by James Millar
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TIFLIS
The ancient buildings of Tiflis (Tbilisi) are shown in this lithograph from 1849. © HISTORICAL PICTURE ARCHIVE/CORBIS the Builder (1089-1125) and reached its medieval zenith in the reigns of Queen Tamar (1184-1212) and her son Giorgi the Resplendent. In the centuries that followed the Mongol invasions (thirteenth-fourteenth centuries), Georgia suffered a long, slow decline, and Tiflis and eastern Georgia came under the hegemony of Iran. In the mid-eighteenth century the last great king of eastern Georgia, Erekle II (1744-1798), recaptured the city, which became the center of a multinational empire that reached north to the Great Caucasus and south into Armenia.
After a devastating invasion by the Persians that destroyed large parts of the city, the Russians marched into Tiflis (1800), which soon became their principal administrative center in Caucasia. The city was then largely Armenian in population, but through the century the percentage of Georgians increased steadily until they became a majority in Soviet times. In the twentieth century Tiflis (Tbilisi) was successively the capital of the Transcaucasian Federation (1918), the first independent Georgian Republic (1918-1921), the Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia (1921-1991), and the second independent Republic of Georgia (since 1991). Today it is a city of more than one million people, but since the end of the Soviet Union Tiflis has lost much of its cosmopolitan flavor as Armenians, Russians, and Jews have steadily migrated elsewhere. The post-Soviet disintegration of Georgia and the collapse of its economy have taken a toll on the town, but the beauty of its buildings and natural setting remains intact. See also: CAUCASUS; GEORGIA AND GEORGIANS; ISLAM; TRANSCAUCASIAN FEDERATIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Suny, Ronald Grigor. (1986). “Tiflis, Crucible of Ethnic Politics, 1860-1905.” In The City in Late Imperial Rus
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sia, ed. Michael F. Hamm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Suny, Ronald Grigor. (1994). The Making of the Georgian Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
RONALD GRIGOR SUNY
Patriarchate at the Church Council of 1917-1918.” Slavic Review 50:497-511. Roslof, Edward E. (2000). “Russian Orthodoxy and the Tragic Fate of Patriarch Tikhon (Bellavin).” In The Human Tradition in Modern Russia, ed. William B. Husband. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources.
EDWARD E. ROSLOF
TIKHON, PATRIARCH
(1865-1925), eleventh patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, 1917-1925.
The son of a provincial priest, Vasily Ivanovich Bellavin attended the Pskov seminary and the theological academy in St. Petersburg. He took monastic vows in 1891, adopting the name “Tikhon,” and was elevated to the episcopacy in 1897. Over the next twenty years, he served dioceses in Russia and North America. He became the first popularly elected Metropolitan of Moscow in July 1917 and president of the national church council that convened in August. After the October Revolution, the council chose Tikhon as the first Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia since 1701. Patriarch Tikhon anathematized the Bolsheviks and their supporters in January 1918, but then backed away from direct confrontation in the face of government reprisals, adopting a strictly neutral political stance during the civil war. Nonetheless, the Bolsheviks saw Tikhon as a counterrevolutionary. They split the church in 1922 by supporting the Living Church Movement. Tikhon spent a year under arrest and interrogation. He was released in mid-1923 after signing a statement repenting his political crimes and condemning foreign church leaders. Tikhon’s last years were spent under constant threat of arrest as he worked to reunite the Church. His death in April 1925 led to new schisms when the government prevented election of a new patriarch and promoted rivalries among Orthodox bishops. Despite official Soviet depictions of Tikhon as an arch-reactionary, Orthodox believers revered him due to his suffering at the hands of the Communists in defense of the faith. The Russian Orthodox Church canonized Patriarch Tikhon in 1989. See also: LIVING CHURCH MOVEMENT
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Evtuhov, Catherine. (1991). “The Church in the Russian Revolution: Arguments for and against Restoring the
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
TILSIT, TREATY OF
The Treaty of Tilsit is the name of the document signed by Emperor Napoleon I of France and Tsar Alexander I of Russia on July 7, 1807, following a famous meeting between the two on a raft in the Niemen River. The treaty focused on three questions: (1) the peace terms between Russia and France; (2) how to handle a war that had erupted between Russia and Turkey; (3) the status of the defeated kingdom of Prussia, which had risen up against Napoleon only the year before. For Alexander, negotiating on behalf of the Prussian king, Frederick William III, Tilsit was a decisive moment. Not only had he experienced murderous military reversals at Danzig and Friedland in June, he was now confronted by the prospect of intrigue and disorder at home, and in this his brother, the Grand Duke Constantine, figured conspicuously and ominously. Most of all, Alexander desired in the most intimate way to bring peace to Europe, and he came to realize that this could only be done if Britain, alone now against Bonaparte, was brought to heel. The treaty was an extremely onerous instrument-a prize example, in fact, of the ruthless brutality of Napoleonic power. The treaty left Russia untouched, but it reduced Prussia to a makeshift territory east of the River Elbe, occupied by Napoleon’s troops, and ringed by his puppet states old and new. It tore away one-third of Prussia’s territory and placed it under the control of the king of Saxony in a new Napoleonic satellite called the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. It pledged Russia would go to war with Britain if the latter did not accept Napoleon’s peace terms; it pledged Napoleon would do the same with respect to Turkey. It was at Tilsit that the whole of Napoleon’s unconscionable ambition found its fullest and most virulent expression. See also: ALEXANDER I; NAPOLEON I
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lllustration of Napoleon I of France, Frederick William III of Prussia, and Alexander I at Tilsit, July 7, 1807.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Schroeder, Paul. (1994). The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
DAVID WETZEL
TIME OF TROUBLES
In the decade and a half before the founding of the Romanov dynasty in 1613, Russia endured what has been known ever since as the Time of Troubles, a period of severe crisis that nearly destroyed the country. It followed the death of Tsar Fyodor I in 1598 and ended with the election of Tsar Mikhail Romanov in 1613. The Time of Troubles has long fascinated and puzzled the Russian people and has inspired scholars, poets, and even musicians. To many Russians who lived through the Troubles, it was nothing more or less than God’s punishment of their country for the sins of its rulers or its people. Others since then have sought more secular explanations, noting that at the center of the Troubles was the most powerful uprising in Russian history prior to the twentieth century, the so-called Bolot-nikov rebellion (named after the rebel commander, Ivan Bolotnikov). Focusing on that event, historians erroneously concluded long ago that at the heart of the Troubles was Russia’s first social revolution of the oppressed masses against serfdom. Recently, that interpretation has been decisively overthrown; instead of a social revolution, the Time of Troubles produced Russia’s first civil war, a conflict that split Russian society vertically instead of horizontally. The long and bloody civil war occurred in two distinct phases: 1604-1605 and 1606-1612.
The Time of Troubles began with the extinction of Moscow’s ancient ruling dynasty. After
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Tsar Fyodor I’s death in 1598, Boris Godunov (regent for mentally retarded Fyodor) easily defeated his rivals to become tsar. Nevertheless, many people questioned the legitimacy of the new ruler, whose sins supposedly included having Tsar Ivan IVs youngest son, Dmitry of Uglich, killed in 1591 in order to clear a path to the throne for himself. Durin
g Tsar Boris’s reign Russia suffered a horrible famine that wiped out up to one-third of the population. The effects of the famine, coupled with serious long-term economic, social, demographic, fiscal, and political problems, contributed to the decline in legitimacy of the new ruler in the eyes of many Russians. Then in 1604 the country was invaded by a small army headed by a man claiming to be Dmitry of Uglich, miraculously saved from Godunov’s assassins. Many towns, fortresses, soldiers, and cossacks of the southern frontier quickly joined Dmitry’s forces in the first popular uprising against a tsar. When Tsar Boris died in April 1605, resistance to the Pretender Dmitry (also known as “False Dmitry”) broke down, and he became tsar-the only tsar ever raised to the throne by means of a military campaign and popular uprisings.
Tsar Dmitry reigned for about a year before he was murdered by a small group of aristocrats. His assassination triggered a powerful civil war, essentially a duplicate of the civil war that had brought Dmitry to power. The usurper Vasily Shuisky denounced the dead tsar as an impostor, but Dmitry’s supporters successfully put forward the story that he had once again miraculously escaped death and would soon return to punish the traitors. So energetic was the response to the call to arms against Shuisky that civil war raged for many years and produced about a dozen more pretenders claiming to be Tsar Dmitry or other members of the old ruling dynasty. Starting in 1609, Russia’s internal disorder prompted Polish and Swedish military intervention, resulting in even greater misery and chaos. Eventually, an uneasy alliance was formed among Russian factions, and the Time of Troubles ended with the establishment of the Romanov dynasty in 1613.
ORIGINS OF THE TROUBLES
The origins of the Time of Troubles were very complex. In the age of the gunpowder revolution, the princes of Moscow unified Russia, quickly transformed their country into a highly effective state geared to war, and expanded their realm with dizzying speed. In the process of building the largest country in Europe, however, they created a coercive central state bureaucracy that subjugated virtually all elements of Russian society and grossly overburdened the bulk of the population. Russian autocracy and imperialism contributed significantly to the development of a serious state crisis by the beginning of the seventeenth century. Tsar Ivan IV (“the Terrible”) personally deserves some of the blame for the Time of Troubles. His unsuccessful Livonian War (1558-1583) and his dreaded Oprichnina contributed to Russia’s serious problems, as did his imposition of high taxes and his decision to allow the lords to collect taxes directly from their peasants. Ivan’s policies and actions retarded Russian economic activity and resulted in the massive flight of peasants and townspeople to untaxed lands or to the southern frontier. That in turn contributed to declining state revenue and to the weakening of the tsar’s gentry militia, which was heavily dependent on peasant labor.
In spite of clear signs of economic and social distress, Tsar Ivan’s successors continued Russia’s imperial drive to the south. Acting as Fyodor I’s regent, Boris Godunov took drastic steps to shore up state finances and the gentry cavalrymen in order to continue Russia’s rapid expansion to the south and east. In the 1590s, Godunov enserfed the Russian peasants, bound urban taxpayers to their tax-paying districts, and converted short-term contract slavery into real slavery. Those harsh measures did not solve Russia’s fiscal problems and actually made things much worse. Many towns became ghost towns, and Russia’s already staggering economy continued to decline. Godunov’s harsh policies of exploiting the population of the southern frontier and harnessing the cossacks to state service also contributed to the country’s problems. By the time Tsar Fyodor I died, Russia was suffering from a severe economic and social crisis, and many blamed Boris Godunov for their misery.
THE FIRST PHASE OF THE TROUBLES
The Time of Troubles began with the political struggle following the extinction of the old ruling dynasty in 1598. Godunov easily defeated his rivals, including Fyodor Romanov (the future Patriarch Filaret, father of Mkhail Romanov), and quickly became tsar; but his reputation suffered badly in the process. Boris was accused by his rivals of having arranged the murder of Dmitry of Uglich in 1591 in order to clear a path to the throne for himself. He also suffered from a commonly held view that boyars were supposed to advise tsars,
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not become tsars. During the reign of Tsar Boris (1598-1605), Russia’s severe state crisis continued to deepen. In addition, Boris’s harassment of certain aristocratic families caused some of them to enter into secret conspiracies against him. It was the great famine of 1601-1603, however, that ruined Tsar Boris’s reputation and convinced many of his subjects that God was punishing Russia for the sins of its ruler. Successive crop failures resulted in the worst famine in Russian history, which wiped out up to a third of Russia’s population. When a man claiming to be Dmitry of Uglich appeared in Poland-Lithuania in 1603 seeking support to overthrow the usurper Godunov, many of Tsar Boris’s subjects were inclined to believe that this man really was Dmitry, somehow miraculously rescued from Godunov’s assassins and now returning to Russia to restore the old ruling dynasty-and God’s grace. Tsar Boris and Patriarch Job denounced the Pretender Dmitry as an impostor named Grigory Otrepev, but that did not stop enthusiasm for the true tsar from growing, especially on the southern frontier and among the cos-sacks.
Russia’s first civil war started with the invasion of the country by the Pretender Dmitry in October 1604. Helped by self-serving Polish lords such as Jerzy Mniszech (father of Marina Mniszech), Dmitry managed to field a small army for his campaign for the Russian throne. As soon as he crossed the border into southwestern Russia, Dmitry was greeted with enthusiasm by much of the frontier population. Several towns voluntarily surrendered to him, and many Russian soldiers (and their commanders) quickly joined Dmitry’s army. Large numbers of cossacks also swelled the Pretender’s forces as he advanced. In December 1604, Dmitry’s army defeated Tsar Boris’s much larger army near Novgorod-Seversky, but in January 1605 the Pretender was decisively defeated at the battle of Do-brynichi. Dmitry hastily retreated to Putivl while Tsar Boris’s army wasted time waging a terror campaign against the local populations that had dared to support the Pretender. By the spring of 1605, Dmitry had recovered, and his forces were growing rapidly. Tsar Boris’s army, by contrast, got bogged down trying to capture rebel-held Kromy, a key fortress guarding the road to Moscow. The death of Boris Godunov in April 1605 paved the way to tsardom for Dmitry. Boris was succeeded by his son, Tsar Fyodor II, but the rebellion of Fyodor’s army at Kromy on May 7 sealed the fate of the Godunov dynasty. On June 1, 1605, a bloodless uprising in Moscow overthrew Tsar Fy1550 odor. Dmitry then entered the capital in triumph, and he was crowned on June 20.
THE SECOND PHASE OF THE TROUBLES
Tsar Dmitry ruled wisely for about a year before being assassinated by Vasily Shuisky, whose seizure of power reignited the civil war. Dmitry’s reign is controversial; many historians have been convinced that he was an impostor named Grigory Otrepev who never commanded the respect of the aristocracy or of the Russian people. In fact, Tsar Dmitry was not the monk-sorcerer Otrepev; instead, he impressed his contemporaries as an intelligent, well-educated, courageous young warrior-prince who truly believed that he was Ivan the Terrible’s youngest son. Tsar Dmitry was also a popular ruler. He did, however, open himself up to criticism for his lack of zealousness in observing court rituals and for a perceived laxity in his commitment to Russian Orthodox Christianity. Criticism notwithstanding, it is significant that Tsar Dmitry was toppled by a coup d’?tat involving a small number of disgruntled aristocrats, not by a popular uprising. His assassination, during the celebration of his wedding to the Polish Princess Marina Mniszech in May 1606, shocked the nation and very quickly rekindled the civil war that had brought him to power. The renewed civil war in the name of the true tsar Dmitry raged for years and nearly destroyed Russia.
Within a few hours of Tsar
Dmitry’s assassination, his supporters successfully put forward the story that he had once again miraculously escaped death and would soon return to punish Shuisky and his co-conspirators. One of Tsar Dmitry’s courtiers, Mikhail Molchanov, escaped from Moscow and assumed Dmitry’s identity as he traveled to Sambor (the home of the Mniszechs) in Poland-Lithuania. There he set up Tsar Dmitry’s court and began seeking support for the struggle against Shuisky. Molchanov sent letters to Russian towns and to the cossacks of the southern frontier declaring that Tsar Dmitry was still alive and urging them to rise up against the usurper Tsar Vasily. Those appeals had a powerful effect. Enthusiastic rebel armies led by Ivan Bolotnikov and other commanders quickly pushed Tsar Vasily’s forces out of southern Russia and reached the suburbs of Moscow by October 1606. During the siege of the capital, however, Shuisky bribed two rebel commanders to switch sides. Istoma Pashkov’s betrayal of the rebel cause occurred during a major battle on December 2, forcing Bolotnikov’s men to break off the siege and reENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
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treat south. After enduring long sieges in Kaluga and then Tula, Bolotnikov was finally forced to surrender to Tsar Vasily in October 1607, but his men (with their weapons) were allowed to go free. Many of them immediately rejoined the civil war against Shuisky by entering the service of the second false Dmitry, an impostor who suddenly appeared in southwestern Russia during the summer of 1607.
The second false Dmitry was nothing more than a puppet of his Polish handlers, but his name attracted men from far and wide. Soon Dmitry took up residence in the village of Tushino and waged war against Shuisky in Moscow. The second false Dmitry managed to attract many Russian aristocrats into his service; Filaret Romanov became Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church in Tushino. When Marina Mniszech was released by Tsar Vasily, she, too, went to Tushino where she recognized her putative husband and eventually produced an heir, little Ivan Dmitriyevich. For over a year, war-torn Russia had two tsars and two capitals. Just as Shuisky’s luck appeared to be running out, however, the excesses of Tsar Dmitry’s foreign troops and cossacks caused a full-scale revolt against the second false Dmitry throughout much of northern Russia. Starting in late 1608, ordinary townspeople began fighting back against constant pillaging by Tsar Dmitry’s troops and heavy taxes collected by his rapacious agents.
