Oprichniki

The Oprichniki are Ivan’s private army in Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible. Their staged song and dance turns political violence into a spectacle of enjoyment, while the scene’s reversal of rank makes them central to the film’s portrayal of the obscene underside of Stalinist power.

Identity and Filmic Role

The film presents the Oprichniki as Ivan’s private army, not simply as background attendants: they perform the central musical number in the hall scene in the second part. Their collective performance joins entertainment to the exercise of political power, making them the scene’s chorus as well as its agents of menace.

The Hall Performance

The hall sequence, the only reel in color in the second part and the penultimate reel of the film, stages a carnivalesque inversion of ordinary hierarchy. Ivan proclaims the idiot Vladimir a new Tsar, supplies him with imperial insignia, then prostrates himself before him and kisses his hand. The Oprichniki’s number unfolds within this temporarily reversed order, where power is at once displayed and made ridiculous.

Its staging is deliberately unrealistic, blending Hollywood musical conventions with Japanese theater. The song first evokes boyars passing golden goblets around a lavish meal; the chorus presses for what comes next, and a solo Oprichnik answers with a call for the axes to strike. The sequence makes the group’s cheerful musical form inseparable from political liquidation: pleasure and violence occupy the same performance.

Political Meaning and Unfilmed Extension

For the book’s reading of the film, this performance marks a shift from the liberating destructive energy associated with Leninism to the obscene underside of the Law under Stalinism. The Oprichniki embody that change through a song in which violence is not presented as a rupture of political order but as part of its charged, theatrical underside. Because the film was shot in 1944, the scene also invites comparison with the carnivalesque character of the Stalinist purges.

A similar nocturnal feast appears in the scenario for the unfilmed third part. Ivan and the Oprichniki hold a drinking gathering presented as a black Mass, wearing black monastic robes over their ordinary clothes. Though this sequence was never shot, it extends the film’s association of the Oprichniki with sacrilegious ritual and the concealed, obscene dimension of political authority.