FALSE DMITRII, FIRST (1582?–1606?; ruled 1605–1606)

FALSE DMITRII, FIRST (1582?–1606?; ruled 1605–1606), the most successful of the several pretenders to the Muscovite throne during the Time of Troubles and a rallying-point for those in revolt against Tsar Boris Godunov; briefly ruled as tsar.

In 1603 a young man appeared in Lithuania who claimed to be Tsarevich Dmitrii Ivanovich, son and heir of Ivan IV. He repudiated the official story that Tsarevich Dmitrii had died an accidental death at Uglich in 1591, claiming instead that he had been delivered from a murder plot concocted by Boris Godunov. The true identity of the man remains in dispute. Some scholars identify him as a defrocked fugitive monk, Grigorii Otrep'ev, a pawn of Godunov's main political rivals, the Romanovs, while others think he was selected by the Nogais many years before and brought up to believe that he truly was the tsarevich.

This False Dmitrii quickly won the recognition and support of the Lithuanian Chancellor Lew Sapieha, Prince Adam Wisniowiecki, and especially Jerzy Mniszech, the palatine of Sandomierz, who raised a small army of Polish mercenaries and adventurers on Dmitrii's behalf. Most likely they intended to regain those parts of Seversk, Chernigov (Chernihiv), and Smolensk that the Commonwealth had lost seventy years before. King Sigismund III allegedly gave this project some qualified unofficial support. How much assistance these men were prepared to offer him cannot be determined, but Dmitrii expected such support and pledged in return to marry Mniszech's daughter Marina and accept the Catholic faith.

In October 1604 Dmitrii's army invaded the Seversk region of southwestern Muscovy. Although many of Dmitrii's Polish troops and retainers soon abandoned him, he more than made up these losses with new support from the Zaporozhian and Don Cossack Hosts. Putivl', Ryl'sk, Kursk, and Kromy quickly capitulated to him. Most of the garrison troops, townsmen, and court peasants of the Seversk region welcomed Dmitrii, seeing him as their deliverer from unpopular military governors and the onerous agricultural corvée on crown plowlands. Tsar Boris's commanders were unable to take advantage of their armies' overwhelming numerical superiority, and their harsh reprisals against Seversk towns and villages, state peasants, and garrison troops stiffened rebel resistance. By spring 1605 the rebellion on behalf of the False Dmitrii had spread to include most of Muscovy's southern frontier. Soon after Tsar Boris's unexpected death on 13 April 1605, many of his field commanders and several of the more powerful duma boyars came over to Dmitrii's camp at Kromy. Boris's successor, the sixteen-year-old Tsar Fedor Borisovich, was deposed and murdered. Dmitrii entered the capital on 20 June 1605 and was crowned tsar the following day.

Tsar Dmitrii attempted rapprochement with the duma boyars but made fatal errors in pardoning his archenemy, Prince Vasilii Shuiskii, and in not pressing his new tsaritsa, Marina Mnischówna, to renounce Catholicism. The allegedly arrogant conduct of Marina's Polish retinue provided further grounds for Shuiskii, the Golitsyns, and Metropolitan Hermogen to agitate against Tsar Dmitrii. On 14 May 1606 riots broke out in Moscow, initially against Marina's Polish guests; on 17 May Shuiskii's agents took advantage of the disorder to assassinate Dmitrii. Vasilii Shuiskii was proclaimed tsar two days later.

See also Boris Godunov (Russia) ; Russia ; Time of Troubles (Russia) .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dunning, Chester S. L. Russia's First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. University Park, Pa., 2001.

Perrie, Maureen. Pretenders and Popular Monarchism in Early Modern Russia: The False Tsars of the Time of Troubles. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1995.

Skrynnikov, Ruslan G. Boris Godunov. Edited and translated by Hugh F. Graham. Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1982.

Brian Davies