Yemelyan Ivanovich Pugachev

Russian rebel leader

• Born: c. 1742
• Birthplace: Zimoveiskaya, Don Basin, Russia
• Died: January 21, 1775
• Place of death: Moscow, Russia

Pugachev led one of the greatest Cossack rebellions against the Russian monarchy, threatening but ultimately strengthening the reign of Catherine the Great, who tightened her control over Russia in the aftermath of the failed revolt.

Early Life

Yemelyan Ivanovich Pugachev (yihm-yihl-YAHN ih-VAHN-uhv-yihch pew-guh-CHAWF) was born in a village in the Don basin sometime in 1742, the exact date being uncertain due to the loss of records in that oft-contested region. He remained illiterate throughout his brief life and probably received only the usual rough-and-ready Cossack education in the handling of horses and of weapons. Certainly, he would have become a proficient rider almost as soon as he could walk, beginning on a small pony and moving up to full-sized horses as he grew. He would have learned how to ford rivers with horses, to plan raids and other mounted military operations, to set up a camp, and to break it down rapidly—all the various skills that were necessary in those semimilitary villages on the wild steppe of Russia’s southern marches. Like all Cossacks of his time, he was subject to mandatory military service, in which he proved intractably resistant to discipline. After being granted a brief leave of absence for illness, he refused to return to his unit and fled as a deserter.

Life’s Work

Unable to find success in any legitimate pursuit, Pugachev decided to capitalize on the political unrest in the Cossack regions and raise a rebellion against Catherine the Great, whose claim to the throne was shaky at best, because she had come to power as the result of a coup d’état against her weak-willed and incompetent husband, Peter III. Although Peter’s death had been engineered by Aleksey Grigoryevich Orlov shortly after being deposed, rumors persisted that he had been spared his fate by divine intervention and now wandered the Russian countryside incognito, awaiting the proper time to reclaim his throne. Several minor rebels had bolstered their positions by claiming to be Peter, but all had been quickly defeated and executed or exiled to Siberia.

In November, 1772, Pugachev entered Yaitsk, capital of the Yaik Cossack Host, disguised as an itinerant merchant and a member of the schismatic Old Believer sect. The latter credential would help gain him sympathy among these people, who had rejected the reforms of Patriarch Nikon more than a century earlier and clung to the old formulas of worship such as making the sign of the cross with two fingers instead of three. Old Believers were treated as heretics by the official Russian Orthodox Church and often treated little better than “nonbelievers” such as Muslims and Buddhists.

In Yaitsk, Pugachev made connections with a number of Cossack dissidents and showed them scars upon his chest, actually from an old illness, which he claimed were “czar marks,” stigmata identifying him as God’s own anointed czar, Peter III. The folk belief that the legitimate czar would bear special identifying marks upon his body was common in a time before photography, when the average peasant never saw an image (such as a painting or drawing) of the ruler and thus had only a vague and formalized idea of what the monarch might look like. Almost every previous pretender to the throne in that period claimed to possess such “czar marks,” and Pugachev was probably just following an established pattern, using a convenient minor disfiguration to further his own program of rebellion.

Eager as the unhappy Cossacks might have been to reclaim their lost autonomy by force of arms, they had to break off their plans when Pugachev was denounced to the government and captured. Taken to Kazan in irons, he was sentenced to be beaten with the knout, a Russian version of the cat-o-nine-tails into which metal and glass were woven, and exiled to Siberia. However, Pugachev contrived to escape his imprisonment, since czarist exile arrangements were comparatively light, a far cry from the Soviet gulag of a later century. By August of 1773, he was back in the Yaitsk region, conspiring once again to raise the banner of rebellion. When czarist officials got wind of the planned uprising and decided to crush it quickly, however, Pugachev moved up his plans and openly declared his rebellion in September, before all his preparations were completed.

With his promises of freedom from Empress Catherine’s oppressive policies, Pugachev was able to rally large numbers of unhappy peasants and Cossacks to his cause. Although he was never able to capture Yaitsk, by October his army was able to take several small outposts along the Yaik River. Emboldened by their success, they set siege to the czarist outpost of Orenburg and sent emissaries to all the minority nationalities throughout the Ural region. Soon, their numbers were increased by an influx of Muslim Bashkirs and Kazakh tribesmen.

By the middle of October, word of the rebellion reached Catherine in St. Petersburg, Russia’s imperial capital. So little did she think of it that she sent a single general at the head of a small punitive expedition, thinking that this disorder could be dealt with as casually as previous years’ Cossack revolts. Thus, it was to her surprise that the next news she received was of her general’s defeat and flight to Moscow.

Realizing that she had a serious problem on her hands, Catherine dispatched a much larger force under two proven commanders. She also issued proclamations comparing Pugachev to the various False Dmitris, pretenders who had taken advantage of the confused succession following the death of Czar Ivan the Terrible to raise havoc and turn that period into a Time of Troubles. Catherine warned of the consequences of following a pretender’s call, including civil disorder and foreign invasion.

Catherine’s hopes for a quick resolution of the rebellion were soon dashed, and in spite of mass captures of rebellious peasants, Pugachev was able to elude his pursuers and maintain his movement. Most alarming to Catherine and her advisers was the discovery that Pugachev even had disaffected young men of the upper class among his followers, as demonstrated by the sudden appearance of a manifesto written in German, which was traced to a young officer captured by the rebels when they defeated the original punitive expedition.

In June, Pugachev’s fortunes turned with the capture and sack of Kazan. Subsequently, Catherine’s forces enjoyed three victories in four days. However, Pugachev was able to escape with a handful of followers and flee down the Volga River to Tsaritsyn (modern Volgograd). There he was finally cornered and captured by Catherine’s forces, who brought him to Moscow for trial and punishment. Given that he had escaped custody once before, they took no chances, confining him in an iron cage like an exhibit in a zoo.

Empress Catherine, who wanted to be perceived as an enlightened monarch, deliberately distanced herself from Pugachev’s trial and execution by delegating the task to the senate (in imperial Russia, the foremost law court rather than a legislative body). Although Pugachev pled guilty to all his crimes and threw himself on the mercy of the court, they sentenced him to the traditional punishment for traitors, to be quartered alive and then beheaded, with his severed limbs displayed in the various parts of Moscow before his corpse was to be burned, denying his spirit eternal rest. However, the judges of the senate also knew that Catherine would never countenance such a medieval punishment and decided to have the executioner “accidentally” behead Pugachev first, and only then remove his hands and feet. The sentence was carried out without incident on January 21, 1775.

Significance

Pugachev’s unsuccessful rebellion hardened Catherine the Great’s resolve to maintain power by any cost, resulting in worsened conditions for the peasantry and delaying actual reforms. To make sure the Cossacks would raise no further rebellions against the throne, she removed the remainder of their autonomy, completing the transformation of these proudly independent people into a military caste who served as the monarchy’s special enforcers against dissidents and rebels. Thus, the Cossacks would be remembered primarily as the brutal horsemen who rode against peaceful demonstrations and who carried out brutal pogroms against Jewish settlements in the western frontier of Russia.

Catherine also determined to erase the memory of the Yaik Cossacks and of Pugachev himself. She ordered the Yaik Host renamed the Ural Host, the Yaik River the Ural River, and Yaitsk, Ural’sk, names they have since retained. She also ordered Pugachev’s brother Dementi, who took no part in the rebellion, to adopt a new surname. This pattern of renaming places and people to erase politically inconvenient memory would find its fullest flower in the Soviet era, particularly under the rule of Joseph Stalin, when various entities might go through three and four renamings in the span of a few years as subsequent honorees were discredited and purged.

Bibliography

Alexander, John T. Catherine the Great: Life and Legend. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Biography includes a lengthy description of Pugachev’s Revolt.

Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich. The History of Pugachev. Reprint. New York: Sterling, 2001. This narrative poem by Russia’s national poet bears witness of the hold Pugachev had on the Russian literary imagination.

Seaton, Albert. The Horsemen of the Steppes: The Story of the Cossacks. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1985. Study of the rise of the Cossacks, from their origins in the cultural collision between Tatar and Russian through the great rebellions of Stenka Razin and of Pugachev.

Ure, John. The Cossacks: An Illustrated History. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. Accessible history of the Cossacks, their explorations and their rebellions, particularly of interest since it includes material available only since the fall of the Soviet Union opened various previously secret archives to study by Western scholars.