This is the second installment of a three-part epic biopic of Russian Czar Ivan Grozny that Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein was commissioned to make at the command of Josef Stalin. The epic's production was halted before the third part could be filmed due to producer unhappiness with Eisenstein's incorporation of forbidden experimental filmmaking techniques into the material, which is more noticeable in this section than in the first. As it was, this second portion was not permitted to be screened until the deaths of Eisenstein and Stalin, as well as a shift in the attitudes of later Soviet leaders. As Ivan the Terrible strives to solidify his power through the establishment of a personal army, his political adversaries, the Russian boyars, plot his assassination.