Russian Plague of 1770-1772 - Moscow Plague

Moscow Plague

When Peter the Great died in 1725, he left behind him the blooming, new capital of St. Petersburg, and the city of Moscow, now unstable because he had transferred the seat of power from that city to St. Petersburg. The now-abandoned Moscow and its suburbs attracted vast numbers of serfs and army deserters, who prompted the government to instigate change by “tightening serfdom and strengthening—or even just creating—administrative and estate institutions, and knitting all three into a seamless web of social control.” The increasing population created more waste that needed to be dealt with, and no real solution for getting rid of it. There was human waste, horse waste, and waste from tanneries, slaughterhouses and other slatternly industries, all of which was piling up on each other. Catherine II inherited the throne in 1762 and recognized the social concerns her empire was facing, such as the drastic increase in pollution and decrease in living standards. In 1767, her government decreed that the polluting factories, slaughterhouses, fish markets, and cemeteries be removed from the city, that it was illegal to pollute the waterways, and that dumps be established. Her goal in this was to westernize Moscow as well as St. Petersburg. She contended that by eliminating the foul smells associated with the city, the health of the inhabitants would improve; during the eighteenth century, the theory of miasma (that disease came from bad smells) was prevalent. By moving the factories out of the city proper, Catherine also ensured a dispersal of the peasants and serfs, whom the city considered to be the source of the putrefaction, and therefore bring the source of the disease outside the city as well. As her memoires indicate, Catherine herself saw the stench and filth of the city as evidence of its being rooted in the past, before Russia became westernized. She hated Moscow, and it is interesting to note that before the plague outbreak, Moscow had no formal boundaries, there was no population count, and no real city planning. This lack of planning was also evidenced by the fact that the city was mostly still built from wood, despite the government urging change to stone structures in this department. While there were some stone buildings, they tended to be located in the center of the city, and the use of stone showed no real sign of spreading. There were fires, there was a high crime rate, the filth was unimaginable; the state of the city was a set up for disaster. Catherine attempted to fix these problems through pardons, case reviews, creating jobs for the unemployed and homeless, and strengthening the local government.

Despite her efforts to change the city, Catherine found herself facing an outbreak of the bubonic plague in the Russian Empire in 1770. The plague was somewhat of a constant threat in early modern Europe; no one could be sure where or when it would strike. In 1765, rumors circulated that the plague had traveled north from the Ottoman Empire into Poland. The same rumors echoed over the course of the next year, with the plague also supposedly appearing in Constantinople and the Crimea. There was a false alarm of the plague entering Russian territory, and another false alarm of supposed plague around Moscow that turned out to be smallpox. There were efforts made to keep plague out of Russia by creating quarantine stations on the southern border, but these proved to be ineffective.

In December of 1770, a Doctor A. F. Shafonskiy, the chief physician at the Moscow General Hospital, identified a case of the bubonic plague and promptly reported it to German doctor A. Rinder, who was in charge of the public health of the city. Unfortunately, Rinder did not trust the former’s judgment, and ignored the report. The next day, the Medical Council met and established the fact that the plague had entered the city, and informed the Senate in St. Petersburg. The response of the national government was to send military guards to the hospital in order to quarantine the cases. However, Shafonskiy and Rinder continued to stand on opposing sides, until Rinder denied Shafonskiy’s claim in January 1771. Shafonskiy submitted a report in February, arguing his case, but the officials chose to believe the German doctor instead. In March, there were definitive signs of the disease, and so Moscow’s government began implementing the established procedures, including setting up field hospitals. In June 1771, Rinder died after contracting the disease from a patient, and by September, the city was in the worst shape yet: the plague had peaked. 20,401 people died in that month alone, and roughly three quarters of Moscow’s population fled the city. Authorities tried to stop the spread of the disease, but the poor were terrified of the destruction of their contaminated homes, and so hid dead bodies. This was likely one of the reasons that, in the aftermath, Catherine ordered the removal of all cemeteries from city centers and out to the borders and suburbs.

The despair of this month led to the Plague Riots, an uprising against the government and their failed methods of protecting the citizens.