18 - The Time of Troubles (1603–1613)

Summary

Historians have used the term, ‘The Time of Troubles’ (smutnoe vremia, smuta), to refer to various series of events in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The classic study by S. F. Platonov, first published in 1899, dated the start of the Troubles to the death of Ivan the Terrible in 1584, when a power struggle among the boyars began. It ended, according to Platonov, with the election of Michael Romanov to the throne in 1613. In the Soviet period, the term, ‘Time of Troubles’, was abandoned in favour of the concept of a ‘peasant war’, derived from Friedrich Engels’s study of the events in Germany in 1525. I. I. Smirnov’s account of the Bolotnikov revolt of 1606–7 identified that episode alone as the ‘first peasant war’ in Russia, but after Stalin’s death some Soviet historians argued that the entire sequence of events from 1603 (the Khlopko uprising) to 1614 (the defeat of Zarutskii’s movement) constituted a ‘peasant war’. 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’. Western historians were never persuaded by the ‘peasant war’ concept for this period, preferring to retain the term, ‘Time of Troubles’. Chester Dunning’s adoption of ’civil war’ terminology, like that of the Russian historians R. G. Skrynnikov and A. L. Stanislavskii, involves a conscious rejection of ‘class struggle’ approaches to the period, and stresses vertical rather than horizontal divisions in Russian society.