by GREG CARLETON
Ivan the Terrible roasts Johann Boy, governor of Livonia, on a spit, 1573. IMAGE/ Engraving, c. 1630. AKG Images
Westerners often consider Russia through the prism of the Soviet Union and the Second World War. But we must look further back if we wish to understand the modern nation’s fears, aims and motivations.
Russia almost didn’t survive the beginning of the 17th century. Convulsed by civil wars, peasant uprisings, foreign invasions, mass famine and repeated power struggles, it faced violence so apocalyptic that a special word was applied to embrace this blood-soaked anarchy: smuta [smoot-uh], usually translated as the ‘Time of Troubles’. It is the most terrifying word in the nation’s history, and yet today, far from just referring to one of the darkest chapters in Russia’s past, it plays a central role in the resurgence of 21st-century Russian nationalism.
If what befell Russia four centuries ago was unprecedented, for those living then it was also totally unexpected. Just decades before, Russia had reached its greatest power to date during the reign of Ivan IV, better known to us as ‘the Terrible’. In English the sobriquet is a misnomer, for it means inspiring awe of the dreadful kind. Not only did his own subjects face that wrath during Ivan’s reign as tsar from 1547 to his death in 1584, so too did his neighbours, particularly to the east. At that time the Volga, while so evocative of Russia now, was controlled by the successors to the Mongol invaders from the 13th century. Hostilities between those descendants and Russia were rampant until Ivan launched an attack in 1552, promoted by the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church as a crusade to eliminate their Muslim foe, against the Khanate of Kazan, whose capital of the same name lay on the mighty river, nearly 450 miles from Moscow.
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