The Atheist Director and the Orthodox Tsar Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible

Abstract

Because Stalin’s cult of Ivan the Terrible failed to impose uniformity on representations of Ivan by historians and artists, Sergei Eisenstein could choose how to deal with religion in sixteenth-century Muscovy. Some contemporary critics and later scholars have noted how religious ‘Ivan the Terrible’ is, but no one interpreted what message Eisenstein sought to convey by presenting Ivan, his supporters and lay opponents as religious, and all clergy and affiliates of the Russian Orthodox Church as enemies of Ivan and of Russia. Eisenstein’s depiction actually argues that lay piety neither guaranteed nor precluded patriotism. But professional piety, even that of a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Philip, virtually precluded patriotism. Eisenstein’s uncompromisingly hostile attitude toward the Russian Orthodox Church stands in sharp contrast to the Soviet government’s policy of compromise toward the Church at the time Eisenstein wrote his screenplay and filmed Part I.