The Cossack rebellion of 1707, or the rebellion of Bulavin, whose main driving force was fugitive peasants and Cossacks, was held under the slogan of exterminating all those who “make a lie” - boyars, governor, etc.
The desire of Peter I in a short time to change Russia, turning it into a powerful military power, was very expensive for ordinary people. Many peasants, in order to avoid the army, abandoned their farms and went to the Cossacks to the Don. The situation was tense. Popular uprisings flared up everywhere.
In 1705, Astrakhan Cossacks raised a riot, executed the governor. Guryev and Black Yar joined them . However, the rebellion was suppressed. And on October 9, 1707, an even more powerful rebellion broke out in the Don, known in history as the Bulavin uprising.
Ataman Kondraty Bulavin, under whose leadership Dolgorukov’s detachment was destroyed, was hiding from the “tsarist” Cossacks in Zaporozhye. However, at the beginning of 1708, he, with the support of the upper Cossack strata, was able to capture the capital of the Don army - Cherkessk.
The rebellion of Bulavin became extremely dangerous for the tsarist army, retreating throughout the territory. The Cossacks, who began to threaten Azov, supported the rebels. Peter sent punitive troops to the Don, who were ordered to exterminate the rebels in any way, because shipyards and, therefore, his pride, the Azov fleet, could remain without labor .
On May 9, a circle was organized in captured Cherkessk, on which Bulavin was elected a Don ataman. At the same time, a letter was sent to the Ambassadorial order from Cherkessk with a proposal to maintain peaceful relations with the tsarist troops. However, the message is ignored.
Slowly, disagreements begin among the rebels: the Cherkasy elders, who themselves want to lead the Bulavin uprising and direct it in their own direction, are trying to turn the Don ataman into his protege, however, having been refused, they decide to eliminate it. But the latter was supported by numerous Cossacks, the spokesman of whose ideas, in fact, he was.
Meanwhile, Bulavin makes an attempt to capture Azov, which ends in failure. Many of his supporters die under the walls of this fortress, and the survivors disperse.
The consequences of this defeat were catastrophic: the Bulavinsky uprising in Russia no longer represented that organized force that was originally.
The rout of troops under the walls of Azov completely erased all the calculations and intentions of Bulavin. Now there was no question of a planned campaign to Moscow, especially after Khokhlach, the right hand and foreman of the Bulavinsky army, without whom the Cossacks did not pose a threat to the traitors, was arrested with the help of conspirators.
It was at this time that the elders, convinced of the small number of Cossacks loyal to Bulavin, treacherously attacked the chieftain. They acted quickly and efficiently, isolating him and the small associates in his own house. It was not necessary to count on the help from outside.
The number of participants in the conspiracy is not even rough information, but traitors and traitors clearly had a tangible numerical advantage.
Bulavin and his supporters took up defensive positions in the house of the former chieftain Maximov. It was here that on July 7, 1708, the life of the leader of one of the popular uprisings, Kondraty Bulavin, ended.
Characteristic is the fact that a similar group of Yatsk rich Cossacks acted in exactly the same way, exactly 66 years later giving the authorities Emelyan Pugachev, whom they supported for a long time.
The uprising of Bulavin had one important feature: it, unlike the Pugachevsky and Razin rebellions, was not of a tsarist, monarchical character and did not oppose the “good tsar” to “unkind boyars”. It was a peasant-Cossack anti-feudal movement, the purpose of which was the struggle against feudal exploitation.