Catherine the Great

Orlov took control of the stricken city. With the death toll between six hundred and seven hundred a day, he asked the physicians what they wanted done and then bullied the people into obedience. He was forceful and effective but also humane. He accompanied doctors to patients’ bedsides, he oversaw the distribution of medicines, he supervised the removal of corpses rotting in houses and the streets. He promised freedom to serfs who volunteered to work in hospitals, he opened orphanages, he distributed food and money. Over a period of two and a half months, he spent a hundred thousand rubles on food, clothing, and shelter for survivors. He had victims’ clothes burned, and he burned more than three thousand old wooden houses. He reimposed compulsory quarantine, the policy that had caused the riots. He scarcely slept, and his dedication, courage, and effort inspired others. Deaths in the city, which had risen to 21,000 in September, dropped to 17, 561 in October, 5,255 in November, and 805 in December. In part, this was a result of Orlov’s actions; in part, it was a function of the arrival of cold weather.

Confidence in Gregory, together with hope for the coming of an early winter, sustained the empress during these weeks. She had feared that the epidemic might move northwest toward St. Petersburg; already there had been suspicious outbreaks in Pskov and Novgorod. Precautions were taken to protect the capital on the Neva: checkpoints blocked all roads; extra care was taken in handling mail; a medical examination became mandatory after every suspicious death. She worried about the effect of reports and rumors at home and abroad. At first she tried to suppress stories about mass sickness, terror, and violence. Then, at the peak of the epidemic, to counter further inflammatory rumors—for example, that people were being buried alive—Catherine authorized publication of an official account of the Moscow riots. Foreign newspapers picked up and circulated her version. Privately, however, she was dismayed by what was happening. To Voltaire, she gave her comment on Ambrosius’s death: “The famous Eighteenth Century really has something to boast of here. See how far we have progressed!” To Alexander Bibikov, the former president of the Legislative Commission, she wrote, “We have spent a month in circumstances like those that Peter the Great lived under for thirty years. He broke through all difficulties with glory. We hope to come out of them with honor.”

By mid-November 1772, the crisis was waning and Catherine allowed public prayers of thanksgiving. When Orlov returned to St. Petersburg on December 4, she covered him with honors. She had a gold medal struck with a likeness of a mythical Roman hero on one side and a likeness of Orlov on the other. The inscription was, “Russia also has such sons.” She commissioned a triumphal arch in the park at Tsarskoe Selo; on it was emblazoned: “To the hero who saved Moscow from the plague.”

“Saved” was accurate only in the sense that the losses could have been greater. One contemporary estimate was that the plague had killed 55,000 people in Moscow, one-fifth of the city’s population. Another estimate was that 100,000 had died in Moscow and 120,000 throughout the empire. To prevent a recurrence, quarantine was maintained along Russia’s southern border for another two years, until the Turkish war ended in 1774.

56

The Return of “Peter the Third”

DURING 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.