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A tsar without a reliable army
When Ivan IV was crowned in 1547, the first Russian ruler to formally take the title "Tsar", his military was still built around a medieval system: boyars and gentry landholders who owed cavalry service in exchange for their estates, mustered unevenly and armed however they could afford. There was no permanent, professional force the crown could call on year-round, and no infantry arm capable of the sustained siege warfare that campaigns against the fortified Tatar khanates would require.
That gap shaped nearly everything that follows: the creation of a standing infantry corps, the annexation of two Volga khanates, a private army built to police his own nobility, and a long war for the Baltic that outran what Russia could actually sustain.
The streltsy: Russia's first standing army
In 1550, Ivan IV decreed the formation of the streltsy ("shooters"), Russia's first permanent, government-paid military corps. The initial force numbered around 3,000 men organized into six units of 500, each broken into companies of 100 under noble-appointed officers. They were armed with arquebuses (pishchal, a matchlock firearm) as their primary weapon, backed by the berdysh, a long-handled axe that doubled as a firing rest for the heavy arquebus, and sabres for close combat.
Unlike the boyar levies, streltsy were paid a state salary (roughly four rubles a year plus grain in the 1550s) and, later, land grants, though chronic underfunding pushed many into farming and trading on the side. Their battlefield job was straightforward: soften enemy lines with volley fire before cavalry charged, and anchor the grinding, technical work of siege warfare that horsemen could not do. By around 1571 their recruitment, pay, and equipment were centrally administered through a dedicated government office, the Streletsky Prikaz. The corps proved its worth immediately, its first major combat test was the siege of Kazan in 1552, and it would remain the backbone of Russian infantry for a century and a half, growing to roughly 50,000 men by 1680.
Kazan and Astrakhan: taking the Volga
The Khanate of Kazan, a successor state to the Golden Horde, had raided and traded with Muscovy for a century by the time Ivan decided to settle the question permanently. On June 16, 1552, a Russian force estimated at roughly 150,000, infantry, cavalry, streltsy, artillery, and allied Cossacks, marched out of Moscow via Kolomna. The siege proper began on August 22, 1552, with Russian guns opening a sustained bombardment of the walls from August 29.
The engineering behind the siege was as decisive as the numbers. Military engineer Ivan Vyrodkov built a 12-metre wooden siege tower on-site capable of mounting ten heavy cannon and fifty lighter guns, letting Russian gunners concentrate fire on chosen sections of Kazan's wooden walls. Sappers dug mining galleries under the fortifications and detonated charges that both breached the walls and destroyed the city's underground water supply. Kazan was stormed and fell on October 2, 1552, ending the khanate.
Astrakhan followed by a shorter, less bloody route. A first Russian campaign in 1554 defeated Khan Yamghurchi and installed a client ruler, Dervish Ali; when Dervish Ali switched allegiance toward the Ottomans in 1556, Ivan sent a second force that annexed the khanate outright, on September 25, 1556, with little fighting. Together the two conquests put the entire length of the Volga and its trade route to the Caspian Sea under Russian control, one of the most consequential territorial gains of Ivan's reign, and one achieved as much by combined-arms siegecraft as by numbers.
The Oprichnina: a private army turned on the nobility
In January 1565, Ivan announced he was dividing his realm in two. One part, the oprichnina ("that which is set apart"), came under his direct personal rule and control; the rest, the zemshchina, remained nominally governed by the boyar aristocracy in Moscow. Ivan moved his court to a fortified estate at Alexandrovskaya Sloboda, northeast of Moscow, and from there ran a personal military and police force, the oprichniki, that answered to him alone.
The oprichniki numbered around 6,000, with an inner circle of 300 acting as the tsar's personal bodyguard. Their emblems were a dog's head and a broom tied to the saddle, meant to signal that they would sniff out treason and sweep traitors away. In practice they functioned as both a private guard regiment and a secret police: confiscating boyar estates, exiling or executing suspected opponents, and, in the winter of 1570, carrying out a punitive campaign against the city of Novgorod over an alleged (and almost certainly fabricated) plot to defect to Lithuania. Death-toll estimates for the Novgorod massacre vary wildly across sources, from contemporary chronicle figures near 60,000 down to modern historians' estimates of roughly 2,000-3,000, reflecting how thin and unreliable the surviving records are.
The Oprichnina's military credibility collapsed the following year. In 1571 the Crimean Khan Devlet I Giray raided south Russia and burned Moscow itself, and the oprichnina's own regiments failed to defend the capital. When Devlet Giray returned in 1572 with a much larger force, Ivan fielded a combined army of oprichnina and zemshchina troops together under Prince Mikhail Vorotynsky, which crushed the Crimean horde at the Battle of Molodi that summer, a victory serious enough to end Crimean-Ottoman ambitions of pushing north into Russia for a generation. Weeks later, Ivan formally abolished the Oprichnina; afterward, simply speaking the word aloud became a punishable offense.
The Livonian War: a 25-year campaign that emptied the treasury
In 1558, Ivan invaded Livonia (roughly modern Estonia and Latvia), hoping to seize a foothold on the Baltic Sea while the Livonian Order was weak. The opening years went well: Russian forces took Narva and Dorpat and besieged Reval, and some Baltic peasants reportedly welcomed the Russians as liberation from German landowning control.
The war dragged on for a quarter-century and drew in Poland-Lithuania, Denmark-Norway, and Sweden, all with their own claims on Livonia. The turning point came in 1578, when a combined Polish-Lithuanian and Swedish force inflicted Ivan's first serious defeat of the war at the Battle of Wenden; Swedish troops under Pontus De la Gardie then cleared most of Russian-held Estonia and captured Narva itself in 1581. Exhausted and unable to sustain the fight on multiple fronts, Russia signed the Truce of Yam-Zapolsky with Poland-Lithuania on January 15, 1582, surrendering its Lithuanian conquests and renouncing all claims to Livonia; a separate settlement ceded Estonia and the Gulf of Finland coast to Sweden. Ivan ended the war having spent his kingdom's resources for twenty-five years and gained no Baltic coastline at all.
In his own words
Ivan's letters to the boyar-turned-defector Prince Andrei Kurbsky, written after Kurbsky fled to Lithuania in 1564, are among the few places his own reasoning for centralizing military and political power survives in his own voice. Defending unchecked tsarist authority against boyar objection, Ivan wrote that "the Russian autocracy, the autocrats themselves have from the beginning ruled all their dominions, and not the boyars and not the grandees", the same logic that justified bypassing the boyar-led levies with a tsar-controlled corps like the streltsy, and later the oprichnina itself. Of Kurbsky's defection to the enemy camp, Ivan wrote that he had, "traitorously, like a dog," gone over "to the enemies of Christianity", the same dog imagery the oprichniki would soon wear on their saddles as a symbol of hunting down traitors.