In the early years of his reign, Ivan ruled with the group of reformers known as the Chosen Council and established the Zemsky Sobor, a new assembly convened by the tsar.

Ivan also pursued cultural improvements, such as importing the first printing press to Russia, and began several processes that would continue for centuries, including deepening connections with other European states, particularly England, fighting wars against the Ottoman Empire, and the conquest of Siberia.

[4][5][6] Historians generally believe that in a fit of anger, he murdered his eldest son and heir, Ivan Ivanovich;[7] he might also have caused the miscarriage of the latter's unborn child.

This left his younger son, the politically ineffectual Feodor Ivanovich, to inherit the throne, a man whose rule and subsequent childless death led to the end of the Rurik dynasty and the beginning of the Time of Troubles.

[8] According to Edward L. Keenan, Ivan the Terrible's image in popular culture as a tyrant came from politicised Western travel literature of the Renaissance era.

[3] Vladimir Dal defines grozny specifically in archaic usage and as an epithet for tsars: "courageous, magnificent, magisterial and keeping enemies in fear, but people in obedience".

He was baptized in the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius by Abbot Joasaph (Skripitsyn) and two elders of the Joseph-Volokolamsk Monastery were elected as recipients—the monk Cassian Bossoy and the hegumen Daniel.

According to his own letters, Ivan, along with his younger brother Yuri, often felt neglected and offended by the mighty boyars from the Shuisky and Belsky families.

According to historian Janet Martin, the new title "symbolized an assumption of powers equivalent and parallel to those held by the former Byzantine caesar and the Tatar khan, both known in Russian sources as tsar.

[32][33][34] Other events of the period include the introduction of the first laws restricting the mobility of the peasants, which would eventually lead to serfdom and were instituted during the rule of the future Tsar Boris Godunov in 1597.

The combination of bad harvests, devastation brought by the oprichnina and Tatar raids, the prolonged war and overpopulation caused a severe social and economic crisis in the second half of Ivan's reign.

Russia was devastated by a combination of drought, famine, unsuccessful wars against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Tatar invasions and the sea-trading blockade carried out by the Swedes, the Poles and the Hanseatic League.

[citation needed] On 3 December 1564 Ivan left Moscow for Aleksandrova Sloboda, where he sent two letters in which he announced his abdication because of the alleged embezzlement and treason of the aristocracy and the clergy.

The massacre of Novgorod consisted of men, women and children who were tied to sleighs and run into the freezing waters of the Volkhov River, which Ivan ordered on the basis of unproved accusations of treason.

From then on, the embassy was headed by Smolensk merchant Vasily Poznyakov, whose delegation visited Alexandria, Cairo and Sinai; brought the patriarch a fur coat and an icon sent by Ivan and left an interesting account of his two-and-a-half years of travels.

Ivan celebrated his victory over Kazan by building several churches with oriental features, most famously Saint Basil's Cathedral on Red Square in Moscow.

In the summer of 1569, a large force under Kasim Pasha of 1,500 Janissaries, 2,000 Sipahis and a few thousand Azaps and Akıncıs were sent to lay siege to Astrakhan and to begin the canal works while an Ottoman fleet besieged Azov.

The war ultimately proved unsuccessful and stretched on for 24 years, engaging the Kingdom of Sweden, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Teutonic Knights of Livonia.

Meanwhile, the Union of Lublin had united the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Kingdom of Poland, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth acquired an energetic leader, Stephen Báthory, who was supported by Russia's southern enemy, the Ottoman Empire.

[citation needed] To buy peace from Devlet Giray, Ivan was forced to relinquish his claims on Astrakhan for the Crimean Khanate, but the proposed transfer was only a diplomatic maneuver and was never actually completed.

[citation needed] The following year, Devlet launched another raid on Moscow, now with a numerous horde,[63] reinforced by Turkish janissaries equipped with firearms and cannons.

After several days of heavy fighting, Mikhail Vorotynsky with the main part of the army flanked the Tatars and dealt a sudden blow on 2 August, and Khvorostinin made a sortie from the fortifications.

When the magnate Dmitri Oblensky Ovchinin sneered to Basmanov that "We serve the tsar in useful ways, you in your filthy sodomitical dealings,” Ivan scalded and stabbed him to death.

[78] That contention, however, has not been widely accepted (exceptions include Donald Ostrowski and Brian Boeck); most other scholars, such as John Fennell and Ruslan Skrynnikov, have continued to argue for their authenticity.

[82] Some scholars explain the sadistic and brutal deeds of Ivan the Terrible with the religious concepts of the 16th century,[83] which included drowning and roasting people alive or torturing victims with boiling or freezing water, corresponding to the torments of hell.

[84] Ivan freely interfered in church affairs by ousting Metropolitan Philip and ordering him to be killed and accusing of treason and deposing the second-oldest hierarch, Novgorod Archbishop Pimen.

[102] In the 1920s, Mikhail Pokrovsky, who dominated the study of history in the Soviet Union, attributed the success of the oprichnina to their being on the side of the small state owners and townsfolk in a decades-long class struggle against the large landowners, and downgraded Ivan's role to that of the instrument of the emerging Russian bourgeoisie.

"[103] Joseph Stalin, who had read Wipper's biography, had decided that Soviet historians should praise the role of strong leaders, such as Ivan, Alexander Nevsky and Peter the Great, who had strengthened and expanded Russia.

[105] Eisenstein's success with Ivan the Terrible Part 1 was not repeated with the follow-up, The Boyar's Revolt, which angered Stalin because it portrayed a man suffering pangs of conscience.

[citation needed] In post-Soviet Russia, a campaign has been run to seek the granting of sainthood to Ivan IV,[107] but the Russian Orthodox Church opposed the idea.