Russo-Turkish wars of the early nineteenth century represented a continuation of the Russian Empire’s southern expansion of the last third of the eighteenth century. While the territorial acquisitions that they led to were modest in comparison with the creation of the New Russian province and the annexation of Crimea, the wars of 1806-1812 and 1828-1829 constituted an intense Russian involvement in the politics of reform in Moldavia and Wallachia – two vassal polities of the Ottoman Empire. Culminating with the adoption of the Organic Statutes for Moldavia and Wallachia in 1831-1832, this involvement, for various reasons, remained an understudied subject in pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet historiographies,^[1] yet it can be revealing for an understanding of interconnection between imperial discourses and policies, relations between imperial and regional elites, as well as the transfer of technologies of government across imperial borders. The political reforms in Moldavia and Wallachia, carried out in uneasy collaboration between Russian occupation authorities and the Romanian boyars, constitute an aspect of the continental empires’ struggle for control over the frontier zones. One of the unintended this struggle was the emergence of a modern Romanian nation-state.
Russian policies on Moldavia and Wallachia are remarkably different from both the empire’s policies in its borderlands and the strategies it adopted to maintain hegemony in buffer-states. Scholars studying the Empire’s borderlands point out that the center’s approach consisted of securing political loyalty of the regional elites through their incorporation into the imperial nobility and the preservation of the social status quo. Long after the annexation, local administration in these regions retained their own peculiar legal frameworks and/or administrative institutions. Designed to consolidate the Empire’s hegemony in Moldavia and Wallachia, the reforms of 1828-1834 differ remarkably from the means employed to the same end in other buffer-states during the eighteenth century. Whereas in Sweden and Poland Russia defended traditional aristocratic “constitutions” in order to thwart centralizing reforms of the monarchs,^[2] in the two Romanian principalities it chose to sponsor comprehensive restructuring of the police, military, civil service and judiciary informed by ideals of “rational” government. Russian involvement in the internal administration of Moldavia and Wallachia can be compared to a similar engagement in Bulgaria almost half a century later. Both followed a victorious war with the Ottoman Empire and aimed at consolidation of Russia’s dominance in the respective buffer states. In both cases, Russian authorities sponsored some sort of constitution that nevertheless failed to prevent major conflicts between the executive and the legislative authorities. However, here the similarities end. While the Bulgarian case offers an example of an empire consciously participating in the construction of a “nation-state” whose political loyalty to the empire seemed to be secured by Pan-Slavist ideology, Russian policy in the Romanian principalities during the heyday of legitimism did not envision their national unification or independence. The reforms were conceived within the mindset of early modern statehood and can be interpreted as application of a policy of “enlightened despotism” to a buffer state (which is precisely what Russia sought to prevent in eighteenth-century Sweden and Poland).
Generated by the Empire's traditional concerns of expansion and frontier security, the policies of the Russian empire in Moldavia and Wallachia in 1828-1834 were informed by the ideal of the Polizeistaat – a peculiar type of government that originated in the early modern German territorial states. The phenomenon of the Polizeistaat signified first of all the expansion of the traditional scope of authority “from the passive duty of preserving justice to the active task of fostering the productive energies of society and providing the appropriate institutional framework for it.”^[3] On the practical level, transformation of the nature of government was reflected in increasingly meticulous regulation of all aspects of life and activities of the subjects of a territorial ruler by means of police ordinances (called Landes und Polizeiordnungen in German speaking areas of Central Europe), embracing such diverse areas of human life as personal behavior, public order, fire-protection, sanitation, taxation, charity, husbandry and house building. Placed in the care of an increasingly professionalized body of public officials representing the public interest, all these diverse activities composed the domain of the police (Polizei),^[4] which provided the essence of a new type of government called the well-ordered police state (Polizeistaat).^[5]
The all-embracing and regulative character of the Polizeistaat makes it tempting for one to treat it as an early manifestation of what Zygmunt Baumann called the “crusading, missionary, proselytizing force” of the modern state, “bent on submitting the dominated populations to a thorough once-over in order to transform them into an orderly society, akin to the precepts of reason.” This rationale made the modern state a “gardening state” par excellence, predicated as it was on the ideal of a rationally designed society. Routed in a set of fundamental oppositions, the most basic of which was the distinction between nature and culture, the project of modernity “delegitimized the present (wild, uncultivated) condition of population” in favor of a “design presumed to be dictated by the supreme and unquestionable authority of Reason.”^[6] The gardening enterprise classified individuals or groups into both “useful plants to be encouraged and propagated, and weeds – to be removed and rooted out.” This led to all kinds of social engineering ranging from the Jesuit state in seventeenth-century Paraguay to the twentieth-century Soviet and Nazi social experiments.^[7]
The weak point of Bauman’s approach is not only its failure to account for the ability of individuals and groups to both resist and shape the agenda of a modern state, but also the assumption that the latter constituted the only institutional context in which the “gardening” took place. Many of the practices and technologies of government associated with the nineteenth-century state, such as the census, cadastral surveys and other methods of bureaucratic classification of the population were, in fact, practiced in Europe and other regions well before the beginning of the modern era.^[8] The continental empires (China, the Habsburg Monarchy and Russia) adopted these forms of governmentality before the emergence of a Europe of nation-states. In fact, crystallization of the modern nation-state could not have taken place without the deployment of “rational” technologies of government by the continental empires. Instead of being intrinsically characteristic of the homogenizing nation-state, these practices and technologies of government constituted a means of managing diverse and heterogenous populations that empires and emergent nation-states in the nineteenth century used competitively. The apparent failure of the continental empires in this competition should not occlude their crucial impact on the institutional origins of the nation-states that appeared in their wake. Early nineteenth-century political reforms in the Romanian principalities provide a case in point. In what follows, I will demonstrate how the practical necessity to combat epidemics in the context of the on-going war with the Ottoman Empire in 1828-1829 led Russian occupation authorities in Moldavia and Wallachia to embrace a wider reform of police institutions in the principalities, seeking to turn them into a durable foundation of imperial dominance.
Pursuing the ideal of a well-ordered police state in a sprawling continental empire, Russian rulers inevitably confronted the necessity to adopt its institutions and practices in frontier zones.^[9] The western part of the Eurasian steppe including the regions to the north and west of the Black Sea represented a formidable challenge in this respect with its nomadic and semi-nomadic populations or sedentary societies with rather unconsolidated social structures and elites that survived by virtue of developing multiple, contrasting and shifting loyalties in a space contested by several imperial centers. The closure of what William H. McNeill called “Europe’s steppe frontier” occurred at the price of radical transformations in the ecology of the frontier zone that meant the elimination, sedenatarization or deportation of the nomads, massive agricultural settlement, as well as the emergence of clear territorial demarcation of various sovereignties to control and sometimes exclude the trans-border movement of goods, populations and ideas.^[10] Austrian and Russian authorities of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries made territorial boundaries a factor of increasing importance in the everyday life of people living along the middle and lower Danube and the northern Black Sea region by creating border patrols, landmarks, sentry boxes, customs houses, sanitary cordons and passport check points.^[11]

MOLDAVIA AND WALLACHIA IN RUSSIAN DISCOURSE

Transformations in the ecology of the Danubian-Pontic frontier were legitimized by the discourse of a “civilizing mission” that was rooted in the portrayal of these territories as the abode of barbarism and oriental despotism.^[12] Russian accounts of Moldavia and Wallachia of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century are full of references to the despotic character of local political system and deplorable moral state of the upper classes.^[13] Sometimes borrowing directly from Western literature about the principalities, Russian authors portrayed the Phanariote princes in Moldavia and Wallachia as tax farmers of the Ottomans, whose short and precarious tenure deprived them of either time or desire to emulate the “enlightened despots” of Eastern and Central Europe.^[14] The predatory ways of the hospodars were emulated by the boyars, whose culture was reminiscent of Muscovy. In the words of a one-time vice-governor of Bessarbia F. F. Vigel, “[the] similarity between the way of life of the richest Moldavians and our ancestors, however shameful such parallel might be, is striking… Everything takes you to the seventeenth century and makes you realize the importance (tsenu) of the Enlightenment.”^[15] The corruption and bribery that reigned in the principalities remained, according to Russian authors, completely unchecked by courts that only perpetuated it and by laws that the Russian authors found non-existent.^[16] The cumulative result in the words of F. F. Vigel, a one-time vice-governor of Bessarbia, was a veritable hierarchy of slaves, whereby the Moldavians were the slaves of the Greeks, who in turn were the slaves of the Turks.^[17] Such unflattering characteristics served to portray the Moldavian and Wallachian princes and boyars as the “other” of the westernized imperial elite. The only point of sympathetic reference in these accounts were the Romanian peasants, whose suffering, however, made them all but lose their humanity.^[18] Finally, in a manner typical of all orientalist accounts, Russian descriptions of the principalities treated local populations as part of an “exotic” landscape. A perceived contrast between the climate and nature of the right and left bank of the Dniester that separated the principalities from the Russian Empire at the turn of the century made some authors claim that the river constituted the real boundary between Europe and Asia.^[19]
While “oriental despotism” represented a critical aspect of the discourse of Russia’s “civilizing mission” in Moldavia and Wallachia, the reform of local institutions in accordance with the principles of enlightened government constituted its positive side. What forced Russian diplomats to proceed beyond mere condemnation was, however, a very pragmatic problem that the Russian army encountered in the principalities during a series of Russo-Turkish wars of the late eighteenth – early nineteenth century. Frustrated in his war efforts by the failure of the principalities to deliver necessary supplies, the commander of the Danubian army during the war of 1806-1812, P. I. Bagration, was at the same time unwilling to attribute it to the “ill-will of the people.”^[20] Instead he claimed that “the real cause of misery and desperation of the people are the officials” and found it “most offensive” that these misfortunes were explained to the population in the form of demands of the Russian army.^[21] Like his predecessor A. A. Prozorovskii,^[22] Bagration insisted on “adopting little by little Russian laws and customs in the governing of the Principalities.”^[23] In the absence of an effective “Russian model” of local government, “russification” reflected simply an adherence to the principles of rational and orderly government. Setting the guidelines for reform of local administration, Bagration employed the language of late enlightenment political science and argued “that reasonable economy constitutes one of the major factors contributing to the well-being of the land and revealing good government.”^[24] A precise definition of the amount of taxes paid by each taxpayer according to his social status was a precondition for “the security of property as the foremost right (after life and honor) of every citizen living under the protection of benevolent government.”^[25] Vesting his struggle against abuses in local administration in the language of public good, Bagration insisted that the “revenues of Wallachia” be considered “state property (gosudarstvennoie imushchestvo).”^[26]
Clearly, there was nothing specifically “Russian” about Bagration’s formulas. If anything they were in sharp contrast with Russian institutional realities of the early nineteenth century. Instead, these formulas determine a specific performative scenario followed by Russian officials in the principalities in order to legitimize their involvement in local affairs. Such a posture helped them cover the rather “pragmatic” goal of putting local resources at the army’s disposal, but it required a serious effort towards maximization of these resources and rationalization of their use before they could be meaningfully “exploited.” Thus, even if “public interest” was a rhetorical formula, the logic of the situation forced Russian officials to put some substance into it. Their alleged attachment to common good was contrasted to “patrimonial ideas of government” ostensibly followed by the Phanariote princes and the Romanian boyars.^[27] They structured the Russian-Romanian imperial encounter in terms of different “degrees of enlightenment” of the two sides and defined the Russian “civilizing mission” as a mandate to bring the Romanians higher up on the “ladder of civilization.”^[28]
This peculiarity of the Russian “mandate” provides an additional dimension to the status of the principalities as a symbolic frontier. Moldavia and Wallachia represented a symbolic frontier of enlightenment not only in the geographical sense of being located between Europe and Asia, but also historically, insofar as they constituted a particular province of time located between a barbarous past and a civilized future. Indeed, foreign observers were fascinated not only by the “exotics of backwardness,” but also by the fact that the principalities illustrated a specific moment of human evolution, when, in the words of Russian traveler A. Demidov, “there is still a possibility of capturing the last traces of this historical way of life and, at the same time, understanding the way in which this barbarity turned into civilization and how hope for the future developed out of this terrible past.”^[29] Ever since Catherine the Great's correspondence with Voltaire at the time of the Russo-Turkish war of 1768-1774, the discourse of Russia’s “civilizing mission” sought to present the empire as the exclusive agency of this miraculous transition.^[30] Demidov’s “Puteshestvie” represents a typical illustration of this trend. Taking a retrospective look on Kiselev’s reforms from 1837, Demidov compared the Russian President-Plenipotentiary to a demiurge, who “not only transformed the principalities, but also created them anew.”^[31] This implicit comparison with Peter the Great, who was seen to have created Russia from scratch, served as an argument that “to Russia and only to her do the principalities owe their material and moral rebirth.”^[32]
The construction of Moldavia and Wallachia as a space of Russia’s civilizing mission differed from other territories (e. g. the Caucasus or the lands south of the Danube) that were similarly appropriated within the symbolic geography of the Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. Unlike the Caucasus that became a major topos of Russian literature, the principalities attracted little attention from Russian literary figures: the predominant genre of Russian descriptions of Moldavia and Wallachia are either statistical surveys or travelogues. Whereas the appropriation of the Caucasus occurred through literary romanticism, Russian descriptions of the principalities that started to appear in the late eighteenth century are still rooted in an Enlightenment paradigm. The perception of Moldavia and Wallachia also differs from the representation of the lands south of the Danube that by the middle of the nineteenth century come to be heavily invested with Pan-Slavic themes. Given the importance of Moldavia and Wallachia as sites of Empire’s military glory during its “golden age,” Russian discourse on the principalities can be identified as a survival of the eighteenth-century symbolic geography of Eastern Europe amidst the increasingly “nationalized” representations of other peripheral areas.

THE BACKGROUND OF REFORMS OF 1828-1834

Reforms of police institutions in Moldavia and Wallachia in 1828-1834 should thus be seen within the broader context of the closure of “Europe’s steppe frontier” and the discourse of Russia’s “civilizing mission” in the region, although various internal factors, like the political struggle between princes and the boyar aristocracy as well as tensions within the boyar class were also important.^[33] Against the background of prolonged unclarity as to the goals of Russian policy in the principalities, with references made to Russia’s drive to Constantinople or desire to create a Pan-Slavic utopia, the emphasis put by Alexander Bitis in his recent book Russia and the Eastern Question on the more pragmatic and down-to-earth concerns of the Russian military is salutary.^[34] The simplicity of “pragmatic” explanation is, however, rather deceptive since it might lead to the confusion of cause and effect. Due to their peculiar status within the Ottoman Empire, the principalities undoubtedly interested Russian diplomats and the military “as more readily detachable from the Sultan’s control.”^[35] However, “semi-independent status, homogenous population, and defined territorial limits of each principality”^[36] signify not so much their pre-existing characteristics, as the ideal envisioned by Russian policy-makers. The goal of reforms pursued by Russian occupation authorities in the principalities headed by the President-Plenipotentiary of the Moldavian and Wallachian Divans, General Pavel Kiselev,^[37] was precisely to make the principalities more (although not totally) independent from Istanbul (and more dependent on St. Petersburg).
Preparatory studies made by the Chief of Staff of the 2nd Army and P. D. Kiselev on the eve of the 1828-1829 Russo-Turkish War demonstrate desire to avoid the difficulties in delivering supplies that were experienced in 1806-12 and determination to turn the principalities into a power base for future military operations.^[38] However, Kiselev’s activities as head of the Russian occupation authority in Moldavia and Walachia in 1829-1834 also reveal a concern with the permeability of imperial frontiers and general political instability of the frontier zone demonstrated by the Greek Etairia rebellion and Tudor Vladimirescu “revolution” of 1821.^[39] The consolidation of the territorial borders of the principalities was likewise seen as a means of weakening Ottoman control over them and was, therefore, an equally significant motivation behind the reforms.^[40] In fact, the circumstances of 1828-1829 made it more important. While the war renewed tensions with the local population over the problem of supplies, in contrast to 1806-1812 this did not prevent the Russian army from achieving a relatively quick victory. Instead, the Russian command confronted a problem unencountered during the previous war. The plague epidemics of 1828-1830 made the problem of border-control even more urgent than the problem of supplies. The challenge of dealing with epidemics was similarly integrated within the framework of Russia’s “civilizing mission” and explained by the “viciousness of the local administration” that could be remedied through reform in accordance with the principles of rational and orderly government. The universal character of anti-epidemic measures reduced (although did not eliminate completely) the conflict between the narrow interest of the Empire and its military and the “common good” of the population. References to “public interest” were therefore less of an ideological screen, although, as will be demonstrated, the epidemics proved to be a highly manipulable and politicized issue that could serve the interests of the Empire as much as it would later serve the interests of the nation-state.
The sanitary policies of the Russian occupation authorities in 1828-1834 represented the most immediate instance of the application of contemporary European police practices. Facing major epidemic challenges, Russian authorities sought to protect Russian troops, the local population and the demographic security of the Russian Empire itself through the application of principles of medical police.^[41] Dealing with hygiene, procreation, nutrition, food sanitation, prevention of epidemics, as well as the organization of the medical profession, the medical police was part of the “intervention of power in the biological processes of life,” which Michael Foucault called “biopolitics of population.”^[42] According to Foucault, “biopolitics (nosopolitics) of population” regulating procreation, births and mortality, health and life expectancy emerged at the time of eighteenth-century demographic growth and represented both an attempt to make this growth sustainable as well as a means of dealing with the dangers it presented.^[43] The former was achieved through the reformulation of the family as a unit of procreation as opposed to its earlier function as a kinship system or a mechanism for the transmission of property. The latter was effected through medical control of the increasingly crowded urban space by means of a program of hygiene and an institution of medical police based on close cooperation between physicians and city authorities.^[44]
While in France this cooperation took place relatively independently from central government, corresponding Central European practices and institutions, systematized at the end of the eighteenth century by Johann Peter Frank and Franz Anton Mai, presupposed the central role of princely authority. Given the prevalence of Germans among local medical personnel and Russian military physicians, it is only natural that the anti-epidemic measures of Russian occupation authorities were informed by the principles of German medical police.^[45] Besides Leyden (Europe’s most important medical school), Russia’s physicians received their degrees from the universities of Halle (the center of cameralist sciences) and Gottingen (where they could pick up the principles of medical police elaborated by Johann Peter Frank, who also taught at Vilna in the early nineteenth century and was a one-time personal physician of Alexander I).^[46] Due to the absence of independent institutions of higher education and the primacy of the army, medical administration was even more centralized and state-controlled than in the German states. The seventeenth-century Apothecary Prikaz was replaced in the first half of the eighteenth by the Medical Chancery, which in turn gave way to the Medical Collegium in 1763 that monopolized medical policy. The reform of local administration and the creation of gubernii provided an institutional framework for the extension of the state medical service to the provinces. However, the shortage of personnel continued to plague the state medical service because of the extreme weakness of professional medical education for which the “importation” of German physicians failed to compensate.

PLAGUE EXPERIENCE IN RUSSIA AND THE PRINCIPALITIES DURING THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Attempts to combat plague and maintain public health and hygiene in the principalities were made long before the arrival of Russian occupation authorities in 1828. A special organization of caretakers (brelsa ciocliilor) in Moldavia existed already in the late seventeenth century. In 1735 Phanariote hospodar Grigorie Ghica I reorganized it to undertake the burial of those killed by plague and created a similar service in Bucharest after he was transferred to rule there in 1752. He also founded hospitals at the monasteries of St. Pantelemon and St. Vissarion, which were specially destined for those afflicted with the plague, while Moldavian hospodar Grigore Callimah founded a similar one (St. Spiridon) in Iaşi. At the news of the plague outbreak in Silistria in 1784, Wallachian hospodar Mihai Suţu ordered a quarantine and appointed a special official (epistat de ciumă) to command detachments of auxiliaries (sejmeni) and caretakers. In 1786 Vienna-trained Bucharest physician Dumitru Caracaş, on the order of the hospodar Nicolae Mavrogheni and the Divan, elaborated special instructions to inform the authorities and local population about how to fight the plague. In 1813 hospodar Ion Caragea tried to save the principalities from advancing plague epidemics by establishing a quarantine near the Ottoman reaya Giurgiu and appointed a special official (epistat al lazaretelor) while a boyar commission produced a “Statute for Combating the Plague.”^[47]
Unlike other European countries, Moldavia and Wallachia in the early nineteenth century lacked an organized medical administration that would certify the qualifications of physicians, keep track of their practice or oversee the apothecary shops. At the same time, a few qualified physicians who confronted plague outbreaks in the principalities were trained in either Vienna or Italy (Pavia), the two places where Johan Peter Frank taught extensively between 1785 and his death in 1821, where they had an ample opportunity to pick up the elements of Frank's system of medical police. In addition, Austrian quarantine installations in Transylvania had offered a model to be imitated since the early eighteenth century. Already in 1728 Transylvanian authorities created hospitals functioning as quarantines at the Wallachian border. In 1754 on pretext of new epidemics in the principalities, the Austrian border was closed altogether and in 1760 a permanent quarantine guard was created alongside the borderguard proper. After the Austrian annexation of Bukovina in 1775, the quarantine service was extended there as well.^[48]
What made the struggle against the plague in the principalities ineffective was not the shortage of information or practical models to follow, but the lack of determination and consistency on the part of the authorities. Measures taken by the hospodars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century to prevent the spread of epidemics remained partial and usually consisted of creating an improvised quarantine around specific places where cases of the plague were reported, such as the Ottoman fortresses along the Danube. The personnel that was supposed to run such stations was poorly trained and largely unpaid. To make matters worse, corrupt local authorities soon turned epidemic-prevention measures into a sources of abuse and extortion. The caretakers (cioclii) plundered the houses of the plagued, placed the dead and the ill in the same cart, and left them in the open field outside the city. The population was terrorized by the officials charged with combating plague.^[49] The latter not only were interested in the prolongation of the epidemics in order to continue receiving their salaries, but also extorted money by threatening to proclaim houses contaminated and take inhabitants to the plague hospital, where death was almost assured. The abuses of authorities during plague epidemics forced the Austrian subjects to create their own caretaker service and hospital. Observing the crimes committed by officials as the plague was ravaging areas nearby, the Prussian consul Ludwig von Kreuchely ascribed it to the “moral and political plague” afflicting the principalities.^[50] Finally, the population frequently resisted anti-epidemic measures informed by notions of contemporary medical police and clung to religious rituals. Thus, the resistance of Bucharest inhabitants forced Ion Caragea to revoke the “Statute for Combating Plague” less than a month after it was put into practice in January 1814.^[51] The quarantine measures taken by Iaşi authorities during 1819 epidemics provoked an outright revolt forcing the hospodar to revoke them.^[52] The deplorable epidemic situation of the principalities in the early nineteenth century made the establishment of a regular quarantine service one of the items on the agenda of reform-minded boyars and quickly became a priority for President-Plenipotentiaries after 1828.
The Russian encounter with the plague in the northern Black sea region was the result of the Empire’s expansion to the south. While the plague was known in Muscovy, the Russo-Turkish wars of the eighteenth century increased Russia’s vulnerability to outbreaks of plague epidemics as troops marched south and supply lines followed. The weight of the epidemics was particularly heavy on Russian troops during the war of 1736-1739. However, due to the energetic measures of Russian commander Munnich, emissaries of the central government in larger towns were spared. After the outbreak of the plague in 1738-1739, Munnich promptly established a cordon along the Dnieper and when this failed to contain the spread of the epidemic additional cordons were established between Russia and Ukraine as well as between southern and central Russia, with special precautions taken around Moscow and St. Petersburg.^[53] Russian diplomatic representatives in Constantinople, Crimea and Persia constantly informed the government about more frequent plague epidemics in the Balkans, Southern Poland, Crimea and the Caucasus. Gradually ad hoc cordons gave way to a network of permanent inspection and quarantine stations supplemented by occasional pesthouses or lazarets. Towards the middle of the century a special border physician in charge of quarantines was appointed and special bills of health were required to pass the border. However, shortage of personnel and the conditions of an open steppe frontier populated by semi-autonomous communities (Cossacks, Serbian colonists) made it easy for merchants to circumvent a few permanent quarantine stations. The establishment of the New Serbia colony in Ukraine in 1754 was accompanied by a network of quarantines with field surgeons, lazarets and storage barns, but it remained on paper for decades.^[54] Although the connection between war in the south and disease did not escape contemporaries, the absence of major outbreaks of the disease during the three decades that separate Munnich's campaigns in the south from the first Russo-Turkish war of Catherine’s reign might also explain a lack of determination take measures against it.
The destruction caused by the 1768-1774 Russo-Turkish war precipitated a plague, which eventually found its way to Moscow where it took a staggering toll and provoked a riot, shaking the political stability of the empire.^[55] The experience of the 1770-1771 epidemics proved to be paradigmatic since the bulk of its 120,000 victims were from Moscow or the Moscow province, while St. Petersburg and most of the country were spared. Lacking knowledge of the mechanism of transmission of the disease, physicians were divided into those who attributed the disease to a contagion and those who saw it as the result of bad constitution of the air. Yet, all physicians agreed about the Muscovite population’s lack of “enlightenment,” pointing to such “irrational” practices as overheating of houses and general filthiness or else to the looting of the possessions of the dead and the kissing of miracle-working icons during the outbreak (the riot broke out as a result of the government seeking to prevent the adoration of icons). Besides a bloody revolt against “enlightened” anti-epidemic measures, the shocking experience of the 1771 Moscow plague riot resulted from the temporary collapse of local authorities, with the Governor-General of Moscow Saltykov fleeing the plague stricken city. The epidemic receded as a result of winter advancing and the energetic measures of Catherine’s favorite G. A. Orlov, who established the Plague Commission to oversee strict quarantines, the burning of the deceased and their possessions, and separation of the afflicted in the “pest houses.” Above all, the epidemics strengthened the symbolic tension between “regular” stone-built St. Petersburg and “Asiatic” and wooden Moscow that had structured the symbolic geography of the Russian Empire since the early eighteenth century. It also explains the readiness with which westernized Russians interpreted the plague in the principalities in 1828-1830 as a consequence of their “Muscovite” traditionalism.
The treaty of Kucuk Kaynaraca of 1774 opened the way for the realization of the large-scale colonization project in New Russia that the Russian government had launched at mid-century.^[56] The establishment of seaports and development of trade with the Mediterranean was one of the major priorities for Catherine the Great and G. A. Potemkin. Efforts in this direction bore fruit after the founding of Cherson and, especially, Odessa which provided a major outlet for the Russian grain trade already in the second decade of the nineteenth century.^[57] However, the establishment of maritime links increased the vulnerability of the empire to the outbreaks of the disease such as the major plague epidemic in Odessa in 1812-1813. Fortunately, the new commercial connection also promised a remedy since it put the new Russian outlets in contact with Mediterranean ports, some of which, especially Marseille had the most advanced quarantine installations in Europe.^[58] Marseille's system was adopted in Odessa and later was imitated, however imperfectly, in the principalities.