(^238) Gentlemen to Officers
also headed a cuirassier regiment in that region during the 1790s, held a weekly
feast for his officers. They sat down to table at 2 p.m. and did not rise until
midnight. ·it was a real orgy; one had to drink until one dropped~, one of the
participants recalls.^35 These occasions were useful up to a point as a. means of
reinforcing service loyalties and maintaining control. Needless to say, they
were hardly feasible when a unit went to the front, and excessive indulgence in
alcohol might on occasion have harmful results on the battlefield.^36
The real problem here was that even junior officers who were economical
and abstemious could not accumulate enough savings to tide them over a cam-
paign, when they would have to acquire equipment and a stock of food. In
consequence they often went as hungry as their men-even more so, accord-
ing to one memorialist who broke the taboo on complaining in print about
material wants.37 The future general A. A. Zakrevsky told his biographer that
in 1802, when he was an ensign stationed in Lithuania, he was lodged for some
time in a filthy henhouse and lived solely off eggs-which in later years he
would cook tastefully for his friends.^38
To make ends meet junior officers would often pool their limited resources,
in a manner not too different from that of a soldiers' artel. Sometimes they
would even mess together with their men. When Catherine II heard of such
expedients she expressed concern, perhaps because she feared that fraterniz-
ation of this kind would undermine discipline.^39 Practices such as this lead one
to qualify the conventional image of junior officers being separated from their
men by an all but unbridgeable gulf. Despite the difference in pay rates and the
nobility's growing class-consciousness the gap was often narrower than it
might be in civilian life, where the relationship was one between master and
serf.
Scattered data on officers' private incomes suggest that few had large estates
-although no doubt their personal service records (jormulyarnye spiski) do
not tell the whole story.^40 Of 14 officers stationed in Moscow in 1764 who were
in line for promotion, and whose records were therefore submitted to the
governor, one who bore a princely title had 450 souls, three otbers had
between 14 and 18 souls, and the remainder apparently had no property.^41 A
century later, when the first systematic investigations were undertaken into
officers' material conditions, using the same type of records, only 16 per cent
were found to own land. The statistician responsible suggested that this figure
ought to be doubled(!) to allow for deliberate understatement, so that not too
H Ltlwenstern, Memoires, i. 25.
l 6 Tarle, Campa11ne de Russie, p. I I 5; Hansen, Zwei Kriegsjahre, p. 39.
J7 Von Stork, Denkschrift, p. 45.
38 Drutsky-Sokolinsky. 'Biogr. zametka', pp. i-ii.
J9 Pishchevich, Zhizn ·, p. 38; Vyazemsky, 'Zaphka', p. 20; Dubrovin, Suvorov, p. 9; cf. Eyler,
'Zapiski', p. 337.
40 Zayonchkovsky, Prov. apparat, p. I I, has shown that this was true of the recorib of civil
officials.
41 Shchukin. Sbornik, vii. 375-9.
wang
(Wang)
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