The death of Vassili transmitted the crown to his only son, Ivan, an infant but three years of age.  By the will of the dying monarch, the regency, during the minority of the child, was placed in the hands of the youthful mother, the princess Helene.  The brothers of Vassili and twenty nobles of distinction were appointed as counselors for the queen regent.  Two men, however, in concert with Helene, soon took the reins of government into their own hands.  One of these was a sturdy, ambitious old noble, Michel Glinsky, an uncle of Helene; the other was a young and handsome prince, Ivan Telennef, who was suspected of tender liaisons with his royal mistress.

The first act of the new government was to assemble all the higher clergy in the church of the Assumption, where the metropolitan bishop gave his benediction to the child destined to reign over Russia, and who was there declared to be accountable to God only for his actions.  At the same time embassadors were sent to all the courts of Europe to announce the death of Vassili and the accession of Ivan IV. to the throne.

But a week passed after these ceremonies ere the prince Youri, one of the brothers of Vassili, was arrested, charged with conspiracy to wrest the crown from his young nephew.  He was thrown into prison, where he was left to perish by the slow torture of starvation.  This severity excited great terror in Moscow.  The Russians, ever strongly attached to their sovereigns, now found themselves under the reign of an oligarchy which they detested.  Conspiracies and rumors of conspiracies agitated the court.  Many were arrested upon suspicion alone, and, cruelly chained, were thrown into dungeons.  Michel Glinsky, indignant at the shameful intimacy evidently existing between Helene and Telennef, ventured to remonstrate with the regent boldly and earnestly, assuring her that the eyes of the court were scrutinizing her conduct, and that such vice, disgraceful anywhere, was peculiarly hideous upon a throne, where all looked for examples of virtue.  The audacious noble, though president of the council, was immediately arrested under an accusation of treason, and was thrown into a dungeon, where, soon after, he was assassinated.  A reign of terror now commenced, and imprisonment and death awaited all those who undertook in any way to thwart the plans of Helene and Telennef.

Andre, the youngest of the brothers of Vassili, a man of feeble character, now alone remained of the royal princes at court.  He was nominally the tutor of his nephew, the young emperor, Ivan IV., and though a prominent member of the council which Vassili had established, he had no influence in the government which had been grasped so energetically and despotically by Helene and her paramour Telennef.  At length Andre, trembling for his own life, timidly raised the banners of revolt, and gathered quite an army around him.  But he had no energy to conduct a war.  He was speedily taken, and, loaded with chains, was thrown into a dungeon, where, after a few weeks of most cruel deprivations, he miserably perished.  Thirty of the lords, implicated with him in the rebellion, were hung upon the trees around Novgorod.  Many others were put to torture and perished on the rack.  Helene, surrendering herself to the dominion of guilty love, developed the ferocity of a tigress.