An Interview with Charles J. Halperin, author of Ivan the Terrible in Russian Historical Memory since 1991
June 30, 2021
“I suspect that there is something in every country’s history that some of its residents would rather forget. For reasons that remain unclear Ivan the Terrible made war on his own people. Unfortunately Ivan’s reign was so important in Russian history in both domestic and foreign affairs that it is impossible to avoid. To further complicate matters the surviving sources on his reign are often contested, either because they are biased (which applies to native as well as foreigner accounts) or are extant only in seventeenth-century manuscripts which compromises their authenticity and accuracy. There are major gaps in the types of evidence that have survived; for example, we have no personal rather than public documents from Ivan. Therefore there is a wide space for legitimate scholarly disagreement. But Ivan’s controversial identity goes well beyond these academic considerations.”