Romanovs E-Book

Oliver Thomson

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The Romanovs were one of the most extraordinary families in world history, producing a succession of brilliant yet often dysfunctional rulers whose whims affected the lives of millions. Oliver Thomson delves deep into the dynasty's rise to power from the moment when Anastasia Romanovna was plucked from obscurity to become the wife of the tsar later known as Ivan the Terrible. He traces the remarkable careers and personal traumas of the Romanov tsars and emperors, larger-than-life characters like Peter I and Catherine the Great, as well as the tragic stories of Paul and Nicholas II. Including maps, portraits of family members and stunning colour photographs of the main surviving Romanov buildings, this absorbing book charts the rise and fall of one of history's most powerful dynasties and at the same time examines the lives of the often flawed human beings who were part of it.

Leseprobe

‘We have taught ourselves to ridicule all our past: we never acknowledge a good deed or a good intention in our history’

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

‘Unfortunate things often happen to Russian sovereigns’

The Emperor Paul’s mother-in-law

CONTENTS

Title

Maps and Illustrations

Introduction

PART ONE: THE TSARS OF MUSCOVY

I

Anastasia Romanovna: The Beauty and the Beast

II

Feodor: The Half-Romanov Tsar

III

Feodor Romanov: The Reluctant Monk

IV

Mikhail Feodorovich Romanov: The Elected Tsar

V

Alexei: The Quietest Tsar

VI

Feodor III: The Underestimated Tsar

VII

Tsarevna Sofia and Tsar Ivan V

VIII

Tsar Petrushka or Bombardier Peter Alexevich

PART TWO: THE EMPERORS OF RUSSIA

I

Peter the Great: Father of the Fatherland

II

The Empress Catherine I: A Lithuanian Peasant Girl

III

Emperor Peter II: The Tsar Who Never Grew Up

IV

The Empress Anna: The Huntress

V

Ivan VI: The Prisoner of Schlusselburg

VI

The Empress Elizabeth: The Pleasure Lover

VII

Peter III: The Drill Master

VIII

Catherine II the Great

IX

The Emperor Paul: The Sergeant Major

X

Alexander I: The Blessed

XI

Nicholas I: The Gendarme of Europe

XII

Alexander II: The Reluctant Liberator

XIII

Alexander III: Sasha the Bulldog

XIV

Nicholas II: The Henpecked Husband

Epilogue: The Survivors

PART THREE: A TOUR AROUND THE EMPIRE OF THE ROMANOVS

The Tour

Glossary

Bibliography

Plates

Copyright

MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

1 Russian expansion from Ivan IV to Catherine the Great

2 Russian expansion from Catherine the Great to Nicholas II

3 Historic Moscow

4 Historic St Petersburg

BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Peter I strikes one of the Streltsi in the face

2 Peter at fifty

3 Peter with Catherine on the Neva

4 Catherine II

5 Paul

6 Alexander I

7 Nicholas I

8 The coronation of Alexander II

9 Alexander III

10 Nicholas II

11 Tsarevitch Alexis

12 Rasputin

13 Alexandra

14 Child victims of a pogrom in the Ukraine

COLOUR ILLUSTRATIONS

Moscow

1 St Basil’s Cathedral

2 Tsar Feodor’s cannon

3 Trinity Tower

4 Annunciation Cathedral and Great Kremlin Palace

5 Bolshoe Theatre

6 Cathedral of Assumption and Palace of Facets

7 Bell Tower and Kremlin Wall

St Petersburg

8 The Bronze Horseman

9 Peter and Paul Fortress

10 Peterhof Cascade

11 The Winter Palace façade

12 The Winter Palace interior

13 Smolny Institute

14 Pavlovsk and statue of Tsar Paul

15 Spilt Blood Cathedral

16 The Cruiser Aurora

Of the black and white illustrations, 1-12 are from the author’s private collection.

For the colour pictures I am indebted for 1 to my son-in-law Neil Sutherland and for the remainder to my old friend Lawrie Taylor.

For tolerance I am indebted to my long-suffering wife.

INTRODUCTION

The Romanovs were from the start in many ways a very dysfunctional family yet for several centuries they dominated what became the largest nation in Europe. Their incredible self-belief, their obsession with absolute control, their addiction to savage punishment, their self-indulgence and hedonism, their carelessness with human life and later their sheer incompetence caused enormous suffering. Their obstinacy cost millions of lives, particularly when they played a key role in starting the First World War, then wantonly exposed their massive but ill-prepared armies for slaughter. This book examines the extraordinary psychology of the leaders of this dynasty, their remarkable ability to survive major disasters, the strong and talented women they chose as wives and produced as daughters. They were not only an eccentric dynasty but their leading members were eccentric in remarkably different ways: from feeble, monk-like characters such as Tsar Mikhail to the workaholic giant Peter the Great or the hen-pecked mediocrity, Nicholas II.

The rewards for those members of the family who won the throne were enormous in terms of wealth and, if they had the character to wield it, almost unlimited power. Yet such was their sense of duty that they made great personal sacrifices for what they believed was right. The price of failure was also very high: for the men it often meant murder – six out of their eighteen crowned heads met violent ends – or imprisonment in remote fortresses for the rest of their lives; for the women it meant the dangers of frequent child-bearing, of compulsory incarceration in a nunnery or years of neglect as they had no choice but to tolerate the open adultery of their husbands.

Partly due to ill health and partly due to violence the average life-span of ruling Romanovs was not high: their average age at death was forty-four. Only two lived beyond the age of sixty, Catherine the Great (sixty-seven) and Alexander II (sixty-two) and none of them made it to seventy. The average length of reign was only seventeen years with Peter the Great having the longest – forty-three years – six others lasting five years or less.

Each chapter is a stand-alone mini-biography of each head of the family, so in terms of chronology there is some back-tracking, but that is because this book is more an analysis of character than a history of Russia. At the same time there is a thread running through all the lives, for each generation introduced variations on the theme of compulsive autocracy which cumulatively created an inheritance that made any softening dangerous, if not impossible, and led inevitably towards disaster.

The third main section of the book takes us on an armchair trip round the vast Russian empire which spread into areas which are now part of China and the United States as well as Poland, Finland, the Baltic States and a whole clutch of central Asian republics. Here we look at the extraordinary architectural legacy of a dynasty that did nothing by halves.

NOTE ON SPELLING

It is difficult to arrive at a style of spelling Russian names in our alphabet which is at once consistent, easily readable and true to the beauty of the Russian language. Some of the main characters in this book are so well known by their anglicised form of name like Peter or Nicholas that it seems pedantic to call them Pyotr or Nikolai, let alone Yekaterina for Catherine, whereas since the days of Gorbachev we have become used to Mikhail for Michael. Similarly we are well used to Tchaikovsky in concert programmes with a T and why change the final ‘y’ to a double ‘i’? We are used to Moscow not Moskva, Crimea not Krim. Tartar is easier to say that Tatar. Odesa is more up to date than Odessa. Thus I have not been entirely consistent but have included a short glossary at the back of the book which lists those Russian words and names used with alternative spellings, especially those place names like St Petersburg that have been changed by different governments. I have also been slightly more pedantic in the gazeteer section so that people can find their way around.

NOTE ON CALENDAR

I have generally avoided complications due to the difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendars, though occasionally it does have some significance like the October/November revolution of 1917.

REFERENCES

Footnotes have not been included but wherever a source or writer is mentioned or quoted the details of the work referred to are included in the bibliography.

PART ONE

THE TSARS OF MUSCOVY

I

ANASTASIA ROMANOVNA THE BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

‘If they had not separated me from my little heiffer there would not have been so many victims’

Letter from Ivan IV to Prince Kurbsky

In February 1547 in the Cathedral of the Annunciation in the Kremlin, Moscow, the seventeen-year-old Ivan IV, the first ruler of Muscovy officially to be given the title Tsar, married his teenage bride Anastasia. Both his new title and his choice of bride were to be of great significance in the centuries that followed.

His new title Tsar, or Czar, was the russianised form of Caesar, first borrowed informally by his grandfather Ivan III after the fall of two great cities had presented him with a unique opportunity. The capture by the Turks of Constantinople, known as the Second Rome, meant that Moscow could put itself forward as ‘the Third Rome’ and one that would last for ever. The other city was Kiev which had been captured first by the Tartars, then the Poles, which meant that Moscow had a claim to be the capital of the Russian Orthodox Church. Put the two concepts together and the Grand Princes of Muscovy could justifiably call themselves Caesar. They could also start promoting Moscow as the new capital of the Christian world.

Even at the age of seventeen Ivan IV was ambitious and impatient, so that the concept of a jump in status from mere grand prince to Caesar appealed to him. As we shall see his career was in many ways to justify these pretensions although at considerable cost. He and his successors as tsars were to turn the small state of Muscovy into one of the most powerful and autocratic nations of the world.

Ivan’s choice of a bride might not immediately have seemed so significant but was to have far-reaching and unexpected consequences, for the girl’s name was Anastasia Romanovna. Ivan, who had only just come of age, had initially toyed with the idea of finding a foreign princess to be the first tsaritsa, but there were none available that appealed. So he had organised a short list of all the virgins of Muscovy who were of suitable age and rank. Then he summoned the most likely 300 to Moscow for medical tests, for personal inspection of their appearance and to check on their table manners. He even sneaked into their quarters at night to make sure they did not snore or sleep-walk. From this extraordinary beauty parade, not the first to be held by a Muscovite ruler, many had soon been eliminated and once Ivan spotted Anastasia he seems to have plucked her like Cinderella from the crowd. It appears to have been a genuine love match. He presented the handkerchief and ring that meant she had won the contest.

Up to this point the Romanov family had been more minor gentry than serious aristocracy. Anastasia’s father Roman Zacharin, who had died two years earlier, had provided the family with its new surname. He was himself descended from an Andrei Kobyla who in around 1346 had migrated to Moscow from the area of the Baltic coast known to the Russians as Prus (Prussia). That very year Estonia just to the north had been sold by the Swedes to the Teutonic Knights of Germany who had already overrun Lithuania from their crusading base at Marienburg. It was in this atmosphere that the ancestors of the Romanovs, who were almost certainly of Slavonic origin and the Orthodox faith, chose to seek asylum in Moscow.

Andrei Kobyla was sufficiently respected for the Grand Prince Simeon, ruler of Muscovy, to give him some ambassadorial duties to the neighbouring principality of Tver which was not yet part of his growing state. Andrei and his fifth son Feodor Koshka seem to have made money, perhaps in the usual way in Moscow at that time by helping collect taxes for the Tartar overlords, perhaps from trade, for having moved from Prus they could not as yet be great landowners. They became influential but as yet untitled members of the boyar class, the group of semi-independent landowners who were entitled to advise the Grand Princes of Muscovy. They could if they dared even seek the protection of alternative grand princes in neighbouring states. One of Feodor Koshka’s grandsons was called Zachariah and from him were descended Roman Zacharin and his daughter, the new tsaritsa, Anastasia Romanovna. Roman’s brother Mikhail Zacharin (d. 1539) was a counsellor of Ivan III’s and another uncle, Gregori, helped put Anastasia forward as a potential royal bride in 1547.

Nevertheless since Anastasia did not come from a top boyar family it was somewhat of a surprise when Ivan picked her from the final ten candidates and gave her the tokens which symbolised her triumph. Though their marriage was to last only thirteen years she was to make such a lasting impression that nearly half-a-century later it was to be her grand-nephew Mikhail who was elected the first tsar from the Romanov family and thus to alter the course of history.

It was Anastasia’s pleasant personality that was the key to her success. An English visitor commented that she was ‘wise and of such holiness, virtue and government that she was honored, loved and feared by all her subjects. He (Ivan IV) being young and riotous, she ruled him with admirable affability and wisdom.’ Brought up quietly by her widowed mother she was not highly educated or sophisticated, but quietly pious, and in her own womanly way uniquely able to manage her unusual new husband. She behaved exactly as the textbook for Russian female behaviour, the Domostroy, said a woman should behave. Not that this entirely stilled the jealous tongues of the senior boyars.

We now turn to the teenager who had plucked Anastasia from obscurity. At this point Ivan IV was of course not yet known as Grozny (usually translated in English as Terrible though in Russian it means something more like Formidable which is not quite such a damning quality in a ruler). But already there were signs that his lonely childhood had left him psychologically scarred: he was rumoured to have dropped dogs from the battlements of the Kremlin. He was tall, but stooped and gawky with a hawkish face and close-set eyes.

Ivan had inherited the Grand Princedom of Muscovy at the age of three when his father Basil III (Vasili III ruled 1505-1533) died unexpectedly. Basil’s first marriage had lasted twenty years but failed to produce an heir so he was already in late middle age when he put his wife aside and, to the horror of the Church, remarried. His new wife Helen was from Lithuania like the Romanovs and quickly bore him two sons, but as the bishops later chose to remind people, they had put the second marriage and its progeny under a curse which after Anastasia’s death they were able to claim was fulfilled.

Meanwhile five years after Grand Prince Basil’s death Helen, who had become regent for her son Ivan, was the victim of a palace coup. She was poisoned, her lover Prince Ivan Obolensky was stabbed to death and control of Moscow was seized by a faction of royal cousins and murderous boyars who were to create an oppressive atmosphere for the child tsar for the next few years.

Thus Ivan at the age of eight was made an orphan and until he came of age nine years later was left very much to his own devices. In particular as a bookish teenager he spent many hours sifting through the archives of the Kremlin and this gave him a unique awareness of the achievements of his father and grandfather in expanding the state of Muscovy. It was his grandfather Ivan III (1462-1505) who had captured Tver, subdued the princes of Yaroslavl, then conquered the city and mercantile republic of Novgorod 300 miles to the north-west. He had thus taken land-locked Muscovy to the Baltic Sea and right up to the White Sea where Ivan later founded the new sea-port at Arkhangelsk, albeit one that only functioned in the summer months.

Not only had Ivan III thus quadrupled the size of his princedom, but he had worked hard at its image as the focal point for the Slavonic nations. Rival Russian princes were gradually eliminated. The Great Bell of Novgorod was brought to Moscow and Ivan, instead of being the first amongst equals, began to emphasise his independence from boyar advice and his role as an autocrat (samoderzhetz) and sovereign (gosudar). Then Ivan also exploited the opportunity created by the fall of the two great cities which had previously been the centres of the Orthodox Church. Constantinople had been captured by the Turks in 1453 and Ivan in 1472 married Zoe, a princess from the old Byzantine dynasty, thus giving credence to the idea that Moscow would take over from Constantinople (the Second Rome) and become a Third Rome that would be everlasting. The other rival city which had previously been the centre for the Russian Orthodox Church was Kiev, but this had fallen to the Lithuanians and Poles who had turned it into a Catholic outpost directed against the heretic Orthodox. So the archbishops of Moscow could see their potential role as leaders of Orthodoxy and aped the elaborate ceremonials of the Byzantine Church. Princess Zoe was renamed Sofia (the Greek for wisdom) and Anastasia was christened in the same fashion for her name was the Greek for resurrection.

To sustain the new image of Moscow as a religious and ethnic capital Ivan III had imported Italian architects and masons to rebuild the city. The vast triangular fortress of the Kremlin facing the Moscow River was given five huge square towers. With the tributary Neglinnaya on one other side and a wide moat on the third the Kremlin became an impregnable island. There were new dungeons and torture chambers including the Beklemishev Tower named after a boyar who had pushed his luck too far with Ivan III and been executed as an example to the rest. The main gateway to the Kremlin was the Saviour’s Tower with its venerable icon and perpetually burning candles where all those who entered took off their hats in respect. In addition there was the new arsenal, not used just for the manufacture and storage of weapons, but also for a whole range of other crafts such as icon-making for the new cathedrals and jewellery for the royal family. Ivan also had three new cathedrals built. The largest was the Uspensky Sobor (Assumption) which contained the specially fabricated (but not genuine) throne of Vladimir Monomakh that was to be used for the coronation of all tsars. This magnificent white building with its huge four-arch façade had four onion-shaped domes surrounding a larger one in the centre. By the time of Napoleon the cathedral held 5½ tons of gold and silver for the French soldiers to steal.

The two other new cathedrals were the slightly Italianate Archangel Mikhail and the smaller but riotously domed Blagoveshchensky (Annunciation), the first for funerals and burials, the second for royal weddings for it was here that Ivan IV was to marry Anastasia. The three cathedrals bounded a square which also included a group of new bell towers, including the as yet half-built Ivan the Great Tower eventually 270 feet high and built to hold the monster Novgorod Bell, the symbol of Ivan III’s greatest conquest. On special occasions this bell and three dozen smaller companions would ring out and receive a response from ten times that number of bells in the many other churches round Moscow.

For living quarters, Ivan III had built the Palace of Facets (it had diamond-shaped stones in its façade like its Florentine models) for state banquets and the display of dynastic wealth, while the new Terem Palace was for ordinary living and the royal females who were kept there in rigid seclusion. The two were partly connected by the Red Staircase.

As a long-term side-effect of Ivan’s recruitment of Italian builders came the first introduction of spirit distillation, for the Italians brought that skill with them and the new beverage now produced for the first time in Russia was called little water or vodka.

The expansion of Muscovy continued under Ivan’s father Basil III who conquered the states of Pskov and Ryazan and worked on the further embellishment of the Kremlin, but his death when his heir was only three years old created potential problems for the Rurik dynasty. However, after an uncomfortable period of regency young Ivan IV eventually asserted his adulthood in 1547 and donned the great crown of Vladimir Monomakh. He then very rapidly began to show that he had the character and ambition to make an effective tsar. After a brief honeymoon with Anastasia at the famous Troitse Monastery outside Moscow he settled down to work. Despite his subsequent reputation for cruelty and promiscuity his first marriage seems to have been a model of domestic normality. Though Anastasia kept herself mostly away from the public eye in the Terem, when she did appear she seems to have exuded an air of saintliness which was to boost the image of the Romanov family in years to come. In this she was helped by her brother Nikita Romanov or Romanovich Zacharin who became an influential courtier and friend to the tsar. Then in turn his brothers were also promoted, Daniel Romanovich becoming steward of the Grand Palace and his cousin Vasili Mikhailovich the steward of Tver, a move not too popular with rival boyars. There seems to have been a purge of the Glinsky clan, the relations of Ivan’s mother, using as an excuse the accusation that their tricks had led to a fire that swept through the wooden houses of Moscow in 1547.

The first thirteen years of Ivan’s rule which coincided with his marriage to Anastasia were successful in almost every way. He made a good choice of ministers who made intelligent reforms in the law and church. In his first major military campaign at the age of twenty-two Ivan accompanied by Nikita Romanov captured the important city of Kazan on the Volga some 500 miles east of Moscow from the Muslim Tartars. It was to celebrate this victory that he started work on another new cathedral outside the Kremlin in Red Square, the spectacularly domed Cathedral of the Intercession. It was later more usually called St Basil’s after the wandering holy man Basil (Vasili Blazhennovy) who was befriended by Anastasia and was buried in a side chapel when he died in 1588. Thus by a strange coincidence both the first tsaritsa and the last were to be influenced by wandering holy men, in Alexandra’s case Rasputin. Another church built for Anastasia was St Catherine the Martyr in the Fields and to emphasise her holiness she went on pilgrimages with Ivan to Rostov, Pereslavl and Yaroslavl.

Four years after the Kazan campaign Ivan also conquered Astrakhan which gave Muscovy its first outlet onto the Caspian Sea and meanwhile trade routes had been opened up to the rest of Europe from Arkhangelsk on the White Sea. Anastasia who so far had two daughters that had died in infancy at last produced the first of three sons, so the dynasty appeared to be secure. The only hint of difficulty was when Ivan himself was extremely ill in 1553 and tried to extract an oath of allegiance from the boyars for his infant son Dimitri. Anastasia and her brothers Nikita and Daniel were amongst the few who supported him and when he recovered there was the first hint of neurosis as Ivan realised how few of his boyars he could trust. Even then Daniel seems to have been dismissed briefly for a period soon afterwards. In a mood slightly suggestive of his later paranoia Ivan accused some of his less cooperative boyars of stirring up hatred of Anastasia by hinting that she was like evil princesses of the past. Implicated in this criticism of Anastasia were two key men in Ivan’s entourage: Prince Andrei Kurbsky, for a long time Ivan’s favourite general, but one who perhaps did not relish having to serve under Anastasia’s brother, seems to have fallen out with her. Her other critic was the fire-eating Sylvester, the homophobic arch-priest of the Assumption Cathedral who ranted about the immoralities of court life, allegedly wrote the anti-feminist textbook the Domostroy and blamed Anastasia for her slow production of a male heir. Yet what exactly he had against her is not clear unless it was her patronage of the eccentric Saint Basil who like Rasputin nearly 400 years later was not part of the religious establishment.

The complexion of Ivan’s reign started to change drastically when Anastasia fell ill herself. She went on a pilgrimage in the hope of recovery but died soon afterwards at the Kolomenskoe Palace outside Moscow, probably of natural causes, though there were the usual Kremlin suspicions of poison. Ivan blamed Sylvester and his allies for preventing her from going to other places of pilgrimage to aid her recovery, but at the time he was himself helping to put out another fire that was raging through Moscow. Yet since she had borne six children, four of whom died in infancy, it is hardly surprising in those days of minimal sanitation and uneven diet that she should succumb to illness.

Anastasia had been twenty-nine and Ivan still had twenty-four years of his reign ahead of him. Though little Dimitri had died as an infant there were still two sons: Ivan (1554-81) and Feodor (1557-98). But with his sister gone it was to be a major test for the key surviving male member of the Romanov family, Anastasia’s brother Nikita.

It is hard to disentangle the image of a mad sadist from that of a ruthless Renaissance monarch, for Ivan IV was probably a bit of both. Certainly after Anastasia’s death his personality seemed to undergo a drastic change. He began to attack his closest adherents, and when one of them, his ex-favourite Prince Andrei Kurbsky, went over to the enemy he exploited the situation to the full. He staged a mock abdication and refused to resume his reign until he had extracted more autocratic powers from the boyars. He then began to recruit an elite brotherhood of some 6,000 oprichniks, or enforcers, to purge those boyars who were holding back his plans to centralise the state. One of the prime movers of this new force seems to have been the Romanov cousin, Vasili Zakharin.

There followed a seven-year reign of terror during which the black-uniformed oprichniki tortured recalcitrant boyars until they confessed to disloyalty. It was during this period that Nikita Romanov who had himself been enlisted as an oprichnik, nevertheless enhanced the image of his family by restraining the sadism of his colleagues, so much so that a folk song about his adventures became one of the most popular of the decade. These acts of bravery in defiance of such a terrifying master were to stand the family in very good stead when the Muscovites were looking for a new tsar some fifty years later.

Meanwhile the oprichniki, like most private armies recruited to do dirty work, showed themselves to be cowardly and inept when threatened by real warriors from outside. In 1571 the Tartars attacked Moscow and the oprichniki failed totally to defend it. And since they had already done most of the purging that Ivan had wanted their days were numbered. Almost their final task had been to wipe out the population of Novgorod which had dared to rebel against Ivan’s oppressive rule and objected to their business being snatched away by Ivan III’s new port on the Baltic, Ivangorod. Now with the Tartar fiasco Ivan could abandon his protégées and allowed many of them to be massacred in Red Square. Operating from the Alexandrovo Sloboda Monastery they had encouraged Ivan’s orgies as well as being the tools of his violence and had allegedly turned the building into a large brothel where the Tsar had, according to his critics, become a serial abuser of women. So when Ivan disbanded them there were plenty of enemies eager for revenge.

Five years later came perhaps the lowest point in Ivan the Terrible’s career. For a man who had had six or seven wives and arranged for at least two of them to be murdered it was an odd act of prudery for him to protest about an immodest ante-natal garment being worn by his daughter-in-law, the pregnant wife of his eldest son the Tsarevich Ivan. According to the most credible account this was the cause of the quarrel which ended with the Tsar murdering his own heir in 1581. There may have been other reasons for there is some evidence that the Tsarevich had disapproved of the Novgorod massacres and been backed in this by the Romanov clan. One of Anastasia’s nephews, Protasi Zacharin, was executed in 1575 whilst both Vasili Zacharin’s daughter and grandson were also executed so there may have been a connection, perhaps the beginnings of a plot to replace Ivan with his half-Romanov elder son.

The murdered Tsarevich Ivan, a Romanov on his mother’s side, was sometimes portrayed as violent and promiscuous like his father but he had at least been healthy and of enough intelligence to be a competent tsar. The same could not be said of the new Tsarevich Feodor, Anastasia’s youngest son. He was small for his age, suffered from dropsy, had weak legs, probably had severe learning difficulties and was apparently only interested in bell ringing. Moreover he had spent his youth with no mother to guide him in the brothel-cum-police headquarters, the notorious Alexandrovo Monastery.

Meanwhile Ivan IV, apparently full of regret that he had killed his son, still had another three years to reign. Like Henry VIII of England (who died the year Ivan married Anastasia) he was a serial collector of queens. Nikita Romanov who had married an Evdokhia Yaroslavovna was still in sufficiently good odour to be sent to negotiate with the ambassador of Queen Elizabeth for the hand of Mary Hastings, a relation of the Tudors. The English conditions were too demanding however and Nikita was dismissed from his position in 1582, the negotiations coming to nothing. Ivan was by this time fifty-three and showing signs of decrepitude. He died in 1584, a character blackened by many subsequent chroniclers though his achievements were considerable if not necessarily beneficial and his behaviour was probably only marginally worse than many other rulers, including Romanovs, who were later described as great.

II

FEODOR THE HALF-ROMANOV TSAR

‘Without the tsar the land is a widow, without the tsar the people are an orphan’

Old Muscovite Proverb

When Ivan IV died in 1584 he left his much increased state of Muscovy to a virtual invalid of about twenty-seven. Significantly Feodor (ruled 1584-98) was of course half a Romanov for his mother had been Anastasia. One thing in his favour was that Russians had a certain affection for saintly idiots like the holy beggars who tramped the country roads round Moscow, and the new Tsar Feodor I (his name meant Gift of God in Greek, the language of the Church) fitted this category though he was to live on until he was over forty. Perhaps he was not as stupid as people chose to suggest for he could speak Polish as well as Russian and was an avid reader of the latest Polish romances.

All might still not have been lost for the old dynasty of Rurik for initially Feodor had an able and popular regent, his uncle Nikita Romanov, but sadly within two years Nikita died and Muscovy was heading for chaos.

The new head of the Romanov family, Nikita’s son, shared Christian names with his first cousin the Tsar Feodor, but sadly he was a mere teenager and in the hurly burly of Kremlin politics he stood no chance of replacing his father as Regent for the sickly tsar. Certainly he was intelligent, well educated and perhaps even more able than his father the popular Nikita. He commissioned the first Russian-Latin dictionary to help his study of the ancients but this was of little value in the current crisis. Thus he was packed off to the Lithuanian front to gain some military experience, leaving Moscow to the mercies of a succession of ruthlessly ambitious boyars.

Instead of any member of the Romanov family the new star of Muscovite politics was a former aide and chess-playing companion of Ivan the Terrible’s, Boris Godunov. He had contrived to get his sister Irene married to the new tsar and had himself earlier gained favour by marrying the daughter of the chief oprichnik. Though of Tartar descent and not a ranking boyar he was in his early-thirties both able and decisive, so he quickly established himself as the new regent.

The next twelve years saw the gradual decline of the ailing and almost imbecilic tsar. Since he had no surviving children, and there were no other acknowledged legitimate male heirs, it spelled the end of a dynasty that had ruled Muscovy since its migration there in 1263. The only other surviving son of Ivan the Terrible had been Dimitri, the product of his seventh and ecclesiastically challenged marriage, and he had died in mysterious circumstances at Uglich in 1591 aged nine. It is quite clear therefore that the ambitious Boris Godunov had used his period as regent to prepare himself to take over and found a new dynasty. He had his own man Iov appointed as Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. He allowed the Muscovite peasants to become the virtual property or serfs of local landowners, whom he exempted from tax to help create his own power base.

By 1597, the year before Tsar Feodor’s death it was clear that Boris had only one serious rival as a potential replacement tsar, Feodor Romanov. Feodor had excelled in the army and now in his early-thirties, a decade younger than Boris, he was a popular figure. But as yet he lacked the networking skills of his rival who one way or another had most of the senior boyars in his pocket, the civil service and the Church well under his thumb. Boris also had the supreme advantage of having the Tsar’s widow as his sister and had no intention of losing his advantages.

III

FEODOR ROMANOV: THE RELUCTANT MONK

‘He is irritable, mistrustful and so overbearing that the tsar himself is afraid of him’

Comment on Feodor Romanov by Archbishop Pakhomi of Astrakhan

Feodor Romanov and his allies made one last effort to stop the election of Boris Godunov as tsar. He was apparently involved in a scuffle where it was said he tried to stab Boris. The Romanovs also encouraged a smear campaign which implicated Boris in the strange death of Dimitri, the son of Ivan the Terrible’s final marriage which had never been fully accepted by the Church. The boy Dimitri was epileptic and according to one official version had accidentally slit his own throat during a fit at Uglich, but naturally there were rumours of murder. The odd circumstances of his death meant that in future years it was easy enough to suggest that the whole thing was fiction and look-alikes were found so that Dimitri could be brought back to life to the discomfort of future tsars. So from suggestions that his death had been a murder organised by Boris Godunov it was a natural step to make the additional, though even less likely accusation, that Boris had poisoned Tsar Feodor as well.

In the meantime however Boris was successful. He was crowned Tsar in September 1598 with the full approval of the Zemski Sobor, the assembly of notables. Initially he was not vindictive to his former rivals such as Feodor Romanov and Alexander Romanov was actually promoted to boyar rank. But within two years Boris had failed to deliver on many of his promises to his supporters and there were rumours of unrest to which it is probable that the Romanov family contributed. In October 1600 Feodor’s brother Alexander Nikitich Romanov was accused by one of his own servants of practicing witchcraft against the Tsar and poisoned herbs were conveniently discovered in his store house. It was a standard ploy encouraged by Boris in his campaigns against restive boyars and one regularly used by him when he had been an oprichnik officer for Ivan the Terrible. The accusations of witchcraft were mere cover for the real crime of the Romanovs which had been to create a private army made up mainly of their personal slaves and to begin to concentrate it round Moscow.

Feodor, Alexander and two other Romanov brothers were arrested and charged with plotting to kill the Tsar. One of the main Romanov houses in Moscow was burned down. All four brothers were sentenced to exile – Ivan to Pelym in Siberia – and two of them died mysteriously in the process. All their lands were seized and redistributed amongst boyars who favoured Boris. Their private armies were disbanded and their adherents similarly punished in a major purge. Then most calamitously of all for the family its senior member Feodor was forced to become a monk, an especial disaster for him, because in the eyes of the Russian Church such a step was irreversible and it meant that all Feodor’s hopes of a royal career were permanently dashed. In addition his wife Xenia was forced to become a nun and after four infant deaths in the family they had only one sickly son left alive, so it looked as if the Romanovs as a potential royal dynasty were no longer a possibility.

Thus the new monk, renamed Filaret (lover of virtue in Greek) and the new nun renamed Marfa had to go their separate ways, Filaret initially to the Antoniev Sissky Monastery and Marfa to faraway Onega. It was to be one of the remarkable feats of history that this family whose star had been so drastically eclipsed should eventually triumph thirteen years later.

This is not the place to discuss in detail the tribulations of Tsar Boris as he struggled to retain control till his death five years later. He was far from being an ineffective ruler for he continued Muscovy’s expansion southwards and kept good control of finances despite the expense of trying to subdue the Cossacks. But he struggled always with the fact that he was a newcomer and fairly or unfairly was tainted by the slanderous accusations about the death of the Tsarevitch Dimitri. Our concern is more with the extraordinary guile shown by the monk Filaret as he fought to regain the political initiative despite his huge disadvantage. In this he was aided by two factors. One was the increasingly unpopular rule of Boris himself, which became reminiscent of the bad days of Ivan the Terrible as he felt it necessary to use torture to gain confessions and encourage false accusations by slaves and servants against their masters. The other was the mischievous assistance of one-time rival and now close ally, the unscrupulous ex-oprichnik Bogdan Belsky. He and other Romanov allies exploited the growing unpopularity of Boris when Muscovy was hit by a disastrous famine which wiped out nearly one-third of the population. Ordinary Russians were reduced to eating hay, roots, dogs and cats. Belsky and Filaret revived the irritating rumour that the Tsarevitch Dimitri had not died at Uglich but was a living legitimate tsar who should be called back to replace the usurper Boris. This was the theme of Mussorgsky’s much later opera Boris Godunov based on a play by Pushkin.

Then unexpectedly Tsar Boris died in 1605 and was replaced at once by his sickly son the sixteen-year-old Feodor II Borisovich who handed out 70,000 roubles to the populace in a vain effort to enhance his popularity. Bogdan Belsky, the Golitsyns and other allies of the Romanovs produced the replacement (or just possibly genuine) Tsarevitch Dimitri and proclaimed him the legitimate only son of Ivan IV. A mutiny in the Tsar’s army at Kromy and a popular uprising in Moscow led to an almost bloodless takeover by the supporters of this first look-alike Dimitri. Tsar Fedor II and his mother the widow Godunov were strangled on the orders of Golitsyn and ‘Dimitri’ was crowned Tsar.

As his reward for help in this coup the humble monk Filaret Romanov was instantly promoted to Metropolitan of Rostov. The other Romanovs recovered their estates and Ivan Romanov the senior lay member of the family was promoted back to the rank of boyar.

The success of this first ‘Tsar Dimitri’ did not last long however. There were perhaps well-founded rumours that he was a Pole and therefore a Catholic, possibly even an ex-monk. Another version was that he was Otrepev, a monk and a former servant of the Romanovs who had specially groomed him for the job. In 1606 he was assassinated.

The Romanovs were not ready for this new vacancy on the throne. Filaret as a monk could not be a candidate; his son Mikhail at the age of nine was too young; while the only other senior male Romanov, Ivan, had made himself too unpopular and was ill anyway. So Vasili Shuisky leader of the boyar coup which had ousted ‘Dimitri’ came forward as the champion of Russian Orthodoxy against the Poles.

The wily Filaret was not to be outdone. He quickly organised a new look-alike Dimitri. Despite the objections of Tsar Vasili he managed to have himself made Patriarch of Moscow and when he was sacked by the Tsar simply took the job back for himself with the help of his tame new alternative tsar, the second ‘Dimitri’ based at Tushino to which Filaret had been brought as a prisoner in 1608. This time it was Tsar Vasili’s turn to be forcibly shorn in Red Square and condemned to life as a monk.

Despite the fall of Tsar Vasili, there was little gain for Filaret Romanov. He was sent to the Polish capital of Krakow to negotiate the peaceful appointment of a Polish candidate, Ladislaus, as the new tsar, an offer that was to be conditional on the Pole converting to Russian Orthodoxy. Most Muscovites thought this a desperate measure and the Poles probably had no intention of letting their man abandon Catholicism. In this messy situation Filaret was arrested in Krakow and was to spend the next eight years as a prisoner in Wawel Castle. The fate of the ex-tsar Vasili, now monk Varlan, was even worse for he was murdered in Poland.

With four tsars in three years, the onset of another famine, a spreading plague and an invasion by the Poles which threatened Moscow itself, Muscovy appeared in 1611 to be in terminal decline. The Swedes captured Novgorod. The so-called Time of Troubles had reached its deepest trough. However Moscow was saved by a gallant contingent under Prince Dimitri Pozharski who was given financial support by a demagogic butcher named Kuzma Minin from Nizhny Novgorod. They drove the Poles out of Moscow.

The next year a third look-alike Dimitri was in prospect and the Cossacks were involved. They were the amorphous body made up mainly of ex-serfs, casual workers and wandering hunter-gatherers who had turned themselves into a part-time militia and had helped colonise the dangerous steppe country previously controlled by the Tartars. They also probably included many of the ex-slave soldiers previously part of the Romanov family’s private army. They could in times of unrest wield considerable influence and supported the latest false look-alike Dimitri, the third to make his appearance since the days of Boris Godunov. There was also another part-time militia, the Streltsi or marksmen, founded by Ivan the Terrible in 1550 as a group of 3,000 specialists trained to use the arquebus – guns so heavy that that they had to be fired from a stand. Mostly they were city tradesmen who were given a basic wage and tax privileges in return for military service, but when there was a power vacuum as at this period they could use their bargaining power, just like the Cossacks. By this time there were around 7,000 of them in Moscow alone as well as at least the same scattered through other Russian cities. So now they also ranged themselves alongside the new Dimitri who made his base at Pskov. Despite this a counter-coup soon afterwards resulted in the capture of the third Dimitri in 1612 and he was put on display in a cage for some time before being hanged.

By this point the state of affairs was so chaotic that the need for a genuine, legitimated tsar became desperate. The Zemsky Sobor was summoned, backed by the threatening presence in Moscow of belligerent Cossacks, frustrated Streltsi and large numbers of the more prosperous peasants. A three-day fast was ordered to clear the heads of participants. There were as usual plenty of boyar candidates for the tsardom, but none that had any special claim or outstanding ability. The Patriarch Filaret Romanov was not on the list partly because of his tonsure and partly because he was still a prisoner in Poland. His brother Ivan Romanov was not popular as he was blamed even more than Filaret for trying to sell out to the Poles. But with the residual image of the Romanovs’ connections to the old dynasty, particularly the memory of Anastasia and Nikita, and more recently some of the more popular ploys of Filaret, there was a swing of mood towards the Romanovs. The Cossacks in particular dominated the meeting of the Zemsky Sobor and were desperate for the installation of a proper tsar and the restoration of normal life.

Their only candidate was Filaret’s son Mikhail Romanov, aged sixteen, but no one even knew his whereabouts. Many of the boyars had been alarmed by the extravagant support given to all three of the false Dimitris and dreaded the concept of a populist tsar. They thought that Mikhail would be another puppet submitting himself to their whims, so they seem mostly to have supported the new candidate. All that remained was to find him.

How and when Filaret in his distant Krakow prison heard the news that his son was to be the first Romanov tsar we do not know. But it must have been with mixed feelings, for the lifespan of recent tsars, even capable ones, had been extremely short, and Mikhail was young, inexperienced, untrained and physically weak.

IV

MIKHAIL FEODOROVICH ROMANOV THE ELECTED TSAR

‘Let us have Misha Romanov for he is young and not yet wise; he will suit our purposes’

Alleged remark made by one of the boyars at the assembly of 1613

The boy chosen without his knowledge to be the new tsar was at the time living 200 miles from Moscow in the remote Ipatiev Monastery at Kostrome, the latest place of exile for the reluctant nun, his mother Xenia or Marfa. Here he had spent much of his childhood and naturally his education had veered towards the ecclesiastical rather than the military or political. The fact that he had been a sickly child with no prospects but a monastic career had made this seem eminently sensible.

When the boy Misha and his mother were told about his selection as Tsar by the Zemsky Sobor it is hardly surprising that at first they both rejected the idea. It was not just the usual act of playing hard to get which had been used by both Ivan IV and Boris Godunov. They were both aware of the high death rate amongst recent tsars and Misha had been exposed to some of the violence when he was briefly resident in the Kremlin during the Polish occupation. But despite initially shedding tears at his fate Misha was eventually persuaded that it was his divine duty to accept the title of Tsar Mikhail.

To add romance to the story of his election there was the somewhat embroidered tale of how he had been saved from a group of murderous Polish soldiers by a local peasant, Ivan Susanin, who had at the cost of his own life lured the Poles off the track into the deepest and coldest part of the forest. This incident provided the new dynasty with its first martyr and centuries later gave the composer Glinka the ideal theme for his patriotic opera A Life for the Tsar.

Meanwhile the emphasis was not on Mikhail being the first of a new dynasty, but much more about his continuity with the old one. Six months after his selection by the Zemsky Sobor he was crowned in the Cathedral of the Assumption or Uspensky Sobor in Moscow and the elaborate sacraments were all tuned to emphasise his relationship as cousin of Feodor, the last legitimate tsar of the dynasty of Rurik and as the proper upholder of the Russian Orthodox Church. In this context it was appropriate that his father was an imprisoned patriarch and he had himself been largely educated in the Ipatiev Monastery. Significantly as he and his mother had made their first stately progress to Moscow they had passed through Yaroslavl, then Rostov his father’s first Episcopal see and finally the famous fortified Troitse Monastery. At each stopping point they had ostentatiously received oaths of allegiance from the surviving inhabitants, for vast numbers had been killed or died of starvation and lay unburied by the roadsides. Many farms and villages had been burned by passing Polish platoons or rebel Cossacks.

Several major problems confronted the new tsar and his boyar advisers. The first was the virtual bankruptcy of Muscovy due to the depredations of the Poles and the extravagance of successive short-term tsars. As a temporary expedient Mikhail borrowed a considerable sum from the Stroganov family who had made their fortune in the Siberian fur trade and metal foundries in the Urals. This source was soon put on a more formal footing by imposing a levy of 10 per cent on all fur traders. It brought in 45,000 roubles a year and even that doubled by the end of the reign, as the trade thrived with exports of ermine, sable, otter, lynx and marten to the west. The only problem was that the animals were hunted out of existence and the trappers had to move ever deeper into Siberia to make a living.

The second problem was the fragile credibility of the new tsar, accentuated by the fact that the Russians had listened to so many lies from the three false Dimitris and other claimants to the throne that it was hard to distinguish fact from fiction. Moreover the Romanovs were still somewhat tainted by their recent support of a Polish candidate to the throne, particularly the double dealings of Ivan Romanov and to a lesser extent the dubious mission of Filaret to Krakow. It had only been redeemed when he was arrested by the Poles and could now be portrayed as victim rather than perpetrator of treason. So a major propaganda campaign was orchestrated to emphasise the credentials of Mikhail as an oblique descendant of the old Rurik dynasty and as a supporter of Russian Orthodoxy against the encroachments of the hated Catholic Poles. At the same time there was a network of informers set up to search for any new Dimitris who might try to make an appearance. Torture, beatings and executions were used to intimidate anyone who might question the Romanov tsardom.