Eric's Reviews > The History of Pugachev

Like Ségur's account of the retreat from Moscow and Grant’s Personal Memoirs, Pushkin’s History of the Pugachev Revolt narrates a welter of insane shit – axe-armed peasant mobs, the flaying-alive of corpulent gentry, total civic breakdown in which “the simple people did not know whom to obey” – in an coolly “classical” style; that is, a style terse and spare, unemphatic, unshockable, and above all, swift. Pushkin moves the story along, records but does not dwell on the bizarre; merely hints at the picturesque. An example: the Russian cavalry, pursuing Pugachev’s nucleus-band of mutinous Cossacks across some desolate stretch of the steppe, stops to interrogate the area hermits. The hermits! Pushkin records what the hermits said – and that’s all. The cavalry rides on. The only thing he tells us about the hermits is where they directed the cavalry. Undescribed, they simply point the way to the narrative’s next phase. I’m sure Pushkin could have colored them in – he knew the Imperial archives inside and out, and did months of fieldwork in the formerly rebellious regions – but his style would not admit such indulgent atmospherics. Not that I’m complaining. The styles of Ségur, Pushkin, and Grant ache with the suggested, the not-fully-pictured; and I like that ache, especially in Grant, whose style puts the plain yet cryptic man of contemporary accounts in the room with you.


Mirsky said that Pushkin was, at heart, too much the eighteenth century classicist narrator to analyze the social conflict behind the Pugachev revolt to ttwentieth century satisfaction. Certainly – but this book contained plenty to trouble the chauvinist. Czar Nicholas I, Pushkin’s personal censor, demanded the original title, The History of Pugachev, be changed to The History of the Pugachev Revolt — because “a rebel,” he said, “could not have a history.” Nicholas’s reaction is understandable, but like all autocrats he plugged one leak merely to open another. To reduce Pugachev to his real stature as an opportunistic bandit is the raise the question of his opportunity. And Pushkin is very clear that his opportunity was the fundamental discontent of the propertyless:

Pugachev was fleeing, but his flight seemed like an invasion. Never had his victories been more horrifying; never had the rebellion raged with greater force. The insurrection spread from village to village, from province to province. Only two or three villains had to appear on the scene, and the whole region revolted. Various bands of plunderers and rioters were formed, each having its own Pugachev…

Ironically, Pushkin’s romance of the revolt, The Captain’s Daughter, with its attractive, at times honorable, and charismatically central Pugachev, lets the Czarist state off the hook. It only fleetingly mentions the series of mutinies, going back decades, of the Cossack and other steppe horse tribes that had entered Russian service as guards of empire's fluid frontiers with the Ottoman sultan and the Shah of Persia, only to find themselves oppressed and robbed by local Czarist officialdom. The Captain’s Daughter also says nothing about a significant portion of the Pugachev hordes, the “factory peasants,” serfs uprooted from the land and made to toil in the mines, foundries and arsenals of the military-industrial base Peter the Great established to equip the armies and fleets of his new, modern, European state. The social changes wrought by modernizing Peter fascinated Pushkin, and appear in all the modes he wrote in -- lyric, prosaic, historical.


So yeah, highly recommended. A swift and economical account of a rebellion astonishing in its duration, scope, and ferocity.