Polish-Lithuanian occupation of Moscow

After the tsarist troops were defeated under Klushin and the Semiboyarshchyna agreed to raise Prince Vladislav to the Russian throne , to maintain order in the capital until the arrival of the new head of state in October-November 1610, Polish-Lithuanian troops Stanislav Zholkevsky entered Moscow without a fight. Since the beginning of August, Zholkevsky camped on the Khoroshevsky meadows and the Khodynsky field . He entered the city under pressure from the king, although he himself was against the occupation of the Russian capital ^[2] .

At the end of 1610 in Moscow and the Novodevichy Convent, about 6,000 fighters of the armor-clad and hussar banners, 800 foreign-born infantrymen, 400 hajduks — only four regiments led by Alexander Gonsevsky, Martin Kazanovsky , Alexander Zborovsky and Ludwig Weikher — were stationed . For each soldier, there were three civilians from among the “ Tushintsevs ”, servants, and martyrs who pounced on them on the way to Moscow ^[2] .

Zholkevsky placed the soldiers around Moscow so that in the event of an attack they could come to each other's aid or retreat to the Kremlin. A significant part of the garrison was located west of the Kremlin wall near the Neglinnaya River . To maintain order, a tribunal was established in which the Russian side was represented by Grigory Romodanovsky and Ivan Streshnev , and the Polish-Lithuanian side was represented by Alexander Korychinsky and Lieutenant Malynsky ^[2] .

When in November Zholkevsky went to Smolensk for a meeting with Sigismund III , he took his regiments with him. Several units were left in the Novodevichy Convent to control the roads to Mozhaisk and Volokolamsk . The hetman placed the rest closer to the besieged Smolensk - in Vereya and Mozhaisk.

In March 1611, in connection with the formation of the First People’s Militia, the commander of the Polish-Lithuanian garrison Gonsevsky provoked street battles , during which most of Moscow was burned down. Having broken the resistance of the townspeople in advance, Gonsevsky hoped to minimize support for the First Militia.

In April and early May, militias stormed the walls of the Earth City and the walls of the White City , freeing up most of Moscow (more than 95%), and then locked the interventionists behind the Kitaygorod and Kremlin walls . Cossacks of Prince D.T. Trubetskoy actually besieged the Kremlin garrison.

Together with the Poles in the besieged Kremlin sat the members of the Semiboyarschyna , as well as the future Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov with his mother ^[3] .

The provisions for the garrison were collected in the Moscow Region by the regiment of Jan Peter Sapieha . In feeding the Polish-Lithuanian army were allocated "station" (region) to the north-east of Moscow. According to the memoirist Samuil Maskevich , “what did anyone like, and the greatest boyar had a wife, daughter, or took them by force” ^[4] . After the death of Sapieha in September 1611, Jan Karol Khodkevich , the great Lithuanian hetman, took on the difficult task of collecting food.

The entire first half of 1612 turned out to be abnormally cold. Not receiving a salary, many soldiers of the garrison formed a confederation and left the Russian capital. Famine began in the city. Speculators from the Moscow region sold bread in the city at a 30-fold price.

At the end of 1611, carts with food collected by Samuel Koretsky reached the Kremlin. In January 1612, the Buzila regiment was able to break into Moscow. He brought in supplies that temporarily eased the food situation. The Hungarian infantrymen Felix Nevyarovsky, who arrived later , did not bring any food, and with their presence they only accelerated the return of the nourishment. On July 25, Yakub Bobovsky brought in several carts of grain, but it was a drop in the bucket.

Avraamy Palitsyn claims that after entering the Kremlin, the Cossacks of Trubetskoy “having acquired many tans and floors of human flesh are salted and there are many human corpses under the slings” ^[5] .

Seeing the futility of the resistance, Polish-Lithuanian formations began to leave the city. The most combat-ready regiment of Zborovsky went to Smolensk in early June 1612. Until the end of summer, Gonsevsky followed with all the veterans of the Klushinsky battle ^[6] . With them retreating took away the remnants of the Kremlin treasury. At the head of the garrison, Gonsevsky left Nikolai Strus .

In the early days of autumn, Khodkevich returned from a campaign through the Upper Volga lands with 400 supplies. During bloody battles on September 1-3, 1612, he approached the besieged Kremlin 1800 meters, but, having lost 1,500 soldiers in 2 days of fighting, he was forced to retreat. After that, the fate of the besieged was a foregone conclusion.

At the beginning of November ^[7] , the Cossacks of Trubetskoy established control over Kitai-Gorod , after which Strus opened negotiations on the terms of surrender. The Kremlin garrison capitulated on November 7th. Although the losers were promised to be “left in good health and respected”, after the Kremlin surrendered there was a massacre of its defenders: “Cossacks beat the entire Evo regiment, few were left” ^[8] .

Before the Deulinsky truce of 1619 and the ensuing exchange of prisoners by the Poles and Litvinians captured in the Kremlin, they settled in Yaroslavl , Balakhna , Nizhny Novgorod and other Upper Volga cities. Prisoners in Galich and Unzha were completely exterminated. In Nizhny Novgorod, the mother of Prince Pozharsky stood up for Budzil with his comrades, after which they were placed "in a dungeon in which they had been sitting for nineteen weeks, very dark, thin and stinking" ^[9] .

• The occupation of Moscow by the French

• Florya B. N. Polish-Lithuanian intervention in Russia and Russian society / B.N. Florya; Grew up. Acad. Sciences, Institute of Slavic Studies. - M.: Indrik, 2005 (SPT Type. Science). - 415 p. - ISBN 5-85759-303-4 .