The Singer at the Enigmatic Death of Ivan IV ('the Terrible')

with thanks to Russians with Attitude

Jul 01, 2023

The Russians with Attitude (RWA) podcast this week released a brilliant episode on Ivan IV, Tsar of All Russia (1530-84). It begins their series on the Romanov Dynasty. If you are interested in Russian history, culture, and the war against NATO in Ukraine, I highly recommend listening to this podcast. You need to take a paid subscription to get the full experience, but I guarantee it is worth it. You will be much better informed, entertained, and will learn to ‘manoeuvre through the hellscape of American cultural hegemony’.

RWA also have twitter and telegram accounts, and the podcast is on all the platforms despite the information war against Russians. RWA also have a

RWA Samizdat

substack account, where they publish from time to time RWA Samizdat from contributors from their community. I contributed one such samizdat, but there have been some technical issues with the platform so I am publishing it here, with RWA’s agreement, on my substack.

The brief samizdat is about one incident in Ivan’s life, or rather the mystery of the last hours of his life. Do listen to the RWA podcast for more context about his life. Nikolai and Kirill were good enough to summarise this incident during their podcast. I have some further reading at the end of the piece if you are curious about Ivan IV or indeed my writing.

Ivan IV’s Singer

Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’ or Groznyi, грозный) tests the limits of historical understanding. All that we know of him, we only seem to know of him. All the stories we tell of him, we can only separate from legend with difficulty. His experience of the world, to the extent that we can reach that interpretation beneath other interpretations, was a reality that we accept only with a troubled mind: borderline madness; a belief in an idea of sovereignty, consecrated by a Byzantine political tradition that has disappeared from the world; an intimate familiarity with violence and trauma, and the dissociation of memory, image and culture.

His life is secreted in enigmas. There is even a theory that the person we know as Ivan, fourth of his name, Tsar of Holy Mother Russia, was in fact three different persons, fused together in that old form of disinformation known as historical legend. Even his death is an enigma. There is a surviving account by an English commercial agent. Can you trust anything an Englishman writes about Russia? Maybe not. Still this account includes an enigmatic description of the moment of his death. ‘In the mean,’ the Englishman said, ‘he was strangled and stark dead.’ How did Ivan die? Was the tyrant Ivan murdered in an early regime change operation, and, if so, by whose hand and why?

No-one knows for sure how Ivan the Terrible died. The Tsar of all Russia, Grand Prince of Vladimir and Moscow and all the rest, died in 1584, but just how he died, we do not really know. The uncertainty, together with the availability of scientific methods, led to the exhumation of his bones from his grave within the Cathedral of the Kremlin that houses all the bones of the fallen Tsars, except, of course, the last Romanov.

The enigmatic account of his death was written by the unreliable commercial adventurer, Jerome Horsey, but it is an eyewitness account, which is an uncommon thing in the history of the death of kings (Jerome Horsey, ‘Travels’, 1598, in Bond, Russia at the Close of the Sixteenth Century). Ivan the Terrible suffered from multiple ailments and was a believer in all kinds of magic and religion, and so, according to Horsey, he called in his last hours for precious stones to be brought to his private chamber. He placed coral and turquoise stones on his body and declared to his private court: ‘I am poisoned with disease; you see they show their virtue by the change of their pure colour into pall; declares my death.’

Ivan then spent the last hours of his final day with the comforts of his doctor and his alchemist. Ivan had denied these comforts to thousands upon thousands who he listed in his sinodiki (prayers for the dead, listing the many names of his victims) which Ivan sent to monasteries in the deranged grief that followed his murder of his son and heir. He took a bath and there ‘made merry with pleasant songs as he useth to do.’ Ivan had always loved the singers of his court, the skomorokhi, who sang ballads and ribaldry and performed as clowns. They had roots in peasant and even pagan culture, and were suspected by the Russian church of fomenting heresy and disrespect for priestly authority.

Indeed, such was Ivan’s love for the skomorokhi that as part of perhaps his most infamous act, the sack of Novgorod and the massacre of its citizens, he captured all the loved and artful skomorokhi of Novgorod, and, after using them to shame the insubordinate Archbishop of this city, still too proud of its religious and republican traditions, carted them off to Moscow. Russell Zguta identified at least one of these skomorokhi who would later serve Ivan for over 20 years, indeed most likely till the day of his death (Russell Zguta, Russian Minstrels: a history of the skomorokhi, 1978).

Was it one of these captive artists, seized by this perfect monster of power, who helped Ivan approach his death, stained with sin, but merry with song? I like to imagine that one of these skomorokhi became the cruel man’s most loyal singer, and so found in captivity, like much art does, a comfortable life. But such a lowly singer does not appear in the next scene of Jerome Horsey’s account of the Tsar’s final moments.

Returning to his bedchamber fresh from his bath and in new linen, the Tsar called for a chess board. Beside the bed stood the two rivals for the Tsar’s favour. Boris Godunov would later become Tsar, uniquely so since he was not part of any dynastic family. Bogdan Belsky was the sly and surly drinking partner of the Tsar. Would they have been the Tsar’s chess opponent? It seems odd indeed. But perhaps it was the singer, who like Roy in Bladerunner, used a game of chess to confront his maker?

Then Ivan suddenly fainted and fell back, and now the confusion and omissions of details in Horsey accounts demand the imagination. Ivan called for the apothecary, and the more usual remedies, the doctor and the confessor. Horsey depicts a strange scene of rivals in power, who stood apart from a minstrel clown in their suddenly vulnerable terror. And then, Horsey wrote, most enigmatically of all, “In the mean he was strangled and stark dead”.

The great biographer of Ivan the Terrible, Isabel de Madariaga wondered, was Ivan murdered (Isabel de Madaraiaga, Ivan the Terrible, 2005, pp. 351-2)? It was not poison. A 20th century autopsy found no markedly irregular traces of poison in his body. But there were other means to kill and many motives for murder. The Tsar had been in disarray with grief and madness and sorcery. His war plans were ruined. His own dynasty had been brought to the edge of extinction by his rage-filled impulse to kill his own son.

Madariaga formed the cautious view the Horsey’s strangling was a spasm or suffocation of a heart attack. But I see another possibility. There in that room, the captive artist finally struck out at the domination of power and terror. It was too late, of course; far too late for all the dead souls whose fate the singer did not celebrate. It was too convenient. But does not patronage always support art so? The artists imagine they seduce power, when power controls their every step. So I imagine, in the black spots of history’s recall, that the moment the Tsar fell back, and panic filled the room, his friendly chess opponent, his loyal skomorokhi, saw his power wane, reached across the board, and strangled the Tsar to death. Belsky and Godunov looked on and did not intervene. In the hours after Ivan’s death, the two rivals conspired together to take the sad and broken life of Ivan’s Singer. Maybe? And to think, we can only begin to know this drama because the clumsy Horsey let slip one stray word, ‘strangled’.

My Writing

Thanks again to the wonderful RWA podcasters for opening the world’s eyes to the real Russia in history and today. I try to do the same and to imagine the world afresh with a little bit of good quality history.

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Jeff Rich

I also offer a paid subscription for which you get a fortnightly essay from me.

I also post at www.theburningarchive.com.

I have published a number of articles on the war in Ukraine and the problems of American Empire.

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