Catherine the Great

Catherine did not completely surrender to Peter Panin. Buoyed by her sweeping victory over the Turks and by Pugachev’s defeat at Kazan, she restricted his authority to the regions directly affected and declared that the Investigating Commission would remain under her direct personal supervision. Panin was further circumscribed by being given Suvorov as his second in command. Panin, like Bibikov, was encouraged to enlist the nobility in the rebellious provinces. As their reward, all privileges of the aristocracy, including absolute power over their serfs, were guaranteed by the crown. This approach produced results: the noblemen mustered men, money, and supplies of food.

In the field, Panin’s methods of retribution were only marginally less cruel than those of Pugachev. Earlier, under Bibikov, the army had dealt leniently with captured rebels. After the relief of Orenburg, the vast majority of Pugachev’s followers taken prisoner had been released with a safe conduct pass and told to go home. Most of the prisoners captured in the battles outside Kazan were released with fifteen kopecks travel money. Now, as the revolt entered the final phase with Pugachev’s destructive move down the Volga, Panin imposed fierce reprisals. On August 24, he issued a proclamation threatening all who had taken part in the revolt with death by quartering. Panin knew that he was exceeding the authority granted him by Catherine, but she was far away and he ignored her.

Catherine spent August at Tsarskoe Selo anxiously following Pugachev’s rampage down the Volga. By the end of the month she told Voltaire that she was expecting “something decisive,” because for ten days she had not heard from Panin, and since “bad news travels faster than good, I am hoping for something good.” As Suvorov’s veterans advanced, Pugachev’s army began melting away. Yet even near the end he inspired fear. On July 26, in Saransk, he dined in the house of the governor’s widow and then hanged her outside her window. Nobles were hanged upside down in groups with their heads, hands, and feet cut off. On August 1, horsemen announced in the marketplace of Penza that “Peter III” was coming and that if he were not welcomed with the traditional bread and salt, everyone in the town, including babies, would be slaughtered. He came, was welcomed, two hundred men were forcibly recruited, and the governor’s house was burned down with the governor and twenty of the gentry locked inside. In another town, a resident astronomer was hanged so that he might be “nearer the stars.”

Pugachev’s attempts to recruit among his fellow Don Cossacks were mostly ignored. Everyone knew that a reward of twenty thousand rubles had been posted for his capture and that veteran government troops were approaching. Many also knew that Pugachev was not Peter III. When he appeared on August 21 before Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, now Volgograd), riding forward to talk to a group of Don Cossack leaders, he was publicly recognized and denounced as an impostor. Two days later, on August 24, he suffered final defeat at Sarepta, south of Tsaritsyn. The defeat became a rout. Pugachev escaped by swimming the Volga with thirty followers. But defeat, fear, and hunger were sapping the loyalty of everyone around him.

On September 15, 1774, almost exactly a year after he had launched his revolt, Pugachev was back where he had begun: at Yaitsk on the Yaik River. There, a group of frightened lieutenants, hoping to save themselves by betrayal, fell on their sleeping chief. “How dare you raise your hands against your emperor?” he shouted. “You will achieve nothing.” Unmoved, they delivered him in chains to Peter Panin.

On September 30, Panin wrote to Catherine that he had seen the “infernal monster.” Pugachev had made no attempt to sustain his imposture. He fell on his knees, declared that he was Emelyan Pugachev, and admitted that, in parading himself as Peter III, he had sinned before God and Her Imperial Majesty. He was placed inside an iron cage not large enough to allow him to stand, and the cage was bolted onto a two-wheeled cart. In this manner, he was trundled for hundreds of miles to Moscow, through towns and villages where he had been hailed as a liberating hero.