Graves of Murderers

My teacher of Russian History is rather enigmatic. The man is eccentric to the enth and his background is dodgy. He loves Russia. He talks about the great freedom that the citizens now enjoy and he speaks as though the Russians invented Democracy.

We were in class one day and the teacher was going on about the succession of the throne in Muscovite Russia. Ivan the Terrible had died and left only two sons. He had one son earlier, but he had offed him for treason – a fact that the teacher was very deliberate in defending, after all, with all these traitors running around, it was incumbent upon Ivan to uphold the law! Never mind that there was a law passed declaring those generals who surrendered in wartime to be traitors, worthy of death, thereby driving them to flee to the enemy in Poland. No! They were traitors and Ivan had every right to defend his crown!

So Ivan had a son that he killed – there was definitely no mental illness involved at all! – leaving him with two sons more. Fedor was a sickly man, but he did his best as Czar when his father died, though that did not stop him from succumbing to his illness and dying shortly thereafter. So that left young Dmitri as the last heir.

There was at the time a curious church law dictating that any marriage after the third was illegitimate. And it so happened that young Dmitri was the son of the fifth or sixth wife (I can’t recall which). Well, Dmitri was the son of a violent czar, so it came as no surprise when he was found dead in the courtyard, having tripped or slipped while playing alone with a dagger and thereby slitting his own throat. some suspicion was cast upon the boyar Boris Godunov, but that was ridiculous and unfounded, for he became the next czar and when he too died in time, he was buried in a cathedral.

But our teacher was eager to prove that Boris was innocent. Remember that church law about the third wife? Well, since Dmitri was the child of the sixth wife, it is clear that he was illegitimate – the prof used a stronger word, and he used it frequently. So, if the boy was illegitimate, then Boris was clearly innocent. After all, what competition was there in an illegitimate child? No! Boris was innocent, he was elected to the royal seat by a council and he was buried in a church, wasn’t he? Moreover, when our teacher went to Moscow last time, “I went to Boris Godunov’s grave, and I prayed over Boris Godunov’s grave, and I would never have prayed over the grave of a man whom I thought was a murderer!” and he seized the podium in both hands and glared at us from under his Gandalf eyebrows.

There was no response, though the guy behind me snorted real loud and buried his face in a textbook.