Time of Troubles

The "Time of Troubles" (1598-1613) was 15 years of political crisis in Russia. It began with the fall of the Rurik dynasty in 1598, and ended with the rise of the Romanov dynasty in 1613.

This period was plagued by peasant uprisings, foreign interference and multiple attempts to seize the throne. There were extreme economic and social disruptions in the central and southern regions of Russia.

Underlying the whole situation was a general exhaustion of Russia’s security and economic model. The Tsar granted landed estates to the military class in exchange for their service, but by the late 1500’s the country was short on both productive agricultural land and peasants to work the fields. As a result, military servitors found it ever harder to meet their expenses (some even sold themselves into temporary slavery), and the peasantry was ever more harshly oppressed by their landlords. Simultaneously, Russian urban areas were becoming depopulated as residents fled to avoid taxes (one peculiarity of the Russian state at the time being the fact that the tax burden fell almost exclusively on townsfolk). The whole concoction was very dangerous - a resentful and oppressed peasantry, depopulated and impoverished towns, and a military servitor class that was barely hanging on.

The extinction of the ruling dynasty provided the match to light the whole explosive mixture on fire. The Tsar, Feodor I, was mentally handicapped (some now suspect Downs Syndrome) and unable to produce an heir, and his death sent the country spiraling into a cataclysmic civil war which ravaged the land. The Troubles live up to their name in every way - the country was subjected to the bizarre spectacle of a series of imposter tsars, who all claimed to be “Dmitri”, the supposed long lost son of Ivan the Terrible. Every time a Dmitri was killed, a new imposter would materialize claiming to have miraculously escaped death. Eventually, Russia was invaded by both Poland and Sweden, while much of the country became the domain of armed bandits. Moscow was finally liberated after an extended Polish occupation by an army of patriotic Cossacks and militia.

The Time of Troubles fits the conventional profile of a political revolution. The ruling dynasty went extinct, and the subsequent unrest and civil war saw mass participation from virtually all strata of society. The end result of the troubles, however, was the total reset of political system to its pre-Troubles form. Michael Romanov was chosen to become the new Tsar, and his coronation and reign were carefully choreographed to signal continuity with the old dynasty (to whom he was related). Despite the fact that the liberation of Moscow and the enthronement of the Romanovs was made possible by the lower classes - especially the Cossacks - the reconstituting Romanov state was built around the high born princes and aristocrats (boyars), and expended much of its energy putting the Cossacks back in their place.

The result was a Civil War which ended in a political settlement wherein nothing changed. The desire, after so much disorder and death, was only to put everything back the way it was before, and the first Romanovs presented themselves as a continuation of the interrupted old Tsardom. Power continued to be concentrated in the aristocratic families that swirled in constellation around the throne… at least for a time.