However, it never took effect, since Wladyslaw did not come to claim his throne. Instead, Sigismund declared his intention of doing so himself. This prompted the Patriarch, Hermogen, to issue a stern injunction that the Russian people were not to ‘kiss the cross before a Catholic king’. This assertion of Orthodox fundamentalism seems to have struck a chord, and the death of the second pretender at about the same time removed an obstacle to combined national action. At any rate, within a few months an ad hoc alliance of service nobles and Cossacks had formed a militia and a provisional government and issued a statement recognizing as the supreme authority ‘the whole land’. As we have seen, this term signified the power of local communities, separate from but allied with the supreme power. For the moment, the army council reserved to itself the exercise of this authority, but promised not to take certain steps, such as imposing the death penalty, without consulting the whole army. They indicated that lands wrongfully appropriated by boyars were to be returned to the state land fund, from which they would be awarded to servitors strictly in accordance with the duties they had discharged. Serving Cossacks were to be offered the choice of a pomest’e to settle down on or a salary for continuing military service on the borders. Peasants were to be forbidden to leave the estates on which they worked, and provisions were made for their recapture and return if they did so.18
This declaration represented a compromise between the interests of the Cossacks and those of the service nobility. It did not fully satisfy either: Cossacks in particular were suspicious that it would breach their ancient freedom. Moreover, it offered nothing to the towns or to the ordinary peasant soldiers. Relations between the different social groups broke down, and Prokopii Liapunov, a service noble from Riazan’ who commanded the militia, was murdered. The first attempt to unite the nation behind a programme of expelling infidels and foreigners had failed because of the incompatible social interests of those involved.
The second and more successful attempt originated in the towns of the north and east. It began with a traditional skhod, or assembly, of the zemstvo elders in Nizhnii Novgorod, the principal city of the middle Volga. A merchant, Kuz’ma Minin, made an eloquent appeal to his colleagues to reject the rule of Cossacks and aliens as divisive and offensive to the true faith, and to take the initiative themselves in setting up a voluntary militia to march on Moscow, free it and enthrone a new Tsar ‘whom God shall send us’. The assembly approved the idea and composed appeals to other towns for money and recruits: ‘Let us be together of one accord … Orthodox Christians in love and unity, and let us not tolerate the recent disorders, but let us fight untiringly to the death to purge the state of Muscovy from our enemies, the Poles and Lithuanians.’19 Towns in the north and east, and on the Volga one by one joined the movement, sending contributions and troops, while subsidies were also received from the Stroganovs and from some monasteries.
The way the movement was built up demonstrates the importance of the wealth Moscow was by now receiving from the Volga basin and from its new northern and eastern territories, and also the potential of the elective mir assemblies which Ivan had tried to institutionalize at the start of his reign. As the historian Platonov put it, this was a movement of ‘zemskaia Rus’, of church, land and traditional local gatherings against disunity and foreign domination’.20The militia was placed under the command of a service noble and voevoda, Dmitrii Pozharskii, who had earlier distinguished himself in fighting against the Poles.
Pozharskii took up position in Iaroslavl’, as a large town on the Volga much closer to Moscow, and established there a provisional government headed by Minin, with the title of ‘The Man Chosen by the Entire People’. From there the militia advanced on Moscow and drove out the Poles. Then the military council issued invitations to all towns and districts to send their ‘best, most sensible and trustworthy people’, each equipped with a mandate, to a ‘council of the land’ (sovet vseia zemli) which would elect the new Tsar.
Some five hundred delegates came from everywhere between the White Sea and the Don, representing boyars, service nobles, clergy, merchants, Cossacks, posad people (townsfolk), and ‘black’ (non-enserfed) peasants. The bitter divisions which had plunged Russia into anarchy for so long were not fully stilled by the common victory: service nobles and Cossacks were at loggerheads, boyar clans continued to feud and insist on their pedigree, while some supported foreign candidates. The latter, however, were rejected by the assembly as a whole ‘for their many injustices’. It was decided that the new monarch must be Russian and Orthodox.
On 7 February 1613 the sobor elected the sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov as the new Tsar. This choice illustrates the prevailing yearning for stability, the desire to restore a state of affairs as close as possible to what might be called ‘normality’. Mikhail was the eldest son of a family closely related to the Riurik dynasty, and hence the nearest thing to a hereditary monarch that the assembly could find. To legitimate his choice, a story was assiduously put around that Fedor Ivanovich, the last Riurik Tsar, had entrusted his sceptre and crown to Mikhail’s uncle. No explicit conditions were imposed or even requested: the dynastic sense triumphed over the aspiration to set a limit to the monarch’s power, for which this would have been the ideal moment. The delegates, it turned out, had come to the meeting not with binding conditions to put to candidates in the course of the election, but with petitions to submit to him once he was elected.
In its greatest test hitherto, then, the people of Muscovy showed that they felt their vulnerability, from within and without, sufficiently to wish a dynastic, hereditary and autocratic ruler. The forces seeking unity – service nobles, townsfolk, clergy, ‘black’ peasants – triumphed over those – boyars, Cossacks, serfs – better able to profit from discord. The whole movement drew its inspiration, organization and financial support from the areas in the north and east which had been least affected by the oprichnina and by the encroachments of serfdom.
The whole protracted affair suggested that, in moments of supreme crisis, the Russians could and would eventually work together, temporarily putting aside their conflicts, their clannish and socio-economic interests and reconstituting themselves as a potential nation. The Nizhnii Novgorod militia was extremely suspicious of both boyars and Cossacks, but nevertheless cooperated with individuals from both categories when that seemed necessary for the common good. The outcome also suggested that Russians identified themselves with strong authority, backed by the Orthodox Church and unrestrained by any charter or covenant, such as might prove divisive and set one social group against another. Maureen Perrie has shown how, during the Time of Troubles, tales circulated among the common people of a ‘good’ or ‘just’ monarch, who would protect them against their oppressors.21
All the same, the election of a new autocrat did not just mean a return to old Muscovite ways. For one thing, the Time of Troubles had succeeded far better than Ivan IV in weakening the boyars. Individual boyars and their families continued to play a role in politics, but now through their presence at court and through the Tsar’s service, rather than through their patrimonies and retainers. By contrast, the service nobles had gained in