Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (77 page)

56
The Return of “Peter the Third”

D
URING 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.