Will the Real Tsar Dmitri Please Stand Up? (Part 2)

Tsar Dmitri I was murdered by assassins, but he wouledn't be the last to use the name of Ivan the Terrible's son claiming to be the rightful ruler of Russia. Support Noble Blood: —Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/noblebloodtales — Noble Blood merch https://store.dftba.com/collections/noble-blood — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250840578/anatomyalovestory/and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story' https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250861016/immortalityalovestory/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Dana Schwartz?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:35Dana Schwartz?

  Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Listener discretion advised. Just before midnight on May 16, 1606, a courtier and several of his accomplices nervously waited in the palace shadows. With traitors potentially lurking in every corner of the Kremlin, speed and stealth were vital, but also nearly impossible considering the group's mission: sneaking 25 horses out of the czar's private stable. This was no theft, however, no devious horse heist.

• 1:17Dana Schwartz?

  The courtier, Mikhail Molkhanov, had been tasked with securing this royal herd by their owner himself, Czar Dmitri. Molkhanov was one of the emperor's closest associates and had helped hatch this escape plan after Dmitri learned of a post-wedding assassination plot against him that was set to kick off in mere hours. Molkhanov had tasked an experienced stable hand with gathering the horses, but was that man trustworthy? Could this risky getaway possibly work? The tense moments ticked past until at last the "stable hand" delivered the horses as covertly as he could.

• 2:02Dana Schwartz?

  Molkinov and his men met up with a disguised Tsar Dmitri and successfully helped him flee Moscow under cover of darkness, so that he could then travel incognito and daringly test the true loyalty of his subjects and purportedly devoted lords. Or so goes this alternate version of events. After Vasili Shvisky initiated his murderous plan and grotesquely paraded Tsar Dmitri's supposed body through the streets, Molkinov began to spread his dramatic tale within days. "The Tsar," he said, "actually escaped."

• 2:44Dana Schwartz?

  And a few details did add a sniff of plausibility. For example, 25 horses did go missing from Tsar Dmitri's stables. Molkinov also had Dmitri's favorite Turkish horse and state seal to back up his claim. And Vasili reportedly had that skillful "stable hand" tortured, hoping to make him reveal that he had not actually helped Dmitri survive. But that poor "stable hand," apparently deeply loyal to Dmitri after all, died without admitting a thing. Molkinov gradually headed for Poland-Lithuania and has been credited by some historians as

• 3:28Dana Schwartz?

  having done more to keep the legend of Tsar Dmitri alive than any other individual. Molkinov achieved this by not only spinning his yarn that the Tsar and his horses had artfully escaped their enemies, but by also pretending to be Dmitri himself. Molkinov did not bear much resemblance to Dmitri, but he knew him so well that he could deftly imitate him while traveling among less familiar townsfolk.

• 4:00Dana Schwartz?

  In spite of these efforts, Molkinov is typically not even included by scholars as one of the main “false Dmitriys.” Because, although he elicited considerable Dmitriy loyalty in certain localities, Molkinov was already too well-known in Moscow and other power circles to continue to play the role. Since the original Tsar Dmitriy was seemingly never seen or heard from again, Molkinov essentially served as a stand-in who stoked the fires of rebellion until, eventually, you guessed it, the time came to debut a new Dmitriy.

• 4:44Dana Schwartz?

  I’m Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood.

• 4:53Dana Schwartz?

  How was yet another man, and eventually more after that, able to somewhat successfully assume the same Dmitriy identity? Much like franchise movie sequels or knockoff Rolex’s, the market for them was clearly there. And to fully understand how Russia’s impersonator supply kept up with the Dmitriy demand, we must first look at the unstable situation in Moscow. Following the death of the man who had seized power under the name Tsar Dmitriy, Vasili quickly finagled his way into becoming the new Tsar. Vasili’s transition to the throne was rocky, though.

• 5:38Dana Schwartz?

  Many accounts have pegged Vasili as a cunning strategist, particularly accounts he commissioned and/or those that conveniently ignore his “less cunning” plans that backfired in farcical ways. But compared to his predecessor, Vasili was less respected in the capital, where many nobles reportedly saw him as a detestable traitor, and he was far less well-liked than Dmitriy within the larger realm. Vasily has been unfavorably depicted as a stocky, balding, and exceedingly nearsighted man who apparently looked fairly ridiculous, yet still intimidated his opponents through

• 6:22Dana Schwartz?

  tireless scheming and betraying. This is by no means to say that a ruler's overall effectiveness hinges on their looks, or benevolence, or reluctance to fear monger; there are plenty of historical cases that prove otherwise. But unfortunately for Vasily, when it came to winning broad support, he also did not have many other common image-enhancing factors to help his case among either the noble classes or the wider population. Vasily was of a royal background, but even putting aside the whole "committing regicide" issue, any assertion of him being a proper heir was murky at best.

• 7:07Dana Schwartz?

  Vasily also did not naturally come off as a battle-tested hero or military mastermind. And unlike Tsar Dmitri, with his "Jesus-esque" resurrection, Vasily lacked a compelling origin story that was anywhere near as interesting or easy to sell to the masses. Throughout his time in power, Vasily tried to boost his own legitimacy and combat wild rumors about his popular predecessor in numerous ways. Ways which often involved spreading wild rumors about his popular predecessor. He eagerly picked up where Tsar Boris had left off by launching a dramatic propaganda

• 7:50Dana Schwartz?

  campaign to discredit Dmitri. Remember Grigory Otrapov, the defrocked monk, the supposed alter ego of the supposed czar? Vasily incessantly endorsed the idea that the "pretender Dmitri" had undoubtedly been that dabbler in the dark arts all along, and went to great lengths with his related scare tactics. For example, Vasily allegedly staged a ghoulish incident where Dmitri's corpse suddenly appeared at a churchyard, far from where it had been buried the week prior, so that spooky stories would spread.

• 8:29Dana Schwartz?

  Then claiming that the Earth was clearly refusing to accept the body of an evil sorcerer, Vasily had Dmitri’s remains burned in one of the forts Dmitri had commissioned, and, according to an apocryphal-sounding legend, ordered his ashes to be fired from a cannon aimed in the direction from which the so-called Sarvich and his army had marched into Moscow. Along the way, Vasily continued to promote correlated notions that the “heretic Dmitri” was a tool of the devil, had impregnated thirty nuns, was maybe even the actual Antichrist, and so on.

• 9:12Dana Schwartz?

  Sure, this strategy hadn’t worked the first time around, but doubling down on thoroughly demonizing the former czar would surely release people from their sacred obligation to support him as a monarch, right? Far from it. Vasily’s macabre displays and scary accusations seemingly just confused or alienated sizable portions of Russian society. Many citizens were stout in their Russian Orthodox beliefs, and some presumably bought Vasily’s stories, but many others were just fatigued by Vasily’s rumor mill and skeptical of his desperate copying of Boris’s talking points.

• 9:56Dana Schwartz?

  Again, it’s worth noting that the whole “painting your political adversary as a demon” gambit had been so frequently deployed by that point that an average Russian on the street might have been hard-pressed to name a former ruler who hadn’t maybe had a chat or two with Satan. But a more important factor is that Dmitri had made many promises to towns, soldiers, and exiled families in order to gain their support during his civil war crusade back before he died, and he had started to deliver on those debts once he became czar. Vasily, on the other hand, had not specifically promised these groups nearly as many legal

• 10:41Dana Schwartz?

  or financial rewards. So when Mikhail Molkhanov, aka Stand-in Dmitri, and his associates traveled throughout the countryside, building up the myth of Dmitri's miraculous escape, many of Dmitri's ambitious supporters quickly backed the cause once again and revived their civil war fighting. As this rebellion neared critical mass in early 1607, an individual emerged in dramatic fashion, claiming yet again to be the true Tsar Dmitri. Russia had not even had to wait a full year to get their exciting, if somewhat slapdash,

• 11:24Dana Schwartz?

  sequel. The origins of the man who would later be referred to by many as False Dmitri II, or Second False Dmitri, are similarly foggy to those of Tsar Dmitri, who we will now refer to as False Dmitri Number One. Not because we're fully upholding the arguments of various detractors, but for the sake of historians' naming conventions and basic clarity, just to keep all of the Dmitri's straight. Apparently, False Dmitri Number Two was a similar height to False Dmitri The First, but only vaguely resembled him.

• 12:04Dana Schwartz?

  Most accounts described False Dmitri The Second as well-educated, having been able to write in Russian as well as Polish, which, similar to the prior Dmitri, would have helped him gain support in both countries. His handwriting apparently even looked like False Dmitri The First's, although this could have been thanks to help from Stand-in Dmitri, who could have closely modeled the first Dmitri's penmanship for the second Dmitri.

• 12:35Dana Schwartz?

  Regarding the background of False Dimitri II, consistent facts are hard to come by. Some sources pinpoint him as a Jew named Bogdan. This is largely based on the fact that Hebrew writings and a copy of the Talmud were reportedly posthumously found in his belongings. Many other accounts also represent him as someone far less refined or from a low socioeconomic class. Possibly the son of a coach driver or blacksmith. Maybe he was an apprentice himself, or a kossak, or maybe a teacher. According to many contemporary sources, False Dimitri II also had some association with the church,

• 13:18Dana Schwartz?

  since he was knowledgeable when it came to certain Russian Orthodox traditions. So he was probably, they say, the son of a priest, or maybe a priest’s servant. But he was also seemingly a beggar when determined rebel agents were out looking for look-alikes, or if you were sympathetic to their spin, when they were out trying to locate the true czar, who was certainly alive and had in no way been cremated and shot out of a cannon. So that would make False Dimitri II a priest’s servant turned beggar. Some accounts explained this progression through a salacious story about how he was a priest’s servant,

• 14:01Dana Schwartz?

  but how he had been turned out into the streets when he was caught in bed with the wife of the priest he had been serving. Whatever this man’s pre-Dimitri identity, the general consensus among many historians seems to be that False Dimitri II did not want to be Czar Dimitri at all. But after being found, jailed, and threatened with execution, he agreed that, yes, he definitely was the real Dimitri. That said, having only just remembered that he was Dimitri, he needed training and then a big unveiling. In May 1607, the town of Stardob was chosen by rebel leaders

• 14:45Dana Schwartz?

  as a good place for this because of the helpful fact that the people there were not remotely familiar with what Czar Dimitri had been like in person.

• 14:56Dana Schwartz?

  In a carefully engineered event surprisingly similar to an episode of Undercover Boss, False Dmitri II arrived to town under an alias and asks around as to what people thought of Czar Dmitri and if they'd want him back in power again. And then, aha! In a flashy public display, he revealed himself to be Czar Dmitri all along. He had been hiding as a test to judge their loyalty and they'd passed. The whole spectacle supposedly really stirred up the town and won over its occupants. False Dmitri II then continued to gain support, but his rise also came at a great cost.

• 15:39Dana Schwartz?

  His military forces slogged through bloody battles, seizures, and starvation as they fought against Czar Vasily's army. Facing steep obstacles preventing them from sweeping into Moscow, False Dmitri II and his rebel group set up a rival capital in the village of Tashino, which led to a messy, confusing, and wide-ranging conflict that split the country. In a sense, for over a year, Russia had two czars, two capitals, and two armies. Along the way, False Dmitri II's political alliances became extremely fraught, since,

• 16:22Dana Schwartz?

  for various reasons, he had to accept into his circle several other imposters who were also pretending to be the sons of powerful men, some of whom themselves were imposters. It's difficult to avoid being hyperbolic in parts of the story like this, but it basically got to the point that, had you been sitting in a war-planning meeting with False Dmitri II and looked to the person on your left and then to your right, at least one of them would have been an impostor, if not all three of you. During this time, Tsar Vasily tried to speed up peace negotiations by releasing

• 17:02Dana Schwartz?

  key prisoners to appease False Dmitri II’s Polish supporters, including the wife and father-in-law of False Dmitri I. Vasily strictly ordered False Dmitri I’s widow Marina and her father “stick directly with their convoy and after reaching Poland-Lithuania that they were under no circumstances to go join False Dmitri II, where they could declare him to be Marina’s miraculously surviving husband.” So, naturally, after getting captured by rebels, Marina and her dad met up with False Dmitri II, and after some negotiations about her future, she declared that he truly was Tsar Dmitri, her husband!

• 17:47Dana Schwartz?

  He had survived after all! What a miracle! This boosted the legitimacy of False Dmitri II, and by 1608, more than half of Russia recognized him as Tsar Dmitri. But this upswing also brought... ...many more Dmitri’s. Given how the story of Dmitri surviving assassination attempts clearly captivated people, Russia became a hotbed for pretenders hoping to use the same formula for themselves. During the later stages of the civil war, about 10 more copycats claimed to be Tsar Dmitri.

• 18:30Dana Schwartz?

  These fellows do not typically even make it into the top tier of scholars’ False Dmitri lists, since many of them barely scratched the surface of plausibility or garnered any traction at all. Still, all this Dmitri duplication led many Russians to lose faith in False Dmitri II. Desperate to curry favor with certain lords and rejuvenate his public support, False Dmitri II reportedly began offering rewards to those who found pseudo-Tsareviches roaming around and brought them to him. He even resorted to executing other imposters in his own circle, some who he’d previously

• 19:13Dana Schwartz?

  claimed were his close relatives, to prove that he was real and he would not tolerate fakes.

• 19:21Dana Schwartz?

  However, False Dmitri II's influence was unraveling too fast for him to stop. Unlike the more open and forward-thinking ruling style of the first Dmitri, the second Dmitri's court was, by most accounts, the opposite. It was guarded, paranoid, snobbish, and cruel. False Dmitri II lost the support of his advisers, and by letting his soldiers looting and pillaging go unchecked, he lost the support of townsfolk. False Dmitri II fled Tashino as his forces turned on him, but soon mistreated those around him so egregiously

• 20:03Dana Schwartz?

  that the captain of his own bodyguard killed him on December 11, 1610, while they were out sleigh riding. In addition to costing False Dmitri II his life, this bloody chapter of Russian history also sealed Tsar Vasily's fate. Plagued by backlash over his handling of this civil war, Vasily was ousted, forced to be a monk, and imprisoned. He died a couple years later. What a grim and tragic end to the time of troubles, huh? Nope! Hold on to your fur hats because it's time for False Dmitri #3.

• 20:48Dana Schwartz?

  Don't worry, within the (ahem) Tsar-studded cast of False Dmitri's, False Dmitri III's time in the spotlight is the briefest and least complicated. Who was he? Possibly a deacon or a traitor. He purportedly ended up as a beggar in Novgorod when sometime in 1611, he—or purportedly those who put him up to it— revealed his identity to be Dmitri, and he attracted some broader support. Like the first False Dmitri, the third was said to be a great speaker and gained popularity among Cossack groups who had backed prior Dmitri iterations.

• 21:33Dana Schwartz?

  The third's popularity actually grew to the point that several higher-up nobles in the agitated political scene in Moscow once again had to publicly back him. This time, though, their hearts just weren't that in it. In secret, several of the men trying to seize power at the Kremlin saw the Third as a nuisance and worked together to have him captured and hanged in 1612. But that only paved the way for False Dmitri IV kidding, mostly. There were a few rumors over the years about Dmitri's resurrections, but some of these

• 22:15Dana Schwartz?

  might have been due to erroneous reporting or accounting, and we have now covered the most influential branches of our dense Dmitri tree. After several more years of fighting and fierce political jostling, the time of the troubles essentially came to an end in 1613, when Russia started to accept the Romanov Dynasty as legitimate, and citizens went about trying to rebuild their war-torn country. Although the odd and tragic period of the False Dmitri's was relatively brief, their collective story continues to fascinate. Why?

• 22:58Dana Schwartz?

  In addition to having served up numerous uniquely absurd details, the procession of impostors brings up intriguing questions of identity on an individual scale and for Russia as a whole. It's important to remember that at this time, the Russian population was extremely widespread and largely illiterate. Accurate, salient news was hard to come by, so two institutional constants that citizens put their trust in were the sovereignty of Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church. At various points, the figure of Tsar Dmitri offered them a chance to actively fight for both.

• 23:43Dana Schwartz?

  So to say Russian people were repeatedly, embarrassingly duped is perhaps not giving them enough credit. Given the information and resources available, combined with the fact that so many of them were in grave debt and/or starving, it's understandable for them to put their faith in a hopeful, battle-tested legend supposedly capable of near-Christ-like miracles.

• 24:11Dana Schwartz?

  Beyond these loftier motivations, it's possible that some Russians' support of Tsar Dmitri revealed a very practical desire for stability. Power struggles meant bloodshed and steep taxes. Even for those skeptical of the rumors of miraculous escapes, the regal and righteous-seeming Tsar Dmitri, whoever he was, may have been significantly preferable to lesser-known usurpers, if only for the sake of having a semblance of order, stability, and tradition. As for Dmitri, he was both a person—or a series of people—but also an enduring idea.

• 24:55Dana Schwartz?

  As a symbol, Dmitri galvanized the masses and, for centuries to come, inspired creative works of fiction, theater, music, and poetry. In some ways, Dmitri was also an aspirational fantasy. For a brief period in Russia, there was basically an open casting call for an emperor. You could be a peasant, a beggar, an alleged demon-accommodating former monk, and be plucked from obscurity and given the keys to the Kremlin. It's basically Russian-American idol. Tsar Dmitri's narrative was a classic rags-to-riches tale so enticing that it begged to be repeated again and again.

• 25:39Dana Schwartz?

  And can we fully scoff at those involved? Considering we've all probably fantasized about sitting on a throne at some point, maybe, deep down, we all have a little Dmitri in us. That's the end of the second part of the déjà vu-filled story of the false Dmitri's, but stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear about one more supposed Dmitri who baffled Russia.

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• 27:12Dana Schwartz?

  In these false Dimitri chronicles, the Dmitri are all intriguing. But just like in any decent series of comic books or action movies, every legendary hero needs a worthy foil. And in Vasily Shvisky, this story has a fascinating antagonist and case study in contradiction. In analyzing Vasily's battles against various Dimitri incarnations, it's hard not to picture Vasily as everything from a cunning schemer to a ridiculous arch-villain shrieking at his underlings for failing to dispatch his death-defying rival. The time of the troubles may have been a pinnacle for pretenderism,

• 27:55Dana Schwartz?

  but it was also a heyday for hypocrites. Perhaps none bigger than Vasily. For instance, after spending years promoting falsehoods about how Dimitri was a dark sorcerer in league with Satan, when Vasily feared that he was losing the war to false Dimitri II, he allegedly looked into dark sorcery himself. In an even wilder turn of events, there is actually one more type of false Dimitri we have not yet discussed. One whose inclusion is debatable, since he never sought to rule, but whom Vasily had no one but himself to blame for creating.

• 28:36Dana Schwartz?

  After usurping the throne, Vasily sought to further discredit false Dimitri I by having the body of the young boy Dimitri, the one who died when he was eight years old, dug up under the guise of honoring him as a martyr. He had the exhumed Tsarovich paraded around while spreading propaganda that the amazingly well-preserved body of this "true" Dimitri could perform miracles and emitted a sublime fragrance. The only problem with this plan? Every part of it. Accounts claim that the spectacle fooled no one.

• 29:16Dana Schwartz?

  Not only did the body smell like a dead body, everyone was almost certain that Vasily had actually ordered a boy of the same age to be killed and used as a replacement. In other words, the man who had spent an extraordinary amount of time playing a game of whack-a-Dimitri perplexingly created a retroactive false Dimitri himself, although allegedly this one was already dead. And not only did Vasily keep trying to pass off this "false dead Dimitri" as legitimate, he made him a saint, which technically also made him the first canonized but now mostly

• 30:00Dana Schwartz?

  non-canonical Dimitri. As much as Vasily hated his zombie-like nemesis, having dealt with him at every stage, from boy to boy-saint to man to czar to stand-in czar to reluctant czar to quickly multiplying horde of cheap knockoff czars, perhaps we should credit Dimitri's clearly obsessed opposite number as having actually done more to immortalize the Dimitri persona than any other person in history.

• 30:36Dana Schwartz?

  Noble Blood is a production of iHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and research by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Courtney Sender, Amy Height, and Julia Milani. The show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk, with supervising producer Reema Ilkayali, and executive producers Aaron Mankey, Trevor Young, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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