Battle of Moscow (1612)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Moscow was not a single clash but two separate engagements, fought on the 1st and the 3rd of September 1612, inside a city that had already spent two years under foreign occupation. At stake was nothing less than the survival of Russia as an independent state. The Time of Troubles had left the country without a tsar, riddled with mercenaries and gangs, and with a Polish garrison locked inside the Kremlin walls. How had it come to this? And how did a volunteer militia, assembled by a merchant from Nizhny Novgorod and a wounded prince, manage to drive one of Europe's most formidable armies away from the walls of Moscow? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. A Country Without a Tsar

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  After the Battle of Klushino in the summer of 1610, Tsar Vasili IV was deposed and taken to Warsaw. Within weeks, on the 21st of September 1610, a Polish-Lithuanian army marched through Moscow's gates and took up residence in the Kremlin. The boyars, clergy, and ordinary citizens of Moscow, terrified of the pretender known as False Dmitry II, made a fateful choice: they accepted the Polish prince Wladyslaw IV Vasa as their new tsar. Outside Moscow, however, that decision carried almost no weight. The country was ransacked by Polish troops, mercenaries, and roving gangs of robbers. Central government had essentially ceased to exist.

  In March 1611, Muscovites rose up against the occupiers. The First People's Militia, led by Prokopy Lyapunov, a noble from Ryazan, besieged the Polish garrison in the Kremlin. The militia was poorly armed and the fortress held. Then the effort collapsed from within: Lyapunov was murdered by the Cossack leader Ivan Zarutski, and the movement fell into disorder. With no tsar, no functioning government, and now no organized resistance, Russia stood at the edge of dissolution.

• 3. Minin, Pozharsky, and the Second Militia

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  Kuzma Minin, a citizen of Nizhny Novgorod, organized the answer. He assembled the Second People's Militia and placed it under the command of Prince Dmitry Pozharsky. Where the First Militia had been improvised and under-equipped, the Second was better armed and organized from the start. In March 1612, it seized Yaroslavl and established a provisional government there, drawing men, money, and provisions from cities across Russia, including from as far away as Siberia.

  The news that Field Hetman Jan Karol Chodkiewicz was leading a Polish relief army toward Moscow forced Minin and Pozharsky to act. They entered Moscow in August 1612 and threw a siege around the Polish garrison still holding the Kremlin. Chodkiewicz was coming to break that siege. The two battles fought in September 1612 were his attempt to do exactly that.

• 4. The First Battle

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  On the 1st of September 1612, Chodkiewicz sent his forces against the Russian siege lines from the west, driving toward Moscow's suburbs. Polish hussars, supported by Polish, Hungarian, and German infantry, broke through the Russian lines. For a moment the relief column seemed on course to reach the Kremlin garrison, commanded by Mikołaj Strus.

  Then the right flank of the Commonwealth forces was left exposed, and the Don Cossacks of Dmitry Troubetskoy, who had been waiting on the far bank of the Moscow River, saw the opening. Their cavalry attacked in concert with a force Pozharsky had already sent forward to support Trubetskoy. Together they drove the Commonwealth troops back. At the same time, the Kremlin garrison launched its own sortie against the Russian positions outside the walls and also failed. By the end of the day, both sides had lost roughly 1,000 men.

• 5. The Second Battle

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  Two days later, on the 3rd of September, Chodkiewicz changed his approach. He directed his attack through the Zamoskvorechye District, the southern suburb of Moscow. About 600 Hungarian infantrymen pushed through and actually reached the outer walls of the Kremlin. But the main body of Commonwealth troops, following behind, ran into trouble in the district's narrow streets. A Russian counterattack halted them there. Chodkiewicz ordered his army to withdraw, losing several hundred more men in the retreat. The relief mission had failed twice in three days.

• 6. The Kremlin Falls

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  Chodkiewicz's two failures in September were not the last attempt to save the Polish position. King Sigismund himself led an invasion later that autumn, but was stopped in November less than 90 kilometers from Moscow. The garrison inside the Kremlin, with no relief coming, was running out of options.

  On the 26th of October, according to the historian Dunning, Mstislavskii led Ivan Romanov, Mikhail Romanov, and other aristocrats out of the Kremlin. On the 27th of October, the Polish garrison surrendered unconditionally, and the militia forces entered the capital. The city was liberated. What happened next would shape Russian history for the next three centuries: in 1613, the Zemsky Sobor convened in the Kremlin and elected Mikhail Romanov as tsar of all Russia, founding the House of Romanov and bringing the Time of Troubles to a close.