After the end of the Oprichnina, Russia’s internal politics were relatively quiet, broken only by bizarre episodes like Ivan’s temporary abdication in 1575 in favor of Semen Bekbulatovich, a scion of the Astrakhan’ khans who had converted to Orthodoxy, or the death of Ivan’s heir, Ivan Ivanovich, in 1581. The story, perhaps true, was that Tsar Ivan struck his son in a rage and the heir died on the spot. Toward the end of his life Ivan compiled long lists of his victims and sent large gifts to the great monasteries with orders to pray for the souls of those who had perished at his orders. The war in Livonia stagnated, but by 1580, Stefan Bathory, the newly elected king of Poland managed to expel the Russians and divide Livonia with Sweden. The only success for Ivan was Bathory’s subsequent failure to take Pskov after a long siege.
In 1584 Ivan died while playing chess in the Kremlin palace. He had nothing to show for the Livonian war but a country ruined by overtaxation to support a failed war. His earlier successes were overshadowed by the disorder and bloodshed of the Oprichnina years, though his conquests on the Volga remained as a permanent and crucial acquisition. In the very last years of Ivan’s life another rather different expedition enlarged Russia even further. In 1582–1583 the Cossack Yermak, perhaps sponsored by the Stroganovs rather than Ivan himself, crossed the Urals into western Siberia, following the rivers to the capital of the Tatar khanate of Siberia. There a few thousand Tatars ruled other native peoples of the Urals and subarctic regions. Yermak took the city, established a Russian fort nearby to be called Tobol’sk, and proclaimed Russian rule in the name of the tsar. Ivan and his successors quickly moved to send a small garrison and a governor, and the western third of Siberia was theirs. Russia now extended east to the longitude of modern Karachi, and by the 1640s further exploration and conquest brought Russia to the Pacific Ocean. The true importance of all this was far in the future, but for the time it meant a seemingly inexhaustible supply of sable and other furs to sell to the Dutch and English – all to the great profit of the northern Russian merchants and the tsar’s treasury.
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 Ti
me 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.
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 sa
me 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.
None of these developments were visible in the years immediately after 1613 at the court of the first Romanov, Tsar Michael (1613–1645). Michael resumed appointments to the duma and other offices following the precedence system, as did his predecessors. The court was not quite the same, for the experience of the Time of Troubles seems to have taught the boyars the need for consensus, and for sixty years the court intrigues lost the desperate and murderous quality that had marked the previous century. Michael’s father Filaret returned from Polish captivity in 1619 and was immediately named Patriarch of the church. Within a few years he was the de facto regent of Russia, co-sovereign with his son. Patriarch Filaret’s main goal was to exact revenge on Poland, a goal that the boyars did not share. At his urging in 1632 Russia tried to retake Smolensk by relying on mercenary regiments hired in Western Europe. The war was a disaster and in 1633 Filaret died, allowing the tsar and the boyars to end the war. Tsar Michael, now ruling without his father’s supervision, turned to other matters.
The restoration of order and peace allowed the countryside to recover, and by Michael’s death, most of the damage from the Troubles had been repaired. The great accomplishment of the reign was the construction of several lines of forts at the main river fords and on the hills along the southern frontier. In the woods between the forts, workmen felled trees and left them in a tangle to keep out the Tatar cavalry. The defenses were a huge undertaking running over a thousand miles from the Polish border to the Urals. The purpose was to keep out the Tatar raiders, and it worked well enough to allow the peasantry and gentry to move south, for the first time farming the rich black earth of the steppe in large numbers. The tsar gave land to the settler-soldiers to maintain the line of fortifications. A whole society of petty gentry and peasant-soldiers grew up along the line of forts, and beyond the new line, out in the steppe facing the Tatars, were the Cossacks along the southern rivers, the Don, the Volga, and the Iaik farther east. A hundred years after Ivan the Terrible’s conquests, the southern steppe finally began to add to Russia’s wealth and power.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 8