionally supported the work of his metropolitan in the religious field. He disputed successfully with a well-known Polish Protestant, Rokita.
In the field of sacred art I. had the church of Mary the Protectress, later of Basil the Fool for Christ, built by the two Russian architects Barmat and Postnik on Red Square in front of the Moscow Kremlin, another similar one at Svjask near Kazan, and a third at Vologda. To embellish his palace and these churches he had at his service painters who, in a new style, no longer guided by Platonic conceptions, painted frescoes and icons.
I. did not lose his religious sense even in the midst of his terrible ferocity; he knew he was doing wrong and before dying he attempted in some manner to make amends for his misdeeds.
From his youth he felt the "greatness of power": even his cruelties and his crimes, rather than corresponding to the whims of an autocrat, fall within the harshness of a leader determined to reach his goal at any cost. Famous is his ruthless repression of the boyars (a social class in which he feared intrigues and conspiracies): entire families were destroyed, without regard for age or sex. Several nobles managed to flee and some of them went over to the Polish-Lithuanian side: among them Prince Kurbsky, who later carried on with his former sovereign an interesting polemical correspondence, important in the development of Russian literature and very significant on the political plane, inasmuch as it already hinted at some fundamental themes of the ideological struggle between autocracy and a vague "liberalism" with a noble background. On the military plane, I. IV obtained great victories against the Tatars, conquering Kazan and Astrakhan. He anticipated in a certain way the policy of Peter the Great with his struggle for the conquest of the Baltic lands (against Swedes and Poles): notable initial successes in Livonia were, however, followed by reverses. The wars and the struggle against the boyars did not fail to shake the state organism gravely. Not long after his death the so-called "times of troubles" began for Russia. I. has greatly interested historians, novelists and poets. In the U.S.S.R. his figure has been to a notable extent "revalued": there is a tendency to exalt in him the adversary of the boyars in the name of the power of the State and the fighter against the Baltic Germans and Swedes, in the name of the greatness of Russia.