Time of Troubles

(Smutnoe Vremia, Smuta), the name by which Russian gentry and bourgeois historians referred to the era of the late 16th and 17th centuries. The term “Time of Troubles,” which was current among contemporaries, referred to the events that ensued upon the death of Ivan IV the Terrible in 1584 and ended with Mikhail Romanov’s accession to the Russian throne in 1613.