Peter the Great's radical reforms designed to…

Peter the Great's radical reforms designed to "Westernize" old Muscovy by bringing it into the eighteenth century have been met with widespread discontent.

The pious, deeply conservative masses see his reforms as an affront to their traditional way of life and to their Orthodox faith.

Peter has even been equated to the Anti-Christ and assumed to be an impostor posing as the true Tsar.

On top of this, Peter's newly formed police state is expanding territorially, and by this expansion is encroaching upon salt resource sites coveted by the Cossacks for preservation of their foods.

This dispute over land is in one sense an economic issue, but the Cossacks also regard this as an intrusion upon their semi-autonomous political state.

In general, the entire rural Russian atmosphere is in an agitated state, waiting for a catalyst of some kind.

In response to the constraints and fears of living in Peter's police state, large numbers of serfs have absconded, abandoning the major urban areas, especially Moscow and the new capital at St. Petersburg.

While some groups have emigrated to Poland or Austria, many have chosen to avoid the border patrols and have instead fled to the rural periphery and the river regions already inhabited by the Cossacks.

It was Peter's policy to hunt down and arrest absconders and return them to their lords, where they can be counted for taxes, a policy which, by this time, has no statute of limitations.

In accordance with this policy, Peter has deployed a group of bounty hunters under Yuri Dolgoruki to scout the Cossack regions for fugitive peasants.

Despite the fact that the Cossacks harbor some resentment towards the peasants (for overpopulating their region and generally competing for local resources), more deplorable to them is the idea of Petrine agents roaming freely through their territory.

They not only refuse to give up the fugitive peasants, but on October 8, 1707, a small band of local atamans headed by Kondrati Bulavin ambushes and murders Dolgoruki and his men in the village of Shulgin on the Aidar River, opening the door to violence and beginning the Bulavin Rebellion.