Ivan Khovanskii

Date of birth unknown; died Sept. 17 (27), 1682, in the village of Vozdvizhenskoe, in what is now Moscow Oblast. Prince; Russian political and military figure.

A member of the Gediminovich family, Khovanskii began his service in the reign of Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov. In 1636 he became a stol’nik (officer in the tsar’s court). Between the 1650’s and the 1670’s, Khovanskii was voevoda (military governor) in Tula, Iablonovo, Viaz’ma, Mogilev, Pskov, and Novgorod and took part in wars against Poland, Sweden, and the Ottoman Empire. In the 1660’s he headed the Iamskoi Prikaz (the office in charge of the mails and through carriage). Khovanskii attained the rank of boyar in 1659. He tried to bring an end to the Moscow Uprising of 1662 through suasion. After the uprising had been crushed, he presided over the main investigative commission in the village of Kolomenskoe; the commission conducted a brutal investigation of the incident. Khovanskii was placed at the head of the Streletskii Prikaz (the office in charge of the strel’tsy [semiprofessional musketeers]) during the Moscow Uprising of 1682. Relying on the strel’tsy in his struggle for power, he pitted himself against the ruling feudal elite. Khovanskii was executed on orders from Sofia Alekseevna.