The Pugachev Revolt: Largest Peasant Uprising Threatens Rule of Catherine the Great

 

 

The last great peasant revolt to challenge autocratic rule in Russia occurred during the reign of Catherine the Great. Between 1774 and 1774, Emelian Pugachev, a Don Cossack freebooter, rallied thousands of disaffected peasants by proclaiming himself Tsar Peter III, who had been deposed in 1762 and died shortly thereafter. Although there had been many uprisings in the region and numerous pretenders, the Pugachev Revolt was by far the greatest threat to Catherine’s rule which allowed for a large military response.

 

Causes of the Pugachev Revolt

 

Ultimately, as Catherine’s General Bibikov told the aristocracy of Kazan, “This is a revolt of the poor against the rich, of the slaves against their masters.” [1] Yet the causes were many and have been interpreted differently by Russian, Soviet, and Western Historians. [2] Generally, the causes can be broken down as follows:

 

Loss of autonomy by the indigenous groups in the Urals.

 

Forced conscription of local peasants to fight against the Turks.

 

Use of serf labor in the newly created factories and mines.

 

Seizure of lands by the state.

 

Heavy taxation.

 

Expanded state intrusion into local customs, practices, and beliefs.

 

The role of “Old Believers” that rejected official Orthodoxy.

 

Initial Successes of the Revolt

 

Pugachev was a messianic figure, capitalizing on the popular notion that Peter III was seen by the peasants as still alive. Pretenderism had always been a spark in sporadic peasant revolts. Pugachev was a courageous leader with some military skills, having served in the Seven Years’ War. The capture of several garrisons and the rallying of thousands of supporters attest to his leadership.

 

Catherine herself contributed to the rebellion’s early victories by not taking Pugachev seriously, equating the revolt with the many prior disturbances that had been swiftly quelled by her troops. The resurrection of Peter III in the guise of a brigand was troubling, however, and reminded Catherine that she had seized power in 1762 through a coup.

 

Pugachev Defeated by Catherine’s Armies

 

After a series of successes on his way to Moscow at the head of the peasant army, Pugachev was turned back following the partial destruction of Kazan. Bringing death and destruction to the gentry in the Volga region, Pugachev pursued a course that would take him to home territory. Count Panin, commissioned by Catherine to end the insurrection, rushed fresh troops to the region. The Turkish War had been concluded and now Pugachev was facing veteran forces.

 

Adding to Pugachev’s problems, a famine swept the region, depriving his motley army of necessary supplies. In August 1774, he found his last battle against troops commanded by Ivan Mikhelson, an exceptional officer who repulsed a direct charge and counterattacked, totally destroying Puchave’s army. The battle at Cherny Yar was decisive.

 

Although he escaped, Pugachev was betrayed by fellow Cossacks and carried to Moscow in a cage where he was tortured and executed. Rather than addressing reforms, serfdom was strengthened and state control became more onerous. Historians researching 19^th Century Russian radicalism have linked the efforts of revolutionaries with memories of the Pugachev revolt, believing that the peasantry represented the vanguard of revolution. [3]

 

Paul Avrich cites early Bolshevik thoughts regarding the use of the peasant class in achieving revolution and highlights the distinct peasant notions of a “tsar” that would emancipate them and act on their behalf. But the Pugachev revolt would be the last great upheaval until the twentieth century when the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 weakened and ultimately ended autocracy.

 

Sources:

 

[1] Quoted in Paul Avrich, Russian Rebels 1600-1800: Four great rebellions which shook the Russian state in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976) p.211-212.

[2] David MacKenzie and Michael W. Curran, A History of Russia, the Soviet Union, and Beyond, 4^th Ed. (Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1993). See chapter 19 for a brief discussion of historical interpretations of the Pugachev Revolt.

[3] See Paul Avrich, Chapter 5.

 

 Catherine the Great: Enlightened Russian Despot?

 

Catherine the Great died in 1796, several years after the start of the French Revolution. Despite her openness to Enlightenment ideas, her correspondence with pre-revolutionary thinkers like Voltaire and Diderot, and her attempts at internal reform, the violent phases of the Revolution turned Catherine against her earlier inclinations. In the end, she considered sending an army to France to restore the monarchy. Catherine’s depiction as an enlightened despot has left open the door of debate: to what extent did Catherine accept the progress and reform associated with Enlightenment belief?

 

Catherine as Empress After 1762

 

With the assistance of highly placed government officials and the elite Guards units in St. Petersburg, Catherine engineered a bloodless coup in 1762, deposing her inept and highly unpopular husband, Peter III. Intelligent and exceptionally literate, Catherine was devoted to Russia, embraced Orthodoxy, and determined to reform government and foreign policy.

 

Catherine became an avid art collector, filling the Winter Palace (later the Hermitage) with priceless masterpieces. She came to the throne as the most literate and best educated autocrat in the history of Russia. She spoke French fluently, wrote plays, essays, and treatises on a number of topics. Catherine valued books and acquired the libraries of both Voltaire and Diderot upon the deaths of those great thinkers.

 

She invited both Voltaire and Diderot to St. Petersburg. Denis Diderot accepted her invitation and spent afternoons discoursing, freely advising what progressive changes she could facilitate in Russia. Yet, as she admitted in her writings, neither Diderot nor the other philosophes fully appreciated what it was like to govern. Her foreign policy hardly reflected Enlightenment ideas. In 1778, the Prussian king, Frederick II, commented that “the empress of Russia is very proud, very ambitious, and very vain.”

 

Catherine’s reforms, such as in administration and law, were tempered with a sense of paranoia that engulfed her entire reign. Within a two year period, there were 13 pretenders to the throne, some claiming to be Peter III. This culminated in the 1773 Pugachev Revolt, perhaps the greatest peasant uprising of the century.

 

An Enlightened Monarch or True Autocrat

 

Catherine rose at five every morning. Referring to herself as the “first servant of the state,” (much like Frederick the Great said of himself), she worked long hours. Under her rule, more books were published in Russia than in all previous years and the modern Russian language replaced the older “church Slavonic” language. Moscow University was founded and Catherine encouraged the building of elementary and intermediate schools.

 

No reforms, however, limited her role as the autocratic ruler of Russia. As with other so-called Enlightened Monarchs (Frederick the Great, Joseph II of Austria), Catherine was willing to reform certain aspects of civic and social life, but not at the expense of her own power. Under Catherine, serfdom expanded and became more firmly entrenched. Censorship prohibited the publication of books that criticized her reign or the autocratic system.

 

By the time the Bastille fell in Paris in 1789 to French mobs, Catherine had already become reactionary. Events in France, at least for Catherine, represented the effects of unbridled Enlightenment thinking. Additionally, she recalled all too vividly the peasant challenges to her own legitimacy. What she owed Russia was order and stability rather than chaos and turmoil. Hence, she retreated from liberalism.

 

Sources:

 

Anthony, Katherine, Catherine the Great (New York: Garden City Publishing Company, 1925)

Hingley, Ronald, The Tsars 1533-1917 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968)

MacKenzie, David and Michael W. Curran, A History of Russia, the Soviet Union, and Beyond 4^th Edition (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1993)

Riasanovsky, Nicholas V., A History of Russia 2^nd Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969)

 

 In his memoirs in 1925, Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon, recalled telling a friend in 1914 that, "The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." Several years ago, according the the British weekly The Economist, Chancellor Angela Merkel encouraged her Ministers to read Christopher Clark's, "The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to War in 1914." (August 30th, 2018)

There is always an honorable way out. But Mr. Putin knew no way of honor. According to George Kennan, who fully understood the Soviet mentality for decades, wrote in July, 1947, "the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies … Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvers of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence."

Although the Soviet Union may no longer exist, it's goals are still carried out by men like Putin who have been foot soldiers for Communist goals well over several decades. At the same time, the Ukraine crisis must never end as a general European war. Hopefully all participants will realize this before events spiral out of control.

My parents were part of the generation that witnessed first hand the horrors of World War II in Europe. I grew up as a kid in West New York, learning English on the streets and German at home. My mother raised me. My parents were separated. I grew up hearing the stories of bombs falling from the skies, the horizon darkened by bombers, hundreds of thousands burned to death by phosphorescent bombs.

Several of my friends were also children of survivors of the war, brought to America so that they would never have to live through another terrible war. My closest friend, to this day, is herself the child of a Holocaust survivor; her husband, a veteran, is my best friend. On my father's side, I had several people in Concentration Camps.

Yet, growing up in Clifton, I was called derisively"Nazi" by other kids in my fifth grade class. 

What I do know is that neither I nor my elderly friends want to see another war, one that will not stop in Europe. But we also do not want to see another totalitarian regime impose it's will on free thinking peoples. Putin is as much a dictator as was Hitler or Stalin.

Does any leader have the wisdom to move beyond appeasement? I find it ironic that the current European security meeting is being held in Munich. "Peace in our time?" A wish and a prayer.

 

 Celebrating 75 Years: The Marshall Plan

The 1947 Marshall Plan was one of the most successful United States foreign policy initiatives during the Cold War period. Former Secretary of State and Harvard historian Henry Kissinger used it as an example to demonstrate positive outcomes when nations work together out of common necessity and in view of a common foe. Senator J. William Fulbright wrote that the Marshall Plan stopped the Soviet Union from possibly taking over Western Europe “through the manipulation of Communist parties, military intimidation, economic strangulation, and even more direct military action.”

 

Proposing the Marshall Plan

 

Speaking at Harvard University June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall presented the Marshall Plan and the rationale for its immediate implementation. Marshall had been to Europe and witnessed the deprivations still evident from years of war. These were serious problems that could derail European recovery efforts while playing into the hands of Stalin and the emergent Communist parties.

 

Marshall’s report of the Fourth Session of the Council of Foreign Ministers, April 28, 1947, detailed the cataclysmic nature of the European economies. Marshall used coal production to highlight the problems: “less coal means less employment for labor and a consequent delay in the production of goods for export to bring money for the purchase of food and necessities.”

 

Coal was also linked to steel production. In short, the industrial infrastructure had to be rebuilt quickly. Production also meant a balance of trade between the United States and Europe, notably Germany. By early 1947, Germany was using precious credits to purchase food imports but not able to produce export goods. The Marshall Plan would change that.

 

European Participation and the Costs

 

Representatives of sixteen European nations met to create the proposal that would amount to $28 billion in assistance over a ten year period. The proposals were accepted by Marshall and President Truman, but created a furor in the Congress. The mid-term elections in 1946 had given Republicans control of the Congress and they were financially conservative. A key Republican leader, Senator Taft of Ohio, denounced the Marshall Plan as a “European TVA.”

 

Despite dire warning from the administration as well as forward thinking Republicans like Michigan’s Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the initially requested amount was significantly lowered. The chief event that caused passage of the Marshall Plan, however, was the early 1948 coup in Czechoslovakia in which pro-democratic, moderate leaders were either removed or murdered and replace by pro-Moscow Communists.

 

The Marshall Plan and Eastern Europe

 

The Truman administration did not want to exacerbate the Iron Curtain division between East and West, possibly for a long period into the future, and thus invited all nations – including Russia, to participate. There were enough strings attached, however, to keep Stalin from participating. Historian Stephen Ambrose writes that this was the very intention of the men like George Kennan, who crafted the policy and then invited Soviet participation.

 

The Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians wanted to participate, but were held back by Moscow. In his report on the Fifth Session of the Council of Foreign Ministers, December 19, 1947, Secretary of State Marshall, pointing to Germany, noted that the Soviet Union had employed “a type of monopolistic stranglehold over the economic and political life of eastern Germany which makes that region little more than a dependent province of the Soviet Union.”

 

Employing similar economic tactics in other Eastern European economies, Stalin not only made German reunification far more difficult in terms of integrated European economies, but forged a long term policy designed to distance European Communist nations from ever effectively competing with the West or the possibility of future integration.

 

The Marshall Plan worked. Along with NATO, it transformed Europe into a new society and promoted collective economic and political leadership in the face of a common adversary.

 

Sources:

 

Stephen E. Ambrose and Douglas G. Brinkley, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938 (Penguin Books, 1997)

Documents on Germany, 1944-1961, Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968)

J. William Fulbright, The Crippled Giant: American Foreign Policy and its Domestic Consequences (New York: Random House, 1972)

 

Why do we teach students in history classes that unless we learn from history we will be doomed to repeat it? How many essays are written on this topic, taken from the philosopher George Santayana. Perhaps a better question to ponder might be why have we learned nothing from history.

Today, tanks are rolling again in Central Europe and in the Balkans. How many European conflicts in that last hundreds of years can be trace to the Balkans? And then there is the Russian obsession with the Ukraine and the Crimea. As the Ukraine conflict unfolds, Mr. Biden is taking a hard line, perhaps to distract Americans from economic difficulties and the on-going Covid crisis.

In the days of Cold War polemics, Republicans competed with Democrats to see who was tougher on Communism. Republicans blamed Democrats for losing China. "Who lost China?" was the cry after World War Two. And although Korea was never covered under the so-called American defense umbrella conflict there split that nation and is still a point of contention. 

Kim Jong un may have written love letters to Donald Trump but he is building a formidable nuclear arsenal, determined to threaten his neighbors. So much for maniacs we can dictators (and there are several of them around the world).

Today, again, Congressional Hawks try to out do each other proposing sanctions against Russia. They want to win the midterm elections. Many of these are the same ones who championed the insurrection on January 6th. They wanted to overturn the legitimate election results. That makes them traitors or at the very least, un-American.

So we will NOT learn from history. We are too busy doing other things like watching a dozen or move awards shows on television and devoting our time to sports. Even the Winter Olympics has no real snow. Our reality has been warped. And that is why we will never learn George Santayana's dictum.

 

 Origin of Valentine's Day

As with many contemporary holidays and celebrations, Valentine’s Day, as observed on February 14^th, has both early Christian and pagan roots. The most plausible legends surrounding Valentine place him in Italy during the Reign of Claudius II or Claudius the Goth (268-270 CE). With the eventual triumph of the Christian church in the 4^th Century, Valentine was viewed as a martyr and venerated as a saint. Eventually, influenced by the medieval ecclesiastical calendar linking him to both fertility and the coming of light at the dawn of a new spring season, he became the symbol of love and of mating.

 

Roman Influences and Valentine’s Day Symbolism

 

The Roman festival of Lupercalia was celebrated at the time of the Ides of February. It was a celebration of love-making. Young Roman males, wearing the skins of slaughtered goats over their genital areas, struck young women with the thongs in imitation of the god Faunus or Pan. Anthropology Professor Anthony Aveni, detailing the celebration, likens it to a Scottish New Years ceremony. Lupercalia was a festival closely tied to fertility.

 

The Roman tradition, long ingrained in cultural and religious consciousness, gave way – like so many other pagan influences on the newly emerging religion of Christianity, to beliefs and practices important in the cycle of the Catholic ecclesiastical calendar. The feast of St. Valentine, for example, guarded against animal sickness and epilepsy. In the old Roman tradition, Faunus was the god of cattle.

 

Early Christian Legends of St. Valentine

 

The most accepted legend of the historical origin of St. Valentine corresponds to the 3^rd Century CE during the rein of Emperor Claudius II or Claudius Gothicus. Claudius ostensibly outlawed marriage to fill the ranks of the depleted legions; only single men could serve. A certain priest named Valentine, however, preformed marriages secretly. Denounced and convicted, Valentine was jailed until the time of his execution.

 

While in prison, Valentine supposedly received notes of support from young Romans praising love over war. He also received flowers and other gifts. During his prison stay, he developed affection for the daughter of the jailor, and, according to Aveni, left her a note that was signed, “From your Valentine.”

 

Another tradition holds that Valentine was actually the bishop of Interamna, sixty miles from Rome, to where he had been banished. Valentine was brought to Rome and subsequently martyred. Another tradition states that Valentine gave sight to a blind girl in order to demonstrate the power of God, a power that brought light and consequently illumination. It was this particular tradition that legitimized his feast day celebration during the ecclesiastical period of light that began with Candlemas and ended with the February 22^nd celebration “Cathedra Petri.”

 

St. Valentine and the “Birds and the Bees”

 

In “Parliament of Fowls,” Geoffrey Chaucer relates February 14^th to birds choosing their mates: “For this was sent Valentine’s Day, when every fowl comes to choose his mate…” Although Chaucer died in 1400, the identification of St. Valentine’s Day with love and match-making became part of the early modern social and cultural values, particularly in England. It was the early 19^th Century Romanticist movement, however, that encouraged a heightened resurgence of the holiday.

 

Valentine’s Day in the post-modern world has evolved into a commercialized celebration of love. Beyond this generalization, however, it is still a celebration of caring, giving, and devotion. A dozen roses sent to a loved one signed “From your Valentine” continues to evoke the same emotion felt by the legendary third century Valentine on his way to execution.

 

Sources:

 

Anthony Aveni, The Book of the Year: A Brief History of Our Seasonal Holidays (Oxford University Press, 2003)

John J. Delaney, Dictionary of Saints (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1980)

R. W. Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London: The Hambledon Press, 1987)