The overall image Muscovy projected to the world was that of a semi-barbaric and insular people and state, at once arrogantly self-assured as the sole bearer of true Christianity, yet rife with ignorance, superstition, and immorality in everyday life. One visitor to the capital summed up his impressions in outrageous rhyme:
Churches, icons, crosses, bells,
Painted whores and garlic smells,
Vice and vodka everyplace –
This is Moscow’s daily face.
To loiter in the market air,
To bathe in common, bodies bare,
To sleep by day and gorge by night,
To belch and fart is their delight.
Thieving, murdering, fornication
Are so common in this nation,
No one thinks a brow to raise –
Such are Moscow’s sordid days.46
Such attacks on the nation’s character, however, slighted the genuine religiosity of the folk, and ignored the belated but genuine renaissance that had been taking place below the coarsened surface of Russia’s everyday world. In ways unique and uniquely promising to its development, Western cultural influences through trade and other contacts had begun to make themselves felt, and these combined with Russia’s own rich Byzantine heritage might have brought about an awakening more natural and harmonious than the one Russia would later endure. Such embryonic currents, however, were destined to be overwhelmed by the bloody legacies of the immediate past. The experimental tyrannies of Ivan the Terrible had divided the nation in two “as with an axe.”47 The social enmities he had sown throughout the land would long survive him, and as if to ensure that the harvest of sorrow would be full, he had doomed his dynasty in 1582 by killing his eldest son in a rage. Upon his own death in 1584, he was therefore succeeded by another son, Fyodor, an absent-minded and reluctant monarch who relied heavily on the mighty boyars appointed to be his guardians, and whose incapacities were a clear temptation to plots. A power struggle ensued, and the dominant figure to emerge behind the throne was Boris Godunov, a noble of Tatar origin, whose sister was Fyodor’s wife. Before long he was universally recognized as Lord Protector (as the English called him) and de facto head of state.
Godunov proved a man of tremendous ability. Despite the numerous inherited miseries he faced, under his regency trade prospered, revenue increased, taxes were reduced, quiet and peace returned, and people seemed to find “consolation after the sorrows of the past.”48 Fugitive peasants drifted back to their homesteads, more arable land came under cultivation, grain prices fell, and large surpluses were even recorded in granaries. Energetic building reflected the new economic growth, with the construction of stone walls around Moscow and Smolensk, the erection of many churches, expanded port facilities at Arkhangelsk, and the completion of the famed Ivan the Great Belltower in the Kremlin, which reached upward in three tapering octagonal tiers.
Godunov also made headway against the nomads in the southern steppes (between Russia and the Crimea), establishing a series of important new fortified towns; he recovered territory lost to Sweden during the Livonian War, and in Siberia pushed the conquest eastward from the Ob.
Indeed, Godunov seemed destined for national adulation, and upon Fyodor’s death without heir in 1598 he was offered the crown. Like Shakespeare’s Caesar he declined it thrice, to demonstrate the inevitability of his elevation, and likewise looked to the masses for his support. At his coronation, he ostentatiously declared: “As God is my witness, there will not be a poor man in my tsardom!”49 and tore the jeweled collar from his gown. Envious nobles called him Rabotsar – the “Tsar of slaves.”
After Godunov was crowned in the Cathedral of the Dormition on September 1, 1598, favors were announced, officials of the army and administration received a substantial salary increase, merchants were granted tax breaks, and even the natives of Western Siberia were exempted from taxes for one year. “We take a moderate tribute,”50 he declared, “as much as each can pay… And from the poor people, who cannot pay the tribute, no tribute is to be taken, so that none of the Siberian people should be in need.”
But other forces tearing at the social fabric could not be stayed by bountiful deeds. The most fundamental was the competition among landed proprietors for peasants to work their estates. The more prosperous tempted peasants away from smaller holdings, and since many of these were held on military tenure, their decline affected the security of the state. The government took drastic action and tried to solve the problem by binding the peasant to the soil. The peasant’s freedom of movement had already been severely curtailed over the years, but new decrees under Godunov and his successors embedded the trend toward serfdom in the national life. The service gentry squeezed everything they could from their peasants, whom state taxation bent to the breaking point. Violence spread. In the heartland, bands of peasants-turned-highwaymen ransacked monasteries and manorial estates, and along the southern frontier there accumulated legions of the disaffected with animosities ripening toward rebellion against the Crown.
Meanwhile, over the course of three years (1601-03) Russia was beset by protracted crop failures that led to famine and mass starvation. True to his coronation pledge, Godunov distributed money and grain from the public treasury to the destitute, but widespread hoarding and profiteering by landlords and merchants (including the Stroganovs) more than undid the effects of his largesse. Whole villages were wiped out; cats, dogs, and rats were eaten, along with bark and straw; and in public markets, human flesh was sold. Every day in Moscow, wrote an eyewitness, “people perished in their thousands like flies on winter days.”51 Men carted away the dead and dumped them into ditches, “as is done with mud and refuse,” but in the morning could be seen “bodies half devoured, and other things so horrible that the hair stood up on end.” One court apothecary, who had rescued a little girl from starvation in the snow, entrusted her to a peasant family, only to learn later that they had eaten her. Thousands of unemployed laborers, as well as peasants abandoned to their fate by indifferent masters, scavenged through the countryside or fled into the wilds. The Time of Troubles – the most turbulent period in Russian history before the Revolution of 1917 – had begun.
The crisis was beyond Godunov’s control, and his standing fell as the tribulations of the nation grew. Though a legitimate sovereign, properly elected, he could claim no dynastic link with Russia’s “sacred” past, and popular disaffection soon cast him in the role of a ruthless usurper who had ascended the throne through violence, deceit, and crime. Rumor retroactively charged him with the murder of the tsarevich Dmitry§§ (Ivan the Terrible’s nine-year-old son by his seventh wife) and with poisoning his own sister, and even Tsar Fyodor himself. His network of spies uncovered numerous plots, but the discontent welled up ever more powerfully from below. In 1603, bandits, fugitive slaves, and peasants coalesced into an uprising, and the people, romanticizing even the worst days of their past, began to long for the protection of a “born tsar.” On the heels of the revolt (which the army quelled), Godunov was confronted by the messianic rumor that the tsarevich Dmitry had miraculously survived his assassination and was about to reclaim the throne. The Poles, in fact, had schooled such a pretender – the first of many imposters – and he crossed into Muscovy in October 1604 at the head of an army of mercenaries and volunteers. Though “a strange and ungainly figure, with facial warts and arms of unequal length,”52 this False Dmitry, as he was called, proved a charismatic leader, and many malcontents rallied to his cause. By mid-November, his army had swollen to sixteen thousand men, and Godunov, helpless to oppose the rising tide, turned to sorcery and divination in an attempt to alter his fate.