Yemelyan Pugachev

Yemelyan Pugachev was born around 1742, the son of a Don Cossack landowner, and served in the Imperial Russian Army through the Seven Years' War and into the Russo-Turkish War. In 1770 he deserted and spent years as a fugitive, moving among restless peasants, Cossacks, and Old Believers in a Russia straining under Catherine the Great. In 1773 he declared himself Tsar Peter III - Catherine's late husband - and launched open rebellion, pledging to abolish serfdom and rallying a large army that swept across the territory between the Volga and the Urals. His forces captured and razed Kazan in 1774, but that August General Johann von Michelsohnen crushed the rebels at Tsaritsyn. Pugachev's own Cossacks turned him over to the authorities soon after; he was sent to Moscow and executed in January 1775. Decades later, Alexander Pushkin immortalized the uprising in both a historical account and his novel The Captain's Daughter.