Until recently, the fact that Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich the Terrible killed his son Tsarevich Ivan seemed indisputable, because it was reflected even in school textbooks as one of the evidence of the supposedly special cruelty of the Russian autocracy. And no one wondered where this fact came from in historical literature.
Having seen at an exhibition in 1885 in St. Petersburg a new painting by Ilya Repin “Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan on November 16, 1581,” which later became known under the simplified name “Ivan the Terrible Kills His Son,” the Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod and the Russian thinker Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev was extremely outraged by its plot, in which fiction was presented as fact, and wrote to Emperor Alexander III: “The picture cannot be called historical, since this moment ... is purely fantastic.”
Only Metropolitan John of St. Petersburg and Ladoga first refuted this slander against the tsar in his book “Autocracy of the Spirit,” where he proved that Tsarevich John died of a serious illness, and that in the historical documents that have reached us there is no hint of filicide.
What do the documents tell us? In the Moscow Chronicle for the year 7090 (1581) it is written: “... Tsarevich John Ioannovich reposed.” The Piskarevsky chronicler indicates in more detail: “at 12 o’clock in the night of the summer of November 7090 on the 17th day... the death of Tsarevich John Ioannovich.” The Novgorod Fourth Chronicle says: In the same year (7090), Tsarevich John Ioannovich reposed at Matins in Sloboda...” The Morozov Chronicle states: “... Tsarevich Ioann Ioannovich passed away.” As you can see, there is not a word about murder.
As for the facts testifying to the death of Tsarevich John from poisoning, they are completely justified. V.V. Manyagin in his book “The Leader of the Militant Church” (2003) writes: “As for the disease, we can definitely say - it was poisoning with sublimate. The death caused by it is painful, and the dose causing such an outcome does not exceed 0.18 grams.” Who installed this?
“In 1963, in the Archangel Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin,” writes Manyagin, “four tombs were opened: Ivan the Terrible, Tsarevich Ivan, Tsar Theodore Ioannovich and commander Skopin-Shuisky. When examining the remains, the version of the poisoning of Tsar Ivan the Terrible was verified. Scientists found that the arsenic content was approximately the same in all four skeletons and did not exceed the norm. But in the bones of Tsar John and Tsarevich John, the presence of mercury was discovered, much higher than permissible norm. Some historians tried to argue that this was not poisoning at all, but a consequence of treating syphilis with mercury ointments. However, studies have shown that no syphilitic changes were found in the remains of the king and prince. The damage that he could have received from a blow with his father's staff was not found in the remains of the prince. After a study of the burials of Moscow grand duchesses and queens was carried out in the 1990s, the fact of poisoning with the same sublimate was identified as the mother of Ivan Vasilyevich Elena Vasilyevna Glinskaya (died in 1538) and his first wife Anastasia Romanova (died in 1560).”
The royal family was the victim of poisoners for several decades. Among those deliberately killed was Tsarevich John. The poison content in his remains is many times higher than the permissible limit.
But who was the first to slander one of the Russian autocrats? These lines, which were composed by Anthony Possevin, were picked up by Heinrich Staden and quoted by the too trusting Karamzin: “The prince, filled with noble jealousy, came to his father and demanded that he send him with an army to expel the enemy, liberate Pskov, and restore the honor of Russia. John, in a flurry of anger, shouted: “Rebel! You, together with the boyars, want to overthrow me from the throne,” and raised his hand. Boris Godunov wanted to keep her. The king gave him several wounds with his sharp staff and hit the prince hard on the head with it. This unfortunate man fell, bleeding!"
Jesuit monk Anthony Possevin came to Moscow in 1581 to serve as a mediator in negotiations between the Russian Tsar and the Polish king Stefan Batory, who invaded Russian lands during the Livonian War. As legate of Pope Gregory XIII, Possevin hoped, with the help of the Jesuits, to achieve concessions from John IV, taking advantage of the difficult foreign policy situation of Rus'. His goal was not at all the reconciliation of the warring parties, but the subordination of the Russian Church to the papal throne. The Catholic Church promised Ivan the Terrible, if he agreed, the acquisition of territories that previously belonged to Byzantium.
The mission was a complete failure, and the enraged Possevin, out of his malice and intent, created a myth that Ivan the Terrible, in a fit of anger, killed his son and heir to the throne, Tsarevich Ivan Ioannovich. “Possevin says,” writes Metropolitan John, “that the king was angry with his daughter-in-law, the wife of the prince, and during a quarrel that broke out, he killed him. The absurdity of the version (already from the moment it appeared) was so obvious that it was necessary to “ennoble” the story, to find a more “reliable” reason and “motive for the murder.”
This is how another tale appeared - that the prince led the political opposition to his father’s course in negotiations with Batory to conclude peace and was killed by the king on suspicion of involvement in a boyar conspiracy. Both versions are completely unfounded and unproven.
Indirect evidence of Ivan’s death not from a blow from a staff is the fact that in the “modified” version of filicide, his death did not follow immediately after the “fatal blow,” but four days later in Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda. Subsequently, it became clear why the prince faded away for four days - it was caused by sublimate poisoning.
Another rogue who visited Moscow, the German Heinrich Staden, picked up the version of “sonicide”. He wrote slanderous notes, which Karamzin considered to be true (the German was later exposed as a lie by Soviet historians I.I. Polosin and S.B. Veselovsky). Returning to Germany, Staden outlined a project for the conquest of Muscovy, proposing to destroy churches and monasteries, abolish the Orthodox faith, and then turn the inhabitants into slaves. This is whose data Russian historians used when describing the era of John IV in their writings.
What is the sovereign's mistake?
Instructing the creators of the film “Ivan the Terrible,” directed by Eisenstein and playing Tsar Cherkasov, Stalin said: “Ivan the Terrible was very tough. It is possible to show that he was tough. But you need to show why you need to be tough. One of the mistakes of Ivan the Terrible was that he did not destroy five large feudal families. If he is these five large families if he had destroyed it, there would have been no Time of Troubles at all.”
Ivan the Terrible was called a tyrant, exorbitant cruelties were attributed to him, and meanwhile Stalin, who carefully studied the tsar’s policies, concluded that he even showed excessive softness towards hostile boyar families, pardoning them, and thereby allowed Russia to be plunged into Time of Troubles, which killed almost half the population of Muscovy.
Meanwhile, the facts refute the cruelty of the tsar and the inhumanity of the oprichnina “terror.” N. Skuratov writes: “To an ordinary person ignorant of history, who is not averse to sometimes watching films and reading a newspaper, it may seem that the guardsmen of Ivan the Terrible killed half of the country’s population. Meanwhile, the number of victims of political repression during the 50-year reign is well known from reliable historical sources. The overwhelming majority of the dead are named in them... those executed belonged to the upper classes and were guilty of very real, and not mythical, conspiracies and betrayals... Almost all of them had previously been forgiven under the kissing vows of the cross, that is, they were oathbreakers, political recidivists "
Manyagin notes that Metropolitan John and historian R.G. shared the same point of view. Skrynnikov, who pointed out that during the 50 years of the reign of the “formidable king” no more than 4-5 thousand people were sentenced to death. But from this figure it is necessary to remove the executed boyars before 1547, that is, before the crowning of Ivan Vasilyevich. He cannot be responsible for the mutual murders of various boyar clans striving for power.
Manyagin writes: “During the reign of John IV, the death penalty was punishable for murder, rape, sodomy, kidnapping, arson of a residential building with people, robbery of a temple, high treason. For comparison: during the reign of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, already 80 types of crimes were punishable by death, and under Peter I - more than 120. Each death sentence under John IV was passed only in Moscow and approved personally by the Tsar.”
The power of the Orthodox Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich was much softer than in Europe. In 1572, during St. Bartholomew's Night in France, over 80 thousand Protestants were killed. In England, in the first half of the 16th century, 70 thousand people were hanged for vagrancy alone. In Germany, during the suppression of the peasant uprising of 1525, more than 100 thousand people were executed...
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Until recently, the fact that Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich the Terrible killed his son Tsarevich Ivan seemed indisputable, because it was reflected even in school textbooks as one of the evidence of the supposedly special cruelty of the Russian autocracy. And no one wondered where this fact came from in historical literature. But what do the documents say? The article by the Russian publicist and historian, reserve colonel Nikolai Shakhmagonov, is devoted to the search for an answer.
What did the prince die from?
Having seen Ilya Repin’s new painting “Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan on November 16, 1581” at an exhibition in St. Petersburg in 1885, which later became known under the simplified name “Ivan the Terrible Kills His Son,” the Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod and the Russian thinker Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev was extremely outraged by its plot, in which fiction was presented as fact, and wrote to Emperor Alexander III: “The picture cannot be called historical, since this moment ... is purely fantastic.”Meanwhile, the fact that Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich the Terrible killed his son Tsarevich Ivan until recently seemed indisputable. And no one wondered where this fact came from in historical literature. Only Metropolitan John of St. Petersburg and Ladoga first refuted this slander against the tsar in his book “Autocracy of the Spirit,” where he proved that Tsarevich John died of a serious illness and that in the historical documents that have reached us there is no hint of filicide.
What do the documents say? In the Moscow Chronicle for the year 7090 (1581) it is written: “... Tsarevich John Ioannovich reposed.” The Piskarevsky chronicler indicates in more detail: “at 12 o’clock in the night of the summer of November 7090 on the 17th day... the death of Tsarevich John Ioannovich.” The Novgorod Fourth Chronicle says: “In the same year (7090) Tsarevich Ioann Ioannovich reposed at Matins in Sloboda...” The Morozov Chronicle states: “... Tsarevich Ioann Ioannovich passed away.” As you can see, there is not a word about murder.
As for the facts testifying to the death of Tsarevich John from poisoning, they are completely justified. V.V. Manyagin in his book “The Leader of the Militant Church” (2003) writes: “As for the disease, we can say definitely - it was poisoning with sublimate. The death caused by it is painful, and the dose causing such an outcome does not exceed 0.18 grams.” Who installed this?
“In 1963, in the Archangel Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin,” writes Manyagin, “four tombs were opened: Ivan the Terrible, Tsarevich Ivan, Tsar Theodore Ioannovich and commander Skopin-Shuisky. When examining the remains, the version of the poisoning of Tsar Ivan the Terrible was verified. Scientists found that the arsenic content was approximately the same in all four skeletons and did not exceed the norm. But in the bones of Tsar John and Tsarevich John, the presence of mercury was discovered, far exceeding the permissible norm. Some historians tried to argue that this was not poisoning at all, but a consequence of treating syphilis with mercury ointments. However, studies have shown that no syphilitic changes were found in the remains of the king and prince. The damage that he could have received from a blow with his father's staff was not found in the remains of the prince. After a study of the burials of Moscow grand duchesses and queens was carried out in the 1990s, the fact of poisoning with the same sublimate was identified as the mother of Ivan Vasilyevich Elena Vasilyevna Glinskaya (died in 1538) and his first wife Anastasia Romanova (died in 1560).”
The royal family was the victim of poisoners for several decades. Among those deliberately killed was Tsarevich John. The poison content in his remains is many times higher than the permissible limit.
“The history of Russia was written by its enemies”
Who is the author of the slander against Ivan the Terrible? The names of this writer and his followers are known. Their inventions are only links in a chain of false fabrications about our great past. Metropolitan John believed that “the testimony of foreigners had a decisive influence on the formation of the Russo-hating beliefs of “historical science.”The outstanding researcher of antiquity Sergei Paramonov spoke about the same thing in the book “Where are you from, Rus'?”, which he published under the pseudonym Sergei Lesnoy: “Our history was written by Germans who did not know or knew the Russian language poorly.” An example of this is the false Norman theory, the myth about the calling of the Varangians and other myths.
The fact that the authors of works on Russian history were foreigners was also noted by the Soviet academician B.A. Rybakov. He, in particular, wrote: “In times of Bironovism, when to defend Russian beginning In any case, it turned out to be very difficult; in St. Petersburg, among scientists invited from the German principalities, the idea was born of the Slavs borrowing statehood from the North German tribes. The Slavs of the 9th-10th centuries were recognized as “living in a bestial manner” (an expression of the Normans), and the northern robber detachments of the Varangian Normans, who were hired to serve various rulers and kept Northern Europe at bay, were declared the builders and creators of the state.
Thus, under the pen of Siegfried Bayer, Gerard Miller and August Schloezer, the idea of Normanism was born, which is often called the Norman theory, although the entire sum of Normanistic statements over two centuries does not give the right to call Normanism not only a theory, but even a hypothesis, since there is no analysis here sources, nor a review of all known facts.”
It would seem that we are talking about an era that is not related to our topic. But if you do not understand the West’s desire to distort the truth about our great past, it is difficult to believe that what was written about Ivan the Terrible by foreigners is a simple lie.
"WITH light hand For Karamzin, it became a sign of good manners to generously smear this era with black paint,” wrote Metropolitan John. “Even the most conservative Marxist historians considered it their duty to pay tribute to Russophobic rhetoric, speaking of “savagery,” “ferocity,” “ignorance,” and “terror” as self-evident features of the era.”
Moreover, the evidence for the alleged horrors of that era of Moscow Rus' for historians was not eyewitness accounts, not archival data, not the testimony of courtiers recorded and preserved in archives, but the slanderous fabrications of Western envoys. The myth of filicide and other false myths were necessary not only to expose the tsar as a bloodthirsty tyrant in the eyes of his descendants, but also to prove to the Western world, by that time “famous” for the horrors of the Inquisition, that the order in Muscovy was no better.
“Starting with Karamzin,” wrote Metropolitan John, “Russian historians reproduced in their writings all the abomination and dirt that foreign “guests” poured on Russia, and the creative “heritage” of people like Staden and Possevin, for a long time was perceived as evidence of the life and morals of the Russian people.”
A. Gulevich says the same thing in his book “Tsarist Power and Revolution”: “National history is usually written by friends. The history of Russia was written by its enemies.”
Who is the author of the slander?
But who was the first to slander one of the greatest Russian autocrats? These lines, which were composed by Anthony Possevin, were picked up by Heinrich Staden and quoted by the too gullible (?) Karamzin: “The prince, filled with noble jealousy, came to his father and demanded that he send him with an army to expel the enemy, liberate Pskov, and restore the honor of Russia. John, in a flurry of anger, shouted: “Rebel! You, together with the boyars, want to overthrow me from the throne,” and raised his hand. Boris Godunov wanted to keep her. The king gave him several wounds with his sharp staff and hit the prince hard on the head with it. This unfortunate man fell, bleeding!"Jesuit monk Anthony Possevin came to Moscow in 1581 to serve as a mediator in negotiations between the Russian Tsar and the Polish king Stefan Batory, who invaded Russian lands during the Livonian War. As a legate of Pope Gregory XIII, Possevin hoped, with the help of the Jesuits, to achieve concessions from John IV, taking advantage of the difficult foreign policy situation of Rus'. His goal was not at all the reconciliation of the warring parties, but the subordination of the Russian Church to the papal throne. The Catholic Church promised Ivan the Terrible, if he agreed, the acquisition of territories that previously belonged to Byzantium.
“But the hopes of the pope and the efforts of Possevin were not crowned with success,” wrote M.V. Tolstoy in “History of the Russian Church”. - John Vasilyevich showed all the natural flexibility of his mind, dexterity and prudence, which the Jesuit himself had to give justice to, rejected the requests for permission to build Latin churches in Rus', rejected disputes about faith and the union of Churches on the basis of the rules of the Council of Florence and was not carried away by the dreamy promise the acquisition of the entire Byzantine Empire, lost by the Greeks allegedly for retreating from Rome.”
Commenting on M.V. Tolstoy, Metropolitan John wrote: “ Famous historian The Russian Church could add that the machinations of Rome in relation to Russia have a long history, that the failure of the mission made Possevin the personal enemy of the tsar, that the very word “Jesuit”, due to the unscrupulousness and unscrupulousness of the members of the order, has long become a household name, that the legate himself came to Moscow already a few months after the death of the prince and under no circumstances could he have witnessed what happened.”
The mission was a complete failure, and the enraged Possevin, out of his malice and malicious intent, created a myth that Ivan the Terrible, in a fit of anger, killed his son and heir to the throne, Tsarevich Ivan Ioannovich. “Possevin says,” writes Metropolitan John, “that the king was angry with his daughter-in-law, the wife of the prince, and during a quarrel that broke out, he killed him. The absurdity of the version (already from the moment it appeared) was so obvious that it was necessary to “ennoble” the story, to find a more “reliable” reason and “motive for the murder.”
This is how another tale appeared - that the prince led the political opposition to his father’s course in negotiations with Batory to conclude peace and was killed by the king on suspicion of involvement in a boyar conspiracy. Both versions are completely unfounded and unproven.
Indirect evidence of Ivan’s death not from a blow from a staff is the fact that in the “modified” version of filicide, his death did not follow immediately after the “fatal blow,” but four days later in Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda. Subsequently, it became clear why the prince faded away for four days - it was caused by sublimate poisoning.
Another rogue who visited Moscow, the German Heinrich Staden, picked up the version of “sonicide”. He wrote slanderous notes, which Karamzin considered to be true (the German was later exposed as a lie by Soviet historians I.I. Polosin and S.B. Veselovsky). Returning to Germany, Staden outlined a project for the conquest of Muscovy, proposing to destroy churches and monasteries, abolish the Orthodox faith, and then turn the inhabitants into slaves. This is whose data Russian historians used when describing the era of John IV in their writings.
Why was Ivan the Terrible and his reign suddenly subjected to slander? The answer is simple: strong Russia The West is afraid. Unable to destroy Rus' by military means, the West resorted to slander and defamation in order to undermine the authority of the supreme state power in Russia.
Our historian Ivan Yegorovich Zabelin wrote: “Everyone knows that the ancients, especially the Greeks and Romans, knew how to raise heroes... This skill consisted only in the fact that they knew how to portray in their history the best progressive figures not only in history, but and in poetic truth. They knew how to appreciate the merits of heroes, they knew how to distinguish the golden truth and truth of these merits from everyday lies and dirt, in which every person necessarily lives and always gets more or less dirty. They were able to distinguish in these merits not only their real and, so to speak, useful essence, but also their ideal essence, that is, the historical idea of a completed deed and feat, which is necessary and elevated the hero’s character to the level of an ideal.”
About our historians, Zabelin said with regret: “As you know, we very diligently only deny and expose our history and do not dare to think about any characters or ideals. We do not allow anything ideal in our history... Our entire history is a dark kingdom of ignorance, barbarism, superstition, slavery and so on...”
What is the sovereign's mistake?
Instructing the creators of the film “Ivan the Terrible,” directed by Eisenstein and playing Tsar Cherkasov, Stalin said: “Ivan the Terrible was very tough. It is possible to show that he was tough. But you need to show why you need to be tough. One of the mistakes of Ivan the Terrible was that he did not destroy five large feudal families. If he had destroyed these five large families, then there would have been no Time of Troubles at all.”Ivan the Terrible was called a tyrant, exorbitant cruelties were attributed to him, and meanwhile Stalin, who carefully studied the tsar’s policies, concluded that he even showed excessive softness towards hostile boyar families, pardoning them, and thereby allowed Russia to be plunged into the Time of Troubles, which took almost half the population of Muscovy.
Meanwhile, the facts refute the cruelty of the tsar and the inhumanity of the oprichnina “terror.” N. Skuratov in the article “Ivan the Terrible - a look at the time of his reign from the point of view of strengthening the Russian state” writes: “To an ordinary person ignorant of history, who is not averse to sometimes watching films and reading a newspaper, it may seem that the guardsmen of Ivan the Terrible killed half of the population countries. Meanwhile, the number of victims of political repression during the 50-year reign is well known from reliable historical sources. The overwhelming majority of the dead are named in them... those executed belonged to the upper classes and were guilty of very real, and not mythical, conspiracies and betrayals... Almost all of them had previously been forgiven under the kissing vows of the cross, that is, they were oathbreakers, political recidivists "
Manyagin notes that Metropolitan John and historian R.G. shared the same point of view. Skrynnikov, who pointed out that during the 50 years of the reign of the “formidable king” no more than 4-5 thousand people were sentenced to death. But from this figure it is necessary to remove the executed boyars before 1547, that is, before the crowning of Ivan Vasilyevich. He cannot be responsible for the mutual murders of various boyar clans striving for power.
Manyagin writes: “During the reign of John IV, the death penalty was punishable for murder, rape, sodomy, kidnapping, arson of a residential building with people, robbery of a temple, high treason. For comparison: during the reign of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, already 80 types of crimes were punishable by death, and under Peter I – more than 120. Each death sentence under John IV was passed only in Moscow and approved personally by the Tsar.”
The power of the Orthodox Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich was much softer than in Europe. In 1572, during St. Bartholomew's Night in France, over 80 thousand Protestants were killed. In England, in the first half of the 16th century, 70 thousand people were hanged for vagrancy alone. In Germany, during the suppression of the peasant uprising of 1525, more than 100 thousand people were executed...
Why is Grozny a tyrant king, and Europeans are mercy itself? During the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the population growth was 30-50 percent; during the reign of Peter I, the population decline was 40 percent. “Therefore” Tsar the Terrible is a tyrant, and Peter is the Great (only for whom?).
Speaking about executions, we should not forget that it was the undestroyed boyar family of the Shuiskys that was one of those families that pushed Russia into the Time of Troubles. It was since the reign of Vasily Shuisky that the Orthodox vertical of power was violated. Beginning with the reign of John III, it was established that the king swears allegiance to God, and the people swear allegiance to the king as God's anointed. But Shuisky did not take an oath to God - he took an oath of cross to the boyar elite. This was the beginning of the destruction of the Autocracy. And this destruction was the result not of cruelty, but of the extreme mercy of Ivan the Terrible. As “gratitude” for the king’s mercy, they poisoned him with sublimate...
In the photo: Reconstruction appearance Ivan IV based on the skull, made by Professor M. Gerasimov.
On November 19, 1582, the son of Ivan the Terrible, Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich, died. Did Ivan IV kill his son? What was the reason for the departure of the heir to the Russian throne? It is important to understand this: this event became fatal for Russian history.
Fatal intercession
One of the main versions of the murder of his son by Ivan the Terrible is known to us from the words of Antonio Possevino, the papal legate. According to this version, Ivan the Terrible found his son's third wife, Elena, in an inappropriate manner. Ivan the Terrible's daughter-in-law was pregnant and lay in her underwear. Ivan IV became angry and began to “teach” Elena, hit her in the face and beat her with a staff. Here, according to the same Possevino, the son of the Terrible, Ivan, ran into the chambers and began to reproach his father with these words: “You imprisoned my first wife in a monastery for no reason, did the same with the second wife, and now you are beating the third in order to destroy your son, whom she bears in her womb." The ending is known. The father's staff also reached his son, breaking his skull.
This version, which has become a textbook version, is criticized today. First of all, who to believe? Papal legate? Not the most disinterested witness, I must admit. It was beneficial to present Ivan IV as a ruthless son-killer for at least two reasons: firstly, the Russian Tsar appeared in an unseemly light, and secondly, such horrors, which were committed according to the assurances of the same Possevino in Rus', legitimized the European Inquisition.
Political infighting
According to another version, politics became the “stumbling block” between the son and his father. This version was voiced in his “History” by Nikolai Karamzin: “The prince, filled with noble jealousy, came to his father and demanded that he send him with an army to expel the enemy, liberate Pskov, and restore the honor of Russia. John, in a flurry of anger, shouted: “Rebel! You, together with the boyars, want to overthrow me from the throne,” and raised his hand. Boris Godunov wanted to keep her. The king gave him several wounds with his sharp staff and hit the prince hard on the head with it. This unfortunate man fell, bleeding!" It is significant that this version, accepted by Karamzin as reliable, belonged to the same Antonio Possevino. The reliability of this completely literary presentation is even more doubtful than the first version; it is not confirmed by any other evidence. However, there is a grain of truth in this version. It is that the situation in last years The reign of Ivan the Terrible at court was, to put it mildly, tense. It was extremely difficult to survive in such an environment.
Who wrote history
It is amazing with what amazing credulity Russian historians, and first of all Karamzin, “wrote history”, focusing on the testimony of Antonio Possevino, the legate of Pope Gregory XIII, the German Heinrich Staden and the Frenchman Jacques Marzharette. In any historical interpretation, especially foreign ones, one should look for who benefits from it. The same Staden, returning to Germany, outlined a project for the conquest of Muscovy, proposing to destroy churches and monasteries, abolish the Orthodox faith, and then turn the inhabitants into slaves. It is with regret that we must admit that the historian Zabelin was right when he wrote: “As you know, we very diligently only deny and denounce our history and do not dare to think about any characters or ideals. We do not allow anything ideal in our history... Our entire history is a dark kingdom of ignorance, barbarism, superstition, slavery and so on...”
Drank poison
In 1963, in the Archangel Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin, the tombs of Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich and Tsarevich Ivan Ioannovich were opened. Subsequent reliable studies, medical-chemical and medical-forensic examinations of the honest remains of the prince showed that the permissible content of mercury was 32 times higher than the permissible content, arsenic and lead were several times higher. Due to poor preservation bone tissue It was impossible to reliably establish whether Ivan Ivanovich’s skull was fractured. Taking into account the fact that Ivan the Terrible’s mother and his first wife also died from seleme poisoning, the version of the poisoning of Ivan the Terrible’s son seems most likely. Another question: who was the poisoner?
Didn't kill
Ivan the Terrible did not kill his son. This is precisely the version adhered to, for example, by the Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev. Seeing Repin’s famous painting at the exhibition, he was outraged and wrote to Emperor Alexander III: “The painting cannot be called historical, since this moment... is purely fantastic.” An analysis of what happened in 1582 confirms Pobedonostsev’s thought; it is precisely “fantastic.” Since Repin painted the picture, the version of “Ivan the Terrible killed his son” has become a kind of historical meme. It is so ingrained in the mind that the idea of Grozny’s innocence in his son’s death is often simply not considered. By the way, the picture has a difficult fate. In February 1913, she was severely damaged by the knife of the Old Believer Abram Baloshov, and more recently, Orthodox activists appealed to the Minister of Culture with a request to remove the painting from Tretyakov Gallery.
Having seen in 1885 in St. Petersburg at an exhibition a new painting by Ilya Repin “Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan on November 16, 1581,” which later became known under the simplified name “Ivan the Terrible Kills His Son,” the Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod and an outstanding Russian the thinker Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev was extremely outraged by its plot, in which fiction was presented as fact, and wrote to Emperor Alexander III: “The picture cannot be called historical, since this moment ... is purely fantastic.”WHY DID THE TSAREVICH DIED?
Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan November 16, 1581. Hood. I. E. Repin. 1885
Indeed, the fact of the murder of his son Tsarevich Ivan by Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich the Terrible until recently seemed indisputable, because it was reflected even in school textbooks, as one of the evidence of the alleged cruelty of the Russian Orthodox Autocracy. And no one wondered where this fact came from in historical literature. Only Metropolitan John of St. Petersburg and Ladoga first refuted this slander against the tsar in his book “Autocracy of the Spirit,” where he proved that Tsarevich John died of a serious illness and that in the historical documents that have reached us there is no hint of filicide.
But what do the documents say?
In the Moscow Chronicle for the year 7090 (1581 - N.Sh.) it is written: “... Tsarevich John Ioannovich reposed.”
The Piskarevsky chronicler indicates in more detail: "... at 12 o'clock in the night of the summer of November 7090 on the 17th day... the death of Tsarevich John Ioannovich."
The Fourth Chronicle of Novgorod says: “In the same year (7090) Tsarevich John Ioannovich reposed at Matins in Sloboda...”
The Morozov Chronicle states: “... Tsarevich Ivan Ioannovich passed away.”
As you can see, there is not a word about murder.
As for the facts testifying to the death of Tsarevich John from poisoning, they are completely justified.
V.V. Manyagin in the book “Leader of the Militant Church” (2003) writes: “As for the disease, we can say definitely - it was poisoning with sublimate. The death caused by it is painful, and the dose causing such an outcome does not exceed 0.18 grams.”
Who installed this?
“In 1963, in the Archangel Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin,” writes Manyagin, “four tombs were opened: Ivan the Terrible, Tsarevich Ivan, Tsar Theodore Ioannovich and commander Skopin-Shuisky.
When examining the remains, the version of the poisoning of Tsar Ivan the Terrible was verified.
Scientists found that the arsenic content was approximately the same in all four skeletons and did not exceed the norm. But in the bones of Tsar John and Tsarevich John, the presence of mercury was discovered, far exceeding the permissible norm.
Some historians tried to argue that this was not poisoning at all, but a consequence of treating syphilis with mercury ointments. However, studies have shown that no syphilitic changes were found in the remains of the king and prince.
After a study of the burials of Moscow grand duchesses and queens was carried out in the 1990s, the fact of poisoning with the same sublimate was identified as the mother of Ivan Vasilyevich, Elena Vasilievna Glinskaya (died in 1538), and his first wife Anastasia Romanova (died in 1560) .
This indicates that the royal family was a victim of poisoners for several decades.
The data from these studies made it possible to assert that Tsarevich John was poisoned. The poison content in his remains is many times higher than the permissible limit. Thus, Soviet historical science refutes the version of Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich’s murder of his son.”
THE MYTH OF SONICIDE CREATED BY FOREIGNERS
Ivan the Terrible near the body of his son he killed. Hood. Schwartz V.G. 1864
Who is the author of the slander against Ivan the Terrible? The names of this writer and his followers are known. Their inventions are only links in a chain of false fabrications about our great past.
Metropolitan John believed that “the testimony of foreigners had a decisive influence on the formation of the Russo-hating beliefs of ‘historical science’.” The outstanding researcher of antiquity Sergei Paramonov spoke about the same thing in the book “Where are you from, Rus'?”, which he published under the pseudonym Sergei Lesnoy:
“Our history was written by Germans who did not know or knew the Russian language poorly.” An example of this is the false Norman theory, the myth of the calling of the Varangians and other myths.
“During the time of Bironovism, when it turned out to be very difficult to defend the Russian principle in anything, in St. Petersburg, among scientists invited from the German principalities, the idea was born of the Slavs borrowing statehood from the North German tribes. The Slavs of the 9th-10th centuries were recognized as “living in a bestial way " (an expression of the Normans), and the northern robber detachments of the Norman Varangians, who were hired to serve various rulers and kept Northern Europe in fear, were declared the builders and creators of the state.
Thus, under the pen of Siegfried Bayer, Gerard Miller and August Schloezer, the idea of Normanism was born, which is often called the Norman theory, although the entire sum of Normanistic statements over two centuries does not give the right to call Normanism not only a theory, but even a hypothesis, since there is no analysis here sources, nor a review of all known facts."
It would seem that we are talking about an era that is not related to the topic. But if you do not understand the West’s desire to distort the truth about our great past, it is difficult to believe that what was written about Ivan the Terrible by foreigners is an ordinary lie.
One can cite thousands of examples of the distortion of the history of our state by Western historians.
But the era of Ivan the Terrible was subjected to especially vicious attacks.
“With Karamzin’s “light hand” it became a sign of good taste to generously smear this era with black paint,” wrote Metropolitan John. “Even the most conservative Marxist historians considered it their duty to pay tribute to Russophobic rhetoric, speaking of “savagery,” “ferocity,” and “ignorance.” ", "terror" as a self-evident feature of the era." Moreover, the evidence for the alleged horrors of that era for historians was not eyewitness accounts, not archival data, not the testimony of courtiers recorded and preserved in archives, but the slanderous fabrications of Western envoys.
The myth of filicide and other false myths were necessary not only to expose the tsar as a bloodthirsty tyrant in the eyes of his descendants, but also to prove to the Western world, by that time “famous” for the horrors of the Inquisition, that the order in Russia was no better.
“Starting with Karamzin,” wrote Metropolitan John, “Russian historians reproduced in their writings all the abomination and dirt that foreign “guests” poured on Russia, and the creative “heritage” of people like Staden and Possevin was for a long time perceived as evidence of life and morals of the Russian people."
A. Gulevich says the same thing in his book “Tsarist Power and Revolution”: “National history is usually written by friends. The history of Russia was written by its enemies.”
But who was the first to slander one of the greatest Russian autocrats?
These lines, which were composed by Antony Possevin (papal spy), were picked up by Heinrich Staden (German spy) and quoted by the too gullible (?) Karamzin:
“The prince, filled with noble jealousy, came to his father and demanded that he send him with an army to expel the enemy, liberate Pskov, and restore the honor of Russia. John, in a flurry of anger, shouted: “Rebel! You, together with the boyars, want to overthrow me from the throne,” and raised his hand. Boris Godunov wanted to hold it: the Tsar gave him several wounds with his sharp staff and hit the prince hard in the head with it. This unfortunate man fell, bleeding!"
Jesuit monk Anthony Possevin came to Moscow in 1581 to serve as a mediator in negotiations between the Russian Tsar and the Polish king Stefan Batory, who invaded Russian lands during the Livonian War. As a legate of Pope Gregory XIII, Possevin hoped, with the help of the Jesuits, to achieve concessions from John IV, taking advantage of the difficult foreign policy situation of Rus'. His goal was not at all the reconciliation of the warring parties, but the subordination of the Russian Church to the papal throne...
The Catholic Church, having lost hope of breaking the Russian State and the Orthodox Russian Church openly, through crusades, and secretly, with the help of heresies, now sought to achieve this by deception, promising Ivan the Terrible, if he betrayed the true faith, the acquisition of territories that previously belonged to Byzantium .
“But the hopes of the pope and the efforts of Possevin were not crowned with success,” wrote M.V. Tolstoy in “History of the Russian Church.” “John Vasilyevich showed all the natural flexibility of his mind, dexterity and prudence, to which the Jesuit himself should have given justice, rejected the harassment about permission to build Latin churches in Rus', rejected disputes about faith and the unification of Churches on the basis of the rules of the Council of Florence and was not carried away by the dreamy promise of acquiring the entire Byzantine Empire, lost by the Greeks allegedly for retreating from Rome."
Union of Florence, in other words, an agreement on the unification of Orthodox and catholic churches, was signed in 1439 in Florence. This union was another attempt by Rome to spread Catholicism by force. In response to it, in 1448, a council of bishops in Moscow declared the Russian Orthodox Church autocephalous, that is, independent of the Patriarch of Constantinople.
Commenting on M.V. Tolstoy, Metropolitan John wrote:
“A well-known historian of the Russian Church could add that the machinations of Rome in relation to Russia have a long history, that the failure of the mission made Possevin the personal enemy of the Tsar, that the very word “Jesuit”, due to the dishonesty and unprincipledness of the members of the order, has long become a household name, that The legate himself arrived in Moscow a few months after the death of the prince and under no circumstances could he have witnessed what happened.”
John Vasilyevich answered the Jesuit firmly and menacingly: “Are you saying, Anthony, that your Roman faith is one with the Greek faith? And we bear the true Christian faith, but not the Greek faith. The Greeks are not our gospel. Our faith is not Greek, but Russian.”
The mission was a complete failure, and the enraged Possevin, out of his anger, created a myth that Ivan the Terrible, in a fit of anger, killed his son and heir to the throne, Tsarevich Ivan Ioannovich.
“Possevin says,” writes Metropolitan John, “that the king was angry with his daughter-in-law, the prince’s wife, and during a quarrel that broke out, he killed him. The absurdity of the version (from the very moment of its inception) was so obvious that it was necessary to “ennoble” the story, to find more.” a reliable "reason and "motive for the murder." So another tale appeared - that the prince led the political opposition to his father's course in negotiations with Batory on peace and was killed by the king on suspicion of involvement in a boyar conspiracy. Both versions are completely unfounded and unsubstantiated. It is impossible to find even hints of their authenticity in the entire mass of documents and acts dating back to that time that have reached us.
But information about the “natural” death of Tsarevich Ivan has a documentary basis.
Back in 1570, the sickly and pious prince, reverently fearing the hardships of the royal service ahead of him, donated a huge contribution of a thousand rubles to the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery at that time. Preferring monastic feat to worldly glory, he accompanied the contribution with the condition that “anyone who wants to take tonsure, Tsarevich Prince Ivan will be tonsured for that contribution, and if, due to sins, the Tsarevich is no more, then he will be commemorated.”
Indirect evidence of Ivan’s death not from a blow from a staff is the fact that in the “modified” version of filicide, his death did not follow immediately after the “fatal blow,” but four days later, in Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda. Subsequently, it became clear why the prince faded away for four days - it was caused by sublimate poisoning.
Another rogue, the German Heinrich Staden, who arrived in Moscow with intelligence tasks, also picked up and developed the version of “filial murder.”
Staden wrote slanderous notes, which Karamzin considered to be true and which were exposed by Soviet historians. For example, I.I. Polosin called them “a tale of murder, robbery, red-handed theft,” and characterized by “inimitable cynicism.” According to another Soviet historian, S.B. Veselovsky, “they were an incoherent story of a barely literate, uneducated and uncultured adventurer, containing a lot of boasting and lies.”
Returning to Germany, Staden outlined a project for the conquest of Muscovy, proposing to destroy all churches and monasteries, destroy and abolish the Orthodox faith, and then turn the Russian people into slaves. This is whose data many Russian historians used when describing the era of Ivan the Terrible in their writings.
Russian philosopher Ivan Aleksandrovich Ilyin warned that “in the world there are peoples, states, governments, church centers, behind-the-scenes organizations and individuals - hostile to Russia, especially Orthodox Russia, especially imperial and undivided Russia. Just as there are “Anglophobes”, “Germanophobes”, “Japanophobes” - so the world is replete with “Russophobes”, enemies of national Russia, promising themselves every success from its collapse, humiliation and weakening...
Therefore, no matter who we talk to, no matter who we turn to, we must vigilantly and soberly measure him by the measure of his sympathies and intentions in relation to a united, national Russia and not expect: from the conqueror - salvation, from the dismemberer - help, from from the religious seducer - sympathy and understanding, from the destroyer - benevolence, from the slanderer - truth.
Politics is the art of recognizing and neutralizing the enemy."
And Saint Basil the Great advised choosing from the works of historians “only what is necessary for yourself and consistent with the Truth, and leaving the rest without attention.”
WHY WAS THE ERA OF IROZNY DEFAMATED?
Why was Ivan Vasilyevich the Terrible and his reign suddenly subjected to slander?
The answer is simple: a strong Russia is scary to the West, and Ivan the Terrible created the Muscovite kingdom powerful, fought for the purity of faith and strengthened the Orthodox Russian Autocracy, the foundations of which were laid by the holy noble prince Andrei Bogolyubsky.
The reign of Ivan the Terrible and its eve were very significant for Russia. This is how Doctor of Historical Sciences S.V. evaluates this era. Perevezentsev in the book "Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible":
“In the 15th century, events took place that were especially important for Russia, which had a huge impact on its entire subsequent history - in 1439 an agreement was signed in Florence on the unification of the Catholic and Orthodox churches; in 1448, in response to the Union of Florence, the Council of Bishops in Moscow declared the Russian Church autocephalous, i.e. independent from the Patriarch of Constantinople; in 1453 the Byzantine Empire ceased to exist; in 1480 Russian state finally got rid of the Tatar-Mongol yoke.
For the Russian religious and mythological consciousness of that time, such a rapid sequence, in fact, the coincidence of these events could not seem accidental. And the meaning seemed completely definite - the Lord Himself chose Rus' to carry out certain Higher, Divine plans on Earth, for Russia remained the only state in the world that brought humanity the light of the right faith. During this period, Moscow begins to be recognized as the center, core, focus not only of Russia, but of the whole world."
And quite naturally the West sounded the alarm.
Unable to destroy Rus' by military means, the West resorted to slander and defamation in order to undermine the authority of the supreme state power in Russia.
Our historian Ivan Yegorovich Zabelin wrote:
“Everyone knows that the ancients, especially the Greeks and Romans, knew how to raise heroes... This skill consisted only in the fact that they knew how to portray their best progressive figures in their history, not only in historical, but also in poetic truth.
They knew how to appreciate the merits of heroes, they knew how to distinguish the golden truth and truth of these merits from everyday lies and dirt, in which every person necessarily lives and always gets more or less dirty.
They were able to distinguish in these merits not only their real and, so to speak, useful essence, but also their ideal essence, that is, the historical idea of a completed deed and feat, which is necessary and elevated the hero’s character to the level of an ideal.”
About our historians, Zabelin said with regret:
“As you know, we very diligently only deny and denounce our history and do not dare even think about any characters and ideals. We do not allow the ideal in our history... Our entire history is a dark kingdom of ignorance, barbarism, vain holiness, slavery and So there is no point in being a hypocrite: this is what the majority of educated Russian people think..."
WAS JOHN THE TERRIBLE CRUEL?
Instructing the creators of the film “Ivan the Terrible,” director Eisenstein and Cherkasov, who played the role of the Tsar, Stalin said:
"Ivan the Terrible was very tough. It is possible to show that he was tough. But you need to show why you need to be tough. One of the mistakes of Ivan the Terrible was that he did not destroy five large feudal families. If he destroyed these five large families If it were, there wouldn’t have been a Time of Troubles at all.”
Ivan the Terrible was called a tyrant, exorbitant cruelties were attributed to him, and meanwhile Stalin, who carefully studied the tsar’s policies, concluded that he even showed excessive softness towards hostile boyar families, pardoning them and thereby allowing Russia to be plunged into the Time of Troubles, which claimed almost half of population of Muscovy.
Meanwhile, the facts refute the cruelty of the tsar and the inhumanity of the oprichnina “terror.”
N. Skuratov in the article “Ivan the Terrible - a look at the time of his reign from the point of view of strengthening the Russian state” writes:
“To an ordinary person ignorant of history, who is not averse to sometimes watching films and reading a newspaper, it may seem that the guardsmen of Ivan the Terrible killed half of the country’s population. Meanwhile, the number of victims of political repressions during the 50-year reign is well known from reliable historical sources.
The overwhelming majority of the dead are named in them... those executed belonged to the upper classes and were guilty of very real, and not mythical, conspiracies and betrayals... Almost all of them had previously been forgiven under the kissing vows of the cross, that is, they were oathbreakers, political recidivists ".
Manyagin notes that Metropolitan John and historian R.G. shared the same point of view. Skrynnikov, who pointed out that during the 50 years of the reign of the Terrible Tsar, no more than 4-5 thousand people were sentenced to death. But from this figure it is necessary to remove the executed boyars before 1547, that is, before the crowning of Ivan Vasilyevich. He cannot be responsible for the mutual murders of various boyar clans striving for power.
Manyagin writes: “During the reign of John IV, the death penalty was punishable for: murder, rape, sodomy, kidnapping, arson of a residential building with people, robbery of a temple, high treason.
For comparison: during the reign of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, already 80 types of crimes were punishable by death, and under Peter I - more than 120!
Every death sentence under John IV was pronounced only in Moscow and approved personally by the Tsar.”
The power of the Orthodox Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich was much softer than in Europe, about which Manyagin says the following: “In the same 16th century, in other states, governments committed truly monstrous lawlessness.
In 1572, during St. Bartholomew's Night in France, over 80 thousand Protestants were killed.
In England, in the first half of the 16th century, 70 thousand people were hanged for vagrancy alone.
In Germany, during the suppression of the peasant uprising of 1525, more than 100 thousand people were executed.
The Duke of Alba killed 8 thousand people during the capture of Antwerp and 20 thousand people in Harlem, and in total in the Netherlands the Spaniards killed about 100 thousand people.”
So, in “enlightened” and “merciful” Europe, during approximately the same period, more than 378 thousand people were executed, most of them innocent, and in Russia under Ivan the Terrible, 4-5 thousand were executed for specific serious crimes. Why is the Terrible Tsar a tyrant, and the Europeans are mercy itself?
During the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the population growth was 30-50%; during the reign of Peter I, the population decline was 40%.
Therefore, Tsar Terrible is a tyrant, and Peter is the Great. Now we see how accurate the definition of I.L. Solonevich: “The Russian historian is a specialist in distorting the history of Russia.”
Speaking about executions, we should not forget that it was the “not destroyed” boyar family of the Shuiskys that was one of those families that pushed Russia into the Time of Troubles.
It was since the reign of Vasily Shuisky that the Orthodox vertical of power was violated.
Beginning with the reign of John III, it was established that the king swears allegiance to God, and the people swear allegiance to the king as the Anointed of God. But the atheist Shuisky did not take an oath to God - He gave a sub-oath to the boyar elite. This was the beginning of the destruction of the Autocracy built by the Rurik dynasty. And this destruction was the result not of cruelty, but, on the contrary, of the extreme mercy of Ivan the Terrible.
“Gentle and gentle by nature,” noted Metropolitan John, “the king suffered and was tormented, forced to use drastic measures.”
It often happened that as soon as the execution of the worst criminals sentenced by the court began, a messenger arrived with the royal letter and those who had not yet been executed were released under the kiss of the cross. But what does the godless servant of the demons care about this kiss? In gratitude for the king’s mercy, they poisoned him with sublimate...
And Russia slid towards the Time of Troubles, during which it lost 7 million out of 15 million people, and was saved from complete destruction and transformation into a Polish-Lithuanian colony only thanks to that brilliant invention of Ivan the Terrible, which we have undeservedly forgotten.
It was the Zemsky Sobor, convened in 1613 according to the laws and rules introduced by Ivan the Terrible, that was able to revive autocratic rule.
At this Moscow Zemstvo-Local Council, the encroachments of foreign impostors on the throne were finally rejected and Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov was elected Russian Tsar.
After all, the feat of Prince Dmitry Mikhailovich Pozharsky was not only that he liberated Moscow, but also that he was not flattered by the royal throne and did not immediately “shout” himself as king, like Shuisky with the help of those closest to him, but only agreed for temporary management of the country, immediately starting preparations for the convening of the Moscow Zemstvo-Local Council of the All Russian Land, which supported the introduction of the oprichnina in the name of salvation Orthodox faith and the Russian land itself.
Nikolai Shakhmagonov
Historians claim that in his life Ivan the Terrible loved only three people: first of all himself, then his beloved wife Anastasia Romanova and, finally, their common son Ivan.
Queen Anastasia was most likely poisoned by someone (as confirmed by a study of her remains conducted in 2000). At her funeral, Tsar Ivan sobbed like a child, and it was after this event that a turning point in his character was celebrated. But in the end, it was the temple of their son, Tsarevich Ivan, that was broken.
Reconstruction of Ivan the Terrible based on the skull, made by Professor M. Gerasimov
According to the most common version, Ivan the Terrible killed his beloved son 432 years ago, on November 19, 1581. (although a number of sources give other dates). Why did he kill? There are four main versions on this matter.
V. Schwartz “Ivan the Terrible at the body of his murdered son,” 1868.
Version one. Political. She went for a walk around the world from the ninth volume of “History of the Russian State” by Karamzin, and is connected with the Livonian War of 1561-1583.
In 1581, preliminary negotiations began on peace, which brought significant territorial losses to Russia. Tsarevich Ivan opposed it, and, accompanied by the boyars, came to his father to demand that he be sent with an army to liberate Pskov from the invaders. Ivan the Terrible became furious: “ Rebel! You, together with the boyars, want to overthrow me from the throne!“In a fit of anger, the tsar swung at his son, Boris Godunov, who was nearby, tried to prevent this, for which he was beaten by the tsar. After this, Ivan the Terrible turned to his son and continued the “father’s upbringing” he had begun, which led to the ill-fated blow to the temple.
This version is usually objected to by the fact that the Peace of Yam-Zapoolsky was concluded between the Muscovite kingdom and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on January 15, 1582, and the Truce of Plyus on May 26, 1583, i.e. after the death of Tsarevich Ivan. But in long wars, negotiations for a truce usually last for years.
The main argument against this version can be boiled down to one thing - Karamzin was not present. But this way you can refute anyone historical fact: for example, the fact that Ivan the Terrible was the father of Tsarevich Ivan - none of the historians were present at his conception.
N. Shustov “Ivan the Terrible at the body of the son he killed,” 1960s
Version two. Household. Its author is Antonio Possevino, a Jesuit who arrived in Moscow to participate in negotiations on a truce in the Livonian War and inducing Ivan the Terrible to a union with the Vatican.
In the things left behind " Historical writings about Russia,” a Catholic monk describes this event as follows: “ The third wife of Ivan’s son was once lying on a bench, dressed in an underdress, because she was pregnant and did not think that anyone would come to her. Visited her unexpectedly Grand Duke Moscow She immediately rose to meet him, but it was no longer possible to calm him down. The prince hit her in the face, and then beat her so hard with his staff that he had with him that next night she threw the boy away. At this time, son Ivan ran in to his father and began to ask not to beat his wife, but this only attracted his father’s anger and blows. He was very seriously wounded in the head, almost in the temple, with the same staff».
It is usually objected to this version that Ivan the Terrible could not have visited his son’s wife. They say that the rooms of noble wives were usually constantly closed, and the key was kept by their husbands. How then did the king manage to enter and see Princess Elena, and even in her underwear?
How-how, yes, just like that! The king is a king because he goes where he wants. In addition, the following version explains why the king could visit his daughter-in-law.
G. Sedov “Tsar Ivan the Terrible admires Vasilisa Melentyeva”, 1875.
Version three. Erotic. Ivan the Terrible's first marriage to Anastasia Romanova lasted 13 years, until her sudden death. The subsequent number of spouses of Ivan the Terrible has not been precisely established, but seven more names are usually given. Ivan was very keen on the female sex and, according to the Englishman Jerome Horsey, who knew him personally, “ he himself boasted that he had corrupted a thousand virgins».
The son of Tsarevich Ivan took after Tsar Ivan’s father, also often changed wives and concubines, and by the age of 27 he was married three times. Moreover, sometimes the prince shared his mistresses with his father, but his third wife, Elena Sheremetyeva, was greedy to share. But Ivan the Terrible really wanted to become a daughter-in-law (that’s what in Rus' they called a father-in-law who had sexual intercourse with his son’s wife, aka “daughter-in-law”, aka “daughter-in-law”). Whether he became or not is unimportant, but it came to a family squabble, as a result of which the prince was hit on the head with a staff.
AND latest version. Patriotic. Ivan the Terrible did not kill his son at all, as Russia’s slanderers say about him. In October 2013, a group of Orthodox historians and figures sent a letter to the Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation with a request and demand to remove the famous Repin painting on this topic from the Tretyakov Gallery, stating that this work “ insults the patriotic feelings of Russian people».
The appeal noted: “ Modern historical science It is firmly established that the First Russian Tsar John did not kill his son" They lied, of course - nothing has been established by historical science here (let alone “firmly”), and no one knows what actually happened there.
And I want to ask the Russian people: “Is it true that Repin insults your patriotic feelings with this picture?”
