Kevin M.F. Platt (University of Pennsylvania)
The October Revolution released the Russian people from an ancient bondage, only to reinstitute an even more complete subjugation of them in subsequent decades. Among those Russians who was thus emancipated and then returned to servitude was Ivan the Terrible. In the nineteenth century, Ivan, like other prominent figures of Russian history, was pressed into the explicit service of political thought in a variety of renditions of the national past, in which he primarily served in the role of despotic negative example of rulership, although at times he was alternately seen as a great hero of Russian political development. Then suddenly, following 1917, the “ideological imagination” all but abandoned Ivan, along with most other figures of Russian history: state-sponsored views of history of the 1920s, such as those of the dean of early Soviet historiography M.N. Pokrovskii, were uninterested in great individuals and in long-dead tsars; and all other visions of the Russian national past lacked political authority. However, this situation was itself not to last. In the middle 1930s, with the rising tide of Stalinist conservatism and hero-worship of all kinds, Soviet public discourse rediscovered the tsars and, in addition to retrofitting the myths of Peter the Great, Aleksandr Nevskii, and others, erected an unprecedentedly positive historical myth around Ivan. This presentation will take up representations of Ivan the Terrible from the anomalous period of the 1920s—I. Tarich’s film Wings of a Serf, the efforts of a popular archeologist, I. Ia. Stelletskii to discover Ivan’s lost “library,” and some key historiographical publications. These were “Gothic” representations of Ivan the Terrible, which revealed the fullest potential of this figure for spectacular pleasures. Investigation of this maximally frightful, yet horrifically pleasurable vision of the Russian past will allow, in conclusion, interrogation of the function of the “Gothic” potential of this figure and of Russian national history as a whole in other periods—in Stalin’s USSR and in Putin’s Russia.