PUGACHEV REVOLT (1773 – 1775)

PUGACHEV REVOLT (1773 – 1775). Emelian Pugachev (1742 – 1775), a Cossack from the Don region (in contemporary Ukraine), led what would be the last — and arguably the most explosive — of the great Cossack rebellions that plagued the Russian state during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Begun, like so many others, as a frontier rebellion, it engulfed large parts of southeastern Russia and staged a brutal and extended assault on the fortress town of Orenburg between October 1773 and February 1774, and at one point it threatened Moscow itself.

Much of Pugachev's success derived from his use of the pretender myth, that is, his ...