July 27, 2011

I'm reading a fascinating life of Ivan the Terrible by Henri Troyat, translated from French to Russian.  Do you know Troyat?  He wrote many history books, especially on Russian history, and is very good.  Ivan is remarkable.  He used to throw puppies off the Kremlin wall when he was a boy, and enjoyed their squeals as they fell and their death-throes on the bottom.  As an adult, he used to spend hours a day watching his torturers at work in the dungeons, and then would go upstairs for a feast and a drinking bout.  In some ways he seems worse than Hitler, who watched some videos of his enemies strung up on piano wire but didn't revel in gore like Ivan.  Ivan was at the same time very religious, and believed that his infliction of pain was a divine attribute, the same as God's visiting mortals with disease and death.  Stalin seems to have copied some of his techniques from Ivan too, like creating a special corps of murderers outside the law under his direct control.  When Novgorod annoyed Ivan, he sent them there where they killed many thousands, including all the clergy.