Pugachev Rebellion
Yemelyan Pugachev proclaimed himself Peter III in September 1773 and raised the largest revolt in Russian history before 1917. He was a Don Cossack who had deserted from the army, and his claim was that he was the emperor Catherine II had deposed and had murdered in 1762 — one of some forty pretenders to that identity, and by far the most successful. The claim worked because the grievances were real. Cossack communities on the Yaik had lost their autonomy and their fishing and salt rights; serfs on the Volga had been handed to landlords with almost unlimited powers by the same empress who corresponded with Voltaire; Bashkirs, Tatars and Kalmyks had lost land; and Old Believers had been persecuted for a century. Factory serfs in the Urals supplied him with cannon. He issued manifestos in the emperor's name granting land, freedom, the abolition of conscription and the poll tax, and the right to wear beards, and he set up a mock court with officials named after Catherine's ministers. He took Kazan in July 1774 and burned it. The rebellion ran across a front of hundreds of miles and involved perhaps 100,000 people, and the government could not concentrate against it until the Turkish war ended that summer. He was defeated at Tsaritsyn, betrayed by his own officers, and taken to Moscow in an iron cage. He was beheaded and quartered in January 1775. Catherine abandoned reform, tightened serfdom, renamed the Yaik river, and abolished the Zaporozhian Sich. Pushkin wrote a history of the revolt and then made it the setting of a novel.
- Year: 1773 CE
- Category: Military
