History of the Russian State, Vol. 9

A.D. 1560 — 1561.The conqueror of the Crimeans, the Voivode and Boyar Ivan Sheremetev, was thrown into a stifling dungeon, tortured, and shackled in heavy chains. The Tsar came to him and coldly asked: "Where is your treasury? You were reputed to be a rich man." Sovereign! replied the half-dead sufferer: "I have sent it through the hands of the poor to my Christ the Savior" original: "(37)"! Released from the dungeon, he attended the Duma for a few more years; finally, he hid from the world in the Belozersky Desert a remote hermitage or monastery, but did not hide from persecution: Ivan wrote to the local monks that they honored this former nobleman too much, as if to spite the Tsar. His brother, Nikita Sheremetev, also a Duma Councilor and Voivode, wounded in battles for the fatherland, was strangled.

Moscow grew numb with fear. Blood flowed; in dungeons and monasteries, victims groaned; but..... the tyranny was still maturing: the present was terrifying because of the future! There is no correction for a tormentor who is always more and more suspicious, more and more ferocious; bloodthirstiness does not satisfy but intensifies the thirst for blood: it becomes the cruelest of passions, inexplicable to the mind, for it is madness, the execution of peoples and of the tyrant himself. — It is curious to see how this Sovereign, a zealous worshiper of the Christian Law until the end of his life, wished to reconcile its divine teaching with his unheard-of cruelty: he would justify