Catherine the Great

On arriving in Kazan at the end of December, Bibikov found the situation more serious than anyone in St. Petersburg realized. His assessment was that, as an individual, Pugachev was not to be feared, but that as a symbol of widespread, popular discontent, he mattered very much. Bibikov’s forces struck quickly to relieve Orenburg, which had been under siege for six months and where the shortage of food was acute. Pugachev made a stand with nine thousand men and thirty-six cannon, but the battle was decided by the professionally served artillery of the regular army. Pugachev was routed, four thousand of his men were captured, and “Peter III” galloped away to Berda. The siege of Orenburg was over.

In Pugachev’s headquarters in Berda, his lieutenants and camp followers were ready to flee, but all knew that only those with horses would be able to escape. “Leave the peasants to their fate,” became the rationale. “The common people are not fighters; they are just sheep.” On March 23, Pugachev left his headquarters in Berda, taking with him two thousand men and abandoning the rest of his army. Bibikov’s advance guard entered Berda the same day. The scale was balanced, however, when Bibikov, the architect of victory, suddenly developed fever and died. Catherine, saddened, assumed that his subordinate officers would complete his mission. Pugachev disappeared into the Urals.

Before he died Bibikov had assured Catherine that “the suspicion of foreigners is completely unfounded.” The empress then wrote to Voltaire attributing “this freakish event” to the fact that the Orenburg region “is inhabited by all the good-for-nothings of whom Russia has thought fit to rid herself over the past forty years, rather in the same spirit that the American colonies have been populated.” She defended her policy of leniency in the treatment of rebel prisoners by writing her friend Frau Bielcke of Hamburg, who had complained that the measures taken had not been sufficiently severe: “Since you like hangings so much, I can tell you that four or five unfortunates have already been hanged. And the rarity of such punishments has a thousand times more effect on us here than on those where hangings happen every day.”

Catherine believed that the rebellion was over. For the next three months she turned her attention away from Pugachev and back to the Russian offensive on the Danube. She continued to follow the investigation into the causes of the upheaval. A commission report issued on May 21, 1774, restated Bibikov’s earlier assessment, discounting the possibility of domestic conspiracy or foreign meddling. The revolt was blamed on Pugachev’s exploitation of discontent among the Yaik Cossacks, the tribal peoples, and the serfs assigned to the Urals metalworks. Pugachev was depicted as crude and uneducated, but the investigators cautioned that he was also crafty, resourceful, and persuasive—a dangerous man who should not be ignored or forgotten until he was dead or delivered in chains into the hands of imperial officers.

57

The Last Days of the “Marquis de Pugachev”

BY THE TIME Catherine read the Secret Commission report, at the end of May 1774, she considered it a kind of postmortem on the Pugachev revolt. Then, to her astonishment, on July 11, Pugachev appeared before the town of Kazan on the Volga at the head of an army of twenty thousand men. The following day he stormed, captured, and burned the almost defenseless town. His next objective, he announced, was Moscow. Already he had promised, “If God gives me power over the state, and when I have captured Moscow, I will order everyone to follow the Old Belief and to wear Russian clothes. I will forbid the shaving of the beard, and will have hair cut in Cossack fashion.”

Kazan, with its ethnically diverse population of eleven thousand, had fascinated Catherine during her visit in July 1768. Now, Pugachev’s attack had quickly overwhelmed the town’s outnumbered defenders, and his men reduced the city, built mostly of wood, to ruins by fire. A maelstrom of killing, raping, and looting accompanied the flames. Unbearded men in European dress were instantly killed; women in foreign dress were dragged away to Pugachev’s camp. Two-thirds of Kazan’s twenty-nine hundred buildings were destroyed. Nobles and their families who could get away fled to Moscow.

The old capital began to prepare its defenses, but Pugachev did not come. A Russian army, already hurrying to Kazan, arrived too late to save the town, but on July 15, it struck and defeated Pugachev. The following day, the false tsar reappeared with fifteen thousand men. In a four-hour battle, the rebel army was routed; two thousand died, and five thousand were taken prisoner. After the battle, ten thousand men and women held captive in Pugachev’s camp were freed. The pretender with the remnants of his army fled to the south, down the Volga.