In all historical ages men have been found ready to believe in the pretensions of the personators who seem to spring up as the natural aftermath of a vanished dynasty or a quenched idol; pre-eminently prone to be deluded by such deceptions were the Russians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Inured by the exactions of their religion to an unquestioning faith in the supernatural, incapable from their teaching, as much as from their want of teaching, of forming a critical opinion upon a matter which admitted of doubt, and isolated from their own communities and from the sources of reliable information by vast distances and bad roads, they afforded a fit germinating bed for rumours and frauds of the flimsiest nature. Without proof many of them had accepted the theory that Boris Godounov was responsible for the murder of Dimitri Ivanovitch; equally without proof they were ready to credit the reports which began to fly about the country during the winter of 1603-1604 to the effect that the long-mourned Tzarevitch was alive and gathering an army beyond the Lit’uanian border. The explanation which accompanied this story was that Dimitri had been smuggled away from his would-be assassins at Ouglitch and another child had been killed in his stead. The fact that his mother and nurse had shrieked and swooned over his corpse, and that his relatives and the townsfolk who knew him well had had ample opportunity to detect any substitution while the body lay in state awaiting Shouyskie’s inquest, does not seem to have been taken into consideration. It was evident, from the accumulating reports that kept pouring in, that there was someone in Lit’uania, a tangible being, who claimed to be the veritable Dimitri, and it was also evident that the King of Poland and numbers of the Russ-Lit’uanian princes believed in his identity—or professed to.

The generally accepted theory among Russian historians as to the true personality of this pretended Ivanovitch is that he was one Grigorie Otrepiev, an enterprising monk, who had thrown off his frock to live a life of liberty among the western Kozaks. Amid the vicissitudes of a self-seeking career, both before and after quitting the cloister, the idea of impersonating the dead Tzarevitch seems to have cropped up from time to time, and finally, having entered the service of a Lit’uanian boyarin, the adventurer, on the pretence of mortal sickness, announced to a priest his identity with Dimitri. The chief evidence in support of his story was the discovery of a jewelled cross on his person, a clue which might have convicted him of sacrilegious pilfering as convincingly as of royal parentage. His “discoverers,” however, needed little convincing; the King of Poland, to whom he was exhibited after a somewhat rapid recovery, welcomed him as a useful weapon of offence against Boris; the Jesuits saw in him an instrument for the advancement of their Church; and the banished and disgraced Russians with whom he came in contact hailed him as the possible means of restoring them to the state from which they had fallen. Kostomarov, in an exhaustive monograph on the subject, throws doubt on the identity of the false Dimitri with the somewhat nebulous monk Otrepiev, and inclines to the belief that the pretender, whoever he was, was himself convinced of his veritable tzarskie descent.[183]

Whatever the origin and past career of this apparition, he succeeded in the first duty of an impostor, which is to impose. The personal resemblance which he bore to the family to which he claimed to belong does not appear to have been very striking; the medals and coins afterwards struck for him give his presentment as that of a coarse-featured thick-set man, with a heavy lower-jaw, recalling a Habsburg rather than a Rurikovitch type.[184] But with a widely scattered population like that of Russia, rumour, assertion, and hearsay information weighed more than actual facts; the bulk of the people may not have been convinced, but many of them were ready to give the Pretender the benefit of the doubt. Besides the unofficial but more or less open support which he received from the Poles, the restless or uneasy spirits on the Russian side of the border hastened to join his standard. The Don Kozaks, impatient of the control of Boris’s strong hand, sped gleefully to join a leader in whose ranks were already gathered numbers of their fellow-freebooters from the Dniepr. The Tzar displayed a calmness which perhaps he did not feel, and contented himself at first with an expostulatory message to the King of Poland, and an address, signed by the Patriarch and all the bishops, to their fellow-clergy in Lit’uania, counselling them to withhold their allegiance from the unfrocked monk who was masquerading as a Tzarevitch. While a cross-current of proclamations was being directed from Moskva into Lit’uania and from the grand duchy into White Russia, the adventurer was preparing for bolder measures. Though Sigismund would not openly avow him, his cause had been warmly taken up by Urii Mnishek, Palatine of Sendomir, who supported him with men and money, and promised him, moreover, the hand of his daughter Marina. Boris’s attitude of scornful indifference had left the border province of Sieverski more or less open to an invasion, and in October the “Ljhedimitri” (false-Dimitri) crossed with his little army into Moskovite territory. 1604His audacity was rewarded with a large measure of success. The frontier town of Moravsk opened its gates to the Pretender, and the ancient city of Tchernigov followed the example. Novgorod Sieverski, held for Boris by Petr Basmanov (son of that angel-faced Thedor who came to such a miserable end in the days of Ivan), administered a timely check to the invader’s progress, but Poutivl and other neighbouring towns went over to the impostor’s cause. The Tzar set to work in earnest to stamp out the treason which had gained such an advantageous start, but the armed men who had sprung up at his summons to combat the Tartar Khan did not gather in such numbers to march against the soi-disant Tzarevitch. Nor was the sovereign sure of the fidelity either of the troops raised or of the voevodas who were to command them. Gladly would he have seen Basmanov, the man of his heart, who had already stood “among innumerable false, unmoved,” at the head of the tzarskie forces, but the exigencies of his statecraft required that he should employ the old family chiefs on this critical service. 1604-5Accordingly kniaz Mstislavskie and kniaz Vasili Shouyskie were entrusted with the direction of a winter campaign in the Sieverski Oukrain, which resulted in the Ljhedimitri being driven out of the open field and obliged to take refuge in Poutivl. Deserted by the Palatine of Sendomir and most of the Poles, and unable to count even on the continued adherence of the Kozaks, the bold disputer of the throne of Moskva was indeed in desperate circumstances. But the very despair which animated his followers made them formidable opponents to the Tzar’s troops, whose leaders were either incapable of following up their success or unwilling to do so. Instead of making a determined attack on Poutivl and securing the impostor’s person, they centred their efforts on the siege of Kromi, a gorodok held by a small Kozak garrison. The satisfaction felt at Moskva at the first successes of the tzarskie arms gradually evaporated as the weeks dragged on without result, and men began to speak significantly of the marvellous escapes and invincible tenacity of the man who claimed to be Dimitri. That the pretender had many adherents in the capital itself was becoming evident, and Boris is credited by the chroniclers with having cut off the tongues of some who were indiscreet enough to voice their sentiments; a proceeding which, though out of keeping with the Tzar’s general methods, was too thoroughly akin to Moskovite traditions to be unhesitatingly set down as fable. Boris was, however, wise enough to see that he must stand or fall by Russian disposition alone, and the loyal offer of assistance made him by the Duke of Sudermanland, now King of Sweden, was declined. In possession of the throne and the immense treasure appertaining thereto, enjoying the support of the Hierarchy, feared, if not loved, by the boyarins and voevodas, and held in esteem by the Courts of Austria, England, and Sweden, the Godounov Tzar might well have stood his ground against the doubtful rival whom he had hemmed into a corner of the Sieverski province. Every year that he reigned made people more accustomed to the new dynasty, made them look more naturally to his son Thedor as their future sovereign. If the Ljhedimitri had secret well-wishers at the Court, if there were within the Kreml’s precincts men who fancied Boris guilty of reaching the throne by a hidden crime, it was by the same means that they must vanquish him. That such a design existed would not be much to say; that it was ever put into practice there is no proof. History merely records that the Tzar, after transacting business all the morning, dined in the “gilded room” in his palace, and was suddenly stricken with a mysterious malady, of which he died two hours later (13th April 1605). So, working and ruling to the last, passed away the great boyarin, who, with all his faults, gave Russia one of the noblest of her Tzars. His great crime in the eyes of the people who had chosen him to reign over them was that he did not belong to the sacred House of Rurikovitch, but for all his Tartar extraction he was more western in his ideas than any of the sovereigns of Moskovy who had gone before him, and the fifteen-year-old son whom he had educated to succeed him gave promise of being an enlightened and gracious ruler. Since the vaunted Dimitri Donskoi, he was the first Gosoudar who had put himself at the head of an army to meet a Tartar invasion, and Russia was less troubled by Krim inroads during his reign than she had been since the alliance of Ivan III. with Mengli-Girei.

As the sorrowing Patriarch escorted his dead friend across the Kreml square, awake with the young pulse-life of an April day, into the chill shadows of the beautiful Cathedral of the Archangel, he might know that he was burying more than the corpse of a monarch. With Boris had gone the peace of an empire.

In all the wide dominions of the gosoudarstvo three centres of interest stood out with a marked prominence: the capital, the camp before Kromi, and the phantom Court at Poutivl. At Moskva, where the oath of allegiance to Thedor Borisovitch was quietly taken, all the symptoms of a minority or regency reasserted themselves. A Douma, which included the old names and in one case a former member, was beckoned into existence. Bogdan Bielskie, the twice-banished, recurred again in the state council, where he should have been able to give valuable information as to the outlying parts of the tzarstvo. Mstislavskie and Vasili and Dimitri Shouyskie were summoned from their commands at Kromi, less perhaps on account of any counsel they might impart to the Tzaritza and her son, than because their withdrawal smoothed the way for Basmanov to take over the command of the army. The latter brought down to the camp the authentic news of the death of Boris, and exacted from the troops an oath of allegiance to the new sovereign. The court at Moskva felt relieved when the voevoda whom Boris had loved, and who had given proof both of his fidelity and ability in the defence of Novgorod-Sieverski, went down to take command of the army of the Oukrain, and they expected to hear of some decisive blow struck at the impostor, some victory which should open the new reign with brilliancy. Instead of which they learned, from the mouths of two fugitive voevodas, that Basmanov, in conjunction with the princes Golitzuin and Saltuikov, had proclaimed the Ljhedimitri Tzar of Moskovy. How far this was a contemplated move, how far it was a sudden decision, born of a discovery of widespread defection among the troops, it is impossible to say. The effect was enormous, and revolutionised the whole struggle. The long besieged Kozak troop in Kromi found themselves suddenly hailed as allies by the men who had for months been working to encompass their destruction, and the bold adventurer of Poutivl was able to come out of his retreat, and put himself at the head of the army that was to conduct him in triumph to Moskva. The news of these events had stirred all classes in the white-built city; the people left their occupations to gather in agitated crowds on the great square between the Kitai-gorod and the Kreml, and everywhere was heard the name Dimitri. The man who wore that name was marching with the tzarskie army, led by the ablest voevodas of the state, under the banner of the two-headed eagle and St. George the Conqueror. His proclamations were daily smuggled into the city and daily the popular voice turned in his favour. The strielitz and body-guard were becoming less and less in evidence around the Kreml, the members of the Douma were coldly received, the Patriarch dared not show himself, even in the sacred vestments of his office, and could only shed tears of bitter mortification in the shelter of his palace. With the first day of June came the forerunners of the claimant Tzar to the Krasno selo (red, or beautiful village), where dwelt the rich merchants and tradesmen, a class which had never been well affected towards the Godounov interest; the Pretender was enthusiastically proclaimed, and his adherents streamed into unguarded Moskva, shouting the magic name of Dimitri Ivanovitch. The multitude of the city rose in response to the cry, and clamouring crowds, giving vent to their restrained feelings, burst armed and angry and thousand-throated into the undefended Kreml. Boris had asked his subjects to bring him the Ljhedimitri alive or dead. They were bringing him in alive.

The first acts of the aroused Moskvitchi were comparatively moderate. The Tzaritza-mother, the young Thedor, and his sister were removed from the palace and held prisoners in the private mansion of the Godounovs, and a clean sweep was made of the relatives and adherents of the fallen House, who were imprisoned or carried off to distant parts of the gosoudarstvo. For the rest, the people celebrated the upheaval by getting universally intoxicated, and to the wild fury of the day succeeded a night of stupefied repose. The revolution, however, was yet to claim its victims; while the new sovereign was still halting at Toula his enemies were forcibly removed from his path. The Patriarch was dragged from before the altar of the Cathedral of the Assumption and dispoiled of his robes and office, and a few days later a report was circulated that Thedor and his mother had poisoned themselves. Their bodies, exposed to the public view, bore traces of violence, and it was said that they had been strangled by some strielitz at the command of the voevoda Golitzuin.[185] What hand, if any, the Pretender had in the matter there is nothing to show. Thus ended a dynasty which eight weeks previously had seemed in assured possession of the throne. On the 20th of June, amid the resounding of myriad bells and the hoarse shouting of the people who lined streets, and roofs, and campaniles, the Phantom rode into the city of his endeavours, with a crashing of trumpets and kettle-drums, with a glittering retinue of Polish cavalry, German guards, Kozaks and strielitz. The long lost Dimitri, as his subjects fondly imagined him, made solemn obeisance at the tomb where the dread Ivan slept, and incidentally ordered the remains of the usurper Boris to be removed to a less hallowed resting-place. A cross-current of coffins and persons journeyed to and from the centre-point of Moskovite life; Nagois and Romanovs, living and defunct, came in from their monasteries or lonely graves to dwell or decompose in the favoured places of the Kreml, while the Godounov connections and Vremenszhiki went, literally, out into the cold; that is to say, to Perm and Sibiria. Vasili Shouyskie, the man who had conducted the inquest on the murdered Tzarevitch, had the indiscretion to recall this circumstance to the minds of a people gone wild with enthusiasm. His reminiscences were not interesting to the Tzar, who had him promptly arrested. He was interrogated, probably with the accompaniment of torture, and condemned, by a council of boyarins and citizens, to death. While his head was actually awaiting the axe-stroke a dramatically timed reprieve stopped the execution of the sentence, which was commuted to one of banishment. The people, with whom the Shouyskie family were more or less popular, might appreciate the sovereign’s clemency, but it did not strengthen their conviction that he was the son of the terrible Ivan. A new Patriarch was elected, Ignacie, a Greek, once Archbishop of Cyprus, from which see he had been driven by the Turks, since Archbishop of Riazan; he had been one of the first of the Vladuikas to recognise the adventurer as Tzar. There remained one more step towards establishing his identity, which, though of slight historical value, it was important that the Pretender should take. Mariya Nagoi, seventh wife of Ivan IV., was still living, and her testimony was naturally called for as to the authenticity of the person who posed as her son. In the middle of July the ex-Tzaritza was summoned from the convent that had been her prison for so many years, and was met at Tayninsk, a village near Moskva, by the man who claimed her as mother; whom, after a private interview, she publicly acknowledged as the true Dimitri. After thirty years of banishment and disgrace, half of which had been spent in cloistered seclusion, the relict might well have considered that it was a wise mother that knew her own child in the person of a reigning and popular sovereign. The very fact that his imposture had overturned her hated enemies, the Godounovs, would have gone far to soothe any possible scruples. It is significant that after her testimony the “Otrepiev” theory, first put forward by the Patriarch in the reign of Boris, began to gain ground in the capital. The people who had feared to oppose a forlorn and desperate pretender, from an idea that he might be the genuine heir of the Rurikovitches, were not comfortable at seeing him on the sacred throne of Monomachus, from a suspicion that he might not be.

Firmly established at the Kreml, after a campaign of almost unexampled good fortune, the new Sovereign commenced to display characteristics disconcerting alike to his subjects and to future students of his personality. His idiosyncrasies were not those of the House whose scion he professed to be, but neither were they those of a partially-educated adventurer. The boyarins of the leading families of Moskva, encased in the complacent conceit of ignorance, were aghast at being told by this newly-appeared Gosoudar that their great need was schooling. Boris had talked of colleges as a desirability; Dimitri spoke of them as urgent necessities. For their part the boyarins were of opinion that the Tzar himself had much to learn in the way of conforming with the manners and customs of the Moskovites. His behaviour was a growing source of scandal to his Orthodox subjects; his hair was not dressed in the Russian fashion; he never slept after dinner; he sat down to dine to the sound of music instead of prayer; and he ate veal. He drilled his soldiers himself—a thing which no Moskovite sovereign had ever done—and he slew bears with his own hand instead of seeing them killed from a safe distance. The precedent of David, King of Israel, might have been quoted in extenuation of this unbecoming hardihood, but nothing could excuse the erection of a statue of Cerberus in front of the Tzar’s pleasure-house in the Kreml, a locality hitherto graced only with the representations of Bogoroditzas, or at most a saint-mastered dragon. The clergy were offended by the scant consideration with which they were treated, by the toleration shown to Catholics and Lutherans, and above all by a disposition which Dimitri showed to divert some of the hoarded wealth of the monasteries to the public treasury. The strielitz were piqued by the open acknowledgment which the Tzar made of the superior merits of the foreign soldiery, the boyarins resented the subordinate part they were compelled to play at the Court of this man of new and unpalatable ideas. All this gives a glimpse of a strong personality, an enlightened mind, healthily contemptuous of the foibles and superstitions with which it came in contact, and a vigorous faculty for reform and organisation. A rare character in the long list of Moskovite sovereigns. Such a one recurs some ninety years later and creates a new Russia. The Ljhedimitri, himself a man of straw, appears to have tried to cram into a few months the patient efforts of a lifetime. Probably the fact was that the extraordinary facility with which his enterprise had been carried to a triumphant conclusion gave him a false idea of his own powers and of the dispositions of the Russians. In one respect only do his transactions approach, at one and the same time, to the childish arrogance of the legitimate Moskovite Sovereigns and the petulant vanity which might be expected of a mushroom monarch; not only did he demand from the Pope and the King of Poland the acknowledgment of the old disputed title of Tzar, but he further stipulated for the style of CÆsar (Kesar), an innovation of his own devising. It is possible that this solemn trifle, which threatened to interrupt his good understanding with Rome and the Holy See, was really introduced for that purpose, in order to get rid of allies who were likely, now that he had attained his ambitious object, to become inconvenient. That he had, from conviction or policy, privately entered the Catholic Church during the days of his pretendership seems fairly evident; that it was not expedient to carry the matter farther will be readily comprehended. The Jesuit Father, Pierling, in an historical disquisition on the subject, combats the assertion of the Russian writers that the Ljhedimitri was “invented” or first brought forward by the Society of Jesus, the Nuncio in Poland, or any agent of the Pope.[186] Certainly there is no evidence on which to rest such a charge, which probably had its origin in inter-Christian jealousy. The fairest and most reasonable conclusion is that the Jesuits, Ragoni, and the Holy See, allowed themselves to be somewhat easily persuaded of the legitimacy of the claims of a pretender who might render splendid services to their Church. Rome had ever been dazzled with the hope of bringing the Russian Communion into her maternal embrace, and the prospect was the more alluring now that her spiritual dominion had been shorn and abbreviated by the Protestant heresy in the north of Europe, and by the Mohametan encroachments in the south-east. At the same time it should be borne in mind that the evidence on which the Catholics and Poles grounded their ostensible faith in the Ljhedimitri was substantially the same as that which imposed upon the whole of Russia. The zeal of a convert—and a pensioner—showed a considerable abatement when the adventurer was safely transformed into Tzar, and Dimitri evinced no disinclination to continuing bowing down in the house of Rimmon for the rest of his life. The Poles who still hung about his person were permitted to worship freely after their own fashion, and to penetrate into the sacred places of Moskovite Orthodoxy; but when sounded on the subject of establishing the Latin faith the Tzar talked evasively of educating his subjects and of initiating a war against the Sultan, objects nearer his heart than a revolution of dogmas. If a contemptuous clemency could have inspired the Moskvitchi with affection for a veal-eating sovereign, the False Dimitri would not have lacked popularity. Vasili Shouyskie and his two brothers were recalled from their disgrace and banishment, and the former was admitted into the Council of the Tzar. The axe and the gibbet had a long rest, and the monarch hunted bears instead of boyarins. Dimitri might have strengthened his position and gained time to live down the prejudices of his subjects by effecting a prudent marriage; by allying himself with the Romanov or even the Shouyskie family he would have created a party for himself among the nobles and have secured an incontestable link with the line of Rurik, either by remote descent or recent connection. For some reason of his own he was bent on fulfilling his betrothal vow to Marina Mnishek, and such was his impatience to see his bride at Moskva, sharing his throne, that the Palatine, her father, was able to exact considerable sums of money and concessions on the question of the future Tzaritza’s religious liberty (she was a Catholic), before escorting her to her expectant husband. May 1606The arrival at the capital of the Polish maiden, attended by her father and a following of some 2000 persons, together with an embassy from King Sigismund, did not inspire the citizens with any greater affection for their monarch, already tainted in their eyes with partiality for foreign customs and alien faiths. The bride made her state entry in a carriage decorated with silver eagles and drawn by ten pied horses. The tzarskie troops, in red coats with white cross-belts, were drawn up to receive her; cannon, bells, drums and trumpets, sounded a welcome; only the people kept an ominous silence. It was noted with disapproval that as she entered the Kreml through the Saviour Gate, a portal usually crossed with deep obeisance, the Polish band crashed out their national air, “For ever in weal as in woe.” The wedding and coronation festivities were carried on with a lavish display and open-handed conviviality seldom seen before in Moskva, but they were not preceded by the elaborate religious ceremonials by which the Grand Princes of yore had been wont to “purify” any consort they took from un-Orthodox lands. The woman who now shared the throne of Monomachus was a Pole and a Latin; as for the Tzar, no one knew what or who he was—except perhaps Mariya Nogai. The popular discontent had found a rallying-point in the Shouyskie zamok; ’Dimitri had pardoned Vasili Shouyskie, the latter had never forgiven ’Dimitri. Before the arrival of the bridal foreigners the boyarin had set in movement the conspiracy which was intended to hurl the impostor from his mis-gotten throne. The plot was a wide-reaching one and could scarcely be kept from the Tzar’s knowledge, but the newly-wedded monarch, strong in contemptuous security and engrossed in feasting and music, paid scant notice to the warnings which he received from spies or the croaking of his guests as to the temper of the people. The 18th of May he had fixed for a sham battle around a specially constructed wooden fortress; in the early hours of the 17th his subjects gave him a display of a less make-believe nature. Besides the accumulated dislike for the Tzar and all his ways, the Poles who had flocked in such numbers to the marriage festival of Marina Mnishek gave bitter offence to the Moskvitchi by their haughty and irreverent bearing. It was the old history of Kiev repeating itself. The Russians chafed to see the Kreml of their cherished capital, the Holy of Holies of the Moskovite nation, overrun by swaggering Poles and lawless Kozaks, and the hour of vengeance was eagerly awaited by all classes. On the night of the 16th the strangers and the Tzar’s household, weary with wine and revelry, sought unsuspectingly their accustomed couches; otherwise “no one slept that night in Moskva.” As the sun’s first rays touched on the gilded cupolas an alarm bell clanged out from a church; another and another took up the signal, till all over the watching city the warnings resounded. The noise penetrated into the Kreml and roused the Tzar from his bed; the body-guard hazarded the explanation that a fire had broken out, and the Ljhedimitri returned to his chamber. But soon above the clanging was heard the angry yelling of a blood-seeking multitude, and Basmanov, who since his celebrated desertion of the Godounovs had remained true to his adopted master, burst in upon the startled Tzar and warned him to fly. The voevoda himself faced the clamouring crowd on the palace staircase and sank beneath a shower of murderous blows. The Ljhedimitri, hunted through his apartments, jumped or was thrown from an upper window and lay broken and senseless in a courtyard. His bleeding corpse, seized by some strielitz, was borne into a chamber where his principal boyarin enemies gathered round; for a few short moments he returned to a consciousness of agony from broken limbs, saw pitiless scowling faces around him, heard taunts and abuse from angry throats; then bullets and sword-thrusts closed his last audience. His body was dragged with ropes out through the Saviour Gate, to the striking of the same bells that had welcomed his state entry eleven months ago, and haled to the convent of the Ascension, where dwelt the pseudo-mother Mariya. The corpse might well have been beyond recognition, but to the insistence of the boyarins the old Tzaritza declared that the Ljhedimitri was not her son—a recantation as worthy of belief as the former avowal, and nothing more. The carrion that yesterday had been Tzar of all the Russias was dragged back to the Red Place, where, naked and with a ribald mask on its face, it was exposed for three days. At its broken feet lay the corpse of the voevoda who had been faithful to the death. “They loved each other in life; let them be together now.” So passed the Phantom Tzar from the throne he had so strangely haunted; phantom still, even when his dishonoured body had been flung into an unhallowed grave beyond the city walls, in “the house of the wretched,” a waste-land where outcasts were buried. Here, it was rumoured, mysterious fires were seen at night. The boyarins wished to be troubled with no further resurrections; the corpse was dug up and burned, and the ashes, mingled with gunpowder, blown to the winds from a cannon.[187] But not thus even could they get rid of the spirit of the impostor whom they had crowned and anointed. Already, before his downfall, new spectres had started up in various quarters, following on the same lines. From Poland had come a fable that Boris had deluded the Moskvitchi with a sham death and interment and had fled to England disguised as a merchant. A more substantial fraud was that of a false Petr, a supposed son of Thedor Ivanovitch, who was actually carrying on a war of petty depredation at the head of some Volga Kozaks. With a people so easily deluded the ghost of the “child of Ouglitch” would not be easily laid.

Kostomarov’s question, “Who was the first false Dimitri?” is one of those problems of history that seem to become more tangled and unsolvable the more light is brought to bear on them. A careful study of the circumstances and nature of his career, while leading to a strong conviction that he was not Dimitri Ivanovitch, equally disturbs the theory that he was Grigorie Otrepiev. The man who showed himself alike indifferent to the Greek and Latin cults, who would not cross himself before the adored ikons—the real Dimitri would have prostrated himself before them, if heredity and early education go for anything—who, moreover, was earnestly concerned for the education and welfare of his people; who strove by personal effort to raise the fighting value of the deplorably slack Moskovite army, and who restored the old boast of Monomachus, never to leave to subordinates what might be done by himself, above the effete Byzantine-borrowed etiquette of the later Russian Gosoudars; who, in the midst of feasting and rejoicing was steadily preparing for an attack on the Sultan, and who treated his private enemies with clemency and even distinction; the man who displayed all these qualities in the course of a few months was assuredly not a Rurikovitch, nor was he an adventurer who had received his education only in a Moskovite monastery, who had seen life only in a Kozak camp. That he was really an instrument in the hands of the Jesuits, nursed and educated for the purpose which he was afterwards called upon to fulfil, necessitates not only a much greater intimacy with Russian affairs than that body are known to have possessed, but also a foreknowledge on their part of the course those affairs were likely to take under the Godounov dynasty. Such pretenders are not made in a day. Each supposition takes the inquiry no farther than the starting-point—who was the first false Dimitri? And here it must be left. Russian historians of the Orthodox Faith at least are able to say with absolute conviction that the Tzar of 1605-6 was not the real Dimitri, for the latter was beatified by the Church, and many miracles were performed at his reputed tomb. If the supposed impostor were proved to be identical with the veritable Ivanovitch, a new and embarrassing dilemma would arise. The history of the career of the Ljhedimitri is instructive as to the slender evidence on which whole peoples will base their implicit belief in a resuscitation, or even in a resurrection. Such beliefs have lived again and again in human history; some are living yet. Ljhedimitries, false Pucelles, Perkin Warbecks, missing Archdukes, and others that need not be mentioned, have their perennial Easter in the credulity of mankind.

The catastrophe which had overtaken the impostor-Tzar included in its scope the foreign guests who were partly responsible for the outbreak. The massacre commenced with Dimitri’s musicians and servants in the Kreml and extended to the lodgings of the Poles and Lit’uanians in the Kitai- and Biel-gorod. For seven hours the church-bells dinned out their vibrating war-music, and tumultuous crowds of citizens and strielitz put to death such of the foreigners as were unable to defend themselves. Well to the fore in the work of butchery were the priests and monks, who turned the occasion of the Marina marriage into a S. Bartholomew of their own, hunting down with zealous rage the “enemies of their religion.”[188] The houses of the Palatine and of some of the other Polish nobles were vigorously defended by their retainers, who fired from the windows upon their assailants. Vasili Shouyskie (who had led the first rush into the Kreml, crucifix in one hand, sword in another), and other boyarins rode about the streets endeavouring to calm the tempest they had raised, and were able to save Mnishek, the Tzaritza, the ambassadors, and those of the Poles who had been successful in defending their thresholds. The bells were quieted, and the people dispersed to their homes, or vented their smouldering rage in mutilating the figure on the Red Place.

With the disappearance of the Ljhedimitri the Moskovites were again confronted with an interregnum, and on this occasion there was no one very obviously marked out to fill the vacant throne. By a process of exhaustion they fixed on the Rurik-descended kniaz who had offered the most determined opposition to the impostor, and who had engineered the revolution which had brought about his overthrow. Vasili Ivanovitch Shouyskie, a man of mediocre talents, widowed and past his prime, was scarcely a promising personality with whom to start a new dynasty, and the election of a sovereign of such an obviously stop-gap nature almost invited new intrigues and new apparitions. Prudence suggested at least a recourse to a national assembly, such as that which had elected Boris, but Shouyskie preferred to take the tide of his fortune at its flood, and was content to receive the crown of all the Russias from the hands of the boyarins, clergy, and merchants of Moskva. Nor was this the only error he committed in the impatience for power to which old men are especially liable. The trail of Polish influence made itself visible even in the electoral gathering of the nobles and citizens who had just entered a blood-drenched protest against all that pertained to the West-Slavonic state. An oath was exacted from Vasili to the effect that he would swear to govern in consultation with the boyarins, and to put no one to death without their consent; that he would listen to no false denunciators; and that he would not confiscate the lands, goods, shops or houses, of the relatives of condemned offenders.[189] This concession, the first step towards the Pacta conventa of Poland, was an innovation which shook men’s ideas of the sacred nature of the sovereign, and reduced the new Tzar more than ever to the position of a make-shift ruler, the mere head of a boyarin douma. Without waiting for the consecration of a new Patriarch (the Russian Primates regularly toppled over and disappeared in the political earthquakes which engulfed their temporal masters), Vasili’s coronation was solemnised on the 1st of June, the earliest date by which the corpses of the victims of the late massacre could be cleared out of the city. The first act of the new reign was one of nervous ostentation; the remains of the genuine Dimitri were solemnly transported from Ouglitch to the Kreml of Moskva, where they were reinterred in the Cathedral of the Archangel. Here, in this sacred environment, under the eye of the Tzar, it was hoped that this troublesome Ivanovitch would sleep in peace and cease to haunt the throne which should have been his heritage. The revolution was completed by the election of Hermogen, Metropolitan of Kazan, to the Patriarchate, the new head of the Church being a bitter opponent of all that savoured of foreign heresy. Surrounded by courtiers who had not had time to develop disaffection, by complaisant priests and heavily-armed strielitz, encompassed on all sides by the stately and sanctified buildings of the Kreml, and breathing an atmosphere laden with the exhalations of centuries of accumulated homage rendered to saints and sovereigns, Vasili may have fancied himself, in fact as well as title, Tzar of all the wide Russias. But throughout the hot days of July and August, when the sun blazed on the white and gold cupolas, and the dogs slunk about with lolling tongues in the shady bazaars of the Kitai-gorod, and frogs croaked dismally from the steamy marshes of the Neglina, dust-coated messengers kept pouring in to the Tzar’s paradise, by the Saviour and Nikolai Gates, with tidings of trouble and unrest throughout the land. From the Sieverski country, from Toula, Kalouga, from the camp at Eletz, from the Volga valley, and from far Astrakhan came reports of sedition and open rebellion, and the burden of each report was the magic name Dimitri. It almost seemed as if, in scattering the ashes of the impostor to the winds, his undertakers had sown a crop of phantoms which was now springing up in all directions. The most persistent rumour was that Dimitri had escaped once again from the hands of his would-be murderers and had fled into Poland, another man having been killed in his stead; the Moskvitchi instantly recalled the fact that the face of the corpse so ostentatiously exposed on the Red Place had been covered by a mask. Another widely-circulated version invented a new Dimitri who had only just emerged from the obscurity of his exile and claimed the throne as the real child of Ouglitch. Nowhere at the outset was there even the foundation of a pretender round whom these legends might crystallise; he existed as yet only in the popular imagination. The first impostor had created the belief in a romantically restored Dimitri; the belief now called for another impostor. Several princes and boyarins of the lesser rank (styled dieti-boyarins, literally “children-boyarins”) took up arms in support of what was more than ever a phantom, but the most formidable of the war-brands which blazed out at this time was remarkable for belonging to a class which had supplied few men of note to Russian history. Bolotnikov, who claimed to have seen the real Dimitri in Poland and to have been appointed his lieutenant, was a serf who had been carried off in one of the Tartar raids by which South Russia was periodically drained of her already sparse population, and had continued his life of toil in a Turkish galley. Obtaining his liberty, he had wandered back to his native country, to reappear, like a trouble-scenting beast of prey, in the hour of mischief and calamity. His real purpose, which underlay the Dimitri agitation, was to inaugurate a peasant rebellion, and if an apprenticeship of hardship and suffering were any qualification for the championship of a down-trodden class, the enterprise was in good hands. The sedition of the voevodas and their military followings, the loosening of the central authority over the provincial kniazes and boyarins, and the open door which the general dislocation offered to the free-lances and Kozaks of the borders, swelled the insurrection to alarming dimensions. As in the long struggle of the Fronde which distressed France in the same century, it was difficult to say what each particular band-in-arms was fighting for. The very vagueness of the threatened danger added to its alarm, and the waning of the year, instead of dispersing the insurgent army which had gathered round Bolotnikov, impelled it towards Moskva. Towns and gorodoks surrendered to the ex-serf as they had done before to the reputed ex-priest, and the rebels reached the village of Kolomensk on the 2nd December. But the ambitious nobles who had thrown in their lot with the peasant leader saw no prospect of seizing or holding the capital on the strength of an empty name, the shadow of a shadow, nor did they propose to install a serf and sometime galley-slave on the throne of Monomachus. Several flitted away from the insurgent camp, and the young voevoda Mikhail Skopin-Shouyskie defeated and dispersed the diminished company of rebels, whose leader fled to Kalouga. 1607Relieved from the onslaught which had threatened to overturn his throne, Vasili was able to celebrate Christmas in his capital, and the New Year was marked by another of the coffin-movings which accompanied every change in the dynasty, and were characteristic of a period when the dead seemed to share the restlessness of the living. This time it was the remains of Boris, his wife, and Thedor II. which were conducted to the Troitza monastery, possibly as a guarantee against inconvenient reappearances—a precaution certainly not uncalled for. Bolotnikov meanwhile had gathered fresh adherents and joined his forces to those of the pretended Tzarevitch Petr, who brought a large following of Don and Volga Kozaks. The Tzar marched against this new rival in person, at the head of an army of 100,000 men, and drove the rebels into Toula. Bolotnikov, seeing the hopelessness of the struggle under existing circumstances, sent a courier to the Palatine of Sendomir, urging the immediate production of a flesh-and-blood Dimitri, without whom all was lost.[190] The precedent of Kromi, however, was not repeated, and in October the besieged leaders of the revolt, Bolotnikov, the “Ljhepetr,” and two or three boyarins who had continued staunch to the movement, surrendered the fortress on the condition that their lives should be spared. The holy and Orthodox Tzar crowned his victory by inflicting a signal chastisement on his too confiding enemies. Bolotnikov had his eyes struck out and was then drowned, a fit climax to his career; the pretended Tzarevitch was hung, and hundreds of his followers flung into the river. The boyarins escaped with lesser punishments. Vasili returned to Moskva “in triumph.” But the demolition of one pretender seemed to make way for a whole crop of dragon-heads; on all sides sprang up self-styled heirs of the vanished line of Moskva. One was a pretended son of Ivan Groznie, another of the murdered Ivan Ivanovitch, while in the Oukrain alone no fewer than eight apparitions disputed the parentage of the saintly Thedor Ivanovitch.[191] It was as though a whole baby-farm of tzarskie foundlings and unacknowledged offspring had suddenly come to maturity and public notice. But more formidable than any of these shadowy claimants, there appeared in the spring of 1608, in the Sieverski land, the long-demanded Dimitri—Ljhedimitri II. of Russian historians. Who this man was is as deep a mystery as the origin of his forerunner, but his claims received almost as ready a recognition. His following of Dniepr Kozaks and Polish adventurers was swelled daily by desertions from the Moskovite soldiery, and town after town proclaimed him. He advanced as far as Toushin, a village twelve verstas from the capital, where he pitched his camp, which instantly became a rallying-point for all the disaffected and intractable elements which the period of troubles had called forth. Among other birds of sinister omen who made their appearance at the impostor’s improvised Court were the Palatine Mnishek and his daughter, widow of the first Ljhedimitri, and though there was little outward resemblance between the two men, the new pretender was publicly “recognised” by Marina as her husband.

The Moskovites by this time had lost their first enthusiasm for romantically restored Tzarevitches and took their revolutions more soberly. The tide of success carried the Ljhedimitri no farther than Toushin; in Moskva itself there was no popular upheaval such as that which swept the first pretender into the Kreml over the ruins of the Godounov dynasty. On the other hand there was as little enthusiasm for the cause of the Tzar, who inspired none of the reverence and affection which the people had been wont to lavish on their legitimate hereditary sovereigns. The mutual weakness of the rivals led to an extraordinary situation; the Tzar of Moskva dared not march against the “thief of Toushin,” and the pretended Dimitri dared not march against the “usurper.” Russia was divided by two Gosoudars whose antagonistic Courts were pitched within a few miles of each other. Many of the Moskovite upper class, hovering in their allegiance, flitted to and fro between Toushin and the Kreml, paying their respects to both Tzars and gathering favours and presents from both masters—a course of action which earned for them the designation of “pÉrÉleti” (birds of passage). The merchant folk of the capital pursued a similar policy, and finding a better market for their goods among the free-spending camp-dwellers at Toushin, almost depleted the city of its necessary supplies, a state of things further aggravated by the fact that the rebels held the roads to the rich corn-province of Riazan. Beyond the flat meadows of the Moskva valley the contest was waged more briskly; despite Sigismund’s solemn assurances of a strictly enforced neutrality, numbers of Poles flocked to the adventurer’s service, among them the voevoda Sapieha, already distinguished by his military exploits in Transylvania and Sweden. The rapidly moving Kozak and Polish troops of the Pretender’s army outmatched in activity the heavily-armed and, for the most part, slackly-led forces of Vasili. In the north-eastern province town after town fell into the hands of the “Toushinists”; Souzdal, Vladimir, and PÉrÉyaslavl opened their gates or were captured after a perfunctory resistance; Rostov, where resided Filarete Romanov, raised to the dignity of Metropolitan of that town by the first ’Dimitri, made a bolder stand against the conquerors. Defeated in battle outside the walls, the garrison and citizens defended their ramparts for three hours, and when finally overpowered took refuge with Romanov in the cathedral. The town submitted to the impostor’s voevodas, and the Metropolitan was dragged from his sanctuary and conducted with indignity to Toushin, where not martyrdom but preferment awaited him. Out of consideration for Filarete’s kinship with his “late half-brother” (the Tzar Thedor I.), the ’Dimitri proclaimed his captive Patriarch of Moskva and of all Russia.[192]

Unable to attempt a direct attack upon the capital, the pretender endeavoured to possess himself of the Troitza lavra. The accumulated wealth of this famous monastery, which had risen like a celestial city on the site of the lonely cell from which S. Sergie had watched the beavers playing, necessitated safe keeping. High walls and strongly fortified towers and gates peeped out from amid the thickly growing trees, and spoke defiance to Tartar raiders and plundering bands of freebooters. They were now called upon to withstand an organised siege from the batteries of the False Dimitri. In anticipation of the threatened attack two voevodas and a detachment of soldiers were dispatched from Moskva to the assistance of the monks, who numbered scarcely more than 300 brothers; the monastery servants and peasants from the neighbouring villages brought the effective of the defenders to 2500. At the end of September 1608 a force of 30,000 men, Poles, Russians, Tartars, Kozaks, and Tcherkesses, led by Sapieha and Lisovski, invested this secluded haven of peace and piety, which was suddenly transformed into a beleaguered fortress. The balls from ninety heavy cannon crashed incessantly against the walls and towers, which “shivered, but did not fall”; mines and assaults alike were fruitless, and the siege dragged on month after month. The monks fought as vigorously as the soldiers, and during the lulls in the attack paraded their venerated ikons on the ramparts.[193] Meanwhile the tide of the Ljhedimitri’s success had begun to ebb. The composition of his following bore within itself the elements of defeat. The Poles, Kozaks, and Russian outlaws, who formed the most active contingents of his adherents, drove from his cause, by their licentiousness and indiscriminate marauding, the people whom they had previously won over by their energy and the renown of their arms. Wherever the opportunity offered, the towns which had acknowledged the pretender renounced his sovereignty and recognised that of Vasili. The reaction was further hastened by the victorious campaign of Skopin-Shouyskie and his Swedish allies. Vasili, less prudent than Boris, had accepted the renewed offer of assistance which King Karl held out, and, at the price of yielding up the town of Keksholm and district of Korelia, had obtained the services of 5000 Swedes, led by Jacob de la Gardie, son of the famous general. With this reinforcement Skopin-Shouyskie proceeded to strike at the northern strongholds of the Toushinists, and the two young captains (Mikhail was twenty-three, de la Gardie twenty-seven) swept all before them. 1609A victory over the rebels in May was followed by the capture of Toropetz, Kholm, Velikie-Louki, and other places. In July the army of the False Dimitri was driven out of Tver after hard fighting. Temporarily deserted by the Swedes, whose demands he was unable to satisfy, Skopin continued to organise victory; his exhausted war-chest was replenished by patriotic disbursements from several monasteries, while the Stroganovs sent him valuable aid in men and money from Perm. The young voevoda “whom the people loved” had the art of opening purse-strings as well as of forcing strongholds. In August a force detached from the siege of the stubbornly defended Troitza was met and repulsed with loss on the banks of a Volga tributary stream, and in October Skopin, rejoined by the Swedes, drove his enemies successively out of PÉrÉyaslavl and the Aleksandrovski sloboda. The loss of the latter place threatened the blockade which the Ljhedimitri’s voevodas had drawn round Moskva, and Sapieha made a determined effort to beat back the indomitable pilot of the reaction. Around the horror-haunted village where the Terrible had amused himself with his bears and gibbets and services, a bloody battle was fought between the armies of the rival Tzars; Shouyskie’s Moskovite and Permskie troops and the Swedish allies crowned their campaign by another victory, and the followers of the Thief straggled away from a scene of defeat and slaughter. Wearily back they made their way to the doleful camp at Toushin or to the monastery whose battered walls still held them at bay, while the ravens and hooded corbies came barking and croaking out of the darkening woods to interest themselves in the corpses stiffening in the snow; and from afar, perhaps from the distant Valdai mountains, the vultures swooped down on the same errand.

The cause of the phantom was fading; on the 12th January the defenders of the Troitza, worn with sixteen months of siege and wasted with want and disease, saw their foiled enemies withdraw sullenly from their dismantled trenches and vanish from the landscape they had so long disfigured. In February the impostor withdrew southward to Kalouga, and by March the famous camp of Toushin was deserted. But the decline of the Ljhedimitri’s fortunes was not followed by a corresponding improvement in those of Vasili. Sigismund, who had secretly abetted the cause of the second pretender, prepared to play a bolder game now that the insurrection seemed on the wane. The calling in of the Swedes, the “interference” of the rival branch of the House of Vasa, gave him a diplomatic excuse for displaying open hostility towards the Tzar, and the confusion which reigned throughout Russia furnished him with an opportunity for intervening with specious solicitude in the eddying course of the troubles. In September he crossed the border with a not very numerous army, and invited the burghers of Smolensk to admit him as a friend who wished only to stay the shedding of Russian blood. A similar declaration was forwarded to Moskva. Shein, the governor of Smolensk, refused to be cajoled by the benevolent overtures of the honey-lipped King, and the city was blockaded. Sapieha and the Poles and West-Russian Kozaks were summoned from the pretender’s service to join the royal camp, and many of the Moskovite adherents of the Ljhedimitri went with them. Thus a new danger trod on the heels of the old one, and Vasili once again beheld his Sysiphus stone of subjugation and pacification roll back from the almost-gained summit. A catastrophe which was suspiciously like a crime deprived him at once of the services of his ablest voevoda and of the lingering affections of the Moskvitchi. Skopin-Shouyskie and de la Gardie had wintered their troops at Aleksandrov; in March 1610 they made their entry into the capital, where the young Mikhail was received with a public enthusiasm such as had probably never been so spontaneously exhibited since the triumph of the victor of Koulikovo. Far out into the slobodas and meadows the populace streamed to welcome their hero, falling prostrate as he rode by with his companion-in-arms, and calling him their saviour; some were said to have hailed him as their Tzar. This demonstration could scarcely fail to be displeasing to Vasili; it was the old story of a consciously feeble monarch and a victorious and idolised warrior. Still more would it jar upon the Tzar’s brother and natural heir, Dimitri Shouyskie, whose chances of succession were undoubtedly threatened by the popularity of his nephew. At a christening feast given by the Tzar’s brother-in-law, Ivan Vorotuinskie, on the 23rd April, the young hope of the Moskovites was seized with a deadly illness, and expired as soon as he had been carried to his own house. His friend and fellow-in-arms, de la Gardie, forced himself into the death-chamber, and, gazing wofully on his stricken comrade, exclaimed, “People of Moskva, not only in your Russia, but in the lands of my sovereign, I shall not see again such another man.” The heart-wail of the young soldier was echoed by the people, who mingled with their lamentations bitter and not unreasonable accusations of foul play against the Shouyskies. Ekaterina, wife of Dimitri Shouyskie, of the “viper brood” of Skouratov (she was daughter of Maluta), was generally credited with having administered poison to the unsuspecting Mikhail. To crown the universal resentment, Dimitri Shouyskie was given the vacant command of the tzarskie troops.

While the muttering roll of disaffection sounded louder every day on the Red Place and in the markets of the Kitai-gorod, in the west the Polish invaders (who had put forward Vladislav, son of Sigismund, as candidate for the throne of Moskva) were making themselves masters of the Russian border towns. Starodoub, Potchep, and Tchernigov were taken by assault, Novgorod-Sieverski and Roslavl “kissed the cross” to Vladislav. Against these advancing enemies it was necessary to oppose such force as could be rallied on behoof of the disliked and despised Tzar. An army of 40,000 Russians and 8000 Swedes, under the supreme command of the incompetent Dimitri Shouyskie, moved west towards Smolensk. They did not get far. Near Mojhaysk they were attacked by the royal hetman Jholkiewsko on the morning of the 23rd June and completely defeated, the Moskovite cavalry breaking at the first shock.[194] The German troops in de la Gardie’s following deserted to the enemy early in the battle; “the Poles advanced to their regiments crying, Kum! Kum! and the Germans came flying like birds to a call.”[195] The tzarskie voevodas, Shouyskie, Golitzuin, and Mezentzkie, galloped away into the forest, the first-named leaving his baggage, money, staff of command, and his furs in the hands of the victors. De la Gardie, regretting more than ever his lost comrade, surrendered to Jholkiewsko, and was permitted to return with his diminished battalions to the north. As a result of this decisive encounter Voloko-Lamsk, the Iosif monastery, and other places were forced to submit to the Polish commander. In the capital the effect was to hasten the downfall of the Shouyskie dynasty. The brothers Prokopie and Zakhar Liapounov, Rurik-descended nobles possessing immense influence in the province of Riazin, stirred up the Moskvitchi to depose Vasili on the ground that his rule had not restored peace to the land nor checked the spilling of Christian blood. The city was in a ferment; on the 17th of July the ferment came to a head. The kolokols clanged out from their bell-towers the curfew of the reign of Vasili Shouyskie, as they had sounded the death-knell of the first Ljhedimitri. The people, Liapounov led, surged in angry crowds from one point to another; gathering first beyond the Arbatskie gate, thence to the Kreml, where the Tzar vainly endeavoured to recall them to their fealty, back through the Red Place, they finally swarmed outside the Serpoukhovskie gate. There the assembled citizens—boyarins, clergy, traders, and lesser folk—decreed that the stop-gap Tzar must go. Vasili bowed before the storm and departed from the tzarskie palace to his hereditary mansion. To prevent the possibility of a reaction in his favour (he was known to be distributing money among the Strielitz) he was seized by Zakhar Liapounov two days later and forced to undergo tonsure and frocking in the monastery of the Ascension. Thus ignominiously disappeared the last Tzar of the line of S. Vladimir. The government of the city devolved upon a council of boyarins with Thedor Mstislavskie at their head; this was naturally only a provisional arrangement, and the most urgent business of the new Douma was to take steps to give the Moskovite empire the ruler necessary for its cohesion and administration. The choice lay practically between two evils; on the one hand was the exploited and discredited “Dimitri,” with his following of Don Kozaks and bandits, on the other the foreign Prince Vladislav, connected by birth and association with Russia’s two historically hostile neighbours. The common folk and peasants were ready to accept the former and shut their eyes to the gaps in the evidence connecting him with the child of Ouglitch; the boyarins and upper classes—the same aristocracy that had rebelled with pious horror against the Polish and Catholic taint of the first Ljhedimitri—turned their thoughts and inclinations more and more towards the son of Sigismund.

Undoubtedly the near neighbourhood of the pretender (he was then at Kolomensk) and the disposition of the people in his favour forced the hands of the boyarins, who feared that if they did not come speedily to terms with Vladislav the bestowal of the crown would be rudely diverted from their disposal. Their anxiety on this score smoothed the way for Jholkiewsko, who entered into negotiations from his camp at Mojhaysk on behalf of the Polish candidature. He was empowered to give solemn assurances for the upholding of the Orthodox religion, and to promise a share of the administration to the Douma, besides guaranteeing fair trial for all political offenders. In the teeth of the opposition of the Patriarch, and without recourse to the counsel of the citizens in general, still less with regard to the voices of the people as a whole, a small group of the Douma boyarins, Mstislavskie, Golitzuin, and Mezentzkie, and two secretaries of council, signed the treaty which placed the throne of Moskovy conditionally at the disposal of a Polish prince (17th August). Four years previously the Poles had been hunted down like wolves in the Kitai-gorod and Kreml, now the guardians of the State, fearing a popular outburst in favour of “the thief,” were only anxious to see the Polish hetman installed with his troops in the capital. As a precaution against another possible revolution, which might restore Vasili from his cloister-prison to the throne, the persons of the deposed Tzar and his brothers were handed over to Jholkiewsko and by him transmitted to Poland. On the 27th of August, on the road half-way between Moskva and the Polish camp, the oath of allegiance to Vladislav was sworn by a large number of the citizens and boyarins, and the example of the capital was followed by the provincial towns of Souzdal, Vladimir, Rostov, and others. A lingering hope on the part of the Russians that the new Tzar would adopt the Orthodox religion caused a hitch in the progress of the negotiations, and a large embassy, at the head of which was the Rostov Metropolitan, Filarete Romanov, and the kniaz Golitzuin, set out to wait upon Sigismund at his camp before Smolensk, which city still held out against his attack. The anxiety of the leading boyarins to complete a political manoeuvre with which they had already gone too far to draw back, led them to take a step which left them no power to enforce their demands. The doubtful proposals of the Polish king, who began to covet the Russian crown for himself, had aroused strong symptoms of patriotic sedition in the capital, and the Douma, having for the moment appeased the irritated citizens, invited Jholkiewsko to bring his troops into Moskva. On the night of the 20th September the stroke was effected, and the people awoke next morning to find the Poles quietly established in the Kreml, Kitai-gorod, and White-town.

With a garrison at Moskva and others in some of the provincial towns, Sigismund felt certain of securing the crown of Monomachus, which it was now his object to obtain for himself. The voevoda and citizens of Smolensk, though ready to kiss the cross to Vladislav, still stubbornly defended their walls against the King, who had announced his intention of annexing the town to Poland. The Moskovite ambassadors stoutly refused to agree to this projected dismemberment, but in the extraordinary state of affairs they were unable to make any show of relieving the place. Since the days of the Mongol servitude Russia had not been in such a humiliating position. In the north a new trouble arose; the King of Sweden, seeing his ally Vasili deposed and Vladislav of Poland elected in his place, changed his good relations with the gosoudarstvo into open hostility, and sent an invading force into Russian territory. The northern voevodas, divided in their allegiance between the pretender and the Pole, offered an ineffective resistance to the Swedes, and Ladoga and Ivangorod fell into their hands. Meanwhile the weeks dragged on in lengthened negotiations, and the royal camp before Smolensk was the scene of as many intrigues and self-seeking subserviencies as had distinguished the impostor’s Court at Toushin. An unlooked-for event towards the close of the year rid Sigismund of a rival and the Moskovites of an embarrassment. 11th Dec.The false Dimitri, decoyed out hare-hunting on to the steppes by a Tartar who nursed against him a private enmity, was murdered on the lonely plain; his death broke up the camp at Kalouga, despite the efforts of the twice-widowed Marina to form a party on behalf of her infant son Ivan. For the most part the malcontents gave in their adhesion to the elected Tzar Vladislav. Sigismund had now no further excuse for prolonging the uncertainties and anxieties of an interregnum in a country already suffering from the effects of a long period of anarchy and revolution; his object seemed to be, however, to weary the Moskovites into an unconditional acceptance of his rule. From the beginning of the troubles he had played an ungenerous part and sown a fresh crop of bitter animosities between the two Slav nations—a crop which was to yield a rueful harvest to Poland. Threatened with a hostile league between Moskovy and Sweden, it was but natural that he should view with satisfaction the dawning of internal troubles in the former State, natural perhaps that he should give underhand support to the two successive impostors; natural also that he should attempt to secure for his son or himself the eastern Slav sovereignty. But the double-dealing and hypocrisy which marked his policy towards the Russian nation, before whom he posed as a friend and deliverer, while seeking to filch from its weakness an important frontier city, was scarcely worthy of the great House of Vasa, which was about to present to Europe so splendid a warrior.

In long-suffering Moskva murmurs began to be heard against the Poles and against the Jesuits, and hints of armed opposition to Vladislav were wafted about the country. The Patriarch Hermogen, irritated by the sound of Latin chants in the high places of Orthodoxy, sedulously fanned the smouldering spirit of revolt and became so outspoken in his exhortations that he was seized by the Poles in the Cathedral of the Assumption and placed in confinement. Released on Palm Sunday in order to take his place astride an ass in the customary procession, he was soon afterwards sent back to his captivity and displaced from the Patriarchal throne, which was filled by the counter-Patriarch Ignasie; the third, counting Filarete Romanov, who disputed that office. If the State was without a head, the Church enjoyed in that respect a Cerberus-like superfluity. This persecution of their Vladuika did not dispose the people more favourably towards the Poles; Liapounov began to collect troops in the Riazan country, and in the capital an outbreak between the citizens and foreign garrison was only a matter of opportunity. 1611In Passion week the tension between the two elements found vent in a massacre, but on this occasion it was the Poles who set on foot the butchery. Mistaking an accidental brawl for a preconcerted rising, the hetman’s troops, including the Germans serving under him, attacked the defenceless inhabitants of the Kreml and Kitai-gorod and slew, by all accounts, some 7000 men. The alarm spread into the Biel-gorod, where the people, under the direction of Kniaz Pojharskie, prepared to resist the foreigners. The streets were hastily barricaded with timber and furniture, and furious fighting went on round the several gates of the Kitai-gorod, while flames broke forth in various quarters. The city was soon a blazing mass, and amid the roar and crash of conflagration the Poles were driven back on all sides into the Kitai-gorod and Kreml. Pojharskie, wounded in the fray, was carried to the Troitza monastery, which became a base of operations for the Russians, who held the Biel-gorod and all the approaches to the city. The situation of the garrison during the Dis-like night which succeeded the furious day has been vividly pictured by the historian of Moskva. “Darkly gazed the Poles from the walls of the Kreml and Kitai-gorod on the burnt ashes of Moskva, awaiting the arming people and listening through the night to the howling of dogs, that gnawed human bones.”[196] For days the city blazed, and within their quarters the foreign soldiery plundered and ransacked the houses of boyarins and merchants. Outside, the Moskvitchi, swarming like burnt-out bees, were reinforced by drafts of Liapounov’s Riazan levies. The arrival of the chief Zaroutzkie with a following of Don Kozaks was a source of weakness rather than strength, and the quarrels of the ill-disciplined children of the steppes with the Riazan troops served to inflame the jealousy existing between their respective leaders. While the wardens of Polish occupation were being hemmed within the walls of the Russian citadel, Sigismund was steadily discharging his cannon against the battered bulwarks of Smolensk. On the 3rd of June a breach was effected and the city won. The voevoda Shein defended himself with a small body of men in a tower, and only surrendered on a promise of the King’s mercy. The mercy of Sigismund Vasa might be likened to the “gentle dew from Heaven” only in the sense of a tendency to rapid evaporation, and neither his sense of honour nor a regard for brave constancy came to the rescue; the man who had held his forces so long at bay was put to the torture and afterwards dispatched in fetters to a Lit’uanian prison. This besmirched victory was celebrated by a triumphant entry into Warszawa, graced by the presence, in the King’s train, of the befrocked and discrowned Tzar, Vasili Shouyskie. According to the Russian historians, who see the trail of Jesuit intrigue throughout the duration of the Troubles, this success of the Poles had the significance of a Papal triumph. “The success of Poland over Russia brought joy to all the Catholic world. In Rome festival succeeded festival.”[197] Rome was thankful for small mercies in those days. The King found it easier to celebrate his victory than to follow it up by any vigorous action against the Russians who were in armed opposition to his son’s pretensions to the throne. The gosoudarstvo at this moment was in a state of bewildering chaos, and nowhere could be seen the elements of re-organisation. Around the Pole-held inner city of Moskva was quartered an army of some 100,000 men, strielitz, dieti-boyarins and their followings, and Don Kozaks, the whole under the separate leadership of three voevodas, Prokope Liapounov, Dimitri Troubetzkoi, and Zaroutzkie. Besides the personal jealousy which existed between the leaders, it was impossible to say what common cause, except the negative one of opposition to Vladislav, brought and held their forces together. There was not even a phantom to set against the claim of the Polish prince. It almost seems as if, like the Germans who nursed the legend that their Red King still slept in his Untersberg and would come forth with all his knights in the hour of his country’s greatest need, the Moskovites persistently hoped that the real Dimitri would at last emerge from his obscurity and give Russia once more an Orthodox sovereign. Beyond the immediate neighbourhood of the capital, confusion and uncertainty were naturally intensified; no town knew whom to acknowledge and could at most only defend itself against the attacks of the plundering bands which swarmed everywhere. The inhabitants of Velikie-Novgorod, in the midst of their indecision, were suddenly startled by the arrival before their gates of a Swedish army under de la Gardie, who demanded their allegiance to Karl, his king. 1611The old spirit of the Novgorodskie answered defiance to their old enemies, and the Swedes were held awhile in check; on the night of the 16th July, however, de la Gardie was admitted by treachery into the town, and effected his entrance so stealthily that the citizens first learned of the unexpected stroke by seeing the Swedish guards patrolling the walls. After a faint attempt at resistance the city submitted with as good grace as was possible to the Swedish occupation, and swore fealty to Karl-Filip, the King’s second son, as their sovereign. Meanwhile the army around Moskva showed serious signs of breaking up in confusion. A forged letter, supposed to have been concocted by the Poles, calling upon the Moskovites to destroy the Kozaks and signed with the name of Liapounov, was found in Zaroutzkie’s camp. Despite his denial of the authorship, the enraged Kozaks hewed the voevoda down with their sabres, a deed which increased the ill-feeling and distrust with which the country people and citizens regarded them.

In this deplorable condition did the waning of the year find the Russian land; the capital in the hands of the Polish enemy, its outskirts and slobodas infested with scarcely more welcome Kozaks; Smolensk and the towns of the Sieverski country held by Poles; bands of Poles and Dniepr Kozaks ravaging and slaying in the western villages; Great Novgorod, Ladoga, and the cities of the Finnish Gulf in Swedish thrall; freebooters and robber gangs everywhere. To crown all, there descended on the stricken inhabitants a winter of frightful severity, and many of the homeless outcasts died of cold and hunger in the roads and fields.