In 1598 the childless Tsar Fyodor died — and with him the Rurikid dynasty, which had ruled Rus for seven centuries, came to an end. The idol of the Time of Troubles stood exposed: power had shrunk to the throne itself — a thing that could be seized by anyone who claimed the right name. The dignity of the tsar ceased to be service and became a mask, and beneath the mask hid an adventurer. One after another, pretenders appeared, each calling himself the miraculously saved Tsarevich Dmitry; behind them stood Polish magnates and their own hunger for the throne. The tsar's name was worn like borrowed clothes.
The collapse came crashing down from every side at once. In the years 1601 to 1603 a terrible famine fell upon the land — by some estimates nearly a third of the population died; people ate bark and carrion, and the roads were strewn with corpses. Onto the exhausted land came civil war, uprisings, and then open intervention — Polish-Lithuanian and Swedish. Pretenders succeeded one another, the boyars swore allegiance now to one, now to another, and in this chaos foreign armies marched into the very heart of the country.
The captivity was almost total disintegration. The state effectively ceased to exist as a single whole: there was neither a lawful tsar whom all would trust, nor any functioning authority. In Moscow itself stood a foreign garrison — the capital lay under a foreign boot. Rus as a realm hung over the abyss of nonexistence, and to those who lived through it, it seemed the land might vanish from the map at any moment.
The return came not from above but from below — from the land itself. In Nizhny Novgorod the townsman elder Kuzma Minin raised the money, and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky led the militia; in 1612 they freed Moscow from the Polish garrison. And in 1613 the Zemsky Sobor — a broad assembly of "all the land" — elected the sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov to the throne, founding a dynasty that would last three centuries. This was a genuine gathering-in: not a mere change of faces upon the throne, but the restoration of the state by the will of the people, from below. The memory of the Troubles remained in the Russian mind as an archetype — an image of how everything falls apart, and how it can nevertheless be gathered together anew.