Who Was Yemelyan Pugachev?
Yemelyan Ivanovich Pugachev (c. 1742 – 21 January 1775) was a Don Cossack ataman who led the largest peasant rebellion in Russian history, the Pugachev Rebellion of 1773-1775. The revolt swept through the Urals, the Volga region, and western Siberia, threatening the recently acquired territories east of the Volga and forcing Empress Catherine the Great to divert substantial military resources to suppress it. Pugachev was captured, tried in Moscow, and executed on the Bolotnaya ploshchad.
The rebellion drew its force from the grievances of Cossacks, Bashkirs, Tatars, serfs, factory workers, and Old Believers, each with their own reasons to revolt. Pugachev welded them into a single movement by claiming to be the deposed Tsar Peter III, supposedly rescued from the coup that had brought Catherine to power. The claim, however implausible in retrospect, gave the rebellion its legitimacy among a peasantry accustomed to thinking of the tsar as their protector against the landlords.
Early life
Pugachev was born around 1742 in the same stanitsa on the Don as Stenka Razin, the Cossack rebel of an earlier century. The son of a minor Cossack official, he served in the Russian army from 1763 to 1770, taking part in the Seven Years’ War and the first Russo-Turkish War. He was discharged after an illness and spent the next few years as a wandering Cossack, moving between the Don, the Volga, the Urals, and the Polish border, where he fought in the Russian suppression of the Bar Confederation.
In 1773, having failed in various attempts to find a place in the established Cossack communities, Pugachev began to gather followers among the Yaik (Ural) Cossacks, who had been brought to the edge of revolt by Catherine’s restrictions on their traditional autonomy. He declared himself to be Peter III and proclaimed a series of decrees freeing the serfs, restoring the old Cossack freedoms, and granting land to the Bashkirs and other peoples of the region.
The rebellion
The rebellion broke out in September 1773, when Pugachev and a small force attacked the fortress of Yaitsk on the Yaik river. The attack failed, but Pugachev was soon joined by thousands of Cossacks, Bashkirs, Tatars, and runaway serfs and factory workers. The rebels moved into the Urals, capturing several fortresses, and by spring 1774 were in control of much of the region between the Volga and the Urals.
Pugachev issued manifestos in the name of “Peter III” promising freedom from serfdom, land, and the restoration of the old religion. His forces were especially attractive to the Bashkirs, who had their own grievances against the Russian administration, and to the Old Believers, who saw in Pugachev a champion against the official Orthodox Church. The Ural and Volga German colonies, the industrial enterprises of the region, and many landowners’ estates were attacked and destroyed.
The rebellion reached its peak in July 1774, when Pugachev crossed the Volga and turned west toward Moscow. He captured Kazan and held it briefly, and the rebel army was defeated only with difficulty by the forces of General Ivan Mikhelson, one of Catherine’s most able field commanders. By August 1774, the rebellion had been substantially suppressed, and Pugachev’s own Cossack followers began to betray him.
Capture and execution
Pugachev was turned over to the authorities by a group of Cossack leaders in September 1774, taken to Moscow in an iron cage, and tried before a special commission. He was sentenced to death and quartered on the Bolotnaya ploshchad in central Moscow on 21 January 1775, after having provided a detailed account of his life and motives to his interrogators. His execution was carried out in front of a large crowd; the quartered body was displayed at sites around the city as a warning.
Catherine’s response to the rebellion combined repression and reform. The Yaik river was renamed the Ural, the Yaik Cossacks were reorganised and partly exiled, and several administrative changes were made in the Volga and Urals regions. At the same time, the Pugachev Manifesto, which had so alarmed the government with its promises of freedom, accelerated the discussion within the Russian elite of the need to address the serf question.
The legacy of Pugachev
Pugachev became a hero of Russian folk tradition and a recurring figure in Russian literature, most notably in Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter and Shcheglovitov’s The Life of Pugachev, the latter used by Pushkin as a source. Soviet-era historians treated him as a proto-revolutionary; Western historians have tended to see him as the leader of a traditional Cossack-peasant jacquerie whose specific grievances drew on the conditions of the Ural and Volga regions of the 1770s. The rebellion remains the largest armed challenge to the Russian state in the 18th century.