Tsar of Russia (15981605). Of Tartar stock, he became an intimate friend of Ivan IV (the Terrible), who entrusted to Boris the care of his imbecile elder son, Fyodor. Ivan's younger son, Dmitri, had been banished to the upper Volga, where he died in 1591 - murdered, it was said, at Boris's command. During the reign of Tsar Fyodor (158498), Godunov was virtual ruler of the country, with the title of the Great Sovereign's brother-in-law, becoming tsar himself on Fyodor's death in 1598. He continued the expansionist policies of Ivan, going to war against both Poland and Sweden. At home, he disposed finally of the Tartar threat, but was embroiled in the last years of his reign in a civil war against a pretender who claimed to be Dmitri, and who was eventually crowned in 1605 after Boris's death. Boris's life is the subject of a drama by Pushkin that was the basis for Moussorgsky's popular opera.
Boris Feodorovich Godunov (Бори́с Фёдорович Годуно́в) (c. 1551 – April 13, 1605) was de facto regent of Russia from 1584 to 1598 and then the first non-Rurikid tsar from 1598 to 1605.
Early years
Boris was the most famous member of an ancient, now extinct, Russian family of Tatar origin, which migrated from the Horde to Kostroma in the early 14th century. Boris's career of service began at the court of Ivan the Terrible.
In 1571 he strengthened his position at court by his marriage with Maria, the daughter of Ivan's abominable favorite Malyuta Skuratov. In 1580 the Tsar chose Irene, the sister of Boris, to be the bride of the Tsarevich Feodor, on which occasion Boris was promoted to the rank of boyar. On his deathbed Ivan appointed Boris, together with the Romanovs, as guardians of his son and successor;
Years of regency
The reign of Feodor began with a rebellion in favor of the infant Tsarevich Dmitry, the son of Ivan's fifth wife Maria Nagaya, a rebellion resulting in the banishment of Dmitry, with his mother and her relations, to their appanage at Uglich. On the occasion of the Tsar's coronation (May 31, 1584), Boris was given honors and riches, yet he held the second place in the regency during the lifetime of the Tsar's uncle Nikita Romanovich, on whose death, in August, he was left without any serious rival.
A conspiracy against him of all the other great boyars and the metropolitan Dionysius, which sought to break Boris's power by divorcing the Tsar from Godunov's childless sister, only ended in the banishment or tonsuring of the malcontents.
His policy was generally pacific, but always most prudent.
Godunov encouraged English merchants to trade with Russia by exempting them from tolls.
It was during his government that the Russian Orthodox Church received its patriarchate, which placed it on an equal footing with the ancient Eastern churches and emancipated it from the influence of the Patriarch of Constantinople.
Boris's most important domestic reform was the 1587 decree forbidding the peasantry to transfer themselves from one landowner to another, thus binding them to the soil.
The sudden death of the Tsarevich Dmitry at Uglich on May 15, 1591 has commonly been attributed to Boris, because it cleared his way to the throne;
Years of tsardom
On the death of the childless tsar Feodor (January 7, 1598), self-preservation quite as much as ambition forced Boris to seize the throne. His election was proposed by the Patriarch Job of Moscow, who acted on the conviction that Boris was the one man capable of coping with the extraordinary difficulties of an unexampled situation. Boris, however, would only accept the throne from a Zemsky Sobor, or national assembly, which met on 17 February, and unanimously elected him on 21 February.
During the first years of his reign he was both popular and prosperous, and ruled excellently. He was the first tsar to import foreign teachers on a great scale, the first to send young Russians abroad to be educated, the first to allow Lutheran churches to be built in Russia.
Undoubtedly Boris was one of the greatest of the Russian tsars. Boris died suddenly on April 13, 1605, leaving one son, Feodor II, who succeeded him for a few months and then was murdered by the enemies of the Godunovs.
Arts based on Boris Godunov
Boris's life was fictionalized by Alexander Pushkin in the famous play inspired by Shakespeare's Macbeth. His name was also the basis for that of the cartoon character Boris Badenov, the Pottsylvanian villain of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
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