The Giants of Russian Literature: The Greatest Russian Novels, Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький
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took up arms in support of what was more than ever a phantom, but the most formidable of the war-brands which blazed out at this time was remarkable for belonging to a class which had supplied few men of note to Russian history. Bolotnikov, who claimed to have seen the real Dimitri in Poland and to have been appointed his lieutenant, was a serf who had been carried off in one of the Tartar raids by which South Russia was periodically drained of her already sparse population, and had continued his life of toil in a Turkish galley. Obtaining his liberty, he had wandered back to his native country, to reappear, like a trouble-scenting beast of prey, in the hour of mischief and calamity. His real purpose, which underlay the Dimitri agitation, was to inaugurate a peasant rebellion, and if an apprenticeship of hardship and suffering were any qualification for the championship of a down-trodden class, the enterprise was in good hands. The sedition of the voevodas and their military followings, the loosening of the central authority over the provincial kniazes and boyarins, and the open door which the general dislocation offered to the free-lances and Kozaks of the borders, swelled the insurrection to alarming dimensions. As in the long struggle of the Fronde which distressed France in the same century, it was difficult to say what each particular band-in-arms was fighting for. The very vagueness of the threatened danger added to its alarm, and the waning of the year, instead of dispersing the insurgent army which had gathered round Bolotnikov, impelled it towards Moskva. Towns and gorodoks surrendered to the ex-serf as they had done before to the reputed ex-priest, and the rebels reached the village of Kolomensk on the 2nd December. But the ambitious nobles who had thrown in their lot with the peasant leader saw no prospect of seizing or holding the capital on the strength of an empty name, the shadow of a shadow, nor did they propose to install a serf and sometime galley-slave on the throne of Monomachus. Several flitted away from the insurgent camp, and the young voevoda Mikhail Skopin-Shouyskie defeated and dispersed the diminished company of rebels, whose leader fled to Kalouga. 1607Relieved from the onslaught which had threatened to overturn his throne, Vasili was able to celebrate Christmas in his capital, and the New Year was marked by another of the coffin-movings which accompanied every change in the dynasty, and were characteristic of a period when the dead seemed to share the restlessness of the living. This time it was the remains of Boris, his wife, and Thedor II. which were conducted to the Troitza monastery, possibly as a guarantee against inconvenient reappearances—a precaution certainly not uncalled for. Bolotnikov meanwhile had gathered fresh adherents and joined his forces to those of the pretended Tzarevitch Petr, who brought a large following of Don and Volga Kozaks. The Tzar marched against this new rival in person, at the head of an army of 100,000 men, and drove the rebels into Toula. Bolotnikov, seeing the hopelessness of the struggle under existing circumstances, sent a courier to the Palatine of Sendomir, urging the immediate production of a flesh-and-blood Dimitri, without whom all was lost.190 The precedent of Kromi, however, was not repeated, and in October the besieged leaders of the revolt, Bolotnikov, the “Ljhepetr,” and two or three boyarins who had continued staunch to the movement, surrendered the fortress on the condition that their lives should be spared. The holy and Orthodox Tzar crowned his victory by inflicting a signal chastisement on his too confiding enemies. Bolotnikov had his eyes struck out and was then drowned, a fit climax to his career; the pretended Tzarevitch was hung, and hundreds of his followers flung into the river. The boyarins escaped with lesser punishments. Vasili returned to Moskva “in triumph.” But the demolition of one pretender seemed to make way for a whole crop of dragon-heads; on all sides sprang up self-styled heirs of the vanished line of Moskva. One was a pretended son of Ivan Groznie, another of the murdered Ivan Ivanovitch, while in the Oukrain alone no fewer than eight apparitions disputed the parentage of the saintly Thedor Ivanovitch.191 It was as though a whole baby-farm of tzarskie foundlings and unacknowledged offspring had suddenly come to maturity and public notice. But more formidable than any of these shadowy claimants, there appeared in the spring of 1608, in the Sieverski land, the long-demanded Dimitri—Ljhedimitri II. of Russian historians. Who this man was is as deep a mystery as the origin of his forerunner, but his claims received almost as ready a recognition. His following of Dniepr Kozaks and Polish adventurers was swelled daily by desertions from the Moskovite soldiery, and town after town proclaimed him. He advanced as far as Toushin, a village twelve verstas from the capital, where he pitched his camp, which instantly became a rallying-point for all the disaffected and intractable elements which the period of troubles had called forth. Among other birds of sinister omen who made their appearance at the impostor’s improvised Court were the Palatine Mnishek and his daughter, widow of the first Ljhedimitri, and though there was little outward resemblance between the two men, the new pretender was publicly “recognised” by Marina as her husband.
The Moskovites by this time had lost their first enthusiasm for romantically restored Tzarevitches and took their revolutions more soberly. The tide of success carried the Ljhedimitri no farther than Toushin; in Moskva itself there was no popular upheaval such as that which swept the first pretender into the Kreml over the ruins of the Godounov dynasty. On the other hand there was as little enthusiasm for the cause of the Tzar, who inspired none of the reverence and affection which the people had been wont to lavish on their legitimate hereditary sovereigns. The mutual weakness of the rivals led to an extraordinary situation; the Tzar of Moskva dared not march against the “thief of Toushin,” and the pretended Dimitri dared not march against the “usurper.” Russia was divided by two Gosoudars whose antagonistic Courts were pitched within a few miles of each other. Many of the Moskovite upper class, hovering in their allegiance, flitted to and fro between Toushin and the Kreml, paying their respects to both Tzars and gathering favours and presents from both masters—a course of action which earned for them the designation of “péréleti” (birds of passage). The merchant folk of the capital pursued a similar policy, and finding a better market for their goods among the free-spending camp-dwellers at Toushin, almost depleted the city of its necessary supplies, a state of things further aggravated by the fact that the rebels held the roads to the rich corn-province of Riazan. Beyond the flat meadows of the Moskva valley the contest was waged more briskly; despite Sigismund’s solemn assurances of a strictly enforced neutrality, numbers of Poles flocked to the adventurer’s service, among them the voevoda Sapieha, already distinguished by his military exploits in Transylvania and Sweden. The rapidly moving Kozak and Polish troops of the Pretender’s army outmatched in activity the heavily-armed and, for the most part, slackly-led forces of Vasili. In the north-eastern province town after town fell into the hands of the “Toushinists”; Souzdal, Vladimir, and Péréyaslavl opened their gates or were captured after a perfunctory resistance; Rostov, where resided Filarete Romanov, raised to the dignity of Metropolitan of that town by the first ’Dimitri, made a bolder stand against the conquerors. Defeated in battle outside the walls, the garrison and citizens defended their ramparts for three hours, and when finally overpowered took refuge with Romanov in the cathedral. The town submitted to the impostor’s voevodas, and the Metropolitan was dragged from his sanctuary and conducted with indignity to Toushin, where not martyrdom but preferment awaited him. Out of consideration for Filarete’s kinship with his “late half-brother” (the Tzar Thedor I.), the ’Dimitri proclaimed his captive Patriarch of Moskva and of all Russia.192
Unable to attempt a direct attack upon the capital, the pretender endeavoured to possess himself of the Troitza lavra. The accumulated wealth of this famous monastery, which had risen like a celestial city on the site of the lonely cell from which S. Sergie had watched the beavers playing, necessitated safe keeping. High walls and strongly fortified towers and gates peeped out from amid the thickly growing trees, and spoke defiance to Tartar raiders and plundering bands of freebooters. They were now called upon to withstand an organised siege from the batteries of the False Dimitri. In anticipation of the threatened attack two voevodas and a detachment of soldiers were dispatched from Moskva to the assistance of the monks, who numbered scarcely more than 300 brothers; the monastery servants and peasants from the neighbouring villages brought the effective of the defenders to 2500. At the end of September 1608 a force of 30,000 men, Poles, Russians, Tartars, Kozaks, and Tcherkesses, led by Sapieha and Lisovski, invested this secluded haven of peace and piety, which was suddenly transformed into a beleaguered fortress. The balls from ninety heavy cannon crashed incessantly against the