Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin

by Catherine Merridale

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  According to Isaac Massa, Godunov’s coronation oath had included a promise to shed no blood in Moscow for five years; an oath that he kept, the cynical Dutchman observed, by smothering and drowning his enemies or forcing them into monasteries.58 His main rival, a close friend of the late Tsar Fedor, was the handsome Fedor Nikitich Romanov, the son of the old co-regent. The truce between the Godunovs and Romanovs had been abandoned when Tsar Fedor died. In 1600, Godunov’s agents accused the older clan of using witchcraft, if not poison, in a plot against the ruling family. Boris ordered his men to burn the main Romanov residence in Moscow, purged the boyar council, and forced the forty-five-year-old Fedor Nikitich to take the vows of a monk (an irreversible transition to the church’s world) under a new name: Filaret.59

  Whatever else the rival courtier might achieve, there was no further chance he could ascend the throne. With that competitor removed, the skilful Godunov might yet have established a stable government, or at least cemented a more certain rule. But his hold on power was irreparably damaged by natural disaster. The summer of 1601 was cold and wet, reducing the yield of the toughest rye and wrecking some crops altogether. The winter that followed was colder and longer than the winters of the past, and then, in the summer of 1602, unseasonal frost and snow destroyed the harvest that a hungry people desperately needed.60 The worst famine in memory took hold, and nothing Tsar Boris could do would make the fields green again. ‘At about this time,’ Massa explained,

  heaven afflicted the whole land of Muscovy with scarcity and famine such as history has never recorded … There were even mothers who ate their children. The peasants and other inhabitants of the countryside, having consumed all their resources, cows, horses, sheep and fowls, without observing the prescribed fasts, began to look for vegetables such as mushrooms and other fungi in the forests. They ate them hungrily along with husks and the winnowings of wheat, cats, and dogs. Then their bellies swelled; they became distended like cows, and died swiftly in great agony. In winter, they were prey to a sort of fainting. They doubled up and fell on the ground. The roads were encumbered by bodies that were devoured by wolves, foxes, dogs, and all kinds of wild animals.61

  As the countryside starved, Moscow’s streets filled with beggars and fugitives. Massa was appalled. ‘They had to organize teams of men who went every day with carts and sleds to gather bodies,’ he wrote. They took this miserable cargo

  outside to large ditches in the open fields. There they were thrown in heaps, as is done with mud and refuse at home … One day, I myself wanted very much to take some food to a young man seated in front of our lodgings, whom I had watched for four days as he fed himself on hay, dying of starvation. Yet I dared not do so for fear of being seen and attacked.62

  The reproach implied by Massa’s shocked and hostile tone should not detract from Godunov’s record, for the tsar in fact made determined – and expensive – efforts to avert calamity, at least in Moscow and the larger towns. At the start of the famine, in 1601, he passed laws to fix the price of bread. He also ordered his agents to hand out food and money to the starving, and in Moscow his men were soon feeding 70,000 people a day. Boris used his own funds, and his grain stores, to keep his people alive, and when they went on dying he paid for their shrouds. When the snow started falling in the summer of 1602, however, his soldiers were unable to stem the influx of refugees. Speculators converged on Moscow to claim the free food he intended for the city’s poor. The tsar’s own agents were the greediest of all. ‘The poor, the lame, the blind, the deaf … fell dead like animals in the street,’ Massa reported. ‘With my own eyes I have seen very rich secretaries, dressed as beggars, slip among those receiving alms.’ The people of Godunov’s nearungovernable capital must have wondered, at the height of the famine, if God were not punishing them for crowning a tsar who did not have genuine royal blood.

  And then the portents started to appear. ‘At about this time,’ Massa relates, ‘a series of terrible prodigies and apparitions occurred in Moscow, almost always at night and almost always in the vicinity of the tsar’s palace.’ The frightened guards maintained that ‘they had seen a chariot in the sky drawn by six horses and driven by a Pole, who cracked his whip above the palace, crying out in such terrible fashion that several soldiers of the guard fled to their quarters in terror’. A scourge from Poland was indeed poised to destroy Boris and to unleash a war. The Dutchman (who had books to sell), described it as ‘one of the strangest events to be recounted since the beginning of the world’.63

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  Tsar Boris had withdrawn from public life. The strain was telling on his health, but even in the deepest chambers of the Kremlin, his demons would give him no rest. The most persistent source of worry felt like vengeance from a ghost, for it concerned the shade of the dead boy, Prince Dmitry of Uglich. At first the tale was just a whisper, and Boris did no more than punish the gossips and spy on the crowds. But soon the facts were too disturbing to ignore. A man who claimed to be the last surviving son of Ivan the Terrible, the people’s only living hope of a true prince, had entered Russia from Poland and was attracting followers in the south-west. Whatever his identity, the man himself was flesh and blood, and by 1604, when rumours that he had crossed Russia’s borders reached Boris’ ears, he had already raised an army with help from his sponsors in Poland-Lithuania. Boris attempted to dismiss the tale as a ruse by his enemies: the Poles would use a monkey to embarrass Russia if it suited them. Within a few months, however, the man who called himself Dmitry Ivanovich had established a court of his own on Russian soil. At the end of 1604, his army inflicted its first significant defeat on Boris’ troops in a campaign to take Moscow and seize the crown.

  No one can be sure who the self-proclaimed Dmitry really was. There is a general agreement that he was Russian, about the right age, and thoroughly familiar with the routines and hierarchies of Kremlin life. Some say he truly believed himself to be Prince Dmitry, and one historian, Chester Dunning, has recently broken with tradition by suggesting that he may indeed have been Ivan the Terrible’s youngest son, smuggled from Uglich at the time of the supposed murder in 1591 and raised well out of Moscow’s reach.64 Godunov’s agents spread a different tale, however, and it is still widely accepted. In this version, the so-called Dmitry is identified as a renegade monk, Grigory Otrepev, a scoundrel forced to take the cowl by his own father. The real Otrepev had lived in the Kremlin’s Chudov Monastery until 1602, where he could well have learned the basic workings of the court.65 But whoever he really was, Dmitry could be diplomatic, and he knew how to act like a tsar. He was also a fearless soldier, and his interest in military technology, combat and drill would later fascinate civilian Muscovites. These qualities, and the many discontents of Russia’s people, helped to build support around him; his troops and executioners did the rest. He spent the winter of 1604 in the south, where opposition to Boris had long been strong. In 1605 his campaign for Moscow resumed in earnest.

  Boris threatened death to any citizen who dared pronounce the false Dmitry’s name. His agents organized an overblown victory parade (which fooled no-one) to force Moscow to celebrate the outcome of a minor skirmish in the south.66 The tsar lost more support that day, and more again once the atrocities began. His henchmen maimed and butchered their first prisoners of war, and hostages were slowly burned alive or pushed under the river ice. The portents of doom persisted nonetheless. The coldest night of January 1605 brought a pack of wolves into Moscow, and a cemetery in the Kremlin itself was invaded by a band of foxes.67 Meanwhile, more and more of Godunov’s men defected, and the repeated questioning of rebel captives failed to expose Dmitry’s real identity. Indeed, Ivan the Terrible’s last widow (the real Dmitry’s mother), now living as a nun called Marfa, was summoned to the Kremlin on a winter night (Boris’ wife, Mariya, is said to have thrust a searing candle at her eyes), and even she refused to concede that the pretender was a fraud. In April 1605, and notwithstanding the attentions of two English d
octors, Boris collapsed. The rumour that he had been poisoned was inevitable, but his death, almost certainly from a haemorrhage, may well have been caused by the anxiety that allowed him no rest.

  Boris left a male heir, his son, Fedor Borisovich, and for a time the boyar elite in the Kremlin chose to honour this sixteen-year-old rather than face a vacant throne. But Fedor’s claim had shallow roots, and there was little support for a second Godunov among courtiers who had suffered so deeply under the first one. Beyond the Kremlin, a hard-pressed population showed even less enthusiasm for the youth. At peasant hearths, and certainly round cossack fires out on the steppe, the talk was all of an imagined past, an ideal world whose details were so fuzzy that hope soon focused on the return of a leader that many chose to think of simply as the one True Tsar. This figure could have come straight from a fairy-tale (perhaps a dark one, since he was based on Ivan the Terrible), but the yearning for him was Dmitry’s strongest card. Slowly, the military balance began to tilt in the pretender’s favour. On 1 June 1605, Moscow reached a turning-point when a group of officials from Dmitry’s camp gathered openly beneath the Kremlin walls to read a proclamation in their master’s name. It urged every Muscovite to abandon the bloody struggle and swear allegiance to the real heir. ‘God grant’, ran the slogan, ‘that the true sun will once again rise over Russia.’68

  Moscow’s population – encircled, hungry and sick of the fear and bloody spectacle of torture – needed no further encouragement. The Kremlin harboured their tormentors; this long day was their chance to act. A mob more than a thousand strong burst through the gates, and one of its first targets was Godunov’s palace. The vanguard managed to arrest the dead tsar’s widow, her son, and members of his inner circle, but others went on a looting spree, venting their wrath on anything Godunov might have touched. The discovery of alcohol brought chaos as the looters fought to get at the casks and barrels. In their excitement, some of the men took to drinking from their hats: at least fifty drank themselves to death in the Kremlin cellars.69 At the same time, treasures and palace fittings, food and weapons were seized, disputed, and trampled or carried off; much of the gold was buried and lost in the months to come. It was the first day of Dmitry’s rule – his succession was proclaimed from the Kremlin in the midst of the tumult – and it was the end of any Godunov Jerusalem.

  Patriarch Yov was deposed and exiled. Tsar Fedor and his mother were strangled. The hated inquisitor, Semen Godunov, was captured, taunted and locked away to starve to death. Boris himself had been laid to rest in the Riurikid mausoleum in the Archangel Cathedral just over six weeks before. His coffin was removed (today, his remains lie outside the cathedral walls in the monastery complex at Sergiev-Posad). For a moment, it was possible to hope that the Kremlin had been purified, the royal line restored. The idea that Russia’s murderous crisis might resolve if someone could create a rightful heir was appealing, but Russia would face years of civil war before it could agree about the candidate.

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  The newly proclaimed Dmitry’s arrival in the Kremlin opened a fresh chapter in its international affairs. There had been talk of uniting the Muscovite and Polish crowns for generations. The argument for a Russo-Polish alliance, and even union, was clear. The two Slavic kingdoms shared a common history – the ancient Russian capital of Kiev lay in Poland-Lithuania – and the nobilities of the neighbouring courts were interrelated. But talks about union were often a cloak for larger diplomatic games (the agents of the Vatican were never far away). Both sides were also keen to chip away at their opponent’s territory in the borderlands. As recently as 1586, Ivan the Terrible had proposed the candidacy of his son Fedor for the Polish-Lithuanian crown. That move had foundered with his own Livonian war. Now, under a new Polish-Lithuanian king, Sigismund III, the game unfolded with a revised set of aims.

  Dmitry was a useful tool in the Polish schemers’ hands. He owed his first success to Poles, the lords who had equipped him for his military campaigns. Some believe he acted on Poland’s behalf throughout his life, and some allege he was a Catholic; he dressed like one, and shaved his beard, and did not hide his impatience whenever Moscow’s priests intoned their lengthy prayers. He may even have convinced himself that a united Polish and Russian state could be a viable entity.70 In Rome, the servants of the Catholic Inquisition kept an eye on his fortunes, prepared to overlook some wildness in exchange for the hope of allies near (or even on) the Russian throne.71 What is certain is that there were numerous Polish agents at his court; they were housed inside the Kremlin from the start.

  The foreignness of these advisors put the locals on their guard at once. No real Muscovite could think it seemly for a Catholic to tread the Kremlin’s sacred soil, still less to trample on its customs, fasts and prayers. The same crowd that had swept Dmitry to the throne began to speculate about his morals once his retinue became ensconced. And the incomprehension was mutual. The gulf that separated Poles from Russians can be judged from the disgust with which the military officer Jacques Margeret (a Catholic) later dismissed the criticisms of Dmitry’s conduct. ‘As for the argument that [Dmitry] ridiculed the customs of the Russians and that he did not observe their religion except in form,’ he wrote, ‘it is not necessary to marvel at this – especially if one considers their customs and life-styles, for they are rude and gross, without any civility. And Russia is a nation of liars, without loyalty, without law, without conscience – sodomites, and corrupted by infinite other vices and brutalities.’72

  Dmitry himself divides his chroniclers. Jacques Margeret loyally described him as ‘wise, having enough understanding to serve as schoolteacher to his own council’.73 But Margeret, who eventually became the head of Dmitry’s palace garrison, was not objective; the story also persists that Dmitry was crude and licentious. It is said that the pretender debauched young women in his palace (and specifically its bath-house), including several Kremlin nuns and Boris Godunov’s own orphaned daughter, Ksenia.74 The space behind his lodging was turned into a bear-pit: on idle days, for his amusement, wild dogs were set on captive bears (and occasionally on humans).75 According to another tale, the pretender’s legs were so short that they waved in the air when he tried to sit on Ivan the Terrible’s throne.76 If that was so, it did not prevent him from issuing royal commands, and one of these involved a new palace. Conceived, they said, ‘in the Polish style’, it loomed above the Kremlin walls facing the Moscow river. Though it has since vanished from most records, its specifications sound lavish, for every nail and hinge was said to have been covered with thick gilt, and the stoves, in Massa’s view, were works of art. The new tsar ‘also caused magnificent baths and fine towers to be built’, the Dutchman added. But clouds had gathered from the first. ‘Although there were already vast stables in his palace compound,’ wrote Massa, ‘he had a special stable built close to his new dwelling. These new buildings had a number of hidden doors and secret passages, which proves that he was following the example of the tyrants, and that like them, he lived in perpetual fear.’77

  The pretender’s reign lasted for less than a year. His fatal mistake may well have been his choice of bride. When he accepted the help of the Polish noble Jerzy Mniszeck, in 1603, Dmitry had agreed to marry his sponsor’s daughter, Marina, and in the spring of 1606 Mniszeck called in the debt. If Dmitry had chosen a Russian wife, and forged the right kind of dynastic link, the court might well have closed ranks round the self-proclaimed Riurikid, hoping to re-establish the familiar elite ballet.78 Instead, in May 1606, Marina was summoned to Moscow with a spectacular retinue of Polish retainers and a horde of disorderly – and very foreign – wedding guests.

  The bride’s progress was sumptuous. The procession of gilded carriages, the liveried servants and the jewels alone cost several fortunes. Moscow was especially impressed by the horses, the coats of some of which had been transformed with red, orange and yellow dyes. The ten prize animals that pulled the royal carriage were ‘spotted with black (like tigers or leopards), and matche
d so well that one could not distinguish one from another’.79 Horses and all, the whole party, which was grander than the retinue of any bride since Sofiya Palaeologa married Ivan III, was accompanied by music, including flutes, trumpets and kettledrums, though this, the Russians thought, was a distraction from Orthodox prayer. The noise and swagger, however, were only the first of many insults. These Poles seemed to have come to stay. Even if they had enjoyed the pageant and the coloured horses, Moscow’s people caught their breath when the baggage-train behind the guests began to disgorge household goods. The visitors were billeted on wealthy local families, and their hosts (who had not been given much choice) were shocked to glimpse bundles of weapons among the trunks and boxes that were being carried into their guest rooms.80

  The next few days were even worse. It was not the fact of the Poles’ persistent drunkenness (what Russian could speak out on that?), but its timing that caused such offence, the disregard for priests and icons, and the surprise (in a land of full-length robes) of strutting men in vulgar-looking breeches and high boots. On the day of the wedding, the crowds of common citizens, who had been shut out of the Kremlin for the ceremony itself, were horrified to learn that Catholics had taken the best places in the Dormition Cathedral. Isaac Massa reported once again that ominous clouds appeared in the sky, all seeming to come from the direction of Poland. A few nights later the moon turned the colour of blood.81