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Repin said he wanted power looking at what it has just done. The 1913 knife went for the faces first; Repin, in his seventies, painted them back.

The quarrel began, by the account the papal envoy collected at the Russian court, with a dress. In November 1581, at the fortified residence of Alexandrova Sloboda, Ivan the Terrible came upon his pregnant daughter-in-law dressed too lightly for his standards of modesty and beat her; she miscarried. His son and heir, the tsarevich Ivan, 27 and until that week his father's companion in everything including the massacres, confronted him. The old tsar, who went everywhere with an iron-tipped staff, swung it at the end of the argument and caught his son at the temple. The younger Ivan died a few days later, on the 19th, with his father howling at the bedside; witnesses said the tsar beat his own head against the coffin at the funeral. Whether it happened exactly so is still fought over; what is documented is the tsar's letter admitting he had struck him, the sudden grants to monasteries for prayers for the boy's soul, and the succession that now ran through Feodor, the pious, feeble second son. Feodor died childless in 1598; the seven-century dynasty of Rurik died with him; and the state fell into the 15 years of famine, impostors, and civil war Russians still call the Time of Troubles. Repin painted the moment 300 years later, and everyone understood it was not really about 1581. He began it after watching the public hangings of the revolutionaries who had assassinated Alexander II in 1881, wanting, he wrote, a subject where power looks at what it has just done. He gave the son the calm of the already dying and gave the father everything else: the embrace that comes too late, the hand pressed uselessly over the wound, and the eyes, which are the actual subject of the painting. The picture was banned within months of its 1885 debut, the first painting in Russia's history formally forbidden by the censorship; the collector Tretyakov hung it anyway once the ban lapsed. In 1913 a disturbed icon painter slashed both faces with a knife, shouting that there had been enough blood, and the elderly Repin repainted them; the museum's curator threw himself under a train. In 2018 a drunk visitor smashed the case with a security pole and tore the canvas in three places, explaining that the painting insulted a slandered tsar; the restoration took years, and the picture now hangs behind armored glass in the Tretyakov. Russian nationalists still petition to have it removed, on the argument that the killing is unproven. No one has ever petitioned to remove the eyes.