What Was the Time of Troubles in Russia?
The Time of Troubles (Smuta) was the period of political, dynastic, and military crisis that lasted from the death of Tsar Feodor I on 7 January 1598 to the election of Michael Romanov as tsar on 21 February 1613 (3 March new style). The crisis involved the extinction of the Rurikid dynasty, the intervention of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Sweden, peasant and Cossack revolts, the famine of 1601-1603, the two False Dmitrys, and the occupation of Moscow by Polish-Lithuanian forces in 1610-1612. The period is one of the most traumatic in Russian history; the word smuta itself has been used, in Russian, as a synonym for civil war (see Skrynnikov, The Time of Troubles, 1988).
The dynastic crisis
The Time of Troubles began with the death of Feodor I, the last of the Rurikid tsars. Feodor was a sickly and childless ruler; he had been tsar since 1584, and his reign had been dominated by his father-in-law, Boris Godunov. The death of Feodor created a succession crisis that could not be resolved by the standard Muscovite mechanisms, and the subsequent fifteen years of crisis were, in the first instance, a succession crisis. The Russian state did not have a clear mechanism for choosing a new tsar; the Zemsky Sobor (assembly of the land) was the closest equivalent, but it had no formal authority and no clear procedure.
Boris Godunov, who had been the de facto ruler under Feodor, was elected tsar by the Zemsky Sobor on 21 February 1598 (3 March new style), but his election was contested from the start. The southern frontier of the Russian state was being raided by the Crimean Khan; the agricultural and commercial base of the Muscovite state had been hit by the famine of 1601-1603; the peasantry was increasingly restive under the new restrictions on movement. The False Dmitry, the first of the two pretenders, crossed the Polish-Lithuanian frontier in October 1604 with a small force of Polish-Lithuanian mercenaries and Cossacks. He defeated the Russian armies sent against him, was crowned as Tsar Dmitry I in Moscow on 30 July 1605, and ruled for eleven months before being killed in a Moscow uprising in May 1606 (Skrynnikov, 1988).
The Polish-Lithuanian intervention
The Polish-Lithuanian intervention was the central external fact of the Time of Troubles. King Sigismund III of Poland-Lithuania had supported the False Dmitry; the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had provided the military backbone of the pretender’s advance on Moscow. After the death of the False Dmitry in 1606, the Polish-Lithuanian forces supported the second False Dmitry (1607-1610), and Sigismund III himself invaded Russia in 1609, taking Smolensk in June 1611. The Russian state, which had been weakened by the 1606-1610 civil war, was unable to mount an effective resistance; the boyar government in Moscow accepted the Polish prince Władysław (the future Władysław IV) as tsar in August 1610, on condition that he convert to Orthodoxy.
The Polish-Lithuanian occupation of Moscow lasted from September 1610 to November 1612. The Russian Orthodox Church, led by Patriarch Hermogenes (later canonised as a saint of the Russian Church), refused to recognise the Catholic Polish prince and called for a national uprising. The Russian resistance was organised by provincial assemblies, the principal of which was the First Volunteer Army of the Riazan and Tula provinces, which was defeated in early 1611. The Second Volunteer Army, organised by the Nizhny Novgorod merchant Kuzma Minin and led by Prince Dmitry Pozharsky, advanced on Moscow and, in late October 1612, defeated the Polish-Lithuanian garrison at the battle of Moscow. The Polish-Lithuanian forces surrendered on 7 November 1612 (Skrynnikov, 1988).
The election of Michael Romanov
The liberation of Moscow was followed by the election of a new tsar. The Zemsky Sobor of 1613, the largest such assembly in Russian history, met in Moscow on 16 January 1613 (new style) to choose a new ruler. The assembly considered several candidates, including the Polish prince Władysław (the former tsar-designate) and the Swedish prince Karl Philipp. The 16-year-old Michael Fyodorovich Romanov was elected on 21 February 1613 (3 March new style), on the grounds that he was related to the previous dynasty through his great-aunt Anastasia Romanovna, the first wife of Ivan the Terrible.
The election of Michael Romanov established the Romanov dynasty that would rule Russia for the next 304 years. The Romanovs were a minor noble family, with no direct claim to the throne, and the choice was a compromise. The election of Michael was confirmed by the oaths of allegiance of the major military and political groupings, including the Cossacks, the boyars, and the provincial assemblies. The Romanov dynasty, accordingly, ruled by the consent of the Russian ruling classes, and the principle of dynastic election, formally established in 1613, would remain the legal basis of the Russian monarchy until 1917 (Dunning, Russia’s First Civil War, 2001).
The consequences
The Time of Troubles had a long-term demographic and economic cost. The Russian population, which had been about 12 million in 1600, was about 8 million in 1620. The Russian agricultural base had been disrupted by the famine and the civil war; the peasantry was increasingly being bound to the land by restrictions on movement. The Russian state, weakened by the 1606-1612 civil war, took the first steps toward a more centralised autocracy: the Sobor of 1613 confirmed the new tsar’s authority; the Sobor of 1619 restored the patriarchate that had been vacant since 1605; the new Sobornoe Ulozhenie of 1649 was the comprehensive Russian legal code that would be the basis of Russian law until 1832.
The Time of Troubles was, accordingly, the period in which the new Muscovite autocracy took shape. The Russian Empire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was, in many respects, the working-out of the political choices made in 1613 (Skrynnikov, 1988).