However appalling the Terrible Tsar’s methods and means and his numerous excesses and executions may seem to us and our contemporaries, Ivan’s role was progressive, as he administered a blow to feudal reaction, facilitated the acceleration of the historical process, and transformed Russia into a strong, centralized “Great Power.” […] Some of our historians apparently do not understand that there is a principle difference between recognizing the progressiveness of one or another historical phenomenon and endorsing it, as such.

A. A. Zhdanov

I. HISTORY AS ANALOGY AND AS ALLEGORY

In 1939, theater critic V. I. Blium, a staunch senior member of the Soviet cultural establishment, became embroiled in public debates concerning the revisionist celebrations of tsarist heroes that had by then come to occupy a prominent place in Soviet mass culture. Attacked from all sides for his inability to adapt to the new orthodoxy represented by these works, Blium eventually wrote to Stalin himself, complaining that Soviet patriotism had become “distorted” and was “sometimes beginning to display all the characteristics of racial nationalism.”^[1] According to Blium, Soviet cultural life was consumed by an antihistorical “search for ‘our’ heroes of bygone ages, a hasty, blind search for historical ‘analogies,’” and was churning out cheap anti-Polish and anti-German pablum that was all but indistinguishable from the mobilizational propaganda of the pre-revolutionary era – from “the bourgeois patriotism of the Guchkovs, Stolypins and Miliukovs.” Yet besides his trenchant critical observations, Blium’s missive to the Soviet leader also included comments of a more personal nature: “This contradiction torments me, tearing me apart with doubt, and I am sure that I am not the only one who feels this way.”
Blium’s historical anxieties illustrate something of the complex ideological and cognitive implications of Stalinist historical revisionism – implications that are often overlooked in assessments of Stalinist historiography as a monolithic edifice of final and unquestionable truths. In the present article, I trace out some of the more pertinacious implications of the Stalinist revision of the Russian past, as they are revealed in one of the greatest masterpieces of that era and one of its most scandalous failures, S. M. Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible. My analysis concerns a very discrete set of images from part two of the film trilogy, yet from this constrained material I offer some purchase on interpretation of the project as a whole and, furthermore, on the discursive complexity of the history projects of the 1930s and 1940s in general. Much of the critical discussion of Ivan the Terrible has worked to elevate Eisenstein, on the basis of the banned second installment in the project in particular, as an example of willful subversion or noble resistance to the tyranny of Stalinism.^[2] Yet such interpretations have found little hard evidence to support them, either in the films themselves or in the more and more thoroughly mined archival record. While it may be impossible ultimately to resolve whether assessments of the films’ subversive significance are justified, I hope that my own reading may redirect discussion from the dead end of “proving” the films’ critique of Stalinism to what I believe is a more fertile and certain discussion of it as a critique of Stalinist historical revisionism. In my view, Eisenstein’s film presents a meditation on the instability of historical discourse when burdened with the task of rendering comprehensible epochs that were imagined as ruptures in collective identity and political formation – such as both Ivan’s day and Eisenstein’s contemporary era of revolution and war.
Yet before delving into analysis of Eisenstein’s film, I will offer a short discussion of broader questions of the epistemological peculiarities of tsarist history in Soviet mass culture and public discourse. As I have argued elsewhere in greater detail, although party leaders and cultural managers indeed intended to put history in order “once and for all” as they set out to remake the past for Soviet use in the middle 1930s, theirs was a doubly-folded relationship to the past that carried in its belly the inheritance of previous generations of mythmaking even as it worked in public to birth a new version of history for the post-revolutionary world.^[3] Although the Soviet historical imagination was predicated on a conception of the present as an exceptional moment, offering unique epistemological leverage that rendered up the full truth of history, in actuality this vantage point on the past (like any other) was mired in its own limited historical positioning: it was covertly indebted to the traditions in historical imagination of the pre-revolutionary era, and subject to the revisions of the generations to come. The Stalinist redaction of Ivan IV is a perfect case in point. Despite repeated claims as to the originality of the Stalinist vision of Ivan in the face of the gross errors and distortions of bourgeois historiography, this novel historical “truth” was obviously and deeply indebted to the historical and cultural works of the nineteenth century.^[4] Among many other legacies, some of which will be explored below, the Stalinist conception of Ivan revived key tenets of the so-called State School of historiography, which had first claimed Ivan as a grand servant of the historical imperatives of state and empire, and to the thinkers who reproduced and developed this interpretive tradition up to the 1920s – most prominently R. Iu. Vipper and N. V. Ustrialov. Additionally, hovering alongside the celebratory rhetoric of the campaign were the echoes of the dominant pre-revolutionary tradition in interpretation of Ivan that grew out of N. M. Karamzin’s interpretation in his History of the Russian State, according to which the tsar had been a vicious tyrant who oversaw excessive, state-inflicted violence – a tradition that itself had resonance up to the 1930s as a source of allegorical critique of Soviet leaders as “new oprichniki.”^[5] Crucial to comprehension of the historiographical dynamic concerning Ivan both in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries is recognition that what was at issue was seldom the fact of the violence of Ivan’s reign, but its historical significance as, on the one hand, a legitimate and necessary cost of social progress and political greatness or, on the other, a self-defeating, self-serving and perhaps even senseless episode of mass trauma and victimization. In the Soviet 1930s and 1940s, insistence on the former and suppression of the latter interpretation were key to the figure of Ivan’s mobilizational utility. In these decades, the inertia or overhang of these historiographic, cultural and political rhetorical traditions demanded of Soviet men and women the discipline of a self-imposed forgetfulness as they faced the purportedly new historical visions of the Stalinist era; and it was precisely this impossible balancing act between memory and forgetfulness that lay at the root of Blium’s “hermeneutic anxiety.”
Blium’s objections related primarily to historical revisionism in the Soviet cultural arena, and it was there that the contradictory implications of a Soviet Ivan were most lucidly apparent. Stalinist historical films and other representations of history in the cultural sphere, at the instigation of the party hierarchs who ordered their production, labored to give form to super­historical political myths, in which the geopolitical realities and actors of the present appeared as the hypostases of recurrent, unchanging patterns visible in the heroes and battles of the past. Catalyzing the process of rehabilitation and celebration of Ivan, especially in the pragmatic considerations of party elites, were stock elements of this figure’s historical profile that rendered the terrible tsar especially useful as a Soviet mobilizational tool: his military conflicts with European powers in the Baltic region, his policies of social and political transformation, his larger-than-life personality.^[6] Perhaps most important, in a resurgence of the dynamics of nineteenth-century historical mythology that had rendered Ivan such a problematic yet crucial touchstone of the historical and political imagination, were what may be called his “liminal” potentials: he was an avatar of Russian national identity who could also be linked to cosmopolitan aspirations and who oversaw grand territorial expansions, a representative of the prestige and power of the state who pursued “revolutionary” programs in the face of “reactionary” resistance, and a figure who perfectly communicated to audiences the need to look past, repress or collude with the state’s violence against others and even against the self in the interest of grander imperatives. In the 1930s, it was these complex features of the myth of Ivan that allowed him to symbolize both national and super-national, patriotic and revolutionary, chthonic and sublime aspects of Soviet collective identity, so that his Muscovy could come to be seen, in the words of R. Iu. Vipper in a 1943 lecture in the Kremlin’s Hall of Columns, which was broadcast to a mass audience via radio, as “the prototype of the great multinational state of the USSR.”^[7]
Vipper’s statement lucidly illustrates precisely the sort of anti-historical “search for ‘our’ heroes of bygone ages,” that so discomfited Blium. Yet even in the context of such brazen attempts to manufacture and manage historical myth, it should also be said that the critic’s complaints overstate the case for a simple anti-historical blindness, and concurrently underestimate the sensitivity of Soviet official and public discourse towards the ironic eddies in the revisionist stream. Here, I offer a terminological distinction between baldly announced historical analogies, as in Vipper’s pronouncement, and historical allegory, that when deployed with subtlety, may draw a mythic pattern across time without explicitly announcing it. More often than not, Stalinist revisionism required the latter. Tellingly, despite the dissemination of a mythic approach to tsarist history across a broad spectrum of public discursive and cultural contexts in these years, the straightforward equation of, say, Stalin to Ivan (or even to Aleksander Nevskii or Peter I), was never a fully acceptable move. Even in internal party communications concerning the rehabilitation campaign, one seldom encounters overt comparison of Ivan or any aspect of his epoch with contemporary equivalents. Such reticence, which was the rule rather than the exception, reflected the complex historical consciousness (perhaps we should say queasiness) that was preserved in all but the most extreme moments of propagandistic élan during these years. Perhaps the sticking point was the lurking and potentially damning irony of comparing the “most progressive figure of world history” and the society he ruled over to any precedent, no matter how magnificent. Or perhaps we should formulate the problem in a more abstract manner: even if Russian rulers of the past served in novels, plays and films as convenient and instructive doubles for contemporary actors, the open declaration of the absolute identity of present and past or a one-to-one mapping of leading figures of the present onto those of the past flew in the face of the overriding emphasis in Stalinist political and public discourse on the present as the exceptional, culminating moment of history. As the skilled critic and journalist Mikhail Kol’tsov negotiated these conflicting hermeneutical imperatives, the Socialist-Realist method in historical film meant “communicating the fundamental, inner truth of the events,” a truth that “has not grown old in over seven centuries” and “remains fresh and new – as if it took shape only yesterday.” Nevertheless, it was only in the exceptional conditions of the present, a moment when “people’s sense of sight and sound has grown more acute, and our consciousness has been raised” that this “inner truth” uniting present and past could be sensed at all.^[8]
The involuted logic of this temporal knot is laid bare in one of Eisenstein’s several mass-press articles on Ivan the Terrible. Like Kol’tsov, the director preserves a delicate balance between the allegorical unity of past and present, on the one hand, and a distanced and more properly historical approach, respecting the unprecedented achievements of Stalinist era, on the other. He begins by historicizing the tsar’s bloody elimination of his political enemies as typical of sixteenth-century Europe (a common-place move in treatments of Ivan), comparing this to episodes of mayhem attributed to Ivan’s Western contemporaries:

“Historians of a certain sort and writers of a certain tendency branded him a maniac of pointless cruelty. Few would now believe that it was in fact Ivan the Terrible who… rebuked his contemporary Catherine de Medici for the pointless cruelty of St. Bartholomew’s night.… One must approach different stages of history in differing manner: what was progressive in the epoch of the Russian Renaissance of the sixteenth century may be profoundly reactionary at the end of the nineteenth century or the start of the twentieth.”^[9]

At base, this is a straightforward example of a peculiar Stalinist conception of the “dialectical principle” in historical interpretation (see the epigraph to this chapter), by which figures like Ivan or Peter I could be lauded as “progressive for their times.” As the director continues his discussion, however, we sense Ivan’s super-historical, mythic significance: he is “Ivan – the builder; Ivan – the creator; Ivan – one of the founding fathers of the united, multinational Russian state.” As the director writes:

“The audience of today – English, American or Russian – cannot fail to understand the decisive action and necessary cruelty of the man to whom history entrusted the mission of creating one of the mightiest and grandest states in the world. For now, in the days of the Great Patriotic War, as never before, all understand that he who betrays his fatherland is worthy of death; that he who goes over to the side of enemies of his motherland is worthy of severe retribution; and that one must show no mercy towards those who open the borders of their native land to the enemy.”

Yet Eisenstein steps no further into outright identification of the leaders or the traitors of today with those of the sixteenth-century – after all, such equations, precisely in view of the dialectical formula offered earlier, might carry the incendiary implication that Stalinist methods were reactionary holdovers, more proper to the premodern era than to the present. Here, it would seem, the essay has run up against the conceptual limits of Stalinist historical myth.
Yet the problem could be ramped up and resolved on a higher level of abstraction, as Eisenstein demonstrates in the masterful conclusion of his essay. Just as the linkage of the personalities and feats of the past to those of the present must always recognize the preeminence of the latter over the former, the engineers of Stalinist historical myth could never forget that the Soviet present in general occupied a place in human history fundamentally distinct from that of any past epoch. For the very principle that legitimated Ivan’s rehabilitation in the first place, “progressive for his times,” was itself an interpretive mechanism of a limited sort – necessary for comprehension of the past, but inapplicable to the Soviet era. Unlike the “progressive” features of the past, the achievements of the present were progressive for all times, and would presumably remain so for all time:

“To show the great tradition of patriotism and love for the motherland, the mercilessness of our struggle with enemies, wherever they are found and whomever they are – these are the goals of our film. They rest on certain premises. For it is only from the peak of social development that our country has achieved that we can, with full objectivity, look back into our own past, not fearing the truth in all of its aspects and with no other goal than using this truth of the past in the service of the just cause of the contemporary moment. In the historic days of the Great Patriotic war, one may with special acuity and inspiration sense this unbreakable link between the past and the present.”

Even though an “unbreakable link” bound the “historic” present to the historical past, bygone eras could only be seen as distant echoes of present experience, and their true meaning could only be recovered now by the exceptional, objective vantage opened out from the heights of present Soviet accomplishments. The past’s mythic significance grew in the soil of the historical dialectic, but the myth of Soviet transcendence of the dialectic would always trump the myths of history.
In general, then, Stalinist representations of Russian history steered clear of the open proclamation in cleanly articulated analogies that the events and heroes of the past were earlier incarnations of present Soviet experience and leaders. Instead, the allegorical equivalence and mythic import of figures and scenes from the past remained implicit, hovering as a commonly understood, yet seldom articulated relationship. As a fine last example here of the irregular and oblique surfacing of historical allegory, let us consider a photograph that N. K. Cherkasov gave to Zhdanov in 1944 (fig. 1). It shows the actor in the role of Ivan the Terrible, and is inscribed with the final line of Eisenstein’s screenplay, “we are standing at the edge of the sea, and will continue to stand here,” which Ivan pronounces as he stands on the Baltic seashore at the peak of the Livonian War’s successes. Something of an inside joke in its studied understatement, the thrust of Cherkasov’s inscription is to offer Ivan as a figure for Zhdanov – who, besides his prominent role in the Stalinist history project, was at the moment in question also responsible for the integration of the Baltic States into the Soviet Union following their recapture from Nazi Germany. Yet to fully comprehend the allegorical drive of the actor’s inscription, one should recall that Ivan eventually lost all of his Baltic conquests in the disastrous unfolding of the Livonian War. In this light, Zhdanov is not Ivan’s double, but rather the realization of his historical fate. Like an Old Testament prophecy that may be rightly understood only in light of a New Testament fulfillment, Ivan’s ancient words (as Eisenstein has them) are only comprehensible in the Stalinist present, when the attenuated progressive accomplishments of each moment of the past have become as transparent as the fully progressive achievements of the present.

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/platt01.jpg>
Fig. 1.

In sum, Stalinist historical revisionism carried an enormous burden of submerged interpretive complexity, of implications to be forgotten or overlooked in this moment of maximal and objective celebration and remembrance of things past. First there were many inconvenient historical facts that could not be reconciled with the “objective” historical knowledge available in the Soviet present – Ivan’s religiosity, his many military gaffes, or his documented indifference to the suffering of his subjects, traitors or not. Then there was the inheritance of a long tradition of historical interpretation – from Kavelin and Solov’ev to Vipper – and of a rich prehistory of historical myth – Blium’s “Guchkovs, Stolypins and Miliukovs.” Likewise, there was the lurking possibility that countervailing historical myths – dating to Karamzin’s vision of Ivan as perpetrator of completely needless and senseless violence and national trauma – might in fact be relevant to interpretation of the Soviet present. Beyond this was the delicate balancing act between mythic allegory and historical progress in works that might point towards the identity of present and past, but seldom close this circle in explicit historical analogies. Finally, in the course of the Stalinist epoch itself, officially endorsed positions on history changed with disconcerting rapidity, necessitating a forgetfulness of each of these more recent pasts as they were obsolesced. For Blium, as for many others engaged in Stalinist history projects, these interpretational challenges presented grave difficulties. Yet such challenges were not only a source of political conflict, interpretational collapse, and individual crisis of faith. Perhaps surprisingly, given common views of the Stalin years as an era of total domination of society and culture by the state, the contradictory historical consciousness of the 1930s and 1940s presented opportunities for strategic intervention to those who were equipped to capitalize on them, opportunities that could be negotiated with brilliance and a refined ethical sensibility. All of those involved in the rehabilitation of tsarist historical figures were to some extent aware of the struggle they were waging to wrest control over history not only from each other, but also from the prior tradition itself. In practice, the wiggle room left for innovation in writing and rewriting the Russian past in the Stalin era yielded most readily not to the exploitation of party commissars, but to thinkers who, like Eisenstein, were most attuned to the subtle possibilities in representation of history opened up by the complex, covert dynamic interaction of present visions of Russian history with those of past and even future generations.

II. ALLEGORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY: S. M. EISENSTEIN’S IVAN THE TERRIBLE

Eisenstein’s work represents a self-conscious investigation and thoroughgoing critique of Stalinist historiography’s peculiar combination of replacement (concealment) and repetition (commemoration) of preceding traditions in historical myth. Commonly, Stalinist revisionism’s vacillation between insistence on the exceptional status of the present as a culminating point of history and its drive to found the greatness of the present on a mythic national past generated a disciplined selectivity: some aspects of the past were to be remembered (the deep national history of mythic forebears), while others were to be suppressed (the more recent pre-revolutionary history of historical myth itself). Likewise, some implications of historical allegory (the grandeur of Russia’s historical mission, past and present) were to be celebrated, while others were to be passed over in silence (the resurgence of terror and historical trauma). However, the poetics of selective repetition were not without complications, as a brief, analytical bridge between a preceding revisionist historical film and Eisenstein’s Ivan films may demonstrate. According to the director V. M. Petrov’s account of the choice of N. K. Simonov for the role of Peter I in the eponymous 1937-1939 film diptych, the work’s creators at first balked at the actor’s lack of resemblance to any of the “twenty-five known representations of Peter the Great.” Resolving the crisis with an acute syllogism, A. N. Tolstoi is supposed to have pronounced that “if Simonov plays Peter, then it will be he who will be remembered – this will be the twenty-sixth, most famous portrayal of the great reformer.”^[10] The twenty-five representations Petrov refers to were intended to be understood as contemporaneous portraits of Peter – the point being that Soviet filmmakers would author a no less accurate “original” portrayal, on the basis of their own, peculiar contemporaneity with the first emperor of Russia.
Yet like so much else in the public pronouncements of the 1930s, one must treat Petrov’s and Tolstoi’s declared aspiration to originality of vision with great care. In a culminating scene of Peter I, part 1 of 1937, Petrov worked with the attention to detail of an Old Master not to create his own new version of Peter, but to reproduce precisely the scene of N. N. Ge’s historical painting Peter I Interrogates Tsarevich Aleksei Petrovich at Peterhof (1871, fig. 2). The resulting tableau vivant is nothing short of breathtaking in its accuracy, and rather complicates matters with regard to Simonov’s aspiration to create a Soviet original. Still, the film’s appropriation of Ge’s image did not imply its wholesale adoption of the implications of Ge’s painting – quite to the contrary. Ge’s painting, which elicited a firestorm of critical debate when it was first shown, offers a problematically open allegorical window onto the past, which in its lack of clear signals allows viewers to project their sympathy towards Peter or Aleksei in accordance with their own views on the events of the national past and their present significance: the historical legitimacy or despotic injustice of Peter’s elimination of his son, and the implications for present viewers, were left open to interpretation.^[11] Petrov and Tolstoi’s film, in sharp contrast, presents the unequivocal necessity of Aleksei’s execution for the future welfare of state and people – the tsarevich, a conspiring and fundamentally pernicious character, simply gets what he deserves. The strategy of Petrov and Tolstoi’s redeployment of Ge’s image evokes nothing so much as the Soviet repositioning of tsarist monuments – the relocation of I. P. Martos’ 1818 monument to Minin and Pozharskii from the center to the margins of Red Square in 1930 and later, the relocation of A. M. Opekushin’s 1880 monument to Pushkin from one side of Pushkin Square to the other in 1950. Such interventions acted to revise, correct and sanitize nineteenth-century Russia’s historical mythology, rendering it “new” for Soviet men and women, signaling the erasure of the prehistory of inherited images; yet in fact simply burying contrary interpretive positions as a renounced content, the disciplined forgetfulness of which redoubled the affective power of these images for the purposes of Soviet collective identity. Reading Tolstoi’s statement, as Petrov reports it, at a more profound level, one may conclude the actual project was for a new “original” (in fact, a faithful copy) not to replace an old “original” (an “original original”), but to repress it.^[12]

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/platt02.jpg>
Fig. 2.

Despite the runaway success of Petrov’s and Tolstoi’s Peter I, Eisenstein was not overly impressed by the films. As Iurii Tsivian has reported, Eisenstein jotted down an unpublished note to the effect that: “acting in Petrov’s film is a succession of poses. Equally, there is no montage but merely a succession of easel-painting shots. And the scenario is not an organism, but a checklist of traits.”^[13] Doubtless there were many reasons for Eisenstein’s professional distaste for Peter I, and there are certainly many ways in which his historical films compete with Petrov’s. Yet I suspect that Eisenstein may have objected in particular to Petrov’s articulation of his relationship to prior traditions in representation of history, in particular to the “posed,” “easelpainting” revision of Ge’s painting. This aspect of Ge’s film was remarked upon and criticized in print, in sources that Eisenstein would have been familiar with, and by authors who were among his close interlocutors.^[14] And, most importantly, the reuse of past representations, and of nineteenth century painting in particular, was a matter that Eisenstein was himself to engage in the Ivan the Terrible films in a very different manner than had Petrov. In this connection, let us now turn to a closer consideration of Eisenstein’s final project.
In the climactic episode of part two of Ivan the Terrible, Ivan’s rival and relative Efrosynia Staritskaia, a representative of the reactionary interests of Boyar grandees and church prelates, who has plotted to assassinate Ivan and place her dull-witted son Vladimir on the throne, meets her own tragic downfall. Learning at his banquet of Efrosynia’s treasonous plot, Ivan presciently arrays his would-be successor in the royal robes and crown, rendering Vladimir, not Ivan himself, the target of the assassination that then ensues. Immediately after the murderer has done his deed, Efrosynia rushes in triumphantly to proclaim Ivan’s death, yet when the living and wrathful Ivan emerges from the crowd of loyal oprichniki, she examines the “royal” corpse lying before her and discovers that she has engineered the murder of her own child. There follows a striking, emotionally laden shot, thirty seconds in duration, portraying Efrosynia keening a lullaby as she cradles Vladimir’s dead body in her arms in a figural composition reminiscent of a classic pietа rendering of Mary holding the body of the crucified Christ (fig. 3). On the basis of the climactic place of this scene in Eisenstein’s plot and the composition of this shot – so much like a tableau vivant in its peculiar static poses – there is much to suggest that one should read it as an overt reference to Repin’s canvas Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan (fig. 4), and in a broader sense, to a tradition of representations of Ivan as an filicidal father that includes Repin’s work along with a number of plays and operas of the nineteenth century, most prominently N. A Rimskii-Korsakov’s The Maid of Pskov (1872, rev. 1896).^[15] Rimskii-Korsakov’s work, one recalls, tells the tale of the unintended death of Ol’ga, Ivan’s illegitimate daughter, in the process of the tsar’s subduing of rebellious Pskov. Like Repin’s canvas and the final scene of the Maid of Pskov, in which Ivan mourns over the body of his dead daughter, Eisenstein’s climactic shot sums up a tragic story of intergenerational violence among members of the ruling family, in which a parent is inadvertently responsible for the death of a child. Of course, those earlier scenes represent Ivan himself as a murderous father, whereas here Efrosynia occupies this role. Yet Ivan is undoubtedly metaphorically present in Eisenstein’s shot, mediated not only through the tsar’s double, the dead Vladimir, but also through Efrosynia, who is motivated by hunger to seize the tsar’s power herself. Eisenstein’s shot, then, holds up an intriguing distorting mirror to the earlier tradition in representation.

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/platt03.jpg>
Fig. 3.

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/platt04.jpg>
Fig. 4.

Before pursuing further what this angle of vision on Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible offers to interpretation of the films, a consideration of the director’s knowledge of the earlier works in question and of his thinking as he set to work on his Ivan project can substantiate my suggestion that this key shot refers to that prior tradition. It hardly needs to be argued that Eisenstein was familiar with both Repin’s painting and with Rimskii-Korsakov’s opera – these were canonical works that any educated member of the creative intelligentsia would have known. As is well documented, in preparation for his historical projects Eisenstein devoted an enormous amount of energy to the study of artifacts in museums, historiography, relevant artistic images and prior cultural representations. During his reported visits to the Tretiakov gallery in early 1941 in preparation for the Ivan films he undoubtedly spent time in contemplation of Repin’s canvas.^[16] Significantly, out of the many sources of material available to the director, Repin’s name came up several times in the director’s early mass-press articles about the project. In April and May of 1941 in articles in Ogonek and Izvestiia, Eisenstein announced that his film would correct the views of earlier historians and artists who disparaged Ivan, singling out as polemical opponents, with all due respect, the achievements of “Antokol’skii’s chisel, Repin’s brush, and A. K. Tolstoi’s pen.”^[17] In short, Eisenstein’s public announcements at this early stage of the Ivan project twice name Repin as one of his chief interlocutors and precedents.
The director’s memoirs and his personal writings provide further evidence of the significance of Repin’s painting in the films. Some months before the press announcements cited above, on January 23, 1941, Eisenstein jotted down in his private notebooks that “Repin’s Ivan came to him under the influence of Rimskii-Korsakov’s Vengeance.” Although this latter work has no overt tie to The Maid of Pskov, Eisenstein’s note demonstrates that the director was musing on Repin’s canvas precisely as part of a tradition of interrelated representations including the works of that composer.^[18] He continued to think in these terms in the years to come: in the late summer of 1944, as he was editing the first Ivan film, he began an essay in which he cited at length the interview in which Repin had traced his painting’s genesis to that work of Rimskii-Korsakov. Interestingly, Eisenstein’s discussion in this essay in general concerns the relation of Soviet film to the “iron arsenal” of the prerevolutionary cultural tradition that entered “our minds and hearts in childhood.” As he explains immediately following his citation of Repin, the key to the power of Soviet art is not only “the October Revolution, which… freed the intelligent mind, equipping it with the ultimate weapon for exposing secrets and lifting veils of agnosticism” but also, “the fact that the new generation… stood on the terra firma of Russian cultural traditions, an inexhaustible wealth of original and national talent.”^[19]

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/platt05.jpg>
Fig. 5.

Furthermore, in addition to the surfacing of both Repin and Rimskii-Korsakov in this context, Eisenstein’s archives include photos of Shaliapin in his signature role of Ivan the Terrible from The Maid of Pskov (fig. 5).^[20] Famously, in the curtain scene of this work the great basso had self-consciously recreated the Repin canvas as a tableau vivant (fig. 6).^[21] And while there is no hard evidence that Eisenstein saw Shaliapin’s staging of the opera as such, the Soviet director recorded in his memoirs in May of 1946, at the conclusion of his work on Ivan, that he had at some point seen the 1915 silent film, Ivan the Terrible, based on Rimskii-Korsakov’s opera, at the conclusion of which Shaliapin had again recreated Repin’s famous painting in a long static shot (fig. 7). In sum, then, the available evidence confirms not only that Eisenstein was musing on Repin’s canvas as he embarked on his Ivan project in 1941, but that the director had personally observed the tradition of interlinked representations of Ivan as a murderous father to which the painting belonged, and that he explicitly connected his thoughts on that tradition to the question of his own relationship to the pre-revolutionary tradition per se. Eisenstein’s own climactic scene, then, should be seen as a self-conscious and deliberate response to Repin’s painting and to the series of other representations of the terrible tsar to which it belongs.

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/platt06.jpg>
Fig. 6.

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/platt07.jpg>
Fig. 7.

In the 1944 essay cited above, Eisenstein misnames Repin’s painting as Ivan the Terrible Murdering His Child.^[22] As a member of “the new generation,” what “secrets” did the director “expose,” what “veils” did he “lift” in shaping his response to the pre-revolutionary canon? To put the overdetermined metapoetical and metahistorical implications of these questions plainly: how did Eisenstein challenge his cultural fathers on the topic of intergenerational violence itself? An approach to an answer to this question must first realize that, for all of the static qualities of the restaging of Repin in the scene of Efrosynia’s downfall, Eisenstein’s use of the Repin painting is filmic and dynamic, a pervasive figural citation that recurs several times in the course of part 2 of the project. Let us examine some of these other shots. In the earliest portions of the film, Ivan recounts the trials of his orphaned youth at the hands of abusive and power-hungry courtiers. In a flashback sequence, Eisenstein shows the death of Ivan’s mother, Elena, who has been poisoned. The young Ivan cradles her in his arms in the pietа pose, as she warns him of the treachery of the Boyars (fig. 8). Later, we see Efrosynia, plotting to assassinate Ivan, holding her son Vladimir in her arms as she sings to him the lullaby that she will reprise in the climactic scene (fig. 9). Then, at the royal banquet, Ivan in turn cradles Vladimir in a similar pose, as he elicits the drunken Vladimir’s foolishly frank admissions of the plot to set him in Ivan’s place (fig. 10). Finally, the film returns to the pietа pose in the climactic scene of Efrosynia and Vladimir.

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/platt08.jpg>
Fig. 8.

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/platt09.jpg>
Fig. 9.

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/platt10.jpg>
Fig. 10.

Each of these successive pietа shots shows an intergenerational pair of members of the ruling family, in which the upright figure is responsible – in indirect manner related to the exigencies of royal power – for the death of the reclining one: Ivan’s mother is killed because he is the tsar; Efrosynia, as we have seen, unwittingly engineers Vladimir’s death in her hunger for power; and Ivan organizes Vladimir’s death in his prescient substitution of fool for tsar. As other commentators have noted, even without the interpretational spur of reference to the Repin composition, the shots in question are linked to one other in various ways, both compositionally and interpretatively. Efrosynia’s two lullaby shots obviously mirror one another. The scene of Ivan’s mother’s death is a mirror image of the scene of Vladimir’s death, up to the conclusion of the shot, at which point the corpse of Elena is dragged out of Ivan’s arms to the left while the corpse of Vladimir is dragged out of Efrosynia’s grasp to the right.^[23] Finally, one of Eisenstein’s production sketches shows side by side the scene of Vladimir’s confession as a mirror of the scene of Efrosynia’s plotting.^[24] The stylized, posed quality of Eisenstein’s use of the human figure in his later historical films is often noted. However, as this example demonstrates, for Eisenstein the pose was an element in a dynamic interrelation of shots. In short, in distinction from Petrov’s arid “succession of poses,” and “checklist of traits,” Eisenstein creates his plot as an “organism” by means of a montage of related figural compositions.
This organism, this montage of tableaux vivants must be read as a commentary on the tradition of historical representation to which it responds. Yet what is the “significance” of that earlier tradition, and of Repin’s painting in particular? Repin’s associate Ivan Kramskoi reported that one of the first viewers of Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan cried out in outrage “It’s regicide, after all!”^[25] In fact, the painting does not depict an act of regicide (although Repin had considered calling it “Filicide” [Synoubiistvo], and then abandoned this title, likely considering it to be too sensational), yet the remark reveals what viewers had in mind upon seeing the canvas, which reportedly caused women to swoon at its first showing in 1885, and quickly was subjected to a ban that may be traced to the highest levels of the court and to the Emperor Alexander III himself. Any mention of regicide in the middle 1880s could not but evoke the fresh memories of the assassination of Alexander II four years earlier on March 1, 1881. The full title of Repin’s work, Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, 16 November 1581, that goes to awkward lengths in order to include a date exactly three centuries prior to that momentous event, suggests that the artist had precisely this connection in mind when he painted his canvas. Years later, in the same interview that Eisenstein cited in the 1940s, Repin explicitly recalled that he had begun the canvas as a reaction in part to the assassination and to the public execution of the conspirators, at which he was himself present.^[26] In short, the work was calculated to draw an allegorical tie between royal bloodshed in Russia’s past and present, and to suggest that the violence of the present is a legacy of the violence of the past. Yet it should also be said that the precise meaning of this allegorical connection is somewhat difficult to unravel, for it involves a strange reversal, or mirror imaging: how can the murder of the tsarevich at the hands of his father be comparable to the murder of the tsar at the hands of his subjects? It would seem that Repin’s painting was intended as a correction of contemporary views of the assassination of Alexander II. By holding up this strangely distorting allegorical lens to the events of the present, Repin asserted that the true culprits of the murder of the tsar were not criminals or revolutionaries, but rather the rulers of Russia themselves, for whom violence and repression were almost a genetic inheritance. This is to say, the bomb that exploded on March 1, 1881 was elicited by the brutality and cruelty of the state and was a logical (if perhaps not just) response to state violence. Furthermore, the painting’s focus on the transcendent moment of repentance following the tsar’s brutal outburst instructs contemporaries in the proper response to political violence. Whereas Alexander III inaugurated an era of reaction and political repression in response to the murder of the tsar, Repin’s painting suggests that the tsar, and perhaps all Russians, like the anguished and repentant Ivan the Terrible presented in the painting, must accept responsibility for the blood of confrontation, repent of their sins and enter into a new era of peace.^[27] One may remark, in addition, that this motif of Ivan’s repentance following his filicidal acts was common to the other works of the nineteenth century tradition that I enumerate above, and in particular to The Maid of Pskov, in which Ivan mourns silently over Ol’ga’s corpse while the chorus sings:

People of Pskov, Orthodox people
The will of God has come to pass.
For your native Pskov, for your love
You have given your life, beauty and youth.
Russian people, people of Pskov,
Let us forget our ancient quarrels
And pray for her soul:
Let the Lord forgive her sins,
God’s mercy is eternal and without limit!^[28]

Eisenstein’s game is one of permutations and combinations, variations on the fundamental motifs we have noted in Repin’s work. Note that the film picks up on many of the allegorical inconsistencies and surprises of the historical painting: the pattern of unexpected substitutions and convergences of dead parents (Alexander II, Elena) with dead children (the tsarevich Ivan, Vladimir); the odd gender reversal of the painting, that equates Ivan, through the evocation of the pietа, with the Virgin Mary, which is repeated in Eisenstein’s mix and match of genders in the four shots under discussion. (Even regarding the last shot, where the gender distribution of the pietа is reestablished, one must observe that Efrosynia is a masculine woman – a castrating mother rather than the virgin mother of God.) We may read Eisenstein’s variations on Repin’s motif as an answer to the myth of history and power that is inherent the tradition of representation to which Repin’s painting belongs. In that tradition, the figure of Ivan had been used to instruct audiences of an ancient cycle in which the powerful father inflicts his violence on the weak children, yet in so doing ironically brings about his own downfall, the fall of his dynasty even, and unwittingly sets the conditions for a repetition of the same pattern of violent confrontation and bloodshed – as Alexander III did with his violent response to unrest and revolutionary violence. As Repin’s and Rimskii-Korsakov’s works insist, the only way out of this tragic “antioedipal” cycle is by means of repentance and redemption, rendering the dead a sacrificial double of Christ in the interests of familial and national salvation. To ignore this path is to risk perpetuating this “genetically encoded” pattern of autocratic violence and of the national bloodshed that it perpetuates.
Eisenstein’s work offers a different resolution of historical myth. To be more precise, it presents a calculated equivocation between alternate allegorical readings of the national past – ultimately necessitating a highly sophisticated historical hermeneutics. On one hand, the film’s play with the pietа composition may be read as a straightforward Stalinist rewrite of the imperial myth of Ivan. The violence inflicted upon Ivan as a child, both directly and indirectly through the murder of his mother, indeed pulls him into the pattern of intergenerational conflict that is his birthright. In his mature years, animated by his great progressive project, Ivan strikes back against the reactionary and self-interested forces that once terrorized him. Yet these are powerful opponents, and Ivan is in danger of himself falling victim to the violence he has unleashed. Then, through his semi-mystical ability to anticipate his own fate, Ivan sidesteps the cyclic logic of the bloodline, becoming in the climactic scene of part 2 neither victim nor perpetrator – blood flows around, and not through him. The apologetic implications of this reading of Eisenstein’s revision of his cultural fathers are plain: Efrosynia’s betrayal leads inevitably to her downfall. Staritskii’s death is justified by his participation in the conspiracy against Ivan and his progressive historical mission. In the past, and by analogy in the Stalinist present, violence has been reinscribed as a necessary and natural element of the age-old struggle for social progress; its victims are not sacrifices, but vanquished enemies who are themselves responsible for their own condemnation and execution. This reading of the film resonates closely with the Soviet historical myth of revolution – envisioning a non-Christian transcendence of history made possible by a consciousness-expanding leap out of time. Ivan is a “historical hero”: that rare individual who understands the forces of history and therefore can rise up and direct them into new paths. In Eisenstein’s version, instead of being the unwitting object of history’s violence, Ivan is its choreographer.
Yet this reading tells only half of an ambivalent story. Although the tsar is not himself the agent of murder, he is nevertheless responsible and morally culpable for Vladimir’s death, which stands in for the many other deaths wrought by Ivan’s revolution. Just as certainly as the apologetic reading offered above is consistent and sound, one might work towards the alternate conclusion that the films illustrate how Ivan, victim of reactionary violence in his youth and in part one (where the tsaritsa Anastasia is poisoned), has finally learned the ironic lesson of the dependence of Russian greatness on violence and is now willing to sacrifice anything and anyone in order to achieve his grand ends. In killing Vladimir, his blood relative and his double, Ivan has merely managed a “cover-up” of his murder of himself, or perhaps of his own humanity – remember that Repin’s painting, lurking beneath Eisenstein’s frame, shows Ivan’s murder of his own son, Ivan, and of the future of the dynasty with him. Likewise, one may take the moral of Efrosynia’s story as being that you can never know whom you are going to wind up killing when you reach for ultimate power – perhaps it will turn out to be those whom you most love. If Efrosynia herself is villainous and unsympathetic, Vladimir is nothing short of a lamb led to the slaughter – and a pretty compelling Christ figure, as the final pietа shot still stresses most emphatically. In other words, the myth of Christian repentance and redemption articulated in the earlier tradition of representations of Ivan remains a powerful alternative to the revolutionary transcendence of history. This alternate interpretation leads to the contrasting conclusion that Ivan’s aspirations for a politics of transformation are deluded, that the mayhem of Ivan’s reign is simply the transmission of the violence of the boyars who preceded him in power, expressing, once more, the “gene” of tyranny. Allegorically projected against Eisenstein’s day, this reading of the film reveals the irrepressible resurgence of historical trauma, precisely at the moment when it was to have been transcended, echoing uncontrollably forward up to the Stalinist era caught gazing into an ancient mirror like a deer in the headlights.
Now, the tightly wound logic of each of these two readings of the film corresponds to the widely contrasting responses and debates it has elicited from contemporaries and from future commentators alike. Yet given the film’s studied ambivalence between incompatible alternate readings, I would suggest that the key to a synthetic interpretation lies in an approach to it not as a war between allegories at all, but as a critique of historical allegory per se. Such an approach to the repeated deployments of the pietа composition allows us to view them not merely as a brilliant resolution of a technical problem – that of creating a filmic, dynamic response to Repin’s static historical image – but also a means to model the fluidity of historical truth as it itself devolves in time: each revision and reappearance of the image adds new momentum and new inertia to the film’s growing set of fluid interpretational possibilities. In this sense, Eisenstein’s play on the pietа may be read as an overt reference to the repeated historical deployments of Ivan and his dead children, who surface and resurface over the many works and decades of the cultural tradition to which the painting and the film both belong, and who will continue to resurface in future deployments the meaning of which is just as fluid and unpredictable as these past and present representations.
In effect, by this reading Eisenstein’s film is not a historical allegory at all, but rather an allegory of historical allegory. And it offers a trenchant critique of Stalinist and imperial historical myth alike – as the film reminds us, the two traditions are not so easy to separate, after all. How many times can one call for a transcendence of history (whether Christian or revolutionary) before repetition itself renders the futility of the project obvious? The embeddedness of historical allegory in its own history reveals the very sinkhole of irony that Repin and Rimskii-Korsakov (and Eisenstein, in the partial readings offered above) called their audiences to transcend. As Eisenstein’s film forces viewers to recognize, the crux of this irony is the lack of knowledge of those who are trapped in human time, attempting to grasp the “true” meaning and consequences of their actions, the “true” significance of their own allegorical readings of their past and present, when these meanings are themselves temporary, historical constructs.^[29] Just as in Eisenstein’s account, Ivan’s triumph over historical fate or fall back into it is uncertain, each allegorical restaging of Ivan’s reign in imperial or Stalinist texts offered up a transcendence of a traumatic history of violence – rendering the past, once and for all, meaningful and legitimate – yet just as easily could be read, in retrospect, as a repetition of that violence, reiterated in the very act of cutting off a corrupt and unwanted history. In sum, Eisenstein’s Ivan is not an allegory, positive or negative, for Stalin and his lieutenants, but an allegory for Stalinist historiography and the sins it inherited from its imperial predecessors and would pass on to its own heirs. Rather than mapping Ivan and his deeds onto those of present-day actors, the film maps Ivan’s placement in time onto that of the Stalinist present. In so doing, it counters common-place conceptions of the exceptional status of the Stalinist present, with its special access to “objective” knowledge and the “inner truth” of events. Rather than being the mythic origin for an ancient pattern of either national heroism or trauma, Eisenstein revised Ivan the Terrible, who thinks he has conquered trauma but in fact may have merely repressed it, into a mythic origin of imperial and Stalinist repetitions, volens nolens, of this same psychic mechanism – the mythic origin of the Russian cultural tradition of greatness founded in repressed terror.
In 1946, only weeks after awarding Stalin prizes to Eisenstein for the first part of his film project and to other prominent contributions to the rehabilitation of Ivan, the Party’s Central Committee banned the release of the second part of the trilogy.^[30] This event marked the beginning of the end not only for the campaign to rehabilitate Ivan the Terrible, but for most new investments under Stalin in revisionist history of the tsarist era in general. A common mistake of accounts of the banning is the assumption that Stalin and his lieutenants objected to the film’s portrayal of Ivan’s bloody elimination of his political opponents, when what they had ordered up was a whitewash of the terrible tsar that could serve to suppress, by allegorical extension, any thought of contemporary excesses and executions as well. Nothing could be further from the actuality of this event, or from the propagandistic priorities of an era that had been for decades awash with what was seen as the entirely legitimate bloodshed of revolutionary conflict. As Stalin explained in a well documented interview with Eisenstein and Cherkasov in the wake of the film’s banning, Ivan’s fatal shortcoming was not his violent means of conducting politics, but his restraint in not killing enough boyars.^[31] The official objection to the second part of the film was, in fact, that Ivan and his comrades in arms were not shown in sufficiently heroic light as they carried out the death sentences imposed by history itself. As Stalin informed the director and the actor: “Ivan the Terrible was very cruel. It is fine to show that he was cruel. But it is necessary to show why he was cruel.”^[32] According to the party resolution of September, 1946, Eisenstein had been guilty of:

“…ignorance in his depiction of historical facts, presenting Ivan the Terrible’s oprichniki as a band of degenerates along the lines of the American Ku Klux Klan, and Ivan the Terrible, a man of strong will and character, as weak and irresolute, like some sort of a Hamlet.”^[33]

This resolution, which echoes what we know of Stalin’s immediate reaction to the film and of the private discussions of the Soviet cultural establishment surrounding its banning, reveals that one of its chief flaws related not to what Eisenstein depicted of Ivan’s tale, but to his shaping of that tale as a tragedy. Here, the campaign stumbled against a regular feature of cultural works of the era that the official overseers of the Ivan campaign had apparently failed to anticipate and foreclose: the tragic plot that was key to the terrible tsar’s dramatic potential not only in Eisenstein’s films, but also in the commissioned dramatic works of A. N. Tolstoi, V. A. Solov’ev, and I. L. Sel’vinskii. In this, these Stalinist renditions of the story of Ivan and his reign echoed the imperial tradition that had represented Ivan almost without exception as a tragic figure, as exemplified, once again, by Repin’s and Rimskii-Korsakov’s works. Most likely, the Soviet playwrights and filmmaker did not fully think through this inheritance from the earlier tradition – accepting it without a great deal of reflection as axiomatic for dramatic work on the terrible tsar. Nevertheless, this tragic conception of Ivan diverged greatly from the story that the party hierarchy had envisioned of battles won and progressive goals achieved – what, in dramatic terms, may be termed not a tragedy, but a romance plot. In the words of one party insider, Ivan “completed the establishment of a centralized Russian state,” and “fundamentally eliminated the country’s feudal fragmentation, successfully crushing the resistance of representatives of the feudal order.” To tell such a tale as a tragedy was nothing short of a falsification of history.^[34]
In sum, the rehabilitations of Ivan and Peter, and Stalinist historical revisionism as a whole, broke down as a result of insurmountable difficulties of coordination among the campaign’s many professional contexts and hermeneutic imperatives. This unprecedented, state-directed effort to resolve once and for all the Russian national past instead gave rise to intractable interpretative flux. Intended to generate a monumental and inspiring official history, Stalinist revisionism bogged down in endless bickering among historians, cultural figures, and party authorities, powerless to reconcile or to adjudicate between myth and history, romance and tragedy. Their fruitless debates derived from the campaign’s more fundamental inconsistencies – from its antihistorical aspiration for interpretative finality given the essential openness of human time, and from the cleavage between the campaign’s stated ambitions and its social and psychic functionality. Ultimately, the Stalinist attempt to remake Russian imperial historical mythology regarding Ivan presented simply one more turn in a folding and refolding of history within allegory that had begun in the pre-revolutionary era and would continue in unimagined futures beyond the Stalinist present. As Eisenstein’s work reveals, the Stalinist submersion of the incomprehensible violence of Ivan’s reign in a coherent story of Russia’s rise to greatness masked, yet also depended upon, the significance of Muscovite history as a site of historical trauma. The resulting, stridently triumphant historical myth fed off of the psychic urgency of repressed pain, presenting a vision of the justice of ancient wounds as a demonstration of the necessity of present ones. Although this strategy proved instrumentally effective, it also retained at its base the interpretational irresolution of a historical allegory that could just as easily be read in the key of the persistent haunting of political and historical greatness by the incomprehensible trauma that supported it. As Eisenstein’s masterwork reveals, too concerted a contemplation of such a historical mythology in the end arrives not only at recognition of a resurgence of past and present pain in the very texts that were intended to supercede it, but also of the ambivalence and indecipherability of Russian history, as represented in the works that were meant to pin it down, once and for all.
In a 1941 letter to Olga Freidenberg, Boris Pasternak remarked on the rise of Ivan as a subject of Soviet historical myth:

“To our benefactor [i.e., Stalin – K.M.F.P.] it seems that up until now we have been too sentimental and that it is time to come to our senses. Peter the Great no longer appears to be an appropriate parallel. The new enthusiasm, openly professed, is for the Terrible tsar, the oprichnina and cruelty. New operas, plays and film scripts are being written on this topic. No joke.”^[35]

Pasternak’s irony is palpable. Yet the letter is striking for its restrained expressive means: truly, all the poet is doing here is stating the obvious. In a certain sense, I think that something comparable may be said about Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible. Returning, for a moment, to the question of the director’s possibly subversive intent, one must question how effective a critique of Stalinism, per se, his films can be said to have accomplished if that critique was so well camouflaged that it is still a subject of debate six decades later, after exhaustive archival research and elaborate interpretative maneuvers. Yet on the other hand, perhaps the key to these films subversive potential is as simple as Pasternak’s statement of the obvious. Truly, more than anything else, Eisenstein demonstrated that the insertion of a critique of Stalinism into the Soviet myth of Ivan the Terrible was always already a fait accompli, ensured by the prehistory of representations of this figure and the interpretive implications of the campaign itself. Eisenstein’s work, by laying bare the entire tradition of revision and repression, the nested-doll construction of Stalinist historical representations, in the end shows that there was no need for a special articulation of critique, since it was an obvious and logical outcome of the deployment of Ivan as an allegory for present leaders in the first place.
In sum, the attempt to overcome or erase past representations of history is futile: the Stalinist urge to transcendence was merely a hypertrophied version of imperatives inherent from the beginning in the imperial historical myth of Ivan. In this, the ambition to transcend the past was itself, ironically, merely its repetition. In retrospect, we may read Pasternak’s dry evocation of the irony of Stalin’s “passion” for Ivan not only as a representation of the private thoughts of many informed members of the Soviet elite in the 1930s and 1940s, but also as it relates to the angle of vision of all who came after Stalinism or viewed it from an external point of reference: later generations in the USSR as well as foreign observers beginning with the German biographer Emil Ludwig in the 1930s, who could not but remark on the irony of Stalin’s attachment to the tsars.^[36] As is clear in light of these various vantage points outside of Stalinist society, the Ivan campaign in particular was guilty of the most egregious oversights regarding the historical position of the historical imagination itself. The Stalinist cult of Peter the Great has been indicted as a misappropriation of the first emperor’s historical myth. But this was hardly the worst excess of those years. Things are not so simple with the Stalinist Ivan. As a result of the dominance in imperial historical myth of the Karamzinian vision of Ivan as a cruel despot (despite the best efforts of historians like Kavelin), his Stalinist apotheosis as a visionary, heroic leader functioned at the time as an apt tool both to demonstrate the error of imperial predecessors and to achieve current propagandistic goals. Yet for this same reason, in subsequent decades it became a favorite site of interpretation of critics of Soviet history and the Stalinist legacy of all stripes – a wonderful bit of evidence that Stalin, by his endorsement of the campaign, was by his own admission as monstrous, cruel and violent as his fifteenth-century forebear. This stock “irony” of Stalinist history appears in sources from Aleksandr Yanov, who wrote that “given all his ignorance of Russian history, Stalin nevertheless, intuitively yet completely correctly identified among the multitude of Russian tsars his historical doubles,”^[37] to Robert Tucker, who wrote that the “terrible tsar” had served Stalin as a “role model” in the Great Purge.^[38] In the end, blinded by historiographical hubris, instead of the apologetic myth of national and Soviet greatness that it ostensibly set out to create, Stalinist revisionism instead resulted in a hackneyed tool for the critique of Stalinism as a resurgence of “ancient cycles” of Russian terror.