While the people were dying of hunger, an idea was taking shape among the elites and in popular rumor that all these misfortunes were “God’s punishment” for an unrighteous tsar. Whispers spread that Boris had taken the throne after the death of Ivan the Terrible’s son, Tsarevich Dmitry, and that, they said, “the land will not accept” such a ruler.
It was in 1603, in the view of many historians, that the one who would call himself the surviving Tsarevich Dmitry appeared in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—False Dmitry I. For the moment, it was only a rumor creeping in from the western borderlands like a wisp of smoke from a future fire. But to the shrewd Boris it was not a rumor, but a concrete threat. His agents were already reporting the appearance of a “thief and impostor.”