Pugachev

The Rostov museum keeps an oil portrait said to have been painted from life in 1774–75. Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky photographed the canvas in 1911. A later camera on an older likeness is not a sketch from the steppe east of the Volga. Use it as a face attached to a name, then keep the biography dated. Yemelyan Ivanovich Pugachev was born about 1742 at Zimoveyskaya-na-Donu. He died on 21 January 1775, 10 January Old Style, in Moscow. He led a major Cossack and peasant rebellion in 1773–75. This page is that war. It is not the Charter of 1785, and it is not a retelling of Peter III’s six months, except as a stolen name. The Holstein emperor of the last numbered era is a corpse. The Don Cossack of this page needs that corpse to speak as an edict.

In his travels he learned of the Yaik, later Ural, Cossack rebellion of 1772 and of its cruel suppression. He went to Yaitsky Gorodok, now Oral, where the Cossacks remained discontented. Arrested there for desertion from the army, imprisoned at Kazan, sentenced to be deported to Siberia, he escaped. In June 1773 he appeared in the steppes east of the Volga. He claimed to be Emperor Peter III, deposed by his wife Catherine and assassinated in 1762. He decreed the abolition of serfdom. The claim and the decree are why a desertion became a war. A dead nephew returned as a programme for Yaik Cossacks, peasant workers in Ural mines and factories, agricultural peasants, clergymen and Bashkirs. Planning ultimately to depose Catherine, he needed a coalition wider than a host.

The 1772 Yaik revolt is the immediate weather, not a second war to narrate. It had been suppressed cruelly. The host was still discontented when a deserter arrived with an emperor’s name. That is enough preface. Do not invent tavern talk about how the name was chosen. The biography gives desertion, prison, escape, June 1773, a claim, a decree. The last era gave Ropsha. This era gives a man who used Ropsha as a licence. Between those facts sits a countryside that, in the Russian Empire account, had waited for emancipation after the gentry’s 1762 relief. Waiting is not a revolt. A false Peter made waiting into a siege.

The engraving shows him under convoy, in a cage on a sledge: an eighteenth-century print of capture, not a signed report from the men who handed him over. Put it here as a reminder that the war ended in a cage. The middle of the story is still a siege and a fire.

Capture prints like to freeze the end at the beginning of a page. Resist that. Orenburg, Tatishchevo, Kazan, Saratov and Tsaritsyn still have to happen after this cage is shown. The engraving is here only so that a face in Rostov is not the only picture of a body the state later displayed. A cage is not a verdict. It is how an eighteenth-century plate imagined convoy. The verdict is Moscow, January 1775, after a betrayal by Yaik Cossacks. Keep the plate in its place: after the name is explained, before the siege is told, as a warning that this war has a documented finish, not as a spoiler that replaces the campaign.

He stormed and laid siege to Orenburg, an important commercial and industrial centre of the Ural region, in the autumn of 1773. Landowners of the region, fearing for their lives, fled to Moscow. Catherine recognised the seriousness of the rebellion and sent an army under General A. I. Bibikov in January 1774. In the spring Bibikov defeated him at Tatishchevo, west of Orenburg. Defeat at one town was not the end of a war that had already gathered factory peasants and Bashkirs. He proceeded to Kazan and burned the city in July 1774. Kazan had been seized in the revolt; much of the city was burned to the ground. Catherine later rebuilt it on a gridiron pattern. That reconstruction is a civic footnote. The military fact is the fire, then another defeat several days later.

He crossed the Volga, intending to gather reinforcements among the Don Cossacks. He captured Saratov in August 1774 and besieged Tsaritsyn, now Volgograd, where General A. V. Suvorov finally defeated him on 3 September 1774, 23 August Old Style. He escaped but was betrayed by some Yaik Cossacks, sent to Moscow, and executed. Britannica’s Russian Empire page notes that through the whole empire the peasants only awaited his coming to rise, but he did not feel equal to the task, nor could his bands stand against regular troops. He therefore suddenly returned to Cossack country, where he lost his army; he was extradited by his associates, tried, and executed. The two accounts agree on the end. They also agree that regular troops, not a debate, closed the war.

The same Russian Empire account places the revolt after Peter III’s manifesto relieving the gentry of compulsory military service. Serfs had impatiently awaited their own turn for emancipation. Protection extended to the gentry created a growing disaffection. In 1773 the Yaik Cossacks revolted under Pugachev, who called himself Peter III. He roused the Bashkirs and the serfs allotted to the factories in the Urals, assailed Kazan on the Volga, and sacked it. Do not turn those sentences into a speech from a threshing floor. Turn them into the social weather the last era named as two Russias. A Cossack who called himself Peter III was offering the second Russia a rumour of the first Russia’s gift. The coalition is listed. Invented oratory would only decorate the list.

He borrowed a dead emperor’s name, promised to lift serfdom, and could not hold a city against a regular army.

Keep the geography honest, because the war moved. Yaitsky Gorodok, the steppe east of the Volga, Orenburg, Tatishchevo, Kazan, the Volga crossing, Saratov, Tsaritsyn, Moscow: that is the line. Keep the social list honest, because the war was not only Cossack. Ural factory peasants, agricultural peasants, clergy, Bashkirs. Keep the stolen name honest, because without Peter III the decrees would have been a bandit’s paper. The portrait in Rostov, the cage on the sledge, the later lithograph: three images of a man the state needed to show as captured and then as finished. Between them sit months when landowners fled and a city burned. A grid rebuilt later does not unburn 1774.

What followed the execution is the next article’s legal weather, not this campaign’s last volley. A great peasant rebellion had demonstrated the inadequacy of local administration that relied on too few appointed officials, much given to abuse and corruption, and on the informal control exercised by individual landowners and village communes. The statute of provinces in 1775 would answer that demonstration with courts, offices and noble self-government. The Charter to the Gentry in 1785 would thicken landlord power over serfs. Neither document should be narrated as a battle honour on this page. They are aftermath. Pugachev’s own story stops in Moscow in January 1775, with a borrowed name, a burned Kazan, a lost army, and a betrayal by men of the host that had first heard him.

Do not wait for 1861 on this page, and do not return to Ropsha except as the death that supplied a name. The false Peter of 1773 is not the Holstein emperor of 1762. He is a Don Cossack using a death. Catherine’s enlightenment language had disliked the perpetuation of serfdom and then adjourned a commission. Pugachev’s decree offered abolition as a banner. Regular troops answered. The banner fell. What did not fall was serfdom. That persistence is the last article of this chapter, written as a charter and a provincial statute, not as another siege. The Instruction’s free individuals never arrived in Orenburg’s fields. A cage on a sledge did.

A. Rudnev printed a lithograph in Moscow in 1865: execution, 10 January 1775 Old Style, a crowded square. It is a nineteenth-century reconstruction. The sources say he was tried and executed. They do not, in the pages used here, require a method to be invented on the scaffold. The date and the city are enough.

A rebellion that made landowners flee is not a rumour that failed to matter. It mattered enough for a general, then another general, then a betrayal, then a trial. It mattered enough that the next article’s offices exist because this war showed the old scatter of officials to be too thin. It did not matter enough, from the village’s side, to lift bondage. That is the whole of the ending. No last words are recorded here, because none are needed and none should be invented. The facts that do not require embroidery are already grim: a false emperor, a burned city, a cage, a Moscow winter date.

Call him Pugachev, as the sources do, and keep the borrowed name visible so that Peter III is not accidentally resurrected as a policy. The six months of 1762 remain in era IX. This war is era X’s proof that the two Russias could still meet as fire. The charter that follows will try to make sure they meet as a landlord’s court instead. Poland, just behind us, was a taking of a commonwealth. This page is a taking back of a rumour. Both takings were Catherine’s. Only one needed a Don Cossack’s face, photographed in 1911 from a canvas that a museum still calls painted from life. The photograph is late. The death is 1775. Keep both dates in view when the next page begins to write offices.