MOSCOW -- For centuries, he has been called one of the most villainous of the many villains in Russian history, a blood-soaked tyrant who murdered his son, created the country's first secret police force and personally took part in its massacres. Even the name by which he came to be known tells bluntly of his legend: Ivan the Terrible.
Try telling that to Zhanna Bichevskaya.
A famous folk singer since Soviet times, she now performs loving ballads to the memory of the czar and agitates on state-owned radio for him to be canonized as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church. Her eyes fill with tears as she expounds on his holiness.
On her latest CD, released last summer, she extols the 16th-century ruler as a warrior who served the church and worked to "decimate Russia's enemies." She has personally handed a copy of the new CD to Patriarch Alexy II, leader of the church. On it, she sings that Ivan has been "crowned by God with a sacred halo."
"They call him a heretic," she said in an interview, "but he is a saint."
Bichevskaya is not an isolated fan of the czar, who historians say killed thousands of his own people. She is merely one of the more prominent converts pressing the Russian Orthodox Church to declare him a saint.
It's a cause embraced by a loose coalition of dissident priests, extreme nationalist newspapers and politicians, monarchists and an increasing number of regular Orthodox believers, according to religion experts.
"We don't think this is ridiculous," said Sergei Chapnin, editor of the official Russian Orthodox newspaper, the Church Herald. "We consider it to be a serious problem for the church. There is a group that is leading this propaganda and thousands of people are under their sway. It threatens the unity of the church."
Indeed, what makes this Ivan the Terrible revisionism most notable is how hard the church hierarchy is fighting it. Alexy took the unusual step of blasting the idea of sainthood for Ivan, calling it "madness" for the church to equate "murderers and martyrs, lechers and saints." The church canonization commission is now marshaling historical evidence to prove why Ivan the Terrible cannot be a saint, according to a member of the panel.
While publicly dismissing Ivan's supporters as a fringe movement, church leaders fear it is turning into a popular cause among the millions of people who have returned to the Orthodox church in the dozen years since the Soviet Union collapsed. Their enthusiasm taps a deep strain of mystic nationalism that has proved a powerful force at odds with the country's official turn toward integration with the West.
In part, that's because the pro-Ivan forces already have a record of success. In the 1990s, this same coalition advocated the once-outlandish idea of sainthood for the last czar, Nicholas II, and his family, who were all executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. In 2000, yielding to their pressure, the church canonized the murdered Romanovs, ignoring Nicholas's documented anti-Semitism and condoning of pogroms against his Jewish subjects.
"They believe the canonization of Emperor Nicholas II gives them reason to hope for canonization of Ivan the Terrible," said Vladislav Tsypin, a religious scholar and member of the canonization commission. "But there are no real parallels between the two. Nicholas II was a victim of terror, and Ivan the Terrible was an organizer of terror."
The record would seem to make the man known formally as Ivan IV the unlikeliest of saints. The first Russian leader to crown himself czar, or emperor, he built the majestic St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square to commemorate his victory over the Tatar khan in Kazan. But he is better known for the disastrous 24-year Livonian War, which he lost to the Poles and Swedes. He created the feared secret police force known as the oprichniki and led a pogrom that killed thousands in the city of Novgorod in 1570. In 1581, he fatally stabbed his oldest son Ivan.
Tsypin ticked off some other facts that would make Ivan a candidate for church condemnation, not sainthood: his seven marriages (the Orthodox Church allows no more than four) and his alleged involvement in the murder of Metropolitan Filip, who denounced Ivan's terror and was eventually canonized for his sacrifice.
The religious scholar doesn't bother to mention Ivan's reported childhood predilection for throwing animals off roofs or gruesome grown-up practices such as ordering up tortures to duplicate biblical accounts of the sufferings of hell.
Ivan's boosters dismiss such historical criticism. One pro-Ivan Internet tract calls such accounts "myths, legends and lies," circulated by Russophobes, Catholics, Jews or some combination of them. Ivan is instead hailed as Russia's first emperor and as the humble Monk Ioann, who repented in his final years.
At many religious gatherings in Russia, Ivan's supporters circulate through the crowd, handing out glossy printed cards with an icon of Ivan as a saint on one side and a prayer to him on the other. There's also a CD-ROM mustering evidence for their cause, such as a 16th-century fresco in one of the churches of the Kremlin. It depicts the czar with a halo over his head.
"This idea has come to be very popular among simple believers," said Chapnin, the editor of the Orthodox paper. He and others say its success is grounded in the "naive ignorance" of Russian churchgoers about their own history after decades of Soviet repression and point out that those behind the movement are openly challenging the authority of Alexy.
Many Ivan backers also support sainthood for Rasputin, the charismatic monk who gained power over the last czar's family and was famed for his orgies as much as his religious preaching.
This is not the first movement to rehabilitate Ivan. At the height of Joseph Stalin's reign of terror, in the 1930s and 1940s, the Soviet dictator made something of a cult of personality out of Ivan. New popular histories were written emphasizing his spirituality and his campaign to win control over fractious noblemen. Today, some of Ivan's supporters say that Stalin, too, should be canonized.
"In the history of the Orthodox church, the praising of a new saint always comes first from the respect of simple people," the singer Bichevskaya said in the interview. "Only when the process reaches its zenith does the church have no choice but to accept it. Right now, we are educating people so they will pray to Czar Ivan."
Back in Soviet times, Bichevskaya made her name as a folk singer, taking a bootleg record of American Joan Baez as her model, and grew famous for mournful ballads that seemed somehow subversive at the time. In 1988, she said, she found God when she met her husband, a religious songwriter from the city of Tula.
Today, she expounds her brand of religious nationalism twice a week on the state-owned Voice of Russia network. Rants against wealthy "oligarch" business leaders compete with calls to take back the Orthodox church from what she calls a corrupt hierarchy.
"They call us schismatics," she said, her blond hair covered by a heavy black hood, her frosted pink nails matching her frosted pink lipstick. "They call us destroyers of Orthodoxy."
Bichevskaya is disdainful of the patriarch, whom she called "just a boss," surrounded by a Soviet-style set of privileged appointees. ("The church Politburo," she said dismissively.)
She said she receives "bags of mail" after each broadcast in which she mentions Ivan. "They thank me, they're asking me to send icons, prayers of Ivan the Terrible." On the one hand, she doesn't deny that Ivan took part in atrocities. On the other, she says that all the "dirt" about Ivan was made up by Catholics.
Asked about her favorite part of her new Ivan the Terrible song, she cited its ending:
At this most perilous hour The despoiled Christian world Will remember Lord's anointed Czar Ivan Who defended and saved our faith.
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