15. The Next Major Russian Serf Revolt
The next major serf uprising was led by Kondraty Bulavin, a democratically elected Cossack leader. The Bulavin Rebellion (1707 – 1708), also known as the Astrakhan Revolt, was the second of the three major peasant revolts that rocked Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As with the Stenka Razin uprising, this rebellion was triggered by tensions between Moscow and the independent Cossacks. They arose in no small part because the central authorities tried to stem the tide of serfs who fled their oppression in Russia.
The downtrodden serfs ran away from the estates to which they were bound and sought freedom in the Cossack frontier lands. As with Razin’s revolt a generation earlier, when the Tsarist authorities tried to recover the fugitives for their aristocratic masters, the Cossacks resisted. There was another twist in the runup to Bulavin’s Rebellion: resistance to westernization and modernization. At the time, Tsar Peter the Great was engaged in radical reforms to modernize Russia and bring it closer to western norms. That rubbed many in Russia the wrong way, and increased the resentment against the Tsar and his government.