sentative and accredited gossip in Paris — kept this extraordinary woman constantly before the eyes of her contemporaries. For in spite of their fine contempt for kings and kingship, the philosophers thus honoured were in no way averse to publishing the details of their literary intimacy with a powerful sovereign. Catherine, on the other hand, forever cut off by the circumstances of her position from the briUiant society she felt so well qualified to grace, seems to have been consoled by the thought that vicariously at least she had become kno^vn to the salons of Paris and London.
Social philosophy was the fashionable distraction of the hour. Like the "Parlor-Bolsheviki" of our own day, Catherine delighted in the parading before her literary friends principles of the most advanced and enlightened liberalism. Taking its tone from the dilettante reformers of the gardens of Versailles, the correspondence of the Empress- Autocrat is constantly concerned with the solution of problems concerning the welfare of her fellowbeings and the "Rights of Man." The news which she herself announced of the revolt of Pougatchev, bringing to the attention of these courtly republicans the stirring of mighty primitive forces in the depths of a wholly unknown Russia, came as a sensational bit of news to Catherine's correspondents. In the doings of the mysterious beings known as "Cossacks" they may perhaps have recognized the embodiment of that strange philosophical conception, "Primitive Man," whose virtues were so lauded by their oracle, M. Rousseau. And the fact that the hardy rebel chieftain (the Cossack leader to whom Catherine refers as "M. Pougatchev") actually claimed to be the husband of the Tsarina added an almost scandalous touch to a situation filled with every possibility of interest.
From the mass of exaggerations and fiction which have grown up about the great Cossack revolt and the person of Pougatchev we may now try to clear away some of the inaccuracies with which the legends of the Chap-Books have overlaid established facts. Yet even as set forth in the pages of the judicious historian of the Cossacks, Lesur, the barest report of these doings would seem hardly to require literary embellishment. "If audacity of character and conception — and excesses dictated by brutality and ferocity — can make a brigand worthy to figure in history, no one has more merited this deplorable honour than the subject of the present account." ("Histoire des Kosaques," Lesur.)
Yemelyan Pougatchev, generally known by the Russian diminutive of his name, "Yemelka," was born about 1723 in the Cossack stanitza of Zimovnikaja on the Don. Enrolled at an early age in the Cossack regiment to which this district was obliged to furnish its quota, he followed the campaigns and shared in the honors gained by Catherine's armies during the Seven Years' War and in the subsequent War of 1769 against the Turks. After the siege of Bender some difference with his military chiefs caused him to desert from the army. Taking refuge in Poland he was next heard from in a convent of the Greek Orthodox Church near the Russian border.
In the villages nearby the religious sectarians known as Raskolniki or "Old Behevers" had established numerous "congregations." These fanatics" represented the reactionaries or "Puritans" of the Russian Church. The principal tenet of their belief was an uncompromising resistance to the reforms which Peter the Great had introduced in the ritual of the Greek Orthodox Church. It is difficult to believe that the Cossack trooper Pougatchev had any deep knowledge of the finer points of this ecclesiastical controversy. His rebellious nature, however, found sjTnpathetic fellowship with the Raskolniki, who, on account of continued refusal to conform to the government's decrees, either in pohtical or religious matters, were subject to persistent persecution.
Above all else "The Old Believers" prided themselves in following with literal exactitude the teachings of the Old Testament. A favourite text among them was the verse setting forth that "among the followers of Christ there shall be neither first nor last." To this doctrine of absolute equality — travestied by the Bolshevik philosophy of our own day — they joined an almost Mohammedan conviction that to die for the faith was the highest form of happiness.