Migration and Disease in the Black Sea Region by Andrew Robarts

Author:Andrew Robarts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

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“Instruments of Despotism” (II): Epidemic Disease, Quarantines, and Border Control in the Russian Empire

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, enhanced trade connections between the Ottoman and Russian empires, consistent and sizable human migrations in the Black Sea region, and regular outbreaks of Russo-Ottoman warfare resulted in frequent and increasingly severe outbreaks of plague in the Russian Empire. Additionally, in the early 1830s, the appearance of cholera in the Russian Empire combined with plague to pose a severe “security” threat to populations settled in the Russian south. In response, the Russian Empire initiated a comprehensive quarantine construction project to inoculate its southwestern border against the spread of disease. These quarantine and, subsequent, border construction projects resulted in a contested and protracted “closing” of the Ottoman-Russian Black Sea frontier in the early part of the nineteenth century.

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century anti-disease initiatives in the Russian Empire

The detention of individuals and the imposition of travel restrictions on those suspected of carrying disease was a common state response to the appearance of epidemic plague (chuma) in the early modern Russian heartland.1 In the mid-sixteenth century, intermittent outbreaks of plague prompted authorities to prohibit all commercial interaction between Pskov and Novgorod. Checkpoints (zastavy) were erected along the main road linking these two city-states and travelers and merchants inspected for signs of plague. In Novgorod, guards were posted to cordon off plague-infested quarters of the city and watchmen were deployed to quarantine infected domiciles.2

In the mid-seventeenth century, Muscovite authorities expanded upon the anti-disease measures adopted previously in Pskov and Novgorod. For example, following an outbreak of plague in Moscow in 1656, fortified checkpoints were erected along the main roads leading into Moscow. Additionally, special guards were posted to city-gates and non-Muscovite travelers and merchants entering the city were interrogated and inspected for plague. Within the walls of the city, domiciles suspected of harboring the plague were razed, infected neighborhoods quarantined, and the corpses of plague victims hastily buried without proper ceremony or ritual. A prohibition was placed on direct written communication with Tsar Alexei (reigned from 1645 to 1676). All paper dispatches from government servitors and military officers were transcribed prior to their submission to members of the tsar’s inner chancellery and the original copies of these documents were burned.3

During the reign of Peter I (reigned from 1696 to 1725), empirewide regulations were promulgated in an effort to check the spread of disease into and throughout the Russian Empire. In 1712, governors (voyvodas) in the Russian Empire’s frontier provinces received orders to detain and inspect all individuals crossing into Russian territory. Additionally, individuals caught trying to evade Russian border posts or escaping the control of Russian authorities prior to the completion of their obligatory period of medical observation were ordered to be executed on the spot. In perhaps the first example (in the Russian context) of the use of government-issued health documents as a means to impose control over subject populations, merchants and traders contracted to supply military forces billeted in the Russian Empire’s frontier

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