Marina Mniszech. During the wedding festivities in Moscow, Dmitry’s enemies (led by Prince Vasily Shuisky) incited a riot by claiming that the Polish wedding guests were trying to murder the tsar. During the riot, about two hundred men entered the Kremlin and killed Tsar Dmitry. His body was then dragged to Red Square, where he was denounced as an impostor. Shuisky seized power and proclaimed himself tsar, but Tsar Dmitry’s adherents circulated rumors that he was still alive and stirred up a powerful rebellion against the usurper. The civil war fought in the name of Tsar Dmitry lasted many years and nearly destroyed Russia. See also: DMITRY OF UGLICH; GODUNOV, BORIS FYODOR-OVICH; IVAN IV; MNISZECH, MARINA; OTREPEV, GRIG-ORY; SHUISKY, VASILY IVANOVICH; TIME OF TROUBLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barbour, Philip. (1966). Dimitry Called the Pretender: Tsar and Great Prince of All Russia, 1605-1606. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Dunning, Chester. (2001). Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Perrie, Maureen. (1995). Pretenders and Popular Monar-chism in Early Modern Russia: The False Tsars of the Time of Troubles. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
(1299-1326), Prince of Tver and grand prince of Vladimir.
Dmitry Mikhailovich (“Terrible Eyes”) was born on September 15, 1299. Twelve years later he led a campaign against Yury Danilovich of Moscow to capture Nizhny Novgorod. But Metropolitan Peter, a supporter of Moscow, objected. Dmitry therefore cancelled the attack. In 1318, when Khan Uzbek executed his father Mikhail, Dmitry succeeded him to Tver. Soon afterward, he strengthened his hand against Moscow by marrying Maria, daughter of Grand Prince Gedimin, thereby concluding a marriage alliance with the Lithuanians. In 1321 Yury, now the Grand Prince of Vladimir, marched against Dmitry and forced him to hand over his share of the Tatar tribute and to promise not to seek the grand princely title. In 1322, when Yury delayed in taking the tribute to Khan Uzbek, Dmitry broke his pledge. He rode to Saray to complain to the khan that Yury refused to hand over the tribute and to ask for the grand princely title. For his service, the khan granted him the patent for Vladimir. Because Yury objected to the appointment, Uzbek summoned both princes to Saray, but the khan never passed judgment on them. On November 21, 1325, Dmitry murdered Yury to avenge his father’s execution. He therewith incurred the khan’s wrath. The latter sent troops to devastate the Tver lands and had Dmitry executed in the following year, on September 13, 1326. See also: GOLDEN HORDE; GRAND PRINCE; METROPOLITAN; YURI DANILOVICH
DMITRY OF UGLICH
Fennell, John L. I. (1968). The Emergence of Moscow 1304-1359. London: Secker and Warburg. Martin, Janet. (1995). Medieval Russia 980-1584. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
broad sectors of the population and influential factions at court endorsed the notion that Dmitry had miraculously escaped death. Over a dozen seventeenth-century texts excoriate Godunov for Dmitry’s murder, and historians have debated the events surrounding his death and public resurrection ever since.
(1582-1591), youngest son of Ivan the Terrible, whose early death was followed by the appearance of two “False Dmitry” claimants to the throne in the Time of Troubles.
Dmitry Ivanovich, the son of Tsar Ivan IV, was born in 1582 at a time of dynastic crisis. The tsare-vich Ivan Ivanovich had been killed in 1581, and his mentally impaired brother Fedor had failed to produce offspring after several years of marriage. Dmitry’s mother, Maria Nagaia, was the last of the many wives taken by Ivan IV. Although their marriage was considered uncanonical, the birth of Dmitry raised hopes that the Rurikid line might continue. Upon the death of Ivan IV in 1584, Boris Godunov moved to protect the interests of his brother-in-law, Tsarevich Fedor, by removing Dmitry and the Nagoi clan from Moscow and exiling them to the town of Uglich. The Nagois were kept under close surveillance, and the young Dmitry, who suffered from epilepsy, grew up in Uglich surrounded by nannies and uncles. On May 15, 1591, the boy’s body was discovered in a pool of blood in a courtyard. Upon hearing the terrible news, the Nagois incited a mob against Godunov’s representatives in Uglich and several were murdered. A commission of inquiry sent from Moscow concurred with the majority of eyewitnesses that Dmitry’s death was an accident caused by severe epileptic convulsions that broke out during a knife-throwing game, causing him to fall on a knife and slit his own throat. Rumors of Godunov’s complicity began to circulate almost immediately, but they were not officially accepted at court until 1606. In that year tsar Vasily Ivanovich Shuisky, who had headed the commission of inquiry that pronounced Dmitry’s death an accident fifteen years earlier, brought the Nagoi clan back to court and proclaimed Dmitry’s death a political murder perpetrated by Godunov. Shuisky also organized the transfer of Dmitry’s remains to Moscow and promoted the cult of his martyrdom for propaganda purposes. During the Time of Troubles, See also: DMITRY, FALSE; GODUNOV, BORIS FYODOR-OVICH; IVAN IV; RURIKID DYNASTY; SHUISKY, VASILY; TIME OF TROUBLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dunning, Chester. (2001). Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. University Park: Penn State University Press.
On January 13, 1953, TASS and Pravda announced the exposure of a conspiracy within the Soviet medical elite. Nine doctors-including six with stereo-typically Jewish last names-were charged with assassinating Andrei A. Zhdanov and Aleksandr S. Shcherbakov and plotting to kill other key members of the Soviet leadership. These articles touched off an explosion of undisguised chauvinism in the press that condemned Soviet Jews as Zionists and agents of United States and British imperialism. The Doctors’ Plot (Delo vrachei) was the product of an intensely russocentric period in Soviet history when non-Russian cultures were routinely accused of bourgeois nationalism. It marked the culmination of state-sponsored anti-Semitism under Josef Stalin and followed in the wake of the 1948 murder of Solomon M. Mikhoels and subsequent anti-Cosmopolitan campaigns.
Much of the Doctors’ Plot remains shrouded in mystery, due to the fact that virtually all relevant archival material remains tightly classified. Even its design and intent are unclear, insofar as the campaign was still evolving when it was abruptly terminated after Stalin’s death in March 1953. Although it was officially denounced shortly thereafter as the work of renegades within the security services, most scholars suspect that Stalin played a major role in the affair. Some believe that the inflammatory press coverage was intended to provoke a massive wave of pogroms that would give
DOLGANS
Stalin an excuse to deport the Soviet Jews to Siberia. Adherents of this view differ over what precisely was to catalyze such a wave of popular anti-Semitism. According to some commentators, the court philosopher Dimitry I. Chesnokov was to publicly justify the sequestering of the Jews in Marxist-Leninist terms. Others suggest that the campaign in the press would climax with the show trial and execution of the Jewish “doctor-murderers” on Red Square. But the most common story involves an attempt to publish a collective letter to Pravda signed by approximately sixty prominent Soviet Jews that would condemn the traitorous doctors and propose that the entire Jewish community be “voluntarily” deported to Siberia to exculpate its sins. In each of these cases, the exiling of the Jews was to be accompanied by a thorough purge of party and state institutions, a murderous act that would apparently combine elements of the Great Terror with the Final Solution.
Of the three scenarios, only the collective letter to Pravda finds reflection in extant archival sources. Composed at Agitprop in mid-January 1953 by Nikita. A. Mikhailov, the collective letter condemned the “doctor- murderers,” conceded that some Soviet Jews had fallen under the influence of hostile foreign powers, and demanded “the most merciless punishment of the criminals.” I. I. Mints and Ia. S. Khavinson circulated this letter within the Soviet Jewish elite and coerced many, including Vasily S. Grossman and S. Ia. Marshak, to sign it. Others, however, refused. Although the letter did not explicitly call for mass deportations, Ilya G. Ehrenburg and V. A. Kaverin read the phrase “the most merciless punishment” to be a veiled threat against the entire Soviet Jewish
