The early Romanovs are weak rulers.

Under Mikhail, state affairs are in the hands of the tsar's father, Filaret, who in 1619 becomes patriarch of the Orthodox Church.

Later, Mikhail's son Aleksey (r. 1645-76) relies on a boyar, Boris Morozov, to run his government.

Morozov abuses his position by exploiting the populace, and in 1648 Aleksey dismisses him in the wake of a popular uprising in Moscow.

The autocracy survives the Time of Troubles and the rule of weak or corrupt tsars because of the strength of the government's central bureaucracy.

Government functionaries continue to serve, regardless of the ruler's legitimacy or the boyar faction controlling the throne.

In the seventeenth century, the bureaucracy expands dramatically.

The number of government departments (prikazy; sing., prikaz) increases from twenty-two in 1613 to eighty by mid-century.

Although the departments often have overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions, the central government, through provincial governors, is able to control and regulate all social groups, as well as trade, manufacturing, and even the Orthodox Church.

The immediate task of the new dynasty is to restore order.

Fortunately for Muscovy, its major enemies, Poland and Sweden, are engaged in a bitter conflict with each other, which provides Muscovy the opportunity to make peace with Sweden in 1617 and to sign a truce with Poland in 1619.

After an unsuccessful attempt to regain the city of Smolensk from Poland in 1632, Muscovy makes peace with Poland in 1634.

Polish king Wladyslaw IV, whose father and predecessor Sigismund III had manipulated his nominal selection as tsar of Muscovy during the Time of Troubles, renounces all claims to the title as a condition of the peace treaty.

Sigismund III Vasa, the king of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, had died in spring 1632, and although the Commonwealth nobility will soon elect Sigismund's son Wladyslaw IV Vasa as their new ruler, Poland's neighbors, expecting delays in the electoral process, tests the Commonwealth's perceived weakness.

Swedish king Gustav II Adolf has sent envoys to Russia and the Ottoman Empire to propose an alliance and war against the Commonwealth.

Russia, having recovered to a certain extent from the Time of Troubles, agrees with the assessment that the Commonwealth will be weakened by the death of its king, and unilaterally attacks without waiting for the Swedes and the Ottomans.

Russia's aim is to gain control of Smolensk, which it had ceded to the Commonwealth in 1618 at the Truce of Deulino, ending the last Russo-Polish War.

Smolensk is the capital of the Commonwealth's Smoleńsk Voivodeship, but it had often been contested, and it had changed hands many times during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (from the days of the Muscovite-Lithuanian Wars).

A major supporter of the war is the Tsar's father, Patriarch Filaret, who represents the anti-Polish camp at court.

Inspired by the Zemsky Sobor's (Russian parliament's) call for vengeance and reclamation of lost lands, the Muscovite army of approximately thirty-four thousand five hundred-man army sallies west.

The Commonwealth is not ready for war.

The royal army numbers barely three thousand men; the Smolensk garrison is about five hundred strong, and most garrisons in the border area are composed not of regular or mercenary soldiers but of one hundred to two hundred local volunteers.

The Sejm (Polish-Lithuanian parliament), aware that Russia is preparing for war, in the spring of 1632 had increased the army by recruiting an additional forty-five hundred men; by mid-1632 the deputy voivode (podwojewoda) of Smolensk, Samuel Drucki-Sokoliński, had about five hundred volunteers from pospolite ruszenie and twenty-five hundred regular army soldiers and Cossacks.

The Senate in May had agreed to increase the size of the army, but Grand Lithuanian Hetman Lew Sapieha had objected, arguing that the current forces were enough and that war is not likely.

Nonetheless the Field Lithuanian Hetman Krzysztof Radziwiłł has recruited an additional two thousand soldiers.

The Russian army that crosses the Lithuanian border in early October 1632 has been carefully prepared and is under the experienced command of Mikhail Borisovich Shein, who had previously defended Smolensk against the Poles during the 1609–1611 siege.

Several towns and castles fall as the Russians advanced, and on October 28 (the same day that the historic town of Dorogobuzh is taken), Shein moves to begin the siege of Smolensk.

Shein constructs lines of circumvallation around the fortress.

Using tunnels and mines, his forces damage a long section of the city wall and one of its towers.

Russian heavy artillery, mostly of Western manufacture, reaches Smolensk in December 1632.

Sigismund III had died on April 30, 1632, after forty-five years on the Polish throne; his son Wladyslaw is elected to the Polish throne few months after his father's death, on November 8, 1632.

Poland, its royal authority weakened by Sigismund’s lengthy wars, has begun its decline as an international power.

The Commonwealth, under its newly elected King Wladyslaw IV, organizes a relief force.

The Sejm officially sanction a declaration of war and authorize a large payment (six and a half million zlotys, the highest tax contribution during Wladyslaw's entire reign) for the raising of a suitable force in spring 1633.

The intended relief force will have an effective strength of about twenty-one thousand five hundred men.

Over ten thousand of the infantry are to be be organized based on the Western model, previously not common in armies of the Commonwealth.

Field Hetman of Lithuania and Voivode of Vilnius, Krzysztof Radziwiłł, and Voivode Gosiewski meanwhile establish a camp about thirty kilometers (eighteen point six miles) from Smolensk, moving from Orsha to Bajów and later, Krasne.

They have by February 1633 amassed around forty-five hundred soldiers, including over two thousand infantry, and are engaged in raiding the rear areas of the Russian besiegers to disrupt their logistics.

Hetman Radziwiłł also manages to break through the Russian lines on several occasions, bringing about a thousand soldiers and supplies into Smolensk to reinforce the fortress and raising the defenders' morale.