The tale of Boris Godunov, who ruled Russia after the death of Ivan the Terrible, is familiar to modern audiences through the high-octane melodrama of Modest Mussorgsky’s magnificent opera. Both it and the Pushkin play on which it is based tell the story of Russia’s Time of Troubles, the two fraught decades at the start of the seventeenth century – roughly between the death of Fyodor, the half-witted heir of Ivan the Terrible, and the advent of the Romanovs in 1613 – when famine, revolt, economic devastation and foreign invasions came close to destroying the Russian state for ever. Mussorgsky’s libretto paraphrases Pushkin, but both play and opera conjure Shakespearean tragedy from Godunov’s tormented conscience:
Here is conspiracy, sedition1 of the boyars, Lithuanian plots … famine, plague, fear and ruin. The people wander like wild beasts, stricken with disease. Russia groans with hunger and poverty. This dreadful misery is sent by God to punish me for my grievous sin. All blame me for this calamity. Everywhere they curse the name of Boris … Everywhere I see the murdered child!
Both Mussorgsky and Pushkin accept as fact the allegation that Godunov had risen to power by murdering the true tsar, the infant son of Ivan the Terrible, thus terminating the dynastic line of Rurik, the founder of ancient Rus, and creating a catastrophically destabilising power vacuum. In reality, it seems Godunov was innocent and the child – Dmitry – died of natural causes, but the Russian people desperately needed to find some explanation for the apocalyptic fate that had befallen them since Ivan’s death. Three successive years of crop failures, sub-zero temperatures even in the summer months, peasant uprisings and lacerating bouts of plague had brought death and destruction on a scale that prompted panic, and prophecies of the end of time. Hungry masses descended on Moscow, blaming Godunov for usurping the crown and provoking the wrath of God:
What if the murdered2 Tsarevich Dmitry should suddenly rise from out the grave, should cry, ‘Where are ye, children, faithful servants? Help me against Boris, against my murderer! Seize my foe and lead him to me!’
Unbeknown to him, Godunov’s nightmare was about to come true. Amid the public unrest, a series of clever conmen stepped forward, claiming they were the tsarevich and true heir to the throne. None of these pretenders could explain how they’d miraculously risen from the grave, but such was the febrile discontent of the times that they won widespread support. The false Dmitrys played on the popular belief that the true tsar was the anointed representative of God and would never let the holy land of Russia fall into danger – so Godunov must by definition be a usurper.
Russia’s enemies in the west spotted their chance. The Poles and Lithuanians threw their backing behind one of the pretenders, a young monk named Grigory Otrepev, and furnished him with 3,000 troops. In 1604, he marched on Moscow, picking up thousands of supporters who resented the oppressive rule of Moscow and regarded Godunov as an impostor. They arrived just as Godunov was about to drop dead from a heart attack; false Dmitry made a triumphal entry into the Kremlin and was proclaimed tsar in 1605. He married a Polish princess, installed Polish-Lithuanian forces in the Kremlin and announced plans to convert Russia from Orthodoxy to Catholicism.
Dmitry’s reign was to be short and violent, but after his death in 1606 other pretenders emerged, and for seven turbulent years the fate of the nation hung in the balance. The Russian crown was offered to the King of Poland and it seemed another period of hostile foreign occupation was about to begin.
But in 1612, two heroes emerged to save Russia from her foes. Nowadays Muscovites walk past their memorial, by St Basil’s Cathedral in the shadow of the Kremlin walls, with barely a second glance. But without their intervention, Russia could today be a Roman Catholic province of Poland and Lithuania. The heroes’ names are Minin and Pozharsky. The latter was a Russian prince, who had fought in earlier battles against the Poles, but Kuzma Minin was the archetypal man of the people, a merchant – a butcher by trade – from the city of Nizhny Novgorod.
When he heard that Moscow had fallen to the Poles, Minin flew into a patriotic rage. He launched a campaign to raise public funds for a national army of liberation and pledged to drive the occupiers out of Russia. Minin enlisted the support of the Russian Orthodox Patriarch, Germogen, who appealed to the leaders of several Russian cities: ‘Let us act together of one3 accord … Orthodox Christians in love and unity. Let us fight unto death to free Muscovy of our enemies, the Poles and Lithuanians.’ Germogen gave his official blessing to the army of national resistance, cursing the Roman Catholic Poles for their threats against Orthodoxy. For his temerity he was beaten and starved to death by the occupiers.
In the winter snows of November 1612, Minin and Pozharsky arrived on the outskirts of Moscow at the head of a rather ramshackle army. With an unexpected show of tactical genius, they manoeuvred their improvised militia and pinned down the Polish forces inside the Kremlin. Russia was saved. Surrounded and close to starvation – there were reports of them eating dogs and even of cannibalism – the Poles finally offered to surrender on condition of safe passage back to Poland.
The Russians agreed, and the weak, exhausted Poles filed out of the Kremlin gates at the foot of Red Square. But as they did so, the Russians pounced. The Poles were massacred to the last man. Such was the barbarism of the times and the passionate fervour of national feeling. The success of Minin and Pozharsky in 1612 suggests there was by now an Orthodox Russian nation capable of acting independently of the tsar. Religious faith and a community of shared responsibility in the face of a common enemy were once again the glue that bound Russians together.
But the first act of the victorious people was to restore the legitimacy of the monarchy.
Ivan the Terrible, and his imbecile son Fyodor, who served as a puppet for the boyar Boris Godunov, were the last of the Rurik dynasty rulers. Now Russia was in search of a new dynasty. In 1613, the absence of legitimate power had left the throne to be fought over. The Time of Troubles, first with the tormented Godunov and then the usurping Poles, had undermined the authority of the state. Now, desperate for a strong leader to unite the country against her enemies, the boyars called a national council (Zemskii Sobor) of the nobility, clergy and merchants to elect a tsar.
The Romanovs were one among many aristocratic clans at the Russian court. They had a connection with the Crown – Ivan the Terrible’s wife Anastasia was from one of the family’s branches. But they were about to prove themselves by far the most adept at exploiting the power vacuum left by the contested period of boyar rule during the Time of Troubles. No one knew it then, but the Romanov family would rule for 300 years, until the cataclysm of 1917. Several candidates were proposed to the boyars’ council, including King Karl Philipp of Sweden, but the Romanovs scooped the day by promoting their young prince, Mikhail. He was just 17, but he was – crucially – a grand nephew of Ivan the Terrible and consequently an indirect link with the good old days of military strength and economic order.
The start of a new dynasty was potentially a time for a new style of governance in Russia. The nobility at the Zemskii Sobor might have seized the moment to insist on a role in running the country. And if they had done, Russia might once again have taken a different course.
Instead, the nobles acceded to what they all agreed was the country’s overriding priority: the need for an absolute ruler, unshackled by restrictions on his authority, and invested with the monolithic power necessary to safeguard national security. Another opportunity to temper the autocracy that would dog Russia for centuries had slipped by with nothing changed. In the minds of the boyars, and almost certainly of the Russian people, the need for national unity and security was the paramount priority that overrode considerations of participatory government and individual rights. The silnaya ruka was Russia’s default position and, as events were to prove, in 1613 it was clearly the right one.
Mikhail Romanov took office at a perilous time. The Polish occupiers had been driven out of Moscow, but they and other marauding bands of Cossacks, mercenaries and brigands continued to roam the Russian countryside. Tsar Mikhail I had to be escorted to his coronation by heavily armed troops.
But unlike Godunov, the new tsar seemed to enjoy the support of his key constituencies. Popular legends grew up around him, possibly encouraged by the Romanovs. The most famous of them, ‘The Tale of Ivan Susanin’, stressed Mikhail’s closeness to the people, and the people’s solidarity in the cause of the state. Immortalised in Mikhail Glinka’s opera A Life [Laid Down] for the Tsar (1836), Susanin gets wind of an enemy plot: the Poles have dispatched their troops to murder Tsar Mikhail, and our hero is the nation’s only hope of saving him. Susanin sends his nephew to raise the alarm, while he himself promises to take the Poles to the tsar. But Susanin leads the Poles off the road and into the depths of the Russian forest where they, and he, perish from the cold. The story’s message is clear – and the Russian people understood it then, as they did from Glinka’s opera two centuries later – that the individual must sacrifice himself for the greater good; the state is necessary for the survival of the people and the individual is bound to serve it.
The Susanin legend encapsulates the same collectivist ethos we saw in the self-sacrifice of Boris and Gleb, who gave up their throne, and their lives, for the sake of stability in eleventh-century Kiev (see here). And it will recur in the twentieth century, notably in the legend of Matvey Kuzmin, the Soviet partisan who led a Nazi patrol into an ambush at the cost of his own life. The enshrinement of the common good as society’s paramount ideal makes possible at the same time some of the worst and the best in the people and the nation. At one end of the scale, it surfaces in the early idealism of twentieth-century Communism and the continuing social solidarity of the Russian people. At the other, it underpins phenomena like the Red Army’s reckless sacrifice of men in the Second World War and the post-war pillaging of the civilian economy to serve the needs of the military.
The Bolsheviks didn’t know what to make of the Susanin legend. At first they banned Glinka’s opera because it glorified the tsar, but when they realised the power of its collectivist message, they relented. Its rousing final chorus, ‘Slavsya Ty, Rus’ Moya!’, later to become briefly the Russian national anthem, is today a standard in the repertoire of the Red Army:
Glory to you, my native Russian land4!
May you be forever strong!
Strike down with your mighty hand
All enemies who violate our land!
In 2005, the then president Vladimir Putin declared 4 November – the date Minin and Pozharsky united the nation and drove the Poles out of Moscow – a national holiday. It replaced the former Victory Day of 7 November, too closely identified with the old Communist regime. The new holiday was christened Russian National Unity Day, and it was, I suppose inevitably, hijacked by the black shirt-wearing, Hitler-saluting Russian nationalists, who interpret Russian unity as Slavic unity. The Russian National Unity Party welcomed National Unity Day with its own brand of Slavic chauvinism. ‘In 1612,’ it announced, ‘our enemies were the Poles and Lithuanians5; but today they are NATO and the assertive ethnic groups in our own Russian land.’
But that view misinterprets history, for many of those ‘ethnic groups’ had already been assimilated by Russia in 1612 and were fighting on the same side. Russia was by then a multi-ethnic empire that took in vast swathes of territory well beyond the traditional Slav lands. And it was, ironically, the wealth of that very empire – the northern forests, the agriculture of the Asian south, the mineral riches of Siberia – that had given Muscovy the strength to survive its recurring crises. As we’ll see, the relationship between the Russian state and the Russian Empire – between its original Slavic population and its expanding multi-ethnic one – was to become an ever more crucial factor in moulding the country’s future identity.