He proposed to do so by promoting a wholesale immigration into his tsardom of master-workmen and skilled artificers.
Ivan had stopped at Tver, to murder St Philip, while on his way to destroy the second wealthiest city in his tsardom - Great Novgorod.
The complete suppression of these small moribund states and the creation of the autocratic tsardom of Muscovy were the work of Ivan III., surnamed the Great, his son Basil and his grandson Ivan IV., commonly known as Ivan the Terrible, whose united reigns cover a period of 122 years (1462-1584).
Here lay the principality of Lithuania and beyond it the kingdom of Poland, two loosely conglomerated states which had been created by the Piast and Gedymin dynasties in pretty much the same way as the tsardom of Muscovy had been created by the descendants of Rurik.
Though severely tried by disappointments and defeats he never lost hope, and when he died in 1584 he was preparing to renew the struggle and endeavouring to form for that purpose an alliance with England; his great idea, however, was not to be realized till more than a century later, and meanwhile the tsardom of Muscovy had to pass through a severe internal crisis in which its existence was seriously endangered.