Boris Godunov
Boris Godunov ruled Russia for seven years and is remembered chiefly for a murder he may not have committed. Born around 1551 into a minor noble family, he rose at the court of Ivan the Terrible through the oprichnina, the tsar's terror apparatus, and secured his position by marrying the daughter of its head and by marrying his own sister to Ivan's son Fyodor. Fyodor succeeded in 1584. He was pious, simple and uninterested in government, and Godunov ran the state as regent for fourteen years. He ran it competently. He founded fortress towns along the southern and eastern frontiers, colonised Siberia, rebuilt Moscow's defences, negotiated the recovery of Baltic territory from Sweden, and in 1589 obtained a patriarchate for the Russian Church, which raised its standing independently of Constantinople. He also tied the peasantry more tightly to the land, which is the beginning of formal serfdom. In 1591 Ivan's youngest son Dmitry died at Uglich, aged eight, of a knife wound. The official commission, chaired by Godunov's rival Vasily Shuisky, found that he had cut his own throat during an epileptic seizure while playing with a knife. Almost nobody believed it then and historians remain divided now. Fyodor died childless in 1598, ending the Rurikid line, and an assembly elected Godunov tsar. A famine from 1601 killed perhaps two million people, and a pretender claiming to be Dmitry invaded with Polish backing in 1604. Godunov died suddenly in April 1605. The Time of Troubles followed. His son was murdered within weeks. Pushkin made him the subject of a play and Mussorgsky of an opera, both of which take the murder as fact.
- Lived: 1552 CE – 1605 CE
- Nationality: Russian
- Roles: tsar, regent, statesman
