Pandemic and Anarchy in Old Moscow

September 16

Archbishop Amvrosii (Sertis-Kamenskii) was killed in Moscow on this day in 1771.

Moscow Plague Riot of 1771. The watercolor by Ernst Lissner (Russia, the 1930s)

On September 12, I wrote about the mob that pillaged Constantinople in 1183. The psychology of the mob is the same everywhere. People, filled with adrenaline, believe whatever they please and act as if they had a license to do anything and everything.

Russia and the Ottoman Empire fought twelve (unnecessary in my opinion) wars with each other from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. During one such campaign in 1770, a plague spread by prisoners of war infected Russian troops stationed in Moldova. The necessity of constant communication between the frontlines and the rest of the country meant that the spread of the disease, even to the old capital of Moscow, could not be prevented.

Just as Emperor Constantine the Great had needed a break from old Roman elites and built a new capital, Constantinople, so Peter the Great had sought to divorce himself from “backward Rus” as represented by Moscow by founding Saint Petersburg. For Catherine the Great, the unplanned, fetid, mostly wooden city of Moscow epitomized all that she hated about Russia. And Moscow “loved” the Empress right back.