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Emel'yan Ivanovich Pugachev (born 1740 or 1742, executed 1775) declared himself the pretender to the Russian throne and led a Cossack insurrection (1773 - 1774).
Pugachev (the alternative transliteration of his surname as Pugachov better reflects the Russian pronunciation), the son of a small Don Cossack landowner, married a Cossack girl, Sofia Nedyuzheva, in 1758, and in the same year participated in Seven Years' War as part of the Cossack expedition to Prussia under the command of Count Zachary Chernuishev. In the first Russo-Turkish War (1768 - 1774) of Catherine II of Russia, Pugachev, now a Cossack ensign (khorunzhiy - corresponding to the regular army rank of podporuchik or junior lieutenant in modern terminology), served under Count Peter Panin and participated in the siege of Bender.
Invalided home, Pugachev led for the next few years a wandering life. More than once the authorities arrested and imprisoned him as a deserter. Finally, after frequenting the monasteries of the Old Believers, who exercised considerable influence over him, he suddenly proclaimed himself (1773) as emperor Peter III of Russia and organised the insurrection of the Yaik Cossacks which ignited the flames of all-out peasant war in the lower Volga region.
The story of Pugachev's strong resemblance to the murdered emperor Piotr Fiodorovich (died 1762) comes from a later legend. Pugachev dubbed himself Peter III the better to attract to his standard all those numerous dissidents who attributed their misery to the government of Catherine II, for the populace generally remembered Peter III as the determined opponent of Catherine. As a matter of fact Pugachev and his followers showed hostility to every form of settled government. The destitute thousands who joined the new Peter had one aim: to sweep away utterly the intolerably oppressive upper-classes.
Pugachev told the story that he and his principal adherents had escaped from the clutches of Catherine, and had now resolved to redress the grievances of the people, give absolute liberty to the Cossacks, and put Catherine herself away in a monastery. He held a sort of mimic court at which one Cossack impersonated Nikita Panin, another Zachary Chernuishev, and so on.
The Russian government at first made light of the rising. At the beginning of October 1773 it simply regarded Pugachev as a nuisance, and offerred a mere 500 roubles as a reward for the head of the troublesome Cossack. At the end of November it promised 28,000 roubles to whomsoever should bring him in, alive or dead. Even then, however, Catherine, in her correspondence with Voltaire, affected to treat l'affaire du Marquis de Pugachev as a mere joke, but by the beginning of 1774 the joke had developed into a very serious danger. All the forts on the Volga and Ural had now come into the hands of the rebels; the Bashkirs had joined them; and the governor of Moscow reported great restlessness among the population of central Russia. Shortly afterwards Pugachev captured Kazan, reduced most of the churches and monasteries there to ashes, and massacred all who refused to join him. General Peter Panin, the conqueror of Bender, thereupon set out against the rebels with a large army, but difficulty of transport, lack of discipline, and the gross insubordination of his illpaid soldiers paralysed all his efforts for months, while the innumerable and ubiquitous bands of Pugachev gained victories in nearly every engagement. Not until August 1774 did General Mikhelson inflict a crushing defeat upon the rebels near Tsaritsyn, when they lost ten thousand killed or taken prisoner. Panin's savage reprisals, after the capture of Penza, completed their discomfiture.
His own Cossacks delivered up Pugachev when he attempted to flee to the Urals (14 September 1774). Suvorov put the leader of the rebellion in a metal cage and sent him to Moscow fo public execution: this took place on 10 January 1775.
Bibliography:
- N. Dubrovin, Pugachiev and his Associates (Rus.; Petersburg, 1884)
- Catherine II., Political Correspondence (Rus. Fr. Ger.; Petersburg, 1885, &c.)
- S. I. Gnyedich, Emilian Pugachev (Rus.; Petersburg, 1902).
