Westernizing trends, especially via Ukraine and Poland. See also: ALEXEI MIKHAILOVICH; GOLITSYN, VASILY VASILIEVICH; PETER I; SOPHIA
FYODOR II
(1589-1605), Tsar of Russia and son of Boris Go-dunov.
Fyodor Borisovich Godunov was born in 1589 and eventually became tsar. His father, Boris Go-dunov, was the regent of the mentally retarded Tsar Fyodor I. Fyodor Godunov’s mother, Maria, was the daughter of Tsar Ivan IV’s favorite, Malyuta Sku-ratov (the notorious boss of the oprichnina, the tsar’s hand-picked military and administrative elite). Upon the death of the childless Tsar Fyodor I in 1598, Boris Godunov became tsar, and Fyodor Borisovich became heir to the throne. Contemporaries described young Fyodor as handsome, athletic, and kind. Like his older sister Ksenya, Fyodor was well educated and learned from his father the art of government as he grew up. Fyodor was also an avid student of cartography, and he is credited with drawing a small map of Moscow, included on a well-known Dutch map of Russia published in 1614.
In April 1605 Tsar Boris died, and Fyodor was proclaimed Tsar Fyodor II. Although well prepared to rule, the sixteen-year-old tsar was soon overwhelmed by the civil war his father had been fighting against supporters of someone claiming to be Dmitry of Uglich (the youngest son of Tsar Ivan IV). Several of Fyodor’s courtiers immediately began plotting to overthrow him, but it was the rebellion of the tsar’s army on May 7, 1605, that sealed the fate of the Godunov dynasty. Tsar Fyo-dor II was toppled in a bloodless popular uprising in Moscow on June 1, 1605. Several days later he and his mother were strangled to death, and it was falsely reported that they had committed suicide. Almost no one mourned the death of Fyodor II; Moscow was too busy celebrating the arrival of Tsar Dmitry. See also: DMITRY OF UGLICH; FYODOR ALEXEYEVICH; GO-DUNOV, BORIS FYODOROVICH; IVAN IV; OPRICHNINA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bushkovitch, Paul. (2001). Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671-1725. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Soloviev, Sergei. (1989). History of Russia: Vol. 25, Rebellion and Reform: Fedor and Sophia, 1682 -1689, ed. and tr. Lindsey Hughes. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.
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. Skrynnikov, Ruslan (1985). “The Rebellion in Moscow and the Fall of the Godunov Dynasty.” Soviet Studies in History 24:137-54.
(1557-1598), Tsar of Russia reigned 1584-1598.
Fyodor Ivanovich was the second son of Ivan IV (“The Terrible” or Ivan Grozny). Ascending the throne in 1584, three years after his father killed his older brother Ivan in a fit of rage, Fyodor Ivanovich was nevertheless too mentally deficient to govern. His brother-in-law, Boris Godunov (the brother of his wife Irene), ruled instead as regent. Fyodor did not have children and thus was the last descendant of Rurik to occupy the Russian throne.
Fyodor’s father Ivan IV had the longest reign in Russian history, from 1533 to 1584, and the first half of his reign was marked by constructive achievements in both foreign and domestic policy. His defeat of the Tartars of Kazan (1552) and Astrakhan (1556) opened the way southward and eastward to Russian expansion. He also welcomed the British explorer Richard Chancellor in 1553-1554 and established commercial relations with England. By 1560 Ivan IV had established the power and legitimacy of the tsar. He authorized reforms in the army and even established a consultative body known as the zemsky sobor to debate issues and provide advice (although only when he solicited it).
After the death in 1560 of his first wife Ana-stasia-whom he suspected had been poisoned- Ivan IV became moody and violent. Withdrawing from the boyars and the church, he insisted on personal control, exercised through the establishment of the oprichnina-the private police force he could order to kill his personal enemies. In 1591, just seven years after he killed his oldest son, Ivan’s youngest son Dmitry died under mysterious circumstances, possibly by the hand of Boris Go-dunov, a member of the lesser nobility who had become Ivan’s proteg?. In 1584 when Ivan’s second son Fyodor Ivanovich became tsar, Godunov shrewdly exploited Fyodor’s feeble-mindedness to assume de facto power as regent. When Fyodor died in 1598, the zemsky sobor elected Godunov as tsar.
Godunov was an effective regent and tsar. Although he did nothing to ease the burden on the peasants (issuing a decree in 1601 limiting their rights to move from one estate to another), Go-dunov made strides in economic development and colonization of Siberia. He also established the patriarchate in 1589. Before then the Russian church recognized the patriarch of Constantinople (now Istanbul). Under Godunov’s tutelage, Russia waged successful wars against the Tatars (1591) and Sweden (1595).
Plots, intrigues, and natural disasters soon undermined Godunov’s power, however. A stranger appeared, claiming to be Ivan’s youngest son, Dmitry (the first of three “False Dmitrys”). A famine from 1601 to 1603 stimulated rural unrest and opposition to Godunov’s rule. Godunov was killed in 1605 while suppressing a revolt during the advance on Moscow of one of the False Dmitrys. His death ushered in a “Time of Troubles” (Smut-noye vremya), which lasted until the establishment of the Romanov dynasty in 1613. See also: DMITRY, FALSE; GODUNOV, BORIS FYODOR-OVICH; IVAN IV; TIME OF TROUBLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bobrick, Benson. (1987). Fearful Majesty: The Life and Reign of Ivan the Terrible. New York: Putnam. Grey, Ian. (1973). Boris Godunov: The Tragic Tsar. New York: Scribner. Lamb, Harold. (1948). The March of Muscovy: Ivan the Terrible and the Growth of the Russian Empire, 1400-1648. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Yanov, Alexander. (1981). The Origins of Autocracy: Ivan the Terrible in Russian History. Berkeley: University of California Press.
(b. 1958), economist, deputy prime minister (1992-1993), finance minister (1990, 1993), advocate of liberal economic reform.
Boris Fyodorov, an ambitious young economist who served briefly as deputy prime minister, found a business career more fruitful than politics. Fyo-dorov graduated from the Moscow Institute of Finance and went on to earn candidate and doctor’s degrees at Moscow State University (1985) and the USA/Canada Institute (1990). From 1980 to 1987 he worked at Gosbank, and then at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations. He was part of the team led by Grigory Yavlinsky that prepared the Five-Hundred-Day Plan in 1990. In July 1990 he became finance minister in the Russian Federation government, but resigned in December. From April 1991 to October 1992 he worked for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development,
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and then spent two months as Russian director at the World Bank. In December 1992 he became deputy prime minister in Boris Yeltsin’s cabinet, taking on the job of finance minister in March 1993. In December 1993 he was elected to the State Duma from a Moscow constituency as a member of Yegor Gaidar’s Russia’s Choice party.
Fyodorov fell out with Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin in January 1994, citing frustration with weak monetary and fiscal discipline. He then formed a liberal parliamentary fraction, Union of December 12, and in 1995 created his own party, Forward Russia, which mixed advocacy of market reform with patriotic slogans, including support for the war in Chechnya. He was reelected to the Duma in December 1995, famously publishing a book of blank pages entitled “The Economic Achievements of the Chernomyrdin Government.” From May to September 1998 he headed the State Tax Administration, but his political career did not progress. In subsequent years he remained a prominent advocate of further liberal reforms and a defender of minority shareholder interests. In 2000 he was elected a member of the board of Gazprom and Unified Energy Systems, the two largest companies in Russia. See also: CHERNOMYRDIN, VIKTOR STEPANOVICH; FIVE-HUNDRED-DAY PLAN; GAIDAR, YEGOR TIMUROVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
