“Vanya, listen, do you know who Ivan the Terrible is? You share his name. Have they taught you about him in school yet?”

I am speaking to my friend’s 11-year-old son, whose full name in Russian is also Ivan. We’re sitting in the hallway of a small apartment in the suburbs of Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth largest city, which straddles the border of Europe and Asia. Together, Vanya and I are slowly assembling a chair for his younger brother, who shares his first name with another famous Russian tsar, Peter the Great.

“Yes,” Vanya says, still concentrated on screwing in the chair’s leg. “He killed his own son because he had problems with his son’s wife. Was it with his wife? I don’t remember. Anyways, he killed his son.”

Ivan the Terrible’s murder of his son is the single most famous act of domestic violence in Russia’s history. It inspired one of Russia’s most famous paintings, has been immortalized by Soviet cinema and was taught to generations of Russian schoolchildren.