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Time of Troubles

On his death-bed in 1584, Ivan IV appointed Boris Godunov as one of the guardians of his son and heir, Feodor. Like many sons of domineering men, Feodor was weak in will and initiative. Moreover, according to biographers, he was feeble minded. He was never more than a figurehead although 27 when becoming tsar, and a possible successor to Feodor was Ivan's son by his seventh marriage: Dmitri. In 1591 Dmitri was nine and a half, and that year he died after his throat was slit. Officials claimed that the boy had accidentally cut himself playing with a knife during an epileptic fit. Believing that Dmitri had been murdered, mobs attacked and killed Dmitri's guardians. Historians suspect that agents of Godunov had murdered Dmitri. At any rate, when Feodor died in 1598, at the age of 40, Ivan's family had no heirs for the throne, and Boris Godunov was accepted as Moscow's new tsar.

Godunov, meanwhile, had won back the port of Narva from the Swedes, and he invited the British to trade through the port, without tolls. He tried to advance the interests of Russia's middleclass. Near Moscow, he had fortresses and towns built, to check raiding by the Tatars and Finnish tribes. Godunov was the first of Moscow rulers to send young people abroad to study, and the first to allow Lutheran churches.

But despite Godunov's efforts to do well for Russia his reign ended in disaster. Drought came in 1601, followed by famine. Packs of people roamed about the countryside searching for something to eat. People tried eating bark from trees, and it is said cannibalism appeared again.  Nobles could not feed their slaves and drove them out to starve, and an army of desperate slaves harassed Moscow. Rumor spread the Godunov was a usurper and that Russia was being punished for its sins. The famine lasted until 1604, killing, as many as 100,000 in Moscow and a third of Godunov's subjects.

Godunov died suddenly in 1605, in his fifties. He was succeeded by his one son, Theodor II. These were what historians call the Time of Troubles, and rebellion against Moscow authority was in motion. Someone to be known as the False Dmitri claimed to be Muscovy's true tsar, and he pushed through the Ukraine and entered Moscow in triumph. Godunov's wife, and Theodor II were assassinated. Nobles were pleased to be rid of the Godunov's, and the people of Moscow were delighted, believing that another of God's miracles had rescued them from the usurpers and had brought them their true tsar. Soon they were disappointed, as the False Dmitri failed to follow traditional etiquette. He did not attend church services and went about town dressed as a Pole with an entourage of Poles. The Poles were Roman Catholic and were believed by the Eastern Orthodox Russians to be heretics. In May 1606, the False Dmitri married a Catholic woman who brought with her from Poland more Poles. A Muscovite  prince, Basil Shuisky, with allies among the nobles, overthrew and assassinated the False Dmitri and proclaimed that he had been an impostor. And many Muscovites were pleased again. The body of the False Dmitri was publicly displayed and then burned. His ashes were put into a cannon, which was fired in the direction of Poland.

Outside Moscow, to the west, north and south, rebellions continued. In early 1609, Prince Basil Shuisky sought and won help from Sweden in exchange for agreeing to an "eternal" alliance against Poland and giving up any plan to expand into Livonia.  In agreement with Prince Shuisky, 6,000 soldiers arrived from Sweden to combat rebel forces. Sigismund III of Poland was not pleased by the alliance between Sweden and Moscow and declared war on Moscow.

In Moscow, Basil Shuisky was overthrown by a group of nobles who invited the Poles to create law and order. An army from Poland pushed into Moscow in 1610, and the son of Sigismund III, Vladislav, a Roman Catholic, was installed there as tsar. The Swedes believed that if Russia was being carved up they should take a portion for themselves, and they seized the area around Novgorod. The patriarch of the Orthodox church, Hermogen, refused to recognize the Polish tsar, and, in retaliation, the Catholic government let him starve to death. The traditional hostility between Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians intensified, and Orthodox Russians formed an army of national liberation. The Poles were driven from Moscow in 1613, and the Russian family named Romanov seized the opportunity to fill the vacant throne.

The Romanov family was descended from a German nobleman who had migrated to Moscow in the 1300s. In the 1500s one of the Romanov daughters, Anastasia, had become Ivan IV's first wife. Her son, Theodor, had been the last tsar of Ivan’s family, the Riurikid dynasty, hence the Romanov claim to royalty. The patriarch of the Orthodox Church in Moscow was a Romanov, and he proclaimed his sixteen-year-old son, Michael, as tsar. A national council of nobles, called the Zemsky Sobor, elected Michael as tsar, and the Russians were relieved to have a legitimate tsar to rally around.

The Status of Russian Women

In Russia, the husbands and wives of common people were closer than were the husbands and wives of the upper classes. Christian tradition among the Russians held them to the belief that a husband had authority over his wife, and it was common for a religiously devout husband to discipline his wife by beating her. But among common folks a husband and wife were likely to be friends, and to remain friends despite the beatings. Wives, as devout if not more so than their husbands, might expect an occasional beating, and some husbands who beat their wife might ask for her forgiveness. A husband and wife were in need of each other, struggling as they were to survive. They laughed and cried together. They bathed together, and they ate together with other couples of their small community - especially in winter, when they entertained themselves by getting drunk together.

The upper classes were more inclined to follow the cultural tradition inherited from the Eastern Orthodox Christianity from Constantinople and keep males and females apart from each other. In upper class families boys and girls were segregated. The tradition from Constantinople held women inferior, as more childlike and simple than men and, given the opportunity, as wicked as the original Eve. Girls were kept locked behind doors and taught prayer and household skills such as embroidery. While still adolescents, girls might be married to someone the father had decided was appropriate - after negotiations involving dowry size and assurances that the girl was a virgin. The father would order the girl to stand with him and be introduced to her husband-to-be. It was common for a little ceremony to follow. The father would touch his daughter's back with a coiled whip and say that she would now be free of his authority but that he was passing that authority to her future husband who, in his stead, would admonish her with this same whip, which he then gave to the husband-to-be. Carrying on the ritual, the husband-to-be declared that he believed that he would have no need to use the whip, and he attached it to his belt.

In the wedding ceremony, the young bride pledged fidelity to her husband. They exchanged rings. They were blessed by the Church, and the bride touched her forehead to her husband's shoes as a gesture of her subjugation. Then the groom covered his bride with the hem of his coat, symbolizing his obligation to support and protect her. Immediately they went to a nuptial bedroom while the wedding guests partied. The groom was given two hours. Then the guests, in accordance with tradition, burst into the bedroom, and upon hearing confirmation that the girl had been a virgin all cheered and continued their celebration.

The bride then went on to a life without rights except through the husband, just as she had had no rights except through her father. It was her duty to see to her husband's comfort and to bear his children. If the wife of an upperclass man was disobedient  he might beat her. A work dating back to 1556, called The Household Management Code, attributed to a monk named Sylvester, advised that a disobedient wife should be whipped, with politeness rather than anger, and in secret. If a women turned on a husband she might try to kill him to protect herself, and if she succeeded and was prosecuted for it punishment was commonly burial up to the neck and being left to die.

An exceptionally strong woman with an exceptionally weak husband might dominate her husband. Some upper class wives might play an active role managing the family's servants. But often upper class wives were merely hidden away. Generally they dressed well, in brightly colored robes with golden threads and billowing sleeves, and they might wear glittering bracelets, but they were not likely to be seen in their glorious clothes except by the servants and her husband. Shopping was done by servants.

The daughters of a tsar led the most isolated lives. They were not allowed to marry beneath their rank, and they were forbidden from marrying foreign royalty, considered by the Church to be heretics or infidels. And marriage to a brother as among ancient Egyptian royalty was out of the question. This often left the tsar's daughters to a life of prayer, embroidery and gossip among other women. They would attend church via secret passage ways, where they would be shielded by a red silk curtain. If they were in a procession they would be behind a wall of canopies. Or if traveling over roads they would be out of sight in a specially designed carriage, sitting next to their maids and escorted by men on horseback who cleared the roads before them.

A husband divorced his wife by sending her to a convent. The Church allowed each husband two divorces. A woman sent to a convent had her head shaved and she was dressed in a long black gown with hood. Also in the convent might be widows driven there by greedy relatives wishing to avoid sharing an estate, or wives who had run away, preferring anything to going back to their husbands. These women were expected to die in their convent.

Beginnings of the Romanov Dynasty

The time of troubles left much of Russia in ruins.  The country was broke. Moscow and other towns had been destroyed by fire. Michael struggled in his first few years as ruler to restore order. In 1617, four years after Michael had become tsar, Sweden's king, Gustavus II, gave back territory around Novgorod in exchange of assurances from Moscow that it would not expand into the Baltic Sea. In 1618, Poland also signed a treaty with Moscow, recognized by both parties as a breathing spell in hostilities. The Poles still held that Vladislav was Moscow's legitimate monarch, and they still held the town of Smolensk.

In preparation for more war with Poland, Michael began to reconstruct his army, purchasing foreign mercenaries and covering his increased expenses with more taxation. With order re-established in much of Russia, merchants from various nations arrived, and custom duties on trade benefited the state treasury. Trade through the port of Archangel was to double in the coming half century.

King Sigismund died unexpectedly in April 1632, followed by political instability within Poland. Moscow was eager to seize the opportunity against Poland, and for Moscow its armament program became more urgent. Moscow purchased from the Dutch cannon and other military equipment.

Poland was a weak and divided land. It was half-Polish and the other half Lithuanians, Russians, Jews and Germans. The Polish king was elected by a council of nobility rather than a dynasty, and the king and his government had no power to tax. Nobles disliked the idea of paying taxes to the central government, and Poland's king did nothing that the nobility opposed. Poland's nobility were sovereign over vast territories and drew wealth from exporting grain and timber. Lacking unity, Poland had little success against Moscow. The war between Poland and Moscow fought in the years 1632-34 was concluded with Moscow failing to win back Smolensk but Poland's new king, Valdislav IV, withdrawing his claim to the throne in Moscow.

Meanwhile, Cossacks continued to defy Moscow's authority, and war against the Islamic Tatars continued. In 1637, Cossacks seized the Turkish fortress at Azov. In 1641 an Ottoman army and navy drove the Cossacks back. The Cossacks, in turn, offered Azov to Tsar Michael, but Michael believed that his kingdom was not in good enough shape economically to war against the Ottomans, and he declined. Against the Tatars, however, Moscow built an 800-mile wall, with moats and fortresses, along a line as far south as Belgorod. The Tatars were now blocked from making their raids, saving tens of thousands of Russians from slavery and inspiring a rush by Russians to settle on the fertile lands around the area of the Oka River.

A rush to occupy other lands was in motion. It was during Michael's reign that the Russians expanded across the southern Ural Mountains and further into the southern steppe, in conflict there with Tatars and other nomads. In 1638 Russian pioneers reached the Pacific Ocean. In 1652, (after Michael's death in 1645) they occupied the area around Lake Baikal, just north of Mongolia, and they would occupy Kamchatka Peninsula in 1696. Siberia had been sparsely populated by native hunter-gatherers, who offered little resistance to the Russians. The Russians traded with these people (much as the French, and soon the British, were trading with natives in North America). The Russians made middlemen of themselves in the fur trade in addition to taking fur pelts of their own - furs that were in demand in Europe and China. It was the opening of Siberia to Russian domination.

Tsar Alexius

In 1645, Michael was succeeded by his sixteen-year-old son, Alexius, who was to rule for thirty-one years. In January 1648, Alexius married the daughter of the aristocratic Miloslavski family whose members became active in the tsar's government. In the summer of 1648, increased taxation, robbery and corruption under the Miloslavskies caused people in Moscow to rebel, and revolts spread to nearby towns and to Novgorod and Pskov. Facing insurrection and the need to curb the Miloslavskies, Alexius granted concessions to the nobles, and new laws were passed overriding the previous law that limited the hunting of a runaway to nine years. Now a noble was to hunt a runaway to the end of the runaway's life, and a noble could hold a peasant and his offspring to his land as long as he wished. Nobles were allowed to rule over their serfs as they saw fit. Military obligations by the nobility were relaxed, and the nobility were given the right to engage in urban trade and handicraft.

In 1652 a religious crisis erupted. The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Nikon, wished to return to what he thought had been its purity in previous times. Common people resisted changes in how they worshipped. They viewed Nikon an anti-Christ. Twenty thousand of them burned themselves to death, crossing themselves with two fingers rather than the three fingers that Nikon claimed was proper, and as they burned they sang "hallelujahs." In 1667 a Church council deposed and defrocked Nikon, who went into exile in a monastery.

Since the 1650s, Russia had been at war with Poland again, following a move by Ukrainians, who were Eastern Orthodox, submitting to the rule of Russia's Orthodox tsar rather than to Polish authority. The war was settled in the 1660s, with Tsar Alexius keeping the Ukraine and winning back Smolensk.

Then in 1670 came the Stenka revolt - in the wake of the new and harsher laws against Russia's peasants. A commander of a band of Cossacks in the Don River region, Stephen Razin, began moving up the Volga River proclaiming freedom for common folks against tsarist officials and landlords. In town after town he was welcomed by common folks, and in town after town members of the upper classes were massacred. Razin's subordinates had similar successes in widespread areas in the hinterland. The  rebel army reached Simbirsk and grew to some 200,000 men. Poor organization and discipline in the rebel army helped forces sent by Moscow to defeat them, forces that included several regiments trained in a Western military manner. Razin and some followers escaped to the Don River area, but in the spring of  1671 he was seized by rival Cossacks, handed over to tsarist officials and publicly executed. And several months later, Astrakhan, the last center of the rebellion, surrendered.

Continuing Economic Inferiority

Russia had improved its military capability, its population had been recovering and its economy was progressing slowly. Trade was increasing. [note]  In recent decades printing with movable type had been introduced. Russians had begun their own iron industry, and with it the beginning of Russian capitalism. But in Russia, British and Dutch entrepreneurs were still playing a leading role in mining and manufacturing, in areas such as light textiles and glassmaking. The Russians were without much of a merchant fleet of their own. Russia was still not developing a prosperous and influential middleclass. The Church was becoming increasingly annoyed by the growing number of foreigners, and, in Moscow, foreigners were obliged to live in a restricted area.

Under Alexius, Russia still lacked the success in agriculture that had allowed the Dutch to advance economically. Russia's economy was still largely subsistence agriculture: the growing of rye, wheat, oats and barley and millet, using wooden and metal plows, and growing vegetables on small plots. South of Moscow cattle and horses were bred. North of Moscow timber was harvested. And some people lived by hunting and fishing. The agricultural region in the middle of Russia had a short growing season. The soil was poor, and often it rained too much. There, grass barely sustained cattle through the winter.  It took three seeds planted to produce one harvested plant, and the growers habitually practiced a downward genetic selection of their seeds, consuming their better seeds and planting their worst.

Peter the Great Looks West

The Tsarina, Alexius' first wife, Mary Miloslavski, died in 1669 trying to bear her fourteenth child. Of the five sons she bore, two had survived. The eldest, Theodor, was not healthy. Alexius remarried in 1670, and in 1672 his wife, Natalya Naryshkina, bore him a son: Peter, the future Peter the Great. The messy succession that was common to monarchies was in the making.

In 1676 Alexius died. Theodor, at the age of twelve, inherited the throne as Theodor III. The Miloslavskies were pleased and eager to reestablish their power. Soon Theodor was married and under pressure by the Miloslavskies to produce an heir. The Miloslavskies were warned that the effort might be too much for him, and the warning appears to have been correct, for in 1682 at the age of twenty he died, without his wife bearing him a child. Theodor's brother, Ivan, now 16, was half-blind, had a speech impediment and was uninterested in ruling. Theodor's half-brother, Peter, was bright, healthy and aggressive. Peter's mother, Natalya, was named regent, and Peter was named tsar. The Miloslavski family staged a coup, and Peter witnessed the murder of members of his mother's family. A council of nobles, trying to settle matters, made Ivan and Peter co-tsars. Peter's mother was dismissed and the grown daughter of  Alexius and Mary Miloslavski, Sophia, was made regent over the boys. She ruled with the support of the Miloslavski family and enjoyed the power, finding it superior at any rate to the usual isolation of royal daughters. The inevitable showdown between Peter and Sophia took place in 1694 when Peter reached the age of twenty-two. Peter won the men with arms to his side, luring and threatening holdouts. Sophia lost hope that she would be able to exercise the violence needed to combat her younger half-brother. Peter sent an embittered Sophia to a nunnery, and he executed some of her supporters on the charge of treason.

Peter had been interested in sailing and boats. He had spent much of his later teens learning boat building and sailing with Dutchmen by Lake Pleschev, eighty-five miles northeast of Moscow. He enjoyed being treated by the Dutch as a common apprentice. His mother, however, was annoyed by his interest in foreigners. She had arranged his marriage, but Peter was bored by his wife's conversation, still preferring his life with the Dutchmen at Lake Pleschev, and his wife joined his mother's dislike for those foreigners who were stealing her husband's attention. Peter was inquisitive and independent in his thinking. He was a skeptic and unimpressed by Church admonitions that foreigners were evil people.

Peter was aware of the superiority of Western Europe, and in 1697, at the age of twenty-five, he went abroad for eighteen months to learn and to experience life in the West. He went first to Amsterdam, then the wealthiest city in the world -  its harbor packed with sailing ships. In Amsterdam he worked in a shipyard. He visited factories and mills, museums and botanical gardens. He walked the streets, seeing well-dressed and friendly people. He visited Amsterdam's open air market, where goods of all kinds were available.  He visited people in their homes, met with architects, inventors and engineers, and he found himself interested in printing and the surgery of Fredrik Ruysch, who was preserving bodies with chemicals. With his Russian and Dutch companions he enjoyed Amsterdam's taverns. And he was impressed by what he saw of religious toleration. Then Peter went to England, second to the United Netherlands in wealth. He then went to Vienna and he returned home through Poland, arriving back in Moscow in 1698 eager to change Russia.

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