Time of Troubles

Viking settlements were also established along the important waterways of Eastern Europe, including near the Dnieper River, an important trade route which connected Scandinavia, Kievan Rus', and the Eastern Roman Empire, as well as the Volga River, which crossed modern-day Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.

In this region, the Viking Rurik dynasty ruled Kievan Rus' from 862 to 1598, when they were replaced, after the Time of Troubles, with the Romanov dynasty in Russia.

They took control of territories in Slavic and Finnic-dominated areas of Eastern Europe and annexed Kiev in 882 to serve as the capital of the Kievan Rus'.

The age of Viking expansion had a long-lasting legacy.

Instead of that, Gessen writes that under the false Dmitry I, 1506, uh, 1505 to 06, both Jews and other foreigners in relatively large number were baptized in Moscow.

The story goes according to In the Time of Troubles by Sergei Ivanov regarding the 15-year period, 1598 to 1613, of confusion following the failed Rurik dynasty that the false Dmitry II, the thief of Tushino, was born a Jew.

The sources give contradictory information regarding the ancestry of the thief of Tushino.

Sochanesen relates that, um, after the, there's a note in here, uh, by the translator.

Yeah, he's, he's skipping over a lot of this because it's not really, um, the, the number of Jews within the Russian Empire at the time was fairly small.

They were concentrated in Poland, uh, Lithuania.

Now, the false Dimitris that you mentioned, I don't know if we've dealt with that or not, but it's a very strange phenomenon because, um, the revolt against Boris Gudnov, whose death, uh, signaled the beginning of the, of the time of troubles, um, Ivan the Terrible did have, now he was married several times.

Sources are very iffy as to how many, but, um, his, you know, the very last and youngest son of Ivan the Terrible was Dimitri of, of, uh, Uglik.

So that part came true.

And this was the first time since the time of Troubles in the early 17th century that a foreign army would occupy Moscow for any length of time.

And we'll see how he got there so easily in next week's episode.

Whether the second half of his prediction would hold up, i.e. would taking the ancient capital actually bring him the surrender he was banking on, was going to be far trickier than he thought.

And when a throne empties with no successor, the state tends to empty out right along with it.

They called it the Time of Troubles.

Famine, civil war, foreign enemies moving through Moscow, more or less at will.

And at one point, the Kremlin itself was sitting in Polish hands.

Alexander II reset it by reform.

Every time the cohesion ran out, somebody with enough will dragged the whole apparatus forward another century, which works right up until the man on the throne has no particular will of his own.

The founding generation had been hardened by the time of troubles.

The men who elected Michael had watched a state die in front of them.

The heir to the throne, the one competent successor he had, killed in a room by his own father over an argument about clothing.

What was left was a younger son with severe developmental limitations, and the succession crisis that followed helped push the country into a period of civil war and foreign invasion so catastrophic that Russians still call it the Time of Troubles.

But the detail that makes Ivan a genuine psychiatric puzzle, rather than just a tyrant, is the paperwork.

He alternated between torture and religion with an intensity that observers found frightening.

There were also growing efforts to expand westwards into what are now Belarus and Ukraine.

Yet the other side of this period of immense expansion was chaotic internal politics, with a dysfunctional government epitomized in the Time of Troubles, a period between 1598 and 1613 when Russia went through six rulers in 15 years and experienced wars and famines which killed an estimated one million people.

The situation had begun to stabilize somewhat thereafter, but by comparison with other large European states further to the west, like England, France, Spain, Austria, Sweden, and the Dutch Republic, Russia was socially, economically, and politically backwards, with little trade or industry.

It was a society that was mired in the medieval past.

He introduced the Julian calendar, the calendar devised in Roman times and named after Julius Caesar, as the new calendar of Russia in the early 1700s, despite the fact that most of Western and Central Europe had transitioned by the beginning of the 18th century to the Gregorian calendar, which was more scientifically accurate.

The greatest of Peter's political reforms was the creation of the governing Senate of Russia.

Years in the planning, it was formally established in 1711 and replaced the traditional Boyar Duma, a kind of aristocratic council of Russian lords that had functioned intermittently in Russia for centuries, often producing dysfunctional politics that led to the Time of Troubles a century earlier.

The Senate was instead established as a more meritocratic form of governing council.

Instead of that, Gessen writes that under the false Dmitry I, 1506, uh, 1505 to '06, both Jews and other foreigners in relatively large number were baptized in Moscow.

The story goes according to In The Time of Troubles by Sergei Ivanov regarding the 15-year period, 1598 to 1613, of confusion following the failed Rurik dynasty, that the false Dmitry II, the Thief of Tuchino, was born a Jew.

The sources give contradictory information regarding the ancestry of the Thief of Tuchino.

So Shnison relates that, um, after the...

The, the number of Jews within the Russian Empire at the time was fairly small.

They were concentrated in Poland, uh, Lithuania.

Now, the false Dmitrys that you mentioned, I don't know if we've dealt with that or not, but it's a very strange phenomenon because, um, the revolt against Boris Godunov, whose death, uh, signaled the beginning of the, of the Time of Troubles, um, Ivan the Terrible did have...

Now, he was married several times.