Ivan the Terrible’–or, for Russian traditionalists, “the Formidable” or “Fearsome”–earned his dubious reputation.
Ivan IV Vasilyevich, the first self-termed ‘Tsar’ of Russia, the mentally unstable tyrant who ruled Russia from 1533 to 1547, led the motherland into costly wars, murdered his own son, and, five centuries later, attracted the admiration of another Russian mass murderer Josef Stalin, but despite centuries of digging, one of the great mysteries of Ivan the Terrible remains buried somewhere deep beneath the Kremlin.