Russia's Time of Troubles

Ivan the Terrible's dynasty ended without an heir, and Russia came apart for fifteen years: famine killed perhaps a third of the population, Polish armies took Moscow, and a series of impostors claiming to be Ivan's dead son — three separate men, in sequence — raised armies and were crowned or killed. It ended when an assembly elected a sixteen-year-old Romanov, whose family then ruled for three centuries. Russians remember it as the reference case for what happens when central authority fails, and the memory has been available to every ruler since who wanted order preferred to freedom.