The thing is, impostors pretending to be dead tsars is really really common in Russia. (It happens outside Russia too; there were people claiming to be the actually-not-dead Friedrich II Hohenstaufen emperor right up until he would have been over a hundred years old even if he hadn't died when the pope said he did, and it was no longer plausible that he'd still be alive. That was when the "he's not dead!" stories switched to "He's sleeping! He will return in time of need!")
Anyway, there was a lot of this in Russia during the Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century, and the practice continued in the eighteenth century. There were people claiming to be any tsar who'd died young or disappeared: Peter II, Ivan VI, Peter III...Catherine had *already* had to deal with a number of would-be tsars claiming to be Peter III in the early years of her reign.
The difference between the Pugachev rebellion and previous impostors Catherine had to deal with was that this time, it wasn't local unrest aimed at some governor some guy was mad at; it was wide-scale revolt aimed at overthrowing the entire class system, all the way up to Catherine. Pugachev promised to free the peasants and exterminate the nobles. It was basically the Russian Revolution or French Revolution avant la lettre.
Pugachev got a lot of supporters because the 1768-1772 wars with Poland and Turkey had meant intensive taxation and forced recruitment into the army, and the Cossacks had had it up to *here* with that. Forced recruitment, btw, was no joke, it was for life and you never saw your family again. They would often hold a funeral before you left. And most recruits died on the way to the front without ever seeing combat.
Furthermore, when Peter the Great had modernized Russian society, and forcibly changed religious practices, a lot of people had refused to go along with him. They were called Old Believers, they were second class citizens even when they weren't being outright persecuted, and they believed their souls were in danger if they shaved their beards or cut their hair. (Peter used to go around forcibly shaving people's beards. Some people kept their beards in their pockets so they could, on Judgment Day, present it and say they had never been separated from their beards and hope to get off on a technicality.) Pugachev promises to end persecution of Old Believers and return to the old, Russian ways, not these new Western ways.
A lot of these Old Believers live in remote places like the steppes of Ukraine, where the Cossacks are. The Cossacks, like the Austrian hussars, are warrior horsemen who are allergic to authority, and often get recruited as irregular cavalry (some salon members may remember Austrian Trenck, and the looting during the battle of Soor). So they're often quite good at rebellions and putting up a good fight, but they're bad at the organizational parts, with one chain of command that everyone obeys. This is one of the advantages the Romans had over the Celts, and that the English had over the Jacobites! Many individual fierce warriors are not always the best at working together as a unit.
(Of course, this can be a problem even in super disciplined armies, like the Swedish army under Karl XII. Part of what went wrong at Poltava was his top officers refusing to cooperate with each other.)
Anyway, when Pugachev announces he's Peter III in September 1773, he gets a lot of support from his fellow Cossacks. Obviously the first set of volunteers who join him know him personally, and they don't believe him, but as he roams outside the area where he was born, more and more people who have no idea who he is, or what the short-reigning Peter III looked like, join him. He gathers an army of thousands. Hilariously, he develops a replacement court where his "courtiers" name themselves after Catherine's: there's a Count Panin, a Count Orlov, a Count Vorontsov, a Field Marshal Count Chernyshev, etc.
He also marries a woman and calls her his empress…which is kind of weird, as no matter which you spin it, he already has a wife. Either he's Peter III, in which case he's married to Catherine, or he's Emelyan Pugachev the Cossack, in which case he has a wife and kids back home that he abandoned.
Oh well! None one seems to care, the important thing is rising up and throwing off your chains. What's a little spot of bigamy in the grand scheme of things? With their growing army, the Cossacks roam the land, raping pillaging, torturing, and killing:
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.
…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.
In 1773, Catherine is so occupied with the Turks she can't send more than a few troops and not her best generals to deal with this. Furthermore, she doesn't take it super seriously at first; Russian monarchs are used to uprisings in Ukraine. (There's a reason Poltava was fought here.)
Then her first attempts to crush the rebellion are defeated by Pugachev's troops. She's forced to take it seriously, stop trying to keep it a secret from the general public and issue a manifesto proclaiming that she's dealing with it, and send more troops and better generals.
Pugachev is defeated in March 1774, and he retreats into the Urals and disappears.
Catherine starts an investigation looking to find out whether any foreign powers, like France, are implicated in this. It's quite normal for foreign powers like France to instigate local rebellions, whether that's a Jacobite rising against England or a Hungarian uprising against Austria.
All her investigation, though, only finds that Pugachev was acting on his own.
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.”
Having defeated *her* tax dodgers, Catherine can now breathe a sigh of relief.
…Until Pugachev rises from the ashes! It's July 1774, he's got twenty thousand troops, he's captured a town, and he's announced his intention to march on Moscow.
Catherine has to send an army. It takes two battles (or one two-day battle) to defeat him and free ten thousand people he'd been holding captive. Pugachev will never be given the chance to spread the revolt to Moscow.
Instead, he, and his followers, learn that Catherine has finally made peace with the Turks, after 6 years of war, and there will suddenly be a lot more troops and experienced generals free for dealing with the Cossacks.
His troops start to desert, and he's forced to turn back. He keeps trying to raise new recruits, but now he's running into a PR problem:
In turning south, Pugachev was returning to his childhood home, the land of the Don Cossacks. But few impostors can be successful among people with whom they have been raised. “Why does he call himself Tsar Peter?” the Don Cossacks asked. “He is Emelyan Pugachev, the farmer, who deserted his wife Sophia and his children.”
Oops. After enough of this, and after Russian troops start to roll in in larger and more experienced numbers, Pugachev's men finally start thinking about saving their own skins. They turn on him, hand him over to the Russians on September 15, 1774, and beg for mercy.
Catherine still found it hard to believe that this illiterate peasant had come so close to overthrowing the state, but despite intensive questioning, she couldn't turn up any evidence he was doing anything but acting alone. To her credit, she refused to use torture during the interrogations.
She also had him beheaded first, then quartered, during his January 1775, execution, despite the huge disappointment this caused the eager spectators. Some of his supporters, though, were quartered first, then tortured.
In the end, this failed rebellion had huge implications for Russian history: Catherine, who had been trying to find a way to free the serfs, took away the lessons that the peasants had turned on her and the nobility had supported her. So she abandoned any further talk of ending serfdom, and though she tried to encourage more humane treatment, she considered her hands tied by the need to keep the nobles on her side. She also did not stop the nobles from severe reprisals against any serfs who were even believed to have been guilty of supporting the rebellion. All this means that very little changed in Russia in terms of the conditions that had led to this uprising, and class relations continued to play a major role for centuries to come.
Fritz faced this same problem when trying to end feudalism and by and large came to the same "keep myself in power by supporting the nobles" conclusion; Joseph made opposite choices and had to claw back most of his reforms. Leopold died too soon.
ETA: Forgot to cite my sources: all quotes from Massie, although I did have a look at Madariaga to ensure the basic outlines were correct.
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The Pugachev Rebellion
Date: 2024-01-21 08:30 pm (UTC)Anyway, there was a lot of this in Russia during the Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century, and the practice continued in the eighteenth century. There were people claiming to be any tsar who'd died young or disappeared: Peter II, Ivan VI, Peter III...Catherine had *already* had to deal with a number of would-be tsars claiming to be Peter III in the early years of her reign.
The difference between the Pugachev rebellion and previous impostors Catherine had to deal with was that this time, it wasn't local unrest aimed at some governor some guy was mad at; it was wide-scale revolt aimed at overthrowing the entire class system, all the way up to Catherine. Pugachev promised to free the peasants and exterminate the nobles. It was basically the Russian Revolution or French Revolution avant la lettre.
Pugachev got a lot of supporters because the 1768-1772 wars with Poland and Turkey had meant intensive taxation and forced recruitment into the army, and the Cossacks had had it up to *here* with that. Forced recruitment, btw, was no joke, it was for life and you never saw your family again. They would often hold a funeral before you left. And most recruits died on the way to the front without ever seeing combat.
Furthermore, when Peter the Great had modernized Russian society, and forcibly changed religious practices, a lot of people had refused to go along with him. They were called Old Believers, they were second class citizens even when they weren't being outright persecuted, and they believed their souls were in danger if they shaved their beards or cut their hair. (Peter used to go around forcibly shaving people's beards. Some people kept their beards in their pockets so they could, on Judgment Day, present it and say they had never been separated from their beards and hope to get off on a technicality.) Pugachev promises to end persecution of Old Believers and return to the old, Russian ways, not these new Western ways.
A lot of these Old Believers live in remote places like the steppes of Ukraine, where the Cossacks are. The Cossacks, like the Austrian hussars, are warrior horsemen who are allergic to authority, and often get recruited as irregular cavalry (some salon members may remember Austrian Trenck, and the looting during the battle of Soor). So they're often quite good at rebellions and putting up a good fight, but they're bad at the organizational parts, with one chain of command that everyone obeys. This is one of the advantages the Romans had over the Celts, and that the English had over the Jacobites! Many individual fierce warriors are not always the best at working together as a unit.
(Of course, this can be a problem even in super disciplined armies, like the Swedish army under Karl XII. Part of what went wrong at Poltava was his top officers refusing to cooperate with each other.)
Anyway, when Pugachev announces he's Peter III in September 1773, he gets a lot of support from his fellow Cossacks. Obviously the first set of volunteers who join him know him personally, and they don't believe him, but as he roams outside the area where he was born, more and more people who have no idea who he is, or what the short-reigning Peter III looked like, join him. He gathers an army of thousands. Hilariously, he develops a replacement court where his "courtiers" name themselves after Catherine's: there's a Count Panin, a Count Orlov, a Count Vorontsov, a Field Marshal Count Chernyshev, etc.
He also marries a woman and calls her his empress…which is kind of weird, as no matter which you spin it, he already has a wife. Either he's Peter III, in which case he's married to Catherine, or he's Emelyan Pugachev the Cossack, in which case he has a wife and kids back home that he abandoned.
Oh well! None one seems to care, the important thing is rising up and throwing off your chains. What's a little spot of bigamy in the grand scheme of things? With their growing army, the Cossacks roam the land, raping pillaging, torturing, and killing:
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.
…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.
In 1773, Catherine is so occupied with the Turks she can't send more than a few troops and not her best generals to deal with this. Furthermore, she doesn't take it super seriously at first; Russian monarchs are used to uprisings in Ukraine. (There's a reason Poltava was fought here.)
Then her first attempts to crush the rebellion are defeated by Pugachev's troops. She's forced to take it seriously, stop trying to keep it a secret from the general public and issue a manifesto proclaiming that she's dealing with it, and send more troops and better generals.
Pugachev is defeated in March 1774, and he retreats into the Urals and disappears.
Catherine starts an investigation looking to find out whether any foreign powers, like France, are implicated in this. It's quite normal for foreign powers like France to instigate local rebellions, whether that's a Jacobite rising against England or a Hungarian uprising against Austria.
All her investigation, though, only finds that Pugachev was acting on his own.
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.”
Having defeated *her* tax dodgers, Catherine can now breathe a sigh of relief.
…Until Pugachev rises from the ashes! It's July 1774, he's got twenty thousand troops, he's captured a town, and he's announced his intention to march on Moscow.
Catherine has to send an army. It takes two battles (or one two-day battle) to defeat him and free ten thousand people he'd been holding captive. Pugachev will never be given the chance to spread the revolt to Moscow.
Instead, he, and his followers, learn that Catherine has finally made peace with the Turks, after 6 years of war, and there will suddenly be a lot more troops and experienced generals free for dealing with the Cossacks.
His troops start to desert, and he's forced to turn back. He keeps trying to raise new recruits, but now he's running into a PR problem:
In turning south, Pugachev was returning to his childhood home, the land of the Don Cossacks. But few impostors can be successful among people with whom they have been raised. “Why does he call himself Tsar Peter?” the Don Cossacks asked. “He is Emelyan Pugachev, the farmer, who deserted his wife Sophia and his children.”
Oops. After enough of this, and after Russian troops start to roll in in larger and more experienced numbers, Pugachev's men finally start thinking about saving their own skins. They turn on him, hand him over to the Russians on September 15, 1774, and beg for mercy.
Catherine still found it hard to believe that this illiterate peasant had come so close to overthrowing the state, but despite intensive questioning, she couldn't turn up any evidence he was doing anything but acting alone. To her credit, she refused to use torture during the interrogations.
She also had him beheaded first, then quartered, during his January 1775, execution, despite the huge disappointment this caused the eager spectators. Some of his supporters, though, were quartered first, then tortured.
In the end, this failed rebellion had huge implications for Russian history: Catherine, who had been trying to find a way to free the serfs, took away the lessons that the peasants had turned on her and the nobility had supported her. So she abandoned any further talk of ending serfdom, and though she tried to encourage more humane treatment, she considered her hands tied by the need to keep the nobles on her side. She also did not stop the nobles from severe reprisals against any serfs who were even believed to have been guilty of supporting the rebellion. All this means that very little changed in Russia in terms of the conditions that had led to this uprising, and class relations continued to play a major role for centuries to come.
Fritz faced this same problem when trying to end feudalism and by and large came to the same "keep myself in power by supporting the nobles" conclusion; Joseph made opposite choices and had to claw back most of his reforms. Leopold died too soon.
ETA: Forgot to cite my sources: all quotes from Massie, although I did have a look at Madariaga to ensure the basic outlines were correct.