Tatar Girl of the Teleut Tribe
Some time after these events, disturbances not less violent occurred in Pleskov and Novgorod, and were not quelled until much mischief had been done. The pacification of Novgorod was mainly due to the wisdom and intrepidity of the celebrated Nicon, who was afterwards patriarch.
While the nation was in this restless and angry mood, another false Dmitri thought to avail himself of an opportunity apparently so favourable to gather a party. He was the son of a draper in the Ukraine, and was prompted to his imposture by a Polish nobleman, named Danilovski. One day, when the young man was bathing, marks were observed on his back which were thought to resemble letters of some unknown tongue. Danilovski, hearing of this freak of nature, determined to build a plot upon it. He sent for the young man, and had the marks examined by a Greek pope whom he had suborned. The pope cried out, “A miracle!” and declared that the letters were Russian, and formed distinctly these words: Dmitri, son of the czar Dmitri. The public murder of Marina’s infant son was notorious; but that difficulty was met by the common device of an alleged change of children, and the Poles were invited to lend their aid to the true prince thus miraculously identified. They were willing enough to do so; but the trick was too stale to impose on the Russians. The impostor found no adherents among them; and after a wretched life of vagrancy and crime, he fell into the hands of Alexis, and was quartered alive.
Alexis soon had an opportunity to repay in a more substantial manner the ill will borne to him by the Poles, who had further offended him by rejecting him as a candidate for their throne, and electing John Casimir. The cruel oppressions exercised by the Poles upon the Cossacks of the Ukraine had roused the latter to revolt, and a furious war ensued, in which the enraged Cossacks avenged their wrongs in the most ruthless and indiscriminate manner. At last, after many vicissitudes, being deserted by their Tatar allies, the Cossacks appealed for aid to Alexis, offering to acknowledge him as their suzerain. With such auxiliaries the czar could now renew with better prospects the attempt made by his father to recover the territories wrested from Russia by her inveterate foe. He declared war against Poland; his conquests were rapid and numerous, and would probably have terminated in the complete subjugation of Poland, had he not been compelled to pause before the march of a still more successful invader of that country, Charles Gustavus, king of Sweden.
[1658-1662 A.D.]
Incensed at seeing his prey thus snatched from him when he had nearly hunted it down, Alexis fell upon the king of Sweden’s own dominions during his absence; but from this enterprise he reaped neither advantage nor credit; and he was glad to conclude, in 1658, a three years’ truce with Sweden, and subsequently a peace, which was an exact renewal of the Treaty of Stolbova in 1617. The war in Poland ended more honourably for Russia. An armistice for thirteen years, agreed upon at Andnissov, in Lithuania, and afterwards prolonged from time to time, was the forerunner of a complete pacification, which was brought to effect in 1686, and restored to the empire Smolensk, Severia, Tchernigov, and Kiev, that primeval principality of the Russian sovereigns. The king of Poland likewise relinquished to the czar the supremacy he had till then asserted over the Cossacks of the Ukraine.
Russia had as much need as Poland of repose; for the empire was suffering under an accumulation of evils—an exhausted treasury, commercial distress, pestilence and famine, all aggravated by the unwise means adopted to relieve them. To supply the place of the silver money, which had disappeared, copper of the same nominal value was coined and put in circulation. At first these tokens were received with confidence, and no inconvenience was experienced; but ere long the court itself destroyed that confidence by its audacious efforts to secure to itself all the sterling money, and leave only the new coin for the use of commerce. The cupidity displayed in transactions of this kind, especially by Ilia Miloslavski, the czar’s father-in-law, taught the public to dislike the copper coinage; it became immensely depreciated, and extreme general distress ensued. A rebellion broke out in consequence in Moscow (1662), and though it was speedily put down it was punished in the most atrocious manner in the persons of thousands of wretches whose misery had driven them to crime; whilst the authors of their woe escaped with impunity. The prisoners were hanged by hundreds, tortured, burned, mutilated, or thrown by night, with their hands bound, into the river. The number who suffered death in consequence of this arbitrary alteration of the currency was estimated at more than seven thousand; the tortured and maimed, at upwards of fifteen thousand.
[1665-1671 A.D.]
The conduct of the Don Cossacks was soon such as to make it questionable whether the acquisition of these new subjects was not rather a loss than a gain to the empire. At the end of the campaign of 1665 the Cossacks were refused permission to disband as usual and to return to their homes. They mutinied; and several of them were punished with death. Among those who were executed was an officer, whose brother, Stenka Radzin, had no difficulty in rousing his countrymen to revenge this violation of their privileges, and at the same time to gratify their insatiable appetite for havoc and plunder.