Uncovering Ivan the Terrible's Hidden Atrocities

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In January 1570, Ivan the Terrible marched on Novgorod with his paramilitary secret police, the Oprichnina — and the massacre that followed was so thoroughly buried that the only surviving *contemporaneous* accounts appear to come from Western European observers, with later Russian records from the seventeenth century showing possible textual dependence on those Western sources rather than on native survivor testimony. After his wife Anastasia died in 1560, something broke in Ivan. He built the Oprichnina — a shadow state, answerable only to him, designed to crush anyone he suspected of disloyalty. Novgorod was accused of planning treason. Ivan arrived in January 1570, publicly shamed the city's Archbishop, and unleashed weeks of killing and forced looting across the city and surrounding villages. Death tolls remain contested — the sources themselves are the problem. Scholar Cornelia Soldat, writing in the Cambridge World History of Genocide, found that contemporary accounts of the massacre appear only in Western Europe from 1570 onward, and that seventeenth-century Russian records show a textual relationship to those Western sources — not to native survivors. One of Ivan's worst atrocities may have left almost no local written trace, and we should absolutely be asking why. History belongs to whoever wrote it down first. Subscribe — and watch what else got buried.