The traditional designation of Russia’s Time of Troubles refers to the fifteen years between 1598 and 1613, seeing the death of Tsar Fedor Ioannovich, the last official Rurikid, as its beginning, and the enthronement of Tsar Mikhail I Fedorovich, the first Romanov, as its end. There is a certain logic in such identification on the part of those who wish to delegitimize the reign of Boris Godunov, while upholding the pitiful reign of the dimwitted last tsar of the Rurik dynasty as apparently an integral part of a seven-hundred-plus-year-long “business as usual.”
Curiously, in providing its list of Russian rulers from Ivan IV to modern times, Time Almanac offers its own, ruler-oriented, so to speak, chronology for Russia’s Time of Troubles: from the 1610 overthrow of Vasili IV Shuisky to that incontestable 1613 date of the advent of the first Romanov. True, that the three years between 1610 and 1613 were indeed a period of total chaos and misery in Russia, and, strictly speaking, there was no identifiable ruler in Russia during that time, but it wouldn’t be accurate of course to limit the normally used historical term The Time of Troubles to just these three rulerless years alone.
Thus dismissing the terribly restrictive, albeit logically sustainable, designation provided by Time Almanac, we are returning to the traditional designation as the fifteen years from 1598 to 1613. There is a huge illogic hidden here, though, in this presumably established historiographic designation. In my previous entry Boris Godunov, I noted that Boris’s rule (rather than reign) lasted for nineteen years (1584-1605), that is, from the death of Ivan IV Grozny until Boris’s own death in 1605. Thus it doesn’t make much practical sense to start counting the Time of Troubles from somewhere in the thick of Boris’s rule. There were certainly calamities occurring during the official reign of Boris, such as the terrible famine of 1601-1603, giving rise to a series of mutinies and the rumor accusing Boris Godunov of the murder of Tsarevich Dmitri Ivanovich. Illogically, of course, False Dmitri’s rise, resurrecting the corpse of the deceased son of Ivan Grozny, never put to rest the legend of Dmitri’s murder at the hands of the hapless Godunov, but managed to coexist with it. Boris’s guilt firmly established, there were no brows raised concerning the incongruity of the ‘fact’ that the notorious corpus delicti had been presently pressing toward Moscow, on the strength of a sizable Polish army, swelling every day with reinforcements from the ranks of Boris’s numerous foes.
Therefore, having said all this, and considering that the famine occurred three years into Boris’s reign, while the invasion of False Dmitri’s army dates to the year 1604, we must necessarily conclude that the date 1598 given as the official beginning of Russia’s Time of Troubles has no other merit than to besmirch the already much besmirched reputation of the designated villain Boris Godunov. But in all fairness, had it been up to me, I would have designated the beginning of the Time of Troubles starting at the time of Boris’s death. His son Fedor’s super-short reign was already a full-fledged “time of trouble” and it certainly ought to fall under that practical designation.
To be sure, it is the eight years from the death of Tsar Boris Godunov (1605) to the ascent of Tsar Mikhail I Fedorovich Romanov (1613) which were by any standard the eeriest and weirdest period of Russian history, no question about it. This eight-year period, in its entirety, is particularly deserving to be called The Time of Troubles, in my estimation, and I am going to add a few words, mostly for historical reference, about those hard and confusing years.
As I said before, the last years of Boris’s reign had already been marred by an impending and later authentic civil war, unleashed by the forces supporting the probably illegitimate claim of False Dimitri, buttressed not so much by a sincere albeit mistaken belief in his legitimacy, as by a desire to erase the much-hated intrusion of the Godunov family from the Russian royal dynastic continuity. It is a well-known historical fact that the infamous boyar dignitary Vasili Shuisky and others were quite explicit in laying out their strategic priorities: first to support False Dmitri against the Godunov clan and its minions; then to get rid of Dmitri and come to an accommodation among the boyars.
The terrible fate of the hapless seven-week Tsar Fedor II Godunov, an otherwise bright and capable youth, was a part of that strategy. False Dmitri, next, may have been delusionally optimistic about his own chances to rule Russia, but even under the luckiest of circumstances he could not have lasted for more than a year. It was actually some luck for him that he had lasted that long.
Tsar Vasili IV Shuisky (1606-1610) was a despicable rat and unscrupulous intrigue-weaver, whose treason and incessant double-dealing could put him on the Russian throne, but couldn’t keep him there for too long. What followed his overthrow was a real tragicomedy. Unable to install a single credible ruler on the throne, a group of seven most prominent boyars who had survived the peripeties of Russia’s changing fortunes, was quick to established the so-called “Semiboyarshchina,” the “Seven-Boyar Rule,” whose immediate task was to fight the next “False Dmitri” in line, by countering his threat with the help of the Polish Crown Prince and future King of Poland Wladyslaw IV Wasa, whom they disingenuously invited to pick up the Russian throne lest False Dmitri II gets it first.
A scandalous situation therefore developed, in which the fate of the Russian throne was decided by Russian patriots led by Kuzma Minin and Prince Pozharsky, at the head of a patriotic militia, eventually triumphing, and installing Mikhail Romanov on the Russian throne, thus putting an end to the Time of Troubles. (These dramatic events would much later become the basis of Mikhail Glinka’s great first opera Ivan Susanin.
…Having now completed a flittering overview of our subject matter, it is time to focus our attention on just one personage, namely on the person of False Dmitri I, Ruler of Russia from 21 July 1605 to 17 May 1606. We actually know him already as “Grishka Otrepyev” from Pushkin’s drama and Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov. Incidentally, are Grishka and False Dmitri I historically the same?
One shouldn’t be surprised that this and other similar questions about the identity of this man are impossible to answer. Too much bias on the part of the participants of his historical record, to the point that some of the recorded “facts” about him are utterly incongruous and ridiculous, to put it mildly.
It is even impossible to say whether he might have been the real Tsarevich Dmitri Ivanovich, Ivan Grozny’s youngest son, semi-miraculously escaping death at Uglich and taken into protective custody by some brave and bold strategic planner. History gives us no definitive answers, and because we have sharply conflicting testimonies from both his biased Western friends and Russian foes, a reasonable composite picture of him is simply unavailable.
We know that he was smart and well-educated, but this gives us no key to his real identity. As the Tsar, he seems to have done a lot of good things for a lot of people, but all of them apparently for the selfish motive of gaining himself supporters in a place where he had more sworn enemies than he could handle. In essence, we can say that he was used and then disposed of, these two stages corresponding to his rise and fall.
Most Russian historians are hostile toward him, pointing out his selfishness, reckless disregard for Russia’s customs and basic sensibilities, etc. Other historians, probably simply out of the spirit of ad contrarium are suggesting that he may have been a good ruler, opening up Russia to the West, and thus envisaging Peter’s reforms a century later, which looks to me like a very big overstatement.
My opinion of him remains objectively negative: I see no good coming to Russia on the sharpened points of Polish pikes. To me, he is Grishka Otrepyev of Pushkin and Mussorgsky, but not because I am eager to buy this particular version over all others. All others are moot to me, and historically even the Grishka Otrepyev version is trivial to me as well. (But of course not so aesthetically, as the reader knows already.)
Yet "Grishka Otrepyev" carries certain intrinsic connotations which are completely in tune with the concept of the Time of Troubles as such. I believe that this concept refers to a difficult transitional period in the history of Russia, which is so much negatively charged that nothing positive can be ascribed to it, except that Minin and Pozharsky, and Ivan Susanin, and so many other Russian national heroes, had helped to bring an end to it, and good riddance!
Thus, I repeat, the sordid name of Grishka Otrepyev, associated in the Russian language with “filthy rags,” and even “trash,” has become for me an apt metaphor for this whole bizarre period of Russian history which has been chronologically imprecisely, and rather confusingly, labeled as “The Time of Troubles.”
Curiously, in providing its list of Russian rulers from Ivan IV to modern times, Time Almanac offers its own, ruler-oriented, so to speak, chronology for Russia’s Time of Troubles: from the 1610 overthrow of Vasili IV Shuisky to that incontestable 1613 date of the advent of the first Romanov. True, that the three years between 1610 and 1613 were indeed a period of total chaos and misery in Russia, and, strictly speaking, there was no identifiable ruler in Russia during that time, but it wouldn’t be accurate of course to limit the normally used historical term The Time of Troubles to just these three rulerless years alone.
Thus dismissing the terribly restrictive, albeit logically sustainable, designation provided by Time Almanac, we are returning to the traditional designation as the fifteen years from 1598 to 1613. There is a huge illogic hidden here, though, in this presumably established historiographic designation. In my previous entry Boris Godunov, I noted that Boris’s rule (rather than reign) lasted for nineteen years (1584-1605), that is, from the death of Ivan IV Grozny until Boris’s own death in 1605. Thus it doesn’t make much practical sense to start counting the Time of Troubles from somewhere in the thick of Boris’s rule. There were certainly calamities occurring during the official reign of Boris, such as the terrible famine of 1601-1603, giving rise to a series of mutinies and the rumor accusing Boris Godunov of the murder of Tsarevich Dmitri Ivanovich. Illogically, of course, False Dmitri’s rise, resurrecting the corpse of the deceased son of Ivan Grozny, never put to rest the legend of Dmitri’s murder at the hands of the hapless Godunov, but managed to coexist with it. Boris’s guilt firmly established, there were no brows raised concerning the incongruity of the ‘fact’ that the notorious corpus delicti had been presently pressing toward Moscow, on the strength of a sizable Polish army, swelling every day with reinforcements from the ranks of Boris’s numerous foes.
Therefore, having said all this, and considering that the famine occurred three years into Boris’s reign, while the invasion of False Dmitri’s army dates to the year 1604, we must necessarily conclude that the date 1598 given as the official beginning of Russia’s Time of Troubles has no other merit than to besmirch the already much besmirched reputation of the designated villain Boris Godunov. But in all fairness, had it been up to me, I would have designated the beginning of the Time of Troubles starting at the time of Boris’s death. His son Fedor’s super-short reign was already a full-fledged “time of trouble” and it certainly ought to fall under that practical designation.
To be sure, it is the eight years from the death of Tsar Boris Godunov (1605) to the ascent of Tsar Mikhail I Fedorovich Romanov (1613) which were by any standard the eeriest and weirdest period of Russian history, no question about it. This eight-year period, in its entirety, is particularly deserving to be called The Time of Troubles, in my estimation, and I am going to add a few words, mostly for historical reference, about those hard and confusing years.
As I said before, the last years of Boris’s reign had already been marred by an impending and later authentic civil war, unleashed by the forces supporting the probably illegitimate claim of False Dimitri, buttressed not so much by a sincere albeit mistaken belief in his legitimacy, as by a desire to erase the much-hated intrusion of the Godunov family from the Russian royal dynastic continuity. It is a well-known historical fact that the infamous boyar dignitary Vasili Shuisky and others were quite explicit in laying out their strategic priorities: first to support False Dmitri against the Godunov clan and its minions; then to get rid of Dmitri and come to an accommodation among the boyars.
The terrible fate of the hapless seven-week Tsar Fedor II Godunov, an otherwise bright and capable youth, was a part of that strategy. False Dmitri, next, may have been delusionally optimistic about his own chances to rule Russia, but even under the luckiest of circumstances he could not have lasted for more than a year. It was actually some luck for him that he had lasted that long.
Tsar Vasili IV Shuisky (1606-1610) was a despicable rat and unscrupulous intrigue-weaver, whose treason and incessant double-dealing could put him on the Russian throne, but couldn’t keep him there for too long. What followed his overthrow was a real tragicomedy. Unable to install a single credible ruler on the throne, a group of seven most prominent boyars who had survived the peripeties of Russia’s changing fortunes, was quick to established the so-called “Semiboyarshchina,” the “Seven-Boyar Rule,” whose immediate task was to fight the next “False Dmitri” in line, by countering his threat with the help of the Polish Crown Prince and future King of Poland Wladyslaw IV Wasa, whom they disingenuously invited to pick up the Russian throne lest False Dmitri II gets it first.
A scandalous situation therefore developed, in which the fate of the Russian throne was decided by Russian patriots led by Kuzma Minin and Prince Pozharsky, at the head of a patriotic militia, eventually triumphing, and installing Mikhail Romanov on the Russian throne, thus putting an end to the Time of Troubles. (These dramatic events would much later become the basis of Mikhail Glinka’s great first opera Ivan Susanin.
…Having now completed a flittering overview of our subject matter, it is time to focus our attention on just one personage, namely on the person of False Dmitri I, Ruler of Russia from 21 July 1605 to 17 May 1606. We actually know him already as “Grishka Otrepyev” from Pushkin’s drama and Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov. Incidentally, are Grishka and False Dmitri I historically the same?
One shouldn’t be surprised that this and other similar questions about the identity of this man are impossible to answer. Too much bias on the part of the participants of his historical record, to the point that some of the recorded “facts” about him are utterly incongruous and ridiculous, to put it mildly.
It is even impossible to say whether he might have been the real Tsarevich Dmitri Ivanovich, Ivan Grozny’s youngest son, semi-miraculously escaping death at Uglich and taken into protective custody by some brave and bold strategic planner. History gives us no definitive answers, and because we have sharply conflicting testimonies from both his biased Western friends and Russian foes, a reasonable composite picture of him is simply unavailable.
We know that he was smart and well-educated, but this gives us no key to his real identity. As the Tsar, he seems to have done a lot of good things for a lot of people, but all of them apparently for the selfish motive of gaining himself supporters in a place where he had more sworn enemies than he could handle. In essence, we can say that he was used and then disposed of, these two stages corresponding to his rise and fall.
Most Russian historians are hostile toward him, pointing out his selfishness, reckless disregard for Russia’s customs and basic sensibilities, etc. Other historians, probably simply out of the spirit of ad contrarium are suggesting that he may have been a good ruler, opening up Russia to the West, and thus envisaging Peter’s reforms a century later, which looks to me like a very big overstatement.
My opinion of him remains objectively negative: I see no good coming to Russia on the sharpened points of Polish pikes. To me, he is Grishka Otrepyev of Pushkin and Mussorgsky, but not because I am eager to buy this particular version over all others. All others are moot to me, and historically even the Grishka Otrepyev version is trivial to me as well. (But of course not so aesthetically, as the reader knows already.)
Yet "Grishka Otrepyev" carries certain intrinsic connotations which are completely in tune with the concept of the Time of Troubles as such. I believe that this concept refers to a difficult transitional period in the history of Russia, which is so much negatively charged that nothing positive can be ascribed to it, except that Minin and Pozharsky, and Ivan Susanin, and so many other Russian national heroes, had helped to bring an end to it, and good riddance!
Thus, I repeat, the sordid name of Grishka Otrepyev, associated in the Russian language with “filthy rags,” and even “trash,” has become for me an apt metaphor for this whole bizarre period of Russian history which has been chronologically imprecisely, and rather confusingly, labeled as “The Time of Troubles.”
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