The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  The tsar fell in love with the daughter of his Polish backer, Marina Mniszech, whom he married and crowned in the Dormition Cathedral. The fact that she was a Catholic Pole shattered his mystique and she soon became loathed as ‘Marinka the Witch’. Nine days later, at four in the morning, the boyars rang the bells and blockaded the palace. Dmitri leapt from a window but broke his leg and was shot and stabbed at least twenty-one times. Deciding who should be tsar next, the boyars weighed the claims of the Romanovs, taking account of their link to the rightful dynasty. One brother, Ivan, was unpopular, the other, Filaret, was a monk, so that left Filaret’s son, Michael. But he was too young. Finally, the leader of the coup, Vasily Shuisky, a member of another branch of the Rurikid dynasty and a feckless conspirator, was chosen as Tsar Vasily IV while Filaret became the patriarch of the Orthodox Church.

  False Dmitri’s disembowelled body was exhibited naked: ‘his skull had been stove in and his brain lay beside him’, a minstrel’s bagpipes were stuffed in his mouth to suggest he played the devil’s tune and his genitals were laid alongside the rest of these giblets. Filaret Romanov plotted against Vasily IV until he was sacked and ordered to his see of Rostov.

  The genie of the undead Tsarevich Dmitri now stalked the land. The reservoir of popular faith in the extinct dynasty of Ivan the Terrible was deep: more than ten different adventurers led armies claiming to be sons or grandsons of Ivan the Terrible. But one pretender, a second False Dmitri, even more mysterious than the first, became a real threat.

  A former teacher, fluent in Polish and Russian, possibly a converted Jew, advanced to Tushino outside Moscow where he was joined by Marinka the Witch, widow of the First False Dmitri. When she met the coarse Second False Dmitri, nicknamed the ‘Brigand’, she shuddered. She had no choice but to recognize him as her husband. They then married – in secrecy, since if the Brigand really was the False Dmitri they were already married. She was soon pregnant.

  Meanwhile Filaret was reunited with his ex-wife Martha and his son Michael in Rostov – but their trials were not over. In Moscow, Tsar Vasily Shuisky was losing the war against the Brigand, so he called in the help of the king of Sweden who advanced into Russia and occupied Novgorod.

  The Brigand’s Cossacks conquered the south and advanced on Rostov, where Filaret rallied the defence until October 1608 when he was captured. The Brigand appointed him patriarch. The disintegration of Russia was irresistibly tempting to the neighbouring Poles and Swedes who were rivals for power around the Baltic and were both closely linked to Russian boyars and merchants. Ivan the Terrible had fought a twenty-four-year war against both kingdoms for control of the Baltic and Poland itself. The kingdom of Poland and the grand duchy of Lithuania had recently merged into a huge new state, which included most of today’s Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states. Ivan’s demoniac sacking of Novgorod had no doubt persuaded that trading city that it might be happier under Swedish rule. So it was inevitable that these rising powers would tempted to feast on the carcass of Russia.

  As the Swedes swallowed Novgorod and the north, the king of Poland, Sigismund III, was reluctantly drawn into the war by the intrigues of his own magnates and the need to restrain Sweden. The Brigand fled to the south, while Vasily IV was overthrown in a coup by the seven key boyars, who included Ivan Romanov: the ex-tsar was made a monk and later died in a Polish jail. They met to choose a new tsar. Filaret proposed Michael. But when news arrived that the Brigand had raised a new Cossack army in the south, the boyars decided they needed an adult with an army and elected Władysław, son of the Polish king, as tsar.

  Moscow itself was occupied by Polish mercenaries who looted the royal treasures of the Kremlin. Filaret was sent to negotiate with the Polish king, leaving Michael behind in the Polish-occupied Kremlin with his uncle Ivan.

  Filaret, who seems to have been genuinely committed to a Polish tsar, met King Sigismund outside Smolensk and demanded that Władysław convert to Orthodoxy, but the Poles saw no reason for their prince to forsake Catholicism. Filaret was arrested and imprisoned in Poland while, to counteract the Polish candidate, Novgorod proposed that the Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus, become tsar of Russia. Russia seemed doomed until December 1610, when, in the absence of a tsar, it was the head of the Orthodox Church, the Patriarch Hermogen, who dared to speak out and call for a holy national war against the foreign invaders. Hermogen, captured by the Poles, paid for his courage with his life, but out of this uprising came the election of the Romanov tsar.

  The call was answered in Nizhny Novgorod by a coalition of patriots and adventurers. The Brigand had been murdered by his own bodyguard in revenge for one of his many atrocities, but the pretence was not quite over. Marinka the Witch, Polish tsarina of two False Dmitris, now gave birth to a son. Under the banner of her toddling pretender known as the ‘Baby Brigand’, she and her Cossacks rode to join the militia in Nizhny Novgorod. In March 1611 this unlikely alliance marched on Moscow. In vicious fighting, the Poles set light to Moscow and retreated to the Kremlin, where they held Michael and the boyars as prisoners. But the militia failed to defeat the Poles and fell apart.

  Finally in the autumn of 1611, back in Nizhny Novgorod, a capable soldier but middle-ranking nobleman, Prince Dmitri Pozharsky, and a local merchant, Kuzma Minin, gathered an army of national liberation and advanced on Moscow, backed by an aristocratic warlord and former supporter of the Brigand, Prince Dmitri Trubetskoi – while Marinka the Witch and the Baby Brigand fled south.

  The patriots defeated the Poles, cut off their supply lines and then besieged the Kremlin, where the Poles and boyars started to starve. Bodies lay around the fortress; a merchant found a sack of human heads and limbs near the walls. Michael Romanov remained within this charnel-house with his mother. Finally, on 26 October 1612, the boyars including young Michael Romanov emerged from the Kremlin – and the Poles surrendered: most were slaughtered. Apart from the Baby Brigand in the south, the civil war was over.

  The patriots immediately called an Assembly of the Land to elect a new tsar to save the motherland. But the boyars, who had only narrowly escaped being butchered by the Cossacks, were warned that as punishment for their treason they were not to appear at the Assembly. Lucky to be alive, Michael Romanov and his mother vanished into the countryside, seeking sanctuary at the Ipatiev Monastery. No one knew where they had gone – and initially no one cared. The Romanovs, tainted collaborators, were surely finished for ever.6

  Eight hundred delegates arrived at the dilapidated Kremlin in the freezing month of January 1613: they camped in roofless halls and met sometimes in the Riverside Palace, at other times in the Dormition Cathedral. They fasted in the hope of receiving divine guidance but remained divided: the magnates supported the Swedish prince Karl-Filip, the king’s brother, while the gentry and Cossacks insisted on a Russian tsar. Prince Pozharsky was the hero of the hour but he was not a boyar, his family neither rich nor eminent. The Cossacks proposed their leader Prince Dmitri Trubetskoi, who was a scion of Lithuanian royalty and successful freebooter, but for everyone else he was tainted by his closeness to the Brigand.

  When these had all been rejected, the ataman of the Don Cossacks proposed Michael Romanov. Voices shouted that he was too young. The Assembly voted him down. Then a petition was submitted proposing Michael, who gained supporters as the everyman candidate – he appealed to conservative boyars as cousin of the last rightful tsars, to the Cossacks because his father had been the Brigand’s patriarch. He was too young to have any personal enemies or to be blamed for his uncle’s Polish collaboration – and the absence of his father meant that no one controlled him. He was an immaculate pawn.

  On 7 February, Cossacks won the vote for ‘our lawful Tsar Michael Fyodorovich’, but some of the boyars, who had joined the Assembly, favoured the Swede. The Cossacks surrounded their palaces, accusing them of selling out to foreigners. The crowds backed the innocent boy. The boyars put up Ivan Romanov as a stop-Michael candidate, but he himself proposed the gran
dest and richest of the boyars, owner of 134,000 acres, Prince Dmitri Mstislavsky, who refused.* Michael’s cousins Fyodor Sheremetev and Prince Dmitri Cherkassky canvassed for him, but even they were not delighted by their candidate. He was barely literate, sickly and unintelligent, but at least his domineering father Filaret was in captivity and the overweening Trubetskoi was bought off with the gift of vast estates and semi-royal titles. ‘Let us have Misha Romanov,’ wrote Sheremetev, ‘for he is still young and not yet wise; he will suit our purposes.’ But the Cossacks took the decision out of their hands as one of the Polish nobles told the prisoner Filaret: ‘The Don Cossacks made your son sovereign.’

  The decision had to be unanimous. After two weeks, the Assembly fasted for two days and then, on 21 February, voted rank by rank for Michael. Outside the Kremlin in Red Square the crowd waited until the metropolitan of Riazan Fyodorit stood on the platform and cried: ‘Michael Fyodorovich Romanov!’ Thus by popular acclaim, and by election, like a Cossack chieftain, Michael was chosen. But everyone understood that these shoddy wheeler-dealings had to be forgotten and effaced: only God’s blessing could make a true tsar. And then there was another problem: where was the new tsar? No one knew exactly.

  As soon the rumours about Michael reached the Poles, they despatched Cossacks to kill him. He was somewhere around Kostroma. They scoured the area, learning that a peasant called Ivan Susanin knew where he was. ‘While we the Great Sovereign were in Kostroma,’ wrote Michael later, ‘the Poles and Lithuanians came into the region and Susanin misled them and they tortured him with great and immeasurable torments to get him to reveal where the Great Sovereign was. But Ivan, though he knew all about us, suffered but did not tell them so they tortured him to death.’*

  Yet Michael was still oblivious. On 2 March 1613, the delegation set off from Moscow to find their tsar but, as we saw in the Prologue, when they did offer him the throne, his mother cried out that ‘they had never wanted to be tsar. Michael wasn’t old enough, and all ranks of people had sinfully betrayed earlier sovereigns, and that was why these sins had lost Muscovy the blessing of God! And seeing all this treachery, lies, shame and murders and outrages to earlier sovereigns how would even a true tsar be treated after such duplicity and betrayal?’

  As the negotiations developed, the Nun Martha’s argument became a little more practical and focused: ‘the boy’s father Filaret was oppressed’ in a Polish jail. Would the king of Poland punish the boy’s father? And how could the boy accept the throne without his father’s permission?

  The delegates had been instructed that, if Michael baulked, they were ‘to plead with him in every way to take pity and be our tsar because by this election God had chosen him’. Martha wondered how they would fund an army in a ruined country. How could he crowned when the crowns had been pillaged? How would they reach Moscow across bandit-infested badlands?

  The grandees replied that no one would betray Michael Romanov because he was the heir of the last true tsar Fyodor whose mother was a Romanov. All ranks had unanimously elected him. And they would arrange to free his father. This convinced the Romanovs. Michael accepted.

  In faraway Poland, his father Filaret was informed that his son had been elected tsar. He was infuriated by his son’s acceptance without his permission. ‘When I left him, he was so young and without family.’ He shrugged: ‘What was my son to do?’7

  As he processed towards Moscow, Michael complained every step of the way. On 19 April he stopped at Yaroslavl, where he again panicked: ‘It had never even entered our thoughts that we could reign over so many great realms – we aren’t even of mature age. The Muscovite realm is in ruins and the Muscovite people so feeble-minded on account of their sins . . . How will a lawful hereditary ruler fare in Moscow, let alone myself?’

  ‘Have mercy on us orphans, Great Sovereign,’ replied the grandees, pleading with the tsar to hurry. Michael lingered in Yaroslavl where the ‘Cossacks incessantly importune us and we have nothing – how are we to pay our soldiers? We can expect the Lithuanians and Swedes very soon!’ And he needed royal regalia: without this, he would be an emperor with no clothes.

  On 17 April he finally started to travel. ‘We’re coming slowly with little transport and our servicemen in poor condition with many of our musketeers and Cossacks having to travel on foot,’ he grumbled to the Assembly – and ‘not many of my courtiers have even arrived’. When he reached the Trinity Monastery near Moscow, he specified which Kremlin apartments he wanted repaired for himself and his mother. On 28 April, he and his mother had a very public tantrum. Metropolitan Fyodorit and boyar Fyodor Sheremetev wrote urgently to Moscow that ‘the Sovereign and his mother spoke angrily and tearfully to all the ranks assembled at the monastery’.

  ‘You did us obeisance and said you’d come to your senses and give up banditry, but you spoke falsely,’ cried the mother.

  ‘We, your slaves,’ replied the warlords Pozharsky and Trubetskoi, ‘have endured hunger and hardship and harsh sieges. Now there are many with us waiting outside Moscow who petition you Our Sovereign to be graced by your presence.’ In other words, it was time to stop whining.

  On 2 May Michael entered the holy city as bells rang from all the churches. Moscow was regarded by Russians as their sacred capital, a new Jerusalem. Even in this age of religious fervour, foreigners were amazed by the ritualistic piety of the Russians and their severe code of behaviour. Russian men wore long beards, as sacred tribute to God, and long robes, kaftans, with pleated sleeves that hung almost to the floor, on their heads sable or black-fox hats. Musical instruments and smoking were banned and noblewomen, whether virgins or wives, were restricted to their family terem, the separate living quarters of Muscovite women, where they were veiled and hidden. Yet none of this stopped the practice of the national pastime, drinking. Ordinary women were to be seeing lying around the streets, blind drunk.

  Michael processed into the sixty-four-acre Kremlin, the fortress, palace and sacred esplanade of this New Jerusalem – now a pitiful sight. There was rubble heaped in the squares; chairs and beds had been used as firewood; the palaces had served as charnel-houses, full of bodies that had been piled up during the long sieges. The rambling complex of royal residences – the three-storey wooden Terem Palace with its gilded, frescoed throne room, the Golden Chamber and the connected Palace of Facets – were being hurriedly repaired to be ready for the coronation. (The new tsar’s alterations, adding two stone storeys where the royal family would live, would take three years to complete.) In the first months, Michael stayed in the palaces of his nobles, who traditionally had their own residences within the Kremlin.

  The Kremlin had been founded on this hill between the Moskva and Neglinnaya rivers as the prince’s residence in the mid-twelfth century at a time when Moscow was a minor town compared to the chief Russian principalities, Vladimir and Rostov, and to the republic of Great Novgorod. In 1326, Ivan I, known as Moneybags, built the Dormition Cathedral, where grand princes were crowned, and the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael, where they were buried. Ivan had promoted Moscow as the centre of religious and royal authority, but Ivan the Great was the real creator of the Kremlin as Michael would have known it. Advised by his Italian-educated wife, the Byzantine princess, Ivan hired Italian Renaissance masters to rebuild both the cathedrals, raise his Ivan the Great Tower, craft his Palace of Facets, and fortify this acropolis with the crenellated red walls and battlements that now seem so Russian, and were then seen as exotically Italian.

  Michael paraded through the Temple Mount of this holy precinct to pray in the five-domed Dormition Cathedral, where he received the oaths of allegiance. The boy had to assume the sacred charisma of monarchy and there was only one way to do this – via the rituals of coronation. The monarchy had ceased to exist: the coronation must transform Michael into the personification of its restoration. Yet this mystical moment started with an unholy row.8

  On the morning of 11 July 1613, the day before his seventeenth birthday, the boy tsar me
t the boyars in the Golden Chamber, but the meeting soon degenerated into a dispute about precedence, the combination of family pedigree and length of service that in this restored court assumed paramount importance. Michael commanded that the rules of precedence were in abeyance during the coronation, but when his secretary announced that his uncle Ivan Romanov would bear the crown rather than the swaggering warlord Prince Trubetskoi (who had wanted to be tsar himself), the latter refused to allow this because his ancestry was superior. ‘It is true your ancestry is superior to Ivan Romanov’s,’ replied Michael. ‘But he must now be accorded higher rank because he is my uncle.’ Trubetskoi reluctantly agreed to carry the sceptre instead.

  At two o’clock that afternoon, Michael, clad in the Byzantine-style golden robes that had earlier been blessed by Metropolitan Efrem (the senior clergyman – there was no patriarch because the tsar’s father Filaret was still in prison), entered the Palace of Facets. The boyars prostrated themselves before the frail boy.

  As thirty-three Kremlin bells pealed, the courtiers and boyars, bearing on scarlet cushions the crown, orb (held by Pozharsky), sceptre and golden salver of the newly crafted royal regalia, emerged out of the Red Porch to bow thrice then process down the Red Staircase and across Cathedral Square towards the Dormition Cathedral. Then came the cathedral’s archpriest sprinkling holy water, so ensuring that Michael would step only on sanctified ground. The tsar entered the cathedral to the chanting of the hymn ‘Many Years’ rendered without musical instruments as none were used in Orthodox services. When he stood in the church before the icons of the golden iconostasis, Efrem asked for God’s blessing. Then it was Michael’s turn and the boy, who had never before taken part in such a ceremony let alone spoken formally in public, declared that Russia had suffered terrible trials in the fifteen years since the death of the last rightful tsar, his cousin Fyodor, son of Ivan the Terrible. Now Russians must restore peace and order.