Word: ivan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Ivan T. Golyakov, president of the Soviet Supreme Court...
...IVAN THE TERRIBLE (421 pp.]-Hans von Eckardt-Knopf...
...Czar Ivan now betook himself ... to an open space in the suburbs [of Great Novgorod] and ordered his men to bring before him all the boyars, commercial magnates, and elders whom they had arrested, together with their wives and.'children; and here, before his eyes [they] were burnt with red-hot instruments of torture, and then . . . bound to horses and sleighs, dragged to the river . . . and thrown into the water. Women and children . . . were tied together and likewise thrown [in] . . . The streltsy (sharpshooters) followed the victims, borne by the current along the shore and down the middle...
...National Unity." The fate of Great Novgorod, whose crime was the independence and rebelliousness of its inhabitants, belongs in the long and bloody list of massacres perpetrated by tyrants in the name of "national unity." When Ivan the Terrible came to the throne in 1547, Russia was still a collection of semi-independent states; when he died 37 years later, in the midst of a quiet game of chess, the central authority of the Czar in Moscow was recognized even by those whose powers of recognition had been burnt from their eye-sockets with red-hot irons...
...This epoch is of quite exceptional interest to the historians of the Soviet Union," notes Biographer Eckardt, who is a professor of political science at the University of Heidelberg. Like the Soviet historians, Eckardt goes over Ivan's matted reign with a fine-tooth comb; unlike them, he refrains from minimizing the diabolical cruelties of a despot who made even such a hard-faced operator as Cesare Borgia look like a cherubic innocent. Nonetheless, Eckardt does his best to follow the rule he paraphrases from Philosopher Benedetto Croce: "Not to insist upon a description of horrors in history...