Mocking the Corpse of Ivan Miloslavsky
1911
On 4 March 1697 the participants in the plot by Ivan Tsykler, the lieutenant-colonel in the streltsy, were quartered in the village of Preobrazhenskoye near Moscow, and the executions were accompanied by preparations that were very typical of Peter’s character. On the eve of the event the body of the recently-deceased uncle of Tsarevna Sophia, Ivan Miloslavsky, who had been ill-disposed towards Peter, was removed from its grave and brought to the place of execution on pigs. The coffin was placed beside scaffold and the blood of the victims dripped onto Miloslavsky’s corpse. Although such a savage act did not fit in well with the general trend of Peter’s actions, it was a historical fact.
Gavriil Gorelov’s painting Mocking the Corpse of Ivan Miloslavsky was painted in 1911 and sent to an international exhibition in Rome. Although such authoritative figures as Ilya Repin spoke positively about the work, the Russian government decided to remove it from the exhibition since in his picture Gorelov was shaking the long-established and officially propagated personality cult of Russia’s great reformer.