Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (23 page)

Behind the sealed Kremlin walls, meanwhile, the assassins closed in on their victim, who had sent his closest aide, Basmanov, to find out what was happening. The latter was killed as soon as he ran into the conspirators. Dmitry attempted to escape, as his door began to splinter under the intruders’ blows, by jumping through an upper window. He must have hoped to disappear within the maze of buildings round the palace, but in his rush he slipped and broke his leg. Some of the
streltsy
tried to save him, but the invaders had the advantage, and though he pleaded for his life, the injured man was shot. At once the bodies of Dmitry and Basmanov were stripped naked, bound, and displayed with lurid mockery on a small table on the open space beyond the Kremlin moat. All Moscow had the chance now to inspect their so-called tsar. Isaac Massa examined the corpse ‘with great interest’, and reported:

I was able to convince myself that what I saw before me was the same tsar whom I had seen many times, the same who had reigned for a year … I counted his wounds. They were of the number of 21. His skull had been stove in from above, and his brain lay beside him.
⁸⁴

These details mattered because the body was to have an afterlife. Indeed, several corpses featured in the politics to come. First came a rumour that demonic flames had played around the gruesome figures on the Moscow square; then an unseasonal frost blasted the fields, as if in punishment for regicide. The boyar Vasily Shuisky, who now saw himself as tsar, blamed the misfortune on Dmitry’s sorcery, and the pretender’s body was thrown into a pauper’s grave and, later, ceremonially burned. At the same time, a second corpse, this time that of a nine-year-old boy, was transported, with solemn reverence, from Uglich. The idea was to bring the true Dmitry home, to beg forgiveness for the sin of his murder, and to lay his bones to rest at last among his forefathers. The ceremony further damned the pretender who had stolen his name.

Shuisky had sent the Romanov Filaret to fetch the bones, a choice that kept the great priest out of Moscow and left the new tsar free to fill the vacant patriarchal office with a man of his own.
⁸⁵
But whether he felt snubbed or not, Filaret performed his role with aplomb. He declared the body of the martyred ‘Dmitry’ (which may in fact have been that of a child Shuisky’s men had murdered for the occasion) to be uncorrupted and sweet-smelling after fifteen years in the grave. Perfect childish hands still clasped a nut the young prince had been eating as he died. The carcass was now saint-material, and a procession accompanied the coffin on its progress to Moscow, arriving on schedule at the gates of the Kremlin. There, and all the way into the Archangel Cathedral, peacock ranks of bishops and court officials collected at the casket’s side to marvel and to pray. Sick and injured pilgrims were beckoned into the coffin’s presence and declared themselves healed; each new wonder was greeted by a loud peal of the Kremlin bells.

Jacques Margeret was among the unconvinced. The ‘miracles’, he wrote, were staged, and the corpse itself had soon decayed to such an extent that even ‘massive quantities of incense’ could not disguise the stench. This was no proof of holy grace but a ‘vulgar show’. Stinking or not, however, Ivan the Terrible’s last son was destined for the nation’s pantheon. The child’s body was buried in the catacomb of tsars, and no-one’s doubts, then or later, prevented the newly created St Dmitry from acting as a standard-bearer for the Russian nation. His shrine still occupies a place of honour in the Archangel Cathedral.

*   *   *

The combatants in Russia’s seventeenth-century civil war came from all classes and all regions of the Russian lands. It was not a simple class war – peasant against noble, city against countryside – but a conflict about legitimacy and justice that enlisted representatives of all classes on each of the many rapidly changing sides. Even within the Kremlin, there were nobles who supported the new tsar, Vasily Shuisky, and others who, at different times, pledged their allegiance to successive new pretenders or the Polish king. Some changed their minds several times. Filaret himself was captured by rebel troops and persuaded to serve a new pretender at a makeshift court, but the priest-politician eventually cast his lot with Sigismund III of Poland. Beyond the capital, the grievances of impoverished provincial gentry, peasants, cossacks and the landless poor alienated them all from Moscow’s boyars, but that did not mean that they formed a single opposition force. In their struggle for a just order, for freedom and food, the common people and cossack armies ended up fighting on behalf of no fewer than eight self-appointed ‘true tsars’ between 1606 and 1612, and sometimes they fought for two at once.
⁸⁶

The first revolts began in the summer of 1606. City after city fell to rebel armies, mainly in the south, and all refused to swear allegiance to a vain and overfed boyar. Shuisky himself, in the unkind words of a modern historian, was ‘short, stocky, balding and unattractive … and looked vaguely ridiculous’.
⁸⁷
Eschewing Dmitry’s vacant palace, this unpromising tsar built himself new quarters in the Kremlin, but his tenure there, like his contested reign, was brief.
⁸⁸
In July 1606, he had to barricade himself behind the Kremlin walls. For the first time, the cannon ranged around the royal fortress pointed downwards at the citizens below. At least two of the bridges that crossed the moat between the Kremlin and Moscow were also destroyed in preparation for a siege, and by autumn the capital was all but surrounded by insurgent troops. A serious food crisis loomed.
⁸⁹
It was only by convincing Muscovites that the rebels were planning to slaughter all of them, women and children included, that Shuisky held the city at all that autumn. Meanwhile, the embattled tsar was forced to begin selling the contents of the Kremlin’s fabled treasury. According to Isaac Massa, he raided the royal coffers for anything from gold to furs in his efforts to build support and pay his troops.
⁹⁰
But he did not empty the strongrooms completely. That privilege was reserved for his successors.

The Moscow siege began in late October 1606, and its severity exposed Tsar Vasily to the capital’s bitter criticism. Among his limited group of allies, the new patriarch, the ancient zealot Hermogen, became a most unlikely national hero. This seventy-six-year-old had joined the priesthood late in life, but he served it with a fanaticism that brooked no compromise with dissenters, appeasers, or foreigners of any kind. The insurgents, in his considered view, were Satan’s creatures, a judgement that shored up the new tsar’s rule for several months. Vasily, meanwhile, although no general himself, was wise enough to promote his talented nephew, Mikhail Skopin-Shuisky, to the most critical military command. By December 1606 the first insurgent army had been broken, its leaders divided, and Shuisky treated Moscow, yet again, to the spectacle of mass executions. Merchants and minor clerks alike grew tired of the sight of death as 15,000 cossacks were slaughtered. The ringleaders were publicly impaled.
⁹¹

Tsar Vasily had few real friends. Some of the Kremlin’s leading clans (especially the Golitsyns) saw their own members as alternative tsars, but most would have preferred a restoration of the former status quo, where they held power round the throne of someone they could all accept. There was frequent traffic between the Kremlin and the various pretenders’ camps, but though a second ‘False Dmitry’ drew a hopeful suite to his court near Moscow, at Tushino, and though he was an Orthodox Russian (and thus a sort of patriot), he was unable to unite the many factions now competing for the capital. As the state of Muscovy continued to tear itself apart, Tsar Vasily approached the Swedes. In exchange for the Kremlin’s ‘eternal friendship’ (and, by implication, eternal hostility to the Poles), Sweden pledged to help Shuisky to defeat the cossack insurgency and the hated pretenders. In 1609, a Swedish army duly marched south from the Baltic, its sights set on control of Novgorod.

But the Poles remained the real players in the battle for the Russian throne. No-one can be sure when the candidacy of Wladislaw, the son of Sigismund III, was first mooted, and in hindsight the choice appears almost defeatist. A deal with the Poles might well have brought peace to Muscovy, however, or at least supplied some decent troops to help shore up a restored throne. Wladislaw could also have founded a new dynasty, of impeccably royal blood, into which the boyar clans could marry once Vasily had been removed. In secret negotiations, the adherents of this option claimed to have extracted a promise from the fanatically Catholic King Sigismund that his son would convert to Orthodoxy before accepting Russia’s crown. By the summer of 1609, however, Sigismund had taken the initiative himself. He already had spies in the Kremlin as well as troops in the service of the pretender at Tushino, but now he led an army of his own into Russia. His destination was Smolensk, which he intended to take quickly before continuing in triumph to Moscow. If Boris Godunov had not built that mighty fortress, the campaign might have ended differently, and certainly sooner. Instead, it took two years – and the loss of thousands of its citizens’ lives – for Smolensk to fall to the Poles.
⁹²
The Russians did not manage to recapture it for nearly fifty years.

*   *   *

The so-called Time of Troubles, which began with the doomed reign of Boris Godunov, was a saga of destruction, murder and betrayal, but its final chapter, in the Kremlin, was the darkest one of all. In July 1610, a group of boyars, with the support of church leaders and hand-picked citizens, drove Vasily to abdicate. They made sure of his permanent neutrality by forcing him to take the vows of a monk and all but locking him inside the Chudov Monastery. With the glum acquiescence of the city fathers, a seven-man council of boyars assumed interim power, ostensibly to prepare for the accession of Wladislaw.
⁹³

They may have been the wealthiest and most distinguished nobles in the land, but the boyars of this short-lived council were trapped within their Kremlin’s own high walls, and trapped, too, by the mental habits that those walls had fostered over long decades. As detachments of cossacks, bandits and former slaves continued to ransack almost every suburb of Moscow, the seven council members could only cling to rule-books that they knew. Despite the fact that many Russians still seemed drawn to home-grown ‘tsars’ (Tushino had fallen, but ‘Dmitry’ remained at large until December 1610), the councillors could never contemplate a rough pretender on the throne. Nor could they imagine another form of power. Instead, they proposed, in the tradition of their ancestors, to dazzle the people with a new tsar, Wladislaw Sigismundovich, a royal heir, a fulcrum for the secretive, privileged and tightly regulated world they wished to recreate. Far from inviting Wladislaw to take the crown, therefore, they pleaded with him. Court officials were even tasked with listing the Kremlin’s treasures (and the delights of its kitchens) as a form of enticement. Moscow’s royal regalia – the sceptre and jewelled collar, the caps of Monomakh, of Kalita, of Godunov – were just the start; if the prince had acceded to the boyars’ wishes, he could have wrapped himself in golden robes and fur-lined, pearl-trimmed, velvet cloaks. He also stood to inherit gold and silver plates and vessels, gemstones, sables and large quantities of cash.
⁹⁴

Instead of welcoming a prince, however, the Kremlin staff soon had to cope with a rabble of mercenary troops in need of winter billets. The boyar council turned out to be more afraid of its own people than of foreign soldiers. There were already some paid troops in the Kremlin, including Margeret’s, but in the late summer of 1610 the council agreed to allow a Polish officer, the hetman (cossack chief) Stanislaw Zolkiewski, to move more troops into Moscow as a guarantee of public order. It was not a smooth operation, and at one point the city seemed about to rebel, but Zolkiewski eventually billeted parts of his army in the walled areas of Kitai-gorod and the White City and a final group, under his own leadership, inside the Kremlin itself.
⁹⁵

According to the hetman, the Poles behaved impeccably, but others reported arrogance, greed, and the burdensome demands that several thousand men were bound to make.
⁹⁶
Patriarch Hermogen was prominent among those speaking out against the Popish horde, and as the long wait for Wladislaw stretched into months the old man started to attract a following beyond the Kremlin walls. His message, and the shame of citizens who feared their whole culture’s collapse, stirred Orthodox resistance in the provinces. Then came the news that Sigismund had never planned to send his son, and meant instead to seize the crown himself. Hermogen leaked this from his throne in the Kremlin’s Dormition Cathedral, thundering away about the dangers of Catholic rule. At the same time, the diplomatic Zolkiewski left the Kremlin. Control of its garrison was handed, at Sigismund’s request, to a brutal officer called Alexander Gosiewski. His attitude to the job was typified by his (unsuccessful) attempt to cancel the Kremlin’s annual Palm Sunday procession in the interests of public order.
⁹⁷
Though he was also responsible for thousands of civilian deaths, few acts were better calculated to outrage Orthodox Russian souls.

Any pretence that Polish troops might act as saviours of Russia (an unlikely proposition at the best of times) was dissipated by events in the early spring of 1611. The foreign garrison in Moscow came to be regarded – by everyone except the handful of noble families whom they were protecting – as a hostile army of occupation. Beyond the Kremlin, and especially beyond Moscow itself, exhausted citizens in the provinces began to organize resistance movements whose aims were to expel the Catholics, defeat the scourge of banditry, and recapture their holy sites, including the Kremlin. The groups did not all work together, but for some insurgents, the liberation of the capital became a priority. In March 1611, soon after Easter, news reached the city of a breakthrough by Russian troops from Ryazan, and Muscovites responded with an attack that was intended to oust the Kremlin’s Catholic garrison. Gosiewski’s answer was merciless. The Kremlin turned on its own city with savage force. Jacques Margeret’s memoir does not go into details, but another foreigner observed that when the French commander led his troops back into the fortress from one of its missions against the rebels, their clothes were drenched with so much blood that they looked like butchers.
⁹⁸