The Giants of Russian Literature: The Greatest Russian Novels, Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький
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palace to his hereditary mansion. To prevent the possibility of a reaction in his favour (he was known to be distributing money among the Strielitz) he was seized by Zakhar Liapounov two days later and forced to undergo tonsure and frocking in the monastery of the Ascension. Thus ignominiously disappeared the last Tzar of the line of S. Vladimir. The government of the city devolved upon a council of boyarins with Thedor Mstislavskie at their head; this was naturally only a provisional arrangement, and the most urgent business of the new Douma was to take steps to give the Moskovite empire the ruler necessary for its cohesion and administration. The choice lay practically between two evils; on the one hand was the exploited and discredited “Dimitri,” with his following of Don Kozaks and bandits, on the other the foreign Prince Vladislav, connected by birth and association with Russia’s two historically hostile neighbours. The common folk and peasants were ready to accept the former and shut their eyes to the gaps in the evidence connecting him with the child of Ouglitch; the boyarins and upper classes—the same aristocracy that had rebelled with pious horror against the Polish and Catholic taint of the first Ljhedimitri—turned their thoughts and inclinations more and more towards the son of Sigismund.
Undoubtedly the near neighbourhood of the pretender (he was then at Kolomensk) and the disposition of the people in his favour forced the hands of the boyarins, who feared that if they did not come speedily to terms with Vladislav the bestowal of the crown would be rudely diverted from their disposal. Their anxiety on this score smoothed the way for Jholkiewsko, who entered into negotiations from his camp at Mojhaysk on behalf of the Polish candidature. He was empowered to give solemn assurances for the upholding of the Orthodox religion, and to promise a share of the administration to the Douma, besides guaranteeing fair trial for all political offenders. In the teeth of the opposition of the Patriarch, and without recourse to the counsel of the citizens in general, still less with regard to the voices of the people as a whole, a small group of the Douma boyarins, Mstislavskie, Golitzuin, and Mezentzkie, and two secretaries of council, signed the treaty which placed the throne of Moskovy conditionally at the disposal of a Polish prince (17th August). Four years previously the Poles had been hunted down like wolves in the Kitai-gorod and Kreml, now the guardians of the State, fearing a popular outburst in favour of “the thief,” were only anxious to see the Polish hetman installed with his troops in the capital. As a precaution against another possible revolution, which might restore Vasili from his cloister-prison to the throne, the persons of the deposed Tzar and his brothers were handed over to Jholkiewsko and by him transmitted to Poland. On the 27th of August, on the road half-way between Moskva and the Polish camp, the oath of allegiance to Vladislav was sworn by a large number of the citizens and boyarins, and the example of the capital was followed by the provincial towns of Souzdal, Vladimir, Rostov, and others. A lingering hope on the part of the Russians that the new Tzar would adopt the Orthodox religion caused a hitch in the progress of the negotiations, and a large embassy, at the head of which was the Rostov Metropolitan, Filarete Romanov, and the kniaz Golitzuin, set out to wait upon Sigismund at his camp before Smolensk, which city still held out against his attack. The anxiety of the leading boyarins to complete a political manœuvre with which they had already gone too far to draw back, led them to take a step which left them no power to enforce their demands. The doubtful proposals of the Polish king, who began to covet the Russian crown for himself, had aroused strong symptoms of patriotic sedition in the capital, and the Douma, having for the moment appeased the irritated citizens, invited Jholkiewsko to bring his troops into Moskva. On the night of the 20th September the stroke was effected, and the people awoke next morning to find the Poles quietly established in the Kreml, Kitai-gorod, and White-town.
With a garrison at Moskva and others in some of the provincial towns, Sigismund felt certain of securing the crown of Monomachus, which it was now his object to obtain for himself. The voevoda and citizens of Smolensk, though ready to kiss the cross to Vladislav, still stubbornly defended their walls against the King, who had announced his intention of annexing the town to Poland. The Moskovite ambassadors stoutly refused to agree to this projected dismemberment, but in the extraordinary state of affairs they were unable to make any show of relieving the place. Since the days of the Mongol servitude Russia had not been in such a humiliating position. In the north a new trouble arose; the King of Sweden, seeing his ally Vasili deposed and Vladislav of Poland elected in his place, changed his good relations with the gosoudarstvo into open hostility, and sent an invading force into Russian territory. The northern voevodas, divided in their allegiance between the pretender and the Pole, offered an ineffective resistance to the Swedes, and Ladoga and Ivangorod fell into their hands. Meanwhile the weeks dragged on in lengthened negotiations, and the royal camp before Smolensk was the scene of as many intrigues and self-seeking subserviencies as had distinguished the impostor’s Court at Toushin. An unlooked-for event towards the close of the year rid Sigismund of a rival and the Moskovites of an embarrassment. 11th Dec.The false Dimitri, decoyed out hare-hunting on to the steppes by a Tartar who nursed against him a private enmity, was murdered on the lonely plain; his death broke up the camp at Kalouga, despite the efforts of the twice-widowed Marina to form a party on behalf of her infant son Ivan. For the most part the malcontents gave in their adhesion to the elected Tzar Vladislav. Sigismund had now no further excuse for prolonging the uncertainties and anxieties of an interregnum in a country already suffering from the effects of a long period of anarchy and revolution; his object seemed to be, however, to weary the Moskovites into an unconditional acceptance of his rule. From the beginning of the troubles he had played an ungenerous part and sown a fresh crop of bitter animosities between the two Slav nations—a crop which was to yield a rueful harvest to Poland. Threatened with a hostile league between Moskovy and Sweden, it was but natural that he should view with satisfaction the dawning of internal troubles in the former State, natural perhaps that he should give underhand support to the two successive impostors; natural also that he should attempt to secure for his son or himself the eastern Slav sovereignty. But the double-dealing and hypocrisy which marked his policy towards the Russian nation, before whom he posed as a friend and deliverer, while seeking to filch from its weakness an important frontier city, was scarcely worthy of the great House of Vasa, which was about to present to Europe so splendid a warrior.
In long-suffering Moskva murmurs began to be heard against the Poles and against the Jesuits, and hints of armed opposition to Vladislav were wafted about the country. The Patriarch Hermogen, irritated by the sound of Latin chants in the high places of Orthodoxy, sedulously fanned the smouldering spirit of revolt and became so outspoken in his exhortations that he was seized by the Poles in the Cathedral of the Assumption and placed in confinement. Released on Palm Sunday in order to take his place astride an ass in the customary procession, he was soon afterwards sent back to his captivity and displaced from the Patriarchal throne, which was filled by the counter-Patriarch Ignasie; the third, counting Filarete Romanov, who disputed that office. If the State was without a head, the Church enjoyed in that respect a Cerberus-like superfluity. This persecution of their Vladuika did not dispose the people more favourably towards the Poles; Liapounov began to collect troops in the Riazan country, and in the capital an outbreak between the citizens and foreign garrison was only a matter of opportunity. 1611In Passion week the tension between the two elements found vent in a massacre, but on this occasion it was the Poles who set on foot the butchery. Mistaking an accidental brawl for a preconcerted rising, the hetman’s troops, including the Germans serving under him, attacked the defenceless inhabitants of the Kreml and Kitai-gorod and slew, by all accounts, some 7000 men. The alarm spread into the Biel-gorod, where the people, under the direction of Kniaz Pojharskie, prepared to resist the foreigners. The streets were hastily barricaded with timber and furniture, and furious fighting went on round the several gates of the Kitai-gorod, while flames broke forth in various quarters. The city was soon a blazing mass, and amid the roar and crash of conflagration the Poles were driven back on all sides into the Kitai-gorod and Kreml. Pojharskie, wounded in the fray, was carried to the Troitza monastery, which became a base of operations for the Russians, who held the Biel-gorod and all the approaches to the city. The situation of the garrison during the Dis-like night which succeeded the furious day has been vividly pictured by the historian of Moskva. “Darkly gazed the Poles from the walls of the Kreml and Kitai-gorod on the burnt ashes of Moskva, awaiting the arming people and listening through the night to the howling of dogs, that gnawed human bones.”196 For days the city blazed, and within