Fedor Ivanovich and Boris Godunov (1584-1605)
A. P. PAYLOY
At the end of Ivan the Terrible's reign Russia experienced an acute political, social and economic crisis. The protracted Livonian war and natural disasters had brought the economic life of the country to a complete collapse. The Novgorod tax cadastres depict a catastrophic decline in the population by the beginning of the 1580s (by almost 80 per cent) and the neglect of arable land (the proportion of untilled land was more than 90 per cent).[1] The crisis affected not only the north-west but the entire territory of Russia.[2] The economic decline had a deleterious effect on the military capability of the army - many noblemen were unable to provide service from their devastated estates. After Groznyi's death the Polish King Stefan Batory nurtured plans to invade Russia. He counted on finding support in some circles of Russian society. When M. I. Golovin defected to Lithuania he assured the king that he would not encounter any serious resistance in Russia. The country faced a real threat of foreign invasion and internal unrest.
The situation was compounded by a profound crisis in the ruling elites. A power struggle began immediately after the death of Tsar Ivan. On the very night of his death (the night of 18/19 March 1584) conflicts occurred in the duma, as a result of which Tsarevich Dmitrii's kinsmen, the Nagois, were arrested and banished from court.[3] Shortly afterwards Tsarevich Dmitrii was dispatched to his apanage at Uglich. Groznyi's elder son Fedor was elevated to the throne. A sickly and weak-willed individual, he was not capable of ruling independently and, according to contemporaries, he found the performance even of formal court ceremonies to be a burden. The fate of the throne and the state lay in the hands of competing boyar groupings. The viability of Groznyi's protracted efforts to establish 'autocratism' was to be put to the test. In the opinion of S. F. Platonov, the struggle among the elites at the beginning of Tsar Fedor's reign amounted only to simple conflicts for influence at court.[4]But this point of view does not take into account all the complexity and gravity of the situation. At such a time the future political development of the country was in question. At the beginning of Tsar Fedor's reign there were two diametrically opposed positions in the political struggle. At one extreme there stood the upper tier of the hereditary princely aristocracy. The logic of the political struggle created an alliance between the former oprichnina ('court') magnates, the Shuiskii princes, and some former zemshchina men - the Princes Mstislavskii, Vorotynskii, Kurakin and Golitsyn. These boyars could lay claim to the role of the tsar's leading counsellors on the basis of their exclusively eminent lineage rather than of court favouritism. It seems that the political aim of this group was to limit the tsar's power in favour of the premier princely aristocracy. It is not surprising that these 'princelings' should have displayed open sympathy for the system in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita), where the king was elected and his power depended on the will of the great magnates.[5]
The social and political antithesis of this princely grouping were the lowborn oprichnina ('court') nobles who were concerned with preserving the rights and privileges they had enjoyed in Groznyi's lifetime. At the beginning of April 1584 the most energetic of these men - B. Ia. Bel'skii - attempted to seize power and to force the tsar to continue the oprichnina policy. Bel'skii's venture was unsuccessful, and the former favourite was forced into 'honourable exile' as governor of Nizhnii Novgorod. With Bel'skii's removal the position of the former 'court' nobles was seriously undermined.
Neither the 'princely' nor the 'oprichnina' faction managed to gain the upper hand in the political struggle. A third political force, headed by the Godunovs and the Romanovs, moved to the fore and emerged victorious. By the summer of 1584 these two clans had effected a rapprochement. They concluded a 'testamentary alliance of friendship' in which the ageing boyar Nikita Romanovich Iur'ev, Tsar Fedor's uncle on his mother's side, entrusted the guardianship of his young sons - the Nikitich Romanov brothers - to the tsar's brother-in- law, Boris Godunov. This agreement was an advantageous one for Godunov. In all probability it was largely as a result of the support of N. R. Iur'ev that Boris obtained the high boyaral rank of equerry by the time of the new tsar's coronation (31 May 1584). From then onwards the Godunovs' ascent was meteoric. By the summer of 1584 there were already five members of the clan in the duma. In Vienna in November 1584 Luka Novosil'tsev, the Russian ambassador to the Holy Roman Empire, referred to Boris Godunov as 'the ruler of the land, a great and gracious lord'.[6] Thus in the summer of 1584 Godunov emerged from the shadows and was officially recognised as the ruler of the state and de facto regent for Tsar Fedor. For the next twenty years, until his death, he was the central political figure in Muscovy
The regency of Boris Godunov
Boris grasped the reins of government at an extremely difficult time. Ivan Groznyi had left a burdensome legacy for his successors, and it was necessary to lead the country out of a profound political and economic crisis.
One of the most immediate tasks was to overcome the division in the ruling elite and restore the weakened authority of central government. Godunov was unable to resolve this problem fully as long as the Shuiskiis and their supporters stood in his way. Once he had established himself in power, he conducted a decisive struggle against them. The first to suffer were the Shuiskiis' supporters - the Golovins, the Princes Kurakin, Golitsyn and Vorotynskii and the most senior duma boyar, Prince I. F. Mstislavskii. Then, at the end of 1586, came the turn of the Shuiskiis themselves. In May 1586 the Shuiskiis, with the backing of the head of the Russian Church, Metropolitan Dionisii, and of the Moscow townspeople, organised a petition in the name of the estates of the realm. It was addressed to Tsar Fedor, and begged him to divorce his childless wife, Irina Godunova. But the tsar rejected this proposition. Godunov was not at that time prepared to persecute the Shuiskiis directly. He waited for a more favourable opportunity and collected compromising information against them. The removal of the Shuiskiis occurred soon after the return (on 1 October 1586) of a Russian embassy from Poland, when Boris might have received confirmation of his suspicions that the Shuiskiis were in contact with Polish lords.[7] In the autumn of 1586 the Shuiskiis were banished from the capital, and in the following year they suffered severe persecution. The most prominent and active of them - Ivan Petrovich and Andrei Ivanovich - were killed in prison by their jailers, probably not without Godunov's knowledge.[8] Metropolitan Dionisii and Bishop Varlaam of Krutitsa were removed from their posts. The 'trading peasants' who had supported the Shuiskiis were disgraced and then executed.
The end of the 1580s was a major watershed in the political struggle which ended in the complete victory of Boris Godunov. Its main result was the defeat of the elite of the high-born 'princelings' and the removal of the low-born oprichnina guard from power.
Like Ivan the Terrible, Boris Godunov directed all his efforts towards strengthening the autocratic power of the tsar, subordinating all the various estates of the realm, and the princely-boyar elite in particular. But Godunov pursued this aim by different means. Contrary to widespread opinion, although he himself was a former oprichnik and the son-in-law of the notorious oprichnina leader Maliuta Skuratov, Boris was not opposed in principle to the princely elite as a whole. An examination of the composition of the boyar duma leads to a conclusion which is unexpected from the traditional point of view - throughout the entire period of Boris Godunov's rule, both as regent for Tsar Fedor and in his own reign, the highest-ranking princely-boyar elite clearly predominated in the duma.
1
4
S.F. Platonov,
5
B. N. Floria,