TIME OF TROUBLES (RUSSIA)

TIME OF TROUBLES (RUSSIA). The Time of Troubles (1598–1613), a complex political crisis manifested in repeated palace coups, civil war, and foreign occupation, nearly resulted in the shattering of the Muscovite state. The Time of Troubles (smutnoe vremia) had three interconnected causes.

The first and most crucial cause was the temporary delegitimation of royal authority following the extinction of the Riurikid dynasty in 1598, when Tsar Fedor Ivanovich died without an heir. Fedor's successor, Tsar Boris Godunov (ruled 1598–1605), was never able to fully legitimate himself because of court factionalism, his failure to marry into an eminent boyar family, and the suspicion that he had engineered the mysterious death of Tsarevich Dmitrii Ivanovich in 1591.

A second cause was economic dislocation and social unrest in Muscovy's northwestern and southern provinces. In the northwest, the Livonian War, border wars with the Swedes, and overtaxation had stripped the gentry of most of their peasant tenants. This greatly hampered Moscow's ability to mobilize troops from this region, traditionally the largest reservoir of military manpower. By contrast, the entire southern frontier from Seversk in the west to the Volga in the east was experiencing accelerated military colonization to protect against Crimean Tatar raids. Because the colonists were given smaller land and cash entitlements than prevailed in central Muscovy and because they settled among state peasants on crown frontier lands who paid corvée, considerable social discontent arose on the southern frontier. The upper stratum of the middle service class in Riazan' region was also increasingly alienated from Godunov's government because it felt denied the precedence honor and promotion opportunities due it.

The third cause was Muscovy's vulnerability to entanglement in the conflict between Sweden and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. War between King Sigismund III Vasa of Poland and Charles IX of Sweden (ruled 1604–1611) had broken out in 1600. This war eventually spilled over into northwestern Muscovy, because that region had been weakened during the last Livonian War and because of the growing weakness of Boris Godunov's regime.

The first phase of the Troubles (1598–1606) was primarily a dynastic crisis after the death of Tsar Fedor and took the form of boyar intrigues and then mass revolt against the "usurper" Boris Godunov. The spread of famine and banditry in 1601–1603 finally provided Godunov's old enemies—the Romanovs, Nagois, and other boyar clans—with the opportunity to turn the populace against him. They began circulating rumors that Tsarevich Dmitrii Ivanovich had not after all perished at Uglich in 1591 but had escaped Godunov's assassins and was returning to reclaim the throne. In 1603 a pretender Tsarevich Dmitrii surfaced in the grand duchy and received recognition and military support from several powerful Polish and Lithuanian magnates. This False Dmitrii invaded in 1604 and quickly won support across the southern frontier and into central Muscovy. When Tsar Boris died suddenly in April 1605, his generals came over to the False Dmitrii, abandoning Boris's heir Fedor Borisovich and allowing the False Dmitrii to take the throne in June 1605. The First False Dmitrii ruled less than a year. In May 1606 the boyar Vasilii Shuiskii, the Golitsyns, and Metropolitan Hermogen incited riots in Moscow against the presence of the large Polish retinue of Dmitrii's bride, Marina Mniszech, and in the course of these disorders Dmitrii was assassinated.

The second phase of the Troubles (1606–1610) was marked by a series of regional outbreaks against Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii, which ultimately provided both the Swedes and Poles grounds for military intervention. The first such insurrection began in Seversk in 1606 and spread across the south and into central Muscovy, much like the movement that had supported the late False Dmitri. Although led by Ivan Bolotnikov, a former military slave, and involving a significant number of peasant insurgents, it was not a "peasant war" but included many gentry. Bolotnikov was defeated at Tula in 1607, but his forces regrouped and joined with Cossacks and Polish and Lithuanian mercenaries to form a new army under the nominal leadership of a Second False Dmitrii. After an unsuccessful siege of Moscow, they established a rival government at nearby Tushino (1608). Several powerful boyars, most significantly the monk Fedor Romanov (who had been tonsured under Boris Godunuv), abandoned Tsar Vasilii and went over to the Tushinites. Vasilii responded by launching a counteroffensive using troops levied from Novgorod and the far north and a large number of Swedish mercenaries. The Second False Dmitrii was put to flight. But by inviting in Swedish mercenaries Tsar Vasilii had now given King Sigismund III pretext to invade Muscovy and place Smolensk under siege. Fedor Romanov and those surviving Tushinite elites unwilling to seek Vasilii's forgiveness entered into negotiations with Sigismund and invited him to send Crown Prince Władysław to rule Muscovy. A Polish army under Hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski routed Tsar Vasilii's Russo-Swedish forces at Klushino (June 1610). The next month Vasilii was deposed by the Golitsyns, Riazan' gentry leaders, and agents of Fedor Romanov.

After the overthrow of Tsar Vasilii a council of seven boyars holding power in Moscow accepted the bargain offered by the Tushinites and Polish commanders and invited Władysław to rule on the condition that he take the Orthodox faith. But instead of Władysław they were sent a Polish occupation army. In this third phase of the Troubles (1610–1613) no tsar ruled in Moscow, but rather a Polish military dictatorship under siege by a succession of national liberation militias raised by Muscovite provincial elites (military town governors, wealthy merchants, Riazan' gentry) in uneasy alliance with cossack leaders. Smolensk fell to King Sigismund; a Swedish army occupied Novgorod. The Second False Dmitrii was assassinated by his own lieutenants; more new pretenders appeared (including an Infant Brigand, the son of the Second False Dmitrii and Marina Mniszech) but were unable to attract large followings. In 1611 a liberation militia led by Prince Dmitry Pozharsky established a provisional government at Iaroslavl; with Cossack support it finally drove the Poles from Moscow in October 1612. An Assembly of the Realm (Zemskii Sobor) in early 1613 elected Fedor Romanov's sixteen-year-old son, Michael, as tsar.

Incursions by Polish forces acting in the name of Władysław continued for another five years. An armistice signed at Deulino in 1618 required that Smolensk and parts of Seversk and Chernigov be restored to the commonwealth. Karelia was ceded to Sweden in return for the recovery of Novgorod. Much of northwestern and central Muscovy had been depopulated, and political reconstruction was hampered by the loss of several important chancellery archives in the great conflagration at Moscow in 1612.

The Troubles did not permanently alter the political and social order, however. The consultations of Tsar Michael with the Zemskii Sobor did not mean that patrimonial autocracy had given way to estate-representative monarchy; the power of the boyar elite had not declined, and there was no "ascendancy" of the provincial middle service class. Reconstruction (under the guidance of Tsar Michael's father, now patriarch) involved the expansion and refinement of mid-sixteenth-century institutions: the central chancelleries, the military town governors, and the pomest'e system of service-conditional land tenure.

See also Boris Godunov (Russia) ; False Dmitrii, First ; Livonian War (1558–1583) ; Michael Romanov (Russia) ; Romanov Dynasty (Russia) ; Russia ; Russo-Polish Wars ; Sigismund II Augustus (Poland, Lithuania) ; Vasa Dynasty (Sweden) .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dunning, Chester S. L. Russia's First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. University Park, Pa., 2001.

Platonov, S. F. The Time of Troubles. Translated by John T. Alexander. Lawrence, Kans., 1970.

Brian Davies

MNISZECH, MARINA

(1588–1614), Polish princess and Tsaritsa of Russia (1606).

Marina Mniszech was the daughter of Jerzy Mniszech (Palatine of Sandomierz), a Polish aristocrat who took up the cause of the man claiming to be Dmitry of Uglich in his struggle against Tsar Boris Godunov. The intelligent and ambitious Marina met the Pretender Dmitry in 1604, and they agreed to marry once he became tsar. After invading Russia and toppling the Godunov dynasty, Tsar Dmitry eventually obtained permission from the Russian Orthodox Church to marry the Catholic princess. In May 1606, Marina made a spectacular entry into Moscow, and she and Tsar Dmitry were married in a beautiful ceremony.

On May 17, 1606, Tsar Dmitry was assassinated, and Marina and her father were taken prisoner and incarcerated for two years. Tsar Vasily Shuisky released them in 1608 on the condition that they head straight back to Poland and not join up with an impostor calling himself Tsar Dmitry who was then waging a bitter civil war against Shuisky. In defiance, Marina traveled to Tushino, the second false Dmitry's capital in September 1608, and recognized the impostor as her husband, thereby greatly strengthening his credibility. Tsaritsa Marina even produced an heir, Ivan Dmitrievich. When Marina's "husband" was killed in 1610, she and her lover, the cossack commander Ivan Zarutsky, continued to struggle for the Russian throne on behalf of the putative son of Tsar Dmitry. Forced to retreat to Astrakhan, Marina, Zarutsky, and Ivan Dmitrievich held out until after the election of Tsar Mikhail Romanov in 1613. Eventually expelled from Astrakhan's citadel, the three were hunted down in the Ural Mountain foothills and executed in 1614.

See also: dmitry, false; dmitry of uglich; otrepev, grigory; shuisky, vasily ivanovich; time of troubles

bibliography

Dunning, Chester. (2001). Russia's First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of The Romanov Dynasty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Perrie, Maureen. (1995). Pretenders and Popular Monarchism in Early Modern Russia: The False Tsars of the Time of Troubles. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Chester Dunning