Ivan the Terrible

Ivan IV inherited the throne at three when his father died in 1533. Crowned tsar at sixteen in 1547, he spent his early years with a circle of reformers called the Chosen Council, overhauling the legal code, convening the Zemsky Sobor assembly, and creating Russia's first standing army. He conquered Kazan and Astrakhan, bringing the entire Volga under Moscow's control. Then he purged the advisers, launched the ruinous Livonian War that lasted a quarter-century and failed to secure the Baltic, and unleashed the oprichniki - Russia's first political police - in a violent campaign that culminated in the massacre of Novgorod and left Moscow itself burned by Crimean Tatars. Contemporary accounts describe him as intelligent and devout but given to paranoia and episodes of instability that deepened with age. In one such outburst he murdered his eldest son Ivan Ivanovich, leaving the throne to Feodor, a weak ruler whose childless death ended the Rurik line and plunged Russia into the Time of Troubles.