1:59

you back Peter? I'm so relieved to be back.

2:02

Thank you for having me again. We are delighted to have you back.

2:05

And in Comedy Corner she's a hilarious stand-up

2:07

and writer and actor who is nominated

2:09

for Best Newcomer at the 2018 Edinburgh

2:11

Comedy Awards. You'll recognise her from appearances

2:14

on QI, Mock the Week and The Now Show. Plus

2:16

she also has three different shows available

2:18

on BBC Sounds. There's Fight, about

2:20

Russia in the 1990s. There's OK

2:23

Computer and then there's also Human

2:25

Era, all about technology. It's

2:27

the brilliant and clearly very busy Olga

2:30

Kock. Welcome Olga. Drasvojcie!

2:33

Hello everyone. Oh,

2:35

hello! Olga, you're a proper Russian. Yeah,

2:39

I think so. I hope so. Thank you so so much for

2:41

having me. I'm very very excited to be here. Oh,

2:43

we're delighted to have you here. Olga, your dad

2:46

was deputy prime minister

2:48

of Russia, right? Yeah. You

2:51

grew up in Russia. Did you do either the terrible at all at school

2:53

or did you leave before you got to that part of the curriculum?

2:56

We definitely did. Like I remember stuff and I think

2:58

the most vivid thing I would dare

3:00

say any Russian child remembers is

3:02

like the legendary Repin painting

3:05

of Ivan the Terrible Killing His Own Son and that's

3:07

like in every textbook and that's the first thing that comes to

3:09

mind whenever you tell a Russian child,

3:11

ask them about Ivan the Terrible. And that's a pretty

3:14

terrible thing to be the first thing in a child's

3:16

mind. OK, so spoiler alert, Ivan

3:18

the Terrible kills his son. So, what do you know?

3:26

This is where I take a stab, lol, at

3:28

what you might know about today's subject and Ivan the

3:31

Terrible is known as Russia's most infamous

3:33

and cruel ruler, perhaps. The clue

3:35

is in the name. He wasn't Ivan the cuddly. You

3:38

might be picturing a bearded evil genius, similar

3:40

to his appearance as the baddie in the 2009

3:43

film Night at the Museum, Battle of the Smithsonian.

3:45

Or you may have come toe to toe with him as the dastardly

3:48

Russian general in the video game Age of Empires 3,

3:50

one of my faves. And if you're a movie buff,

3:52

you might love the Eisenstein movie with a Prokofiev

3:55

score. But what about the man himself? Was

3:57

he really so terrible? Have we got

3:59

him wrong? Should we be more sympathetic to Ivan

4:01

the Lovely? Hmm, let's find out, shall

4:04

we? Peter, can we get a little bit of background

4:06

on 16th century Russia? Because it's not the same

4:09

country we think of today. So what's the geopolitics

4:12

of the world Ivan is born into? It's not

4:15

really Russia at all, it's actually Muscovy.

4:17

What we think of of Russia, in fact in Ukraine

4:19

and Russia, has been pushed back north

4:21

by the arrivals of the Mongols. And

4:24

eventually a central nuclear point

4:26

starts to grow up around a town called Vladimir, which

4:29

is very close to where Moscow is today. By

4:32

around about 1300s, the rulers

4:34

of Muscovy are starting to become a bit more powerful.

4:37

So Ivan is born in a place that is in transition,

4:39

it's on its way to becoming quite important,

4:42

it's the home of the Orthodox Church

4:44

in Russia. But Muscovy is adding muscles,

4:47

it's in the process of taking steroids when

4:49

Ivan is born. A Russian taking

4:52

steroids, I've never heard of such a thing. He's

4:54

born in 1530, so just shy of 500 years ago.

4:58

Which makes him the contemporary of Henry VIII and

5:00

his childhood. Is it happy fun times

5:03

or is it political nightmare? I don't

5:05

think anybody born 500 years ago had a great

5:07

childhood. Vitamin deficiencies,

5:10

nutrition, etc. But it was particularly tricky

5:13

if, as happened with Ivan, your father died when

5:15

you were 3 and then your mother dies. And

5:17

the aristocracy, the boyar class

5:20

in Muscovy, all figure out that

5:22

Ivan being young, impressionable and

5:25

precarious, that this gives them a chance to become

5:28

wealthier, more powerful themselves. And

5:30

that's a pretty tough world, I think, for

5:32

a young boy to be growing up in. So Paul-Lit-Livan,

5:35

his dad died when he was 3, his

5:37

mum died when he was 8, he's basically like Batman,

5:39

his origin story is about being an orphan boy.

5:42

Yeah, they both have vitamin D deficiency,

5:44

because they're always in the dark. So

5:47

there's a family called the Shushki, who assume

5:50

control, I think. My pronunciation

5:52

is terrible, Olga, I'm so sorry. I'm judging

5:54

you, don't worry. Well judge

5:56

me out loud then, how should I say it? Shushki?

5:59

Shushki. Oh, okay.

6:42

was

8:00

a member of the influential family, was

8:02

outside the window, riding up and down on a stallion waving

8:04

a sword around. That's nice, isn't it? So basically,

8:07

it's a full-on spectacular. It's difficult

8:09

to do it spontaneously if you have such a long

8:12

rider of things that need to happen in

8:14

order to create a mood.

8:17

So the wedding night was red hot, it sounds steamy

8:19

and dreamy. Unfortunately, Moscow was also

8:21

red hot that month because there were devastating fires.

8:24

Thousands are killed, buildings are destroyed and

8:27

rumours circulate that the fire has been started deliberately.

8:30

The rumours say the fire has been started

8:32

by ghouls. Excuse

8:34

me? I didn't know

8:36

that was an option. Yeah,

8:39

it's ghouls. Peter, what have ghouls

8:42

got to do with it? The Russian word is Седечники, I

8:44

think. Okay,

8:46

so Moscow, like most towns

8:49

at this time, is made of wood and that means

8:51

that it catches fire regularly. In summers in Moscow,

8:53

it can be really warm. In 1547,

8:56

the fire is a really bad one, so lots of houses

8:58

and shops go up, one of the powder

9:01

towers in the Kremlin blows up and scatters

9:03

bricks everywhere and kills people. So

9:05

the first question is why has this happened? And

9:07

lots of people start saying, well, it's omens, others

9:10

say we're being punished by God, suppose

9:12

that our sister sort of forced to confess

9:15

and then beheaded or impaled. But

9:17

then a story goes around saying it's Седечники,

9:19

so ghouls or sort of ghosts. And

9:21

these are supposed to be spirits

9:23

that tear people's hearts out and

9:26

then create a special water that creates

9:29

fire. And at no point does anybody suspect

9:31

the town that's made out of wood, paper

9:34

and rain. Even

9:37

as rain has started pretty badly, so he

9:39

does the obvious thing, which is declare war because

9:41

everyone loves a nice war. So he pops

9:43

on his combat boots and goes and posts from butch selfies

9:45

with a big manly cannon and who's he at war with,

9:47

Peter? So it's heading south towards the

9:50

carnates, those post-Mongol entities.

9:52

And some of them are still pretty powerful, like

9:54

in Crimea, the Golden Horde. But

9:56

Ivan, although he's powerful back home,

9:59

he's So the Crimean Khan

10:02

writes to him and says, what do you want, little boy? My

10:04

affection or bloodshed? You choose very

10:06

carefully and we'll see what comes of it. That's so

10:08

hot! It's

10:11

quite a good line. But Ivan gets all

10:13

of his armies together and heads for Kazan, because

10:15

he recognises that if he doesn't capture it, the Crimean

10:18

Khan will and his enemy will become

10:20

even more powerful. He appears to spend most

10:22

of his time inside his tent praying

10:24

for success, which then duly happens,

10:27

and he forcibly converts the population of Kazan

10:30

and then heads south towards Asakhan, which

10:32

is on the Caspian Sea, that opens

10:34

up more trade routes and gathers

10:36

lots of booty, gets lots of prestige. And

10:38

so back home in Moscow, everybody's thrilled

10:41

that this young guy who used to throw dogs and cats

10:43

off balconies turns out that he's pretty

10:45

good at delivering, expanding

10:48

territory, and obviously God is smiling on

10:50

him. And in terms of his fiscal policy, he's

10:52

anti-corruption, he closes tax loopholes,

10:54

he gets rid of the banditry. Things are

10:56

going quite well. Rulership is a tricky

10:58

thing to get right, but generally, transparency,

11:01

lack of corruption, rooting out all the dodgy

11:03

officials is quite a smart way of doing

11:05

it, and having law codes that standardise. The

11:08

question is who stands to benefit. When you centralise,

11:11

you can concentrate more and more power on the

11:14

position of the Emperor. And that creates its

11:16

own problems too, because then you have

11:18

a boyar class who has less authority,

11:20

less prestige, fewer resources, and

11:23

it's normally a matter of time before that pressure starts

11:25

to build up. I'm reminded, Olga, of your

11:27

show Fight on BBC Sounds. Your

11:29

father was partially responsible for

11:31

the economic redistribution of money and

11:33

power to just a tiny set

11:36

of oligarchs. So I guess things happen

11:38

in cycles in Russian history, perhaps. Oh, yeah,

11:40

we only know one way to do things,

11:42

and the way is bad. The

11:45

major thing that's kind of a huge

11:48

part of his life is that in 1553, Ivan has

11:50

a terrifying illness that very nearly kills him,

11:53

and his heir is a tiny baby called

11:55

Dimitri. And Ivan, he's

11:57

on his deathbed and he's like, I want all the boyars

11:59

to... swear allegiance to my baby and they

12:02

are all like, nah, not

12:04

really that fast to be honest. And

12:06

so this is a tricky moment, isn't it? Because

12:08

Ivan survives his illness and

12:11

he's seen all the boyars refuse

12:13

to pledge allegiance to his son. So

12:16

is this where he becomes increasingly

12:19

controlling? The general consensus

12:21

is that it spooks him. I mean, he really is very

12:23

close to death. He has his will checked, he's

12:26

properly ill. And so the fear of leaving

12:28

a precarious child, it

12:30

all reminds him of where he's been before. But

12:33

then when he gets better, he does

12:35

seem to go after the people who

12:37

he thinks haven't shown him the suitable level

12:40

of respect. Things get very

12:42

sad for Ivan now at this point because

12:45

even though he survives his health crisis, his wife

12:47

Anastasia, she doesn't, she

12:49

dies. He thinks possibly

12:51

poison has been involved. And

12:53

also their son, Dimitri, the baby, he

12:56

tragically gets dropped in a river accidentally

12:58

and drowns, which is obviously very sad. And

13:00

then they've also had three daughters, all of whom have died

13:03

very young. So in the space of a few years,

13:05

he's lost his wife and four kids

13:07

and possibly thinks poison might have

13:10

been involved. But he does then settle down and

13:12

he does find a new love, he finds a new

13:14

lady and he marries her. And

13:16

then he finds a new lady and he marries her.

13:19

And then he finds a new lady and he marries, actually

13:22

Olga, how many wives did Ivan the

13:24

Terrible have?

13:24

I genuinely didn't know this aspect,

13:27

but now that like, I know for a fact that like, there

13:30

are always a lot of parallels with Henry VIII.

13:32

Six? We think seven. But

13:35

as with Boris Johnson's children, it's a vague approximation.

13:37

You always have to sit a plus or minus by the

13:40

way. We think seven, but apparently towards

13:42

the end of his life, he was shopping in England for wife number eight.

13:44

Peter, actually that's interesting. So Ivan

13:47

the Terrible, Tsar of Russia, Russia's

13:49

quite a long way away from England, but his

13:52

chief diplomatic ally is Elizabeth

13:54

I in England, what's that about? Well, it's partly

13:56

he struggles to find friends locally. a

14:00

personality thing, but also he's, you

14:02

know, he's hit all of his neighbours and his

14:04

rivals. So if you've met him, you don't like him, but

14:06

if you're 4,000 miles away. And he's safe.

14:09

But he's very persistent about thinking

14:12

that England offer opportunities, partly

14:14

because the English themselves are quite interested in exploring

14:17

trade links to Asia and to

14:19

Russia. We get the sense now that Ivan

14:22

is getting increasingly paranoid. The

14:24

boy laughs off refuse to swear allegiance to his tiny

14:26

baby. His wife, he think maybe was

14:28

poisoned. So

14:30

is this when he turns on his boy Oz now, he

14:32

now goes in to crush them? Well, he's never had

14:35

a great relationship with them. And the problem

14:37

is, is that the longer the list becomes

14:40

of people who have annoyed him or been

14:42

disgraced or had lands confiscated, the

14:44

more that paranoia is probably justified.

14:47

And Ivan potentially lays a very

14:49

smart trap here, Peter. Historians debate it slightly

14:51

as to whether he does this on purpose. But he

14:53

managed to rustle power away

14:55

from the boy Oz by abdicating

14:58

or pretending to quit. He's like, you know, I'm done with this.

15:00

I'm bored of this. And they beg him to

15:02

come back. It's slightly hard to make sense

15:04

of exactly what is going on. Ivan

15:07

starts announcing that he's

15:09

got big plans and starts going

15:11

around Moscow, collecting all the best icons

15:13

from churches and cathedrals and so on, and

15:16

holds a service and says goodbye to everybody.

15:18

And he says, look, I'm basically going to go into

15:20

some form of exile. I'm

15:22

not going to abdicate. He doesn't quite say that. He says,

15:25

I'm going to create a new kingdom. And God

15:27

is going to tell me where that new place should be. But

15:30

at the same time as doing that, he writes an open

15:32

letter essentially to the people of Moscow. And

15:35

he says, this is all the fault of the boy

15:37

Oz. I did as best I could, but they're

15:39

all hopeless and rapacious.

15:42

And they're the cause of all your problems. And the people

15:44

of Moscow don't need any excuse or explanation

15:46

about that. I mean, it's one thing having a czar

15:48

who sits at the top who maybe funnels

15:51

all the cash into his pockets, but actually the kind of middle

15:53

management of the boy our class are the ones

15:55

that nobody likes. The Metropolitan

15:57

Liberal elite. Yeah, exactly. exactly

16:00

what they are. And so they basically say, look, come

16:02

back, Ivan, we're so sorry, we'll do everything you

16:04

tell us and you can choose

16:07

anything from now and we won't stand in your way. That's

16:10

potentially the source of why

16:12

Ivan gets to be so terrible in the last

16:15

part of his reign. Yeah, because the next part

16:17

of his career is what we are getting towards,

16:19

which is the dark, nasty, horrific,

16:21

terrible territory. And the thing that he

16:24

is most famous for is called the Oprechina.

16:26

Olga, have you heard of this? Have you encountered

16:29

this at school or just in general life?

16:31

Yeah, that's his calling card. That's his thing that

16:33

he did that he's remembered for. He basically

16:36

endeavors to destroy the

16:38

boy art class and then creates

16:41

his own personal militia and becomes a

16:43

tyrant with his own militia. Well remembered.

16:46

Oh, sorry. I was talking about Vladimir Putin.

16:48

Sorry. What? So,

16:51

I mean, Peter, Oprechina is

16:53

a process of sort of splitting the kingdom almost

16:55

in half, isn't it? He's sort of taking half

16:58

the lands and going, I will administer these lands

17:00

with my rules, my men. And then there's

17:02

a second section of land that the

17:04

boy arts can rule that bit. So it's a sort of divide

17:07

and conquer section. So what the Oprechina

17:10

does is establishes that the

17:12

crown controls the best cuts of

17:14

land and forces everybody else off.

17:16

And so there's a division between the Oprechina

17:18

on the one hand and then the Zemsitino on the other.

17:21

And the boy arts get to,

17:23

in theory, be in charge of their own lands,

17:25

etc. in the Zemsitino, although they all have

17:28

to keep paying taxes. But

17:30

on the other hand, the Czar essentially establishes

17:32

the Czar as being

17:34

all powerful.

17:35

He establishes an organization or a bunch of

17:37

individuals called the Oprechniki

17:39

who are a black robed, semi

17:42

monastic enforcers

17:44

who, like the Spanish Inquisition, turn up

17:47

unannounced and demanding to

17:49

have access to whatever they want. Olga,

17:51

in terms of the aesthetic, I mean, Peter's mentioned the black

17:53

robes. Can you guess what else the Oprechniki

17:56

wear? Oh, God, now I'm just thinking about that metal

17:58

web, maybe where the baddies get. Maybe

18:01

give them all like sickles the way death

18:03

does. Oh nice. That would

18:05

be fun. Black robes and a sickle. You're not far off.

18:07

They had brooms for sweeping away injustice.

18:10

No! What?! They

18:12

had brooms. They're basically Genesis for justice. They

18:14

would sweep away the treachery. Like bewitched!

18:21

So the operationiki were black and as well as their

18:23

brooms and their dark robes they also

18:26

had dog-headed logos. The

18:28

dog symbolising they were going to bite the

18:30

Czar's enemies. This is where he becomes Ivan

18:33

the Terrible, right Peter? In 1568 his

18:36

rival is a guy called Chelyadin Fedorov,

18:39

one of the boyars, who he thinks is behind

18:41

a petition to try and reverse some

18:43

of these policies. Chelyadin

18:45

Fyodorov is one of these guys who Ivan becomes

18:47

convinced is after his

18:50

throne. So he gets him to come to the palace

18:53

and dresses him up in royal robes and

18:55

then makes him sit on the throne. And then

18:57

he says to him with a kind of classic good

19:00

fellas follow-up, he goes, just as it's in my power

19:02

to put you on the throne, it's also my power

19:04

to remove you. And then he stabs him in the chest

19:06

before getting the obitcheniki to polish him off

19:09

and then chuck him on a dung heap. How real

19:11

housewives is that? We've

19:14

had I think so far Ivan the Mean

19:16

and Shifty, Ivan the pretty sinister,

19:19

Ivan the quite shrewd, but we

19:21

are now entering into this phase of his career,

19:23

which I'm afraid to say is genuinely

19:26

horrific. So he ordered a monk

19:28

to be sat on a barrel of gunpowder and then

19:30

had him blown up. And he quoted at the

19:32

time that if the monk wants to be an angel,

19:35

he can fly up to heaven. Why do he have zingers

19:38

for each and every one of the murders? I don't understand.

19:40

This is the thing Olga is that Ivan the Terrible seems

19:43

to have a kind of weird sense

19:45

of humor. There's a sort of irony to some of his

19:47

executions as if they're kind of bespokely

19:49

crafted for the individual victims,

19:52

a bit like the horrible killer in the Saw

19:54

movies. Like there's a sort of theatre to them.

19:57

Okay, so the next one he has an Archbishop

19:59

stripped. naked, sewn into a bare

20:02

skin and then set upon by wild dogs.

20:05

He had seven monks mauled to death by bears.

20:08

Allegedly, Prince Nikita Odoyevsky

20:10

was executed by having a wound inserted

20:12

into his chest and then one in his back, and

20:15

then a shirt was stuffed through the hole in

20:17

his chest and out of his back, and then he was

20:19

flossed to death with his shirt, which

20:21

is just horrific. They're

20:24

so gruesome, Peter. They're so

20:26

horrifying. Do we have reliable sources

20:28

for this stuff? Do we think these are

20:30

true? I think it's something he's genuinely doing.

20:33

The thing that is most telling are

20:35

letters that Ivan himself writes

20:38

to other leaders. So he writes

20:40

to the King of Poland and says, look, I

20:42

hear you being bad mouthing me saying I'm cruel

20:45

and doing nasty things to my subjects, but

20:47

of course that's absolute nonsense. I would

20:49

never punish anybody. I would never fly

20:51

into merciless rage unless

20:54

someone had done something really bad and deserved it. Can

20:56

we then get to the story of Novgorod, the city

20:58

in northwest Russia, which is his own city, and

21:01

this is genuinely horrific.

21:04

This is probably the worst of his crimes,

21:06

right, Peter? This is the thing that makes him legendary

21:08

almost. It's a bloodbath. It's shocking even

21:10

by his standards. So Novgorod is

21:12

one of the older cities in what's now Russia,

21:15

and about 100 years before Ivan's

21:17

reign, it becomes incorporated into Muscovy.

21:20

It's actually viewed with a little bit of suspicion by

21:22

Muscovites and by Ivan because there

21:25

are rumors that the Novgorodians are upset

21:27

with Ivan that they're thinking about throwing their lot in

21:29

with Poland. So Ivan decides that he

21:31

wants to teach him a lesson. So he starts

21:33

to march on the city

21:36

and on the way there, burns

21:38

nobles alive. Anybody who stands up to him

21:40

gets in his way. Anybody who thinks

21:42

looks a little bit funnily at him, they get set

21:45

on fire and thrown into frozen lakes and held

21:47

down by stakes to be held under the water.

21:50

Women are asphyxiated. Children made to drink poison.

21:52

I mean, it's absolutely horrific. And then eventually

21:54

they reach Novgorod and of course the Novgorodians

21:56

think, well, there's obviously a deal to make. There's something we need

21:58

to sign or, you read say or do

22:00

and he'll go away. Instead it's a

22:02

sort of blood bar. Thousands of people killed,

22:05

people are hunted down, lots of stories

22:07

about cannibalism. The Sack of Nogorod

22:10

is a sign that Ivan is seriously

22:12

unbalanced or is making strategic decisions

22:15

that create bloodshed on a massive scale. Okay,

22:18

but we are a comedy show so

22:20

here's some light relief Olga,

22:22

he doesn't kill everyone. Hooray!

22:25

He merely humiliated an archbishop, he

22:27

stripped him of his holy vestments, dressed him as a clown,

22:30

married him to a horse, strapped him to the

22:32

horse and made him play musical instruments while

22:34

riding through the streets of Moscow. That's classic,

22:37

that's the classic clown horse

22:39

musical instrument gag. We

22:41

love it. So after seven years

22:44

of the Oprechtinina and the reign

22:46

of terror, the lands being split apart, the persecution

22:49

of the boyars, this policy comes to

22:51

an end in 1572 and it's not because

22:54

Ivan has had a change of heart and he's now

22:56

a lovely fella, it's because the Crimean

22:58

Khanate invade and Russia

23:01

has suffered enormously and so

23:03

has Ivan's family because

23:05

he turns on his daughter-in-law and of course famously

23:08

he kills his son. You know, you mentioned Olga

23:10

at the beginning of the show, the painting of him killing

23:12

his son. Do you remember why he

23:14

kills his son? I don't know the story

23:16

exactly. It's like one

23:18

of the most, this is a terrible

23:20

word to use but like effective paintings

23:23

you'll ever see because it's directly

23:25

after he stabbed his son and then you see the

23:28

glistening tears in his eyes and sort of the understanding

23:30

what he's just done. The story goes,

23:32

I think Peter, his son's wife, his

23:34

daughter-in-law is pregnant and she

23:37

is wearing not enough clothes, she's showing

23:39

too much skin and he attacks her for

23:41

immodesty. His son steps in to

23:43

protect her and he smacks him around the head with an

23:45

iron bar. Is that about right? Yeah, that's

23:47

one of the stories. There are other stories that are also told about

23:49

why he kills him and one is that his son

23:52

asks the Tsar if he could have a military

23:54

command position and that makes us all think, oh right,

23:56

you're trying to take my position too so wallops him. the

24:00

consensus is that he sees his son as

24:02

a threat. So those tears that are painted

24:04

in are probably well chosen, but clearly

24:07

he's a man who's highly disturbed, extremely

24:10

paranoid, and personally

24:13

very aggressive. By the end of his life, he's a very poorly

24:15

old man. He's very unwell. He's drinking

24:17

mercury and arsenic, possibly to cure his ailments.

24:20

We know this because later on his body was

24:22

dug up in Stalin's reign. Mortality

24:24

is knocking on Ivan's door. And did

24:26

we get a sense, Peter, that he's starting to ask for

24:29

forgiveness? And perhaps feeling some grief

24:31

and remorse for the things that he's done? Yeah, so

24:33

towards the end of his life, he starts creating what are called

24:35

sinorikis. So from the Byzantine

24:37

world, the Greek world, lists of

24:40

commemorating people. So he starts writing down

24:43

everybody. He's ordered to be killed, people

24:45

he's been mean to. That's a long list. It's

24:48

a very long list. And none of these survive in full, but

24:50

there are fragments of enough to tell us that

24:52

there is a kind of seemingly some sort of

24:54

act of contrition. So there

24:56

seems to be some form of reflection going on at the end of this very

24:59

bloody life. And Olga, do you know how he

25:01

dies? I don't know, but I really

25:03

hope he had a good zinger for it. I

25:07

wouldn't say it was a zinger. He had a nice bath, and

25:09

then he played a game of chess, and then he conked

25:11

over dead.

25:12

Did he win the chess game?

25:13

Oh, I don't know, mid-game probably. When

25:15

he knew he wasn't gonna win, he was like, I'm gonna

25:17

pee, quit ahead of the swallow of my head.

25:21

But he wants window!

25:26

Now, this is my favourite part of the show. This is where

25:28

Olga and I take a breather and Peter talk for two

25:31

uninterrupted minutes on something he needs

25:33

us to know about Ivan. So without much

25:35

further ado, Peter, take it away. The easiest

25:37

thing is to blame Ivan as being

25:40

paranoid or whatever. But I think

25:42

we've got to be careful about all of that. First,

25:44

it's very hard to diagnose from a distance. As

25:46

it happens, around this period, across

25:48

large parts of Europe, rulers are

25:51

argued about whether they are unstable

25:53

in some shape or form, whether they're pathological

25:56

sadists. That's the same in Tudor

25:58

England and Stuart England. that's the same with the French

26:01

kingdoms and with Habsburg monarchs. The

26:03

idea of the ruler as being crazy

26:05

and bloodthirsty is something that we see

26:08

in lots of other places. And I suppose

26:10

the more useful question is about

26:12

cruelty and political control, right? And

26:15

in that sense, if and however

26:17

awful it is, one doesn't have to do a compare

26:19

and contrast, but seeing the

26:21

Atlantic slave trade, which is just starting

26:24

around this time where there's a total disregard for human

26:26

life and how people are treated, we find it

26:28

inconceivable to see that people can act with such cruelty

26:31

towards each other. And yet this is a kind

26:33

of world where violence is ubiquitous.

26:36

And when violence and cruelty are committed, it's not

26:38

about insanity or lack

26:40

of control of faculties. It's about decision

26:43

making about political control. So, you

26:46

know, again, there's a lot written about Ivan

26:48

and that childhood we talked about and how

26:50

traumatic it was and did he throw animals off buildings?

26:53

But, you know, his childhood presumably wasn't any

26:55

more traumatic than Queen Elizabeth I, whose

26:58

mother's executed and the

27:00

instability and so on. But this is

27:03

happening at a time where the Reformation is happening over the

27:05

rest of Europe, where if your religious

27:07

beliefs are said to be one thing or another,

27:09

you're tied up to a stake and burnt in city

27:11

centers. So I think that there is

27:14

no way I think of understanding this other

27:16

than people believe that the ends justifies

27:18

the means. In Ivan's case, that

27:21

want and cruelty and the scale of it, and as

27:23

you said, the kind of amusement is a tool of control in

27:25

itself. So I think that we've

27:28

got to be careful to not make Russia exceptional.

27:30

This is what people do to each other in lots of

27:32

different circumstances. I said, maybe we

27:34

shouldn't think of Ivan as being more

27:36

terrible than anybody else. Maybe all these rulers were terrible

27:38

too. He just has the misfortune of having his

27:41

name attached as Grozny. Thank

27:43

you so much, Peter Olga. One thing I really

27:45

did want to talk about is Grozny, which

27:47

is terrible, like Ivan the Terrible, Ivan Grozny

27:50

in Russian. The word in Russian is less so

27:52

terrible and more like authoritarian

27:54

and scary from a position of power. So

27:57

it's Ivan the Intimidating? Yeah.

27:59

More like...

27:59

even that, like intimidating in a serious

28:02

way,

28:02

like in a scary way. And I think actually

28:05

the name Groschnie doesn't get applied to him

28:07

until quite long after he's dead. So

28:09

it's not necessarily a thing that everyone was saying at the

28:11

time. I'd like to say a huge thank

28:13

you to our guests. In History Corner,

28:15

we've had the marvellous Professor Peter

28:18

Frankopans in University of Oxford. Thank you, Peter.

28:20

Thank you so much. And in Gomorri Corner, we've had

28:22

the outstanding Olga Tock. Thank

28:24

you, Olga. Thank you so much. And to you, lovely

28:27

listener, make sure to join me next time as we dive

28:29

headfirst into the past once more with two different

28:31

study buddies. But now I'm off to rebrand myself

28:33

as the Czar of Podcasting. But a nice

28:36

one, I promise. Bye!