The first "Miss Russia"
In 1505, the Grand Duke of Moscow Vasily Ioannovich, having decided to marry, organized the first All-Russian beauty contest. Throughout the country, the princely people performed bridegings of the most beautiful girls, despite the nobility of the family. Five hundred out of one and a half thousand applicants were selected and brought to Moscow. After the second round of the competition, there were 300 brides left, after the third - 200, after the fourth - 100, and finally, only ten beauties made it to the final.
The members of the jury were midwives, they carefully examined each contestant for virginity, and whether there were any vices, suspicious moles and other witchcraft signs on the body. And the chairman of the jury was the Grand Duke himself, who was to choose one of the best ten - the best. The choice fell on Solomonia Yurievna Saburova from an old but seedy boyar family. She was 14-15 years old, the most common age for marriage in those days. And the groom was over ten years older.
Violent tonsure
The choice of the sovereign turned out to be extremely unsuccessful: although, as they say in the annals, the spouses lived in harmony and harmony, but for twenty years of marriage, Solomonia did not manage to give birth to an heir to the throne, it is not known which of the two is to blame for this, but Vasily III is rightfully strong accused his wife of infertility, after which he decided to divorce and imprison her in a monastery, grossly trampling on the canons of Orthodoxy. The church allowed one of the spouses to enter the monastery only with mutual consent, and Solomon did not want to get divorced and become a nun at all.
The Patriarch of Constantinople - the head of all Orthodox churches in the world - categorically refused Basil III's request for permission to divorce. Some Moscow boyars and clergy were also opposed, in particular, Simeon Kurbsky (grandfather of the famous opponent of Ivan the Terrible Prince Kurbsky), writer Maxim the Greek and a prominent publicist of the early 16th century Vassian Patrikeev - Vasily's second cousin, who was forcibly tonsured into monasticism by Ivan III.
And then the henchmen of the Grand Duke fabricated an accusation against Solomon of witchcraft and damage, which she allegedly directed at her husband. This reservation decided the fate of the Grand Duchess. On November 29, 1525, she was tonsured at the Moscow Rozhdestvensky Monastery. There is evidence from contemporaries that the tonsure was violent: Solomonia desperately resisted, tore off the monk's doll and trampled it with her feet, for which the boyar Shigonya-Podzhogin hit her with a whip. Nevertheless, the tonsure took place, and since Solomonia had many sympathizers in Moscow. Vasily III sent her out of sight to Suzdal, to the Intercession Monastery.
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There is a version that during the tonsure the Grand Duchess was pregnant and already in the monastery gave birth to a son, calling him George.
Is Ivan the Terrible a bastard?
None of the strangers saw the newborn. When rumors of a wonderful baby reached Moscow, Vasily III, who by that time had already married a second time to the young beauty Elena Glinskaya, sent his clerks to Suzdal, but Solomonia flatly refused to show them the child. And five years later, rightly fearing persecution from the Glinskys, she announced the death of her son and his burial in the Intercession Monastery. And she herself, with the help of faithful people, reliably hid the heir to the throne.
If the child was really born, then could Vasily III be his father? Some historians strongly doubt this. On the one hand, he seemed to have proved his male capacity, since Elena Glinskaya bore him two sons - Ivan and Yuri, but rumor ascribes paternity not to Vasily Ioannovich, but to Prince Ivan Fedorovich Ovchin-Telepnev-Obolensky, who was a friend at the wedding, then became lover of the Grand Duchess, and after the death of the sovereign he lived with her almost in the open.
This version is confirmed by some medical indications, for example, in the Rurik family, despite obvious signs of degeneration, there have never been epileptics and people with mental disabilities. But these diseases are characteristic of the Obolensky family. They also manifested themselves in the offspring of Elena Glinskaya. Ivan the Terrible suffered from mental disabilities and epilepsy, and his younger brother Yuri was generally feeble-minded. The sons of Ivan the Terrible were obviously mentally abnormal, and the youngest, Dmitry, allegedly died in Uglich, in a fit of epilepsy, having run into his own knife.
It is no coincidence that the boyars, who actually seized power in the Kremlin after the death of Vasily III, mocking the young Ivan, called him a word that was inconvenient to use in a decent society and denoting bastard (illegitimate).
Chasing a ghost
All his life Ivan the Terrible felt a certain inferiority and precariousness of his position. It is this, and not boyar conspiracies, that explains the incredible, pathological cruelty and horrors of his reign. His people prowled all over Muscovy, trying in vain to attack the trail of the son of the first wife of Vasily III - the legitimate heir to the throne. If George is a myth and a ghost, why is there such a fierce and stubborn pursuit of him? It seems that John Vasilyevich did not in the least doubt the existence of his older half-brother. After all, he three times - in 1552, 1560 and 1564 - came to Suzdal, personally searched, saw a doll in an opened grave.
There is a version that Grozny created the oprichnina only to get an elusive rival. After all, the oprichnina was introduced precisely in those areas where George could find refuge. This was the very first large-scale, thorough special operation raised to the rank of state policy in the history of Russia. It ended with pogroms and massacres of the residents of Novgorod. Tver and Torzhok in 1570. And, apparently, it was in Tver that Grozny overtook his rival. The Danish envoy Yakov Ulfeld testifies: "The city of Tver was destroyed, because it was the home of the murdered prince, that is, the brother of the Grand Duke." Pastor and writer Paul Oderborn also writes about the murder of his brother by Ivan the Terrible: George, who tried to hide in his house, was captured by the guardsmen, chained, tortured and then killed. The epilogue of the search was the mass executions in Moscow on June 25, 1570.
Soon after this, the oprichnina is rapidly liquidated as unnecessary, and all its leaders are brutally destroyed, with the exception of Malyuta Skuratov, who got a bullet during the assault on the Paida fortress in Livonia (although it is not known from which side this bullet came).
And history is silent about Tsarevich George. Only a vague folk memory of him has survived in songs and legends about the noble robber Kudeyar - the Russian Robin Hood, who allegedly had a princely origin and a legal right to the royal throne.
This greatest mystery of the 16th century will hardly ever be revealed. Almost all documents that had anything to do with this case were destroyed by people and time.
Secrets of the 20th century, no. 43, Nikolai Medvedev