During the first plague epidemic in Russia in 1654, quarantine measures were already useless by the time their necessity became apparent. That epidemic was devastating, killing about 700,000 people.
By the second half of the 18th century, public awareness about mass diseases had considerably matured. In 1768, Catherine the Great vaccinated herself against smallpox, one of the most widely-spread infectious diseases of the era, and insisted that all her courtiers and officials did so too. Nevertheless, three years later it was plague, not smallpox that attacked Russia.
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