EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) by Gordon Kerr Read Free Book Online

or buried his rape victims alive. If he was feeling particularly adventurous, he would order his men to throw them to bears.
    Surprisingly, Ivan was also a voracious reader, devouring historical and religious texts. He was also devout in his worship, although, as in many other things, he was a little extreme. In his worship of religious icons, he would throw himself recklessly to the floor, banging his head and creating a patch on the skin of his forehead.
    He was crowned Tsar in 1547, a position that meant he had to get married. To this end, he organised a beauty parade of a kind, at which noblemen presented their daughters to him. He chose the very beautiful Anastasia Romanova for his wife and her influence seemed for a while to have brought his excesses under control. The couple would go on to have six children, but only two survived infancy.
    The first years of his rule were marked by significant progress in Russia. He enjoyed the advice of three wise men – Alexej Adasjev, the priest, Silvester and the Metropolitan – head of the Russian Church – Macarius. With their help and council, he introduced reforms in government, minimising the corrupt power of the nobles, or boyars, as they were called. The church was reformed and he created an elite force in the army, known as the Streltsi.
    He made territorial gains, too, conquering the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan. He took several cities on the Baltic and opened important trading ties with England.
    He was also seriously ill during this period, almost dying of a fever in March 1553. It may have been pneumonia but some have speculated that he suffered an attack of encephalitis. Around this time, he asked his boyars to swear an oath of allegiance to his baby son, Dmitri. They refused and Ivan would never forgive them, resolving from that day to destroy his enemies.
    It was a tragic time. A few months after his recovery, he and his family visited a monastery where they planned to give thanks for the restoration of his health. A nurse accidentally let the baby prince slip from her arms into a nearby river. The baby drowned and Ivan was devastated.
    In 1560, he was distraught once again when his wife Anastasia died following a long illness. Ivan seems to have suffered a nervous breakdown as a result, banging his head on the wall and destroying furniture in an emotional fury. It was a fury that deepened into depression and paranoia – he believed the boyars had poisoned his wife. The mood swings, sudden rages and habitual cruelty that he had displayed when he was younger, returned. He ordered the arrest of a number of nobles who were tortured and killed. He lost his three advisors – Adjasev died in prison, Silvester was sent into exile and Macarius died of natural causes in 1563.
    There was nothing and no one to restrain him now from his worst excesses.
    But, suddenly, in 1564, he abdicated and left Moscow. There was a clamour for his return which was exactly what the manipulative Tsar wanted. He agreed to return on condition that they accept him as an absolute ruler with the power to punish anyone he believed was being disloyal towards him. He also demanded the power to confiscate their estates. The people agreed and he returned even more powerful than when he had left.
    In order to impose his will, he created a new military force – the Oprichniki. They consisted mainly of criminals who dressed in black and rode black horses. They instilled terror in anyone seeing them ride past and quite rightly so – they were known to even slaughter priests at the altar.
    It got worse. Ivan transformed the Oprichniki into a kind of religious order - the troops were the monks and he was their abbot. Their religious ceremonies were abominations. Depraved masses would be followed by orgies during which women were raped, tortured and killed. Ivan is reported to have used sharpened, red-hot pincers to tear ribs out of people’s chests during these events.
    But these perversions would be