Dmitry Pozharsky

Prince Dmitry Pozharsky led the volunteer army that drove the Polish garrison out of Moscow in 1612 and ended the Time of Troubles. He was a Rurikid prince of a family that had fallen out of the first rank. The Troubles were a fifteen-year collapse: a dynasty extinguished, a famine that killed perhaps two million, a succession of pretenders claiming to be the murdered son of Ivan the Terrible, and finally a Polish-Lithuanian occupation with a Polish prince elected to the Russian throne. Pozharsky was wounded fighting the occupiers in the Moscow rising of 1611. While he recovered, a butcher and merchant in Nizhny Novgorod named Kuzma Minin raised money from the townspeople for a new army and insisted that Pozharsky command it. The two marched on Moscow through the summer of 1612, beat a relieving force under Hetman Chodkiewicz, and took the Kremlin in November after a siege in which the garrison starved. A national assembly then elected Mikhail Romanov tsar, beginning a dynasty that lasted three hundred years. Pozharsky was given the title Saviour of the Fatherland and served the new tsar in senior commands and administration without ever becoming a court favourite. He is one of the few Russian heroes claimed with equal enthusiasm by tsarist, Soviet and modern governments. The monument to Minin and Pozharsky on Red Square, raised in 1818, was the first public statue in Moscow, and Russia's national holiday of 4 November commemorates their entry into the city. He declined to put himself forward for the throne at the 1613 assembly, though he was among the names discussed. He spent his later years administering provinces and building churches, and was buried at the Spaso-Yefimiev monastery in Suzdal.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history