The campaign succeeded. Smolensk surrendered in September after a three-month siege. A Cossack force provided material assistance, but the deciding factor was the artillery which the Russian commissariat had managed to bring up and which was deployed under the experienced eye of General Leslie in the presence of the Tsar himself But, though matters at the front went well, there was bad news from Moscow. There had been a virulent outbreak of bubonic plague. This delayed the Tsar’s triumphant return until the following February. He arrived to find that the losses had been grievous. Both the president of the ministerial committee left in charge of the capital and his deputy had died; so had all but fifteen servants left in the palace, half the translators in the Department of Foreign Affairs, and over 80 per cent of the city’s monks — a particularly grievous blow, since monks cared for the sick and unfortunate. Many other cities suffered too. Three thousand died in Kostroma, half the population of Tver perished, and more than half in Kaluga. The Tsar helped raise morale, making a brave show parading war trophies before the surviving population. Then he returned to the front.
The campaign of 1655 was even more successful. Virtually every city of importance in Lithuania, including Vilna, was captured. Poland was helpless. Swedish forces had invaded in June, and the Polish court fled south to take uncertain shelter in the fortified monastery of Czestochowa. This prompted a radical rethinking
Once an independent Hansa city, Riga was now a Swedish possession. Russia had wanted such a trading outlet since the time of Ivan the Terrible (whom Tsar Alexis admired and on whom he modelled himself to some extent), and only five years earlier the Tsar’s interest had been raised further by a project, presented by a Frenchman, to build ships for the international market. Gdansk was also considered. Only the previous year the Tsar had offered it his protection. But, with his sights now trained on Sweden, the army marched on Riga.
Its defences were strong and up to date, but the siege was methodical and the equipment strong. A learned work of the time published by Samuel Pufendorf, historiographer to the Swedish king and a pioneer of international law, contains a fascinating panoramic print of the action. It shows the Tsar, his back to the artist, on a hill overlooking the city, attended by his staff. They wear tall bearskin hats and are elegantly mounted as they discuss the situation and decide what is to be done. The Russian encampment is shown - the positions of the batteries, the placements of the infantry, the supply dumps and bivouacks, and, in between, messengers scurrying to deliver orders and reports. Mortar shells are lobbed in high trajectory over the walls; cannon shots smash into the fortifications, sending out sprays of splintered stone; a Russian powder store blows up. Through this scene of action flows the Western Dvina, which leads to the object of all these exertions: the estuary and the open sea.
The prize eluded Russia that year. It might well have been taken the next, had the Tsar only persevered, for Sweden was in financial straits and might not have been able to sustain its resistance. But the siege was not resumed. Troubles in Ukraine required a diversion of Russia’s efforts.
When Khmelnytsky died, in 1657, deep fissures appeared within the Cossack ranks. Some, the more substantial sort who owned farms and hankered after the privileges and freedom of the Polish nobility (who were never freer than in that age), came to resent the high-handed way in which the Tsar’s representatives dealt with them. They aligned behind the new hetman, Vygovsky. The poorer Cossacks, on the other hand, feared that their interests would be sacrificed, that they might lose their status as Cossacks, and even be reduced to serfdom. Their fears were soon justified. In September 1658 Vygovsky abandoned his allegiance to the Tsar and signed an agreement with Poland. This conceded rights to the Orthodox Church in Ukraine and to its burghers, but it also gave noble status to the top 300, predominately landed, Cossacks and reduced the number of registered Cossacks by half, which prompted an armed reaction by those dispossessed.
