Yemelyan Pugachev
pretender to the Russian throne
1742 CE to 1775 CE
Yemelyan Ivanovich Pugachev (e. 1742 – 21 January [O.S.
January 10] 1775) is a pretender to the Russian throne who lead a great Cossack insurrection during the reign of Catherine II.
Alexander Pushkin writes a remarkable history of the rebellion, The History of Pugachev, and he recounts some of the events in his novel The Captain's Daughter (1836).
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The Great Crossroads
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Russia experiences a major social upheaval, the Pugachev Uprising, during the 1768-74 war with the Ottoman Empire.
In 1773 a Don Cossack, Emel'yan Pugachev, announces that he is Peter III.
Other Cossacks, various Turkic tribes that feel the impingement of the Russian centralizing state, and industrial workers in the Ural Mountains, as well as peasants hoping to escape serfdom, all join in the rebellion.
Russia's preoccupation with the war enables Pugachev to take control of a part of the Volga area, but the regular army crushes the rebellion in 1774.
Pugachev, taking advantage of the rumors circulating that Catherine’s husband and predecessor Peter III is still alive, declares himself to be Peter and claims to have survived an assassination attempt by Catherine.
General Peter Panin thereupon set out against the rebels with a large army, but difficulty of transport, lack of discipline, and the gross insubordination of his ill-paid soldiers paralyzes all his efforts for months, while the innumerable and ubiquitous bands of Pugachev gain victories in nearly every engagement.
Pugachev proclaims the abolition of serfdom, garnering support from thousands of peasants.
He is marching on Moscow at the head of a thirty thousand-strong army by December.
Catherine’s troops, after initial defeats, eventually shatter Pugachev’s rebel army.
Pugachev is betrayed, captured by the tsarist forces, and brought to Moscow in an iron cage; he will be beheaded in January 1775.
Pugachev's taking of Kazan in 1774 is the greatest victory of his insurgency.
Catherine II, in the immediate aftermath of Pugachev’s failed rebellion, initiates a set of local reforms that confirm the privileges of Russia's landowners and deprive the peasants and lower classes in the towns of their traditional advocates, effectively giving the nobles absolute control over their serfs.
The Pugachev Uprising bolsters Catherine's determination to reorganize Russia's provincial administration.
In 1775 she divides Russia into provinces and districts according to population statistics.
She then gives each province an expanded administrative, police, and judicial apparatus.
Nobles no longer are required to serve the central government, as they have since Peter the Great's time, and many of them receive significant roles in administering provincial governments.
Catherine also attempts to organize society into well-defined social groups, or estates.
In 1785 she issues charters to nobles and townsmen.
The Charter to the Nobility confirms the liberation of the nobles from compulsory service and gives them rights that not even the autocracy can infringe upon.
The Charter to the Towns proves to be complicated and ultimately less successful than the one issued to the nobles.
Failure to issue a similar charter to state peasants, or to ameliorate the conditions of serfdom, makes Catherine's social reforms incomplete.