Time of Troubles

For fifteen years at the start of the seventeenth century, the Tsardom of Russia came close to collapse. The crisis, known in Russian as the Smuta, opened with the death of the childless Tsar Feodor I in 1598, which ended Moscow's ancient ruling line, and closed in 1613 when an assembly chose Michael Romanov as tsar. In between came famine, a string of impostors, civil war and foreign occupation of Moscow itself.

Feodor, a son of Ivan the Terrible, had little interest in government, and real power lay with his brother-in-law Boris Godunov. Ivan's youngest son, Dmitry, died in May 1591; an official inquiry concluded that the boy had cut his own throat during an epileptic fit, though rumours later blamed Godunov. When Feodor died in January 1598, Godunov outmanoeuvred his rivals, including Feodor Romanov, and was crowned in September.

Boris's reign was wrecked by the famine of 1601 to 1603, possibly triggered by the eruption of the Huaynaputina volcano in Peru, which brought summer frosts and failed harvests. Estimates suggest that a third or more of the population perished. Many saw the disaster as divine punishment. In 1603 a young man appeared in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth claiming to be the dead Dmitry. Backed by Polish magnates and Cossacks, he crossed into Russia with a small force in October 1604, sparking a wide revolt in the south. After Boris died in 1605, the pretender, known to history as False Dmitry I, entered Moscow and was crowned on 21 July.

The new tsar's Polish advisers and Catholic sympathies made him unpopular. On 17 May 1606, ten days after his marriage to the Polish noblewoman Marina Mniszech, he was murdered in an uprising organised by Prince Vasily Shuisky, who then had himself proclaimed tsar. Vasily IV never won broad support. A rebellion led by Ivan Bolotnikov was crushed only in 1607, and a second impostor, False Dmitry II, set up a rival court at Tushino near Moscow and besieged the capital for some eighteen months. To fight him, Shuisky hired Swedish-supplied mercenaries in 1609, which prompted King Sigismund III of Poland to invade and besiege Smolensk.

After a Polish army routed the tsar's forces at Klushino in 1610, Shuisky was deposed on 17 July and forced to become a monk. A council of seven boyars invited Sigismund's son Władysław to take the throne, and a Polish garrison occupied the Kremlin. Sigismund's apparent aim of ruling Russia himself turned opinion against the Poles. In March 1611 the occupiers suppressed a rising in Moscow, killing about 7,000 people and burning much of the city. Smolensk fell to Poland, and in July 1611 Swedish troops took Novgorod. A further impostor, False Dmitry III, appeared in the north-west.

In the autumn of 1611 Kuzma Minin, a butcher from Nizhny Novgorod, raised money for a new militia and recruited Prince Dmitry Pozharsky to command it. The militia reached Moscow in the summer of 1612, beat off a Polish relief army under Jan Karol Chodkiewicz in early September, and accepted the surrender of the Kremlin garrison in late October. The surrender is still commemorated in Russia by Unity Day on 4 November.

On 21 February 1613 an assembly of the land elected the sixteen-year-old Michael Romanov, son of Feodor Romanov, by then Patriarch Filaret. Peace came only with the treaties of Stolbovo with Sweden in 1617 and Deulino with Poland in 1618, which left Ingria to Sweden and Smolensk and Severia to Poland. Estimates of deaths from the conflict range from 1 to 1.2 million. The dynasty founded in 1613 ruled until 1917.

Our 1600 map shows Russia on the eve of the Troubles, and the 1650 map the Tsardom under the early Romanovs.