Pugachev’s lieutenants were never in doubt that the man sitting next to them, claiming to be an emperor, was in fact an illiterate Cossack, and that his so-called empress was a Cossack girl from the Urals who was not his legal wife. His real wife was on the Don, and his other, supposed wife, the usurping Empress Catherine, was in St. Petersburg. For most of his brief “reign,” both he and his intimate circle lived in overlapping worlds of reality and make-believe. No one complained about this amateur theater, and Pugachev profited from the unspoken agreement to mutual playacting. Believing that
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