Catherine's Limits: Serfdom, Pugachev and Radishchev

Behind Catherine II's enlightened image lay a society built on serfdom. Most Russians were peasants bound to the land, and under Catherine the condition of many worsened: nobles gained wider powers over serfs, she granted huge numbers of state peasants to favorites, and serfdom was extended into Ukraine in 1783. In 1773 the Cossack Yemelyan Pugachev, claiming to be the dead Peter III, led a vast rebellion of Cossacks, serfs, factory workers and non-Russian peoples along the Volga and Urals.

It was crushed in 1774, and Pugachev was executed in Moscow in January 1775. The revolt pushed Catherine closer to the nobility, confirmed in the 1785 Charter to the Nobility. In 1790 Alexander Radishchev published A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow, describing the suffering of serfs; Catherine, alarmed by the French Revolution, had him sentenced to death, commuted to Siberian exile. Her reign shows how enlightened rhetoric could coexist with deepening social oppression.