THE TIME OF TROUBLES
On Ivan’s death the country was slowly recovering from the disasters of the last twenty-five years of his reign. He had two surviving sons, the eldest Fyodor from Anastasiia and Dmitrii (born 1582) from his fourth wife, Mariia Nagaia. Fyodor, who appears to have been limited in both abilities and health, was married to Irina Godunov, the sister of Boris Godunov, a boyar who had risen from modest origins in the landholding class through the Oprichnina. With the accession of his brother-in-law to the throne, Boris was now in a position to become the dominant personality around the tsar. First, however, he had to get rid of powerful boyar rivals who saw their chance to restore their power at the court. Indeed at the beginning of Fyodor’s reign virtually every boyar clan that had suffered under Ivan returned to the duma if they had not already done so. Boris lost no time in marginalizing them one by one and forcing some into exile. His second problem was the presence of the tsarevich Dmitrii, for Fyodor and Irina had only a daughter who died in infancy. Boris imported doctors from the Netherlands to examine Irina, but to no avail. Thus after Fyodor’s death the throne would presumably pass to Dmitrii, but in 1591 he perished, supposedly because he accidentally stabbed himself with a toy sword while playing. This was the conclusion of the official investigation. Naturally the rumor persisted that Boris had secretly ordered him killed, and the mystery has remained unsolved to the present. Certainly Dmitrii’s death made possible all that came later.
In 1598 Tsar Fyodor died. His reign had been one of modest success under the guidance of Godunov. A short war with Sweden recovered the originally Russian territory on the Gulf of Finland lost in the Livonian war. This outcome produced no gains in Livonia itself, but at least Russia was back to the pre-1558 status quo. Godunov’s government also reinforced the standing of the church by convincing the Greek Orthodox patriarchs not only to recognize the autocephaly of the Russian church but also to give the Metropolitan of Moscow the title of Patriarch in 1588–9. In the long run, far more important, and indeed fateful, were the changes in Russian rural society. In spite of the opening of new lands in the south and a booming trade, Russia acquired a new and ominous institution, the serfdom of the peasantry. Virtually all peasants in central and northwestern Russia lost their personal freedom at the end of the sixteenth century and became the bondsmen of the landholding class, boyars and lesser gentry, as well as of the church. The details of the serf’s status were never defined in Russian law, other than by the provision that their owners might recover them if they fled. At first this right of the owner could be exercised only for a few years, but from 1649 it became perpetual. Other relations between master and serf were in the realm of custom. Peasants paid rent as they had before, in kind or in cash, but labor services also became for a time nearly universal. Fortunately for the peasants most landlords were far away, in the towns or even in Moscow itself, and only the great boyars could afford numerous stewards of their estates. The absence of resident masters left the village community to manage payments and services itself, as well as most other affairs. Nevertheless the serfs came under the thumb of the landlord whenever he chose to exercise his power. In the north and on the eastern and southern borders where there were few or no landholders, the peasants – some twenty-five percent of the Russian peasantry – remained free, but even there they were fearful of the future.
With Fyodor dead Boris was determined to take full power. The death of all the heirs of Ivan had extinguished the dynasty that had ruled since the time of Prince Vladimir of Kiev. There were other princes of the line of Rurik, but rather than work out the genealogy and find an heir, the Russian elite chose to elect a new tsar. The Patriarch called an Assembly of the Land that included the boyars, the senior clergy, and representatives from the provincial gentry, and the Moscow merchants. There were several possible candidates among the boyars, including the Romanov clan, prominent boyars for two centuries and the relatives of Ivan the Terrible’s first wife Anastasiia and Tsar Fyodor. Instead, Boris managed to garner enough support in the duma, the church, and other circles to support his own candidacy, and soon the Assembly of the Land proclaimed Boris Godunov the tsar of all Russia.
This was to prove a hollow victory. Among the first acts of Tsar Boris was to exile the Romanovs and their allies. He ordred Fyodor Nikitich, the senior Romanov, to take monastic vows, removing him from politics, and he also forced Fyodor’s wife to enter a convent. The duma soon consisted only of Boris’s relatives and clients and a few others too timid or cowed to resist. Perhaps Boris could have waited out the palace intrigues and eventually restored a more harmonious court, but he did not have the chance. In the early 1600s famine struck the land, which created hardship and unrest, and the free peasants and Cossacks of the southern border began to grow restive. Then a new element arrived with the person of Grishka Otrep’ev, a defrocked monk from a minor landholding family who claimed that he was the tsarevich Dmitrii miraculously preserved from death and had hidden since 1591. Otrep’ev had gone to Poland some years before and told his story there, convincing the powerful magnate Jerzy Mniszech of his prospects and receiving Mniszech’s daughter Marina in marriage. Otrep’ev collected an army of Polish nobles discontented with their own king and ready for adventure as they crossed into Russia at the end of 1604. At first he made little progress, other than inspiring some of the local peasantry and Cossacks to join him. Boris sent out an army to capture the pretender, but early in 1605 the commanders of the army went over to the False Dmitrii, as he was known thereafter. Boris still had plenty of resources on which to draw, but his sudden death changed everything. The way to Moscow was open, and Grishka Otrep’ev entered the Kremlin in June 1605, as Tsar Dmitrii with an entourage of Poles and the support of many of the Russian boyars as well as the Cossacks. The story of Boris would later inspire Pushkin and Mussorgsky to great artistic heights, but for contemporaries his reign inaugurated a decade and a half of upheaval and war – the Time of Troubles.
The Time of Troubles (smuta, or “confusion” in Russian) was the result of the acceleration and unusual violence of the factional battles at the tsar’s court after Ivan IV’s death combined with the rebellions of the Cossacks and peasants. These agrarian revolts centered along the southern border since the new settlers came primarily from villages in the interior where the peasantry had recently been enserfed. In the south the peasantry and Cossacks were still free but had reason to fear that serfdom would soon catch up with them. To make matters worse, many of the new gentry landholders in the south, settled there to provide cavalry on the border, were equally discontented, fearful of falling into the peasantry and convinced that state policy favored the boyars over them. These two conflicts at the top and bottom of Russian society were not the whole story of the Troubles, for the result of the initial events was a general collapse of order in Russian society. The central government lost control of the situation, and the provinces were left to themselves, some choosing to obey the governors sent from Moscow, some not. The governors soon found that even with some local support they were on their own, improvising matters as best they could. Large numbers of armed bands began to roam the country, including some Poles and Ukrainians who had come to Russia with Dmitrii and some Russian Cossacks, many of them just local bandits. The various short-lived governments in Moscow tried to put together a viable army to control the situation, but to no avail.