Before Putin, the Soviet Union, Stalin, and Lenin, Russia was governed by the Tsars, an eccentric bunch of emperors and empresses who ruled the Slavic realm with an iron grip for nearly 400 years. As figureheads with unlimited power, and whose every word was tinged with absolute authority, it comes as no surprise that Russian kings and queens had a tendency to abuse their position, often in spectacularly gruesome ways.

Today we're going to talk about tsars like Peter the Great, Nicolas II, Ivan the Terrible and Anna Ivanova .

No other sovereigns in history left in their wake such misery as the Russian Tsars, who showcased the very worst of humanity. It’s amazing to think that their gory and often imaginative atrocities, like something you might see in a Saw movie, were actually real-life events. We should count ourselves lucky then, that we live in relative comfort, and that we aren’t confined to a Tsarist jail cell preparing ourselves for a bizarre, and probably slow, execution at the hands of a bloodthirsty dictator.