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The Livonian war was now directed against Sweden as well as the Knights, while the Crimean Tatars remained a perennial menace in the south. Indeed, on one occasion they were more than a threat. In 1571 their army had looted Moscow and burned it, though it had failed to take the Kremlin. The strains on Ivan and Russia were severe. Yet there were successes too. In the summer of 1572 another onslaught by the Crimean Tatars was broken at Molodi; in 1573 the Swedish fort of Pajda in Livonia was captured, and a faction of Poland’s nobility even canvassed the name of Ivan’s son, Fedor, as a candidate to Poland’s throne. But not until 1577 could the necessary resources be gathered for yet another major offensive in Livonia. By September of the same year the region was all in Ivan’s possession except for the port cities of Riga and Tallin which he desired so much.

Then the tide turned. In 1578 Russian forces were defeated at Wenden, and other Livonian towns were lost. A new king of Poland, the able Hungarian strategist Stefan Bathory, was sweeping all before him. Then Ivan’s former ally King Magnus of Denmark deserted the cause and in 1579 the city of Polotsk was lost. Ivan had been driven back almost to the point where he had started. Within months he was suing for peace, prepared to surrender everything that he had gained at so much cost in the north-west.

To what extent internal strife had contributed to the reversal of fortune it is difficult to say. Ivan’s purges were over. There had been nine terrible bouts of executions. Indeed, they had become an almost routine mark of that period of Ivan’s reign. He expressed indignation at the massacres in France to his ally the Emperor Maximilian II, but he himself was no gentler than the King of France. Some of his most successful generals were among his victims. So was the keeper of his Great Seal, the brilliant diplomat Ivan Mikhailovich Viskovatii. Nevertheless Viskovatii bequeathed a legacy that was to be of lasting value to the Russian state.

The work of establishing protocol for dealings with foreign countries, already begun, had been extended under Viskovatii’s supervision, at a time when the European diplomatic system was still in process of formation. And he had also established a practice for keeping records in a systematic way ³²Every embassy, of whatever rank, sent to another country (as yet no state maintained permanent missions in other capitals) was equipped with detailed instructions about what to say and even in what circumstances to say it. It was also given specific questions to ask, and lists of matters it should seek intelligence about. As a result, a large database was built up on all previous dealings with a country and of accurate intelligence about its geography, resources, society and mores. Russian diplomats may have taken protocol and recordkeeping to tedious lengths, but the tradition carried with it some inestimable advantages. Russian decision-takers tended to be better informed than their rivals, and, though their representatives abroad often seemed slow and their method cumbersome by contrast to their often more brilliant opposite numbers, they were more careful, painstaking, professional.

This was a less glorious achievement than the capture of Kazan and Siberia, perhaps, but none the less significant. Advantage was also gained from Ivan’s massacres, for they had helped to complete the revolution in landholding begun by the Tsar’s predecessors. Henceforth the entire elite of Russia served the tsar, and knew that their privileges and their advancement depended on him alone. Although his reign coincided with a demographic upswing, it also saw a major haemorrhage of the kind of talent and expertise which is of value in building empires, and the massacres left a blot on his reputation. They stirred deep resentments at the time. Yet they may also have added to the Tsar’s popularity as the supporter of the common man (a reputation which the Tsar’s own court may have helped to create by spreading positive rumours about him). History’s verdict on Ivan has not yet been agreed.