Charles J. Halperin notes that Ivan the Terrible is a figure seemingly so familiar to us as the epitome of a blood-thirsty despot that the modern word gave his name to a guard at the Treblinka death camp during World War II and the particularly destructive Hurricane Ivan in 2004. But then Halperin reconsiders what we actually know about Ivan. He readily admits Ivan's culpability for the violence carried out throughout the Oprichnina, the 1571 military campaign against Novgorod and other cities in northwest Muscovy, the tsar's failure to protect Moscow from the Crimean Tatar raid of 1571, the killing Metropolitan Filipp and the Staritskie, and Ivan's other offences. But close, careful reading of the primary sources leads Halperin to argue convincingly that many accounts of Ivan's other, alleged atrocities are unreliable because they were either biased—written by enemies (Poland-Lithuania or other opponents during the Livonia War) out to blacken Ivan's name—or else were composed long afterwards or far away from the events recounted to be at all trustworthy. He shows that some supposed episodes of Ivan's cruelty are, in fact, taken directly from legend and folklore, as when the ambassador's hat was nailed to his head when he refused to remove it in the ruler's presence, an incident clearly taken from the tale of Vlad Ţepeş (Dracula) then available in Ivan's Muscovy.

The book discusses Muscovite religion, society, the economy, and broader culture during Ivan's lifetime, and not just his life and government. Over the course of the discussion, Halperin makes several valuable contributions to our understanding of Ivan and medieval Muscovy. First, he dismisses the argument of Russian exceptionalism: that Russia was particularly backward or prone to a unique form of “oriental despotism.” Instead, he demonstrates through various comparative examples that Ivan was no more terrible than other rulers of his day, like England's Henry VIII or Elizabeth I, France's Henry III, or Spain's Philip II, and that Muscovy was never particularly far behind other, contemporary European states in military, economic, cultural, or social development. Second, he dismisses the hypotheses that Ivan was simply insane or that mental or physical illness can explain the Oprichnina and the other excesses of Ivan's reign. Scrofula, a fused spine, and Ivan's other maladies, discovered during exhumations of Ivan's remains in the Soviet period, were not severe enough to explain his violent actions, as some scholars have tried to do. Rather, Halperin argues that social upheaval best explains the political terror and violence of the Oprichnina. He thoroughly lays out the extent of conflict between social elements, such as the boyars and gentry, but the argument seems to fall short of showing that this upheaval caused the Oprichnina. Other sections sometimes also seemed underdeveloped or even incomplete, as when Halperin discussed the arrival of English merchants and the founding of the Muscovy Company in a mere three paragraphs on page 149, and the executions of 1570 in only two paragraphs on pages 197 and 198. Halperin acknowledges the limits of his inquiry, suggesting where further research can, hopefully, add to our understanding of Ivan and Muscovite history, and humbly and honestly points out where sources are missing, contradictory, or unclear and, thus, where historians may never be able to come to a reasonable approximation of the truth of what happened or why.

The use of endnotes (probably not Halperin's decision) made for somewhat tedious flipping back and forth from the chapters to the notes, and the absence of a bibliography, no doubt to make for a more readable book, was also a limitation from a scholarly perspective. Despite these inconveniences, Halperin has thoughtfully considered and engaged with the primary and secondary sources and written a book that is a thoroughly-researched, cogently-argued, and thought-provoking reconsideration of what we know, what can be known, and how reliable the sources are about Ivan the Terrible and Muscovy during his lifetime. Halperin shows that Muscovy was not an exceptional autocratic or isolated state misgoverned by an insane despot, but that Ivan was very much like the other rulers, and his tsardom much like the other states around it.