How Bad Was Ivan the Terrible? The Oprichnik Oath and Satanic Spells in Foreigners’ Accounts Valerie A. Kivelson When Sergei Eisenstein wrote the screenplay for his magnificent and histor- ically inaccurate film Ivan the Terrible in 1941, he planned a powerful scene in which the tsar forced his oprichniki to take a terrible, satanic oath. The scene failed to make it past the censors, who reacted strongly, finding it “powerfully and deeply disturbing.” 1 The scene was cut from the film, but the director’s intent is clear. In addition to the screenplay, a few stills and a number of un- forgeable drawings survive. (See figures 1 and 2 in the gallery of illustrations following page 206.) They portray a dark ritual in which each oprichnik was forced to swear: A fearful oath… To serve the Sovereign of Russia like a dog. Its towns and villages to sweep with a broom Villainous scoundrels to tear with my teeth. At the Tsar’s command to lay down my bones. 2 To destroy the enemies of the state To renounce my kin and my clan I would like to thank all of the participants of the Koll-mania conference, and in par- ticular Nancy Kollmann, Brian Boeck, Elena Boeck, Michael Flier, Charles Halperin, and Daniel Rowland for their generous help and suggestions. I also thank Joan Neu- berger, whose observation that Eisenstein’s oath resembled seventeenth-century sa- tanic pacts inspired this essay. 1 He finished a draft of the screenplay, including The Oath, in 1941 though he con- tinued to fiddle with it in 1942. It was published in Novyi Mir in the 1943 issue, which came out in 1944. See Joan Neuberger, Ivan the Terrible: The Film Companion (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 3, 46. 2 Sergei M. Eisenstein, S. M. Eisenstein’s Screenplay: Ivan the Terrible, trans. Ivor Mon- tagu and Herbert Marshall, ed. Montagu (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), 133– 34. Seeing Muscovy Anew: Politics—Institutions—Culture. Essays in Honor of Nancy Shields Kollmann. Michael S. Flier, Valerie A. Kivelson, Erika Monahan, and Daniel Rowland, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2017, 67–84.