A deserter claimed to be Catherine the Great's dead husband and raised an army
In 1773 a Don Cossack fugitive named Yemelyan Pugachev announced that he was Tsar Peter III, secretly alive after his overthrow. He promised to end serfdom, and tens of thousands followed him. His rebellion seized the land between the Volga and the Urals and frightened Catherine the Great out of freeing Russia's serfs.
Pugachev was born around 1742 in the stanitsa of Zimoveyskaya, the youngest son of a small Cossack landowner. He enlisted at 17, fought in Prussia during the Seven Years' War and later against the Ottomans, earning recognition for his soldiering. In 1770, ill and refusing to return to the front, he fell in with Cossacks fleeing toward the Terek River, was implicated in their desertion and began years of arrests and escapes, once talking a guard named Khudiakov into letting him go and slipping away to a Polish border settlement with the help of Old Believers.
Imposters were nothing new in Russia, and the idea of posing as Peter III, deposed and killed in 1762 by supporters of his wife Catherine, came to Pugachev early. The famous claim that he looked just like the emperor is a later legend. Among the restless Yaik Cossacks he won support by promising to restore their privileges and the Old Belief, and after yet another escape, this time from five months' confinement in Kazan, he opened his revolt.
The rising proved surprisingly organised. Pugachev set up a College of War with four judges and its own treasury to pay his Cossacks, secured artillery and supplies, and drew in large numbers of peasants and factory workers. His greatest success was the capture of Kazan in 1774. Government forces under General Pyotr Panin were hampered for months by poor transport and unpaid, unruly troops.
The turning point came in August 1774, when General Michelsohn routed the rebels near Tsaritsyn. Weeks later, on 14 September, Pugachev's own Cossacks handed him over, and he was executed in Moscow in January 1775. The fear he inspired persisted: Catherine shelved plans to emancipate the serfs, and the writer Alexander Radishchev invoked him as a warning. After the 1917 revolution his birthplace was renamed Pugachevskaya in his honour.
Source: Yemelyan Pugachev
