Ivan the Terrible

Reviewed by: Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish by Charles J. Halperin Russell E. Martin (bio) Charles J. Halperin. Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish. 378 pp. Illustrations. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. ISBN 978-0-8229-4591-8. Charles J. Halperin concludes his new book on Ivan IV (b. 1530; r. 1533–84) by acknowledging that “[w]riting a ‘definitive’ study of Ivan and his reign remains impossible” (263), but there can be no question that his book has contributed to our understanding of the Terrible Tsar and his reign, despite the library of books already devoted to them. While Halperin makes modest claims about what he wants to achieve—“the most that any historian can do is engage these problems” (262)—Halperin’s is, in fact, an ambitious book. Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish is the culmination of decades of work poring over published sources and secondary literature. It was preceded by his publication of more than 50 articles and book chapters, going back to 1974, on Ivan, his court, and the religious and political culture of Muscovy in the 16th century—most referenced in the notes of the book (but, alas, only the notes, because the book has no bibliography). The structure of Free to Reward and Free to Punish is a blend of chronological and thematic chapters, devoting space, appropriately, at the start to Ivan’s complex childhood, and at the end to the final years of Ivan’s life and the Muscovy he left behind. In between, Halperin tackles the major themes of, and debates about, Ivan’s life and reign: Ivan’s tough-and-tumble early years, his coronation and first wedding, his wars of conquest in the East (Kazan ́ and Astrakhan ́) and defeat in the West (Livonia), his reforms, Muscovy’s economy, its diplomatic relations, the tsar’s later marriages (seven in total), and, more than any other topic, the oprichnina—Ivan’s seven-year (1564–72) experiment in “mass terror.” It is an important and thorough survey, but like all ambitious books, it poses as many questions as it settles. Halperin seeks to set the record straight on a number of venerable notions about Ivan and his reign. The first is the impulse among historians to divide the reign into the “good” Ivan (up to the death of his first wife, Anastasiia, in 1560) and the “bad” Ivan (the years of the oprichnina and afterward). Halperin traces this “twofold periodization” back to Nikolai Karamzin (though it seems Karamzin may have himself borrowed it from Jerome Horsey or from the little-known early 17th-century Tale of Persecution, as Brian Boeck has convincingly shown) (39). The more common division of the reign by scholars today is to divide it into four parts: Ivan’s minority (to 1547), the period of reforms (the long 1550s), the oprichnina (1565–1572), and the “rest of Ivan’s reign” (8–9). Halperin seems impatient with all these attempts. As he puts it, “Ivan’s behavior is far too complex to be reduced to a single all-encompassing theory, a ‘magic bullet,’ that will ‘explain’ Ivan” (10). No single interpretive model explains the totality of Ivan’s life and reign: one model might help explain Ivan’s [End Page 303] youth and oprichnina years, but falls flat for the 1550s; another might explain his attacks on the boyars, but fails to account for his relationship with his own family. “Ivan was neither all ‘good’ nor all ‘bad,’” he writes, “nor did he shift from all one to all the other. At all times Ivan was a human being, a paradoxical human being to be sure but not simply the monster of legend” (10). When it comes to Ivan, “all-encompassing theories” are a game of Whac-A-Mole. Despite his protests that it is “impossible to write a conventional biography of Ivan,” Halperin seems to want to get as close to one as he can. And despite his claim that “[w]e have no insight into Ivan’s character” (7), Halperin constructs a profile of Ivan that is fundamentally psychological. We see this mostly

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