In some other spheres, Dmitrii's policies were more innovative. He planned to promote science and education, and introduced new types of military training for his troops. He sought to raise Russia's international prestige by adopting the title 'tsesar' (emperor). In his foreign policy he at first gave some indications that he was willing to support Poland in its war against Sweden, but he subsequently abandoned this scheme in favour of an ambitious plan to launch a crusade against the Crimean Tatars and the Turks, a project which was encouraged by the Pope and King Sigismund. Before the campaign could be launched, however, the pretender was overthrown and killed.
After Dmitrii's coronation, the initial doubts about his identity seemed to have been appeased, and by the end of 1605 he was sufficiently confident of his position to pardon the Shuiskiis and permit them to return to the capital. There they soon resumed their plotting against him: some sources refer to a number of abortive assassination attempts in early 1606. In March, a conspiracy against Dmitrii was uncovered in the ranks of his own bodyguard of musketeers; the pretender himself incited the strel'tsy to tear the 'traitors' to pieces. After this episode, organised opposition appeared to subside; but the Shuiskiis and their allies were only biding their time.
Aspects of the new tsar's behaviour created favourable soil for his opponents. In spite of promises that he had made when he was a penniless fugitive in Poland, Dmitrii made no attempt in his short reign to convert Russia to Catholicism. He did, however, have Polish favourites, including his secretaries Jan and Stanislaw Buczynski; he was tolerant of non-Orthodox believers; and he disregarded many traditional court practices, adopting Western-style dress, and furbishing his new palace in the Kremlin in the latest Polish style. The main pretext for the conspirators' action against the 'heretical' tsar, however, was provided by his marriage to Marina Mniszech. The new tsar's choice of a foreign bride, who was unwilling to convert to Orthodoxy, antagonised many Russians; and the arrogant behaviour of Marina's Polish escort when they arrived in Moscow on 2 May 1606 played into the hands of the pretender's enemies. Early on the morning of 17 May, a week after Dmitrii's wedding, the conspirators raised the cry that the Poles were attacking the tsar. The Muscovites rushed to the Kremlin, and fell upon the hated foreigners. Meanwhile, the tsar was murdered by the assassins as he tried to escape from his apartment.
Two days after the pretender's death, Prince Vasilii Shuiskii was declared tsar. A senior member of the Suzdal' princely clan, Shuiskii had some claim to the throne on the basis of his Riurikid lineage; but the legitimacy of his 'election' as tsar was very dubious from the outset. Opposition to Shuiskii soon mobilised under the slogan of restoring Tsar Dmitrii - who, it was claimed, had not in fact perished in the uprising of 17 May - to the throne. The rumours about Dmitrii's escape from death were spread by his Russian supporters, and were of course welcomed by Marina Mniszech, who had been arrested along with her father and the Polish envoys to Moscow after her husband's death.
The Bolotnikov revolt
The main centre of opposition to Shuiskii was the town of Putivl', which had been an important base of support for the pretender in the course of his march towards Moscow in 1605. Immediately after his arrival in Putivl', Prince Grigorii Shakhovskoi, the new governor appointed by Shuiskii, defected to 'Tsar Dmitrii'; and many other towns in the Seversk region also refused to acknowledge Shuiskii as tsar. The belief that Dmitrii had escaped death - which served to legitimise the townspeople's rejection of Shuiskii - was not based only on rumours from Moscow. It was also strengthened by the actions of Michael Molchanov, one of Tsar Dmitrii's closest confidants, who had fled from the capital on the day of the pretender's murder. Molchanov rode to Putivl', where he promoted the idea that Dmitrii was still alive; from Putivl' he went to Sambor, in Poland - the home of the Mniszech family - where he began to play the role of the late tsar. He did not, however, appear in public as Dmitrii, probably because he bore no physical resemblance to the first pretender, who had been a familiar figure at Sambor.
At some time in the summer of 1606 a certain Ivan Isaevich Bolotnikov arrived in Putivl', claiming that he had met Tsar Dmitrii at Sambor and had been appointed by him as commander of his army. Bolotnikov was a former military bondsman and cossack who had been captured by the Turks and served as a galley-slave before escaping and returning to Russia through Poland. Shakhovskoi accepted his claims, and put him in charge of one of the two armies which marched from Putivl' towards Moscow by separate routes in the autumn of 1606. The leaders ofthe second army were of higher social status than Bolotnikov: it was commanded by the petty nobleman Istoma Pashkov, and it was later joined by the servicemen of Riazan' under Prokopii Liapunov. At the beginning of November the two armies joined forces at Kolomenskoe, on the outskirts of Moscow, and began to besiege the capital.
The siege lasted for about a month. The anti-Shuiskii forces sent various messages to the inhabitants of the city. Pashkov, who was the first to reach Moscow, appealed to the inhabitants to surrender, and to hand over the Shuiskiis as traitors to Tsar Dmitrii. Some sources suggest that later, after Bolotnikov's arrival, the besiegers called on the lower classes in the capital to rise up against the rich. Patriarch Germogen claimed that the rebels distributed leaflets inciting bond-slaves to kill their masters, and promising them their wives and lands; encouraged the city's 'rogues' to kill the merchants and seize their property; and promised high court ranks to those who joined them.[350] Some scholars doubt, however, whether Germogen's pro-Shuiskii propaganda accurately reflected the rebels' appeals;[351] even if it did, the insurgents' programme - with its promises of landed estates and noble ranks - hardly amounted to the call for an 'anti-feudal' social revolution which the older historiography detected in it. In spite of the fears which were aroused among the upper classes, no popular uprising materialised in the capital -perhaps because Shuiskii managed to persuade the Muscovites that the rebels held them collectively responsible for the events of 17 May, and planned to massacre them all. The insurgents' position was also weakened by their inability to produce
Tsar Dmitrii in person. Finally, divisions within the besiegers' camp led to the defection of Liapunov and Pashkov to Shuiskii's side: it is unclear whether these divisions reflected purely personal rivalries among the commanders, or whether social tensions also played a part. On 2 December, Tsar Vasilii's troops launched an attack on the besieging forces. Pashkov and his men deserted to Shuiskii in the course of the battle, and Bolotnikov retreated to Kaluga with the remains of the rebel army, still in fairly good order. In spite of this military defeat, the revolt continued across an extensive swathe of territory from the south-west frontier to the Volga basin.
Another pretender had appeared on the Volga even before the death of the First False Dmitrii. In the spring of 1606 a young cossack called Il'ia Korovin was chosen by a band of Terek cossacks to play the part of 'Tsarevich Peter', a non-existent son of Tsar Fedor Ivanovich. Although any real son of Tsar Fedor's would have had a better claim to the throne than Dmitrii ofUglich, the cossacks do not seem to have wanted to replace Dmitrii with Peter; they always acted in Dmitrii's name. They evidently felt that they had not been adequately rewarded for their services to Dmitrii, but they blamed the boyars for this, rather than the tsar.[352] Peter's pretence was clearly modelled on that of Dmitrii; its function, however, was not to overthrow the tsar, but rather to enhance the cossacks' bid to persuade him to grant them a suitable reward. Peter and his supporters rampaged upriver, looting merchant ships as they went; but when they heard of Dmitrii's overthrow and murder, they retreated back down the Volga, before crossing over to the rivers Don and Donets. Around November i606 they moved to Putivl' at the invitation of Prince Grigorii Shakhovskoi, who was still holding the town for Bolotnikov. Here Peter launched a reign of terror against 'traitors to Tsar Dmitrii': he ordered the execution of many noblemen who had been captured by the insurgents during their march on Moscow and were imprisoned at Putivl'. In February 1607 Peter moved his troops from Putivl' to Tula in order to offer support to Bolotnikov, who was besieged by Shuiskii's army in nearby Kaluga. In May, Bolotnikov managed to break out of Kaluga and join Peter's forces in Tula.
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