Dmitry Pozharsky

• 1. Introduction

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  Dmitry Pozharsky is a face many Russians would recognize, even those who could not name him. At Euro 2012, during a group match between Russia and Poland, fans unfurled a banner bearing his image with the words 'This is Russia.' It was a message aimed at Polish supporters, referencing events four centuries old. Pozharsky had been a prince and a soldier, shaped by decades of civil conflict, when a delegation arrived at his door. What made a Russian prince the right man to expel Poland from Moscow in 1612? And why do scholars today disagree so sharply about what his victory meant?

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• 2. A Name Born From Fire

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  The Russian word pozhar means conflagration. At some point in the fifteenth century, the family's estate burned to the ground, and they took a new name from the ruin. Dmitry's ancestors were sovereign princes of Starodub-on-the-Klyazma, a town near Suzdal 190 kilometres northeast of Moscow, descended from the Rurik dynasty. His mother, Maria Feodorovna Pozharskaya, came from the Beklemishev family.

  Kuz'ma was his baptismal name, chosen because he was born on the feast day of Saints Cosmas and Damian. In keeping with Russian noble custom between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, this name was reserved for religious contexts only. The public name, Dmitry, was what the world called him. He was considered to have been born on the 1st of November 1578, in Klin County.

  His documented public career began after the death of Tsar Feodor I in 1598. Pozharsky attended the Zemsky Sobor that elected Boris Godunov as tsar, and his closeness to the throne established him among Russia's nobility. He was attested as a stolnik four years after Godunov's election, a rank that marked him as a trusted member of the court. That standing would matter greatly when the state began to fracture.

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• 3. Years of War

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  Boris Godunov died in 1605, and the Polish-Muscovite War broke out that same year. Pozharsky supported the tsardom. He was present at the defense of Kolomna in 1608. The following year, he helped Vasily IV hold Moscow during a siege. He then routed the rebellious Cossacks of Ivan Bolotnikov at the Pekhorka River. In 1610, he commanded the defense of Zaraysk against the forces of False Dmitry II.

  Prokopy Lyapunov rallied a First Volunteer Army in Ryazan, and Pozharsky promptly joined the uprising. On the 19th of March 1611, defending his house at Lubyanka Square in Moscow, he was wounded. His followers transported him to the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius for convalescence. He withdrew to his Puretsky patrimony near Suzdal. A delegation would find him there that autumn with an offer that would change the course of Russian history.

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• 4. The Second Army

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  From Nizhny Novgorod came Kuzma Minin, a merchant who had been central to assembling the second volunteer force. Pozharsky agreed to command it on one condition: Minin had to serve alongside him. Their partnership would prove essential.

  Yaroslavl was the army's first destination, not Moscow. They stayed there for half a year. A man of devout disposition, Pozharsky prayed before Our Lady of Kazan, one of Russia's holiest icons, before advancing. He paused at Rostov for religious ceremonies and visited ancestral graves at Suzdal. The authorities at the Trinity Lavra tried without success to hasten his progress.

  King Sigismund III's treatment of his Russian allies had eroded the pro-Polish faction among Russia's boyars. Polish soldiers' abuses had turned wider public sentiment against the occupation. Pozharsky was marching toward a capital ready to be liberated; the question was whether he would arrive before the opportunity closed.

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• 5. Battle of Moscow

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  Hetman Chodkiewicz arrived outside Moscow with provisions for the Polish garrison barricaded inside the Kremlin. He reached the city on the same day the Volunteer Army encamped nearby. Pozharsky advanced to the Arbat Gate the very next morning, and two days after that, he engaged Chodkiewicz's contingent in a four-day battle.

  Prince Dmitry Trubetskoy proved decisive. His forces captured the supply convoy Chodkiewicz had brought, cutting off the garrison's last hope of relief. With no food reaching the Kremlin, famine broke out among the Poles. They surrendered in October, after Pozharsky and Trubetskoy guaranteed them safe passage and humane treatment.

  Pozharsky's soldiers kept that guarantee. Trubetskoy's Cossacks did not. As the Poles filed out of the Kremlin, the Cossacks attacked, robbed, and killed most of them; few prisoners survived captivity. The liberation had been won, but the terms Pozharsky had offered were broken by men he could not control.

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• 6. A Life in Administration

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  Pozharsky and Trubetskoy presided over the Muscovite government for half a year, until the Zemsky Sobor elected a new tsar. Pozharsky was made a boyar, and Trubetskoy was honored even more highly.

  Mestnichestvo, the conservative system of precedence that governed Russian military appointments, prevented Pozharsky from taking supreme command in any engagement after 1612. He operated against the Lisowczycy in 1615. Three years later, he fell upon the forces of Vladislaus IV. He governed Novgorod between 1628 and 1630, and fortified Moscow against an expected Crimean Tatar attack in 1637. His last military campaign, the Smolensk operation, relegated him to secondary roles.

  The tsar summoned Pozharsky to confer with English ambassadors in 1617 and with Polish ones in 1635. He managed the Prikaz of Transport in 1619 and the Prikaz of Police between 1621 and 1628. Between 1637 and 1642, he oversaw the Prikaz of Moscow Judges. In recognition of his services, he received extensive estates around Moscow, where he commissioned several churches. One tent-like church survives at his suburban estate of Medvedkovo. The Kazan Cathedral on Red Square still stands at the north-east corner of the square, where Pozharsky's army entered Moscow in 1612.

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• 7. A Contested Hero

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  Shortly before his death, Pozharsky drew up a will that listed a large number of horses, suggesting a lifelong enthusiasm for them. He kept the income from kabaks, the sale of alcohol, carefully separated from his other property, citing piety as his reason. He had married twice and had three sons. His princely line became extinct with the death of his grandson in 1685.

  Mikhail I of Russia gave Pozharsky the unprecedented title of Saviour of the Fatherland. The Romanov dynasty owed its crown in large part to his campaign. When patriotic feeling surged during the Napoleonic Wars, a bronze monument to Minin and Pozharsky was erected on Red Square. The day they had entered the Kremlin as liberators was reestablished as a national holiday in 2005.

  Professor Andrei Fursov was among those who argued that the story was not so clean. He described the Zemsky Sobor that elected Mikhail I as an assembly of 'random people who screamed Mikhail,' with armed Cossacks standing nearby. Pozharsky had not become tsar, and Fursov argued this was not accidental. The boyars who had sworn allegiance to the Polish prince Vladislav in 1610 were declared liberated prisoners after the Kremlin fell, not traitors. Fursov's charge was that Pozharsky had made a fatal error. The men who had collaborated with Poland received higher honors than the man who had expelled it. For historians who question the Romanov version of these events, that verdict on the prince remains open.

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