Recruitment and Service in the Ranks 171officers with whom he corresponded to show 'humanity' (chelovekolyubiye).
To Prince Nassau-Zingen he wrote: 'cease excessive beatings, for it is better to
explain to the men what they ought to know'.^152 But this was an admission
that, although he had by then been vice-president of the War Collegf' for !4
years, this elementary principle had not been enforced. 'Tell your officers', he
wrote to General Khvostov, 'that they should treat their men with the greatest
mildness and look after their interests ... Penalties should be moderate and
serve to reform, not to injure."^53 Yet he did not order Khvostov to take pro-
ceedings against those who flouted a law that had been on the statute-book
since Peter l's reign. The narrow limits to Potemkin's humanitarian sentiment
are evident from a phrase in another letter: 'I have ordered punishments to be
mild, but if anyone should disobey his commander I shall inflict a penalty
equivalent to death'^154 -that is, the gauntlet.
Some of the more conscientious commanders heeded these precepts and
repeated them in their own orders, and by the 1790s the atmosphere in many
units will no doubt have been more relaxed than before. But when fashions
changed at the top, as they did in 1796, the bulk of officers readjusted their
thinking accordingly. The reforms which Catherine and her advisers desired
had not been placed on a sound legal footing. There is much truth in the
observation of G. Gukovsky, a Soviet historian writing before Stalinist neo-
nationalism became obligatory:
The story is endlessly repeated ... of how Potemkin ordered soldiers not to be beaten,
or not to be beaten cruelly. Of course this is in itself most remarkable. But it can hardly
have had much effect in practice; clearly it was unrealizable given the army's set-up at
that time. Soldiers definitely continued to be beaten. If they were sometimes beaten less,
this does not mean that there was an easement in their lot, since they were still subject to
systematic exploitation.^155
On his accession Paul at once moved to tighten discipline. His measures
were directed principally against senior officers, whom he held responsible,
not entirely unjustly, for the abuses that were rife. Soldiers, in so far as they
cared about such matters, probably relished the sight of their superiors
undergoing the harsh treatment that they themselves had to endure. One of the
emperor's first decrees awarded a decoration (the order of St. Anne) to
privates and NCOs who had served without fault for 20 years; this
automatically exempted them from corporal punishment. Another granted an
amnesty to all rankers under investigation for crimes other than murder or the
theft of state property.^156 For men in the line flogging with the knout and exile
112 Dubrovin, Suvorov, p. t 12 (12 Apr. 1788).
151 Ibid., p. 113 ( 17 Sept. 1788).
154 Pot_emkin to Selevin, 16 June 1788, ibid., p. 114.
155 Gukovsky, 'Soldatskiye stikhi', p. 122.
156 PSZ xxiv. 17547, 17556 (12, 16 Nov. 1796). Cf. 17576 (22 Nov.), which repeated the stan-
dard ban on the private employment of soldiers, only 10 permit it-as Peter I had done-'with
their consent or for payment'; xxiv. 17908 (5 Apr. 1797), ~ 13.