History rewritten on Ivan ‘the not so terrible’
Ivan the Terrible was not terrible at all and his reputation as a cruel tyrant is the result of a smear campaign carried out by Westerners in the 16th century, a senior Russian official has claimed.
Nikolai Patrushev, the powerful head of the country’s Security Council and one of President Vladimir Putin’s closest allies, said that Russia’s first tsar, who died in 1584, was targeted during his lifetime by ‘‘Western chroniclers’’ who falsely portrayed him as a sadistic ruler.
The aim, Patrushev said, was to ‘‘divert the attention of Europeans’’ from religious persecution such as the Spanish Inquisition, witch hunts, and ‘‘monstrous’’ human rights violations that accompanied colonisation.
‘‘[Europeans] did not like the fact that the Russian tsar did not recognise their political and moral leadership,’’ Patrushev, 69, told the Argumenty I Fakti newspaper.
Ivan the Terrible is called Ivan Grozny in Russian, which translates roughly as Ivan the Fearsome. He ruled Russia for 37 years and is notorious for the massacre of Novgorod, when thousands of people were burnt alive or drowned by his secret police force, the oprichniki.
The tsar also killed his own son, probably in a fit of anger.
Vladimir Medinsky, a historian and former culture minister,
has argued that Ivan should be judged by the standards of his time and that he deserves respect as a founder of modern Russia.
Patrushev’s comments are the latest move in a governmentbacked attempt to rehabilitate the tsar’s reputation. Critics pointed out that there was no concept of Europe as a political bloc in the 16th century.
And Gleb Pavlovsky, a former Kremlin adviser, scorned the idea of listening to the ‘‘opinions of intelligence officers on history and culture’’.
Under Putin, Russia has been accused of revising history to fit a Kremlin-backed nationalist agenda, including the playing down of Stalin’s purges.
Patrushev said the alleged smear campaign against the tsar was an early example of ‘‘Russophobia’’ and compared it to what he alleged was unjust criticism of the modern Kremlin by western countries.