In the spring of 1885, visitor reactions at the 13th Travelling Art Exhibition in St. Petersburg grew so intense that guards struggled to keep crowds back from a single canvas. The painting, completed by Ilya Repin after two years of relentless studio work, depicted Tsar Ivan IV clutching his dying son, Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich, following a fatal blow struck in a fit of rage on November 16, 1581. Watching viewers weep and recoil before the canvas, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod and top advisor to Tsar Alexander III, wrote a urgent letter to the monarch to demand its removal.
"They began to send me letters from different quarters, indicating that at the Mobile Exhibition there was a painting on display that offended many people's moral sense: Ivan the Terrible with his murdered son," Pobedonostsev reported to Alexander III. "Today I saw this picture and could not look at it without disgust. It's difficult to understand what kind of thought the artist is asking when telling exactly such moments in all reality... It's impossible to name the painting historical, because this moment... is purely fantastic."
Tsar Alexander III agreed with Pobedonostsev. On April 1, 1885, the imperial government issued an official ban prohibiting the exhibition of Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on November 16, 1581, making Repin's work the first painting officially censored in the history of the Russian Empire. Collector Pavel Tretyakov, who had purchased the 199.5 cm by 254 cm canvas directly from Repin for 14,500 rubles, was forbidden from showing it to visitors or hanging it in his gallery rooms. The ban lasted three months until painter Alexey Bogolyubov petitioned imperial court officials, securing permission to lift the restriction on July 11, 1885.
The 1913 Knife Attack and the Secret Night Restoration
On January 16, 1913, twenty-eight years after the imperial censorship ban, violence struck the painting directly. A 29-year-old Old Believer icon painter named Abram Balashov walked into room 9 of Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery, pulled a cobbler's knife from his coat, and lunged at the canvas. Balashov slashed three vertical gashes through the center of the painting, striking directly across the faces of both the Tsar and his son while screaming, "Enough blood! Down with blood!"
The assault sent shockwaves through Moscow's art community. Upon learning that the masterpiece had been mutilated under his watch, Tretyakov Gallery curator Georgy Khruslov walked to the Sukhanovo railway station and threw himself under a moving train. Meanwhile, 68-year-old Ilya Repin travelled to Moscow from his home in Kuokkala, Finland, to inspect the damage and repair his work.
When 68-year-old Ilya Repin arrived from Kuokkala to repair his damaged masterpiece, he began altering the Tsar's facial expression with a fresh coat of gray-violet oil paint; however, gallery director Igor Grabar immediately recognized that Repin's late-period palette clashed with the 1885 original, prompting Grabar to secretly scrub away the master's wet paint using kerosene before re-toning the slashes with reversible watercolors.
The 2018 Iron Pole Attack and the Capsule Return
For more than a century, Grabar's watercolor restoration held the canvas intact. Then, on May 25, 2018, five minutes before the Tretyakov Gallery closed for the evening, 37-year-old visitor Igor Podporin breached the gallery barriers. Podporin grabbed a heavy iron security stanchion used to hold ropes, pushed past museum guards, and slammed the metal pole into the protective glass covering Repin's painting. The glass shattered, cutting through the canvas in three separate places across the central body of the young prince, though the faces and hands were spared.
Police officers detained Podporin at the scene. In his initial recorded interrogation, Podporin attributed his actions to alcohol consumed inside the museum building: "I came to look at the painting. I wanted to leave, but then I went to the buffet and drank 100 grams of vodka. I don't drink vodka and it got to me."
By the time his trial opened in Moscow district court, Podporin abandoned his explanation about alcohol and offered an ideological motive instead. "The painting is a lie," Podporin declared from the courtroom dock. "Ivan the Terrible is a saint, and showing him as a murderer offends Orthodox believers." In April 2019, a judge sentenced Podporin to two and a half years in a general-regime penal colony for damaging an item of cultural heritage.
Following the attack, a conservation team led by chief restorer Alexandra Orlovskaya spent four years restoring the canvas. Restorers re-aligned individual linen threads under microscopic magnification, removed discolored varnish layers applied in 1913, and mounted the canvas onto a climate-controlled backing table. The Tretyakov Gallery returned Repin's masterpiece to public display inside a custom-engineered bulletproof glass capsule equipped with climate and vibration sensors.
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