It was 1584 and Ivan IV, Ivan the Terrible, Tsar and Grand Prince of all Russia, was dead.

The boyars of Russia now had a momentous decision to make: who would rule? Only two of Ivan’s children had managed to survive to adulthood: the Tsareviches Ivan and Fedor.

Fortunately for Russia, Ivan’s oldest son Ivan Ivanovich turned out to be a pretty capable guy and a worthy heir. Unfortunately for Russia, in 1581 Ivan the elder beat Ivan the younger to death after his daughter-in-law gave him some sass. Very unfortunately for Russia, that left them with Ivan’s younger son, Fedor Ivanovich.

Why very unfortunately? By all accounts the 27-year-old Fedor seems to have been a swell guy, who loved going to church and then unwinding afterward by drinking a few bottles of vodka, cavorting with his jesters, and then taking in a bear fight or two. (Maybe if he was lucky they would bring out that one bear who had been trained to use a bow and arrow.)

The problem is swell guys aren’t necessarily tsar material, and Fedor was a people pleaser, unable to be assertive or think for himself. Historians disagree as to whether he was just naturally timid, if he had an intellectual disability, or if he had been broken by years of abuse. Whatever the case, he was not cut from the same cloth as his father. They resembled each other in only one way: they had tremendous difficulty producing heirs.

There was another option: Ivan’s only other surviving child, Dmitry Ivanovich. As the child of the tsar’s sixth wife — or possibly fifth or eighth, depending on how you count them up, but I digress — as the child of the tsar’s sixth wife Maria Nagaya, Dmitry was technically excluded from the line of succession, and also he was only eighteen months old.

Still, there was a faction that would rather roll the dice on a complete unknown than be ruled by a simpleton. Unsurprisingly this faction consisted largely of Dmitry’s mother’s family, the Nagoy, who saw the child as a tool they could use to seize power. Equally unsurprisingly, no one else liked this idea. The Nagoy were arrested on only slightly trumped-up charges of treason, and shuffled off to somewhere cold.

Fedor was crowned Tsar Fedor I, Grand Prince of all Russia.

In actuality, he was little more than a figurehead. The day-to-day governance of the country was taken care of by a council of regents, the seven most powerful boyars in the land. At least at first. Eventually one of the regents outmaneuvered the others, had them disgraced and imprisoned and exiled, and become the true power behind the throne.

That was the tsar’s brother-in-law, Boris Godunov, “the Lord Protector of Russia.”

Depending on your point of view, Boris was either an effective modernizer or a cold-hearted, power-hungry madman. He kept Russia moving along the path Ivan had set for it: aggressively expanding, breaking the power of the hereditary boyars, building up a solid middle-class of non-hereditary “service gentry,” and consolidating power in the hands of the imperial court. He stabilized the country’s borders and made peace with its enemies, he continued to expand into Siberia, and even got the Metropolitan of Moscow promoted to a full-blown Patriarch of the Orthodox Church. At the same time, he also finished transforming Russia’s peasants into serfs by removing what few legal rights and privileges they had left.

One Day in the Life of Dmitry Ivanovich

Right now, though, let’s leave Fedor I, Boris Godunov and Moscow behind and head north.

Last time we saw the Tsarevich Dmitry, he and his entire family had been banished to Uglich, some 200km north of Moscow. Not exactly a nice thing to do to a toddler, but hey, it could have been worse. In earlier times he would have been strangled to keep him from becoming a problem. Compared to that, exile was downright merciful.

Over the next six years Dmitry grew into a handsome little boy who did all the thing little boys love to do. Things like popping down to the butcher and watching with rapt attention as the goats and sheep bled out on the floor. Things like beating chickens to death with his staff just to see what they looked like on the inside. Like making effigies of his enemies out of snow and then cutting off their limbs one by one, shrieking that this would be the fate of all boyars as he decapitated the one representing Boris Godunov.

Tales of these exploits made it back to Moscow, which reassured the boyars that they had made the right choice. Well, most of them. There were still a few holdouts who preferred the honest brutality of a mad tyrant to the wheeling and dealing of a Boris Godunov. They kept searching for a way to restore the Nagoy and put Dmitry on the throne.

Their schemes were not subtle, and soon their enemies wondered if treating Dmitry kindly had been a mistake. It was rumored that the tsar and his lord protector had sent poisoners and assassins to do away with the tsarevich, who had only survived through the grace of God. It’s not clear if these rumors were true — heaven knows, Boris Godunov certainly did a lot worse — or if they were only the paranoid fantasies of the Nagoy.

All this plotting and counter-plotting was rendered moot on May 15, 1591.

Screams were heard from the courtyard of the dowager tsarina’s palace, and when she went to investigate she found her son lying dead in a pool of his own blood, with a gaping wound in his throat.

The tsarevich’s nannies had witnessed it all. Dmitry and two other boys had been playing tychka, a sort of mumblety-peg style game that involves flipping knives, when Dmitry had a violent seizure and accidentally stabbed himself in the throat. He bled out through the jugular before anyone could react.

Maria Nagaya did not believe it for a second. She and her brother Mikhail Nagoy summoned a crowd to the town square, then whipped that crowd into a frenzy by accusing the two boys and their fathers of being assassins. Did I mention that one of those fathers was the local magistrate, whose primary job was keeping an eye on the Nagoy for the tsar? In the ensuing riot he, his son, the other boy, and twelve more were killed.

The Nagoy used the dead tsarevich to turn public opinion against the tsar. When Tsar Fedor and the Patriarch Iov did not attend Dmitry’s funeral, they whispered that they must have been suffering from guilty consciences. (In actuality it was because they suspected Dmitry had killed himself, and suicide was highly stigmatized back then.) When a fire broke out in Moscow a few days later, they spread rumors that Boris Godunov had deliberately started it to distract the people from Dmitry’s murder. (In actuality the fire had been set by the Nagoy’s own agents.)

Boris Godunov was too canny to let the Nagoy control the narrative. He quickly appointed a blue ribbon committee to investigate Dmitry’s death and put Prince Vasily Shuisky in charge. Vasily was an interesting choice, since he and Boris were political enemies, but that was the whole point. No one would be able to doubt it if the tsar and the lord protector were cleared of wrongdoing by their enemies.

The committee went to Uglich and interviewed eyewitnesses, locals, and the palace staff, who stuck to their original stories about the accident. Dmitry’s doctors confessed that the tsarevich was epileptic, and had three serious seizures earlier in the year. The final report was short and to the point: Dmitry’s death was a tragic accident, and the Nagoy were callously exploiting that tragedy to foment rebellion.

The Nagoy men were sent into exile, and Maria Nagaya was forced to enter a convent. And that was the end of Tsarevich Dmitry.

Boris ‘Я’ Godunov

The next several years were, well, I don’t want to say uneventful, so let’s just say most of those events are not relevant to this story. As far as we’re concerned Russia just kept humming along until Tsar Fedor I died on January 7, 1598.

This time there really was a succession crisis because there was no heir presumptive. Fedor’s only child, the Tsarevena Feodosia, had died before her second birthday. There were no other branches of the family tree thanks to years of aggressive pruning by Fedor’s merciless predecessors. With no cousins or kinsmen able to come forward and claim the crown, the line of the Rurik tsars was ended.

As an old Russian proverb says, “Without the tsar the land is a widow.” Someone needed to put in charge, and fast, so the boyars convened a zemsky sobor, an “assembly of the land,” presided over by the Patriarch Iov.

The zemsky sobor was a relatively new institution; the first one had only been called into existence by Ivan IV some fifty years earlier. It wasn’t a legislative or deliberative body; just an advisory board of notables the tsar could use as a sounding board. Legally, it did not have the power to pick a tsar. Practically, it was just as legitimate as any other method anyone could think of.

The obvious candidate for the job was Boris Godunov. Boris was intelligent and fearless. He was more than qualified for the job; heck, he had basically been running the country for fourteen years already. And maybe he wasn’t a Rurik, but he had their seal of approval. After all, hadn’t Fedor loved him like a brother? Hadn’t Ivan IV loved him like a son? (Though given that Ivan had beaten one of his sons to death that might not have been a good thing.) And if that wasn’t enough to convince the boyars, they would have done well to remember that Godunov controlled the army and his brother was in charge of the secret police.

Boris’s enemies, like the Belskys, the Mstislavskys, the Nagoy, the Romanovs, and the Shuiskys, still tried to stop him. They put forward a compromise candidate: Simeon Bekbulatovich, who had briefly co-reigned with Ivan IV. Simeon was a pretty weak choice, on account of being unpopular with the clergy, older than dirt, possibly senile, and half-blind. (Caused, if rumor was to be believed, by a cask of poisoned Spanish wine gifted by one Boris Godunov.)

Since there was really no way to build up Bekbulatovich, the opposition’s strategy was to try and tear down Boris by drawing attention to his flaws. They reminded everyone he was not a hereditary boyar, but one of the service gentry. They claimed he was behind all of Ivan and Fedor’s unpopular policies. (Which, to be fair, was true.) They accused him of murdering Tsarevich Dmitry, and even implied he had murdered Fedor and Feodosia too.

As the zemsky sobor deliberated, someone sent a letter to Smolensk claiming that Dmitry had somehow survived his murder and had been laying low, but was now was ready to reveal himself and claim the throne. It wasn’t true, of course. It seems to have been an attempt to gauge popular support for the anti-Boris faction. Which, it turned out, was tepid at best.

With little fanfare, Boris Godunov became Tsar Boris.

It should have been business as usual, but the country’s problems just kept getting worse. The treasury had been emptied by decades of aggressive territorial expansion. The new regions that had been added to the empire were not yet fully integrated culturally or economically. Indeed, so many of the state’s enemies had been banished to these regions that they were now hotbeds of treason and sedition. They were also hotbeds of economic opportunity, which meant the core of the empire was emptying out as peasants flocked to its fringes. Disempowering the hereditary boyars had weakened the social order. The boyars had been bled dry by the government, the serfs had been bled dry by the boyars, and the only people doing well were foreign merchants who were making out like bandits, as well as the actual bandits who prowled the countryside in ever-increasing numbers.

Boris’s attempts to fix the country’s underlying structural problems did not go over well with traditionalists, which was just about everyone in the country. And since he lacked the benefit of a noble bloodline and therefore the blessings of God, people felt free to blame him personally for the state of the country.

Russia was one good crisis away from a collapse, and it was about to get one.

The winter of 1601 was a long and harsh one. It was bad everywhere in Europe, but especially in Russia, partly because it has a very short growing season, and partly because its agriculture was shockingly primitive.

There was widespread famine. To make matters worse newly-enserfed peasants were now locked to specific estates, making it impossible for them to flee the worst-hit areas. Boris’s government tried to blunt the famine’s impact by distributing grain from government stores, but hoarding, profiteering, and rampant inefficiency meant most of that relief never made it to its intended recipients.

Still, that’s just one bad year, right?

The next few winters were just as bad, if not worse. By 1603 there wasn’t even seed left to sow, because it had been eaten months earlier. The common folk were reduced to eating grass, pets, leather, corpses, babies, even human excrement. Starvation and disease were rampant, and by some estimates nearly a third of the population died.

The clergy preached that God was punishing the country for something, possibly the sins of Boris Godunov, without specifying what exactly those sins might have been. Civil order collapsed in many areas. Bandits roamed the countryside with impunity. At one point an army of serfs marched on Moscow with the intent of literally eating the rich.

It was Time of Troubles, a decade of chaos, disorder, and war that would scar the Russian psyche for centuries. And now we can get around to the actual story I wanted to talk about.

A New Challenger Enters

For now, let’s leave Boris and Moscow behind and head south, to town of Bragin in modern-day Belarus, then part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

It was October 1603 and Prince Adam Wiśniowiecki was enjoying a hot bath. Or at least, he was trying to, but his new valet was incompetent. That simply wouldn’t do, so Prince Adam tried to solve the problem Fonzie-style, kicking and slapping the poor schlub until he started doing his job correctly.

The prince was surprised when the valet broke down sobbing, and cried out, “If you, Prince Adam, knew who I am, you would not rail at me for a whoreson, much less box my ears over such a trifle. But since I professed to be a servant, I must bear it with patience.” Well, that got his employer’s interest. Prince Adam asked the valet what the hell he was blabbering on about.

It turned out the valet was, get this, the Tsarevich Dmitry in disguise!

You see, a decade earlier one of Dmitry’s tutors discovered that the vile Boris Godunov was sending hired goons to do away with the tsarevich, and secretly switched him with another boy who died in his stead. Good thing too. Apparently Boris’s assassins were so bloodthirsty they killed some thirty boys just to make sure they got the right one, and mutilated the bodies so badly that even Maria Nagaya did not realize her son was not among them.

The tutor then spirited Dmitry out of Uglich and raised him as his own son. When the tutor fell ill and died the tsarevich was taken in by another benefactor, and when that one also fell ill and died, he got himself tonsured and became a monk. He spent a few years hopping from monastery to monastery, working as a scribe, until a fellow monk recognized him as the tsarevich due to his “heroic manners.” Then he fled to Bragin and took a job as a valet.

Anyway, to prove that he really was the murdered tsarevich, the valet produced two pieces of evidence: a bejeweled golden crucifix, and a birthmark that was either a Russian eagle or the mark of the true cross, either one, of course, being the sign of a true tsar.

To say this story was fishy as hell is an insult to fish. Why did Boris’s assassins kill thirty boys? Why did they mutilate the bodies so badly when the whole point of the exercise would be to make sure that everyone knew that Dmitry was dead? Where, exactly, had the valet been hiding out for the last decade? How could a monk recognize someone he would never have seen before, just from his “heroic manners?” Why was his only hard evidence a crucifix that could have come from anywhere, and a skin blotch so amorphous it could either be a cross or an eagle?

It did not help that the valet kept switching up his story to keep it fresh. In some versions of the tale he was saved not by a tutor but by his mother or a friendly boyar. In other versions the switch happened not hours or days before the murder, but months or even years earlier. In one he didn’t confess to Prince Adam, but fell deathly ill and confessed everything to a priest who then told Prince Adam. In another he faked his illness knowing the priest wouldn’t be able to resist gossiping about it.

He did not particularly look or act like a Rurik, either. He had no waistline, his arms were uneven, he had wild red hair, a big ugly nose, and warts. He carried himself like a noble but did not act like a noble. Which is to say, he could walk the walk but not talk the talk. He was crude, unmannered, and ignorant of palace etiquette.

So who was this guy, actually?

Honestly, we have no idea. Contemporary chronicles are fragmentary, extremely biased, and completely unreliable. You have to do a lot of reading between the lines, and those lines leave a lot of room for interpretation.

It seems almost impossible that he was the real Dmitry, though several historians have made that argument with a straight face. It should be noted that though Dmitry seems to have been epileptic, this pretender was not. (The pro-Dmitry faction claims that he shows “all the traits of an epileptic” including “mood swings, megalomania, and excessive sensuality.” Yikes.)

Other historians suggest he was an unknown who had had been raised to believe he was the real Dmitry by plotters. Except that the two people who would benefit the most from such a ruse, Maria Nagaya and Vasily Shuisky, were happy to go on the public record and declare that Dmitry was dead. (Though it’s also possible they were under tremendous political pressure to say so.)

Others say his noble bearing suggested a noble background. He couldn’t have been a Rurik, but perhaps he was some other dispossessed aristocrat or the illegitimate son of some foreign king, seeking to make his fortune through imposture.

Tsar Boris and his secret police insisted he was born Yury Bogdanovich Otryepyev, then a monk with the name Grigory (or the diminutive “Grishka.”) Grishka is a real person, one of several monks who fled to Poland during the famine, but beyond that his story is hard to pin down. He may have been a serf who turned to a life of petty crime, or a former Romanov retainer guilty of treason. We can be pretty sure he only became a monk to avoid prison time. He was definitely a scribe of some sort, and may have even been Patriarch Iov’s private secretary. He may have been a Lutheran heretic but probably was not a black magician. He may have studied files on the late Dmitry until he became convinced he could impersonate him.

Honestly, your guess is as good as anyone’s else. Histories call him the “Pseudo-Dmitry” or “False Dmitry.” I’m just going to call him regular old Dmitry, even though he certainly was not.

For some reason Prince Adam bought the valet’s story and bowed to him as the rightful Tsar and Grand Prince of all Russia.

Or, more likely, Prince Adam did not buy the valet’s story but could see how having a tsar on his side, even a fake one, would be useful. He was constantly at war with Russians from Chernihiv, who had recently invaded his lands and captured two of his cities. King Sigismund III of Poland had refused to offer assistance to his vassal (he had just signed a peace treaty with Russia) but now he could take those cities back, using the pretender to justify his invasion and secure local support. Maybe if he played his cards right, he could topple the tsar and put his own puppet on the throne.

Prince Adam and the Tsarevich Dmitry began gathering allies. Fortunately, many factions in Poland were eager to resume hostilities with Russia. That included Prince Adam’s brother Prince Konstantin Wiśniowiecki and Jerzy Mniszech, the palatine of Sandomierz.

Jerzy Mniszech is important for two reasons. First, he was the operation’s money man. And second, when Dmitry was introduced to Jerzy’s daughter Marina Mniszech he fell head over heels in love with her. Marina was not smitten, but she knew a good opportunity when she saw it. She told the pretender she would not marry him until he became tsar. Now that’s motivation.

As part of his attempts to woo Marina, Dmitry converted to Roman Catholicism. That energized local Jesuits, who gave him their support and began clamoring for a new crusade to save Russia from the heresy of Eastern Orthodoxy. (Fortunately, Pope Clement VIII wasn’t interested.)

The plotters now had a sizable army assembled in Sambir, in modern-day Ukraine. It consisted of about a thousand men, mostly Polish men-at-arms and German mercenaries.

What they did not have was the approval of King Sigismund, who would not break that peace treaty. Sigismund was canny enough to realize that Dmitry had popular support, though, and decided to turn a blind eye to his plotting. In exchange he extracted a promise from the would-be tsar that if the invasion was successful Russia would help Poland invade Sweden and oust Sigismund’s uncle Charles IX, who had split it off from the Commonwealth a few years earlier.

Word of the large army assembling on his border reached Tsar Boris and he sent two agents to deal with it. One of them made it as far as Dmitry’s bedchambers, knife in hand, when his confederate accidentally alerted the guards while securing horses for their getaway. They were quickly captured.

The assassination attempt only managed to raise Dmitry’s profile. His army was now joined by ethnic Russians, about two thousand Cossacks and disgruntled serfs. Some of them were true believers, but most of them were just hungry for change and not particularly picky about what that change was.

The Cossacks brought with them a spy, Pyotr Khrushchov. Whether out of genuine delusion or a desire to save his neck, Khrushchov made a big show of recognizing Dmitry as the real deal and swearing allegiance to him.

Then he handed over some valuable intelligence. Tsar Boris was afraid of the Tsarevich Dmitry and was attempting to squash knowledge of his very existence. He had executed boyars who had drank a toast to the tsarevich’s health, and even killed Fedor’s widow Irina, his own sister, for daring to suggest that tsarevich was alive. The stress was beginning to take a toll on his health. The time to strike was now.

Riot, Revolt, and Revolution

In October 1604 Dmitry’s army crossed the Dnieper into Russia. According to legend, Sigismund’s Orthodox subjects spontaneously appeared to help shuttle them across the river. (This seems unlikely, since the pretender’s conversion to Catholicism was public knowledge.)

With the advantage of surprise on his side, Dmitry scored quick victories in Chernihiv, Putyvl’, Rylsk, Kursk, and Moravsk. They only encountered real resistance in Novgorod Severski, and even that fell after a quick siege.

The Russian people flocked to his banner in huge numbers.

Wealthy districts in the south and east of the country announced their support long before his armies ever drew near. Many of these new recruits were just bandwagoners, flocking to the side of the only viable alternative to the current government. Others were opportunists, swayed by Dmitry’s promise to suspend all taxes for a decade after he seized the throne. Traditionalists craved a tsar with noble blood who would make Russia great again. Dreamers saw him as the reincarnation of his namesake, Prince Dmitry Ivanovich Donskoy, who had defeated the Golden Horde centuries earlier. Religious fanatics even believed that Dmitry had not escaped his murder, but that had been raised from the dead to be a new Messiah who would deliver Russia from the Devil Boris.

Then, disaster.

On New Year’s Day 1605 the Polish mercenaries mutinied because they hadn’t been paid, and then deserted Dmitry’s army en masse. The rebellion continued, but the loss of seasoned troops and the element of surprise meant they could no longer win battles and Boris was able to block their attempts to approach Moscow.

At the Battle of Dobrynichi on January 21, 1605 Dmitry was almost captured when his horse was shot and killed during a cavalry charge. The rebel army retreated all the way back to Putyvl’ and hunkered down for the long Russian winter.

Boris was unable to follow up on these victories, partly because winter was fast approaching, partly because his troops were starving and exhausted, and partly because his commanders were too busy looting the locals in the rebellious districts they had just recaptured.

These needless reprisals turned popular sentiment against the tsar and provided even more recruits for the rebel army. By the spring it had nearly doubled in size, and Dmitry was ready to make a final push towards Moscow. History would suggest that Boris’s disciplined and professional army would defeat Dmitry’s disorganized rabble, after a long and difficult siege…

…but we’ll never know, because Boris Godunov died on April 23, 1605.

The odd timing of Boris’s death led to rumors that something else was going on. Had he been poisoned by Dmitry’s allies? Did he poison himself when he realized he could’t win? Had he frightened himself to death when he realized Dmitry was the real deal, back from the dead? Had he faked his own death and fled the country when a fortuneteller told him that Dmitry could not be defeated while Boris remained in Russia? (Frankly, the tsar had been in ill health for years and his death was not surprising to those who knew him. It was just a stroke. Really.)

Boris’s teenage son was crowned Tsar Fedor II, but did not have any real support from the boyars or the common people. It did not look good for the young fellow.

Traditionally, when a new tsar was crowned there was z\a brief amnesty period when anyone banished or exiled by the previous tsar could return to the country and beg for clemency. There were a lot of boyars who took advantage of that opening, and almost all of them went right over to the rebels.

The rebel army resumed its slow march towards Moscow, and people gathered along the road to cheer him on and proclaim him Russia’s “rising sun.” Fedor II’s army engaged in delaying tactics, putting up just enough resistance to show the pretender that taking the capital would not be easy.

So Dmitry changed his strategy. He sent a proclamation to Moscow offering pardons to anyone who switched sides and joined him. Several prominent boyars took him up on the offer, including Vasily Shuisky, who recanted his earlier finding that Dmitry had been murdered in Uglich and now declared the pretender to be the real deal.

When messengers presented the proclamation in Red Square, someone (probably Vasily) simultaneously opened the doors of the city’s prisons. Hundreds of political prisoners descended on the square to share their tales of torture at the hands of Boris’s secret police. The crowd began to riot, stormed the Kremlin, and captured Fedor II and his family.

(Legend also says that while exploring the palace’s cellars the rioters discovered they were full of gunpowder, which Boris and his sorcerers had planned to use to blow the Kremlin to bits so the pretender could not have it. Sounds a bit too Game-of-Thrones-y for me, but what do I know.)

Dmitry’s army reached Moscow a week later on June 30, and took it without firing a shot. (Indeed, the only casualties were soldiers who died of alcohol poisoning after too much looting.) He arranged a tearful public reunion with his mother, Maria Nagaya, who welcomed her “son” home. (Probably because she had been threatened with death if she didn’t play along.)

By then Tsar Fedor II and the Tsarina Mariya were already dead, strangled by the local boyars to keep the pretender’s hands clean. (A shameful act, but they covered their tracks by claiming the tsar and his mother had committed suicide.) The only member of Boris’s family left alive was his daughter Ksenia, who was forced to become Dmitry’s concubine.

The Great Pretender

A zemsky sobor gave false Dmitry its seal of approval, and he was crowned tsar on July 21, 1605. To celebrate, he had Boris’s body dug up, ritually defiled, and reburied in an unmarked grave. (This led to rumors that the body in the grave wasn’t really Boris and that he had somehow survived and would return to overthrow the usurper.) He also had the real Dmitry’s corpse removed from the family crypt in Uglich, on the grounds that it was obviously a fake.

Shortly after the coronation Vasily Shuisky decided to switch sides again, recant his recantation and openly declare that new tsar was not Dmitry but Grishka. Vasily was arrested and tried for treason. Dmitry himself served as prosecutor, and was apparently so eloquent that the defendant fell to his knees and tearfully recanted recanting his recantation. He still got sentenced to death, though the mercurial tsar commuted that sentence to exile while Vasily’s head was literally on the chopping block, before eventually pardoning him completely.

For the most part, Tsar Dmitry’s reign seemed to be business as usual, and the machinery of state ran smoothly. I say “seemed to” because again, the records of this era are spotty and horribly biased. Dmitry may have been a good tsar, or he may have had his propagandists working overtime to convey that image. A historian’s opinion about his reign seems to tell you more about that historian than it does about what actually happened. All we can really say is that he seems to have been popular with commoners, and less so with the boyars.

In foreign affairs, he maintained cordial relationships with both Poland and Sweden (Though Sigismund III was a little cross, because he had promised to help overthrow Charles IX of Sweden.) He rebuilt and restructured the military, with the intention of pacifying the Crimean Tatars and then launching a crusade against the Ottoman Turks.

On the domestic front, he seriously considered petitions from the commoners, simplified the code of laws, lowered taxes on his allies, and tried to root out corruption. He also restored the estates and fortunes of Boris’s enemies. That included his own purported family the Nagoy, as well as the exiled Romanovs, who were rumored to be his secret masters.

That last act of generosity may have been Dmitry’s undoing. The restored boyars were not grateful, but resentful. They began to ask if they even needed Dmitry now that they had their power back. Why should they continue to keep up the charade that he was the real Dmitry? Why not cut out the middleman and rule the country themselves?

Petty grievances began to add up. Boyars did not like the way Dmitry protected the peasants and Cossacks who had supported him, or the performative favoritism he showed towards the Nagoy. The clergy was not happy that he had converted to Roman Catholicism, the religion of the Anti-Christ, or that he was trying to tax churches. Nationalists were not happy that he was allied with Poles and Jesuits. Bureaucrats did not like the way he took an active role in government instead of delegating everything to underlings. Traditionalists did not like his disdain for formality and court etiquette, or the way he mingled freely with his subjects, or his Western dress and personal grooming habits, like shaving his beard. Moralists thought he was lewd and lascivious (though we can probably ignore rumors that he was a degenerate gambler who used black magic to seduce both nuns and monks as propaganda).

In short, the complaints boiled down to the idea that Dmitry was not Russian enough, though the idea of what that Russian-ness entailed differed from group to group. (Then again, apparently Dmitry used to ride bareback on unbroken stallions and once climbed into a bear pit to fight the bear himself. That sounds super-Russian to me.)

In another place or time, the idea of a populist tsar, a modernizing man of the people, might have been a winner even with the boyars. But this was seventeenth-century Russia, and that meant one thing: Tsar Dmitry had to go.

The resistance started off small.

A monk named Timofey Osipov took offense at the tsar calling himself “invincible,” for of course only almighty God is invincible. He denounced Dmitry in public, was arrested, and sent into exile.

Two boyars, Pyotr Turgenev and Fedor Kalashnik, continued to insist that Dmitry was really Griskha. When they refused to change their minds after some light torture, they were executed in Red Square. Before he was beheaded, Kalashnik cried out: “You have accepted this servant of the Antichrist and you worship this messenger of Satan. But you won’t understand this until you have perished by him.”

Dmitry’s enemies began recruiting agents from the small army of disgruntled courtiers, secretaries, and clerks who had been turfed out for being too loyal to Boris and Fedor II. In January 1606 three of them attempted to assassinate the tsar, but failed. After that Dmitry stopped mingling with the common folk; now he was always surrounded by dozens of foreign bodyguards.

The assassins made another attempt when Dmitry decided to participate in that year’s winter military exercises. Who can blame him, though? The army had set up a crazy new siege engine on the frozen river, a wooden and bronze structure painted with racing flames, studded with gun emplacements shaped like demon heads, guarded by a life-sized automaton of Cerberus, and equipped with flamethrowers, pyrotechnics, and a smoke machine. I would have wanted to see that bad boy up close and personal too. Anyway, the second assassination attempt failed and Dmitry’s bodyguard was doubled.

When the snows melted it was finally time for the tsar to get married. Hey, fair’s fair. Marina Mniszech had said she would only marry Dmitry if he was tsar, and now he was tsar. They made it official with a proxy marriage in Krakow, and then Marina set out for Moscow. (Meanwhile, Dmitry quietly set Ksenia Borisovna aside and had her imprisoned in a convent.)

Marina arrived on May 2, 1606 at the head of a small army of 2,000 mercenaries who would join the tsar on his upcoming campaign against the Tatars. The formal ceremony was held on May 8.

A week later, while the tsar should have been enjoying his honeymoon, six assassins tried to kill him in his bedchambers. Three were killed and three were captured, but Dmitry was furious and purged his bodyguards. The ones who remained were competent and completely loyal, but there may not have been enough of them to actually keep him safe.

The tsar’s enemies realized they needed to strike now. They only had a few weeks before he left to begin his campaign against the Tatars. Once in the Crimea he would be protected by the army and beyond their reach.

On May 17, 1606 ringing church bells summoned Muscovites to Red Square, where they were met by a small army and a group of boyars including Vasily Shuisky. The boyars announced that the Polish diplomats and mercenaries who had come for the wedding were secretly plotting to murder them all; that they planned to lure the people outside the city walls with a grand fireworks show and then mow them down with artillery. Then they would turn on the tsar and Poland would annex Russia. Was the mob going to let them get away with this base treachery?

Hell no it wasn’t. It stormed the Kremlin, and as the common people made mincemeat of the half-awake Poles and confused palace guards Vasily and the boyars made a beeline for the tsar’s chambers. As they broke down Dmitry’s door he shouted a warning to Marina and tried to leap out the window into another building, but slipped and fell to the ground, breaking his leg and knocking himself out. Some loyal streltsy briefly protected him from the boyars, but they were quickly overwhelmed.

Dmitry begged for a chance to make his case to the people, but the boyars shouted him down. They stripped him of his finery and dressed him as a common pie seller. One shouted, “Behold the tsar of all the Russias!” to which another responded, “I’ve got a tsar like that in my stable at home!” Then they shot him in the head and stabbed him until he was dead.

The tsar’s corpse was dragged through the streets to Maria Nagaya’s palace, and she was tauntingly asked if this was her son. She responded, “You should have asked me while he was still alive; now, obviously, he is no longer mine.” Then she spit on the corpse and cursed it. (She hadn’t been happy with the pretender since he had her real son’s remains dug up.) Then it was dragged to Red Square, mutilated further, dressed as a minstrel, and put on display for public mockery.

Dressing Dmitry as a minstrel was an attempt to smear him as a black magician; for some reason, Russians associated minstrelsy with the Devil and witchcraft, and it was common to accuse your political opponents of being witches and heretics. In this case it also served another purpose. Dmitry had been hailed as the Messiah by fanatics, and the boyars were trying to legitimate their coup by destroying that image.

They may have succeeded too well. Rumors began to circulate that at night hellfire erupted from the ground near Dmitry’s body. The panicked boyars gave orders for the corpse to be removed from Red Square and disposed of, but when it was disturbed it was followed by a whirlwind that destroyed everything it touched. The late tsar was thrown into an open pit used to bury paupers, but somehow kept escaping from the pit and turning up in the streets, where doves perched on it. Attempts to bury him in a church cemetery failed when the holy ground rejected his wicked body. They had to carry the body out of the city and bury it in an unconsecrated field, but right after the body was carried through the city gates they collapsed. And it was said that if you stood on the pretender’s grave, you could hear strange music floating up from below.

Sure sounds like someone was laying it on real thick.

Never Go Against Vasily When Death Is On The Line

That someone was Vasily Shuisky, who declared himself Tsar Vasily IV and had himself coronated on June 1, 1606. He did not bother having his election confirmed by a zemsky sobor, as Boris and Dmitry had, because he knew it would never choose him if there was any other option.

To be fair, Vasily had some qualifications for the job. He was the head of one of the country’s oldest and most distinguished noble families, he was smart, and had served the government well for decades. Well, when he wasn’t plotting against the reigning monarch or hacking him to bits during a palace coup. And that was the problem, all of his positive qualities were offset by the fact that he was a duplicitous double-dealer. It did not help that he had all the personal charm of a mushy rutabaga. People started began looking for alternatives to the new tsar almost immediately.

Within days of the coronation rumors began circulating that, surprise surprise, Dmitry had survived his second death the same way he had survived his first: by switching places with a body double. This was probably not helped by the fact that by the time Dmitry’s body had reached Red Square it had been so thoroughly mutilated it could have been anyone.

Vasily sought to squash these rumors by digging false Dmitry’s body back up, burning it, then stuffing the ashes into a cannon and firing them towards Poland. Then he had the real Dmitry’s remains disinterred back in Uglich, where they were discovered to be miraculously incorrupt, so Dmitry was canonized as the pious Saint Dmitry. Which is one heck of a posthumous reward for someone whose greatest accomplishments in life involved decapitating snowmen and torturing farm animals to death.

These acts of political theater were intended to reassure the public that the previous tsar had been a pretender, and it sort of worked and sort of didn’t. People bought that Tsar Dmitry had been a pretender, but suspected that Vasily had killed a young boy to provide a fresh-looking corpse for his very convenient miracle. It didn’t help that after the blessed remains were put on public display in a cathedral they began to putrefy so quickly that the priests had to burn a small fortune in incense to cover up the awful smell.

Though Vasily was trying to tear down the reputation of the former tsar, he made attempts to placate Dmitry’s surviving allies by giving them government jobs (albeit unimportant ones in remote parts of the empire). For instance, he appointed Prince Grigory Shakhovskoy the governor of Putyvl’ and Prince Andrey Telyatevsky the governor of Chernihiv.

The two princes began conspiring to overthrow the new tsar almost immediately.

During the coup, Shakhovskoy had managed to quietly pocket one of the royal seals before escaping. He gave the seal to one of his lieutenants, Mikhail Molchanov and sent him across the border to Sambir, where Jerzy Mniszech had sheltered Dmitry and built up his army. Molchanov authored dispatches to Russia posing as Dmitry, claiming that he had escaped and fled to safety, and encouraging the people to rise up and overthrow the usurper Vasily.

Vasily’s spies quickly identified the Dmitry in Sambir as Molchanov, and the tsar tried to shut him down by sending a highly detailed and accurate description of the fugitive to the Poles. Molchanov vanished before he could be arrested… but not before finding Ivan Bolotnikov.

Bolotnikov was a former slave of Telyatevsky’s who had run away to join the Cossacks, got captured by the Crimean Tatars, sold to the Turks as a galley slave, then liberated by German sailors and taken to Venice. He was on his way back to Russia when he stopped in Sambir and encountered Dmitry. Or at least, Molchanov pretending to be Dmitry, who he naively mistook for the real deal. Bolotnikov swore allegiance to Molchanov/Dmitry, who made him a general and sent him off to Putyvl’ to take control of the army Shakhovskoy and Telyatevsky were raising.

It wasn’t much of an army, little more than a rag-tag assembly of serfs, slaves, service gentry and Cossacks. The various factions had nothing in common except that they hated Vasily and had nothing left to lose. It helped a bit that there was somewhere between 12,000 and 50,000 of them.

Bolotnikov took command of these troops and split them in half, taking command of one half and giving boyar Istoma Pashkov command of the other. In August 1606 both armies began marching towards Moscow, with Bolotnikov taking the direct route while Pashkov looped around to approach the city from a second direction.

Along the way Bolotnikov’s army liberated dozens of towns, destroying their fortifications, emptying their prisons, plundering their treasuries, burning government tax documents, persecuting boyars and landowners, and murdering everyone who tried to stop them. The peasants and common folk loved it, and flocked to the banner of the dead (or possibly not dead) Dmitry.

Vasily called out the army to oppose the rebels, but for some reason decided to tell them they were fighting marauding Crimean Tatars.

Their first objective was to retake Krom, which could be strategically reinforced to stop both of the rebel armies from leaving Sloboda Ukraina. The government troops had just managed to trap the locals in the town’s citadel when Bolotnikov’s main force arrived to assist the defenders. For the first time Vasily’s forces realized they were fighting fellow Russians, discovered that they had no taste for it, and deserted en masse. As did more of Vasily’s troops when the learned what was going on.

In November both columns of rebels united at Kolomenskoye, on the outskirts of Moscow. Vasily threw together another army to meet them, and it was crushed on the banks of the Oka River. A rebel victory seemed nearly inevitable.

Then in December Bolotnikov was stabbed in the back. Figuratively, this time.

The rebels’ boyar allies were beginning to question just what they had got themselves into. Their erstwhile allies had shown no hesitation to kill boyars and landowners and take all their stuff; if the rebellion succeeded, would the rebel boyars be next? When Vasily suggested there would be cash incentives and amnesty if they switched sides, they took him up on his offer. The rebels were driven away from the capital and took refuge in Kaluga.

Kaluga wasn’t exactly the best place to be besieged. It had neither a citadel nor stone walls. Bolotnikov’s men had to work overtime to throw up earthworks and other defenses, and only managed to pull it off because Vasily’s troops were too depleted to take advantage of the rebels’ momentary weakness.

The mass defection of boyars shifted the balance of power, but not far enough. Bolotnikov still controlled the south and east of the country, but Vasily managed to hold on to the north by convincing the locals that the rebels intended to slaughter them all. Neither side could martial enough military strength to achieve anything better than a stalemate.

Something Is Better Than Nothing (But Not By Much)

As the rebels wintered in Kaluga, they ran into a huge problem. Muscovites had been hesitant to support the rebel forces because they did not believe their Dmitry actually existed, after all, if he did he would be making public appearances. That doubt was starting to infect the rebel rank and file.

Shakhovskoy and Telyatevsky realized that they needed to produce a tsar, and fast. Molchanov would have been the obvious choice, but while he could forge a passable missive from Dmitry, no one would ever mistake him for the late tsar. So, until they could find a convincing and reliable Dmitry, they turned to the next best thing.

Ilya Korovin is another person whose true origins have been lost to history. He definitely hailed from Murom, which means every Russian historian thinks it’s hilarious to point out that he was no Ilya Murometz. He was somebody’s illegitimate son, though it’s not clear if that someone was a boyar or just a cobbler. As an adult he briefly worked as an apple-seller in Nizhny Novgorod and as a cook on a merchant ship plying the Volga before running off to join the Cossacks.

By 1605, Ilya was running with a band of Cossacks who had previously been allied with Dmitry, but turned to banditry after his coronation. The bandits had the sudden inspiration that they should get their own phoney baloney tsar. When it came time to choose someone to play the role, they whittled down their options to two newcomers: Ilya and Mitka, and Ilya won because he was slightly more cosmopolitan.

That’s how Ilya Korovin became Pyotr Fyodorovich, the long-lost son of Fedor I. That would have been news to Fedor, whose only child was a daughter who died in infancy, but that’s because Pyotr had been switched with a girl child in the cradle. The Cossacks couldn’t decide whether that had been done by Boris to stop him from inheriting, or by his mother to protect him from her own brother. People actually bought this incredible story, or at least pretended to buy it so they had a reason to loot the countryside.

Soon Pyotr was at the head of an army of 4,000 bloodthirsty bandits rampaging across Sloboda Ukraina. Ostensibly their plan was to march on Moscow, confront the tsar, and demand their fair of the war’s spoils, like the post-World War I bonus army. In realty they just were just looting and pillaging and killing boyars in novel and inventive ways: running them through with swords, battering them to death with a knout, dropping them head-first off tall buildings, nailing them to the wall, separating all their joints, and boiling them in oil.

When Dmitry was assassinated, Pyotr and his forces retreated back to the Donets. That’s where Shakhovskoy and Telyatevsky found him, and thinking that perhaps the wrong pretender was better than no pretender, joined forces with him. At least until they could get a better-quality Dmitry from their agents in Poland.

Pyotr and Shakhovskoy marched north to relieve the siege of Kaluga. It did not start out well; their first attempt in February 1607 was crushed by Vasily so conclusively that whole squadrons of rebels decided to sit on powder kegs and blow themselves up rather than surrender.

For months neither side could claim anything other than a pyrrhic victory; if the rebels won they were too weakened to keep pressing on and lift the siege, and if Vasily won he was too weakened to press his momentary advantage.

Then in May 1607 the rebels finally wore down the government to the point that they were able to break the stalemate, lift the siege, and reunite their forces. They resumed marching, confident they would soon be knocking Vasily off his throne.

The rebels were overconfident. They were routed at Kashira, on the outskirts of the city, retreated, and then got stuck in a second siege in nearby Tula.

The siege of Tula lasted for months, which was frustrating for the rebels and embarrassing for the tsar. Then, on the advice of his generals, Vasily dammed the Upa River downstream from the town. The waters backed up into the town proper, flooding the streets and completely cutting off the residents from the outside world.

The frustrated Tulans turned on Prince Shakhovskoy, tossing him into prison and telling him they would only release him when Dmitry showed up. At this point Shakhovskoy’s chief general and current pretender realized that Dmitry was never going to show up. They began negotiating the surrender of the city. Or rather, Bolotnikov had Pyotr bound hand and foot to get him out of the way, and then unilaterally began negotiating the surrender of the city.

His terms were simple: just spare our lives. On October 10, 1607 Vasily agreed to those terms, and then reneged on them almost immediately.

Pyotr was briefly imprisoned, and then hung in February 1608. (Because no one can just die in this story, rumors immediately began circulating that he had switched places with a body double and escaped to Lithuania.)

Bolotnikov still held out hope that his side would prove victorious. He taunted his captors: “Soon I shall put you yourself in chains and sew you into bearskins!” His bravado was not justified. He was exiled to remote Kargopol, and as soon as he arrived the town’s governor poked out his eyes. Later, when a new group of rebels approached the town, he was drowned in a river to keep him out of rebel hands.

Shakhovskoy too was exiled, but escaped to fight another day.

The Thief of Tushino

If the rebels had only managed to hang on for a few more weeks, they would have learned that Dmitry was actually on his way! Or at least, a new Dmitry was on the way!

During the siege of Tula, Shakhovskoy sent a letter to his allies in Sambir informing them that morale was dangerously low and the rebellion needed a new figurehead, immediately, and demanding one be sent from “the pretender factory.”

He got one.

No one with functioning senses would have ever mistaken the new false Dmitry for the first false Dmitry. Physically, they were night and day: they had different hair and eye colors, their foreheads, noses, and chins were different; their warts were in different places; and their grooming habits were wildly different. (For starters, the new Dmitry had a beard). The first Dmitry had been polite and uneducated but curious; the second Dmitry was educated but uncouth and incurious. The first Dmitry was eloquent and charismatic, the second Dmitry was crude and off-putting.

Dmitry II — 2mitry? Dmiitry with two Is? I’m just going to say Dmitry to keep things simple, just remember it’s not the same guy — Dmitry really only had one thing in common with his predecessor: we have no idea who he really was. Was he really Bogdan, Ivashko, Mitka, or Matyushka? Was he the son of a priest, a church sexton, a schoolteacher, or a member of the service gentry? Was he from Mogilev or Seversk or Shklov? Was he secretly Jewish? His lack of courtly manners and the consistent description of him as “an uncouth peasant, foul-mouthed in his conversation and with vile habits” seem to suggest a lower-class origin, while his surprising amount of book learning seems to suggest he was a teacher or scribe, but that’s about it.

Tradition says he was a priest’s servant from Shklov (in modern-day Belarus), who was kicked onto the streets when his master caught him in bed with his wife. Later two of the Tsarevich Pyotr’s soldiers found him on the streets, drunkenly thought that he looked enough like the late Dmitry based purely on his height, and pressed him into service against his will. Tradition is probably wrong here, but it’s as a good a story as any.

The conspirators took this unpromising raw material and made no attempt to sculpt it into a replica of the late tsar. To explain the tsar’s seemingly miraculous survival it was said that on the day of his assassination he had switched places with a German body double named Artsykalus, who died in his place.

You can understand why someone would have believed in the first false Dmitry, because his story was just conspiratorial enough to sound true and because he actually presented a viable alternative to the existing power structure. Why, though, would anyone believe in the second false Dmitry, who bore no resemblance to either the real Dmitry or the first fake, whose story was even more incredible, and who did not comport himself like a tsar?

The short answer appears to be that few people did believe in him. To Shakhovskoy and Telyatevsky the second pretender was merely a convenient figurehead that could be used to rally ignorant commoners and those who had never met the first false Dmitry. His own army did not respect him, because he existed outside their chain of command and their own generals regarded him as a useless appendage. The public did not seem to have any great enthusiasm for him either, but they had even less for Vasily.

False Dmitry II first appeared in Starodub in May 1607, claiming to be the tsar’s uncle “Andrey Nagoy” (a person who did not exist). Local authorities arrested him for disturbing the peace, at which point he conveniently revealed that, ha ha, he was just joking, he was really Tsar Dmitry after all! He was helped by a positive identification from Cossack leader Ivan Zarutsky, Who knew he wasn’t actually either Dmitry, but had sent by Bolotnikov to fetch the new guy and take him back to Tula.

By September 1607 Dmitry II and Zarutsky had managed to pull together a small army of Polish mercenaries and began marching toward Tula. They stupidly announced their coming by sending envoys to Vasily, demanding that the usurper recognize his majesty and abdicate. Vasily responded by having the messengers burned at the stake outside the gates of the city.

It did not go well. At the end of the month most of the mercenaries deserted because they hadn’t been paid. (Because no one in this story ever thinks to have enough money on hand to pay their mercenaries.) Zarutsky managed to build their numbers back up by recruiting more Cossacks, but when they were ready to resume marching on Tula word reached them that Bolotnikov had surrendered. The army retreated to Karczew, where the remaining mercenaries looted the city of valuables and then deserted.

At this point the rebel leaders realized how little respect their mercenary army actually had for them, and how much those rioting mercenaries had incensed the good people of Karczew. Dmitry and his backers quietly gathered a few dozen close allies and fled the city in the middle of the night.

Vasily then made the same mistake Boris had made earlier: instead of pressing his advantage and pursuing the rebel army, he decided to take retribution on the rebellious locals. Once again it proved to be counterproductive, driving more people to the rebel side.

Meanwhile, Dmitry II and his retinue were on his way to Putyvl’ when they ran into a third army led by another pretender, Tsarevich Fedor Fyodorovich, who claimed to be Tsarevich Pyotr’s younger brother. The two pretenders decided to join forces and hunkered down for the winter in Orel.

Over the long winter they were joined by stragglers from Bolotnikov’s army, Cossacks, and somehow even more mercenaries (who kept pouring into the country even though no one ever had any money to pay mercenaries).

In April 1608 Dmitry II marched on Moscow and won two small battles before being turned away at the outskirts of the city by Vasily’s army in June. He retreated and set up a temporary camp outside Tushino, a small town about 12km outside of Moscow. (For reference, that’s like a rebel army marching on Washington, DC, being turned away, and setting up camp just outside the Capital Beltway.) As before Vasily could not oust the rebel army; they were too evenly matched.

The country was essentially torn in half, with Muscovy recognizing Vasily as the tsar, the southern and eastern regions recognizing Dmitry II as the tsar, and everyone else either taking a neutral stance or paying homage to both tsars.

The so-called temporary camp in Tushino wound up becoming the rebels’ semi-permanent base of operations. Dmitry II set up his own court, duma, and bureaucracy. He passed laws, collected taxes, granted lands and titles to retainers.

The success of the obviously fraudulent Dmitry II seemed to embolden other would-be pretenders. First there was Ivan Augustus, who claimed to be the illegitimate son of Ivan IV from his fourth wife (who had no children). Then there was Lavrenty, who claimed to be the son of the Tsarevich Ivan (except Ivan’s wife had miscarried after her father-in-law beat her husband to death). There was Pyotr the Bear, who shared Tsarevich Pyotr’s origin except instead of being hidden away for being the son of Fedor I he was hidden away because he was a half-man/half-bear monster. Pyotr could have had his pick of long-lost half-siblings claiming to be Fedor I’s children: Yeroshka, Gavrilka, Klementy, Martina, Savely, Simeon, and Vasily. None of the new pretenders was particularly convincing or successful; Ivan Augustus managed to round up some Cossacks and spread chaos near Astrakhan but that was about it. The public, it turns out, was tired of would-be tsars and obvious fakes.

At first Dmitry II tried to court the pretenders as allies but eventually even he tired of them. In Summer 1608 Zarutsky’s Cossacks captured Ivan Augustus and Lavrenty and brought them to Tushino. Dmitry took the two prisoners and his erstwhile ally Fedor Fyodorovich, then had them hung along the road to Moscow as a warning to all other pretenders.

While all this was going on, Vasily signed a peace treaty with the Poles, in the hope that Sigismund would crack down on the constant stream of mercenaries and soldiers crossing the border to join the rebels and pillage the countryside.

As part of the treaty Vasily released Jerzy and Marina Mniszech, who had been held captive since Dmitry I’s assassination, on the condition that they leave the country immediately.

They did not. On their way out of Moscow the Mniszechs were very conveniently “captured” by the rebels in Tushino.

Marina Mniszech had apparently been holding out hope that her husband was still alive. She was disappointed when she came face-to-face with Dmitry II, because it was immediately obvious he was not the same man. Still, she knew she would never be tsarina without making a few compromises, so she swallowed her pride and recognized him.

Dmitry II immediately married the woman to whom he was supposedly already married. It turned out the rebels desperately needed Marina to lend them legitimacy, because they were rapidly losing public support. As their treasuries emptied and their bellies grumbled the rebels had started acting less like liberators and more like occupiers. Their foraging troops plundered and pillaged the land, while the court-in-exile divvied up their allies’ estates amongst themselves as if they were conquered lands. These tyrannical behaviors led many of Dmitry’s allies to abandon his cause.

Things were not going great for Vasily either. He was fending off assassination attempts left and right; in February 1609 a group of conspirators (including Mikhail Molchanov) attempted to storm the Kremlin and kill Vasily the way he had killed Dmitry I and only failed because they could not persuade the mob to join them.

Also, the Poles hadn’t been living up to their treaty obligations. Sigismund did nothing to stop princes in the border regions from raising armies and sending them across the border, mostly because he was just happy they were making trouble somewhere else for a change. So Vasily decided that the enemy of his enemy was his friend and formed a pact with Sweden. In exchange for abandoning Russia’s territorial claims on Livonia, Charles IX would send him 5,000 mercenaries and help him crush the rebels.

The combined Russian/Swedish army was put under the command of Vasily’s nephew Mikhail Skopin-Shuisky. In the spring they drove back the rebels on every front, driving them out of northern Russia, lifting sieges all over the place, and winning what should have been a decisive battle at Tver. Then, say it with me, the Swedish mercenaries refused to keep fighting until they were paid. When Vasily dithered about that, the Swedes began looting the countryside.

Then Sigismund decided that it was finally time to get a piece of the action for himself, if only to stop his uncle Charles from breaking off a larger piece. The Poles invaded Russia over the summer with the stated intent of putting Sigismund’s son Prince Władysław on the throne. When they invaded many Polish soldiers left Dmitry’s army to join their king, leaving the pretender with only a small force of Cossacks.

Once again Dmitry II could see which way the wind was blowing and decided to get out of town. In the middle of the night of December 29, 1609 he snuck of out Tushino hiding in the back of a manure cart, disguised as a peasant and accompanied only by his faithful jester. He fled to Kaluga and raised a new army, using anti-Polish and anti-Swedish sentiment as a recruiting tool.

The next two years were total chaos and no one was sure who would come out on top. There was only one thing anyone could agree on: it wouldn’t be Vasily.

Mikhail Shopin-Shuisky, who had been responsible for all of the tsar’s greatest victories, died unexpectedly in the spring. Rumor said he had been poisoned either by the tsar, who was afraid of his nephew’s popularity, or by his sister-in-law, to ensure that her husband Dmitry Skopin-Shuisky would inherit the throne when the childless Vasily died. Whatever the case, Mikhail Skopin-Shuisky proved irreplaceable. When Dmitry Skopin-Shuisky rode off to fight the Poles and Swedes and rebels he got himself killed in short order.

Detecting an opportunity, one of Dmitry II’s advisors, Prince Dmitry Trubetskoy, approached the people of Moscow and suggested a way out of this mess. The boyars would get rid of Vasily, Trubetskoy would get rid of Dmitry, and then they could form a united front, convene a zemsky sobor, pick a new tsar, and drive the Poles and Swedes out of the country.

On July 7, 1610 the boyars, clergymen, and commoners of Moscow rose up, stormed the Kremlin, and deposed Vasily. The plotter tsar was forced to shave his beard and become a monk.

Trubetskoy, of course, did nothing, because he had never intended to do anything. But he had convinced one of Dmitry’s enemies to cripple itself.

The Muscovites panicked. They could not decide who should be the next tsar, so they decided to throw their support to side with the most powerful army. They offered the throne to Prince Władysław, on the condition that he convert to Orthodoxy. The Poles agreed.

Over the summer the combined Muscovite/Polish forces pushed back the resurgent rebels and the Swedes. However, two things quickly became clear. First, Władysław had no intention of actually converting; and second, that Sigismund had decided to take the throne for himself and only hand it over to his son on his deathbed. The alliance dissolved and the four-sided war resumed.

Dmitry II found himself in an excellent position to capitalize on anti-Polish sentiment… but he never got a chance to capitalize on it.

Over the months he had grown increasingly paranoid as Polish psyops had him convinced that there was no one he could trust. The commoners were against him, the boyars were against him, the Poles and Swedes were against him, and his armies were now largely composed of Cossacks, Tatars, and Turks who had no particular love for Russia.

Eventually the rebels captured documents that implied Dmitry’s Tatar bodyguards were plotting against him. These documents had been forged by the Poles, but he didn’t know that, and decided it was time to kill or be killed. He accused a random Tatar khan of treason and had him executed.

That did not make the Tatars happy, and they were going to have their revenge. On December 11, 1610 while Dmitry II and his jester — again with the jester? I’m getting real Steve McKenzie vibes here — while Dmitry II and his jester were riding a sleigh down a country lane, Tatar Prince Pyotr Urusov shot Dmitry dead, then cut off his head and fled to the Crimea with it.

The Littlest Felon

Dmitry II’s followers were stunned. Not so stunned that they didn’t immediately slaughter all the Tatars in their camp, but still pretty stunned.

Marina Mniszech, who was eight months present, took it really hard. She ran out of her rooms, rending her clothes and hair, and demanding to be killed. No one was willing to oblige her. Instead, she was placed in the care of the top rebel general, Ivan Zarutsky, the same Zarutsky who had brought Dmitry II to Russia years earlier.

When Marina gave birth to a healthy baby boy a month later, Zarutsky proclaimed Ivan Dmitrievich to be the rightful heir to the throne and began recruiting Cossacks to fight for the infant. He also tried to forge alliances with the Shah of Persia and the Sultan of Turkey, who weren’t interested. In fact, most Russians were not interested either, and many of them doubted whether Ivan was even Dmitry’s real son.

With no tsar in Moscow and no tsar in the rebel camp, the country was once again a widow. Sigismund held sway in the west. Charles was gaining ground in the north. Zarutsky was losing the south, but losing it very slowly. Muscovy was hanging on by a thread and ruled by committee because no one, absolutely no one, could agree who should be tsar.

And you know what that means.

Third Time’s A Charm

Time for another pretender!

In March 1611 a third man claiming to be the late Dmitry appeared in Novgorod. This time, the story was that Dmitry had only been wounded in Uglich, and then restored to life twice after his stabbing in Moscow and beheading in Kaluga. Because apparently three miraculous resurrections would have been too far-fetched.

As usual, we have no idea who this guy was. He may have been Matyushka, a rural church deacon; Sidorka, the rogue of Pskov; or a scribe from Moscow; or a Novgorod knife-seller; or the illegitimate son of a Lithuanian hetman; or even just a mentally ill man plucked off the streets.

The only thing we know for sure was that he was acting on his own initiative. The Poles and Swedes and Cossacks already had their own would-be tsars, and by this point even Russians could not be bothered to act like he was the real deal. Even so there’s always someone willing to take advantage of a pawn, no matter how limited its utility might be.

Dmitry III — 3mitry? — had no luck raising an army in Novgorod, which was still largely held by the Swedes and had no interest in backing another pretender, especially since they seemingly knew Dmitry and didn’t trust or like him.

The pretender moved on to Ivangorod where the people were more receptive to his rhetoric. In June 1611 he marched to Pskov at the head of a small army. The citizens of Pskov were none to happy to see another pretender and denounced him as a godless apostate. As Dmitry prepared to set up a siege, the Swedes suddenly appeared behind him and cut off his supply lines. The rebels retreated so quickly they lost most of their men and all of their siege engines and artillery. Then the Swedes besieged Pskov.

When Pskov finally managed to drive the Swedes away in December 1611, they had a change of heart and asked Dmitry III to come save them from their foreign enemies. As usual, the south and east flocked to the pretender’s banner and Muscovites would have none of it.

The only problem was that Dmitry III was a hot mess. He ruled through terror and extortion, and when the Swedes besieged Pskov again in spring 1612 the citizens kicked him out. He was eventually captured by his enemies, taken to Moscow, and chained up in front of the Kremlin to be abused for the amusement of the general public.

Fool Me, Can’t Get Fooled Again

And about this time a fourth Dmitry appeared in Astrakhan!

Maybe. This one actually appears to be a phantom created by later historians trying to reconcile confusing and inaccurate chronicles. At some point Dmitry III attempted to make an alliance with Zarutsky and Marina Mniszech, and those overtures were recorded as the appearance of yet another pretender in the south.

In any case, if he actually existed we know even less about this guy than the other pretenders, since he just sort of vanishes after being mentioned once. I think we can safely say that even if he did exist he certainly didn’t matter.

So let’s move on to the end of the story.

Hail To The Tsar

By 1613 the various factions finally decided that enough was enough and banded together. Their combined forces pushed the Swedes out of the country, stopped the Poles from gobbling up more territory, and drove Zarutsky back to the Crimea.

Now that they had breathing room, the convened a zemsky sobor to pick a new tsar. They had a few conditions. Obviously no one who had collaborated with the Poles or Swedes would be acceptable. Foreign princes were right out, and so were Catholics. More importantly, they declared they were done with Dmitrys, and that Marina Mniszech’s son was completely off the table.

In the end the zemsky sobor picked the sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov. He was from a prominent family with a distant relation to the Rurik tsars, and was young enough that he could plausibly claim to have had nothing to do with the never-ending plotting and treason of the Time of Troubles.

Tsar Mikhail I’s first act of business was to get rid of his remaining rivals. Dmitry III was dragged out of his damp prison cell and hung like a common criminal. The rebels in the south were crushed, though their leaders eluded capture until June 1614. Zarutsky was impaled, the four-year-old Ivan Dmitrievich was hung outside of Moscow’s gates, and Marina Mniszech was imprisoned in a convent. Or maybe used her witchcraft to transform herself into a magpie and escape, if you believe such things.

Sigismund and the Poles were finally driven out of the country in 1618, well, “out of the country” if you discounted the enormous territorial gains they had made. Prince Władysław only formally renounced his claim to the Russian throne in 1634, several years after he had become the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania.

Rebels continued to pledge allegiance to Dmitry Ivanovich and Ivan Dmitrievich for decades, though it’s debatable whether anyone actually thought they were still alive or if it was just an excuse to make rebellion seem more palatable.

There were still a few pretenders floating around. For years Władysław funded the operations of one obvious fraud who claimed to be Ivan Dmitrievich. In 1643 a second Ivan Dmitrievich impostor stepped forward claiming he had been hiding out in a Jesuit monastery (though he turned out to be an unwitting dupe raised to believe he was the dead Ivan). At one point two men even claimed to be the sons of the childless Vasily IV.

But that was that, though. The Time of Troubles was over. Russia got its act together, freed itself from the twin scourges of self-delusion and misinformation, and never, ever, ever experienced political turmoil again.

What’s that you say?