HISTORICAL DICTIONARY A–Z - Russia: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present - page 147

ous intrigues he and his mother were murdered.
False Dmitrii entered Moscow victorious in June
1605 with help from prominent local boyars and
was proclaimed czar. False Dmitrii quickly alien-
ated his Polish-Lithuanian patrons by failing to
act on his promise to introduce Catholicism to
Russia and his Muscovite supporters by his
untraditional behavior and his Polish entourage.
In 1606, he was overthrown and murdered by a
group of boyars, led by Vasili Shuisky, who then
assumed the Muscovite throne until 1610.
The second False Dmitrii, claiming to be the
recently murdered czar although quite unlike
him in appearance, emerged in August 1607 and
attracted significant support in southern Russia,
mostly from peasants. By the spring of 1608 he
had established a base, complete with court and
administration, at Tushino, on the outskirts of
Moscow (hence his nickname, Thief of Tushino).
His troops ravaged northern Russia, and his

authority soon rivaled that of Czar Vasili Shuisky,
who in 1610 forced the pretender to flee to
Kaluga. While there the second False Dmitrii con-
tinued to press his claims until fatally wounded in
October 1610 by one of his own followers. A third
and last False Dmitrii emerged in 1611 and raided
the plains before retiring to PSKOV (hence his
nickname Thief of Pskov), where he was betrayed
and executed. The Time of Troubles ended with
the election of Michael Romanov as czar.

famines
Famines have been a recurrent event in Russian
history, a result of drought and other conditions,
and have contributed to social unrest in the
countryside and unrest in urban centers. The
severe famine of 1891-92, which affected the
Volga region following the comparatively calm
1880s, aroused renewed social and political activ-

A group of children, deserted by their parents and most of them barefoot, in the Volga district, an area hit hard by
famine, 1921 (Library of Congress)