Lost Kingdom: A History of Russian Nationalism from Ivan the Great to Vladimir Putin

by Serhii Plokhy

Ivan the Terrible died in 1584, one year after a peace with Sweden ended the Livonian War. He left his son and successor, Fedor Ivanovich, who would be the last Rurikid on the Muscovite throne, a country economically broken and devastated by war and terror but more centralized than under any previous Muscovite ruler. He also left Fedor the title of tsar, which was now recognized by foreign leaders, and Monomakh’s Cap as the crown of the Tsardom of Muscovy. The cap and the legend attached to it embodied the complex identity of the tsardom and its elites as it had evolved in the course of the sixteenth century. Featuring Central Asian gold and jewels and Muscovite furs, the cap was swathed in invisible layers of historical mythology, first Kyivan, then Byzantine, and finally Roman. Whether the Muscovites sought a Roman connection by way of the Baltics and Prussia or the Black Sea and Constantinople, all ways led through Kyiv, the seat of the first Rurikid princes, without whom there could be no claim to anything but the Mongol tradition.