co-opted enough of regional elites and power structures, they would help control
the lower classes. Fewer options for accommodation were open to taxed, lesser
groups; resistance was one of them.
While Russian peasants in the eighteenth century enjoyed a rising standard of
living, they did so in the interstices of an economy oriented towards the noble
ruling class and based on service—service to state and often to landlord. Popular
dissatisfaction was always latent. Russian peasants resented their conditions of
servitude as peasants did the world over. Increasing tax and work burdens were
only one cause; being ascripted into factory and mine labor was another; state
peasants being awarded as serfs in mass distributions to favorites for which Emp-
resses Elizabeth and Catherine and Emperor Paul were famous was another. For
non-Russians, being expropriated out of traditional grazing lands in the steppe and
hunting lands in Siberia was yet another. As discussed in Chapter 10, resistance
took familiar forms—flight, work slowdowns, refusal to innovate agricultural
techniques, and the occasional violent rebellion.
Violent rebellion on small scale was common, on large scale rare, as it required
the sort of organizational ability that peasants could rarely muster. The century
began with the rebellion of Don Cossacks led by Kondratii Bulavin (1707–9),
which was put down brutally. The century was punctuated by Bashkir rebellions
(half a dozen major uprisings from the 1640s through the 1770s), regular riots by
Urals factory workers, endemic attacks by Siberian tribes, and persistent raids by
Kazakhs, Kalmyks, and Tatars. Peter III’s 1762 emancipation of the nobility
spawned expectations of an end of serfdom and won him the misguided loyalty
of peasants. When their hopes went unrealized, they blamed the nobility and rural
unrest followed, with over forty serious disturbances between 1762 and 1772 and a
rebellion by the Volga Cossacks in 1772. In Paul I’s brief reign over 300 peasant
disturbances were recorded in thirty-two southern provinces.
The eighteenth century’s counterpart to the Stepan Razin revolt (1670–1) was
the uprising led by Emelian Pugachev (1773–5). There are many similarities: both
Razin and Pugachev were Don Cossacks with worldly experience and military
training conducive to organizing a revolt. Cossacks provided the military leadership
and both leaders legitimized their revolts with inversions of the dominant ideology.
While Razin traveled with two pretenders—a false Tsarevich and a false Patriarch
Nikon—Pugachev himself claimed to be Peter III reclaiming the throne from his
illegitimate German wife. In so doing, Pugachev was one of more than twenty false
Peter III’s in Catherine II’s reign.
Pugachev’s rebellion, like Razin’s, began as a protest by Iaik Cossacks in the
Urals against decades-long erosion of their military status and autonomies. Pug-
achev was an experienced servant of the empire; as a Don Cossack he had served in
the Seven Years War in Prussia, on the Polish border, and in the Turkish war in
1768 before deserting and taking refuge in an Old Believer community in the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Making his way to the Iaik in late 1772, he
rallied Iaik Cossacks around his claim to be Peter III and his defense of the Old
Belief, popular among the Host. Other social groups joined the unrest: in the Urals,
factory workers working in unspeakable conditions, Bashkirs, Tatars, Kalmyks, and
370 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801