Tsardom of Russia

At a glance

What was the Tsardom of Russia?

The Tsardom of Russia was the Muscovite state in the period when its rulers called themselves tsars. It inherited the work of the grand princes of Moscow, above all Ivan III (1462–1505). He annexed Novgorod in 1478, and in September 1485 he besieged Tver, Moscow's oldest rival, whose last grand prince fled before the city surrendered. The Grand Principality of Moscow that Ivan IV inherited in 1533, at the age of three, was already a large northern state, but it was still bordered on the east and south by Tatar khanates.

When Richard Chancellor's English ship reached the White Sea in 1553, Clement Adams reported, the crew "learned that this Countrey was called Russia, or Moscovie, and that Ivan Vasiliwich (which was at that time their Kings name) ruled and governed farre and wide in those places." Samuel Collins, physician to Tsar Aleksei, already called it an "Empire" in 1671.

Why was Ivan IV crowned tsar in 1547?

Ivan IV, born on 25 August 1530, was grand prince from 1533, and his childhood was dominated by feuding boyar clans. The Orthodox Encyclopaedia (Pravoslavnaia entsiklopediia), a Russian Church reference work, credits Metropolitan Makarii with the coronation. He won agreement for it by calling a meeting of all the boyars, including those in disgrace, and wrote the coronation rite himself. Ivan was crowned on 16 January 1547 and became the first Russian ruler crowned as tsar.

Moscow burned that year, worst of all in the great fire of 21 June 1547. A chronicle of the mid-1550s, the Letopisets nachala tsarstva, counted 1,700 dead in the June fire, men, women and children. In the uprising that followed, the crowd killed the tsar's uncle Iurii Glinskii, whose family was blamed for the disaster.

The title "tsar" is often explained as a claim to the heritage of Byzantium and of Rome. The sources gathered for this entry do not settle what Ivan's advisers meant by it in 1547. The Orthodox Encyclopaedia says only that by the late 1550s Ivan had become expert in Byzantine traditions of imperial power.

What were the reforms of Ivan IV?

In February 1549 a council later known as the "Council of Reconciliation" met in Moscow and decided to draft a new law code. Reforms followed:

• The Sudebnik of 1550. Adopted in June 1550, the code required elected local representatives to attend the governors' courts and laid down penalties for judges who took bribes.
• The Stoglav of 1551. A Church council chaired by the tsar, whose questions set its agenda. Among them, in veiled form, was the question of limiting monastic landholding.
• The streltsy. Musketeers paid by the state formed a standing infantry. Scholars disagree on how far they continued the earlier units of handgunners.
• Local government. In the mid-1550s governors who lived off their districts "in feeding" (kormlenie) were abolished, and power passed to elected local elders.

How did Russia conquer Kazan, Astrakhan and Siberia?

The Khanate of Kazan on the middle Volga had raided Russian lands for a century. The Presidential Library in St Petersburg dates the storming of Kazan to 2 October 1552 (Old Style), after mines were exploded under the walls on the feast of the Intercession the day before. Fighting in the khanate went on for years, and Russian rule was secure only by 1557.

The Astrakhan Khanate at the mouth of the Volga followed in 1556, bringing the whole river under Moscow. A kind of protectorate was set up over the Nogai Horde, and in 1557 Khan Ediger of Sibir accepted vassalage and paid tribute. The tsardom now ruled Muslim Tatars and other Volga peoples; a rising of the Mari in the Kazan lands was put down only after Ivan's death. Ivan added the titles tsar of Kazan and tsar of Astrakhan to his own.

To mark the conquest of Kazan, Ivan ordered the Church of the Intercession on the Moat, now called St Basil's Cathedral, which was built in 1555–1561 on what became Red Square. UNESCO lists it within the World Heritage Site "Kremlin and Red Square, Moscow", inscribed in 1990.

Siberia came next. The Cossack leader Ermak led a campaign into the Khanate of Sibir beyond the Urals. Its date is disputed. Older scholarship placed it in 1581. Ruslan Skrynnikov and A. T. Shashkov dated it to 1582, relying on an angry letter of Ivan IV to the Stroganovs dated 16 November 1582, which says the Cossacks had set out on 1 September.

Meanwhile Chancellor's voyage of 1553 opened a sea route to England through the White Sea, and the Muscovy Company received its charter in 1555.

What was the oprichnina?

The Livonian War, which Ivan began over Livonia's unpaid "Dorpat tribute" in the winter of 1557/58, started well. Russian troops took Narva and Dorpat in 1558, beat the Livonian army at Ermes in 1560 and captured Polotsk from Lithuania in February 1563. Then the war turned. In 1564 Prince Andrei Kurbskii, Ivan's governor in Livonia, fled to Lithuania and wrote accusing the tsar of cruelty.

In December 1564 Ivan left Moscow for Aleksandrova Sloboda, taking the treasury with him, and announced that he was abandoning the throne. He returned in early 1565 on his own terms: the right to punish "traitors" as he chose, and a division of the realm into the oprichnina, a royal domain with its own court, army and offices, and the zemshchina, the rest of the country, which was made to pay him 100,000 roubles. According to the Orthodox Encyclopaedia, the oprichniki wore black, and dogs' heads were fixed to their horses' harness and brooms to their saddles, as a sign that they would hunt down and sweep away traitors.

The English envoy Giles Fletcher, who visited Moscow in 1588–89, wrote that "there were slayne within one weeke to the number of three hundred within the citie of Mosko". He saw a long legacy: the division had "filled it so full of grudge and mortall hatred ever since, that it wil not be quenched (as it seemeth now) till it burne againe into a civill flame." Fifteen years later it did, in the Time of Troubles.

In January 1570 the oprichnina army fell on Novgorod, suspected of plotting to go over to Lithuania. The killings and destruction there are described in the entry on the Massacre of Novgorod (1570). The historian Ruslan Skrynnikov, working from the tsar's own list of the executed for prayers, the Sinodik opal'nykh, estimated that 2,000 to 3,000 people died in Novgorod. He rejected older calculations of 40,000, since the city's population had never exceeded 25,000–30,000. Mass executions in Moscow that year struck alleged Novgorod "traitors" and officials of the government offices.

In autumn 1572 Ivan abolished the oprichnina and forbade even the use of the word. The 1856 editor of Fletcher's book gave its start as 1560; the usual date is 1565, after the abdication crisis.

What happened when the Crimean Tatars burned Moscow in 1571?

The south remained the tsardom's weakest flank. The Crimean Khanate, allied with the Ottoman Empire, raided Russian lands almost every year. In May 1571 Khan Devlet I Girei, joined by Nogai nobles, broke through the defences on the Oka River, reached Moscow and burned it. The oprichnina army could neither stop him nor guard the tsar, and the khan demanded Kazan and Astrakhan.

Fletcher wrote that the city burned "almost within the space of foure houres", and that "there perished at that time (as was sayd) by the fire and the presse, the number of 800,000 people or more". Fletcher was writing almost twenty years later from hearsay, and the numbers are impossible: he gives Moscow's houses at 41,500 before the fire.

The khan returned in 1572 with Ottoman troops and artillery. Between 30 July and 2 August 1572 a Russian army under Prince Mikhail Vorotynskii, who had recently been in disgrace, held him off at Molodi, south of Moscow. Most Russian scholarship calls Molodi a decisive victory that ended the threat of conquest. The historian Amet-Khan Sheikhumerov argued in 2019 that the sources describe something smaller: a failed five-day siege of the Russian guliai-gorod, a mobile wooden fortress, followed by an orderly Crimean retreat across the Oka. He notes that only one leading Crimean noble is known to have died.

Did Ivan the Terrible kill his son?

He almost certainly caused his death, but not in the way often imagined. Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich, born on 28 March 1554, died on 19 November 1581 at Aleksandrova Sloboda after his father struck him in a rage. The sources disagree on why and how:

• Antonio Possevino, the papal envoy then in Russia, reported that the tsar beat the tsarevich's pregnant wife with his staff, causing a miscarriage, and then struck his son on the head when he protested. The Vremennik of the clerk Ivan Timofeev indirectly supports this.
• Giles Fletcher wrote that the tsarevich "died of a blowe given him by his father upon the head in his furie with his walking staffe, or (as some say) of a thrust with a prong of it driven deepe into his head".
• Jerome Horsey, an English merchant in Moscow, said the quarrel was over post-horses that the son had granted without his father's leave, and that Ivan "Strake him in his furie a box on the ear", after which the son "fell into a burninge feavour" and died days later.
• The Third Pskov Chronicle says the tsarevich had spoken of relieving Pskov, then besieged by the Polish king Stefan Batory.

A medical author, N. F. Nedel'ko, argued in 2012 that analyses made when the royal tombs were opened in 1963 found high levels of mercury in the remains of both father and son, and doubted that the son was killed at all. This remains a minority view. The famous scene of Ivan clutching his dying son is a painting by Ilya Repin of 1885, not a source.

Ivan's last years were spent seeking terms. The Truce of Iam Zapol'skii, agreed with Poland–Lithuania on 15 January 1582 through Possevino's mediation, gave up all Russian conquests in Livonia, and a truce with Sweden on the Pliussa River in August 1583 left Sweden Russian towns as well. Ivan died in Moscow on 18 March 1584 (Old Style). Horsey's "about the eighteenth of April" is a month out, and his remark that the tsar "was strangled" is a hint, not evidence.

Ivan's epithet Groznyi is traditionally rendered "the Terrible" in English. The word also had a religious sense: a canon attributed to Ivan himself is addressed to the "Angel Groznyi voevoda", the dread commander-angel.

Who ruled after Ivan the Terrible?

Ivan's son Feodor I was crowned on 10 June 1584, according to Horsey. Real power soon passed to his brother-in-law Boris Godunov, the effective ruler from 1585, whose government built new walls round Moscow and stone fortresses at Astrakhan, Kazan and Smolensk.

In 1589 Patriarch Jeremias II of Constantinople, visiting Moscow, consecrated Metropolitan Job as the first Russian patriarch, on 26 January 1589 in the Dormition Cathedral.

On 15 May 1591 Feodor's half-brother Dmitrii, aged eight, died at Uglich. A commission that included Prince Vasilii Shuiskii took statements from 140 people and reported to the Boyar Duma and the Church council on 2 June 1591. According to its file, the boy had epilepsy; four boys who were playing a knife game with him said that "the falling sickness" came on and he fell on the knife. His mother, Tsaritsa Mariia, accused Osip Volokhov and relatives of the government official Mikhail Bitiagovskii. Rumours that Boris had ordered a murder spread at once. Horsey heard at midnight that the tsarevich's throat had been cut. But the first written accounts of a murder come from tales composed in 1606 in the circle of the same Vasilii Shuiskii, by then tsar himself, who had the boy canonised that year. The Orthodox Encyclopaedia treats both versions as sources to be weighed; the question is still open.

Under Feodor and Boris the government also tightened its control over peasants. Older historians assumed a decree of about 1592 that banned peasants from leaving their lords throughout the country. V. A. Arakcheev concluded in 2008 that the hypothesis of such a decree remains unproven: documents from Elets in 1592 show a regime identical to the existing "forbidden years" (zapovednye gody), when departure was suspended. A decree of 1597, known through the 18th-century historian Vasilii Tatishchev, set a five-year limit for recovering runaways (urochnye leta).

Feodor died childless in 1598, ending the Rurikid line in Moscow. An assembly of the land elected Boris tsar on 17 February 1598, and he was crowned on 1 September.

What was the Time of Troubles?

The Time of Troubles (Smuta) was the civil war and foreign intervention that followed the end of the old dynasty. It began with famine. Crops failed in 1601–1603, and Moscow filled with starving people drawn by the tsar's handouts. The French captain Jacques Margeret wrote that more than 120,000 people died in Moscow alone, and the German Conrad Bussow that more than 500,000 did. Both figures are contemporary estimates, not counts, and Bussow's is far beyond any plausible population of the city.

In 1604 a man claiming to be the dead Tsarevich Dmitrii invaded from Poland–Lithuania. Russian official sources identified him as Iurii (in religion Grigorii) Otrep'ev, a minor nobleman and former monk. Boris died suddenly on 13 April 1605; the army went over to the pretender, Boris's son Feodor II was killed, and "Dmitrii" entered Moscow on 20 June and was crowned on 21 July 1605. On 17 May 1606 he was killed in a revolt, and Vasilii Shuiskii was proclaimed tsar two days later.

In summer 1608 a second pretender, False Dmitrii II, set up his camp at Tushino outside Moscow, and the country divided between two tsars. Sigismund III of Poland–Lithuania invaded in autumn 1609 and besieged Smolensk. After a Russian defeat at Klushino in June 1610, Shuiskii was deposed on 17 July 1610. The ruling boyars, known as the Seven Boyars (Semiboiarshchina), offered the throne to Sigismund's son Władysław. In late September 1610 they let a Polish garrison into the Kremlin, against the protests of Patriarch Hermogen. Sweden took Novgorod in 1611.

A first militia reached Moscow in March 1611 but broke up. In autumn 1611 Kuzma Minin, an elected elder of Nizhnii Novgorod, approached Prince Dmitrii Pozharskii to lead a second militia, which set up a "Council of All the Land" at Iaroslavl'. In August 1612 it beat back a Polish–Lithuanian relief army of about 8,000 under Hetman Chodkiewicz. The Kremlin garrison held out until late October. According to the Orthodox Encyclopaedia, a surrender treaty was agreed on 26 October, and on 27 October the Polish regiments laid down their arms. The Presidential Library gives 22–26 October for the capitulation.

Russia's National Unity Day on 4 November, created by a law of December 2004 and first observed in 2005, commemorates these events. Its date is a modern convention: they fell between 22 and 27 October in the calendar then in use.

How did the Romanovs come to power?

In early 1613 an assembly of the land met in Moscow. On 21 February 1613 it chose the sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov. The Presidential Library says the choice was made on the initiative and under the pressure of the "free Cossacks" camped outside the city, and a study of the assembly calls it "elections without a choice". Mikhail accepted on 14 March in Kostroma and was crowned on 11 July 1613.

The young tsar shared power with his father. Filaret, forced into a monastery by Boris Godunov and a prisoner in Poland from 1611, returned in 1619 and became patriarch on 24 June 1619. Like his son, he was styled "great sovereign" (velikii gosudar'). A contemporary wrote that he managed all the affairs of the land and was "so powerful that the tsar himself feared him".

By the Treaty of Stolbovo of 27 February 1617, Sweden returned Novgorod but kept Ingria and Korela, cutting Russia off from the Baltic, and Russia paid 20,000 silver roubles. After Władysław's failed assault on Moscow on 1 October 1618, the Truce of Deulino in 1618 left Smolensk and the Severian lands to the Commonwealth for 14½ years. Russia's attempt to win Smolensk back in the war of 1632–1634 failed, but at Polianovka in 1634 Władysław IV finally renounced his claim to the Russian throne.

How did serfdom take hold in the Tsardom of Russia?

Aleksei Mikhailovich came to the throne in 1645 at sixteen. According to the Orthodox Encyclopaedia, he gave no written pledge on his accession, "because they thought him very quiet", and in his first years his tutor Boris Morozov ran the government. A heavy tax on salt, which pressed hardest on the poor, set off a rising in Moscow in early June 1648, the "Salt Riot". The crowd killed the clerk Nazarii Chistoi and the officials Leontii Pleshcheev and Petr Trakhaniotov. Aleksei saved Morozov by sending him secretly to the Kirillo-Belozerskii monastery. Unrest spread to many other towns.

The crisis led to a new code of law. An assembly of the land met from September 1648, and on 29 January 1649 it adopted the Sobornoe Ulozhenie, the Assembly Code, of 25 chapters and 967 articles. Its chapter on peasants ordered that fugitive peasants be returned to their lords "bez urochnykh let", without any time limit. Townspeople were bound to their towns. The code remained the basic law of Russia until 1830.

The Presidential Library writes that the Ulozhenie "finally established" serfdom, the usual formula in Russian textbooks. It was the end of a long process, not its beginning. Limits on peasant departure and time limits for recovering runaways had existed for decades; the gentry had petitioned for those limits to be removed, and the code granted their demand.

More unrest followed. Between 1654 and 1663 the government paid for its wars partly with a new copper coinage. The Scottish soldier Patrick Gordon, who entered Russian service in 1661, complained that his pay came "in a base copper coyne, which passed at foure to one of silver". On 25 July 1662 a crowd of about 7,000 marched to the tsar at Kolomenskoe outside Moscow. The historian D. A. Liapin argued in 2020 that only about a hundred of them were active rioters, that they demanded the punishment of "traitors" around the tsar rather than an end to copper money, and that the name "Copper Riot" is therefore misleading.

The largest revolt was led by the Don Cossack Stepan Razin. After years of piracy on the Caspian, in 1670 he pushed up the Volga and took Astrakhan, Tsaritsyn, Saratov and Samara, but not Simbirsk or Kazan. He was captured at Kagal'nik in April 1671 and executed in Moscow in June. The historian Brian Davies writes that Soviet historians exaggerated the revolt as a class war; Razin probably aimed to seize garrison resources on the lower Volga and expand Cossack raiding.

How did Russia gain Kiev and left-bank Ukraine?

During the Cossack–Polish War, the Zaporozhian Cossacks under Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky fought Poland–Lithuania. After his Crimean Tatar allies abandoned him again in 1653, Khmelnytsky turned to Moscow. Negotiations with the tsar's envoy Vasilii Buturlin began at Pereiaslav in January 1654 and were concluded in Moscow in April. The agreement consisted of the tsar's charter of 6 April to the Zaporozhian Host and eleven articles; the original documents have not been preserved. Afterwards Muscovite officials visited 117 Ukrainian towns, and over 127,300 men swore loyalty to the tsar. The Orthodox Encyclopaedia records that the assembly of 1653 which agreed to the union was the last zemskii sobor called under Aleksei.

What Pereiaslav meant has been argued over ever since. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine lists the readings: the voluntary incorporation of Ukraine into Russia, autonomy within it, a real union or a personal union of two states, vassalage, a protectorate, or a temporary military alliance. Soviet historians described it as the "reunification" of two fraternal peoples, and Russian state institutions still use that term. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine itself concludes that Moscow later used the treaty to justify growing interference in Ukraine's affairs.

The war with Poland–Lithuania lasted until the Truce of Andrusovo of 30 January 1667. It returned Smolensk and Chernigov to Russia, gave Russia the lands east of the Dnieper while the Commonwealth kept the west bank, and placed the Zaporozhian Sich under joint control. Kiev was to be Russian only until 1669, but Russia kept it. The "Eternal Peace" signed in Moscow in 1686 confirmed the division, and Russia paid 146,000 roubles for Kiev.

What was the Raskol, the schism of the Old Believers?

Nikon became patriarch on 25 July 1652, also with the title "great sovereign", and set out to bring Russian church books and rites into line with contemporary Greek practice. Before Lent in 1653 he sent Moscow's churches an order, known from Avvakum's account, to reduce the number of prostrations and to make the sign of the cross with three fingers rather than two. The order had no conciliar approval.

The fiercest opposition came from within the Church's own reform movement, a group of Moscow clergy known as the "zealots of piety", among them the archpriest Avvakum. Nikon himself quarrelled with the tsar and left the patriarchal see in July 1658. The Great Moscow Council of 1666–1667 deposed him, in a sentence read on 12 December 1666, but upheld his reforms and anathematised their opponents.

Avvakum, born in 1620, was exiled to Tobol'sk in 1653 and later to Dauria in eastern Siberia. In 1667 he was sent to Pustozersk in the far north, where from 1670 he was held in an earthen pit and wrote his Life in the early 1670s. On 14 April 1682 he and three fellow prisoners were burned in a log frame "for great blasphemies against the tsar's house". The English translation of 1924 gives the year as 1681, noting conflicting evidence; modern Russian sources give 1682.

In Moscow Avvakum was spiritual father to the boyar's widow (boiarynia) F. P. Morozova, her sister Princess E. P. Urusova and other defenders of the old rites. Two centuries later Morozova became the subject of a famous painting by Vasily Surikov.

How did Russia reach the Pacific?

Cossacks and fur traders advanced along the rivers of Siberia, building wintering posts and forts and forcing the local peoples to pay tribute in furs (iasak). Ivan Moskvitin's party reached the Sea of Okhotsk under Tsar Mikhail. The historian V. A. Turaev noted in 2013 that Soviet editions of the reports about Moskvitin cut passages describing armed clashes with the Tungus. Cossacks from Iakutsk founded a wintering post at Okhotsk in 1647; it became Russia's first Pacific seaport only in 1731.

In summer 1648 Fedot Popov and Semen Dezhnev sailed from the Kolyma River round the Chukotka peninsula, from the Arctic into the Pacific. According to the Russian Geographical Society, about 90 men set out and only 12 reached the upper Anadyr' River, where they built a fort. The discovery went unnoticed for about 90 years.

Farther south, Russian settlers on the Amur River clashed with the Qing dynasty. In August 1689 Qing troops, more than 15,000 according to the Presidential Library, surrounded Nerchinsk, held by about 1,500 Russians. The Treaty of Nerchinsk, signed for Russia by Fedor Golovin, gave up the upper Amur, ordered the Russian fort of Albazin to be razed and allowed trade between the subjects of the two states. The Russian text is dated 27 August 1689; according to the Russian edition of the documents, the Latin and Manchu copies were drawn up on 28 August and the Latin copies signed on 29 August. Jesuit missionaries serving the Kangxi emperor are said to have acted as interpreters, but the sources consulted for this entry do not confirm their role.

How did the Tsardom of Russia become the Russian Empire?

Feodor III, Aleksei's eldest surviving son, abolished the old system of precedence (mestnichestvo), by which nobles could refuse to serve under men of lower family rank, on 12 January 1682. He died on 27 April 1682. On 15 May the Moscow streltsy, roused by a false rumour that the Naryshkin relatives of the young Peter had strangled his elder half-brother Ivan, stormed the Kremlin and killed Artamon Matveev and others. Ivan V and Peter I became joint tsars, with their sister Sofiia as regent. In August 1689 Peter fled from Preobrazhenskoe to the Trinity monastery; by early September Sofiia had been removed and confined to the Novodevichii convent.

Peter turned the tsardom towards the sea. Azov fell to his army and newly built fleet on 19 July 1696. In 1697–98 he travelled through Western Europe with the Grand Embassy, under the name "desiatnik Petr Mikhailov", and earned a shipwright's certificate in Amsterdam. A new revolt of the streltsy in 1698 brought him home early; he took part in the torture and execution of the rebels and began disbanding their regiments.

The Great Northern War against the Swedish Empire began with disaster. At Narva on 19 November 1700 Charles XII routed a Russian army of about 35,000. According to S. A. Chirkin's study of Swedish soldiers' accounts, the Russians lost about 7,000 men, 200 banners and all their artillery; the Swedish losses, traditionally put at under a thousand, he considers too low. Peter rebuilt his forces, founded St Petersburg at the mouth of the Neva on 16 May 1703 and destroyed the Swedish army at Poltava on 27 June 1709. According to the Presidential Library, 42,000 Russians fought there, and some 16,000 Swedes surrendered at Perevolochna afterwards. In January 1721 he replaced the patriarchate with the Holy Synod.

The Treaty of Nystad, signed on 30 August 1721, ended the war. Sweden ceded Livonia, Estonia, Ingria and part of Karelia, and Russia paid 2,000,000 efimki in four instalments of 500,000. Two months later, after a meeting of the Senate with the Synod on 20 October, the senators asked Peter to accept the titles "Father of the Fatherland, Emperor of All Russia, Peter the Great". He did so on 22 October 1721, and the tsardom became the Russian Empire. The country, its capital, its laws and its dynasty did not change that day; only its title did.

Common myths about the Tsardom of Russia

Timeline of the Tsardom of Russia

What the map shows next

The border data draws the tsardom from 1547 to 1720. At 1634 on the map it reaches across Siberia, with the Sea of Okhotsk still ahead. Its predecessor, the Grand Principality of Moscow, sits between the Baltic, Lithuania and the Tatar khanates, and in 1550 the Khanate of Kazan still blocks the middle Volga. In the year of the Treaty of Nerchinsk the tsardom meets the Qing dynasty on the Amur, and on the eve of the Great Northern War the Swedish Empire still holds the Baltic coast. From 1721 the same lands appear as the Russian Empire.