During its 200-300-thousand-year history, Homo sapiens - Homo sapiens - has more than once found itself on the brink of death. One of the greatest dangers was the plague, which kills millions of people in one go. Russia did not escape the visits of the black death.
Man has always lived and lives in fact on the edge of the abyss. So, about 74 thousand years ago, a catastrophic volcanic eruption in today's Indonesia eclipsed the sky for two decades, turning all seasons into winter. As scientists assume, then about 2 thousand people survived. Having enthusiastically accepted the commandment of the Almighty "be fruitful and multiply", after a dozen or two millennia, people have settled on all continents of the Earth with the exception of Antarctica.
But in addition to natural disasters, the existence of mankind was threatened by epidemics of diseases, which in short periods of time mowed down an impressive part of the population. The plague epidemics that regularly visited the inhabited continents until the 20th century were especially bloodthirsty. She was dubbed the black death with horror. The 1346-1353 pandemic claimed the lives of about 60 million people. Given that the entire population of the planet was then about 430 million.
The price of gratitude to the pastor
The plague was a frequent guest in Russia. Chroniclers from the XI century now and then report: "There is a lot of pestilence in Novgorod", "The pestilence is strong in Smolensk", "Byasha is pissed at people in Pskov and Izborsk" … And everywhere "many people die." But since the chronicles do not contain descriptions of the symptoms of pestilences, it is not possible to attribute them to plague epidemics.
The first pestilence, which can be reliably identified as a plague epidemic, befell Russia in 1352. The city of Pskov, which had lively trade relations both with the East and with the West, where the plague ruled a few years earlier, fell under him. The mortality rate among the residents of Pskov was so high that each church had up to 30 corpses for the funeral service per night. Several dead people were placed in the coffins.
Since the prayers of ordinary townspeople did not bring deliverance from the black death, a delegation was sent to Novgorod to Archbishop Vasily Kalika with a tearful request to come to Pskov and pray for an end to the pestilence. Vasily heeded the request, made a procession in Pskov, and on the way back to Novgorod died of the plague.
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The Novgorodians honorably accompanied their pastor on his last journey: the church, where the coffin stood, was not crowded with visitors. And in Novgorod an epidemic of pneumonic plague broke out. The disease began with acute chest pain, fever, profuse sweating, chills, then hemoptysis appeared, and on the second or third day the person died.
The epidemic spread to other Russian cities and towns, devastating the country and provoking famine. Throughout the second half of the XIV century, Russia was besieged by black death. And in the following centuries, she visited the country with short interruptions.
Turkish "gift"
In November 1770, an officer brought from the area of the Russian-Turkish war, where the plague was raging, entered the Moscow General Hospital. The poor fellow died soon after. And after him went to another world, the doctor who used it and 22 of the 27 people who were in the hospital for treatment. A pestilence was diagnosed, as the plague was then called. Later, the disease manifested itself in the Bolshoi Cloth Yard, a large weaving factory in Zamoskvorechye, where trophy Turkish wool with fleas hiding in it, carriers of the infection, arrived. About a hundred workers became its victims.
The factory management initially tried to hide the threat and did not introduce quarantine. The plague broke free and soon engulfed all of Moscow. The death toll reached a thousand daily. Created teams of Mortus, dressed in black capes with a slit for the eyes, hooked the dead from the places where death overtook them, and buried them in mass graves without a funeral service. There were not enough funeral teams, sometimes corpses waited for their turn for several days, spreading the infection.
Moscow commander-in-chief Pyotr Saltykov, and after him other wealthy citizens fled from Moscow to country estates. Panic reigned in the city. The neighboring peasants refused to take their products to Belokamennaya. Hunger began.
Muscovites trusted in God. Rumors spread about the miraculous power of the Bogolyubskaya Icon of the Mother of God, which crowned the Barbarian Gate of Kitai-Gorod. Thousands of people rushed to the miraculous icon in order to motivate the Intercessor to disgust the city of the plague with prayers and donations.
Archbishop Ambrose of Moscow, realizing the fatalities of the gathering of people in an epidemic, ordered the prayers before the icon to stop, the donations to be sealed, and the icon itself to be transferred to the Church of Cyrus and John on Solyanka, which was nearby (it was demolished in 1934).
It was whispered in Moscow that Ambrose intended to appropriate the donations. And then, like a burning candle in a powder magazine, someone in the crowd threw a cry: "The Mother of God is being robbed!"
On September 15 (old style), 1771, the alarm bell of the Spassky bell sounded on the Kremlin's Alarm Tower, and thousands of people armed with clubs, stakes, axes, knives and stones filled the space between the Barbarian and Ilyinsky gates of Kitai-Gorod. The heated crowd headed to the Chudov Monastery in the Kremlin - the archbishop's residence - to deal with Ambrose. He, warned, hid in the Donskoy Monastery, protected by powerful walls. The Miracle Monastery was plundered.
The next day, thousands more citizens joined the rebels. The walls did not protect the Donskoy Monastery from the angry crowd. Ambrose was found in the choir of the monastery church, dragged out into the street and subjected to merciless torture.
Other rioters went to smash medical institutions, being sure that doctors - mostly foreigners - only do what they kill honest people.
To suppress the uprising, troops were brought into the city. The rebels desperately resisted, but buckshot, bayonets and sabers did their job. The riot was suppressed three days later.
By order of Catherine II, the Empress's favorite, Count Grigory Orlov, arrived in Moscow with four Life Guards regiments. With the help of the measures taken by him, the further spread of the plague stopped, and soon the epidemic subsided.
Fanfare and punishment
Ekaterina highly appreciated Orlov's merits. A solemn welcome was prepared for him in Petersburg. In the Catherine Park of Tsarskoe Selo, a marble triumphal arch was installed with the inscription "Orlov saved Moscow from trouble." A medal "For the deliverance of Moscow from an ulcer in 1771" was minted with a dedication to the recipient: "Russia has such sons in itself." Orlov had the right to award this medal to those who made a significant contribution to the pacification of Moscow.
After a thorough investigation with the use of torture, more than 300 participants in the riot were brought to trial. Four of them were sentenced to be hanged, two hundred were whipped and sent to hard labor.
The Spassky alarm bell, which gave the signal for the start of the riot, was sentenced by the empress to the withdrawal of the tongue. The bell hung silent for 30 years, and then was removed and eventually ended up in the Armory.
The Moscow epidemic of 1770-1771, the last major outbreak of plague in Russian history, claimed the lives of more than 50,000 Muscovites. But it also became an incentive for the authorities to improve cities and create a sanitary inspection service.
Grigory Orlov strictly forbade burying Moscow residents who died from the plague in city cemeteries. At some distance from the then borders of the First See, "plague" cemeteries arose: Armenian, Dorogomilov, Miusskoe, Pyatnitskoe, Danilovskoe, Kalitnikovskoe, Semyonovskoe, Preobrazhenskoe, Rogozhskoe. The most famous of the "plague" ones is the Vagankovskoye cemetery, formed in 1771 near the village of Novoye Vagankovo. Having accepted the bodies of hundreds of plague deceased, for many years it was the last refuge of the common people. But when it turned out to be surrounded by Moscow, hearses with famous people flocked here. The great Russian artists Tropinin, Savrasov, Surikov, the great Russian poets Yesenin and Vysotsky, great artists found their rest here …
There are stories that the Yersinia pestis stick, the bacterium that incites black death, can break out of disturbed plague graves and cause trouble. Fortunately, the bacteria's age is short. Our distant ancestors, who fell in an unequal struggle against the plague, threaten us with nothing.
Magazine: Mysteries of History No. 29, Leonid Budarin