A dead prince kept coming back to claim Russia's throne
Tsarevich Dmitry was officially reported dead in 1591, killed by his own knife during a seizure. Yet within a decade a man claiming to be him marched out of Poland-Lithuania, took Moscow and was crowned tsar. He was only the first of several false Dmitrys in Russia's fifteen-year Time of Troubles.
The crisis began in 1598, when Feodor I, the pious and weak son of Ivan the Terrible, died without an heir, ending the Rurik line that had always ruled Moscow. Real power had already rested with his brother-in-law Boris Godunov, who won the crown that September and then staged a Zemsky Sobor to endorse him after the fact. Historian Chester Dunning credits Godunov with expanding Russia, but he also bound millions of peasants to the land and imposed heavy taxes.
Nature then turned on him. From 1601 to 1603 a famine, possibly triggered by the eruption of the Peruvian volcano Huaynaputina, brought summer nights below freezing and ruined harvests. Estimates of the death toll run from a third of the population upwards, and many Russians read the disaster as divine anger at their ruler.
Into this chaos stepped the pretender. Dunning points to evidence tying the scheme to Russian nobles, including the Romanov clan, while Polish Catholic leaders and Jesuits hoped a convert tsar might bring Russia into their fold. With roughly 2500 men he crossed the border in October 1604, sparking a revolt across the southern frontier. After Godunov died in 1605, the claimant entered Moscow in triumph, and Ivan's widow Maria Nagaya even accepted him as her son. His Polish entourage and Catholic conversion soon made him hated; on 17 May 1606, ten days after his wedding to Marina Mniszech, a conspiracy led by Prince Vasily Shuisky had him killed, and rioting left 420 Poles dead along with several hundred Russians.
Shuisky's hasty seizure of the crown, without a Zemsky Sobor or wide support, only deepened the instability. Poland-Lithuania occupied Russia during the war that followed, and Smolensk was lost. Order returned only in 1613, when an assembly elected Michael Romanov tsar, founding a dynasty that would last until the February Revolution of 1917.
Source: Time of Troubles
