Word: oprichniki
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...traces its arrival in the country to Genoese merchants who traveled to Moscow in the 14th century and met with Prince Dmitry Ivanovich. Monks in the Kremlin's Chudov Monastery began distilling the first Russian spirits some time in the 15th century. Ivan the Terrible served vodka to his oprichniki - the special police force that carried out his violent and, well, terrible orders. To facilitate their drunken revelry, Ivan opened kabaks, or taverns, that served vodka and other alcohol (no food). By 1648, with Russians developing a strong taste for drink, a third of the country's male population...
Though Ivan IV liked to deliver his mayhem personally, much of it was meted out by the oprichniki, his 6,000-member guard of thugs who terrorized the country for seven years until the Tsar abolished the group. In a fit of contrition late in his life, Ivan made a list of more than 3,000 opponents he had executed. He sent the names, along with generous sums, to monasteries for memorial prayers to be recited...
...struggle with the nobles, lyrical moments of happiness with his first wife, Anastasia, plotting by the boyars and the duplicitous Prince Kurbsky, who tries to destroy Ivan by poisoning his queen. After her death, the Czar's madness grows, and with it his use of the dreaded oprichniki (a primitive kind of secret police) to suppress both boyar and peasant revolts. Ivan's Stalinoid cruelties have always represented something of an ideological embarrassment to the Kremlin. Grigorovich, in a program note, argues unconvincingly that the real heroes of the ballet are the Russian people, "who withstood...
...Czar, i.e., Caesar, and Sovereign of all the Russias. He began to build a strong brick wall around the Kremlin: it still stands today.† Then Moscow was ruled by Ivan IV, called the Terrible, who decisively defeated the Tartars and gave Moscow its first secret police-the blackclad Oprichniki ("extras"), who were mounted on black horses and carried a broom and a dog's head at their saddle, "to sweep and gnaw away treason." When much of Moscow was destroyed by the huge fire of 1547, Ivan retired to the Sparrow Hills...
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