Pugachev's Rebellion

The largest peasant uprising in the history of the Russian Empire broke out in 1773 among the Cossacks of the Yaik River, in the south-eastern borderlands, and spread across the Volga and Ural regions before it was crushed in 1774. Its leader, the Don Cossack Yemelyan Pugachev, claimed to be the murdered Tsar Peter III and promised freedom from serfdom, presenting the most serious internal challenge of the reign of Catherine the Great.

Over the eighteenth century the condition of Russia's serfs had worsened. Peter the Great had handed whole villages to favoured nobles, and Catherine confirmed the nobles' authority over their peasants in exchange for their political loyalty. A decree of 1767 forbade peasants from petitioning the empress directly. Rising taxes, inflation, crop failures and the Moscow epidemic of 1771 added to the strain, and more than fifty peasant revolts were recorded between 1762 and 1769. The rising came, too, while Russia was at war with the Ottoman Empire.

Pugachev, a former junior officer who had deserted the army, exploited a popular legend that Peter III, overthrown by his wife Catherine in 1762, had survived and would return to protect the common people. Posing as Peter, he issued decrees in Russian and Tatar, read aloud by village priests and mullahs, which offered land, salt, grain and freedom from the poll tax and military levy. He created his own war college and gave his lieutenants the names of real courtiers.

His first followers were Yaik Cossacks, many of them Old Believers resentful of the state's interference in their traditions. They were joined by serfs, factory workers from the Ural ironworks, religious dissenters and small free farmers, and by non-Russian peoples, including Bashkirs, Tatars, Chuvash, Mari, Mordvins and Udmurts, each with grievances of their own. The Bashkirs, led by figures such as Salawat Yulayev, were especially important; some historians argue the rising might have died early without them.

Pugachev launched the revolt in mid-September 1773, overran several frontier posts along the Yaik and in October besieged Orenburg, the provincial capital. The government at first treated him as a nuisance, offering a modest bounty, while the revolt spread into the Urals, towards the Volga and into Siberia. A relief army under General Aleksandr Bibikov defeated the rebels in March and April 1774, but Pugachev slipped away to Bashkiria and raised new forces. On 23 July 1774 his men attacked Kazan and burned most of the city. Beaten repeatedly by government troops there, he crossed to the Volga's west bank and moved south, taking towns as he went.

On 5 September 1774 Pugachev failed to take Tsaritsyn and was defeated nearby, with perhaps 9,000 to 10,000 rebels killed. Within days his own Cossacks betrayed him to the authorities. General Petr Panin carried out harsh reprisals in the rebel regions. After a long interrogation, Pugachev was beheaded and dismembered in Moscow on 21 January 1775. Estimates put rebel losses at about 20,000 killed.

Catherine responded by further curbing Cossack privileges, stationing more garrisons and reorganising provincial government into smaller units. The rising lived on in folk memory and in literature, above all in Alexander Pushkin's novel "The Captain's Daughter" of 1836.

Our 1783 map shows the Russian Empire under Catherine a decade after the rebellion, including the Volga and Ural lands where it was fought.