Mezhdu sviatymi i demonami: Zametki o posmertnoi sud′be opal′nykh tsaria Ivana Groznogo, and: Ivan Groznyi: Pervyi russkii tsar′ (review)

The books reviewed here represent two approaches to the enigmatic figure of the first Russian tsar, Ivan IV the Terrible (1533–84), both of them typical of modern Russian scholarship. Capitalizing on the great tradition of Russian cultural studies, Andrei Alekseevich Bulychev offers a powerful interpretation of Ivan’s attitude toward terror and death. Viacheslav Valentinovich Shaposhnik’s book revives another tradition in Ivaniana, that of presentist glorification of Ivan the Terrible and his policy.

Bulychev graduated from the Moscow Institute of Historical and Archival Research in 1984. He is head of the Depository of Early Printed and Rare Books at the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGADA) and the author of works on the history of the Orthodox Church, medieval Russian culture, printing in Muscovy, and genealogy. His book is a collection of essays on the posthumous fate of the victims of Ivan the Terrible’s terror. The importance of studying all aspects of terror in this period is obvious if one considers Ivan’s nickname (Groznyi in Russian, translated as “Terrible,” in the sense of terrifying or awe-inspiring), which derives from his use of fear as a political weapon.

Shaposhnik had many different jobs before he went to St. Petersburg University to read history. He graduated in 1995. His candidate’s dissertation was devoted to Metropolitan Makarii and the relations between church and state in Russia in the 1540s and 1550s. In 2003, he defended a doctoral dissertation on church–state relations in the 1530s–80s in which he made a number of important observations on the subject.¹ He is currently professor at his alma mater. Shaposhnik’s book is a historical biography of Ivan the Terrible.

Their different genres require our authors to arrange their material in different ways. Bulychev’s book is organized thematically. His first, and most important, essay is about the commemoration of the Orthodox victims of the oprichnina in the 16th and early 17th centuries. (In fact, Bulychev covers a wider chronological period in his book.) In his second essay, Bulychev looks at the three most common types of executions during the oprichnina (1565–72). The third essay deals with the phenomenon of the destruction of the victims’ property in medieval culture. Shaposhnik, in contrast, provides a chronological account of Ivan’s reign. At the end of his book he also adds two thematic chapters on the biblical kings (“tsars” in East Slavic literary tradition) and the views of medieval Russian bookmen on the tsar’s power.

No study of Ivan the Terrible is possible without resorting to previous scholarship. Aspects of Bulychev’s theme of terror under Ivan have been studied by S. B. Veselovskii, R. G. Skrynnikov, and more recently by Ludwig Steindorff and A. L. Iurganov.² Iurganov’s study of the categories of medieval Russian culture is essential for Bulychev’s methodology.³ He follows Iurganov’s method of exploring the meanings of cultural categories, though he disagrees with Iurganov on particular issues. Bulychev correctly notes that we still know very little about how Ivan’s terror was perceived by Muscovites (7). This is the underlying question of his research. Shaposhnik argues that previous biographies titled Ivan the Terrible dealt in fact not with Ivan the man and ruler but with the events of his reign and their results. One might expect Shaposhnik to take on this colossal task, but he is too well aware of the fact that a biography of Ivan the man is virtually impossible because of the lack of private sources.⁴ This is why, despite his criticism of predecessors, Shaposhnik declares that his aim is only to tell about...