56 
DURING THE LAST, climactic year of the war with Turkey (1773–74), another crisis, more threatening than the foreign war, arose inside Russia. This was the rebellion known as the Pugachevshchina, after its leader, the Don Cossack Emelyan Pugachev. In a single year, by uniting Cossacks, runaway serfs, peasants, Bashkirs, Kalmucks, and other discontented tribal groups and malcontents, Pugachev produced a storm of violence that swept across the steppes, at one point menacing Moscow itself. A civil war and a social revolution descended into anarchy, and the upheaval challenged many of Catherine’s Enlightenment beliefs, leaving her with memories that haunted her for the rest of her life. Of palace revolutions she had experience. This upheaval, however, occurred in the vast, empty territories of Russia stretching far beyond St. Petersburg and Moscow—out on the Don, the Volga, and in the Urals. It awakened her to the passions seething in the countryside and brought her to the decision that her primary duty as empress was to enforce the authority of the crown. She did this by summoning soldiers, not philosophers.
Most Russians still lived in a world of oppression and discontent. There had been previous uprisings: mine workers had attacked their overseers; villagers had resisted tax collectors and recruiting levies. Pugachev’s revolt, however, was the first mass explosion of what might be described as class war. Neither Catherine’s Nakaz nor the discussions of the Legislative Commission had brought significant change; the serfs and peasants who worked on the land or labored in the mines still worked under a system of forced labor. The empress had tried to change this and had discovered that she could not. The unwieldy machinery of the imperial government, her dependence on the nobility, the vastness of Russia—all these were obstacles to change. In the end, she had been forced to leave things as they were. And then, in the fifth year of the war with Turkey, Russia exploded.
On October 5, 1773, Catherine attended a routine meeting of her war council in St. Petersburg. Presiding was General Count Zakhar Chernyshev, the handsome officer with whom Catherine had enjoyed a flirtation twenty-two years before, and whose military abilities had raised him to leadership of the College of War. Catherine listened closely as Chernyshev read reports from Orenburg, a garrison town three hundred miles southeast of Kazan, describing the appearance of a band of rebellious Cossacks. Restlessness among the Cossacks was not new in Russia, but this disturbance differed from its predecessors. It was led by a man who proclaimed that he was Tsar Peter III, Catherine’s husband, miraculously saved from assassination. Now, riding across the southeastern borderlands of Russia, he was issuing incendiary manifestos, promising the people freedom once they had helped him regain his throne.
Cossacks traditionally were adventurers who resented the stream of imperial decrees that restricted their freedom. To escape, they had fled to the borderlands, where, over time, they established their own settlements, chose their own leaders, and lived in their own communities by their their own laws and customs. Some were Old Believers who had fled the reach of the traditional Orthodox Church and now prayed only in their own churches. The men were often splendid horsemen, who, once forcibly recruited into the army, were used as irregular cavalry and, as such, terrified Russia’s enemies. The Polish and Turkish wars had brought even more frequent visits by government tax collectors and recruiting parties. By August 1773, the Cossack communities were simmering, needing only a leader to rise in protest. In such an atmosphere, no leader would seem better than a man rumored to be a tsar.
• • •
The appearance of impostors was not rare in Russia; the nation’s turbulent history had often featured false tsars whom an uneducated, credulous population was only too ready to accept. In 1605, an adult impostor claiming to be Ivan the Terrible’s son Dmitry (who had, in fact, died as a child), seized the throne from Tsar Boris Godunov. Stenka Razin, a Cossack, had defied Peter the Great’s father, Tsar Alexis, for two years and, after capture and execution, became a legendary folk hero. Peter the Great himself, in the Great Northern War against Sweden, had been forced to deal with the defection of the Ukrainian Cossacks under hetman, Ivan Mazeppa. Following Peter’s death in 1725, the uncertainties surrounding the Romanov succession produced a series of pretenders claiming to be Peter II or Ivan VI. During the first ten years of Catherine’s reign, there had already been impostors claiming to be Peter III, all of whom had been arrested before they could make trouble. Catherine had no interest in them beyond a wariness that foreign powers might attempt to sponsor them. But the promises of these earlier impostors had been localized and specific. Their followers, usually few in number, were protesting against local government officials, not against the tsar or even against the nobility. What distinguished Pugachev’s rebellion was that it was directed at the empress herself.
The seedbed of the revolt lay between the Don and Ural rivers, intersected by the Volga. It was an unsettled land, with rich grasses, dense forests, and fertile, black soil, watered by the three great rivers. On the west lived the Don Cossacks, who had gradually progressed from an undisciplined, itinerant life to a more organized and settled existence. Although still sending many recruits to the army, they had also developed agriculture and trading and had prospered. The Volga district farther east, with its mixed population of Russians and non-Christian tribes, was less organized and disciplined; in the 1770s, it was a land of trading posts, roaming adventurers, and vagabonds. And still farther east, where the Yaik River flowed west from the Ural Mountains, lay the true frontier, the province of Orenburg, a thinly settled area whose rivers teemed with fish, whose earth was studded with salt mines, and whose forests were a fruitful source of lumber and furs. The principal town, also named Orenburg, was a fortress and trading center standing at the junction of the Orel and Yaik rivers.
Here in Orenburg province, in the village of Yaitsk, Pugachev appeared in September 1773 and proclaimed that he was Tsar Peter III and that he had eluded the assassination plotted by his usurping wife. Now he had returned to regain his throne, punish his enemies, save Russia, and free his people. According to Pugachev, Catherine, aided by the nobility, had driven him from the throne and then tried to kill him because he was planning to liberate the serfs. Some believed his story; for years there had been a rumor that, after Peter III’s decree releasing the nobility from compulsory service, his next intention was to liberate the serfs, and that the empress had prevented him. Some even said that his decree was already drawn up but then was suppressed by his wife when she usurped the throne. For those who accepted this story, Peter III, who in his brief reign had been enormously unpopular, now became a hero, while Catherine became his tyrannical wife.
Pugachev bore no resemblance to the tall, narrow-shouldered Peter III, who had spoken mostly German, who had been a parade ground soldier, and who had never seen a battle. This new “Peter” was short, stocky, and muscular; his matted black hair grew in a heavy fringe across his forehead; he had a short, bushy, black beard; he was missing a number of teeth. These physical dissimilarities did not disqualify him, however, because the real Peter III had reigned too short a time for most Russians to know what he looked like. The new Peter who roamed the countryside at the head of his army of Cossacks and tribesmen surrounded by bearded officers and waving banners was a charismatic figure, an experienced soldier who spoke of a bright future in which all Russians would be free. He had little difficulty attracting followers. For people in the southeastern provinces who had never seen a tsar, this short, robust, magnetic fellow with the black beard, crimson caftan, and fur cap satisfied their imagination.
In reality, Emelyan Pugachev was a Cossack born around 1742 in one of the Cossack communities on the lower Don. He owned a small farm, married a local woman, and had three children. He was drafted into the Russian army and served as one of the Cossack cavalrymen in Poland and again in Rumyantsev’s army in the 1769 and 1770 campaigns against the Turks. In 1771, he deserted, was captured and flogged, and escaped. He made his way back to the eastern steppes, but not to his homeland and family on the Don. Instead, he moved toward the lower Volga, from one Old Believer community to another. In November 1772, he reached the river Yaik, hoping to find safety among the Yaik Cossacks.
During his wanderings, Pugachev acquired knowledge of the state of mind of the people of the lower Volga: it was a fierce antagonism to authority similar to his own. This shared hatred, added to his military experience, made him a figure around whom the Yaik Cossacks could rally. When he offered to lead discontented Cossacks against their local officials and other oppressors, they accepted. Their plans were postponed when Pugachev was identified, arrested, and taken to Kazan for interrogation. Within six months he escaped again, and in May 1773 he returned to Yaitsk. In September, when the local governor of Yaitsk learned where he was and moved to recapture him, Pugachev and the Cossack dissidents hastily proclaimed their revolt. It was at this point that Pugachev suddenly announced that he was Tsar Peter III.
He promised freedom from a harassing government and a return to the old way of life. He promised an end to the harassment of Cossack Old Believers. He promised “forgiveness of all previous crimes” and “freedom of the rivers from their sources to their mouths and the land and the grass on both sides, and the trees and wild animals that grew thereon.” He promised free salt, arms, lead, powder, food, and a gift of twelve rubles a year to every Cossack. In an “imperial manifesto,” distributed on September 17, 1773, he declared, “I give eternal freedom to you and your children and your grandchildren. You will no longer work for a lord and you will no longer pay taxes. We make you a gift of the cross and your ancient prayers, of the long hair and beard.” He named specific enemies: “If God permits me to reach St. Petersburg,” he said, “I shall put my wicked wife Catherine into a convent. Then I will free all the peasants and exterminate the nobles down to the last man.”
The message carried beyond the Yaik Cossacks. The Bashkirs declared for him and were followed by the Kalmucks, the Kirghiz, and other seminomadic tribes of the lower Volga. Soon, agricultural serfs and peasants were setting out to join him. A few came on horseback carrying swords and lances, but most brought only farm tools—scythes, axes, and pitchforks. Before winter, the industrial serfs of the mines and foundries of the Urals were rallying to him.
Pugachev first attacked the small fort at Yaitsk, set on a high bank overlooking the Yaik River. He had only three hundred men, and the government commander had a thousand, but many of these soldiers were Cossacks. When they quickly deserted, the government commander retreated into the fort and abandoned the rest of the settlement to the rebels. Pugachev left him there and moved up the river. On October 5, he reached the larger town and government fortress at Orenburg. Pugachev’s force now had grown to more than three thousand, outnumbering the garrison except in artillery. Again, the soldiers withdrew into the fortress, which was defended by seventy cannon; again, the rebels were not strong enough to take the fortification by storm. This time, Pugachev settled down to starve the defenders into surrender, and established his headquarters at Berda, three miles away.
By November, the impostor’s large following was constantly augmented by the arrival of volunteers. Pugachev’s appeals now reached across the area between the Volga, the Yaik, and western Siberia. In December, another thousand Bashkirs joined his army, and in January 1774, two thousand Tatars. Factory serfs and peasants seized the copper foundries and other metalworks in the Urals; soon forty-four foundries and mines were supplying guns and ammunition to the rebel army. There was one interesting exception to this mushrooming support: the Cossacks of the Don, from whom Pugachev came, were glaringly absent.
News of the revolt on the Yaik was slow to reach St. Petersburg. When it arrived, the empress and her advisers were unperturbed; it seemed a local affair, occurring in a perennially unstable region. Catherine and her war council were concentrating on Poland and the Danube, where Russia’s armies were deeply committed and where, during the coming summer, they hoped to force an end to the Turkish war, now entering its sixth year. Because the army was straining to mount a fresh offensive, few regular troops could be spared. The best that could be managed was to send General Vasily Kar from Kazan with a small detachment of soldiers. In addition, to counter Pugachev’s appeals, Catherine issued a manifesto for distribution only in the areas affected by the revolt; otherwise the troubles were to be kept secret. She denounced Pugachev’s imposture as “this madness” and “this godless turmoil among the people” and called for cooperation with General Kar to defeat and capture “the chief brigand, incendiary and impostor.” Unfortunately, she and her advisers had grossly underestimated the strength of the enemy Kar had been sent to face. On approaching Orenburg, Kar found the rebel army far more numerous than he had foreseen; moreover, they were being reinforced daily by new recruits. Led by Pugachev, they routed Kar’s small force. When Kar escaped and returned to report what had happened, he was dismissed. Another small expedition was immediately dispatched from Simbirsk. Pugachev easily defeated this force and hanged its colonel.
In his Berda headquarters, Pugachev enjoyed playing the role of tsar. Dressed in a scarlet caftan, wearing a velvet cap, and holding a scepter in one hand and a silver axe in the other, he looked down at the supplicants kneeling before him. Unable to read or write, he kept a secretary at his side and dictated his orders, which were signed, “The great sovereign, the Russian Tsar, the Emperor Peter the Third.” He would deign to write his name himself, he announced, when he had mounted his throne. Medals were struck with his likeness and inscribed “Peter III.”
Every day, he ate heavily, drank continually, and bellowed Cossack songs with his comrades. Many of these men had now become “noblemen.” Having sworn to exterminate the real nobility, Pugachev distributed titles among his close companions, naming them after the principal members of Catherine’s court. There was a Count Panin, a Count Orlov, a Count Vorontsov, a Field Marshal Count Chernyshev. These newly created grandees were decorated with medals ripped from the tunics of dead officers. They were granted future estates on the Baltic coast; some were even presented with gifts of serfs. In February 1774, Pugachev, who had abandoned his wife and three children on the Don, “married” Yustina Kuznetsova, the daughter of a Yaik Cossack, and surrounded her with a dozen Cossack maids of honor. Prayers were said daily for the emperor and for Yustina, who was addressed and treated as “Her Imperial Majesty.”
Pugachev’s lieutenants were never in doubt that the man sitting next to them, claiming to be an emperor, was in fact an illiterate Cossack, and that his so-called empress was a Cossack girl from the Urals who was not his legal wife. His real wife was on the Don, and his other, supposed wife, the usurping Empress Catherine, was in St. Petersburg. For most of his brief “reign,” both he and his intimate circle lived in overlapping worlds of reality and make-believe. No one complained about this amateur theater, and Pugachev profited from the unspoken agreement to mutual playacting. Believing that the growing momentum of the revolt permitted him everything, the illiterate Cossack could not stop himself.
His costumed make-believe was played against a backdrop of blood and terror. Pugachev’s imperial decrees, proclaiming that the nobility must be killed, unleashed a frenzy of hatred. Peasants killed landlords, their families, and their hated overseers. Serfs who had always been considered resigned, submissive to God, the tsar, and the master, now flung themselves into orgies of cruelty. Noblemen were dragged from their hiding places, flayed, burned alive, hacked to pieces, or hanged from trees. Children were mutilated and slaughtered in front of their parents. Wives were spared only long enough to be raped in front of their husbands; then they had their throats cut or were thrown into carts and carried off as prizes. Before long, Pugachev’s camp was filled with captured widows and daughters, who were distributed as booty among the rebels. Villagers who persisted in recognizing “the usurper, Catherine,” were hanged in rows; nearby ravines were filled with bodies. Desperate townspeople, not knowing what their interrogators wished to hear, gave stock answers when asked whom they considered their lawful sovereign: “Whomever you represent,” they replied.
As Pugachev’s army, swelling to a torrent, moved down the long roads, flames from landlords’ burning mansions glowed in the night, and smoke hung like curtains on the horizon. Towns and villages opened their gates to surrender. Priests hurried to meet and welcome the rebels with bread and salt. Officers of the tiny garrisons were hanged; the men were offered a choice: change sides or die.
At first, before Catherine realized the gravity of the uprising, she attempted to play down its importance in the eyes of western Europe. In January 1774, she wrote to Voltaire that “this impudent Pugachev” was merely “a common highway robber.” She personally did not intend that Pugachev’s antics should disturb the stimulating conversations she was having in St. Petersburg with her famous visitor Denis Diderot, editor of the Encyclopedia. Voltaire agreed that Catherine’s dialogue with one of the leaders of the Enlightenment ought not to be interrupted by the “exploits of a brigand.” She complained that the European press was making too much fuss over the “Marquis de Pugachev who is giving me a little trouble in the Urals.” When she passed along the information that the impertinent fellow was actually claiming to be Peter III, Voltaire picked up her airy, dismissive tone, mentioning to d’Alembert “this new husband who has turned up in the province of Orenburg.” But the “new husband” and “Cossack brigand” was giving Catherine more trouble than she admitted. By the spring of 1774, when Pugachev’s army had grown to over fifteen thousand men, she understood that a local Cossack revolt was becoming a national revolution. After General Kar failed to capture the “miscreant,” and the besieged governor of Orenburg reported severe shortages of food and ammunition, she confessed to Voltaire that “for more than six weeks I have been obliged to devote my uninterrupted attention to this affair.”
Determined to crush the rebels, Catherine summoned the experienced General Alexander Bibikov and gave him full power over all military and civilian authorities in southeastern Russia. Bibikov was a veteran of the wars in Prussia and Poland, and had acquired national prestige as president-marshal of the Legislative Commission. Although the Turkish war still prevented the withdrawal of any significant part of the regular army, Bibikov was assigned as many troops as could be found. He arrived in Kazan on December 26, made it his headquarters, and took immediate steps to stabilize the situation. Nobles were persuaded to form a volunteer militia, arming peasants they considered loyal. Catherine had also ordered Bibikov to establish in Kazan a commission of inquiry to investigate the source of the revolt by “this motley crowd which is moved only by seething fanaticism or by political inspiration and darkness.” It was to interrogate captured rebels to ascertain whether any foreign influence was at work. Was Turkey implicated? France? What or who had prompted Pugachev to assume the name of Peter III? Were there any traces of conspiracy involving her own subjects? What were his connections with the Old Believers? With disgruntled nobles? Bibikov was instructed not to use torture. “What need is there to flog during investigations?” she wrote to him. “For twelve years the Secret Branch under my own eyes has not flogged a single person during interrogations, and yet every single affair has been properly sorted out, and always more came out than we needed to know.” If guilt was established, Bibikov was empowered to execute death sentences, although in cases of nobles or officials found guilty, his judgments were to be referred to the empress for confirmation.
Before sending Bibikov on his mission, Catherine had issued another manifesto, for use only in the region of the rebellion:
A deserter and fugitive has been collecting … a troop of vagabonds like himself … and has had the insolence to arrogate to himself the name of the late emperor Peter III.… As we watch with indefatigable care over the tranquility of our faithful subjects … we have taken such measures to annihilate totally the ambitious designs of Pugachev and to exterminate a band of robbers who have been audacious enough to attack the small military detachments dispersed about these countries, and to massacre the officers who have been taken prisoner.
Two weeks later, after reports confirmed the expansion of the revolt, Catherine decided that the rebellion could no longer be concealed from the public. To explain her decision, she wrote to the governor of the Novgorod region:
Orenburg has already been besieged two full months by the crowd of a bandit who is committing frightful cruelties and ravages. General Bibikov is departing there with troops who will pass through your gubernia in order to curb this distemper which will bring neither glory nor profit to Russia. I hope, however, that with God’s aid, we shall prevail. This riffraff is a rabble of miscreants who have at their head a deceiver as brazen as he is ignorant. Probably it will all end on the gallows; but what sort of expectation is that for me who has no love for the gallows? European opinion will relegate us to the time of Tsar Ivan the Terrible. That is the honor we must expect from this contemptible escapade.
On arriving in Kazan at the end of December, Bibikov found the situation more serious than anyone in St. Petersburg realized. His assessment was that, as an individual, Pugachev was not to be feared, but that as a symbol of widespread, popular discontent, he mattered very much. Bibikov’s forces struck quickly to relieve Orenburg, which had been under siege for six months and where the shortage of food was acute. Pugachev made a stand with nine thousand men and thirty-six cannon, but the battle was decided by the professionally served artillery of the regular army. Pugachev was routed, four thousand of his men were captured, and “Peter III” galloped away to Berda. The siege of Orenburg was over.
In Pugachev’s headquarters in Berda, his lieutenants and camp followers were ready to flee, but all knew that only those with horses would be able to escape. “Leave the peasants to their fate,” became the rationale. “The common people are not fighters; they are just sheep.” On March 23, Pugachev left his headquarters in Berda, taking with him two thousand men and abandoning the rest of his army. Bibikov’s advance guard entered Berda the same day. The scale was balanced, however, when Bibikov, the architect of victory, suddenly developed fever and died. Catherine, saddened, assumed that his subordinate officers would complete his mission. Pugachev disappeared into the Urals.
Before he died Bibikov had assured Catherine that “the suspicion of foreigners is completely unfounded.” The empress then wrote to Voltaire attributing “this freakish event” to the fact that the Orenburg region “is inhabited by all the good-for-nothings of whom Russia has thought fit to rid herself over the past forty years, rather in the same spirit that the American colonies have been populated.” She defended her policy of leniency in the treatment of rebel prisoners by writing her friend Frau Bielcke of Hamburg, who had complained that the measures taken had not been sufficiently severe: “Since you like hangings so much, I can tell you that four or five unfortunates have already been hanged. And the rarity of such punishments has a thousand times more effect on us here than on those where hangings happen every day.”
Catherine believed that the rebellion was over. For the next three months she turned her attention away from Pugachev and back to the Russian offensive on the Danube. She continued to follow the investigation into the causes of the upheaval. A commission report issued on May 21, 1774, restated Bibikov’s earlier assessment, discounting the possibility of domestic conspiracy or foreign meddling. The revolt was blamed on Pugachev’s exploitation of discontent among the Yaik Cossacks, the tribal peoples, and the serfs assigned to the Urals metalworks. Pugachev was depicted as crude and uneducated, but the investigators cautioned that he was also crafty, resourceful, and persuasive—a dangerous man who should not be ignored or forgotten until he was dead or delivered in chains into the hands of imperial officers.