The reign of “Tsar Dmitrii” was short. Within a year the populace of Moscow rebelled and stormed the Kremlin, tearing the pretender to pieces and killing many of his followers. They burned his body and shot the remains out of a cannon pointed at Poland. Marina saved her life by hiding under the skirts of one of her ladies in waiting, but she was soon captured. Prince Vasilii Shuiskii and other boyars were behind the riot, and Vasilii himself ascended the throne in May 1606. Vasilii Shuiskii’s seizure of the crown with the support of only a small group of boyars only worsened the chaos, for in opposition a vast peasant rebellion enveloped the south of the country and new pretenders arose. After Vasilii managed to defeat the peasants the next year, the “thief of Tushino,” another pretender, took up residence in the village of that name west of Moscow and besieged the capital. Marina Mniszech and her father turned up in the Tushino camp and pretended to recognize him as the true Tsar Dmitrii once again having been miraculously saved from death. The thief of Tushino was no longer just a peasant rebel, for he had the support of several Polish regiments and had attracted a number of Russian boyars to his camp. The elite had split once again, and to make matters worse King Sigismund of Poland appeared before Smolensk with a great army. In desperation Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii turned to Sweden, making a treaty in 1609 that gave him the mercenary army he wanted although under Swedish command, but ceded the Russian territory on the Gulf of Finland to his new ally. The Poles defeated the Russians and the Swedish mercenary army, which then went over to Sigismund. Shuiskii’s regime collapsed in 1610 and seven of the boyars formed an interim government in Moscow. At this point many of the boyars and the gentry, realizing Poland’s strength, decided to support the candidacy of Sigismund’s son Wladyslaw for the Russian throne. Negotiations with the King of Poland grew increasingly difficult for the Russian boyars and some began to resist his conditions. Sigismund responded by throwing them in prison. The Polish army occupied Moscow, while the surrounding anarchy reached its nadir. The King’s army only added its forces to the already numerous Polish bands of soldiers who roamed the countryside, competing for booty with ever more Russian Cossacks, peasant rebels, and simple bandits. For the population it was difficult to tell these bands apart, as their aims and methods were essentially the same. In many areas the inhabitants fled to the forests or farther away looking for safety.
Some areas of the country resisted the Polish-sponsored regime. The Trinity Monastery endured months of siege rather than recognize the new order in Moscow. The Volga and the North began to rally with the encouragement of the church. In Nizhnii Novgorod and elsewhere the merchant Kuzma Minin and the local gentry formed a volunteer army and provisional government. By the summer of 1612 the army, under the command of Prince Dmitrii Pozharskii, was strong enough to move toward Moscow and in October they defeated the Poles before the city wall. Soon they were able to enter the Kremlin, and while war and anarchy still raged, the leaders of the army, the remaining boyars and higher clergy called an Assembly of the Land to choose a new tsar. Once again they rejected the dynastic principle in favor of the consensus of the elite and the population as a whole. The Cossacks were particularly vocal, and the choice fell on the sixteen-year-old Michael Romanov, the son of Boris Godunov’s erstwhile enemy Fyodor Romanov, who had become the monk Filaret. Tsar Michael was crowned in July of 1613. As his father Filaret was in prison in Poland, the leadership of the new government fell to Michael’s mother, the nun Marfa, and her relatives, favorites, and the boyars who had finally come to support Minin and Pozharskii. Five more years were necessary to defeat the Poles and expel the Swedes from Novgorod and the northwest. In the south rebellion only slowly receded. The first false Dmitrii’s wife, Marina, took up with the Cossack chieftain Ivan Zarutskii and the two terrorized the lower Volga region for years until the new tsar’s army finally defeated them and executed Zarutskii. Marina soon died in prison. Russian society had been smashed, Smolensk lost to Poland, and the Russian coast of the Gulf of Finland ceded to Sweden at Stolbovo in 1617. Huge areas were devastated and depopulated. The Troubles, however, were over, and a new era began.
1 From okolo (around, about); that is, someone “around” the person of the prince.
2 From old Russian oprich’, meaning “separate” or “apart from.”
4 Consolidation and Revolt
The end of the Time of Troubles brought peace to Russia and a new dynasty of tsars, one that would remain on the throne until 1917. The decades that followed the Troubles saw the restoration of the social and political order that had existed before, so that Russia looked very much the same as it had on the day that the Assembly of the Land elected Boris Godunov tsar. Yet under the surface of restored customs and institutions, earlier trends gathered speed and new developments appeared. Serfdom provided a rigid framework that determined the life of most Russians and slowed, but did not preclude, economic changes and growth. At the other end of Russian society, at the court and among the higher clergy, shifts in religious sentiment and cultural changes were taking place that would have far-reaching effects.
Rapid population growth meant greater prosperity and also made it possible for Russia to absorb and preserve the new acquisitions in Siberia and on the southern steppes. Growing integration into the burgeoning European markets meant wealth for merchants and townsmen. The rebuilding of the government was not limited to the restoration of the old system and old institutions. The creaky apparatus of the Moscow offices of state managed more or less to maintain control over a huge area and an unruly population. Control, in the Russian context, was always a relative matter, for this was also the “rebellious” century of Russian history: with not just the Troubles but urban riots in Moscow and elsewhere, the first great Cossack and peasant revolt of the legendary Stenka Razin, and the politically crucial revolts of the musketeers at the end of the century. Each time, however, the authorities eventually restored order and, after 1613, the state did not collapse.
In the long run, more important even than economic growth or political success were the cultural changes. These are difficult to describe, for they lack the drama of the later transformation under Peter, and they were all still within the limits of a predominantly Orthodox culture. These changes within Orthodoxy were a response to Russian religious, social, and political needs, but they came by way of close interaction with the Orthodox church of Kiev, with mainly Ukrainian monks and clergy and the books and new ideas they brought to Moscow. For half a century, from the 1630s to the 1690s, Kiev was a major center of influence on Russian thought and life. At the same time, political events in Poland – the revolt of the Ukrainian Cossacks – brought Russia into war with Poland and ultimately changed the political balance in Eastern Europe in Russia’s favor. For most of the seventeenth century the politics and culture of Poland and its peoples were crucial to Russian affairs.