Book recommendations on the rise of Muscovy and early Russian Tsardom (1600s)?

by Julius_Maximus
_ferz

I can suggest "Ivan the Terrible" by Perrie and Pavlov.

mikedash

It rather depends on how far back you are interested in going. Janet Martin's Medieval Russia 980-1584 is a solid and pretty well regarded general survey of the period up to the end of Ivan the Terrible's reign. Once you get into Boris Godunov, the Time of Troubles and the early Romanov dynasty, you are also entering a fairly confusing period where there are considerable differences in interpretation, most obviously between the Marxist historians who see this period as a sort of proto-revolutionary one, and are focused on attempts to identify and dissect "class struggle," and historians who argue that "class" is a fairly meaningless concept in this period of Russian history.

I have found Chester Dunning's Russia's First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty (2001) to be a reliable overview of the period that is still pretty up-to-date in terms of its scholarship. Maureen Perrie's Pretenders and Popular Monarchism in Early Modern Russia is an excellent and pretty accessible study of the ideological and social backgrounds that produced the False Dmitris.

For a more popular overview, Simon Sebag-Montefiore's The Romanovs 1618-1918 is good. Sebag-Montefiore writes for a general audience, but he speaks Russian, has done original research, and - as those who have read his books on Stalin will recognise - he benefits from personal political connections when it comes to getting access to some rarely-exploited Russian archives.

We are less well served when it comes to individual biographies of English of the seventeenth century tsars. Michael Romanov was something of a cipher - one reason he was chosen in the first place – and I have never read a really satisfactory bio of him. Back when I was a student, I got hold of a copy of Philip Longworth's 1980s bio of his son, Alexis, Tsar of All the Russias, and enjoyed it - it is also well rooted in primary sources. It's not really been superseded since.