Mstislaf reigned but about four years, when he suddenly died in the sixtieth year of his age.  His whole reign was an incessant warfare with insurgent chiefs and barbarian invaders.  There is an awful record, at this time, of the scourge of famine added to the miseries of war.  All the northern provinces suffered terribly from this frown of God.  Immense quantities of snow covered the ground even to the month of May.  The snow then melted suddenly with heavy rains, deluging the fields with water, which slowly retired, converting the country into a wide-spread marsh.  It was very late before any seed could be sown.  The grain had but just begun to sprout when myriads of locusts appeared, devouring every green thing.  A heavy frost early in the autumn destroyed the few fields the locusts had spared, and then commenced the horrors of a universal famine.  Men, women and children, wasted and haggard, wandered over the fields seeking green leaves and roots, and dropped dead in their wanderings.  The fields and the public places were covered with putrefying corpses which the living had not strength to bury.  A fetid miasma, ascending from this cause, added pestilence to famine, and woes ensued too awful to be described.

Immediately after the death of Mstislaf, the inhabitants of Kief assembled and invited his brother Vladimirovitch to assume the crown.  This prince then resided at Novgorod, which city he at once left for the capital.  He proved to be a feeble prince, and the lords of the remote principalities, assuming independence, bade defiance to his authority.  There was no longer any central power, and Russia, instead of being a united kingdom, became a conglomeration of antagonistic states; every feudal lord marshaling his serfs in warfare against his neighbor.  In the midst of this state of universal anarchy, caused by the weakness of a virtuous prince who had not sufficient energy to reign, Vladimirovitch died in 1139.

The death of the king was a signal for a general outbreak—­a multitude of princes rushing to seize the crown.  Viatcheslaf, prince of a large province called Pereiaslavle, was the first to reach Kief with his army.  The inhabitants of the city, to avoid the horrors of war, marched in procession to meet him, and conducted him in triumph to the throne.  Viatcheslaf had hardly grasped the scepter and stationed his army within the walls, when from the steeples of the city the banners of another advancing host were seen gleaming in the distance, and soon the tramp of their horsemen, and the defiant tones of the trumpet were heard, as another and far more mighty host encircled the city.  This new army was led by Vsevolod, prince of a province called Vouychegorod.  Viatcheslaf, convinced of the impossibility of resisting such a power as Vsevolod had brought against Kief, immediately consented to retire, and to surrender the throne to his more powerful rival.  Vsevolod entered the city in triumph and established himself firmly in power.