My interest in the pretenders of the Time of Troubles dates back more than twenty years, although my work on the topic has been somewhat intermittent. My approach to the subject has undergone considerable modification over the course of time. In the 1970s, inspired by notions of pretenders as ‘social bandits’ and their followers as ‘primitive rebels’, I was drawn to the Time of Troubles by Soviet works that depicted the period as a ‘peasant war’ whose participants were guided by ‘popular socio-utopian legends about returning royal deliverers’. Preliminary research, however, indicated that these concepts could not be supported by the evidence. Discouraged, I moved off to work in other fields, returning to the Time of Troubles only when my study of the folklore about Ivan the Terrible suggested potentially more fruitful approaches to pretence. The thinking behind the present volume has been influenced by semiotic interpretations of cultural history, by the concept of mentalité, and by studies of symbolism and ritual in popular culture – although an inherent tendency to scepticism and empiricism has, I hope, saved me from some of the more self-indulgent excesses of ‘theory’.

Over the years in which this book has been in the making I have accumulated a number of debts. Some of the material was first presented to seminars at the universities of Birmingham, East Anglia, Glasgow and London, and I am most grateful to participants for their comments.