Part 4 (2/2)
Great and fierce was the sorrow of the Tsar when he found he had slain his beloved son--the one thing he loved upon earth, and there remained to inherit the fruit of his labors and his crimes only another child (Feodor) enfeebled in body and mind, and an infant (Dmitri), the son of his seventh wife. His death, hastened by grief, took place three years later, in 1584.
CHAPTER XII
SERFDOM CREATED--THE FIRST ROMANOFF
Occasionally there arises a man in history who, without distinction of birth or other advantages, is strong enough by sheer ability to grasp the opportunity, vault into power, and then stem the tide of events.
Such a man was G.o.dwin, father of Harold, last Saxon King; in England; and such a man was Boris G.o.dunof, a _boyar_, who had so faithfully served the terrible Ivan that he leaned upon him and at last confided to him the supervision of his feeble son Feodor, when he should succeed him. The plans of this ambitious usurper were probably laid from the time of the tragic death of Ivan's son, the Tsarevitch. He brought about the marriage of his beautiful sister Irene with Feodor, and from the hour of Ivan's death was virtual ruler. Dmitri, the infant son of the late Tsar, aged five years, was prudently placed at a distance--and soon thereafter mysteriously died (1591). There can be no doubt that the unexplained tragedy of this child's death was perfectly understood by Boris; and when Feodor also died, seven years later (1598), there was not one of the old Muscovite line to succeed to the throne. But so wise had been the administration of affairs by the astute Regent that a change was dreaded. A council offered him the crown, which he feigned a reluctance to accept, preferring that the invitation should come from a source which would admit of no question as to his rights in the future. Accordingly, the States-General or _Sobor_ was convened, and Boris G.o.dunof was chosen by acclamation.
The work of three reigns was undone. A _boyar_ was Tsar of Russia--and a _boyar_ not in the line of Rurik and with Tatar blood in his veins!
But this bold and unscrupulous man had performed a service to the state. The work of the Muscovite Princes was finished, and the extinction of the line was the next necessary event in the path of progress.
Boris had large and comprehensive views and proceeded upon new lines of policy to reconstruct the state. He saw that Russia must be Europeanized, and he also saw that at least one radical change in her internal policy might be used to insure his popularity with the Princes and n.o.bles. The Russian peasantry was an enormous force which was not utilized to its fullest extent. It included almost the entire rural population of Russia. The peasant was legally a freeman. He lived unchanged under the old Slavonic patriarchal system of _Mirs_, or communes, and _Volosts_. These were the largest political organizations of which he had personal cognizance. He knew nothing about Muscovite consolidation, nor oligarchy, nor autocracy. No crumbs from the modern banquet had fallen into his lap. With a thin veneer of orthodoxy over their paganism and superst.i.tion the people listened in childish wonder to the same old tales--they lived their old primitive life of toil under the same system of simple fair-dealing and justice.
If their commune owned the land it tilled, they all shared the benefit of the harvests, paid their tax to the state, and all was well. If not, it swarmed like a community of bees to some wealthy neighbor's estate and sold its labor to him, and then if he proved too hard a taskmaster--even for a patient Russian peasant--they might swarm again and work for another.
The tie binding them to special localities was only the very slightest.
There were no mountains to love, one part of the monotonous plateau was about like another; and as for their homes, their wooden huts were burned down so often there were no memories attached to them.
The result of this was that the peasantry--that immense force upon which the state at last depended--was not stable and permanent, but fluid. At the slightest invitation of better wages, or better soil or conditions, whole communities might desert a locality--would gather up their goods and walk off. Boris, while Regent, conceived the idea of correcting this evil, in a way which would at the same time make him a very popular ruler with the cla.s.s whose support he most needed, the Princes and the landowners. He would chain the peasant to the soil. A decree was issued that henceforth the peasant must not go from one estate to another. He belonged to the land he was tilling, as the trees that grew on it belonged to it, and the master of that land was his master for evermore!
Such, in brief outline, was the system of serfdom which prevailed until 1861. It was in theory, though not practically, unlike the inst.i.tution of American slavery. The people, still living in their communes, still clung to the figment of their freedom, not really understanding that they were slaves, but feeling rather that they were freemen whose sacred rights had been cruelly invaded. That they were giving to hard masters the fruit of their toil on their own lands.
Now that Russia was becoming a modern state, it required more money to govern her. Civilization is costly, and the revenues must not be fluctuating. Boris saw they could only be made sure by attaching to the soil the peasant, whose labor was at the foundation of the prosperity of the state. It was the peasant who bore the weight of an expanded civilization which he did not share! The visitor at Moscow to-day may see in the Kremlin a wonderful tower, 270 feet high, which was erected in honor of Ivan the Great by the usurper Boris; but the monument which keeps his memory alive is the more stupendous one of--Serfdom.
The expected increase in prosperity from the new system did not immediately come. The revenues were less than before. Bands of fugitive serfs were fleeing from their masters and joining the community of free Cossacks on the Don. Lands were untilled, there was misery, and at last there was famine, and then discontent and demoralization extending to the upper cla.s.ses, and a diminished income which finally bore upon the Tsar himself.
Suddenly there came a rumor that Dmitri, the infant son of Ivan the Terrible, was not dead! He was living in Poland, and with incontestable proofs of his ident.i.ty was coming to claim his own. In 1604 he crossed the frontier, and thousands of discontented people flocked to his standard with wild enthusiasm. Boris had died just before Dmitri reached Moscow. He entered the city, and the infatuated people placed in his hand and upon his head the scepter and the crown of Ivan IV.; and after making sure that the wife and the son of Boris G.o.dunof were strangled, this amazing Pretender commenced his reign.
An extraordinary thing had happened. A nameless adventurer and impostor had been received with tears of joy as the son of Ivan and of St. Vladimir, the seventh wife of Ivan the Terrible even recognizing and embracing him as her son! But Dmitri had not the wisdom to keep what his cunning had won. His Polish wife came, followed by a suite of Polish Catholics, who began to carry things with a high hand. The clergy was offended and soon enraged. In five years Dmitri was a.s.sa.s.sinated, and his mutilated corpse was lying in the palace at the Kremlin, an object of insult and derision; and then, for Russia there came another chaos.
For a brief period Vasili Shuiski, head of one of the princely families, reigned, while two more ”false Dmitris” appeared, one from Sweden and the other from Poland. The cause of the latter was upheld by the King of Poland, with the ulterior purpose of bringing the disordered state of Russia under the Polish crown, and making one great Slav kingdom with its center at Cracow.
So disorganized had the State become that some of the Princes had actually opened negotiations with Sigismund with a view to offering the crown to his son. But when Sigismund with an invading army was in Moscow (1610), and when Vasili Shuiski was a prisoner in Poland, and a Polish Prince was claiming the t.i.tle of Tsar, there came an awakening--not among the n.o.bility, but deep down in the heart of orthodox Russia. From this awakening of a dormant national sentiment and of the religious instincts of the people there developed that event,--the most health-restoring which can come to the life of a nation,--a national uprising in which all cla.s.ses unite in averting a common disaster. What disaster could be for Russia more terrible than an absorption into Catholic Poland? The Polish intruders and pretenders were driven out, and then a great National a.s.sembly gathered at Moscow (1613) to elect a Tsar.
The name of Romanoff was unstained by crime, and was by maternal ancestry allied to the royal race of Rurik. The newly awakened patriotism turned instinctively toward that, as the highest expression of their hopes; and Mikhail Romanoff, a youth of 16, was elected Tsar.
It was in 1547 that Anastasia, of the House of Romanoff, had married Ivan IV. At about the same time her brother was married to a Princess of Suzdal, a descendant of the brother of Alexander Nevski. This Princess was the grandmother of Mikhail Romanoff, and the source from which has sprung the present ruling house in Russia.
CHAPTER XIII
NIKON'S ATTEMPT--RASKOLNIKS
In the building of an empire there are two processes--the building up, and the tearing down. The plow is no less essential than the trowel.
The period after Boris had been for Russia the period of the wholesome plow. The harvest was far off. But the name Romanoff was going to stand for another Russia, not like the old Russia of Kief, nor yet the new Russia of Moscow; but another and a Europeanized Russia, in which, after long struggles, the Slavonic and half-Asiatic giant was going to tear down the walls of separation, escape from his barbarism, and compel Europe to share with him her civilization.
The man who was to make the first breach in the walls was the grandson of Mikhail Romanoff--Peter, known as ”The Great.” But the mills of the G.o.ds grind slowly--especially when they have a great work in hand; and there were to be three colorless reigns before the coming of the Liberator in 1689--seventy-six years before they would learn that to have a savage despot seated on a barbaric throne, with crown and robes incrusted with jewels, and terrorizing a brutish, ignorant, and barbaric people--was not to be Great.
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