Author: Vladimir Karpets

Translator: Yulian Orlov

Source: Zavtra 40 (933), 5 October 2011

It is precisely starting in the middle of the sixteenth century (on the eve of the creation of John Dee’s main designs, and later with his active participation as well) that British intelligence agencies began ‘working on Russia’. In 1553-1554, the British merchant Richard Chancellor, a confidant of the English court, appeared in Rus. He was able to acquaint himself with the Muscovite state and was even honoured with an audience with the young Ivan IV. The conclusion that the Chancellor drew on Russia was such: “If they knewe their strength no man were able to make match with them.” [1] As pointed out by A. Efremov, an historian specialising in the history of the British intelligence services: “Richard Chancellor appeared in Russia as a result of an unfolding geopolitical conflict of a religious-civilisational character between the intensively Protestantised England and the rest of the Christian world, primarily catholic, that then surrounded it…The analytical conclusions that were sent to London by him were essentially geopolitical. He especially emphasised that at the beginning of his reign, Ivan IV had already “eclipsed his ancestors in both power and virtue” (incidentally, other Englishmen gave analogous evaluations in their reports to London). Chancellor also paid close attention to the fact that Rus:

“has many enemies and is pacifying them. Lithuania, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Livonia, Crimea, and the Nogay are terrified by the Russian name…Towards his subjects, he is surprisingly lenient and amiable. In a word, there are none in Europe more devoted to their sovereign than the Russians, who equally fear and love him. He is unceasingly ready to listen to complaints and help Ioann in whatever arises and resolve everything; he is not bored with affairs, nor does he engage in merrymaking, neither catching beasts nor music, but is engaged exclusively with two thoughts: how to serve God, and how to exterminate the enemies of Russia.” [3]

Chancellor spent eight months in Moscow. After his return to England, a special ‘trading’ company was founded, the main partners of which were members of the Most Honourable Privy Council [3]. During the thirty years of its existence, the company was unprofitable, and financed by the coffers of the monarch. The ‘special’ nature of its activities is clear to see.

Soon, events started occurring that remain mysterious to this day. These events have already received widespread publicity (see http://talk.wwhp.ru/showthread. php? p=2822 [dead link – transl.]). After the Commission for Graves of the Ministry of Culture of the USSR opened the tombs of Ivan the Terrible, his sons (Ivan Ivanovich and Fyodor Ivanovich), as well as that of voivode [4] prince Mikhail Skopin-Shuisky in 1963, a terrible picture emerged. An excessively high concentration of one of the most poisonous metals (quicksilver) was found in the remains of Ivan IV the Terrible. What is more, the amount of quicksilver reached thirteen grams per tonne, whereas the amount of quicksilver in a normal human body is not more than five milligrams per tonne! This is a difference of 2600 percent. What is more, during the analysis, the fact that Ivan IV had been buried in a robe that had been richly embroidered with golden threads had not been taken into account. Gold, however, is a very strong absorber of quicksilver. Consequently, the true amount of quicksilver in the remains of the tsar should have been far higher. The remains of Ivan Ivanovich were also found to contain quicksilver of up to several grams per tonne, which is also absolutely abnormal. Finally, in the remains of the tsar’s younger son (Fyodor Ioannovich), no quicksilver was found! The simple collation of these facts leads us to a single conclusion: Ivan IV and his family were purposefully poisoned with quicksilver. These are the facts.

The first-born (Dmitry) of Ivan IV and Anastasia Zakharina (Romanova-Yuryeva) was born a healthy and normal child, but died of the common cold (he caught the disease during a pilgrimage he made with his father), which at that time not even royal physicians could not cure. No traces of quicksilver were found in his remains.

The second son of Ivan IV and Anastasia was Ivan, the very same son that was apparently killed by his own father in 1581 with crook (there is not even a hint of such a death in those historical documents that concern this period of the rule of Ivan), was born in 1554 when his father was only twenty-four years of age. He grew up to be a healthy and strong man. Based on evidence from documents and chronicles, it is very clear that the tsarevich ‘passed’ during four days of horrific suffering caused by a severe illness, which, in turn, was (as has already been proven in the twentieth century) caused by severe quicksilver poisoning. 0,18 grams of quicksilver are enough to end in a lethal result. Meanwhile, as has been indicated above, the amount of quicksilver that was found in the tsarevich’s remains was several tens of times higher than the minimum lethal dose! The myth about Ivan’s filicide was ‘invented’ by the papal legate and Jesuit Antonio Possevino, who had arrived in Moscow in 1581 to serve as an intermediary in the negotiations between the Russian tsar and the Polish king Stefan Bathory, who in turn had invaded Russian lands during the Livonian War. Before this, he had offered Ivan a royal and later imperial title from the pope in exchange for the organisation of a “crusade” against the Ottoman Empire and the “liberation of Constantinople”; the tsar refused both offers. “We do not want an all universal state”, the Russian Tsar answered at the time, for which he received in return from Rome a dose of ritual slander that has not been repealed by neither the Church nor historians up until this day. Later, Possevino’s theory would be adopted by the ‘German oprichnik’ Henrich von Staden, who would subsequently go on to propose one of the first projects for the conquest of Muscovy [5]!

In 1560, tsaritsa Anastasiya passes away. What is more, at this juncture Ivan Vasilyevich himself had no doubts that she was poisoned. Poisonings with quicksilver (mercury chloride) have been known for a long time. For example, in the entire recorded history of Europe we find an ailment called ‘mad hatter disease’: the disease was widespread among haberdashers, who used lethal quicksilver compounds when preparing the then fashionable felt. The illness is now known as the ‘Minamata disease’, as it was first encountered in Japan as the result of mass quicksilver poisoning.

Soon after Chancellor, another envoy of London appeared at the height of the Livonian War in 1570: a German (or rather Dutchman) who had married an Englishwoman called Eliseus Bomelius (1530 – 1579). He would go on to become the Tsar’s royal surgeon and was a highly skilled poisoner.

The influence of the new chirurgeon and astrologer became practically limitless after Bomelius revealed to Ivan IV that he was under the influence of dark magic and that two of his wives had been killed by jealous courtiers and black mages (the attempt to ‘shift’ the blame on the Russian boyars is telling). According to several historians, it was due to the instigation of Bomelius that such prominent and respected men of that time as the princes Mikhail Vorotynsky, Nikita Odoevsky, and Petr Kurakhin [6], the boyar Mikhailo Morozov and his two sons and wife Evdokia, okolnichy Petr Zaitsev [7] and Grigory Sobakin, the Pskovian hegumen Kornely, and finally, the Novgorodian archbishop Leonid were all punished by the tsar.

What is more, Bomelius himself soon entered into an agreement with the Pskovian boyars who hated Ivan the Terrible and one night, having taking the gold he had acquired, fled from Moscow; however, after as little as a day, the physician was captured on the road to Pskov and taken to Moscow. After harsh torture during which the astrologer revealed all his accomplices, Bomelius was given the penalty of the death: the disgraced mage was first strung up on the rack, all his joints were turned inside out, and, finally, his legs were dislocated with his heels forward (the version given here has been created with the help of materials provided by S. Kozhushko. Source: “Mysteries of the Twentieth Century” no. 19, 2010).

“A geopolitical layer is present in the remaining folktales about Russian enmity towards Bomelius: as they hated him and were convinced that the evil German Bomelius had ingrained brutality in the Tsar through his magic, the Russian people crafted an explanation that the Germans (i.e. all foreigners) [8] apparently had found out through their scrying and magic that they would be utterly destroyed by the Russian Tsar. In order to prevent themselves from having to suffer such a fate, they sent one of their sorcerers to Rus” – A. B. Martirosyan, another historian of the activities of the British intelligence agencies in Russia, tells us. – “The actions of the young Tsar were an absolutely adequate reaction to the then sharply growing onslaught against Rus which came primarily from the Catholic West, which was searching for an overland route to the East, to India: in those days it was already known that it lied through Rus. It is not by chance that this onslaught, especially in the first period of the Rule of Ivan IV, met with deservedly fierce resistance from Muscovy, which, in addition, aspired to reacquire its historically legitimate exits to the Baltic Sea. In this arena of the harsh geopolitical confrontation of Catholicism and strongly growing Protestantism, London came out with its spies, mages, and poisoners in a highly cunning combination.” (http://delostalina.ru/?p=550 [dead link – transl.]).

To this very day, many questions surround the so-called ‘English courting’ of Tsar Ivan which is widely used to compromise the Tsar, as if he had initially courted the British queen and then called her a “simple broad” in a letter because she was “not autocratic” [9]. This is what A. B. Martirosyan says on the matter: “As he aspired to the development of Anglo-Russian cooperation, Ivan IV granted the Muscovy Company a monopolistic right to trade with the Russian state, as a result of which the British traders turned into absolute monopolists overnight. Later, the company received the right to toll-free trading, and in 1569 it even received the unique right to toll-free transit trading with Eastern countries via the Volga trade route! The Brits purposefully worked towards acquiring these privileges. For example, there is a letter dated to 1568 that was sent by the lord Burghley to the English resident ambassador in Moscow Randolf, in which the lord indicated the need to demand the expansion of privilege for English traders from the Russian government, especially that of independent trade with Persia. After all, the main task of the English was to reach the East in any possible way, while bypassing the control of Catholic countries…. However, the unrestrainable greed of the British led the Tsar to deprive the Company of all its privileges after one of his fits of brutality in 1570. That is to say, the British lost their privileges after only a year! In that time already, ‘special means’ prevailed to such a degree in the activities of British diplomacy that Moscow’s patience ran out. In cooperation with the dyaks [10] of the Ambassadorial Prikaz [11], the autocrat executed an interesting action of strategic influence: he sent the English queen Elizabeth a missive on 24 October 1570 in which he directly accused her of allowing her entourage to conduct the affairs of the British state… Actually, what kind of negotiations or unions can we speak of if Lord Burghley knew very well that his own agent was poisoning the Tsar and his relatives with catastrophic consequences for the Russian royal dynasty?!” Later, this missive would come to be interpreted as the hysterics of an offended husband, and this interpretation enters into all history textbooks… How else?

Translator’s notes:

[1]: Quotation from a partial online edition of Richard Chancellor’s The booke of the great and mighty Emperor of Russia, available at https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hakluyt/voyages/v03/chapter5.html .

[2]: EIA was unable to track down the original source of this quotation in the above-cited accessible version of Richard Chancellor’s The Booke of the Great and Mighty Emperour of Muscovy. Karpets references the following dead link: http://delostalina.ru/?p=933. See above. 

[3]: The Most Honourable Privy Council is a body of advisors to the Sovereign of the United Kingdom. It consists mostly of senior politicians who advise the Sovereign on various legal issues. In the past, however, it was vastly more powerful and influential, being made up of various nobles. 

[4]: ‘Voivode’ is a Slavic term that denotes a high-ranking military leader. Its meaning is now dependent on the country in which the term is used. In West-Slavic use, it denoted a noble roughly equal to a duke. In Rus, the term eventually came to denote a noble who acted as a high-ranking official with civil and military powers.

[5]: Henrich von Staden (1542 – date of death unknown) was a German mercenary and maverick adventurer who joined the service of Ivan IV in 1578. His main occupation, however, was that of a spy for the Teutonic Order. The plans mentioned by Karpets are recommendations for a conquest of Rus that Staden sent to the kings of Poland and Sweden. He wrote one of the few eye-witness descriptions of the so-called oprichnina, which can be read here.  

[6]: Mikhail Vorotynsky (1516 or 1519 – 1573) was an outstanding military leader and the founder of the first Russian border service. Nikita Odoevsky (date of birth unknown – 1573) was another prominent military leader. Petr Kurakhin (date of birth unknown – 1575) was a voivode in service to Ivan IV.

[7]: An okolnichy (окольничий) was a high-ranking civil servant with either military or purely civil duties.

[8]: The general Slavic term for foreigner, ‘nemets’ (derived terms include Polish niemiec, Russian немец), literally means ‘mute one’. The term eventually came to be applied exclusively to Germans.

[9]: The term used here (‘autocratic’) is not meant to carry any pejorative connotations. Rather, Ivan IV is accusing Elizabeth of not being truly sovereign, with her power being depending on various third persons.

[10]: A dyak (дьяк) (derived from the Greek διάκονος, from whence English deacon) was a civil sergeant in charge of a prikaz in Muscovite Rus.

[11]: A prikaz (приказ) was a Muscovite governmental entity that is roughly equal to a ministry in power and importance.