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- The Time of Troubles is ingrained in the Russian national consciousness and creative imagination. Besides defining the first two decades of the seventeenth century as a period of upheaval with catastrophic consequences, it also came to symbolize the country's historical experience as a place of recurrent crises.
academic.oup.com/jcs/article/56/3/587/2730425Orthodox Russia in Crisis: Church and Nation in the Time of ...
How did the ‘Time of Troubles’ start in Russia? One of the reasons for it was the crisis of power. Tsar Ivan the Terrible had put a lot of effort into establishing the sole, unbridled power...
Time of Troubles, period of political crisis in Russia that followed the demise of the Rurik dynasty (1598) and ended with the establishment of the Romanov dynasty (1613). During this period foreign intervention, peasant uprisings, and the attempts of pretenders to seize the throne threatened to.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Time of Troubles united the Russian social classes around the Romanov tsars, laying the foundation for the later reforms of Peter the Great. Estimates of total deaths caused by the conflict range from 1 to 1.2 million, while some areas of Russia experienced population declines of over 50%.
Mar 28, 2008 · Towards the end of the Soviet era, Russian historians rejected the notion of a ‘peasant war’ and either reverted to the use of the older term, ‘Time of Troubles’, or introduced the idea of a ‘civil war’.
- Maureen Perrie
- 2006
- Overview
- Social and economic conditions
- Cultural trends
In the period from 1606 to 1613, during the so-called Time of Troubles, chaos gripped most of central Muscovy; Muscovite boyars, Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian Cossacks, and assorted mobs of adventurers and desperate citizens were among the chief actors. In May 1606 a small-scale revolt supported by popular indignation at the foolishly insulting behav...
In the flux of social and economic life in the 15th and 16th centuries, three interconnected processes may be observed: a steady economic growth, mainly from colonization and trade; an expansion in the power of the central government; and the encroachment of the nobility upon the lands previously held by the free peasantry, accompanied by the reduction of the bulk of the peasantry to serf status.
In the middle of the 15th century, society and the economy were still organized along traditional lines. The land was sparsely settled. Life for most of the population was simple and probably close to the subsistence level. Serfdom did not yet exist. Most of the peasantry lived on state lands and paid whatever taxes could be extracted from them by their prince or his bailiff.
A number of changes occurred in this pattern in the latter part of the 15th century. About 1460, measures were taken to bring the peasantry under more regular control of the state and the landlord. Peasant registration appeared at this time, and also the requirement spread that peasants might renounce the tenancy of the land they were working only at the end of the agricultural cycle, in the week of St. Yury’s Day (November 26 [December 8, New Style]). The growing controls upon the peasantry received impetus from the large-scale deportations and colonizations that accompanied the annexations of Novgorod, Tver, Pskov, and Ryazan, when the old nobility were replaced with nobility owing service to the prince of Muscovy. The nationwide promulgation of the restriction on movement to St. Yury’s Day was contained in the law code of 1497, which added the stipulation that peasants leaving a former situation must pay the landlord all arrears in addition to a departure fee. All of the measures, together with the expansion of the state apparatus for tax gathering and adjudication of disputes over land and peasants, were associated with the growing complexity and power of the central government.
The law code of 1550 repeated the stipulation of 1497 limiting peasant departure, but with much more specific provisions and stronger sanctions. Other reforms put an end to local administration by rotating military governors and limited monastic landholding and the juridical rights of landlords over their peasants. The events and policies of the latter half of the reign of Ivan IV destroyed many of the beneficial results of the reforms. The Livonian War imposed unprecedented burdens upon the taxpaying population and the landowning military caste. The political disruption caused by Ivan’s oprichnina further undermined the position of the service class and led to the looting of Novgorod and other towns. At the same time, other new trends provided the basis for economic growth: trade in local and Asian transit goods, organized through Arkhangelsk, primarily by English and Dutch merchants, brought unprecedented wealth and luxury to the court; the opening of Siberia provided additional income; and the extension of Russian agriculture into the steppe promised, for the first time, agricultural prosperity.
This period also saw the crystallization of that complex of forms and ideas that can, for the first time, be identified as Russian culture. There was a gathering and integration of the Novgorodian, Tverite, and Suzdalian cultural traditions. Moscow began to attract the artists, craftsmen, and learned monks who built the eclectic but “national” churches of Ivan III’s otherwise Italianate Kremlin and who wrote the revised national, pro-Muscovite versions of the chronicles that had been kept in Rostov, Ryazan, and Novgorod. The regional traditions were not always easily reconciled. Novgorodian attitudes in particular clashed with those of Muscovy.
The reign of Ivan III saw a marked turning toward the West. Ivan surrounded himself with Italian and Greek diplomats and craftsmen. His palace of 1487, his Kremlin with its Latin inscription over the main gate, and his churches, the original aspect of which has been altered by successive Russifying restorations, were clearly in the Italian style, as contemporary foreign visitors noted. His marriage to Sofia Palaeologus had, in addition to its diplomatic significance, a symbolic function of bringing Ivan into the circle of Western princes. Muscovy supposedly regarded itself as the heir of Byzantium and as the spiritual leader of the Orthodox world. It may be that the church leadership, militantly anti-Roman, thought of itself in this light. Ivan and many around him viewed the Byzantine heritage as Western, in contrast to the Ottoman and Tatar world, and were at pains to associate Muscovy with Western traditions and interprincely relations. This striving to be accepted in the Western world marked most of the changes in regalia and style of Ivan’s reign, although these were later to be buried in the lore of Muscovite Byzantinism.
The beginning of the seventeenth century, the actual historical ‘Time of Troubles’, plays a comparatively small role in Dugin’s overall views. He deplores it not just for the disintegration of the state and the role of the Poles who were ready to take over Russia.
the center of the Time of Troubles was a powerful rebellion of the oppressed masses. For this reason they focused primarily on long-term social causes, usually linking the Time of Troubles back to the tumultuous reign of Ivan IV and the enserfment of the Russian peasants.2 In 1983, in a panel discussion at the annual convention of the American ...
