DEMETRIUS, PSEUDO- (or FALSE), the name by which three Muscovite princes and pretenders, who claimed to be De metrius, son of Ivan the Terrible, are known in history. The real Demetrius had been murdered, while still a child, in 1S91, at Uglich, his widowed mother's appanage.
I. In the reign of Tsar Boris Godunov (1598-1605), the first of these pretenders, whose real name seems to have been Yury or Gregory, first appears in history circa 1600, when his learning and assurance impressed the Muscovite patriarch Job. Tsar Boris, however, ordered him to be seized and examined, whereupon he fled to Prince Constantine Ostrogsky at Ostrog, and subsequently entered the service of another Lithuanian, Prince Wisniwiecki, who tried to enlist the sympathy of the Polish king, Sigismund III., in his favour. The king refused to support him officially, but his cause was taken up by the Polish magnate Yury Mniszek, whose daughter Marina he afterwards married. The Jesuits also seem to have believed in the man, who was evidently an uncon scious impostor brought up from his youth to believe that he was the real Demetrius; finally he set out, at the head of an army of Polish and Lithuanian volunteers, Cossacks and Muscovite fugi tives, to drive out the Godunovs, after being received into the Church of Rome. At the beginning of 1604 Sigismund presented him at Cracow to the papal nuncio Rangoni. His public conver sion took place on April 17. In October the false Demetrius crossed the Russian frontier, and shortly afterwards routed a large Muscovite army beneath the walls of Novgorod-Syeversk. After the sudden death of Tsar Boris (April 13, r 6o5) the prin cipal Russian army, under P. E. Basmanov, at once went over to him (May 7) ; on June 20 he made his triumphal entry into Mos cow, and on July 21 he was crowned tsar by a new patriarch, the Greek Isidore. He at once proceeded to introduce a whole series of political and economic reforms. He did his best to relieve the burdens of the peasantry; he formed the project of a grand alli ance between the emperor, the pope, Venice, Poland and Muscovy against the Turk; and he displayed an amazing toleration in reli gious matters which made people suspect that he was a crypto Arian. But his assumption of the title of emperor, and his pre dilection for Western civilization, alarmed the ultra-conservative boyars (the people were always on his side), and a conspiracy was formed against him, headed by Basil Shuisky, whose life he had saved a few months previously. On May 8, 1606, when De metrius was married to Marina Mniszek, the boyars urged the citizens to rise against the Poles who had accompanied Marina to Moscow, while they themselves attacked and slew Demetrius in the Kremlin on the night of May r 7.
2. The second pretender, called "the thief of Tushino," first appeared on the scene circa 1607 at Starodub. He is supposed to have been either a priest's son or a converted Jew, and was well educated. He pretended at first to be the Muscovite boyarin Nagi; but confessed, under torture, that he was Demetrius Iva novich, whereupon he was taken at his word and joined by thou sands of Cossacks, Poles and Muscovites. He captured Karachev, Briansk and other towns; was reinforced by the Poles; and in the spring of 1608 advanced upon Moscow, routing the army of Tsar Basil Shuisky, at Bolkov, on his way. He entrenched him self at the village of Tushino, 12 versts from the capital, which he converted into an armed camp. In the course of the year he captured Marina Mniszek, who acknowledged him to be her hus band (subsequently quieting her conscience by privately marrying this impostor who in no way resembled her first husband), and brought him the support of the Lithuanian magnates Mniszek and Sapieha so that his forces soon exceeded ioo,000 men. He raised to the rank of patriarch another captive, Philaret Romanov, and won over the towns of Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Vologda, Kashin and other places to his allegiance. But subsequent disasters, and the arrival of King Sigismund III. induced him to fly his camp dis guised as a peasant and go to Kostroma, where Marina joined him and he lived once more in regal state. He also made another but unsuccessful attack on Moscow, and, supported by the Don Cossacks, recovered a hold over all south-eastern Russia. He was killed, while half drunk, on Dec. 11, 161o, by a Tatar whom he had had flogged.
See Sergei Soloviev, History of Russia (Rus.), vol. viii. (St. Peters burg, 1857, etc.) .
3. The third, a more enigmatical person than his predecessors, supposed to have been a deacon called Siderka, appeared suddenly, "from behind the river Yanza," in the Ingrian town of Ivangorod (Narva), proclaiming himself the tsarevich Demetrius Ivanovich, on March 28, 161 r. The Cossacks, ravaging the environs of Mos cow, acknowledged him as tsar on March 2, 1612, and under threat of vengeance in case of non-compliance, the gentry of Pskov also kissed the cross to "the thief of Pskov," as he was usually nicknamed. On May 18, 1612, he fled from Pskov, was seized and delivered up to the authorities at Moscow, and there executed.
See Sergei Soloviev, History of Russia (Rus.), vol. viii. (St. Peters burg, 1857, etc.) .