“I have promised to deliver up to you Moroson and his confederates in the government.  Their acts I admit to have been very unjust, but their personal relations to me renders it peculiarly trying for me to condemn them.  I hope the people will not deny the first request I have ever made to them, which is, that these men, whom I have displaced, may be pardoned.  I will answer for them for the future, and assure you that their conduct shall be such as to give you cause to rejoice at your lenity.”

The people were so moved by this address, which the tzar pronounced with tears, that, as with one accord, they shouted, “God grant his majesty a long and happy life.  The will of God and of the tzar be done.”  Peace was thus restored between the government and the people, and great good accrued to Russia from this successful insurrection.

During the early reign of Alexis, there were no foreign wars of any note.  The Poles were all the time busy in endeavors to beat back the Turks, who, in wave after wave of invasion, were crossing the Danube.  Upon the death of Ladislaus, King of Poland, Alexis, who had then a fine army at his command, offered to march to repel the Turks, if the Poles would choose him King of Poland.  But at the same time France made a still more alluring offer, in case they would choose John Casimir, a prince in the interests of France, as their sovereign.  The choice fell upon John Casimir.  The provinces of Smolensk, Kiof and Tchernigov were then in possession of the Poles, having been, in former wars, wrested from Russia.  The Poles had conquered them by taking advantage of internal troubles in Russia, which enabled them with success to invade the empire.

Alexis now thought it right, in his turn, to take advantage of the weakness of Poland, harassed by the Turks, to recover these lost provinces.  He accordingly marched to the city of Smolensk, and encamped before it with an army of three hundred thousand men.  Smolensk was one of the strongest places which military art had then been able to rear.  The Poles had received sufficient warning of the attack to enable them to garrison the fortifications to their utmost capacity and to supply the town abundantly with all the materials of war.  The siege was continued for a full year, with all the usual accompaniments of carnage and misery which attend a beleaguered fortress.  At last the city, battered into ruins, surrendered, and the victorious Russians immediately swept over Lithuanian Poland, meeting no force to obstruct its march.  Another army, equally resistless, swept the banks of the Dnieper, and recovered Tchernigov and Kiof.

Misfortunes seemed now to be falling like an avalanche upon Poland.  While the Turks were assailing them on the south, and the Russians were wresting from them opulent and populous provinces on the north, Charles Gustavus of Sweden, was crossing her eastern frontiers with invading hosts.  The impetuous Swedish king, in three months, overran nearly the whole of Poland, threatening the utter extinction of the kingdom.  This alarmed the surrounding kingdoms, lest Sweden should become too powerful for their safety.  Alexis immediately entered into a truce with Poland, which guaranteed to him the peaceable possession of the provinces he had regained, and then united his armies with those of his humiliated rival, to arrest the strides of the Swedish conqueror.