17d: Time of TroublesTo this day, Russians aren't totally sure what to think about Ivan the Terrible. Ivan took autocracy to an extreme. Ivan's crimes against humanity are well known and properly reviled. Ivan let Russia's peasants become serfs during his reign, thereby ensuring a backwardness which persists to this day. His attempt to gain Russia an outlet on the Baltic Sea cost many lives and accomplished nothing. Yet on the other hand, his victories over the Kazan and Astrakhan Khanates not only expanded Russia's Eastern territories, but established a sensible plan for assimilating their people into Russian life - if not necessarily into Russian culture. Toward the end of his reign he oversaw the exploration and conquest of Siberia, which would provide the Russian state with unbelievable riches. Perhaps it is best to say that Ivan was "grozny" in every sense - terrible, dread, and awesome all at once.
Ivan was succeeded by his simpleminded son Fyodor (his youngest son, Dmitry, was only two years old at the time) but the true power behind the throne was Fyodor's brother-in-law Boris Godunov. As Fyodor's counselor, Boris Godunov followed many of Ivan's initiatives in a less confrontational way. The tsarevich Dmitry had died in 1591 under suspicious circumstances; when Fyodor died in 1598, the line of Rurik's male descendants was ended. A zemsky sobor was summoned, but this democratic institution selected a new tsar - none other than Boris Godunov. As Tsar, Boris made a promising start, making peace with Russia's northern enemies and trying to bring education closer to Western standards. But he quickly ran out of luck. Thousands of Russians starved in the famines of 1601 and 1602, causing the survivors to wonder whether they had offended God. The boyars were definitely offended - taking orders from a descendant of Rurik was one thing; it was quite another to obey a fellow boyar who had merely married into the royal family. But Boris managed to keep his haters in check until he encountered his nemesis, the kind of character only Russia seems able to produce - False Dmitry I.
As early as 1601, False Dmitry I (whose real origin is lost to the centuries) was going about Moscow claiming to be Dmitri Ivanovich, son of Ivan the Terrible and his wife Mariya. He was arrested but escaped to Poland, where he converted to Roman Catholicism. The Poles were happy to assist him out of sheer hatred for Russia. In 1604 False Dmitry I marched against Russia with a motley crue of adventurers, Polish mercenaries, and Cossacks - peasants who escaped serfdom by running so far into the hinterlands that Russian "justice" couldn't find them. Dmitry's chances of success were effectively less than zero - until Boris I took ill and died in April 1605. Boris's son was crowned at once as Tsar Fyodor II, but the boyars murdered him, prefering a false Dmitry to a real Godunov. At first the new Tsar Dmitry ruled Russia well enough, but he soon showed his true colors, displaying a passion for everything Polish and marrying a Polish princess who hadn't even bothered to convert to Russian Orthodoxy. For once, the boyars and the peasants were in complete agreement. Dmitry had to go. After a reign of ten months False Dmitry was trapped in the Kremlin and shot after trying to jump out a window and escape. His remains were cremated, and fired back to Poland out of a cannon. The boyar Vasily Shuisky - from the same Shuisky clan which had tormented young Ivan the Terrible - was next elected Tsar. By this time, revolution was in the air - peasants and boyars alike rose up all over Russia, sometimes against each other, sometimes with each other against Vasily Shuisky. None of these uprisings succeeded, though, until False Dmitry II appeared in 1607. The widowed Mrs. False Dmitry I greeted False Dmitry II as her husband. They even had a child together. For a while, the two tsars ruled side by side, Vasily from Moscow and False Dmitry II from a nearby town. But finally Vasily called in the Swedish army, which cornered and defeated False Dmitry II at the very center of the Russian Orthodox Church - the St. Sergius-Trinity Monastery, northeast of Moscow. But there were no winners.
If you thought all of that was confusing, what followed is even worse. At least we didn't have to live through it! The Swedish army holed up outside of Novgorod and decided to install yet a third False Dmitry in office, with predictable results. Poland presented an even greater threat. The Polish king Sigismund decided to take advantage of Russia's weakness by conquering western Russia. He also planned to make his son Wladyslaw the next Tsar. Sadly, many Russian boyars supported this move, preferring rule by Polish royalty to rule by the peasants and/or a fourth false Dmitry.. At this point - on the verge of national disintegration - the Russian people did something kind of wonderful . The inspiration came from the Russian Orthodox Church. The leaders of St. Sergius-Trinity Monastery called fon all Russians, rich and poor alike, to drive out the invaders and save the Third Rome. Under the leadership of the merchant Kuzma Minin and the soldier Prince Dmitry Pozharsky, the Russian people literally rose up and drove all the foreign troops out of their land. By September 1612 the army of Minin and Pozharsky was at the gates of Moscow. On November 4,1612 Moscow was captured and the zemsky sobor was summoned once more, this time including even peasant representatives, to elect a new tsar. Though Prince Pozharsky was regarded as the savior of his country and was himself of Rurikid descent, he stayed out of the election. The Russian people needed a free choice for its next leader, and he would not complicate the choice. A statue of Minin and Pozharsky stands in Red Square, and in 2005 the Russian Federation began celebrating November 4 as "The Day of National Unity."
17a: Muscovy becomes Russia
17b: Gathering the Lands
17c: Ivan the Terrible
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17e: Conclusions
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