Philip Longworth - Russia

The policies that Boris and his colleagues pursued were judicious. One of the new regime’s first measures was to abolish the tax privileges of hereditary estate-holders. It also gave effective relief to the hard-pressed service gentry by giving them seigneurial rights over their ploughland, as well as allowing them to pursue and recover their runaway peasants. Tradesmen, craftsmen and other productive commercial people — another vital constituency — were helped too, by exempting the suburbs and settlements where they lived from taxation. These measures promoted social peace and encouraged commerce especially in central Russia, but the government also took radical measures to develop the south and south-east, chiefly by building new towns.

Samara and the stronghold of Ufa in northern Bashkiria (founded in 1586), Tsaritsyn, later Stalingrad (1589), Saratov (1590) and Tsivilsk — forts and future cities with alliterative, romantic names — were all founded on the middle and lower reaches of the Volga at this time. The government’s hold of the steppe was furthered both by founding new towns and by refor-tifying others: Voronezh and Livny (1586), Kursk (1587), Yelets (1592), Kromy (1595) and in 1598 Belgorod on the river Donets. The purpose was to create strong defensive points and governmental centres to administer the growing population of those parts, for since Tsar Ivan’s time Russian settlement had been growing denser south and east of the centre. In pursuing this policy, therefore, the state was trying to catch up with its own population, and at the same time to promote, protect and control commerce. But it also probed regions beyond. In 1586 an emissary was sent to spy out the land of Kakhetia south of the Caucasus Mountains. He returned with an envoy from the local king. This proved the beginning of a long, close association between Russia and Georgia. 3

Before the end of the century Moscow was also in touch with the Kazakhs of the southern steppe, and further north, across the Urals, it was extending its authority into Siberia. Tiumen was founded in 1585, Tobolsk in 1587, as well as Pelym, Tara and other strong-points, including eventually Verkhoturia. This was a remarkably swift follow-up of Yermak’s conquest of the Tatar state of eastern Siberia and the Stroganovs’ exploitation of it. The building boom extended to established towns too. Astrakhan and Kazan were given new stone citadels at this time, and Smolensk on the western frontier was developed into the strongest fortress of all. 4

The chief purpose of the government’s extension into Siberia was to secure that invaluable source of furs — a major export — and to administer the native population, the hunters and trappers, who all paid their taxes in furs. Russia was creating an immense colonial empire in Siberia and the southern steppe. But it did so innocently, without realizing the world significance of the fact, 5its long-term strategic significance in giving Moscow control of the world’s most extensive land mass. But, though the motive was short-term and practical, the policy was systematically pursued. Every strong-point, whether built of logs upon earthworks, of brick or of stone, was strategically sited and provided a serviceable district centre for the government’s representative, who acted as both civil governor and military commander. 6

Scattered as many of them were, it would be the work of decades to develop these strong-points into an integrated system of defence. In the meantime older expedients still had their uses, like that of which the Elizabethan venturer Jerome Horsey wrote in 1588: ‘The moving Castle \gulaigorod] … so framed, that it may be set up in length… two, three, foure, five, sixe or seven miles’. A double wall of timber spaced with three yards in between and closed at both ends, the structure could be dismantled, transported and re-erected where needed, and was an effective block to Tatar and other raiders from the steppe. 7

Careful thought as well as improvisation lay behind these essentially expansionist developments — as behind the stabilization programme and the economic and foreign policies — and Boris Godunov was the moving spirit behind all of them. He had a particular interest in the south-east, and some relevant expertise, having earlier run the department which administered Kazan, Astrakhan and Siberia. He knew all about running a central financial department and how the palace was administered, was supported by some very able helpers, and made it a principle to promote and exploit talent. Apart from the Shchelkalov brothers, he furthered the careers of men like Foma Petelin, the treasury specialist whom the English merchant Giles Fletcher considered outstandingly efficient and politically astute, and Eleazar Vyluzgin, chief administrator of the department of service estates, who seems to have headed the regents ‘private office and who, in 1591, was sent to Uglich with the commission of inquiry into the sudden death of the Tsarevich Dmitrii.

The untimely death of the Tsar’s younger brother is popularly attributed to Boris, but the charge is unjust. Boris had no motive to kill Dmitrii in 1591, when Tsar Fedor, whatever his mental strength may have been, was in good health and expected to sire heirs. Generations of good historians from V. I. Klein to Ruslan Skrynnikov have sifted the evidence and concluded that Boris was innocent and that, as the investigation report concluded, Dmitrii died by accident or misadventure while playing with a sharp instrument in the courtyard of the palace at Uglich. 8Why, then, has the contrary view prevailed?

The rumour that the Tsarevich had been murdered was first put about immediately after his death by his mother’s kinsmen, the Nagois. But the Nagois hated Boris. They had tried to displace Tsar Fedor, and Boris had thwarted them, sidelining the heir apparent and his entourage. After the death they sought revenge, spreading derogatory rumours about Boris and trying to organize opposition to him. They had little immediate effect, although, as we shall see, they were to gain ground later. The myth that Boris had had Dmitrii murdered was furthered fifteen years later by the young prince’s canonization (for cynical political reasons) as an innocent ‘sufferer for Christ’s sake’, like the popular boy saints Boris and Gleb. Later still, and for their own purposes, the Romanovs were also to exploit the myth. 9The leading nineteenth-century historian Soloviev followed the Nagois’ line, giving an account of ‘the saint’s murder’ which was dramatic, sentimental and disgracefully tendentious, and the famous Vasilii Kliuchevskii followed him uncritically — although both historians wrote before essential evidence was published in 1913.

Meanwhile Russia’s greatest poet, Pushkin, and the composer Mussorgsky had used the myth to create a popular Shakespearian-type tragedy and a famous opera. Since then the lie about Boris’s implication in Dmitrii’s ‘murder’ has been perpetuated by the Church, which would find it embarrassing to de-canonize the saint, and by the financial interests of those who profit from the pilgrims and tourists attracted to Dmitrii’s shrine. Boris Godunov has been traduced. There is no evidence that he plotted to murder his way to the throne as Shakespeare pictures Richard of York doing; no evidence that he was more scheming than any other politician anxious to preserve his position near the top of the pile. But there is evidence that he was an able minister concerned to promote the country’s interests, treating its subjects no worse than necessary. 10

In 1588 Terka, Russia’s stronghold in the north-eastern foothills of the towering Caucasus, was rebuilt on a new site. In the following year Prince Andrei Khvorostinin was appointed its governor. The region had been identified as particularly important, and the government sensed that its politics were complex, so Khvorostinin was instructed to follow the situation there particularly closely. In 1589 he reported that Shevkal, the shamkhal of Tarku, was being wooed by the Ottoman pasha of Derbent. The shamkhal was chief of the Kumukhs, who had originated in the mountains of Dagestan but had come to dominate the Kumyks of the coastal plain west of the Caspian. But if the Turks wanted the shamkhal to declare for them, the Russians wanted him on their side and the Turks out of the region. The motive was control of the profitable trade route between Moscow and Persia, the source of rich silks and other oriental luxuries. 11Besides, the Tarku area was adjacent to the most convenient road south across the mountains to the exotic lands of Georgia and Armenia. Moscow was now particularly interested in the little successor states to the united Georgia that the Mongols had undermined, for their peoples were Orthodox Christians and natural allies. So in April 1589 an embassy left Moscow for the south, returning a mission from the King of Imretia which accompanied them. The importance of the mission can be gauged by the presents it took.