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Economic activity revived; the outward migration of population from the Moscow region ceased. Abandoned villages were gradually resettled. Service gentry, in despair at losing their peasant tenants, who had been leaving for the freedom of the frontier areas or for large estates which offered them terms that mere gentry could not afford, were mollified by new laws. These banned the departure of peasant tenants before St George’s Day (the end of the autumn harvest), and authorized their recovery by force for a period thereafter. At the same time, the weight of government demands on the peasantry was lightened.

The new domestic policy sought to establish internal calm after all the recent storms. It was paralleled by a foreign policy which guarded Russia’s essential interests without requiring any massive mobilization of resources. Dangerous ambition was abandoned, and feelers were put out to countries far and near offering co-operation for mutual benefit. The defences of the southern frontier were shored up; a twelve-year peace was concluded with Poland-Lithuania in 1591; diplomatic relations were established with the Ottoman Empire, and commercial relations with Holland and France. Only the confrontation with Sweden continued — but it was to result in the recovery of central Karelia and territories on the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga which had been lost in the Livonian War. Another triumph, achieved by peaceful means, was the raising of the metropolitan see of Moscow, hitherto subject to the Patriarch of Constantinople, to the status of an independent patriarchate in 1591. This made the Russian Church effectively a national church, increasing both its authority and that of its partner, the state. ¹

If Ivan’s misrule had made a collapse inevitable, the measures taken under his successor kept disaster at bay, and when the reckoning eventually came it was to be precipitated and deepened by factors independent of Ivan’s actions — by ‘acts of God’ that were quite unforeseeable.

The new tsar, Fedor, was the elder of Ivan’s two surviving sons. The younger, Dmitrii, was to die an accidental death in 1591. Years afterwards this event was to precipitate a crisis, but not at the time. True, Tsar Fedor was rumoured to be of limited ability - he was probably mentally retarded - but he served well enough as a figurehead, and he soon gained a reputation for piety, a critical indicator of legitimacy in that age and therefore a real political asset. Besides, it transpired that he was capable of siring an heir. His policies, however, are associated with those who managed affairs for him - the regents, his ministers.

These included the brothers Shchelkalov — Andrei, who had headed the Foreign Office (Posolskii prikaz) from 1570 to 1594, and Vasilii, who as head of both the Musketeer Office (Streletskii prikaz) and the Felony Department (Razboinii prikaz) was effectively in charge of state security. ²Two other leading lights were Dmitrii Godunov, a former oprichnik, and his brother Boris, who made a reputation as a financial manager. The Godunovs hailed from Kostroma on the Volga, where they were generous benefactors of the riverside Trinity Monastery. Both had been members of Ivan’s council of ministers; both were shrewd politically, and when Boris persuaded the Tsar to marry his sister his prospects were much enhanced.

The policies that Boris and his colleagues pursued were judicious. One of the new regime’s first measures was to abolish the tax privileges of hereditary estate-holders. It also gave effective relief to the hard-pressed service gentry by giving them seigneurial rights over their ploughland, as well as allowing them to pursue and recover their runaway peasants. Tradesmen, craftsmen and other productive commercial people — another vital constituency — were helped too, by exempting the suburbs and settlements where they lived from taxation. These measures promoted social peace and encouraged commerce especially in central Russia, but the government also took radical measures to develop the south and south-east, chiefly by building new towns.