True tsar; good tsar?

After his coronation, Dimitry disbanded his foreign mercenaries, whose behaviour in the capital had caused tensions with the Muscovites. He also dismissed most of his cossacks, whom the boyars had not forgiven for their insulting behaviour at Tula. The cossacks were generously rewarded, but this did not stop them grumbling about their treatment. Isaac Massa presciently commented that ‘Each of these malcontents would have liked to have been tsar himself!’

Meanwhile King Sigismund was anxious to put pressure on his protégé, the new tsar of Russia, to provide military assistance to the Rzeczpospolita against Charles IX of Sweden. In August 1605 Dimitry received the Polish ambassador, Alexander Gosiewski, in secret audience. Gosiewski repeated to Dimitry a tale which, he said, had been told him in Poland by a former official in Boris's administration. This story was as follows. When he had received news of the pretender's successful invasion of Russia, Boris Godunov had consulted his soothsayers. They had told Boris that as long as he remained in Moscow, the tsardom would be vulnerable to the pretender; but if Boris left Russia, and his son Fedor became tsar, Muscovy could resist Dimitry. Boris had acted on this advice. He had ordered his own death to be announced, poisoned another man who resembled him, and ordered him to be buried as if he were the tsar. Boris had then collected a mass of gold and other treasures, and fled to England in the guise of a merchant.