Time of Troubles

A period of intense social and political turmoil in Russia (1598–1613), involving a series of successive crises, civil wars, famines, Cossack and peasant revolts, foreign invasions, and widespread material destruction. In 1591 the legitimate heir of Ivan the Terrible, Dmitri, was murdered, possibly on the orders of Boris Godunov. Subsequently, four pretenders assumed his name. The first appeared in Poland c.1600. Enlisting the support of Lithuanians and Poles, he invaded Russia and was crowned tsar in 1605. He was killed in an insurrection by the boyars, and in 1607 another Dmitri appeared, aided by the Poles and identified by the late tsar Dmitri's widow, the Polish noblewoman Marina Mniszech, as her legitimate husband and tsar of Russia. In 1610 he too was killed, and in 1612 a man claiming to be Dmitri's son was put to death. Another, also claiming to be Dmitri's son, was beheaded in 1613. The period ended with a national uprising against the invading Poles, and the election of the boyar Michael Romanov, first of the Romanov line, as tsar. The political turmoil and power struggles following the collapse of communism in the early 1990s was also referred to by the Russian people as ‘The Time of Troubles’.

The Time of Troubles (Russian: Смутное время, Smutnoye Vremya) was a period of Russian history comprising the years of interregnum between the death of the last of the Moscow Rurikids, Tsar Feodor Ivanovich in 1598 and the establishment of the Romanov Dynasty in 1613.

After Feodor's death without issue, his brother-in-law and closest advisor, Boris Godunov, was elected his successor by a Great National Assembly (Zemsky Sobor).

Under the influence of the great nobles who had unsuccessfully opposed the election of Godunov, the general discontent took the form of hostility to him as a usurper, and rumours were heard that the late tsar's younger brother Dmitri, supposed to be dead, was still alive and in hiding. In 1603 a man calling himself Dmitri, and professing to be the rightful heir to the throne, appeared in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. and the mysterious individual who was impersonating him was an impostor but was regarded as the rightful heir by a large section of the population and gathered support both in Muscovy and outside its borders, in the Commonwealth and the Vatican.

A few months later he crossed the frontier with a small force of 4,000 Poles, Russian exiles, German mercenaries and Cossacks from the Dnieper and the Don, in what marked the beginning of the Commonwealth intervention in Muscovy, or the Dymitriad wars. Although the Commonwealth had not officially declared war on Muscovy (as its king, Sigismund III Vasa, was opposed to the intervention), some powerful magnates decided to support False Dmitri with their own forces and money, expecting rich rewards afterwards.

The reign of Dmitri was short and uneventful. Before a year had passed a conspiracy was formed against him by an ambitious Rurikid prince called Vasily Shuisky, and he was assassinated in the Moscow Kremlin, together with many of his supporters. The chief conspirator, Shuisky, seized power and was elected tsar by an assembly composed of his faction, but neither the Muscovite boyars, nor the Commonwealth magnates, nor the pillaging Cossacks, nor the German mercenaries were satisfied with the change, and soon a new impostor, likewise calling himself Dmitri, son and heir of Ivan the Terrible, came forward as the rightful heir. However after Shuisky signed an alliance with Sweden, the king of the Commonwealth, Sigismund III, resolved to officially intervene in the internal affairs of Russia.

Polish troops crossed the Russian borders and lay siege to the fortress of Smolensk.

The Polish king, however, opposed the compromise, deciding to take the throne for himself and to convert Russia to Roman Catholicism. At the same time it was displeasing to the Swedes, who had become rivals of the Poles on the Baltic coast, and they declared war on Muscovy and started a false Dmitri of their own in Ivangorod.

When Sigismund and Wladislaw left Moscow, the tensions grew.

The severity of the crisis produced a remedy, in the form of a patriotic rising of the nation under the leadership of Kuzma Minin, a Nizhny Novgorod merchant, and Prince Pozharsky.

A Grand National Assembly elected as tsar Michael Romanov, the young son of the metropolitan Philaret, who was connected by marriage with the late dynasty and had been saved from the enemies by a heroic peasant, named Ivan Susanin.

The Dymitriad wars against the Commonwealth would last until the Peace of Deulino in 1619, and the Ingrian Wars against Sweden lasted until the Treaty of Stolbovo in 1617.