subsided in 1772, half the city’s population hadfled and three-quarters of those
who remained had died, upwards to 70,000 people. St. Petersburg established a
plague hospital in 1770 but stringent quarantine measures kept it at bay; a
permanent quarantine hospital was founded there in 1783.
Smallpox continued to be endemic here as in Europe; mortality was highest in the
youngest population and tapered off for people over age 10. St. Petersburg suffered a
major outbreak in the early 1770s. Siberia suffered major epidemics in the 1710s,
1730, and the 1760s and smaller ones everyfive to six years; the disease hit the
Pacific coast, killing two-thirds of the native people of Kamchatka in a 1768– 9
outbreak; it decimated the Kalmyks by the 1770s. Smallpox even affected the ruling
family: the young Tsar Peter II died of the disease in 1730 and Catherine II’s
husband, Peter III, contracted the disease in his childhood in Holstein and survived
with disfiguring facial scars.
Inoculation for smallpox came to Russia late in the century. Russian folk practice
traditionally combated smallpox by exposing babies to people who seemed to have a
weak case of it, but peasants did not practice inoculation as traditional societies in
China and India had been doing from ancient times. Catherine II is famous
for bringing modern smallpox inoculation to Russia when she summoned to
St. Petersburg British doctor Thomas Dimsdale, who had been championing the
method across Europe. He inoculated Catherine herself and her son Paul in 1768
and returned in 1781 for her two grandsons. Catherine insisted the court nobility
be inoculated and through the next three decades the state established inoculation
centers in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kyiv, Irkutsk, and Kazan; enlightened nobles
established them on their estates. An estimated 20,000 (some estimate many more)
were treated, but Russia lacked the public health network to make a real impact
across the empire.
The same might be said about the entire enterprise of protecting against
infectious disease in this century. Russia lacked a public health network, advanced
medical and epidemiological studies, and means of dispersal of information suffi-
cient to protect the population from disease. Hovering in the background of
people’s experience across the early modern period was the debilitation and
mortality of disease. It was a fact of daily life, as well as an occasional terror.
THE LAW
Second to taxation in touching people’s daily lives was the tsar’s legal system for
such important issues as land and property, trade and personal honor, felony and
political crime. The state continued to guard its monopoly on violence jealously,
which can be illustrated by a 1716 decree on dueling. As private violence, dueling
had been condemned since Europeans brought it to Muscovy in the late seven-
teenth century; quarreling parties were told to use the tsar’s courts for insult to
honor. The 1716 decree’s unusual punishment underscored the state’s intolerance
of private violence: if two men were found guilty of dueling, both were to be
hanged, even if one had been killed in the duel and had to be hanged as a dead
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