The mysterious death of Dmitry, Ivan the Terrible’s last son
Dmitry Ivanovich, the last son of Ivan the Terrible, was the first ever Tsarevich (heir apparent) to the Russian throne.
However, this little boy lived only 8 years.
In fact, he became more famous in death than he ever was in life.
Dmitry’s mother Maria Nagaya, was Ivan the Terrible’s sixth (or seventh) wife, whom he married in 1580.
According to Russian Orthodox law, this marriage was illegitimate and children born of such union were considered b*stards.
Dmitry was treated as a tsar’s son born out of wedlock, and he and his mother were sent away from Moscow.
Dmitry’s unusually cruel personality, was already displaying the cruelness of his father.
The English ambassador to Russia wrote:
“At a young age, all the qualities of his father begin to be revealed in him.
He finds pleasure in watching sheep and livestock in general being slaughtered, in seeing a throat cut open and blood flowing from it (whereas children are usually afraid of it), and in battering geese and chickens with a stick until they die.”
Dmitry was found dead on 15th May 1591 (May 25, New Style) in the courtyard of his palace in Uglich, with a wound to his throat.
There was nobody around, and no witnesses of what had happened.
The last time Dmitry was seen alive, he was playing a traditional Russian game of Svayka, where you have to stick sharp metal spikes in the ground.
Playing with him were two other boys, the sons of Maria’s court ladies.
Dmitry’s nannies and a wet nurse were somewhere nearby at the time, but claimed they didn’t see what happened.
Apparently, somebody or something stabbed Dmitry’s throat with a spike.
Minutes after Dmitry’s body was found, Maria ran from her palace to the yard.
Upon seeing her son’s body, she started battering Vasilisa Volokhova, Dmitry’s nanny, with a wooden rod.
Dmitry’s remains were transported to Moscow, and interred in the Arkhangelsky Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin.
When Maria saw the actual remains of her son, on their arrival to Moscow, she stayed speechless for several hours.
The death of the Tsarevich roused a violent riot in Uglich, instigated by the loud claims of Dmitry’s mother Maria, and her brother Mikhail, that Dmitry was murdered.
Chroniclers and later historians, offered two possible scenarios of what could have happened to Dmitry.
The first theory is that Dmitry was killed by the order of Boris Godunov, making it look like an accident.
It was widely believed at the time that Godunov got rid of Dmitry to clear the way for his own eventual succession.
The second scenario, was that the boy had suffered an epileptic seizure while playing with a knife and killed himself.
The detractors of this scenario assert that, since during an epileptic seizure the palms are wide open, the self-infliction of a fatal wound becomes highly unlikely.
To this day, what exactly happened to that eight year old heir to the Russian throne, remains a mystery…
“Tsarevich Dmitry,” by Sergey Blinkov 2005
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