In 1823, cholera descended on the Russian Empire for the first time. By 1830, according to a study by R. E. McGrew published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, it had reached Moscow, and a year later, the capital, St. Petersburg. The Empire was, McGrew wrote, “literally frozen in the cholera’s grasp.” Army recruitment had stopped, commerce was at a standstill, and the nation was “strat-jacketed by quarantine regulations” Alexander Chernyshyov, who was then the Minister of War, wrote that the cholera “places us in a situation such as never has existed before.”
Russia
