The period under consideration is delineated by two crises. In 1598 the ruling dynasty died out in Muscovy. This became the most important cause of social and political upheaval known as the ‘Time of Troubles’ (1598−1613) even by contemporaries. The extinction of the dynasty combined with the worsening of the climate and ensuing famines led to social uprisings, the appearance of false tsars and finally foreign intervention by the Poles and Swedes. The weakness of Moskovskoe gosudarstvo (the ‘Muscovite state’ [that is realm])1 is clearly indicated by the success of the First False Dmitrij who was able to rule Moscow for a year (1605−06), and it is even more revealing that Polish troops were in possession of the Kremlin between 1610−12. Political consolidation could only begin after the Poles had been ousted from Moscow and a new tsar was ‘elected’ (1613) by the ‘assembly of the whole country’ (that is a gathering consisting of the church council, the boyars and people of various social origins, (townsmen, military servitors and even peasants) sent to Moscow). To have a generally recognized

1 This article is part of a research project supported by the Hungarian fund OTKA (reference number: T043432). Although the term Moskovskoe gosudarstvo had been known before, it came into widespread use precisely during the early seventeenth century and it was to remain the most important expression referring to Russia in official documents (see the Law Code of 1649) throughout the century (with the exception of titles where Rossiya became the established term). Gosudarstvo, however, did not mean state at that time but ‘had a number of different meanings’, of which the most important was ‘realm’; it could also refer to parts of the realm and was often used in the plural. Simon M. Dixon, The Modernisation of Russia 1676−1825 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 190. For the changes in the meaning of gosudarstvo see my article ‘“Proprietary Dynasticism” and the Development of the Concept of State in 17th-Century Russia’, in Márta Font (ed.), Specimina nova III (Pécs,

true (that is real) tsar (istinnyj/pravednyj tsar) or, in other words, a born tsar (prirozhdennyj tsar) was the key to political stability after the false tsars and the three-year interregnum (1610−13).