This legend found its way readily into the minds of the peasants, who for a whole year, under the leadership of the rebellious Cossack Emilian Pugacheff, alias “Emperor Peter Theodorovitch,” held half Russia in their power. It would be, of course, a rash conclusion to seek to establish any immediate connection between the bloody uprising of 1773-1774 and the discussion of the question of emancipation in the “Commission for the Enactment of a New Code,” called by Catherine II. in 1767. Yet it is worth noticing that such a question did arise, and that the emancipation of the peasants was pleaded for by the representative of the Don Cossacks, who were shortly to lead the insurrection. And, indeed, many of those who represented the Cossacks in the commission were later on active in the civil war. The suppression of the latter led to the expansion of serfdom, since the “pension system” of that epoch consisted, of necessity, only in grants of “peasant souls.” Thus in the reign of Catherine II. about one million “state serfs” were given into the private possession of landlords, for military, or civil (or “personal”) merit. The reigns of her successors were marked by an uninterrupted series of peasant uprisings, agrarian crimes, and half-measures on the part of the government to loosen the bonds of serfdom. At the same time, after the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars, abolitionist ideas began to win their way among the land-owning, upper classes. The insurrection of December 14th (26th), 1825, had among its chief purposes the abolition of serfdom. The disastrous termination of that insurrection did not stop the propaganda of the abolitionist ideas which reached even to the palace, through the famous Russian poet Zhukoffsky, instructor of Alexander II.