Ivan the Terrible in Russian Historiography

Abstract

Russian historians have taken a livelier interest in Ivan the Terrible than in any other Tsar except Peter the Great. But they have always been seriously handicapped in their treatment of him by grave deficiencies in the material at their disposal. These deficiencies are of two kinds. First, the material is very incomplete and scanty. The Moscow archives and many other Russian documentary records were destroyed during the ‘Time of Troubles’ and in the great fire of Moscow of 1626, and historians have had to try to reconstruct the history of sixteenth-century Russia from what have been called ‘accidental scraps and fragments of material’. Secondly, an appreciable part of even the material which survives, such as the Chronicles, the correspondence between Ivan and Kurbsky, and Kurbsky's History of the Grand Prince of Moscow, is partisan and has to be used with the greatest caution. By the sixteenth century, Russian Chronicles had begun to be written and revised to put an official gloss on events; the correspondence between Ivan and Kurbsky was polemical in tone and aim; and the History of the Grand Prince of Moscow was an able political pamphlet aimed at influencing opinion in Lithuania. With only fragmentary and partisan sources to draw on, Russian historians came to differ widely in their interpretation of Ivan the Terrible and his achievements, particularly in the pioneer days of historical writing. But in a penetrating sketch of Ivan's reign published in 1923 Platonov felt able to affirm that, in the course of the controversy, Ivan and his times had begun to be substantially understood, and that this ‘success’ was ‘one of the brilliant pages in (Russian) historiography, one of the decisive victories of the scientific method’.