SUMMARY:

Non-Marxist historians are convinced that the Pugachev rebellion was not a peasants’ war, but a protest movement on the southeastern steppe-frontier, the periphery of the Russian Empire, against the government’s policy of integration, unification, and modernization. This taken for granted, we are confronted with a peculiar contradiction: the Jaik Cossacks conspired with the Don Cossack Pugachev in September 1773 so that he, in the disguise of the late emperor Peter III, should lead them against the Empress Catherine II, the state, its ruling elite, and its regional strongholds along the border. From its very beginning, the protest movement of the periphery aimed to conquer the “center” of the Russian Empire. For exactly one year, till the end of the movement in September 1774, Pugachev played his role consequently and issued manifestos and orders as he thought a legitimate emperor of the Petrine type would, but not as a Tsar of Moscovy or of the peasants. He and the Cossacks around him had only a vague political or social program for Russia, but tried to win every possible group of combatants in the periphery – Cossacks, peasants, factory workers, inhabitants of the towns and especially the different non-Russian peoples in the Ural and Volga regions – by proclaiming in manifestos what they wanted to hear. It is also important that the Jaik Cossacks, after the rejection of their legitimate claims by the state and after a harsh punishment by the regular military forces in 1772, discussed many ideas about how to make use of the frontier situation: from different emigration projects to an empire of their own on the frontier to an attack on the “center”, by triggering off peasants’ uprisings. At least, the historical realization of a campaign against the state lead by a false emperor was only one of the possibilities offered by the Empire’s periphery.