Worsley begins by profiling 16-year-old
Mikhail Romanov, who was plucked from obscurity to become the Tsar in 1613, and his descendent Peter the Great.
In 1613,
Mikhail Romanov, 16, was unanimously chosen by Russia's national assembly to be czar, beginning a dynasty that would last three centuries.
Among them are a 17th-century equestrian portrait of Tsar Mikhail Romanov from the State Historical Museums (Fig.
Together with two pairs of water pots with dragon spouts and serpent handles, of which there are no other known surviving examples, they were bought by Tsar Mikhail Romanov from the merchant Fabian Smith in 1629.
But Mikhail Romanov cannot have participated in this particular uprising, for he was then living much further south.
On the first of April 1936, the Onega camps contained 13,352 prisoners, one of whom was Mikhail Romanov. (26) The zakliuchennye (zeks or prisoners) were deployed in timber cutting and in building a fairly basic type of cellulose factory.
Gruber sees the Church as playing three principal roles during the time of troubles: mainly through the person of the Patriarch and leading Church figures, it developed a doctrine of legitimacy that was used to justify successive monarchs on the throne (including Mikhail Romanov in 1613); principally through the economic activities of especially the large monasteries, the Church fostered the sort of popular discontent that underlay much of the rebellious activity during this period; and mainly through the Patriarch Hermogen, the Church contributed to the development of sufficient national unity to both underpin the accession of Mikhail Romanov and combine to expel the invaders.
This formula was applied at all successions up to and including that of Mikhail Romanov. Although there was considerable ambiguity in understanding how these different elements combined, they were cobbled together in such a way that they provided a notion of legitimacy that encapsulated the principles of divine selection (acceptance by the Church), hereditary succession (the formal acknowledgement of the right to rule by a leading female member of the dynasty), and popular approval (usually envisaged as being embodied in the deliberations of a Zemskii Sobor, or Assembly of the Land, a quasi-representative body convened from time to time by the tsar).
(9) For the present reviewer's views on this issue, see Morin Perri [Maureen Perrie], "Izbrannyi tsar' i prirozhdennye gosudari:
Mikhail Romanov i ego soperniki," in Gosudarstva i obshchestvo v Rossii XV--nachala XX veka: Sbornik statei pamiati Nikolaia Evgen 'evicha Nosova, ed.
Almos 20 years would pass before 16-year-old
Mikhail Romanov, a distant cousin of Ivan IV's wife, Anastasia, would be crowned Tsar.
"Dmitrii's" brief reign was stable and prosperous enough; but a second phase of the Troubles "reignited" in 1606 with "Dmitrii's" murder and ran until 1612, with the calling of the Assembly of the Land (Zernskii sabot) that would eventually elect Mikhail Romanov tsar in February 1613 (3, 5, 91, 134, 170, 299, 313).
In the first part of the book, Morozova focuses narrowly on events during what Platonov called the third, or national-struggle phase of the Troubles (1610-13) and on the election of Tsar Mikhail Romanov in 1613, the event that most agree brought the Troubles to their end.
