Ivan Groznyi. Krovavyi poet [Ivan the Terrible. Bloody Poet]

Ivan the Terrible was the first officially declared tsar of Russia. A person who expanded Russia's limits. A person who laid the groundwork for a state system, created a real government from the semi-independent feudal principalities. A person who carried out the most serious reforms in many spheres of life-reforms which, without exaggeration, transformed the old, obsolete Rus' into a real state. Although he is most often portrayed in the role of a loathsome butcher, spilling blood everywhere he went, this is simply entertainment for the sake of a certain sense of sadism in his native country, for the love of execution and torture. The figure of Ivan the Terrible is too majestic and complicated to approach from primitive judgments and abstract intellectual humanism.