This Crown Is Mine: History of Pretenders for the Crown, Civil War, and Foreign Invasion in Seventeenth-Century Russia

In the early 17th century, Russia went through a foreign invasion and the nation’s first civil war — a time so horrible that it acquired its own name in Russian history: “The Times of Troubles”. Internal and external forces came together to create a storm of such magnitude that it threatened the very existence of the nation. The country lay in ruins and a foreign army occupied Moscow. For a while it seemed that Russia would never become an independent nation again, but the Russian people fo...