Mikhail Shein

Mikhail Borisovich Shein (about 1570 to 1634) was a leading Russian general during the reign of Tsar Mikhail Romanov. He put down peasant revolts in 1602 and 1603 and the revolt of Ivan Bolotnikov in 1606 and 1607, became a boyar, and in 1607 was made voivode of Smolensk, which he defended for twenty months against a Polish siege before it fell on 3 June 1611. He was imprisoned in Warsaw for nine years, returned to Moscow in 1619 with Patriarch Philaret, and later led the cannon office. In 1632 he led the Russian army against Smolensk again, but after ten months of siege, a relief force under King Wladyslaw IV, disease and desertion, he surrendered his army on 15 February 1634 and was executed for incompetence and treason later that year. His diaries of the siege survive in the National Archives of Sweden.