Ivan the terrible & his son

Following the death of his first wife, Ivan the Terrible appeared to have lost his emotional balance. His six subsequent wives never exercised the same beneficial influence on him as had Anastasia. The tsar was increasingly given to feeling of persecution and outbreaks of wild rage. He saw traitors everywhere. After the oprichina began its work, Ivan the Terrible’s life became part of a nightmare which he had brought into being. With Maliuta Skuratov and other oprichniki the sovereign personally participated in the investigations and the horrid tortures and executions. Weirdly he alternated dissolution and utmost cruelty with repentance, and blasphemy with prayer. Some contemporary accounts of events defy imagination. In 1581, in a fit of violence, Ivan the Terrible struck his son and heir Ivan was a pointed staff and mortally wounded him. It has been said that from that time on he knew no peace at all. The tsar died in March 1584, a Soviet autopsy of his body indicating poisoning. ~ Page 151