Concise Russian history for a traveler

Ancient Russia
Ivan IV. Ivan was doubtless a puppet in the hands of the leading politicians long after his coronation. The major reforms of the middle 1550s, which produced a new law code, a new military organization, a reform of local government, and severe restrictions on the powers of hereditary landowners (including the monasteries), were probably the work of the bureaucrats and boyards. Toward the end of the 1550s Ivan seems to have seized control of the government. Ivan was a disastrously bad ruler, in part because no one had ever anticipated that he would rule. His lifelong ill health made it quite natural for the regency and the politicians to ignore him and to neglect his education. Ivan established his famous oprichnina, an aggregate of territory separated from the rest of the realm and put under his immediate control as crown land. Specific towns and districts all over Russia were included in the oprichnina, their revenues being assigned to the maintenance of Ivan’s new court and household. The trained statesmen and administrators were replaced by hirelings cronies, the central government and military organizations began to disintegrate.

By the time he died in 1584, the state was in ruins.

The Time of Troubles. The events until 1613 cannot be captured in a few words. Chaos gripped most of central areas of Muscovy. The so-called False Dmitry, a defrocked monk who had claimed to be the son of Ivan IV (the true Dmitry had died during an epileptic seizure in 1591), was declared the tsar. The pretender with his Polish garrison entered Moscow in triumph and was crowned.

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