Russian Classics Ultimate Collection: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький

and strongly fortified towers and gates peeped out from amid the thickly growing trees, and spoke defiance to Tartar raiders and plundering bands of freebooters. They were now called upon to withstand an organised siege from the batteries of the False Dimitri. In anticipation of the threatened attack two voevodas and a detachment of soldiers were dispatched from Moskva to the assistance of the monks, who numbered scarcely more than 300 brothers; the monastery servants and peasants from the neighbouring villages brought the effective of the defenders to 2500. At the end of September 1608 a force of 30,000 men, Poles, Russians, Tartars, Kozaks, and Tcherkesses, led by Sapieha and Lisovski, invested this secluded haven of peace and piety, which was suddenly transformed into a beleaguered fortress. The balls from ninety heavy cannon crashed incessantly against the walls and towers, which “shivered, but did not fall”; mines and assaults alike were fruitless, and the siege dragged on month after month. The monks fought as vigorously as the soldiers, and during the lulls in the attack paraded their venerated ikons on the ramparts.193 Meanwhile the tide of the Ljhedimitri’s success had begun to ebb. The composition of his following bore within itself the elements of defeat. The Poles, Kozaks, and Russian outlaws, who formed the most active contingents of his adherents, drove from his cause, by their licentiousness and indiscriminate marauding, the people whom they had previously won over by their energy and the renown of their arms. Wherever the opportunity offered, the towns which had acknowledged the pretender renounced his sovereignty and recognised that of Vasili. The reaction was further hastened by the victorious campaign of Skopin-Shouyskie and his Swedish allies. Vasili, less prudent than Boris, had accepted the renewed offer of assistance which King Karl held out, and, at the price of yielding up the town of Keksholm and district of Korelia, had obtained the services of 5000 Swedes, led by Jacob de la Gardie, son of the famous general. With this reinforcement Skopin-Shouyskie proceeded to strike at the northern strongholds of the Toushinists, and the two young captains (Mikhail was twenty-three, de la Gardie twenty-seven) swept all before them. 1609A victory over the rebels in May was followed by the capture of Toropetz, Kholm, Velikie-Louki, and other places. In July the army of the False Dimitri was driven out of Tver after hard fighting. Temporarily deserted by the Swedes, whose demands he was unable to satisfy, Skopin continued to organise victory; his exhausted war-chest was replenished by patriotic disbursements from several monasteries, while the Stroganovs sent him valuable aid in men and money from Perm. The young voevoda “whom the people loved” had the art of opening purse-strings as well as of forcing strongholds. In August a force detached from the siege of the stubbornly defended Troitza was met and repulsed with loss on the banks of a Volga tributary stream, and in October Skopin, rejoined by the Swedes, drove his enemies successively out of Péréyaslavl and the Aleksandrovski sloboda. The loss of the latter place threatened the blockade which the Ljhedimitri’s voevodas had drawn round Moskva, and Sapieha made a determined effort to beat back the indomitable pilot of the reaction. Around the horror-haunted village where the Terrible had amused himself with his bears and gibbets and services, a bloody battle was fought between the armies of the rival Tzars; Shouyskie’s Moskovite and Permskie troops and the Swedish allies crowned their campaign by another victory, and the followers of the Thief straggled away from a scene of defeat and slaughter. Wearily back they made their way to the doleful camp at Toushin or to the monastery whose battered walls still held them at bay, while the ravens and hooded corbies came barking and croaking out of the darkening woods to interest themselves in the corpses stiffening in the snow; and from afar, perhaps from the distant Valdai mountains, the vultures swooped down on the same errand.

      1610

      The cause of the phantom was fading; on the 12th January the defenders of the Troitza, worn with sixteen months of siege and wasted with want and disease, saw their foiled enemies withdraw sullenly from their dismantled trenches and vanish from the landscape they had so long disfigured. In February the impostor withdrew southward to Kalouga, and by March the famous camp of Toushin was deserted. But the decline of the Ljhedimitri’s fortunes was not followed by a corresponding improvement in those of Vasili. Sigismund, who had secretly abetted the cause of the second pretender, prepared to play a bolder game now that the insurrection seemed on the wane. The calling in of the Swedes, the “interference” of the rival branch of the House of Vasa, gave him a diplomatic excuse for displaying open hostility towards the Tzar, and the confusion which reigned throughout Russia furnished him with an opportunity for intervening with specious solicitude in the eddying course of the troubles. In September he crossed the border with a not very numerous army, and invited the burghers of Smolensk to admit him as a friend who wished only to stay the shedding of Russian blood. A similar declaration was forwarded to Moskva. Shein, the governor of Smolensk, refused to be cajoled by the benevolent overtures of the honey-lipped King, and the city was blockaded. Sapieha and the Poles and West-Russian Kozaks were summoned from the pretender’s service to join the royal camp, and many of the Moskovite adherents of the Ljhedimitri went with them. Thus a new danger trod on the heels of the old one, and Vasili once again beheld his Sysiphus stone of subjugation and pacification roll back from the almost-gained summit. A catastrophe which was suspiciously like a crime deprived him at once of the services of his ablest voevoda and of the lingering affections of the Moskvitchi. Skopin-Shouyskie and de la Gardie had wintered their troops at Aleksandrov; in March 1610 they made their entry into the capital, where the young Mikhail was received with a public enthusiasm such as had probably never been so spontaneously exhibited since the triumph of the victor of Koulikovo. Far out into the slobodas and meadows the populace streamed to welcome their hero, falling prostrate as he rode by with his companion-in-arms, and calling him their saviour; some were said to have hailed him as their Tzar. This demonstration could scarcely fail to be displeasing to Vasili; it was the old story of a consciously feeble monarch and a victorious and idolised warrior. Still more would it jar upon the Tzar’s brother and natural heir, Dimitri Shouyskie, whose chances of succession were undoubtedly threatened by the popularity of his nephew. At a christening feast given by the Tzar’s brother-in-law, Ivan Vorotuinskie, on the 23rd April, the young hope of the Moskovites was seized with a deadly illness, and expired as soon as he had been carried to his own house. His friend and fellow-in-arms, de la Gardie, forced himself into the death-chamber, and, gazing wofully on his stricken comrade, exclaimed, “People of Moskva, not only in your Russia, but in the lands of my sovereign, I shall not see again such another man.” The heart-wail of the young soldier was echoed by the people, who mingled with their lamentations bitter and not unreasonable accusations of foul play against the Shouyskies. Ekaterina, wife of Dimitri Shouyskie, of the “viper brood” of Skouratov (she was daughter of Maluta), was generally credited with having administered poison to the unsuspecting Mikhail. To crown the universal resentment, Dimitri Shouyskie was given the vacant command of the tzarskie troops.

While the muttering roll of disaffection sounded louder every day on the Red Place and in the markets of the Kitai-gorod, in the west the Polish invaders (who had put forward Vladislav, son of Sigismund, as candidate for the throne of Moskva) were making themselves masters of the Russian border towns. Starodoub, Potchep, and Tchernigov were taken by assault, Novgorod-Sieverski and Roslavl “kissed the cross” to Vladislav. Against these advancing enemies it was necessary to oppose such force as could be rallied on behoof of the disliked and despised Tzar. An army of 40,000 Russians and 8000 Swedes, under the supreme command of the incompetent Dimitri Shouyskie, moved west towards Smolensk. They did not get far. Near Mojhaysk they were attacked by the royal hetman Jholkiewsko on the morning of the 23rd June and completely defeated, the Moskovite cavalry breaking at the first shock.194 The German troops in de la Gardie’s following deserted to the enemy early in the battle; “the Poles advanced to their regiments crying, Kum! Kum! and the Germans came flying like birds to a call.”195 The tzarskie voevodas, Shouyskie, Golitzuin, and Mezentzkie, galloped away into the forest, the first-named leaving his baggage, money, staff of command, and his furs in the hands of the victors. De la Gardie, regretting more than ever his lost comrade, surrendered to Jholkiewsko, and was permitted to return with his diminished battalions to the north. As a result of this decisive encounter Voloko-Lamsk, the Iosif monastery, and other places were forced to submit to the Polish commander. In the capital the effect was to hasten the downfall of the Shouyskie dynasty. The brothers Prokopie