Ivan's Return

Monuments, busts and statues in Russia and the former soviet states are closely tied to the political regimes that erect them or pull them down.

In 2014, the toppling of Lenin statues in Ukraine became a symbol of the country’s pro-Europe revolution. In recent years, Russia has seen statues erected to Stalin as the bloody Soviet leader’s reputation is rehabilitated and his qualities as a strong leader and military victor are increasingly valued.

In November, President Vladimir Putin unveiled an enormous statue just outside the Kremlin to Prince Vladimir, the tenth century prince of Kiev who converted to Orthodox Christianity. Many consider the monument an effort to elbow aside Ukraine – with which Russia has seen a collapse in relations in recent years – from the narrative of Russian history. 

Yet one of the most controversial newcomers to Russia’s pantheon of heroes represented in stone is the notorious Russian leader Ivan the Terrible, known to many as a bloody tyrant.

On a grey day in October, about 1,000 people gathered in the city of Oryol for the official opening of Russia’s first monument to the sixteenth century ruler.

Members of nationalist groups wearing black and carrying the white, gold and black flags of Imperial Russia, stood near the statue. Local Cossacks, some in camouflage, lined the nearby paths. Orthodox believers, several carrying an icon of Tsar Nicholas II, mingled with the nationalists. Many said they had traveled from Moscow for the event.

The statue itself is on a large pedestal of black stone and shows Ivan the Terrible astride a horse, in full tsarist regalia, a cross raised in his right hand, a sword in his left. It has its back turned to Oryol’s seventeenth century Bogoyavlensky Cathedral.

Ordinary people who had come to watch the spectacle stood behind temporary railings, or lined a nearby bridge that overlooks the monument in the historic heart of the city, where a sliver of land marks the intersection of the Oka and Orlik rivers.

“Ivan the Terrible is a saint… he killed real criminals and I would also have them killed today,” said Vladimir Tuftin, who was watching the proceedings. Viktor Sogan, a passerby, said the statue was too small and that Ivan the Terrible needed something bigger.

A local acting troupe put on a play about the history of Oryol, which Ivan the Terrible is said to have founded as part of a drive to reinforce Russia’s southern border.

The play was followed by a series of speeches from the guests of honor – a collection of prominent nationalists, Orthodox clerics and government officials. The crowd was addressed by the governor of Oryol Region, Vadim Potomsky; Alexander Zaldostanov, the head of a notorious pro-Putin biker gang, the Night Wolves; extreme nationalist publicists, Alexander Prokhanov and Sergei Kurginyan; and Schema-Archimandrite Iliy, a senior Orthodox cleric and personal confessor to the head the Russian Orthodox Church. A letter from Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky was read aloud.

Speakers praised Ivan the Terrible, who ruled Russia from 1547 to 1584, as a leader who strengthened the state, grew its territory and built many churches. Schema-Archimandrite Iliy blessed the statue and people laid flowers, mainly red carnations, at its base.

Governor Potomsky, a member of the Communist Party who campaigned for the statue, said Ivan the Terrible fought off foreign invaders like Russia fought off the Nazis in World War II, and drew a comparison with President Vladimir Putin. 

“We have a great, powerful president who has forced the whole world to respect and defer to Russia like Ivan the Terrible did in his time,” said Potomsky. “Enough is enough. We have to tell our children and our descendants about great tsars and great rulers.”

But the statue has stirred controversy in Russia, where Ivan the Terrible’s bloody deeds and the Time of Troubles – a period of chaos characterized by warring factions – that followed his death, means he has never before been honored in such a way. The question has been widely debated on television talk shows and in newspaper columns.

“If you were to have an audition for the most repulsive monster in all Russian history, the role would be won by Ivan the Terrible,” said prominent author Boris Akunin in an August video address urging the people of Oryol to stop the statue.

Critics said the unveiling of the statue was only possible in Putin’s Russia, which has seen a centralization of power, growing authoritarianism, military assertiveness, and an increasingly prominent cult of a strong leader.

The only other Russian ruler to have expressed admiration for Ivan the Terrible is Stalin, who commissioned film director Sergei Eisenstein to produce a movie about the tsar’s life and pressured historians to portray him more favorably. The second part of Eisenstein’s movie was not released during Stalin’s lifetime, as the Soviet leader disliked its depiction of the violence and paranoia during the latter part of Ivan the Terrible’s reign.

Meanwhile, the monument ignited local protests in Oryol, where opponents held pickets and collected hundreds of signatures on online petitions.

“Is the statue a symbol that the screws are being tightened and that we are returning to the Middle Ages? I don’t know, but I fear that is exactly what is happening,” said activist Natalia Golinkova, who described how she was attacked one night in August by an unknown assailant and warned to drop her public opposition to the statue. She has since left the country.

The demonstrations succeeded in persuading the authorities to change the statue’s location from the original plan, whereby it would have been installed in front of the city’s children’s theater. But the group has had no success in getting the statue removed.

Activists allege that the monument was erected on a protected site, and retired physics professor Yuri Malyutin, 79, is suing the local government.

A few days after the statue was put up, an unknown person overnight placed a bag over its head and hung a sign around Ivan the Terrible’s neck that read: “Oh, is it hot in here. Oh, what darkness.” The bag and the sign were quickly removed by authorities; it was later announced that the perpetrator had been caught and fined.

Shortly after the unveiling, in October in the Siberian city of Kansk, a local artist put up his own version of a monument to Ivan the Terrible by the banks of a local river: a stake streaked with red paint to symbolize blood. Within three days, someone had hacked down the stake.

In popular memory, Ivan the Terrible is associated with famous artistic portrayals, like that of painter Ilya Repin, who depicted the tsar with bulging eyes, covered in blood and cradling his son in his arms after battering him to death in a fit of rage.

Historians describe how, in the final decades of his reign, Ivan embraced a vicious authoritarianism and launched a campaign of terror against his own people. He was particularly known for state sponsored massacres – the most famous being the 1570 sack of Novgorod, in which thousands are said to have perished.

“It was a cruel epoch, but Ivan the Terrible stands out,” said Yury Petrov, director of the Russian History Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

There is little discussion among historians over whether Ivan the Terrible killed his son, according to Petrov, although the tsar’s defenders claim it is a myth. Governor Potomsky provoked ridicule earlier this year when he said Ivan the Terrible’s son died when traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg (St. Petersburg did not exist at the time).

Despite high-level support from clerics – governor Potomsky has said he has the backing of Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Orthodox Church – the statue has ignited debate in Orthodox circles. Critics point out that Ivan the Terrible deposed the Metropolitan of Moscow, who had criticized the tsar’s excesses, and the prelate was strangled to death by his henchman Malyuta Skuratov.

In an opinion piece written for the Orthodox news website Pravmir.ru in October, Sergei Khudiev said the lionization of Ivan the Terrible was equivalent to a “cult” that “has its roots in Eastern European inferiority complexes and its spiritual sources in the cabal.”

There are few critics of the statue among senior government officials. One prominent supporter is Culture Minister Medinsky. In his letter read out at the opening ceremony, he said Ivan the Terrible was one of the “outstanding figures of our history.”

In a Moscow lecture given around the same time, Medinsky laid out a broad historical justification for some of his ideas. Ivan the Terrible was, he said, the victim of an “information war” by Western visitors to the country, whose critical writings have been given undue weight by historians. Medinsky drew direct parallels between a similar information war that he said was being waged against Russia by Western powers today.

Medinsky, like other supporters of the statue, stresses Ivan the Terrible’s church building program, his mastery of several languages, and his contributions to the then-emerging art of printing. They also point to his military victories, including the seizure of the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, and his military and political reforms.

The statue itself was not state funded, but was commissioned and paid for by the Moscow-based International Fund of Slavic Literature and Culture. The organization was headed by sculptor Vyacheslav Klykov until his death in 2006 – Klykov put up several statues to Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, as well as the statue of Soviet general Georgy Zhukov trampling Nazi banners at the entrance to Red Square in Moscow.

The Ivan the Terrible statue was designed by artist Oleg Molchanov, his first statue after switching from his preferred genre of painting. In an interview at the opening ceremony Molchanov said of Ivan the Terrible: “He was very kind. He was very intelligent. And he loved his country more than his life.”

The person responsible for suggesting the idea of an Ivan the Terrible statue to local governor Potomsky was the deputy head of the International Fund for Slavic Literature and Culture, Mikhail Sokolovsky. Prior to joining the organization, Sokolovsky was deputy governor of a region in Russia’s Far East and served two jail terms, a total of eight years behind bars, following convictions for exceeding his official authority and committing fraud.

Sokolovsky declined to speak about the origins of his personal connection to Potomsky during an interview, but said the statue righted a historical wrong. “Above all, it is about correcting a mistake. Ivan the Terrible was a great ruler of Russia,” Sokolovsky said.

And others agree. The town of Alexandrov – where Ivan the Terrible lived outside Moscow after renouncing the throne and where he established the murderous oprichniki – is planning to unveil Russia’s second statue to Ivan the Terrible. There have also been calls for streets in both Moscow and St. Petersburg to be named after him.

It may well be that the Oryol statue is just the first step in Ivan the Terrible’s return to the Russian mainstream. RL