Polish–Russian War (1609–1618)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Polish-Russian War began in 1609, when a king who already ruled the largest country in Europe decided to reach further east. Sigismund III Vasa wanted more than land. He wanted a tsar of his own choosing on the throne in Moscow, and he wanted Orthodox Russia turned Catholic. For nearly a decade his soldiers fought across Russian soil, and for a time they did something almost unthinkable. Polish troops marched into Moscow and garrisoned the Kremlin itself. A Polish prince was even elected tsar by Russian nobles. Yet by 1618 no Pole sat on the Russian throne, and a new family ruled Russia instead. How did foreign armies come to occupy the heart of Russia? Why did a country invite a rival's prince to rule it? And how did the chaos of these years end by founding a dynasty that would last three centuries? The answers run through famine, false tsars, a butcher, a prince, and a fortress that refused to fall.

• 2. A Crown Without Heirs

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  After Tsar Feodor I died in 1598, the Rurik dynasty that had ruled for centuries came to an end. The succession crisis that followed plunged Russia into the period later called the Time of Troubles. Boris Godunov was crowned to the throne that year, but his rule carried the stain of suspected illegitimacy. Many believed he had orchestrated the assassination of Dimitri, the young son of Ivan IV, who had died in 1591. The first years of the new century turned exceptionally cold, a worldwide chill most likely caused by a severe volcanic eruption in South America. In Russia the cold became catastrophe. A great famine swept the country from 1601 to 1603. Into this weakened state stepped Poland-Lithuania, whose magnates near the Russian border looked east and saw opportunity. In late 1600 a Polish mission led by Chancellor Lew Sapieha had even proposed a personal union of the two states, where after one childless monarch died the other would rule both lands. Godunov declined and instead extended the Treaty of Jam Zapolski by 22 years, to 1622. The union idea was dead for the moment, but the ambition behind it was not.

• 3. The Pretenders

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  False Dmitry I appeared in Poland in 1603, claiming to be the murdered son of Ivan the Terrible. Powerful magnates such as Michal Wisniowiecki and the Sapieha family funded him, and Jesuits backed him as a tool to spread Catholicism eastward. Sigismund gave him 4,000 zlotys, enough for a few hundred soldiers, and in June 1604 Dmitry promised the Commonwealth half of Smolensk territory in return. The statesman Jan Zamoyski dismissed the whole affair as a comedy worthy of Plautus or Terentius. Dmitry rode into Russia in June 1604 with roughly 3,500 soldiers of the magnates' private armies, joined later by about 2,000 southern Cossacks. He won at Novhorod-Siverskyi but lost badly at Dobrynichi, and his cause was saved only by the sudden death of Boris Godunov on the 13th of April 1605. On the 20th of June the impostor entered Moscow in triumph, and was crowned by a patriarch of his own choosing. His marriage to the Polish noblewoman Marina Mniszech, who refused to convert from Catholicism, outraged many Russians. On the morning of the 17th of May 1606, conspirators stormed the Kremlin. Dmitry broke his leg fleeing through a window and was shot dead. His reign had lasted ten months, and his ashes were reportedly fired from a cannon toward Poland. A second impostor, False Dmitry II, rose in 1607, recognized by Marina Mniszech as her first husband. He gathered an army at the village of Tushino, twelve kilometers from Moscow, a force that swelled past 100,000 men.

• 4. Sigismund Declares War

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  On the 28th of February 1609, Tsar Vasili Shuyski signed a military alliance with Charles IX of Sweden. That alliance gave Sigismund III his pretext. With permission from the Polish Sejm, he declared war, hoping to expand the Commonwealth, weaken Sweden, and bring Orthodox Russia under Catholicism, a goal the Pope strongly supported. A book published that year by the Silesian nobleman Pawel Palczowski, Kolenda moskiewska, or The Muscovite Carol, compared Russia to the golden empires of the New World, full of riches and easy to conquer. Palczowski himself joined the expedition and died during it. Sigismund did not fight for either pretender. He wanted Russia for himself, and his entry caused most Polish supporters of False Dmitry II to abandon the impostor. Dmitry fled his camp disguised as a peasant, and on the 11th of December 1610 a Qasim Tatar princeling named Pyotr Urusov, whom Dmitry had once flogged, killed him while he was half drunk. The war Sigismund had launched would prove far harder than the golden cities of Palczowski's pamphlet had promised.

• 5. The Fortress of Smolensk

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  On the 29th of September 1609, Hetman Stanislaw Zolkiewski laid siege to Smolensk, a city Russia had recaptured from Lithuania in 1514. Fewer than 1,000 Russian men under the voivod Mikhail Shein held the walls against Zolkiewski's 12,000 troops. Smolensk had one decisive advantage. Boris Godunov had sponsored a massive fortress there, completed in 1602, and the Poles found it impenetrable. They settled into a long siege, firing artillery, tunneling under the moat, and raising earthen ramparts whose remnants can still be seen today. The largest tunneling effort, in December 1610, destroyed only more of the outer wall while the inner wall held. The siege lasted 20 months. On the 13th of June 1611, Cavalier of Malta Bartlomiej Nowodworski slipped a mine into a sewer canal, and the explosion tore a breach in the walls. The fortress fell that same day, on the 2nd of June 1611 by the broader reckoning of its capture. The Poles had been guided by a Russian defector named Andrei Dedishin. Roughly 3,000 remaining defenders took refuge in the Assumption Cathedral and blew themselves up with stores of gunpowder rather than be taken. Shein was captured and held prisoner by Poland-Lithuania for the next nine years, yet his stubborn defense made him a hero, and the loss freed Russian troops to fight the Poles elsewhere.

• 6. A Polish Prince For Tsar

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  On the 4th of July 1610, at the Battle of Klushino, 7,000 Polish winged hussars led by Zolkiewski crushed a combined Russian and Swedish army of 35,000 to 40,000 men. The scale of the defeat shocked everyone and opened a new phase of the war. Support for Tsar Vasili Shuyski evaporated. The Russian Duma voted to remove him, and Shuyski was forcibly shaved as a monk, sent to Warsaw as a war trophy, and eventually died at Gostynin. On the 8th of October 1610, the boyars opened Moscow's gates, and Polish troops under Aleksander Gosiewski garrisoned the Kremlin. A treaty promised the boyars the same vast privileges as the Polish szlachta in exchange for recognizing Prince Wladyslaw as tsar. The Seven Boyars elected the 15-year-old Wladyslaw in September 1610. But the boyars demanded he convert to Orthodoxy and that the Commonwealth return its captured fortresses. Sigismund refused to allow his son to convert, and from that point the planned Polish-Lithuanian-Muscovite union began to fall apart. Sigismund then decided he wanted the throne for himself, a move most Russians opposed because he hid neither his intent to Catholicize nor to Polonize the tsardom. Zolkiewski, who had opposed the war from the start and favored a peaceful union like the one with Lithuania, returned to Poland disappointed. Wladyslaw never took real power, and the small Kremlin garrison soon found itself isolated as formerly pro-Polish boyars changed sides.

• 7. The Butcher And The Prince

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  A 1611 uprising in Moscow marked the end of Russian tolerance for the occupation. The burghers seized the munition store, and the fighting set off a great fire that consumed part of the city. The Poles had imprisoned Patriarch Hermogenes and ordered him to call off the attack. He refused and was starved to death. In Nizhny Novgorod, the merchants' guild turned to Prince Dmitry Pozharsky to lead the opposition, while a respected town butcher named Kuzma Minin oversaw the funds donated to form the Second Volunteer Army. On the 1st of September 1612, a 9,000-strong Polish army under Hetman Jan Karol Chodkiewicz tried to relieve the besieged Kremlin garrison, escorting a mobile tabor fortress through the city, but Russian Cossack reinforcements forced him to retreat. The garrison starved, with reports of cannibalism. The historian Parker wrote of the Polish soldiers that first they ate grass and offal, then they ate each other, and the survivors finally surrendered. The Kremlin fell on the 6th of November 1612. As the Polish soldiers withdrew the next day, Russian forces massacred half of them despite a promise of safe passage. In March 1613 the Zemsky Sobor named the 16-year-old Michael Romanov, son of Patriarch Filaret of Moscow, the new tsar. The Romanovs were a powerful family. Michael's great-aunt Anastasia Romanovna had been the wife of Ivan the Terrible. The dynasty he founded would rule Russia for three centuries.

• 8. Truce And Long Shadow

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  After Smolensk fell, the border stayed relatively quiet from 1612 to 1617, though no treaty was signed. Sigismund, criticized by the Sejm for losing Moscow, received little money, and unpaid soldiers formed the konfederacja rohaczewska, the largest and most vicious mutiny in Commonwealth history, defeated only on the 17th of May 1614 at the Battle of Rohatyn. A final campaign launched on the 6th of April 1617, with Wladyslaw as nominal commander and Chodkiewicz in real control. In 1618 Petro Sahaidachny brought his Zaporozhian Cossacks from the south, and on the 2nd of October the two armies laid siege to Moscow. The night assault of the 10th to the 11th of October failed, and the siege was lifted. On the 11th of December 1618 the Truce of Deulino granted the Commonwealth control of Chernigov, Severia, and Smolensk, and proclaimed a 15-year truce, while preserving Russia's independence. Wladyslaw refused to give up his claim to the Russian throne even though Sigismund had. The war became the first major sign of a rivalry between Poland and Russia that would last for centuries, and it fed a lasting negative stereotype of Poland among Russians. Its memory still echoes in works such as Pushkin's play Boris Godunov, Mussorgsky's opera of the same name, Glinka's A Life for the Tsar, and the films Minin and Pozharsky from 1939 and 1612 from 2007. In post-Soviet Russia, National Unity Day on the 4th of November, reestablished by President Vladimir Putin in 2004 and first celebrated in 2005, commemorates the 1612 uprising that drove the occupiers from Moscow.