Ivan the Terrible's Terror Territoriality in Moscow

Abstract: This paper discusses the spatiality of the oprichnina, the notoriously repressive and controversially divisive policy (1565–72) of the first Russian tsar, Ivan the Terrible. Although the chronicle provides a very precise description of its territory in Moscow, later reproductions and representations of the oprichnina have most often been incomplete or variously biased, arguably due to its complex spatiality as well as changing ideological contexts in the country, especially in the Stalinist period, when both Ivan the Terrible and Moscow as the capital of the so-called "centralized Russian state" were in demand as justification for Stalin's personality cult. Ivan the Terrible's oprichnina territory in Moscow evades simple binary classification. It could be better understood as "the other," a heterotopic ex-centric space constructed as a preventative infrastructure for real, local environmental challenges or an eccentric reaction to imagined global eschatological threats.