Sunday Pages: "Ivan the Terrible, Parts I & II"
A film in two parts by Sergei Eisenstein
Dear Reader,
For Father’s Day, I am writing about three fathers: the father of the Russian state, Ivan IV Vasilyevich; the father of the Soviet Union, Ioseb Besarionis Dzhugashvili; and the father of Russian/Soviet film, Sergei Eisenstein. In 1941, the three fathers collided, when Eisenstein was tasked by Dzhugashvili to make a film about the life of Ivan IV Vasilyevich. The last two men, monsters both, are better known by different names: Joseph Stalin and Ivan the Terrible.
Eisenstein wound up making the Ivan film in two parts, each about 90 minutes long, and planned to make a third but died before it could be completed—although the ending of the second film is so satisfying that I don’t know that another installment was necessary. If the same project were undertaken today, Ivan the Terrible, with its episodic structure, would probably be a two-season TV series. So while it is technically two movies, released years apart, it’s best to think of it as—and I will write as if it is—one long film.
Some odd impulse—perhaps the craven attempt by our own resident dictator to rule the United States with an iron fist, and the unleashing of his own ruthless oprichniks on innocent civilians—led me to read up on Ivan IV this week, which in turn led me to the movie. I’d never seen it before. I’d only heard of it relatively recently, from flipping through the Criterion Collection offerings on HBO Max. Heck, I’ve never even seen Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein’s silent film masterpiece.
Ivan the Terrible is also a masterpiece: beautifully shot, exquisitely set-designed, moody, brooding, ambitious, populated with superb and interesting-looking actors, sometimes melodramatic to the point of camp but also emotionally powerful, patiently paced, and propelled by a rousing and majestic Sergei Prokofiev score. We feel Ivan’s loneliness and isolation, the psychic injury caused by the boyars’ betrayal of him and the horrible death of his mother, his utter agony and anguish when he loses his wife—and also the creeping dread felt by the boyars, the cinematic moment of “Oh shit, now we’ve really pissed him off” seen usually in horror movies, as they realize that they have created a madman whose lust for vengeance can never be sated.
Eisenstein imbues Ivan with more humanity, perhaps, than the historical figure deserves. But that’s part of his genius. Ivan is weird for sure, but fascinating as a piece of filmmaking, and absolutely riveting. There is much to learn here about how a ruthless dictator is formed: though nature, through nurture—and, also, through fate.
By the time 1938 rolled around, Sergei Eisenstein had not worked for almost ten years. No, that’s not accurate—he had worked; he’d researched, written, drawn storyboards, cast, shot reels of footage, done some editing—all the things a distinguished filmmaker does. But he had nothing to show for it.
Eisenstein came of age as an artist in the relatively brief interregnum between the fall of the Romanovs and the rise of Stalin. There is a reason why the 1920s comprised such a high water mark for the arts in Russia. As the scholar Maya Garcia explains in a Harvard dissertation, “The Queer Legacy of Ivan the Terrible,” “The system of Imperial censorship was gone almost overnight, and the Soviet regime of arts censorship took years to establish and consolidate the power to manage creative expression as exactingly as had the old regime. The transitional decade of the 1920s presented many artists with an open playing field for publicly exploring ideas previously confined to the avant-garde and underground margins.”
Eisenstein was a beneficiary of this open playing field—but was also around long enough to watch Stalin, who in his own youth in Georgia had been a poet and a singer of not inconsiderable talent, slam the window shut.
By the 1930s, Eisenstein could not secure funding to make his films, or get distributors to show his films, without permission from the Soviet state film industry. The head of that industry was an artless little man from Siberia named Boris Shumyatsky. And Boris Shumyatsky didn’t understand the fuss about the auteur who wrote and directed Battleship Potemkin, a movie whose influence on filmmaking is right up there with The Birth of a Nation and Citizen Kane. Boris Shumyatsky thought Eisenstein was a pompous, overrated fop. He refused to green-light any of his films. He even wrote a letter to his boss—again: Stalin!—suggesting that Eisenstein never be allowed to work again in the industry.
Boris Shumyatsky was close to Stalin—or as close as anyone could be to a madman. In the early days of the Revolution, they’d been exiled to the same remote city. But Stalin, like Ivan IV, was paranoid, impetuous, sadistic, and cruel. On New Year’s Eve, 1937, Boris Shumyatsky and his wife attended a dinner party at Stalin’s dacha. Stalin demanded that all the guests drink to his good health. Boris Shumyatsky didn’t drink, hated the smell and taste of alcohol, and so did not drain his glass with the requisite enthusiasm—which, unfortunately for Boris Shumyatsky, did not escape Stalin’s despotic attention. A few days after this faux pas, Boris Shumyatsky was removed from his position, placed under arrest, and, in June of 1938, executed by firing squad. The official reason was treason—a conspiracy involving “saboteurs” in the film community—but really, Stalin was just channeling his inner Ivan the Terrible.
With Boris Shumyatsky off to the great arthouse cinema in the sky, Eisenstein was once again free to make movies. In 1938, he and another director, Dmitri Vasilyev, produced Alexander Nevsky, a historical epic set in medieval Novgorod, where the Russians in the 13th century had repulsed the incursion of the Teutonic Knights. The score for the film was composed by another artistic genius named Sergei who’d run afoul of the Kremlin: Prokofiev. Luckily for the two Sergeis, Stalin dug Alexander Nevsky. Eisenstein even received the coveted Stalin Prize for his work on the film.
Even so, Eisenstein’s creative freedom continued to be hampered by the Stalinist police state. Several of his pitches after Alexander Nevsky were rejected by Boris Shumyatsky’s equally artless successor. Frustrated by the bureaucratic bullshit, and clearly out of fucks to give, Eisenstein went over the new guy’s head, appealing to Stalin directly. Stalin didn’t care for the new pitches either, so, at an in-person meeting, he came up with one of his own: a film about Ivan IV, the first tsar of “All the Russias,” better known by his sobriquet, Ivan the Terrible. Could Eisenstein make that, perhaps?
To me, Ivan IV Vasilyevich is the most fascinating figure in the annals of Russian history: brilliant, brutal, tragic, and momentous. He consolidated all that came before, created the role of the tsar, established Russia as a serious regional power, but left the country in such a state after his death it was plunged into what is now known, simply and accurately if understatedly, as the Time of Troubles. When some Polish rando showed up in Moscow in 1605 to claim the Russian throne, he told the boyars he was Dmitri—the long-lost son of Ivan the Terrible—and was immediately installed on the throne! So Ivan was even indirectly responsible for the embarrassing “False Dmitri” debacle.
Ivan’s dad was the son of a Byzantine princess and the Grand Prince Ivan the Great; his mom was the daughter of a Serbian princess and a Tatar who was said to be descended from the Mongol ruler Mamai. None of that mattered. His father died when Ivan was three; his mother was poisoned by the boyars—the Russian nobility—when he was eight. He was already the Grand Prince of Moscow, but the title meant nothing. He could only watch helplessly during his regency as different factions within the boyar ranks—some in cahoots with the Poles, some with the Germans—vied for power and plunder. He was belittled, gaslit, emotionally abused, damaged; and he took out his inner rage on the unfortunate animals he came across.
In 1547, at the age of 16, Ivan was crowned Tsar of All the Russias—the first Russian Grand Prince to formally assume that title—and all bets were off. He was determined to unite all of Russia under his iron fist, to expand his sovereign territory, and to destroy the boyars who were his childhood tormentors. He had a vision for how Russia should be governed—more like a modern-day dictatorship than the old system of a nominal tsar elevated by the boyars, which was akin to the NFL franchise owners jointly deciding on a commissioner. In pursuing each of these objectives, Ivan found great success.
In 1560, after the murder by poison of his first wife, Anastasia Romanovna—from whose quasi-royal lineage the House of Romanov descended—Ivan lost his mind. Without his beloved wife to temper his darker impulses, he went absolutely bonkers. He became obsessed with rooting out traitors. He saw treason everywhere. He established the oprichnina, functionally a secret state police; these domestic terrorists dressed all in black, wore black masks, rode black horses, galloped into town under cover of night like ringwraiths to wreak havoc on the Russian people. The city of Novgorod, for example—where Alexander Nevsky had repulsed the Teutonic Knights three centuries before—was the site of a bloody massacre; some 15,000 people there were exterminated by the oprichniks, either by the sword or by fires set to literally scorch the earth. Ivan was increasingly paranoid, capricious, sadistic, cruel. At one point, he fell into a violent rage at his adult son, striking him in the head with a sharp object with such force that the heir died. His sobriquet means something slightly different in Russian: terrible as in inspiring terror, or awe, or great power. But terrible, Ivan was.
In this 16th century psychopath, Stalin found a kindred spirit. By 1941, the Kremlin was ready to rehabilitate the reputation of Ivan IV, to glorify the strong, fearsome leader who, through sheer force of will, planted the seeds of the despotic Russian state. Stalin was a big fan. Remember how he’d executed Boris Shumyatsky for not swallowing enough vodka at the New Year’s Eve party? That was totally something Ivan the Terrible would have done.
And so poor Sergei Eisenstein was tasked to make—as Joan Neuberger phrases it in This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia, her book on the making of Ivan the Terrible I & II— “a film about a bloody tyrant for a bloody tyrant.”
I didn’t know any of this until right before I sat down to watch the movie this week. And I can’t quite wrap my head around it. It’s amazing that Ivan exists at all. Eisenstein was working in the worst possible circumstances, both in terms of the technical difficulties he faced shooting a film during the Second World War, and because the guy he was reporting to, and who had to approve the final cut, was Joseph Fucking Stalin!
The criticism of Ivan is itself fascinating. Writing at Criterion, J. Hoberman describes the work as a “majestic synthesis of disparate forms,” explaining that “Sergei Eisenstein’s final film seems to be as much a ballet or an opera or a moving painting (or a mutant kabuki show) as it is a movie. As elaborately scored by the distinguished composer Sergei Prokofiev, the two-part Ivan the Terrible is a spectacle unlike any other.” That hits the nail on the head.
Here is Neuberger’s take:
Part I of Ivan the Terrible gives us a young and determined ruler, committed to defeating Russia’s external enemies, and the obsolete aristocracy, who opposed his efforts to centralize Russian power and establish The Great Russian State. And apparently the portrait of Ivan was just monumental and triumphalist enough for Part I to win the Stalin Prize and cause American critics to see it as pure Soviet propaganda. But this view of the film required ignoring the paranoia, violence, trauma, vengeance, treason, and betrayal that permeate its story, its characterizations, and its bizarre and murky visual setting. Ivan himself is beset by inner conflicts over his mission and constantly asks if he is on the right path. He repeatedly beseeches himself, his friends and his enemies, God, and the audience, “Am I right in what I am doing?” His own uncertainty cues us to ask if the opposition to the centralization of power is, perhaps, in some ways justified, a question that is, in fact, at the heart of Eisenstein’s conception of the film. In Part II, the questions become darker, revolving insistently around cycles of murder and revenge. Ivan still asks for reassurance but God is silent and no one else gives him the answers he wants, spurring him on to greater, more vicious acts of violence.
All Eisenstein’s questions had obvious analogues in Stalinist society. But the filmmaker was after something more than simple critique. He wanted to explain how Ivan became the bloody, manipulative, demagogic tyrant he became. Eisenstein had stated from the beginning that he did not intend to “whitewash” the medieval ruler or justify his violent reign, but rather to explain, as he put it, “the most atrocious things.” The interrogative mode that he used in Ivan the Terrible established a set of standards for judging any ruler. That’s how you make a film about a bloody tyrant for a bloody tyrant.
If Stalin was instrumental in bestowing Part I with the Stalin Prize, he hated Part II and had it immediately banned.
It was in reading up on the film that I came across the aforementioned doctoral dissertation by Maya Garcia, “The Queer Legacy of Ivan the Terrible,” that, among other things, delves into the film’s subtle but unmistakable homoerotic undertones. Garcia writes:
I disagree strongly with the oft-repeated assessment of many earlier critics and scholars that Ivan is a “totalitarian” work. Yes, it is a work which thematically explores autocracy and marshals a staggering array of participants, referents, and artistic forms to execute its vision, but this vision is heterogenous and suffused with ambiguities and contradictions. To riff on terminology frequently employed by Eisenstein, the “totalitarian” analysis over-emphasizes the toto at the expense of the pars. The messy pars strongly resist being hewn into anything like a clean totalitarian monument. Ivan is an open-ended work, and not merely because it was never fully filmed. I will go so far as to argue that perhaps Ivan was never meant to be “finished”—Eisenstein’s vision from its very inception exceeded the limitations of Soviet film as it existed at the time, both in terms of material reality and political censorship.
The production, too, was fraught with difficulty: Eisenstein began work right when the Germans invaded Russia, and the entire operation had to be removed to Alma Ata, the Kazakh capital (very nice!). Filming was done at night, to conserve electricity for the war effort. There is only one color sequence in the otherwise black-and-white film—not for artistic reasons, but because Eisenstein couldn’t score color film until Stalin confiscated some from the Nazis.
So, having first read all of the fascinating criticism, it was with great curiosity that, to get my weary mind off the authoritarian power-grab of Donald Trump, I streamed a two-part movie about Ivan the Terrible.
To reiterate: the film is superb. Every frame looks spectacular. The action takes place almost exclusively in this creepy stone castle, with dim lights and doorways that look like mouse-holes, where everyone has to stoop to enter and exit. The décor is rendered in the Byzantine style, which I love. The actors, all of them, are dizzyingly expressive—Nikolay Cherkasov, in the title role, has eyes that are open wide, unblinking, almost melodramatically, for much of the movie, but it totally works. He is mesmerizing, and his herky-jerky movements, and the odd way he holds his scepter, project his high status. The opening of the second film takes place in the Polish court of Sigismund II Augustus, and it looks amazing.
There isn’t dialogue like we are now accustomed to, but just enough to propel the action and give us a sense of what’s happening. (Orson Welles saw Ivan without subtitles and still managed to understand it well enough to write a review.) It’s almost Shakespearean in that sense; Ivan is Hamlet, if Hamlet had been brave enough and resolute enough to kill his uncle to avenge his father—and then kept right on killing. Eisenstein paces it beautifully, in stark contrast to the rush-rush-rush of modern films. I agree with the Criterion review that the film is as much “a ballet or an opera or a moving painting (or a mutant kabuki show) as it is a movie.” And, while I was not expecting any sort of plot twists, the end of the second installment shocked me.
With that said, some of the stuff went over my head. There was a character, a boyar and a relative of Ivan’s, who was plotting against him. I didn’t realize until the second film that this was his aunt; I thought it was a man for the entire first movie; she kind of looks like Terry Jones in the Monty Python sketches. The banquet scene in Part II, the only sequence in color, features men in black robes doing an elaborate Russian dance to the swirling Prokofiev soundtrack. It’s fabulous, but it reminded me a little too much of the monks dancing in the “Inquisition” segment of Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I.
Even so, I can’t stop thinking about the film—both the finished product and the circumstances under which it was made. Stalin loved the first part but hated the second—the latter being the part when Ivan went mad and started having people whacked. He called Eisenstein to the Kremlin to discuss it. Can you imagine? A meeting with Joseph Stalin, who has notes on your creative project—a creative project he commissioned, which is about a long-dead tyrant but is also pretty clearly a commentary on Stalin himself? What’s Russian for “Yikes?”
“Ivan the Terrible was very cruel. You can show that he was cruel, but you have to show why it was essential to be cruel,” the dictator told the filmmaker. “One of Ivan the Terrible’s mistakes was that he didn’t finish off the five major families.”
Stalin thought the second film wasn’t sympathetic enough to Ivan, but I found the opposite to be the case. Prefiguring Godfather II, it shows some flashbacks of a young Ivan, the origin story of the Terrible, in what was the most emotionally moving part of the film. While I would not have done what Ivan did, I certainly understood his motivations.
The plan was for Ivan the Terrible to be a trilogy. The second part, suppressed by Stalin, was not released until 1958, after the strongman was five years dead. The third installment was never even begun in any meaningful way. This was by design, apparently. Eisenstein determined to work himself to death to get out of his commitment to finishing; he died in 1948, a few weeks after his 50th birthday, and years before the second film was released.
As for the other artistic genius who worked on the film, and who was also oppressed by the brutal Stalinist regime? Sergei Prokofiev died on March 5, 1953—which also happened to be the same day that Stalin himself bought the farm. Incredibly, the dictator outlived the composer by just 55 minutes!
As Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator is a comic takedown of Adolf Hitler, Ivan the Terrible is a dramatic critique of Joseph Stalin. With his deft touch, Sergei Eisenstein showed that it is possible for an artist to portray a bloodthirsty dictator while living under said bloodthirsty dictator’s absolute rule.
As a commentary on the United States of 2025, I’m pleased to report that Ivan the Terrible shows just how far we have to go before things get really bad—or, er, terrible. Donald Trump is no Ivan IV; the only thing they have in common, really, is malignant narcissism and a yen for marrying multiple Slavic wives. (The film doesn’t present the “brideshows” from which Ivan selected his wives, but from what I read, they sound a lot like Trump’s Miss Universe beauty pageants.) Ivan began his reign as tsar by invading Kazan, a Khanate due east of Moscow, and taking over that vast territory; Trump can’t even get Greenland to return his calls. Also, Donald is elderly. His poorly-attended military parade, remember, was supposed to honor his birthday; the guy acts like a child but he’s 79 years old, more like a late-stage Soviet leader than a medieval tsar. Most of all, there was nothing “TACO” about Ivan the Terrible. Nothing scared that crazy motherfucker.
The current MAGA courtiers, however, do have a lot in common with the Terrible’s obsequious retinue. AI could plop Stephen Miller or Elon Musk into Ivan and they would look right at home. Melania could plausibly be one of Ivan’s tsaritsas, except for the fact that she treats her husband like shit.
With that said: if the republic really does topple, and the United States descends into a monarchy of the kind desired by Curtis Yarvin and the Dark Enlightenment crew, we would be wise to beware the presumptive heir to the throne—the next King of America.
Donald is no Ivan the Terrible. But Barron might be.
ICYMI
I flew solo on The Five 8 this week. The great Alex Aronson was kind enough to join me for a solid hour and answer all my questions about the judicial branch:
CHUNK wonderfully animated the “Donald Trump’s Marines’ Hymn”:
PROGRAMMING NOTES
This week, I’ll be releasing my podcast interview with Candace Rondeaux, author of the absolutely brilliant new book, Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse Into Military Chaos. It’s both stunningly well researched and beautifully written.
The publishers were kind enough to let me do a book giveaway. If you’d like a chance to win a copy, just email me [gregolear at gmail dot com] with the subject heading SLEDGEHAMMER. I will randomly pick three winners after the episode drops.
And, finally, as an attempt to relax, I’ve been designing t-shirts—most of them based on “Sunday Pages” stuff and manifestos of various early 20th century artistic movements. This is very much in the larval stages, I’ve not written up the full descriptions, and I’m not even sure it works perfectly. But if you’re interested, you can take a gander here.
Happy Father’s Day!
This is a gripping, gorgeously written essay that makes Russian history, Soviet cinema, and totalitarian terror feel urgent, personal, and hauntingly strange. It’s the kind of piece that makes you immediately want to watch the film. Well done, Greg! Happy Father's Day 💙
Happy Father’s Day Greg! The show was great with Alex and of course Chunk’s animation chefs kiss. I went to our city’s No King protest. It was awesome. This was our 3rd event and it was definitely our largest crowd! Now we need to turn out the vote.