These communities were filled up with people who chose freedom and danger in favor of the relatively safe and dependent living in Central Russia. They lived in fortified settlements that were set up to protect the duchies from the nomadic tribes that wandered around in the area called the Wild Fields – between the lands of Vladimir-Suzdal Rus’ and the Caspian and the Black seas. The first Cossacks were people who were living on the outskirts of the Russian duchies, mainly in the South of the Russian lands – approximately from the 14th-15th centuries. Obviously, in Russia it appeared to denote people who weren’t tied down to their masters or landlords. The very word Cossack (‘казак’) is Turkic and means a free man, a vagabond, a fortune seeker. One of the oldest surviving Siberian Cossack fortresses This also marked the end of the myth of Catherine the Great’s humanism.Yalutorovsk ostrog (fortress), Tyumen region, Russia. Yemelyan Pugachev was brought to Moscow by Alexander Suvorov in a cage. Pugachev was betrayed by fellow Cossacks, who handed him over.
In September 1774 the peasant army was defeated near Tsaritsyn. Potemkin’s army temporarily defeated Pugachev near Kazan in 1774, but soon another peasant uprising broke out near Nizhni Novgorod, close to Moscow, that made people in Moscow very fearful.Īfter the forces, who had been fighting in Turkey, were brought back to defend Moscow, the tables finally turned. They conquered Saratov that was a power-base for the imperial army, by 1774 also Orenburg was taken. By 1773 he had behind him an army of 25,000 – peasants, convicts, Cossacks and representatives of Bashkirs, Kalmyks and Tatars. Pugachev stated he was Emperor Peter III, who had not in fact been killed. In 1772, the Don Cossack Yemelyan Pugachev emerged in that area. The rebellion of the Yaik Cossacks near the Ural River was one among many smaller uprisings. “Pugachev’s Judgement” by Vasily Perov (1875)
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