Black Death in Russia

The first Black Death wave reaches Moscow and conventionally abates

Moscow's grand prince lost two infant sons, then died himself in April. His brother followed in June. This is what the tidy phrase 'the plague subsided' looks like up close.

Easter as an endpoint

A Novgorod chronicle says the epidemic that began there in September 1352 continued until Easter — 24 March 1353 — with sudden deaths following the coughing of blood. That local wave has something the supposed global ending does not: a stated last day.

Phylogeographic research places the final European spread in northwestern Russia, at Pskov and Novgorod, between 1351 and 1353, probably by a Baltic route rather than directly from the neighbouring Golden Horde.

Moscow's spring

Evidence reviewed in a Russian medical-history journal indicates plague had reached Moscow by spring 1353. Metropolitan Theognost died on 11 March, Grand Prince Simeon Ivanovich on 26 April, and Simeon's brother Andrei of Serpukhov on 6 June.

The plague attribution is probable rather than uniformly explicit: Russian chronicles disagree on dates and sometimes record deaths without naming the disease, so several of these diagnoses are historical inferences.

What 'subsided' actually means

Modern genomic scholarship conventionally defines the Black Death as the 1346–1353 opening episode of the second plague pandemic and says it abated in 1353. There was no single day when it ended everywhere; the year labels a geographically staggered process.

It does not mean Yersinia pestis disappeared. One study describes the first Russian wave as running from 1352 to 1355, and the second pandemic continued through recurrent epidemics for centuries. The listing's parenthetical 1331 is not supported as a start date for the conventionally defined Black Death.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 7 sources 2 audit passes Traditional date

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

Traditional date. This date is the conventional one, not one fixed by a contemporary record.

What the sources leave uncertain

There was no single day in 1353 when the Black Death ended everywhere. The year is a conventional terminal date for the first wave.
Russian chronicles disagree on dates and sometimes record deaths without naming plague; several Moscow plague diagnoses are historical inferences.
One study describes the first Russian wave as lasting from 1352 to 1355, showing that “subsided in 1353” is too neat if applied beyond the conventional western chronology.
“Black Death” commonly means the opening 1346–1353 wave, whereas the second plague pandemic continued through recurrent epidemics for centuries.