History RaeTold

The Perpetual Cycle of False Dmitries, or: Anyone Can Rule Russia for a Short Period of time if They Claim to be Called Dmitry and Don't Mind Dying a Violent Death

There’s no denying that history’s fucking wild, but do you know what’s EXTREMELY fucking wild? Russian history. Russia is just a millennium-long soap opera where everyone’s fucking half the population and murdering the other half and nothing makes any sense. 

My fans (read as: two of the five people who read this) have been asking me about Rasputin for a while, and so I’ve chosen to ignore them and talk about some mad obscure 17th century shit with millions of men with the same name instead. I’ll do Rasputin eventually. Maybe for your birthday.

Before we get to the many men with the same name, though, we need to start with a bit of preamble, featuring one man with one name and one really fierce moniker. Ivan the fucking Terrible.

Ivan the Terrible, despite the name, was a relatively decent Tsar who ruled Russia for a good chunk of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. He wasn’t even assassinated, which is overwhelmingly good going for any Russian, Tsar or no.

He was also completely batshit insane, but that was par for the course (Tsar for the course? No? Yes? Actually, you know what, yes. That’s a good joke. You should laugh at that) for royalty at the time, as they were all so inbred they were just two identical genes sellotaped together and seeped in untreated bipolar disorder and a terrible upbringing for centuries. 

Ivan had a bunch of kids by a bunch of wives (some of whom may or may not be fictitious, Wikipedia is shaky on the details), but only three of his kids survived infancy and lived long enough to be relevant to our story: Ivan (who, for the sake of simplicity we’ll call Little I), Feodor and Dmitry. 

Three sons was pretty good going in terms of continuing Ivan’s awful, inbred bloodline. Even better, Little I, first in line to the throne, managed to impregnate a woman with an heir of his own. Unfortunately, Big Ivan then killed both Little I and Little I’s unborn child in a rage, putting a massive downer on the whole affair.

(He also killed the mother of Little I’s unborn child in the process, but historically people didn’t give a shit about the parts of a woman which weren’t uterus, so it’s not discussed much).

So when Ivan finally died (during a chess game, because even powerful Tsars would rather die than have to play fucking chess), Feodor was left to rule Russia. Sadly, he was a complete drip and a fairly ineffective ruler up until his death, a handful of years later, with no babies of his own.

And sadly, Dmitry, who was Ivan the Terrible’s final chance at an heir, had died a few years earlier at the age of nine, from a stab wound that historians claim MAY have been self-inflicted. Because who hasn’t accidentally STABBED THEMSELVES IN THE FUCKING THROAT at some point?

Yeah I’m calling this one. Definite assassination.

This plunged Russia into the ‘Time of Troubles’, left adrift with no ruler. For a while, some dude called Boris took the throne, but I didn’t read up on him much and thus know nothing about him beyond the fact that he wasn’t super popular, a common occurrence for leaders named fucking Boris.

This is all nauseatingly familiar.

It was during this time that a plucky young lad emerged, claiming to be Ivan’s youngest dead son, Dmitry. According to him, his mother had gotten wind of a plot to assassinate him and had smuggled him out of Moscow into Poland, where he spent his adolescence in hiding, and was now back to claim the throne that was rightfully his.

There was very little evidence to support this claim, but that didn’t stop Poland seizing on the opportunity to get a Pole on the Russian throne. They happily threw themselves behind this rando dude and formed an army to march on Moscow. And despite the blistering lack of evidence to support False Dmitry the First (to be known as FDI), everyone fucking hated Boris enough that a good chunk of people happily joined FDI’s gang, and so his little army grew.

As they went, they got into a few scuffles with some Russian soldiers who themselves weren’t big on Boris but were contractually obliged to defend him so went into it with an air of “fine, ok, I GUESS”. The last of these scuffles pretty much wiped out Dmitry’s army.

This would’ve been a disappointing end to our hero’s story, if Boris hadn’t, at that point, conveniently died.

So it CAN happen. Cling to that hope.

From my (limited) research, this was genuinely a wild coincidence rather than assassination, but was super handy for FDI. The Russians he had been fighting immediately joined him, and there nobody was left in his way as he stepped into the Tsarring role.

That was also a good joke. I'm funny.

After that, FDI ruled Russia for a glorious year and a bit, before some assorted Russians decided they weren’t having some Polish dude, who was very clearly NOT the real Dmitry, ruling their country. Reasonably, they stormed the Kremlin and beat him to death. They then cremated him and SHOT HIS ASHES OUT OF A CANNON towards Poland in an unnecessarily heavy-handed symbolic act, because, and I cannot emphasise this enough, Russia is fucking mental. 

I’d rate this as a solid 5/10 effort for FDI. Full points for successfully taking the throne, but minus points for that later business with the dying and whatever the fuck that was with the cannon.

Of course, after this, everyone realised that pretending to be a dead prince in order to rule Russia was a terrible idea that would end in violent death, and nobody tried it again.

Aye, like fuck they did.

Less that a year later, another Dmitry emerged. He initially claimed to be an aristocrat, but nobody believed that blatant lie and so they tortured him a bit. As you do. Under torture, he confessed, instead, to being the twice-deceased Dmitry. I’m not sure what they were trying to torture out of him but I’m pretty sure “I’m that prince who was stabbed in the throat and then came back from the dead and got shot out of a cannon” wasn’t it. And yet here we were.

Anyway, once again, a bunch of people happily believed him despite no supporting evidence and tried to march on Moscow.

They honestly just really loved marching on Moscow.

Interestingly, he didn't dispute the legitimacy of the last False Dmitry, instead sticking to a nice streamlined narrative and claiming to be one continuous Dmitry who had survived both the throat-stabbing and the cannon-firing.

This time, someone with somewhat of a brain cell was like “aha! Let’s take him to the LAST Dmitry’s widow and catch him out”. Which would’ve been a GREAT idea, had FDI’s widow not inexplicably gone “yep, that’s my husband” and fully gone along with whatever bit this obviously entirely different man was doing. Either it was a political move, or she was genuinely thick as shit and couldn’t tell one white man from another (which is fair, they all look pretty similar).

And then, of course, he was murdered.

This is actually a really fun murder (who doesn't love a good murder?). FDII was getting smashed one night, cracking open a cold one with the lads, and decided to go for a drunken sleigh ride because, you know, Russia. He loaded up his sleigh with a bunch of mead like some kind of fancy boozy Santa and took to the road. Sadly for him, one of his bodyguards that night was a prince called Peter (where the fuck are all these princes coming from? Surely they could easily identify the guy pretending to be Dmitry because he was literally the only person in the country who wasn’t already fucking royalty). Now, FDII and Peter had had a bit of a falling out, which resulted in FDII whipping Peter, leading Peter to take advantage of FDII’s drunken state and seek out totally reasonable retaliation: shooting him in the face and beheading him with a fucking sabre.

How very Russian.

And that was the end of the second False Dmitry.

You’re never going to guess what happened next.

No really, you’re going to shit.

Another. Fucking. Dmitry.

Ok, yeah, sure, you probably got that from context.

The third False Dmitry emerged three months after the death of FDII, because by this point they were on a fucking roll. There’s less information available on this guy, because historians lost momentum after the first three Dmitries (one real, two false), but the limited info on Wikipedia claims he “appeared suddenly, from behind the river Narva” which makes very little sense but implies he was some kind of river nymph. Who knows at this point.

Either way, FDIII gained military support pretty quickly, because everyone had reached a point where they didn’t remember that they did with their lives when they weren’t marching on Moscow with some guy or another called Dmitry.

FDIII managed to keep this up for a little over a year, which is pretty good going, before he was arrested and secretly executed. Such a low-key death, after all the prior mad shit, shows how fucking bored everyone was with this Dmitry bullshit. Didn’t even shoot him out of a single cannon. Gutted for that guy.

After that, there were no more Dmitries. But who knows? Maybe the next False Dmitry could be you.