The Giants of Russian Literature: The Greatest Russian Novels, Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький

by those fierce irregulars, who, now that the binding tie of a common military task was loosened, were more than ever a thorn in the side of the Moskovites. Helping themselves to plunder and demanding pay, they threatened to turn their weapons against the citizens and country troops, and the capital seemed likely to become the scene of renewed bloodshed. In the midst of these feuds and disorders Moskva was suddenly agitated by the intelligence that the King of Poland in person was marching against it with a large army. This was only half a truth; Sigismund had indeed made a tardy movement towards the succour of his Polish outpost in the Russian capital, but neither Poland nor Lit’uania had furnished him with the necessary forces. Valuable time was lost at Vilna and at Smolensk without any resulting increase in the King’s army, and in October he was obliged to move forward with only 3000 German troops, of whom 2000 were infantry. A junction effected with the retreating remnant of Khodkievitch’s forces did not materially strengthen his following, and the news of the surrender of the Kreml put a finishing touch to the hopes of the expedition. An ineffectual assault on Voloko-Lamsk completed the Polish monarch’s discomfiture, and soon after the Moskvitchi learned that their enemy had withdrawn across the border. The Russian land was free from the invader, and the Russian people had liberty and leisure to set about the important task of electing a new sovereign, and evolving a new dynasty from the chaos and wreckage which had attended the disappearance of the old one. In the dark winter days which followed the capture of the Kreml, when anger and fear and suspicion, rumour-bred or founded on past experiences of trouble, had sharpened the minds of the citizens, an idea had sprung up which seemed to be flavoured at least with hope. As a door had suddenly opened in the Kreml wall and given egress for a crowd of eagerly-escaping hostages, so, from that very circumstance, a way seemed opened as an outlet for Russian perplexities and troubles. Among the throng who had pressed across the gangway over the Neglina was the sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov, son of the Metropolitan “Filarete,” and grandson of Nikita Romanovitch, whose sister Anastasie had been the first wife of Ivan the Terrible. Here was a representative of a family which furnished a link with the vanished dynasty, and which at the same time had no untoward reminiscences in its past history to cloud the affections of the people. If the Romanovs had rendered no striking services to the country, at least there were no skeletons of Ouglitch, no records of extortion and faction-mongering to reproach them with. Standing near the throne, they had never seemed to scheme for its possession, and if the citizens and country-folk alike turned their thoughts towards young Mikhail it was a spontaneous movement, innocent of the influences by means of which Boris Godounov and Vasili Shouyskie had engineered their elections. Nor was the young boyarin devoid of recommendatory qualities, though these were naturally of a negative order; but lately a prisoner in the hands of the Poles, as his father was still (Thedor Romanov had visited the cradle of his race under inauspicious circumstances, having been seized and carried as a prisoner to Marienburg at the outbreak of hostilities), he was scarcely likely to have leanings towards Polish and Catholic ideas. His connection with the elder family branch of Ivan IV. precluded him from sympathy with the Nagois and the brood of impostors which sprang up in mock relationship with them, and equally he was free from any taint of political association with Zaroutzkie and the partisans of Marina. The people saw in his parentage a relic of the old reigning family, in his youth perhaps a reminiscence of his namesake, their beloved Skopin-Shouyskie, and they forgave him the fact that the blood of Rurik did not flow in his veins. 1613As the dieti-boyarins and starostas, the archimandrites of monasteries and other church dignitaries, and all the various country representatives came flocking into Moskva to the national electoral sobor, one name was heard on every side; and when, in “Orthodox Week” of the great Lent, the Archbishop of Riazan, attended by the archimandrite of the Novo-Spasskie, the cellarer of the Troitza, and the boyarin Morozov, proceeded to the high place of execution and put the question of the choice to the assemblage crowded in the Red Square, one name was thundered back from a gaping chorus of throats. “Mikhail Thedorovitch Romanov.” The Time of the Troubles had ended.

      Hymns of jubilation arose in the temples, the kolokols sounded from one end of Moskva to the other, and the great city and its influx of country-folk rejoiced at having once more a holy and Orthodox sovereign. But much remained to be done ere the new state of things was settled on a firm footing; Zaroutzkie and his Kozaks, driven out of the capital, plundered and ravaged in the south-east; the Poles and Swedes threatened the west and north-west; freebooters, unattached to any party, rode in marauding troops everywhere. The situation was alarming enough to deter any but the most adventurous from challenging its outcome, and when the ambassadors from the sobor came, with the news of Mikhail’s election, to the Ipat’evskie monastery at Kostroma, whither the young boyarin had retired with his mother, they found the latter reluctant to sanction her son’s acceptance of the offer. Her husband was a prisoner in the hands of the Poles, and her boy was now called upon to brave the fate which had brought to a violent end the younger Godounov, and perhaps his father, had lured on and destroyed both the False Dimitris, and had sent Vasili Shouyskie to a dishonoured captivity. When she at length yielded to their insistence other difficulties stood, literally, in the way. The Tzar-elect was constrained to halt for several weeks at Yaroslavl, on his journey to Moskva, by reason of the swarming bands of Kozaks and Polish adherents which infested the roads, and made travelling unsafe for any party smaller than an army. At length on the 2nd of May the long-looked-for cavalcade arrived, and the young Mikhail was triumphantly conducted into the Kreml which he had left under such different circumstances. Nine weeks later (11th July) the ceremony of the coronation took place in the Ouspienskie Cathedral with the customary pomp and time-honoured usages. The revered ikons of the Mother-of-God of Vladimir and the Mother-of-God of Kazan duly made their appearance on the scene, like the “male and female phœnix, entering with solemn gambollings,” which formed an auspicious feature in the festivals of Chinese Court mythology. But the throes of revolution had left the tzarstvo weak and the treasury depleted, and the young Gosoudar had to begin his reign by appealing for substantial support to a country already drained by contributions and forced distraints. The dieti-boyarins and small landowners, on whom the State depended for military service against the many enemies that threatened it, were unable to obtain the necessary sustenance from their deserted estates, and there were no means of supplying the wants of their retainers from the empty public coffers. A letter, signed by the Tzar, was sent to the administrators of the Perm and Sibirian provinces, the loyal and trusty Stroganovs, requesting the prompt payment of all outlying debts and taxes and further soliciting, “in the name of Christian peace and rest,” an immediate loan of money, corn, fish, salt, cloth, and all kinds of goods for the payment and support of the soldiery. Similar letters were sent to the principal towns and districts of the gosoudarstvo. Russian convalescence demanded feeding and strengthening against the possibility of a relapse.

Dark and anxious for the Moskvitchi was the winter following the tzarskie election; sullen and ill-fed troops quartered within the capital, and without bands of Kozaks prowling like wolves about the country; no supplies coming into Moskva, only rumours of warlike invasion from Lit’uania. The thaws of spring might bring with them Sigismund and his hetmans, and the swallow tribes returning to their nests on the Kreml ramparts might once again be greeted with the singing of the Latins in the holy places of Orthodoxy. The forebodings of Polish invasion passed away, however, with the winter snows, and the Tzar’s counsellors were able to devote their attention to a campaign of extermination against Zaroutzkie and his wild horsemen. 1614The kniaz Ivan Odoevskie was dispatched with a Moskovite army in search of the Kozak chief, and after a series of marchings and counter-marchings fell in with him not far from Toula; according to the voevoda’s report, Zaroutzkie was completely defeated after two days’ continuous fighting, and forced to fly across the Don to Medvieditz with a few followers, leaving his baggage train, standards, and many prisoners in the victor’s hands. The chronicles give a somewhat different account of the matter, and relate that the rebel leader repulsed the tzarskie troops and retired in good order to Astrakhan, leaving a devastated country behind him. Whatever the actual result of the fighting, the disturbing element was at least removed from the heart of the empire, and the authorities at Moskva were able to open up negotiations with the Kozaks of the Don and Volga for the purpose of detaching them from the cause of Zaroutzkie and Marina and enlisting their services against the Lit’uanian enemy. The Tzar sent them messengers with his flag and exhortations to withdraw their allegiance from heretics and traitors; more to the purpose, he was able to send them supplies of cloth,