Person: Griesse, Malte
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Pugachev Goes Global : The Revolutionary Potential of Translation
This chapter by Malte Griesse explores the reverberations of what was probably the most serious revolutionary event in eighteenth-century Europe before the French Revolution: the Pugachev Rebellion of 1773–75. This Cossack “uprising” was led by Emel’ian Pugachev, who posed as Peter III, the tsar who had been ousted and assassinated in 1762. After the rebellion was suppressed, Catherine the Great, Peter III’s widow and successor, attempted to silence all discussion of the events in Russia. She was unable, however, to control their reverberations abroad. Griesse examines two accounts of the uprising by foreign writers. The first is a 1775 biography of Pugachev in French (allegedly a translation of a Russian original) that represents the rebel as a cosmopolitan figure and Enlightenment reformer. The work serves both to critique despotism in France and to challenge Catherine II’s monopoly on Enlightenment discourse in Russia. The second text, which seems a reaction to the first, is an anonymous German account of the revolt, which depicts Pugachev as an illiterate brute. Griesse analyzes the contexts in which these works were published and traces how these representations were “retranslated” into Russian when the taboo began to be relaxed.
Konnte die schwedische Innenpolitik der Großmachtzeit aus der Beobachtung fremder Revolten lernen?
Popular memory and early modern revolts in Russia : from Razin to Pugachev
The most notable 'popular' uprisings in early modern Russia were led by soldiers, such as the Cossacks and musketeers, the minor nobility and military slaves. Although there were many other uprisings, the majority of the popular verse and folk songs collected by anthropologists and historians since the nineteenth century deal with the revolts led by Sten'ka Razin (1670-1671) and, to a lesser degree, Emel'jan Pugachev (1773-1775). This chapter focuses on these two uprisings, both of which proved influential in popular oral culture. It also focuses on Pugachev's revolt, but the memory of the events cannot be understood without taking into account the ways they echoed Razin's earlier uprising. The chapter begins with some comments about the idiosyncrasies of Cossacks as social actors in this period, and explores the importance of folklore about uprisings to Soviet historiography and its interest in the Cossack revolts as examples of 'class conflict' and 'peasant wars'.