Kazakhs defending lands, nomadic life, and status. As the rebels moved into the
Middle Volga and forested steppe, they were joined by peasants protesting higher
taxes and burdens, byodnodvortsyangered at loss of status and threatened by
in-migration of nobles, and by non-Russians (Chuvash, Votiak) resenting their
transformation into taxpaying state peasants. At the height of his rebellion Pug-
achev claimed a force of 10,000–15,000, led by at least 1,500 Cossacks armed with
over 100 cannons and other arms furnished by rebels in the ironworks.
The rebellion spread in 1773–4 from the Urals westward to Kazan and south
along the Volga to Astrakhan. Pugachev created a fairly sophisticated central
military and political apparatus shaped and named in parody of Russian imperial
institutions. Despite his central oversight, the rebellion was chaotic and hugely
destructive. His supporters were internally disunited: in the Urals, workers attacked
factories and management, while Bashkirs attacked workers, as well as peasants and
Cossacks whom the Bashkirs rightly perceived as undermining their status and
lifestyle. On the Volga, peasants and native peoples attacked landlords and German
colonists. Terrific violence was turned on people and property everywhere: more
than half of the about 120 factories in the Urals were seriously damaged; churches
were ransacked, granaries looted, and estates burned; city suburbs, notably Kazan,
were sacked, looted, and burned. At factories, rural centers and noble estates,
crowds not only killed landlords but also (as in the Razin rebellion) destroyed the
documents that ensured their subjugation—tax rolls, deeds, account books, work
logs. In the summer of 1774 major Volga regions were aflame—Kazan, Nizhnii
Novgorod, Arzamas, Alatyr’, Simbirsk, Penza, Saransk, Tambov, Voronezh. One
contemporary estimate reckoned that 1,572 nobles, 1,037 government officials,
and 237 clergy were killed, with total loss of 22,000 in the revolt, mostly rebels. In
the end Pugachev captured no major administrative center save for Cheliabinsk
(briefly), but tremendous destruction befell the entire area of the rebellion.
By late 1774 regular Russian troops were routing the rebels and Pugachev was
captured (turned in, like Razin, by Don Cossacks loyal to Russia). Retribution was
fierce. Hundreds of rebel leaders were hanged, others beaten and exiled. Pugachev
was taken to Moscow, tried and quartered in January 1775, although Catherine II
notably did him the mercy of forbidding torture in his trial and of having him
beheaded before quartering. In the aftermath, Catherine tried to erase the memory
of the revolt, renaming the Iaik River the Ural and the Iaik Cossacks the Ural
Cossacks. By March 1775, she declared that the rebellion be shrouded in“eternal
oblivion and profound silence,”just as twenty years later she and the partitioning
powers declared the name of the sovereign state of Poland forever abolished.
More substantively, she moved to destroy Cossack independence across the
empire, regularizing and putting greater political controls over Cossack units
from Zaporozh’e to the Kuban, as we saw in Chapters 4 and 5. Catherine also
responded with new labor regulations for mining and the 1775 administrative
reforms that created a much denser infrastructure of rural government and control,
discussed in Chapter 14.
No one, however, seriously considered abolishing serfdom, particularly not as a
response to peasant rebellion. Catherine II played theoretically with the idea.
Soslovie, Serfs, and Society on the Move 371