Russia’s prospects seemed good. Tsar Boris was experienced in all the major branches of state policy; he commanded the loyalty of state servants, both military and civil; and, in early middle age, he was at the height of his powers. Moreover, his son Fedor was a healthy and intelligent boy. Russia seemed destined to prosper under the new regime. Yet the seven lean years that followed were lean indeed, and by the time they ended Boris was dead, his heir murdered, the realm in ruins, and the enemy at the gate.
The cause was not the legacy of Ivan the Terrible, though this contributed to the disaster, and the supposed murder of the Tsarevich Dmitrii was merely incidental. The fundamental reason was a change in weather patterns known as the Little Ice Age. Bad weather caused repeated famines and associated ecological problems and epidemics. These in turn affected agriculture, and promoted migrations and public discontent. Soon social distress spilled over into political protest, giving space to the political climbers and entrepreneurs who are always ready to profit personally from public disasters. Events unfolded inexorably, as in a Greek tragedy.
They began with a severe drought in the first summer of Boris’s reign, and then fire struck the dried-out timbers of the still largely wooden city of Moscow. The winter of 1600 was long and very cold, particularly in the south and west, and then there was a spate of unusually heavy storms. The consequence was famine, but not disaster. Russians were no strangers to cruel weather and the destructive forces of nature. They resowed, repaired, eked out what they had left, borrowed if they had to. The urban population suffered when the price of bread rose, but, like the government of ancient Rome, the Russian tsardom made provision when hunger threatened. There had been localized famines before, and a widespread one in the winter of 1587—8, without causing any long-term trauma. This time it was different.
Disaster struck not once or twice, but year in, year out. The summer of 1601 was extremely wet. Day after day ‘rain fell without stopping, and the rye and the spring wheat got sodden and lay on the ground all winter.’ Around Moscow itself there were heavy frosts in late July, and every type of grain and vegetable was frozen. Nor was the disaster localized. It hit Pskov in the west, and also Kaluga and Livny in the south-east. In 1602 there was another drought, followed by violent storms and floods so great that even the very old could not remember their like. Then blights struck and epidemics, and every year now seemed a year of famine. 18 Well might the religious have recalled the ten plagues that God sent to afflict the Egyptians, and concluded that Tsar Boris must have committed dreadful God-offending acts. Historians who attribute Russia’s collapse to the dynasty dying out are just as mistaken as those who attributed it to Boris’s ‘sin’. Climate change and the series of weather disasters precipitated a social catastrophe, and political debacle flowed from it. Tales about the infant Dmitrii and the ‘usurper’ Boris only gained currency in the wake of the great hunger.
Far from being to blame, Boris did everything within his power to alleviate his people’s sufferings. He campaigned against speculators who hoarded grain waiting for the price to rise; he sold grain cheaply from his own granaries; he sent out messages of encouragement; he arranged for the indigent dead to be given decent burial, and doled out large sums to the needy from his own treasury. But luck had deserted him: the grain he sold cheaply was often resold for private gain; as news of his largesse spread, more and more poor peasants crowded into the city in expectation of his charity, compounding the problems. Whatever was done was never enough. An eyewitness described the scene:
I swear to God that this is the truth. I saw with my own eyes people lying on the streets, eating grass like cattle in summer and hay in winter. Some were already dead, with hay and dung in their mouths and also (pardon my indelicacy) had swallowed human excrement …
Many dead bodies of people who had perished through hunger were found daily in the streets.… Daily … hundreds of corpses were gathered up at the tsar’s command and carried away on so many carts, that to behold it (scarcely to be believed) was grisly and horrible. 19
