Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  Tsar Vasily eventually turned to Sweden for assistance against the second false Dmitry. In early 1609, troops raised by King Karl IX crossed the border and assisted Shuisky’s forces in clearing Dmitry’s supporters out of north Russia. Karl also gobbled up Russian territory for himself, immediately provoking Polish intervention in Russia. The Polish king Sigismund III invaded Russia and laid siege to the great fortress of Smolensk. Under pressure from all sides, the Tushino camp broke up during the winter of 1609-1610. The second false Dmitry and Marina fled to Kaluga, but some Tushi-nite courtiers traveled to Smolensk to beg Sigismund to permit his son, Wladyslaw, to become tsar of Russia. The king seemed to agree, and soon a Polish army headed toward Moscow. In June 1610, at the battle of Klushino, the Poles decisively defeated Tsar Vasily’s army. In July, exasperated Russian aristocrats seized Tsar Vasily and forced him to become a monk. Eventually, the powerful Russian lords who gained control of Moscow (the Council of Seven) agreed to allow the Poles to occupy the capital in the name of Tsar Wladyslaw. A grand procession of Russian dignitaries (including Filaret Romanov and Vasily Shuisky) was then sent to parley with King Sigismund about Wla-dyslaw’s accession, but the king threw them in prison. Sigismund had decided to conquer Russia and not to rule it indirectly through his son. In Moscow, the Council of Seven was unceremoniously shoved aside as a brutal military dictatorship was established by the Poles.

  The Polish occupation of Moscow shocked much of Russia, and soon ordinary people began to organize to oust the foreigners. The murder of the second false Dmitry in December 1610 was celebrated by the Poles, but it actually removed the chief obstacle to unifying the Russian people against foreign intervention. A powerful but still disjointed patriotic movement slowly began to develop throughout the land and even in Moscow. Various Russian factions warily reached out to one other and with great difficulty coordinated operations against the hated Catholic Poles. Inside Moscow, protests against the Latin heretics by Patriarch Hermogen got him thrown into prison; but, before he starved to death, Hermogen sent letters to many towns urging his fellow Orthodox Christians to rise up and throw the evil foreigners out of Russia. Hermogen’s call to arms was highly effective.

  By early 1611, a patriotic Russian commander, Dmitry Pozharsky, forged an uneasy alliance with forces that had been loyal to the second false Dmitry, including the cossack commander Ivan Zarutsky, who championed the cause of Marina Mniszech and Ivan Dmitriyevich. Pozharsky attempted to liberate Moscow in March; but, after bitter street fighting during which the Poles burned much of the outer city, Pozharsky’s patriots were forced to retreat and regroup. By June 1611, the patriots managed to form a highly representative council of the entire realm to coordinate military operations against the foreigners and to lay the foundation for a temporary national government. Pozharsky and others made sure that militarily useful cossacks who were willing to join the national militia received adequate food and the promise of freedom even if they had formerly been serfs or slaves. Such unprecedented promises attracted many new recruits to the patriot cause. Due to rivalry among its commanders, however, the national liberation movement stumbled during the following months. The unscrupulous Zarutsky tried to take over as militia commander, but other patriots wanted nothing to do with his unruly cossacks or little Ivan Dmitriyevich. UnforENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

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  TIME OF TROUBLES

  tunately, various factions ended up fighting against each other, and for many months chaos reigned in Russia. Shortly after the Poles captured Smolensk in June 1611 and the Swedes captured Novgorod in July, some beleaguered Russians asked the king of Sweden to consider putting his son on the Russian throne. Most patriots, however, dreamed of a Russian tsar.

  By late 1611, a new patriotic movement and a new military force capable of salvaging Russia’s national sovereignty began to take shape in Nizhny Novgorod. There a butcher named Kuzma Minin convinced his fellow citizens to raise money for an army to liberate Russia and to restore order to the realm. Minin chose Prince Pozharsky to be the commander-in-chief of the new militia, and Minin himself became the patriotic movement’s treasurer with very broad powers. Many Russian towns and villages quickly joined the movement, and Yaroslavl soon emerged as the headquarters of the provisional government. Pozharsky succeeded admirably in getting cossacks and others to join his growing militia; and once Zarutsky broke with the national liberation movement and rode off to the south with Marina Mniszech and Ivan Dmitriye-vich, Pozharsky was able to concentrate on the siege of Moscow.

  The Polish garrison in Moscow surrendered on October 27, 1612. As soon as the capital was liberated, urgent and unprecedented messages were sent throughout the country calling for representatives of all free men (nobles, gentry, soldiers, townspeople, clergy, peasants from crown and state lands, and cossacks) to come as quickly as possible to Moscow. Soon the most representative Assembly of the Land (Zemsky sobor) in Russian history gathered to choose a new tsar. Under intense pressure from the cossacks (who by then made up half of the national militia), Filaret Romanov’s son Mikhail was elected on February 7, 1613.

  The Time of Troubles officially ended with the crowning of Tsar Mikhail on July 21, 1613, but it took several years to restore order to a devastated land. While bureaucrats and members of the Assembly of the Land worked feverishly to rebuild the Russian government, Tsar Mkhail dispatched military forces to destroy Zarutsky, Marina Mniszech, and Ivan Dmitriyevich. They were finally captured and executed in 1614. Kicking the Poles and Swedes out of Russia proved to be far more difficult. Only after a Swedish invasion was stalled by the heroic defense of Pskov in 1615-1616, did King Gustavus

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  Adolphus agree to negotiate with Tsar Mikhail. The Treaty of Stolbovo (1617) restored Novgorod to the Russians, but the Swedes kept enough captured territory to block Russian access to the Baltic Sea until the time of Peter the Great. After 1613, Polish armies tried repeatedly to try to put Tsar Wlady-slaw on the Russian throne. The sturdy defense of Moscow in 1618 by Prince Pozharsky, the capital’s civilian population, and the cossacks (who were very badly treated by the Romanov regime) finally convinced the Poles to negotiate. Poland gained many west Russian towns (including Smolensk) from the Truce of Deulino (1618), but Filaret Romanov was released from Polish captivity. In many ways, the celebration of Patriarch Filaret’s return to Moscow in 1619 marked the real end of the Time of Troubles.

  The Time of Troubles had been a terrible nightmare for the Russian people. By the time the Troubles ended, Russia’s economy was shattered and many towns were ruined. As a result, the early Romanovs faced serious fiscal problems. The conditions of overtaxed townspeople, serfs, and gentry cavalrymen actually worsened during the early seventeenth century and set the stage for sharp conflicts under Tsar Mikhail’s son, Tsar Alexis. Ironically, the rapid expansion of the Romanov empire after 1613 caused many people to conclude incorrectly that the Time of Troubles did not have much long-term impact. In fact, the terrifying experience of the Troubles produced a powerful consensus within Russian society in favor of enhancing the already great authority and prestige of the tsar (and the patriarch). That consensus significantly strengthened Russian autocracy and imperialism, and it also slowed down the development of capitalism and the emergence of civil society in Russia. See also: ASSEMBLY OF THE LAND; BOLOTNIKOV, IVAN ISAYEVICH; DMITRY OF UGLICH; DMITRY, FALSE; FEDOR IVANOVICH; FILARET ROMANOV, PATRIARCH; GODUNOV, BORIS FYODOROVICH; IVAN IV; OPRI-CHNINA; OTREPEV, GRIGORY; POZHARSKY, DMITRY MIKHAILOVICH; ROMANOV, MIKHAIL FYODOROVICH; SHUISKY, VASILY IVANOVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Barbour, Philip. (1966). Dimitry Called the Pretender: Tsar and Great Prince of All Russia, 1605-1606. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Bussow, Conrad. (1994). The Disturbed State of the Russian Realm, tr. G. Edward Orchard. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s.

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  TKACHEV, PETR NIKITICH

  Dunning, Chester. (2001). Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and th
e Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Howe, Sonia, ed. (1916). The False Dmitri: A Russian Romance and Tragedy Described by British Eye-Witnesses, 1604-1612. London: Williams and Norgate. Margeret, Jacques. (1983). The Russian Empire and Grand Duchy of Muscovy: A Seventeenth-Century French Account, tr. and ed. Chester S. L. Dunning. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press. Massa, Isaac. (1982). A Short History of the Beginnings and Origins of These Present Wars in Moscow under the Reigns of Various Sovereigns down to the Year 1610, tr. G. Edward Orchard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Perrie, Maureen. (1995). Pretenders and Popular Monar-chism in Early Modern Russia: The False Tsars of the Time of Troubles. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Platonov, S. F. (1970). The Time of Troubles, tr. John T. Alexander. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Skrynnikov, Ruslan. (1982). Boris Godunov, tr. Hugh Graham. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. Skrynnikov, Ruslan. (1988). The Time of Troubles: Russia in Crisis, 1604-1618, tr. Hugh Graham. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. Zolkiewski, Stanislas. (1959). Expedition to Moscow, tr. and ed. J. Giertych. London: Polonica.

  CHESTER DUNNING

  the new, they leveled the existing walls down to the foundations and commissioned the architect Vasily Stasov to construct a neo-Byzantine church. This church was demolished by the Soviets in 1935 and the site covered with pavement.

  From twentieth-century excavations, however, there emerged a plausible notion of the original plan, with the arms of a cross delineated by the aisles at the center of the church. While there is no way of determining with any accuracy the church’s appearance, some sense of its decoration may be gleaned from the salvaged fragments of mosaics, frescoes, and marble ornaments. The walls were probably composed of alternating layers of stone and flat brick in a mortar of lime and crushed brick. See also: ARCHITECTURE; CATHEDRAL OF ST. SOPHIA, KIEV; KIEVAN RUS; VLADIMIR MONOMAKH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Brumfield, William Craft. (1993). A History of Russian Architecture. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rappoport, Alexander P. (1995). Building the Churches of Kievan Russia. Brookfield, VT: Variorum.

  WILLIAM CRAFT BRUMFIELD

  TITHE CHURCH, KIEV

  The most ancient church in Kiev was built between 989 and 996 by Prince Vladimir, who dedicated it to the Virgin Mary and supported it with one-tenth of his revenues. Destroyed by a fire in 1017 and reconstructed in 1039, the church was looted in 1177 and in 1203 by neighboring princes, and it was finally destroyed in 1240 during the siege of Kiev by the Mongol armies of Khan Batu. Various stories exist concerning the cause of the structure’s collapse; as one of the last bastions of the Kievans, it came under the assault of Mongol battering rams, and it may have been further weakened by the survivors’ attempt to tunnel out. Nonetheless, part of the eastern walls remained standing until the nineteenth century, when, in 1825, church authorities decided to erect a new church on the site. Rejecting the idea of incorporating the old walls into

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  TKACHEV, PETR NIKITICH

  (1844-1886), revolutionary Russian writer.

  The voluminous writings of the revolutionist Petr Nikitich Tkachev were considered by Vladimir Lenin to be required reading for his Bolshevik followers. Lenin said that Tkachev, a Jacobin-Blanquist revolutionary in Russia of the 1870s, was, “one of us.”

  Indeed, Soviet publicists in the 1920s (before Lenin’s death) treated Tkachev, once a collaborator of the terrorist Sergei Nechayev, as a prototypical Bolshevik. As one writer put it, he was “the forerunner of Lenin.” This apposition was dropped, however, after 1924, when Stalin introduced the Lenin Cult. This Stalinist line did not acknowledge any pre-1917 revolutionary as a match for Lenin’s vaunted status as mankind’s unique, genius thinker.

  The proto-Bolshevik concepts developed by Tkachev in such publications as the illegal newspaper Nabat (Tocsin) and in publications in France,

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  TOGAN, AHMED ZEKI VALIDOV

  where he resided as an exile, consisted of the following points: 1) a revolutionary seizure of power under Russian conditions must be the work of an elitist group of enlightened, vanguard thinkers; to wait for the “snail-like . . . routine-ridden” people themselves spontaneously to adopt true revolutionary ideas was a case of futile majoritarianism; 2) the revolutionary socialist elite would establish a dictatorship of the workers and a workers’ state; 3) new generations of socialists could thus be reeducated and purged of old, private-property mentality; 4) rejecting Hegel and his protracted dialectic, Tkachev called for a proletarian revolution tomorrow, claiming that to wait for private property-mindedness to sink deeper within the Russian population was unacceptable; instead, a revolutionary jump (skachok) must be made over all intermediate socioeconomic stages (Tkachev parted with the Marxists on this point, describing Hegelianism as metaphysical rubbish); 4) to ensure the purging of old ways, the new workers’ state must set up a KOB (Komitet Obshchestvennoi Be-zopasnosti), or Committee for Public Security, modeled on Maximilien Robespierre’s similar committee in striking anticipation of the Soviet Cheka, later OGPU and KGB.

  In a famous letter written to Tkachev by Friedrich Engels, the latter disputed Tkachev on the Tkachevist notion that Russia could become a global pacesetter by independently making the social revolution in Russia, a backward country, in Marxist terms, building socialism directly on the basis of the old Russian commune (obshchina). In his letter to Engels in 1874, Tkachev had lectured Marx’s number one collaborator to the effect that Karl Marx simply did not understand the Russian situation, that Marxist strategies were “totally unsuitable for our country.” Ironically, this allegation became the mirror image of Georgy Plekhanov’s point d’appui in his dispute with Russian Jacobins in the mid-1880s, since Plekhanov, basing himself on Hegelian historical teaching of orthodox Marxism, regarded Jacobinism and Blanquism as a distortion of true Marxian revolutionism. For his part, years later Lenin, echoing Tkachev, retorted by describing Plekhanov as a feeble, wait-and-see gradualist.

  When Tkachev died in a psychiatric hospital in Paris in 1886 (he was said to have suffered paralysis of the brain), the well-known Russian revolutionist Petr Lavrov delivered the eulogy together with others such as the French Blanquist Eduard Vaillant. Years later, Tkachev’s body was disin1554 terred since the cemetery plot in the Cim?tiere Parisien d’Ivry was not adequately financed. His remains were cremated. See also: BOLSHEVISM; ENGELS, FRIEDRICH; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Volkogonov, Dmitri. (1994). Lenin: A New Biography. New York: Free Press. Weeks, Albert L. (1968). The First Bolshevik: A Political Biography of Peter Tkachev. New York: New York University Press.

  ALBERT L. WEEKS

  TOGAN, AHMED ZEKI VALIDOV

  (1890-1970), prominent Bashkir nationalist activist during the early Soviet period and well-known scholar of Turkic historical studies.

  Born in a Bashkir village in Ufa province and educated at Kazan University, Ahmed Zeki Validi (Russianized as Validov) had begun a promising career as an Orientalist scholar before the revolution. In May 1917 Validov participated in the All Russian Muslim Congress in Moscow, where he advocated federal reorganization of the Russian state and criticized plans of some Tatar politicians for extraterritorial autonomy in a unitary state. By the end of the year, Validov had emerged as primary leader of a small Bashkir nationalist movement that promulgated (in December 1917) an autonomous Bashkir republic based in Orenburg. Arrested by Soviet forces in February 1918, Validov escaped in April and joined the emerging anti-Bolshevik movement as full-scale civil war broke out that summer. Attempts to organize the Bashkir republic and separate Bashkir military forces under White auspices flagged, particularly after Admiral Kolchak took charge of the White movement. In February 1919 Validov and most of his colleagues defected to the Soviet side in return for the promise of complete Bashkir autonomy. However, sixteen months of increasingly frustrating collaboration with Soviet pow
er ended in June 1920 when Validov departed to join the Basmachis in Central Asia, hoping to link the Bashkir search for autonomy to a larger movement for Turkic independence from Russian colonial rule. These hopes were dashed with Bas-machi defeat.

  ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

  TOLSTAYA, TATIANA NIKITICHNA

  After leaving Turkestan in 1923, Validov taught at Istanbul University in Turkey (1925-1932), where he adopted the surname Togan. He went on to earn a doctorate at the University of Vienna (1932-1935) and taught at Bonn and G?ttingen Universities (1935-1939). Togan returned to Istanbul University in 1939 and remained there until his death in 1970. Togan’s scholarly output was prodigious, with over four hundred publications, largely in Turkish and German, on the history of the Turkic peoples from antiquity to the twentieth century, including his own remarkable memoirs (Hatiralar). During these years of exile, Validov and Validovism (validovshchina) lived on in the Soviet lexicon as the epitome of reactionary Bashkir nationalism, and accusations of connection with Validov proved fatal for hundreds if not thousands of Bashkirs and other Muslims in Russia. Since the early 1990s Togan’s name has been rehabilitated in his homeland, where he is now recognized as the father of today’s Republic of Bashkortostan. See also: BASHKORTISTAN AND THE BASHKIRS