You know I am a child and cannot be supposed to be a judge whether I ought to go there or not, but I will wager that I do not go. Mr. Panin will tell me that there is a great monster called Smallpox, walking up and down the ballroom. This same monster has very good foreknowledge of my movements for he is generally to be found in precisely those places where I have the most inclination to go.
The disease came close to Catherine and Paul in the spring of 1768 when Nikita Panin’s fiancée, Countess Anna Sheremeteva, described by a British diplomat as a woman of “uncommon merit, beautiful, and immensely rich,” was struck by smallpox. At Tsarskoe Selo, the empress waited anxiously. When, on May 5, she learned that Panin himself had been placed in quarantine for two weeks, she secretly ordered Paul brought to her. “I am very upset,” she said, “not being able to focus on anything better, for everything is awful in this critical situation.” Paul arrived at Tsarskoe Selo on May 6, and mother and son waited together. Catherine herself was ill on May 14 and better the next morning; she quickly informed Panin of her overnight recovery and passed along her doctor’s assurance that “these difficult days for your fiancée will pass.” Two days later she was told that Countess Sheremeteva was dead. “Having this hour learned of the demise of Countess Anna Petrovna, I could not help letting you know my real sorrow,” she wrote to Panin on May 17. “I am so touched for you by this grievous misfortune that I cannot sufficiently explain it. Please watch your own health.” She spent seven weeks at Tsarskoe Selo, and for the rest of the summer, she and Paul moved between country estates to avoid crowds.
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Fear for herself, her son, and the nation prompted the empress to investigate a new, controversial method of inoculation that assured permanent immunity: the injection of matter taken from the smallpox pustules of a patient recovering from a mild case. This medical technique was being used in Britain and the British North American colonies (Thomas Jefferson was inoculated in 1766) but was shunned in continental Europe as being too dangerous.
Dr. Thomas Dimsdale was a Scot and a Quaker whose grandfather had accompanied William Penn to America in 1684. Thomas Dimsdale himself, now fifty-six, had a degree from Edinburgh University and had just published The Present Method of Inoculating for the Small Pox, describing his success and claiming to have minimized the risks. His book had gone through four editions in Britain, and Catherine, hearing about it, invited the author to St. Petersburg. Dimsdale arrived in Russia at the end of August 1768, bringing with him his son and assistant, Nathaniel. Catherine soon received them privately at dinner.
Dimsdale was charmed by Catherine, finding her, “of all that I ever saw of her sex, the most engaging.” He was amazed by “her extreme penetration and the propriety of the questions she asked relative to the practice and success of inoculation.” The empress, in turn, liked his common sense, but in her opinion, he was overly cautious. She smiled at his stumbling French and tried to understand his English. She told him that she had feared smallpox all her life, but now she wished to be inoculated as the best way of overcoming the fears of others about the disease and about inoculation. She wanted to be inoculated as soon as possible. Dimsdale asked to first consult her court physicians, but Catherine said that this was unnecessary. Dimsdale then suggested that, as a trial measure, he should first innoculate other women of her age; again, Catherine said no. Bowed by the responsibility, Dimsdale begged her to wait a few weeks while he experimented on several local youngsters. She reluctantly agreed, on condition that he keep his preparations secret. The official court register ignored Dimsdale’s presence entirely, although the British ambassador reported on August 29 that the empress’s intention “is a secret everybody knows. And which does not seem to occasion much speculation.” Finally, the empress and the doctor agreed on a date for inoculation: October 12.
Catherine stopped eating meat and drinking wine ten days before this date and began taking calomel, powder of crab’s claws, and a tartar emetic. At nine in the evening on October 12, Dimsdale inoculated Catherine in both arms with smallpox matter taken from a peasant boy named Alexander Markov, whom she subsequently ennobled. The next morning, Catherine drove to Tsarskoe Selo for rest and isolation. She felt healthy “except for some slight uneasiness” and exercised outdoors for two or three hours a day. She developed a moderate number of pustules that dried up in a week. Dimsdale pronounced the inoculation a success, and three weeks later Catherine resumed her regular schedule. She returned to St. Petersburg on November 1, and Paul was inoculated without difficulty the next day. Congratulated by the Senate and the Legislative Commission, she responded, “My objective was, through my example, to save from death the multitude of my subjects who, not knowing the value of this technique, and frightened of it, were left in danger.”
Catherine’s example was followed by 140 of the St. Petersburg nobility, including Gregory Orlov, Kyril Razumovsky, and an archbishop. Dimsdale then went to Moscow and inoculated another fifty people. A Russian translation of his treatise explaining his technique was published in St. Petersburg, and inoculation clinics were established in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Irkutsk, and other cities. By 1780, twenty thousand Russians had been inoculated; by 1800, two million. As a reward for his service, Catherine made Dimsdale a baron of the Russian empire and awarded him ten thousand pounds plus a life annuity of five hundred pounds. In 1781, Dimsdale returned to Russia to inoculate Catherine’s first grandson, Alexander.
Catherine’s willingness to be inoculated attracted favorable notice in western Europe. Voltaire compared what she had allowed Dimsdale to do with the ridiculous views and practices of “our argumentative charlatans in our medical schools.” At the time, the prevailing attitude toward the disease was fatalistic: people believed that, sooner or later, everyone must have it, and that some would survive and some would die. Most refused inoculation. Frederick of Prussia wrote to Catherine urging her not to take the risk. She replied that she had always been afraid of smallpox and wished more than anything to escape this fear. In May 1774, almost six years after Catherine was inoculated, smallpox killed the king of France. Louis XV took to bed a barely pubescent girl who was carrying smallpox. He died soon after, ending a reign of fifty-nine years. His successor, nineteen-year-old Louis XVI, was inoculated immediately.
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Catherine’s personal confrontation with smallpox occurred three years before Russia was plunged into a desperate struggle with an even more terrible disease: bubonic plague. Plague was a perennial threat along the empire’s southern frontiers with European Turkey. It was believed to appear only in warm climates; the link with fleas and rats was unknown. The traditional defense was isolation, ranging from quarantine of suspected individual carriers to cordons of troops sealing off entire regions.
In March 1770, plague appeared among Russian troops occupying the Turkish Balkan province of Wallachia. In September, it reached Kiev, in the Ukraine. Cooler autumn weather slowed the advance of the disease, but by then, refugees were fleeing north. By mid-January 1771, the scare seemed over, but with the first spring thaw, Muscovites began to develop the distinctive dark spots and swollen glands. One hundred and sixty workers died in a single week at one textile factory in the city. On March 17, Catherine decreed emergency quarantine measures in Moscow: theatrical performances, balls, and all large public gatherings were banned. A sudden freeze at the end of March brought an abrupt decline in the death rate. Catherine and the municipal authorities began lifting restrictions. At the end of June, however, plague reappeared. By August, it was ravaging the city. Soldiers removing bodies from the streets fell ill and died. The city’s chief doctor requested medical leave for a month to receive treatment for his own illness. On September 5, Catherine was told that the daily death toll was between three and four hundred; that abandoned corpses littered the streets; that the network of checkpoints around the city was collapsing, and that the people were hungry because no supplies were being delivered. Men, women, and children alrea
dy ill were required to enter quarantine centers.
The imposition of medical precautions led to rioting. Many in Moscow’s terror-stricken population came to believe that the physicians and their medicines had brought the plague to the city. They refused to obey orders forbidding them to gather in marketplaces and churches and to kiss supposedly miraculous icons in hope of protection. Instead, they gathered to seek salvation and solace around these icons. A famous icon of the Virgin at Varvarsky Gate became a magnet; day after day, crowds of diseased people swarmed around her feet. She became the deadliest center of contagion in the city.
The doctors knew what was happening but dared not intervene. The archbishop of Moscow, Father Ambrosius, was an enlightened man who saw that the physicians were helpless. Attempting to reduce infection by preventing the formation of crowds, and relying on his authority as a priest, he had the Varvarsky Virgin removed from the city gate under cover of night and hidden. He believed that once the people knew that he was the one responsible, they would go home and the plague-ridden site would be eliminated. Instead, his well-meaning attempt provoked a riot. The crowd, rather than dispersing, was enraged. Ambrosius fled to a monastery and took refuge in a cellar, but the mob pursued him, dragged him out, and tore him apart. The riot was put down by troops, who killed a hundred people and arrested three hundred.
Catherine realized that Moscow and its population were slipping out of control. The nobles had abandoned the city for their estates in the countryside; the factories and workshops were closed; the workers, serfs, and urban peasants, living in crowded wooden houses that harbored swarms of rats carrying the plague-bearing fleas, had been left to shift for themselves. Late in September, the empress received a message from the governor of Moscow, seventy-two-year-old General Peter Saltykov, saying that, with deaths exceeding eight hundred per day, he was helpless; the situation was our of control. He asked to be allowed to leave the city until winter. The empress was shocked. The rising death toll, Ambrosius’s violent murder; Saltykov’s desertion of his post. How was she to cope with this? To whom was she to turn?
Gregory Orlov stepped forward and asked permission to go to Moscow to halt the epidemic and restore order. This was the kind of challenge he had sought; after years of idleness, he needed to redeem himself in his own eyes and Catherine’s. The empress accepted his “fine and zealous” offer, she told Voltaire, “not without feelings of acute anxiety over the risks he would run.” She knew his restlessness and eagerness for action; his frustration at being kept in St. Petersburg while his brother Alexis and other officers won victories and praise on land and sea. She gave him full authority. Orlov assembled doctors, military officers, and administrators and departed for Moscow on the evening of September 21.
Orlov took control of the stricken city. With the death toll between six hundred and seven hundred a day, he asked the physicians what they wanted done and then bullied the people into obedience. He was forceful and effective but also humane. He accompanied doctors to patients’ bedsides, he oversaw the distribution of medicines, he supervised the removal of corpses rotting in houses and the streets. He promised freedom to serfs who volunteered to work in hospitals, he opened orphanages, he distributed food and money. Over a period of two and a half months, he spent a hundred thousand rubles on food, clothing, and shelter for survivors. He had victims’ clothes burned, and he burned more than three thousand old wooden houses. He reimposed compulsory quarantine, the policy that had caused the riots. He scarcely slept, and his dedication, courage, and effort inspired others. Deaths in the city, which had risen to 21,000 in September, dropped to 17, 561 in October, 5,255 in November, and 805 in December. In part, this was a result of Orlov’s actions; in part, it was a function of the arrival of cold weather.
Confidence in Gregory, together with hope for the coming of an early winter, sustained the empress during these weeks. She had feared that the epidemic might move northwest toward St. Petersburg; already there had been suspicious outbreaks in Pskov and Novgorod. Precautions were taken to protect the capital on the Neva: checkpoints blocked all roads; extra care was taken in handling mail; a medical examination became mandatory after every suspicious death. She worried about the effect of reports and rumors at home and abroad. At first she tried to suppress stories about mass sickness, terror, and violence. Then, at the peak of the epidemic, to counter further inflammatory rumors—for example, that people were being buried alive—Catherine authorized publication of an official account of the Moscow riots. Foreign newspapers picked up and circulated her version. Privately, however, she was dismayed by what was happening. To Voltaire, she gave her comment on Ambrosius’s death: “The famous Eighteenth Century really has something to boast of here. See how far we have progressed!” To Alexander Bibikov, the former president of the Legislative Commission, she wrote, “We have spent a month in circumstances like those that Peter the Great lived under for thirty years. He broke through all difficulties with glory. We hope to come out of them with honor.”
By mid-November 1772, the crisis was waning and Catherine allowed public prayers of thanksgiving. When Orlov returned to St. Petersburg on December 4, she covered him with honors. She had a gold medal struck with a likeness of a mythical Roman hero on one side and a likeness of Orlov on the other. The inscription was, “Russia also has such sons.” She commissioned a triumphal arch in the park at Tsarskoe Selo; on it was emblazoned: “To the hero who saved Moscow from the plague.”
“Saved” was accurate only in the sense that the losses could have been greater. One contemporary estimate was that the plague had killed 55,000 people in Moscow, one-fifth of the city’s population. Another estimate was that 100,000 had died in Moscow and 120,000 throughout the empire. To prevent a recurrence, quarantine was maintained along Russia’s southern border for another two years, until the Turkish war ended in 1774.
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The Return of “Peter the Third”
DURING THE LAST, climactic year of the war with Turkey (1773–74), another crisis, more threatening than the foreign war, arose inside Russia. This was the rebellion known as the Pugachevshchina, after its leader, the Don Cossack Emelyan Pugachev. In a single year, by uniting Cossacks, runaway serfs, peasants, Bashkirs, Kalmucks, and other discontented tribal groups and malcontents, Pugachev produced a storm of violence that swept across the steppes, at one point menacing Moscow itself. A civil war and a social revolution descended into anarchy, and the upheaval challenged many of Catherine’s Enlightenment beliefs, leaving her with memories that haunted her for the rest of her life. Of palace revolutions she had experience. This upheaval, however, occurred in the vast, empty territories of Russia stretching far beyond St. Petersburg and Moscow—out on the Don, the Volga, and in the Urals. It awakened her to the passions seething in the countryside and brought her to the decision that her primary duty as empress was to enforce the authority of the crown. She did this by summoning soldiers, not philosophers.
Most Russians still lived in a world of oppression and discontent. There had been previous uprisings: mine workers had attacked their overseers; villagers had resisted tax collectors and recruiting levies. Pugachev’s revolt, however, was the first mass explosion of what might be described as class war. Neither Catherine’s Nakaz nor the discussions of the Legislative Commission had brought significant change; the serfs and peasants who worked on the land or labored in the mines still worked under a system of forced labor. The empress had tried to change this and had discovered that she could not. The unwieldy machinery of the imperial government, her dependence on the nobility, the vastness of Russia—all these were obstacles to change. In the end, she had been forced to leave things as they were. And then, in the fifth year of the war with Turkey, Russia exploded.
On October 5, 1773, Catherine attended a routine meeting of her war council in St. Petersburg. Presiding was General Count Zakhar Chernyshev, the handsome officer with whom Catherine had enjoyed a flirtation twenty-two years before, and whose military abiliti
es had raised him to leadership of the College of War. Catherine listened closely as Chernyshev read reports from Orenburg, a garrison town three hundred miles southeast of Kazan, describing the appearance of a band of rebellious Cossacks. Restlessness among the Cossacks was not new in Russia, but this disturbance differed from its predecessors. It was led by a man who proclaimed that he was Tsar Peter III, Catherine’s husband, miraculously saved from assassination. Now, riding across the southeastern borderlands of Russia, he was issuing incendiary manifestos, promising the people freedom once they had helped him regain his throne.
Cossacks traditionally were adventurers who resented the stream of imperial decrees that restricted their freedom. To escape, they had fled to the borderlands, where, over time, they established their own settlements, chose their own leaders, and lived in their own communities by their their own laws and customs. Some were Old Believers who had fled the reach of the traditional Orthodox Church and now prayed only in their own churches. The men were often splendid horsemen, who, once forcibly recruited into the army, were used as irregular cavalry and, as such, terrified Russia’s enemies. The Polish and Turkish wars had brought even more frequent visits by government tax collectors and recruiting parties. By August 1773, the Cossack communities were simmering, needing only a leader to rise in protest. In such an atmosphere, no leader would seem better than a man rumored to be a tsar.
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The appearance of impostors was not rare in Russia; the nation’s turbulent history had often featured false tsars whom an uneducated, credulous population was only too ready to accept. In 1605, an adult impostor claiming to be Ivan the Terrible’s son Dmitry (who had, in fact, died as a child), seized the throne from Tsar Boris Godunov. Stenka Razin, a Cossack, had defied Peter the Great’s father, Tsar Alexis, for two years and, after capture and execution, became a legendary folk hero. Peter the Great himself, in the Great Northern War against Sweden, had been forced to deal with the defection of the Ukrainian Cossacks under hetman, Ivan Mazeppa. Following Peter’s death in 1725, the uncertainties surrounding the Romanov succession produced a series of pretenders claiming to be Peter II or Ivan VI. During the first ten years of Catherine’s reign, there had already been impostors claiming to be Peter III, all of whom had been arrested before they could make trouble. Catherine had no interest in them beyond a wariness that foreign powers might attempt to sponsor them. But the promises of these earlier impostors had been localized and specific. Their followers, usually few in number, were protesting against local government officials, not against the tsar or even against the nobility. What distinguished Pugachev’s rebellion was that it was directed at the empress herself.
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