(^222) The Imperial Century, 1725-1825
their backsides'.^97 (Incidentally, this practice, although kept an official secret,
can be authenticated from other sources during the war of 1812, when it seems
to have been Yermolov's idea; called 'the chain', it is said to have 'caused
many thousands to remain in the ranks of the brave'.^98 But this was of course
not the sole reason for the troops' loyalty.)
Foreign observers were right in their estimate that military morale was
changing, although they overestimated the pace at which this was occurring
and its practical effect. Russian soldiers would still fight stoutly for Tsar and
Fatherland for another century or so. The main evidence of change is the
desertion rate. Flight from the colours was the easiest way for a soldier to
register dissatisfaction with his lot. It was a gesture of passive protest, under·
taken at great personal risk, in a situation where more active measures, such as
an act of collective insubordination, would have been so fraught with danger
as to be impracticable. Desertion was not just a means of se,lf-help but also a
blow against the absolutist military system, in the same sense as the flight of
peasants to the borderlands was a silent indictment of serfdom.
The authorities took the desertion problem seriously and developed a whole
range of measures to deal with it which can only be touched on briefly here.
Naturally there are no comprehensive statistics as to its extent; the scattered
evidence suggests that the rate fell under Catherine II but rose again thereafter.
In 1732 there were said to be 20,000 fugitives, equivalent to 10 per cent of total
effectives.^99 The proportion was only one tenth as great (200 out bf 20,000)
among Russian forces in Finland over a ten-month period in 1792, 100 and it
was probably higher in this region than in other parts of the empire at the time.
In the Vologda infantry regiment 30 men deserted in one month during the
peaceful year of 1779,^101 but in the entire First Division only 38 did so during
March 1795.^102 Both units were stationed in frontier areas (Kuban', Kiev) and
the season was the same. In two months of 1812 the police chief at
Dorogobuzh, a small town in western Russia, had 17 cases brought to his
notice by the staffs of six regiments stationed nearby;^103 but he would not have
been informed of those absconders whom the military authorities had already
caught: Higher figures are reported from another unit, the Yekaterinburg regi-
ment (140 men in one month),^104 but they mean little unless we know what the
normal rate of wastage was. Fortunately composite figures are available for
the Second Army, stationed in south-western Russia, for three successive
peacetime years, 1819-21. They show a desertion rate of 1.3 per cent, 1.5 per
cent, and 1.6 per cent respectively^105 -significantly less than in 1732. It was
91 Ami de la Verite, Coup d'reil, p. IOI.
98 Mayevsky, 'Moy vek'. p. 254; cf. Lowenstern, Memoires, i. 273.
(^99) Petrov, Russkaya voyennaya sila, ii. 151; Kersnovsky, Istoriya, i. 63.
100 Meshcheryakov, Suvorov, iii. 137. 101 Yon Shtrandman, 'Zapiski', p. 273.
102 TsGVIA, V-UA, fond 1349, d. 300 (1796), I. l.
(^103) Shchukin, Bumagi, i. 1-76, esp. pp. 19, 21, 40, 59, 73. For desertion from the Lithuanian
Ulans: ibid., ix. 3 ff. Desertion rates were high among militiamen, especially in the Baltic: Voyensky,
Akry ... 1812 g., ii. 265, 274. 104 Semevsky, Polit. i obshch. idei, p. 125.
ios Kiselcv to Zakrevsky, 5 Apr. 1822, Pis'ma, SIRJO lxxviii (1891). 102.
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