Time of Troubles

• 1. Introduction

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  The Time of Troubles was a fifteen-year catastrophe that came close to erasing Russia as a political entity. It began in January 1598 when Tsar Feodor I died without an heir, ending the only ruling dynasty Moscow had ever known. What followed was famine, civil war, foreign occupation, and a parade of impostors each claiming to be the rightful heir to the throne. By the time it ended in 1613, estimates suggest between one and 1.2 million people had died. Some parts of Russia lost more than half their population. The cultivated farmland of central Russia shrank by several times its previous extent. How did one of Europe's largest states collapse so completely? Who were the false tsars that kept Russian society in a state of permanent chaos? And how did a sixteen-year-old boy end up founding a dynasty that would rule Russia until 1917?

• 2. A Dynasty Without an Heir

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  Tsar Feodor I was the second adult son of Ivan the Terrible, the first tsar of Russia. He was never supposed to rule. His elder brother, Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich, was the heir apparent until their father allegedly killed him in anger on the 19th of November 1581. That act of violence made Feodor heir to the throne by accident. The historian Chester Dunning described Feodor plainly: Ivan the Terrible knew his son could not rule on his own, and before his own death in 1584 set up a council of regents to govern in the young tsar's name. Among those regents was a boyar named Boris Godunov, Feodor's brother-in-law. On the day of Feodor's coronation, Godunov was named master of the horse, a title that immediately marked him as the most powerful man on the boyar council. Potential rivals were removed methodically. Prince Ivan Mstislavsky made a bid for power in 1585 and was forced to become a monk, a step that was irreversible in Russia at the time. By 1586, Godunov had consolidated his grip further: the aged Prince Ivan Shuisky was also forced into a monastery under heavy guard. Feodor himself was pious and took little interest in politics. He produced one child, a daughter named Feodosia, who died at age two. When Feodor died in January 1598, there was no heir. His wife Irina abdicated to the boyar council and entered a convent. The Zemsky Sobor, Russia's assembly of estates, was convened to choose a successor. Godunov prevailed over his chief rival Feodor Romanov, and was crowned tsar in September 1598. Dunning noted that Godunov had himself elected after the fact by what was essentially a staged Zemsky Sobor, an arrangement that would haunt the legitimacy of his reign. One further event would cast a long shadow: in May 1591, Feodor's younger half-brother Tsarevich Dmitrii was reported dead. An investigative commission concluded he had accidentally cut his own throat during an epileptic seizure while playing with a knife. The question of whether Godunov ordered his murder would become the spark for Russia's first civil war.

• 3. Famine and False Heirs

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  Between 1601 and 1603, Russia was struck by a famine that Chester Dunning connected to the eruption of the Peruvian volcano Huaynaputina. Nighttime temperatures during the summer months repeatedly dropped below freezing, destroying harvests. By 1602 the country was engulfed in hunger, then disease. Contemporary accounts suggested the famine killed between a third and two thirds of the population. Hunger riots swept across Russia, and in September 1603 the Khlopko rebellion added to the disorder. Many Russians came to interpret the famine as a sign of divine anger with the tsar, a belief that devastated Godunov's standing even as he tried to manage the crisis. Into this atmosphere stepped a man who would be known as False Dmitry I. He appeared in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1603, claiming to be Tsarevich Dmitrii miraculously rescued from Boris Godunov's alleged assassination attempt twelve years earlier. Dunning argued that the pretender scheme originated as a conspiracy among Russian lords, with considerable evidence linking the pretender to the Romanov clan. Dmitrii revealed himself to the Ukrainian magnate Prince Adam Vishnevetsky, who helped him secure the backing of Zaporozhian and Don Cossacks. Jerzy Mniszech housed the pretender and assembled witnesses who testified to his identity. Poland's King Sigismund and Catholic leaders, dreaming of converting Russia and using it against Sweden, took keen interest when reports emerged that Dmitrii was considering conversion to Catholicism. By September 1604, Mniszech had gathered roughly 2,500 men. In October 1604 they crossed into Russia and triggered what Dunning called a massive rebellion of frontier provinces, towns, and Cossacks that eventually toppled the Godunov dynasty. After Godunov's death in 1605, False Dmitry I entered Moscow in triumph and was crowned tsar on the 21st of July. He visited the tomb of Ivan the Terrible and met with Ivan's widow, Maria Nagaya, who accepted him as her son. On the 8th of May 1606, he married Marina Mniszech by proxy, in exchange for promises of land grants and wealth.

• 4. The Boyar-Tsar

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  Prince Vasily Shuisky had been one of the first voices to claim that False Dmitry I was a fraud: a runaway defrocked monk named Grishka Otrepyev. He was condemned to exile for saying so, then pardoned and reinstated. But as soon as he returned to Moscow in late 1605, he began secretly conspiring to have the tsar killed. By spring 1606 he had recruited supporters among the court, the church, and the merchant elite. On the 17th of May 1606, ten days after Dmitry's wedding to Marina Mniszech, Shuisky's co-conspirators spread word that the Poles were planning to assassinate the tsar, triggering a massacre that lasted six or seven hours. Around 420 Poles were killed, along with several hundred Russians. The tsar fell from a window, broke his leg, and was shot by a man named Mylnikov. Shuisky then claimed the tsar had been a sorcerer and skomorokh. Dmitry's corpse lay on Red Square for three days without a Christian burial before being burned; legend says his ashes were fired from a cannon toward the direction he had arrived from. Two days after the killing, on the 19th of May, Shuisky's co-conspirators gathered at his townhouse and then carried him to Red Square, where he was proclaimed tsar. He was crowned on the 1st of June. Dunning was blunt about Shuisky's political position: the narrowness of his support, his reputation as a liar, his act of regicide, and his failure to secure the approval of a proper Zemsky Sobor all undermined his credibility from the start. He was called the "boyar-tsar", and almost immediately he faced fresh uprisings. A man styling himself Tsarevich Petr, a supposed secret son of Feodor Ivanovich who had supposedly been hidden from Boris Godunov, gathered an army of 30,000 in Putivl. He was, in reality, a man named Ilia Korovin, the illegitimate son of a cobbler from Murom. In the summer of 1609, Shuisky himself began a four-month siege of Tula, where both Bolotnikov and Tsarevich Petr had taken refuge. Tula surrendered after the army dammed the Upa River and flooded the city. Tsarevich Petr was tortured and hanged outside Moscow.

• 5. Polish and Swedish Intervention

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  In July 1607, yet another impostor appeared: False Dmitry II. By October 1607 he had gathered Polish lords and around 1,800 mercenaries; in April 1608 the Ukrainian Prince Roman Rozynski joined with 4,000 more. This second false Dmitry advanced on Moscow and set up court in Tushino, besieging the city for the next eighteen months. At its height, members of the Romanov clan flocked to his camp. In September 1609, King Sigismund III Vasa of Poland invaded Russia outright and began the siege of Smolensk. In response, Prince Skopin-Shuisky had already signed a treaty in February 1609 with Sweden's Charles IX, exchanging the Korela Fortress for the use of 3,000 mercenaries composed of Germans, English, Scots, and French. On the 4th of February 1610, Russian lords from the Tushino court signed a separate treaty with Sigismund, hoping to restore order by accepting his son Wladyslaw as tsar. Among those willing to support Wladyslaw were Patriarch Filaret and other members of the Romanov clan. But Sigismund's true intentions became clear: he continued the siege of Smolensk, allowed Polish raids on Russian towns, and placed a garrison of 800 mostly German mercenaries under Alexander Gosiewski inside Moscow. On the 17th of July 1610, Shuisky was arrested, forced to become a monk, and imprisoned in a Kremlin monastery. A council of Seven Boyars took temporary control. On the 17th of July 1611, Sweden's de la Gardie occupied Novgorod; by early 1612 the Swedes had annexed many border towns, cutting Russia off from the Baltic Sea entirely. The Orthodox Patriarch Hermogenes was imprisoned by the Poles, though he continued writing what Dunning called incendiary letters urging Russian towns to resist, until he died of starvation in February 1612. From the 19th to the 21st of March 1611, Polish and German mercenaries suppressed riots in Moscow, massacring 7,000 people and burning the outer city on the order of commander Gosiewski.

• 6. Minin, Pozharsky, and Liberation

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  Kuzma Minin, a butcher from Nizhny Novgorod, took it upon himself to fund a second national militia in the fall of 1611. He collected taxes from the local population, from monasteries, and from crown peasant villages. He then recruited Prince Dmitry Pozharsky to command it. Yaroslavl became the militia's headquarters and the seat of a new provisional government. In June 1612 Pozharsky secured a truce with Sweden, allowing his army to advance on Moscow, arriving there on the 28th of July 1612. A 9,000-strong Polish army under Hetman Jan Karol Chodkiewicz was advancing to lift the siege. The Battle of Moscow began on the 1st of September. Chodkiewicz used cavalry attacks in open ground and deployed a mobile tabor fort as a new tactic. He nearly broke through, but was driven back by Don Cossack reinforcements aligned with the Russian forces. On the 3rd of September he launched a second attack that reached the walls of the Kremlin itself; Moscow's narrow streets stopped his troops, and a Russian counter-attack forced a retreat. The Polish garrison inside the Kremlin surrendered unconditionally on the 27th of October 1612. Dunning recorded that the day before, the Kremlin's gates opened and Ivan Romanov, Mikhail Romanov, and other aristocrats were led out. The 22nd of September 1612 had brought one last act of destruction when Polish and Lithuanian forces took and burned Vologda. But with the capital retaken, the path to a new tsar was open.

• 7. The Romanov Settlement

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  Mikhail Romanov was elected tsar by the Zemsky Sobor on the 21st of February 1613. He was sixteen years old, the son of Patriarch Filaret of Moscow. He was crowned on the 21st of July. Dunning framed his election as one of the great ironies of Russian history: the founder of the Romanov dynasty consolidated his power in part by crushing the very Cossacks whose fighting had saved Russia and brought him to the throne. Romanov was connected by marriage to the Rurikids, which gave his claim a degree of dynastic continuity. He reportedly had been saved from enemies by a heroic peasant named Ivan Susanin. His early acts set the tone for what followed: False Dmitry II's three-year-old son was hanged on his order, and Marina Mniszech was reportedly strangled to death in prison. The wars did not end with his coronation. The Ingrian War with Sweden continued until the Treaty of Stolbovo in 1617. The conflict with Poland ran on until the Truce of Deulino in 1619. Russia was forced to cede Ingria to Sweden and surrender Severia and Smolensk to Poland, though most of these losses were recovered over the following century. The human cost was staggering. Estimates of the total dead from the fifteen years of conflict range from one to 1.2 million. Population losses in some areas exceeded fifty percent. Cultivated farmland in central Russia contracted by several times. One lasting consequence was an unexpected improvement in peasants' wages, as the shrinking population briefly reversed the process of enserfment that had been intensifying since the mid-sixteenth century. Unity Day, held on the 4th of November each year to commemorate the Polish garrison's surrender, was observed until the Soviet era suppressed it and replaced it with celebrations of the October Revolution. President Vladimir Putin reinstated it in 2005.

• 8. Art and Memory

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  The Time of Troubles left a deep imprint on Russian culture. Its three most popular subjects have been the Pozharsky-Minin liberation of Moscow, the struggle between Boris Godunov and False Dmitry I, and the story of the peasant Ivan Susanin. Mikhail Glinka composed an opera, A Life for the Tsar, based on Susanin's supposed self-sacrifice to lead Polish troops away from the young Mikhail Romanov. Alexander Pushkin wrote Boris Godunov as a play; Modest Mussorgsky then transformed it into an opera. The figure of False Dmitry I attracted two additional operatic treatments: Antonin Dvorak's Dimitrij and Victorin de Joncières's Dimitri, both drawing on Friedrich Schiller's unfinished play Demetrius. A monument to Minin and Pozharsky stands in Red Square. The Soviet filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin made Minin and Pozharsky as a film. A 2007 epic film by Vladimir Khotinenko, titled 1612, returned to the period with a broad canvas. Chester Dunning, in his 2001 book Russia's First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty, wrote that modern Russia began in 1613 with the founding of the Romanov dynasty. On the 4th of April 2024, a Russian action role-playing game titled Smuta was released, set during the Troubles, suggesting the period remains vivid enough to anchor a commercial entertainment more than four centuries later.