Feodor II of Russia

Feodor II of Russia (b. 1589, Moscow - d. 1605, Moscow) was a tsar of Russia (1605). He was the son and sixteen-year-old successor to Boris Godunov. His mother was one of the daughters of Malyuta Skuratov , the infamous favorite of Ivan the Terrible.

Physically robust and passionately beloved by his father, he received the best available education for those days, and from childhood was initiated into all the minutiae of government, besides sitting regularly in the council and receiving the foreign envoys. He seems also to have been remarkably and precociously intelligent, and the first map of Russia by a native, still preserved, is by his hand.

On the sudden death of Boris he was proclaimed tsar (13th of April 1605). Though his father had taken the precaution to surround him with powerful friends, he lived from the first moment of his reign in an atmosphere of treachery. On the 1st of July the envoys of Pseudo-Demetrius I arrived at Moscow to demand his removal, and the letters which they read publicly in the Red Square decided his fate. A group of boyars, who was unwilling to swear allegiance to the new tsar, seized control of the Kremlin and arrested him. On the 20th of July he was most foully murdered at his Kremlin apartments, and his mother soon followed suit.