342 Towards a Modern Army, 1825-1874which he offered a vivid portrayal of front-line conditions, and also hinted
cautiously at the corruption and inefficiency that marred the army's perfor-
mance. "8 To many military men the outcome of the war seemed to vindicate
critical sentiments which they had hitherto been obliged to keep to themselves.
After the harsh puni5hrnents naeled uut tu the Dccc1ub1 i~i~ auU iiu:i1 !'.)y111-
pathizers, the tsar instituted strict controls over the army's internal life.
Gendarmes reported regularly on the officers' mood and employed agents-pro-
vocateur to expose those whose unorthodox behaviour or casual talk suggested
political unreliability.^119 Under such conditions there could be no question of
continuing the political activity that had characterized the last decade of Alex-
ander l's reign. Dissent was silenced, but not eliminated. In a paradoxical way
Nicholas's repression encouraged a maturation of thought within the army, as it
did in Russian society generally, even though no one could express their ideas
freely. Like their civilian counterparts, the military intelligentsia of the
preceding era had been captivated by grand designs for radical change; now the
spirit was different. Most officers remained loyal conformists, at least in their
outward behaviour, but there was an enlightened minority-rationalists, if not
precisely liberals-whose common-sense views derived from practical experi-
ence; they were more renective, pragmatic, and above all aware just how far they
could safely go.
It was partly a matter of generations, as one contemporary pointed out.
Using 'Aesopian language' to make his point without alarming the censor, he
stated that in the late 1820s the older officers, 'who had fought against
Napoleon' (scilicet: had survived the purge), patronized newcomers to their
regiments, seeking to develop their 'sense of honour' and reproving them gently
for such moral shortcomings as 'boasting, excessive self-indulgence, or indig-
nation against the general understanding'; the younger men, with few excep-
tions, treated them with respect and 'put knowledge of the service ahead of
everything else'.^120 The natural response was to relinquish any overt interest in
public affairs and to concentrate on professional matters.
Much depended on potential dissenters' physical location, rank, educational
background, and social origin. To begin with the first point: in the Caucasian
Corps, to which some 60 officers and 2,400 soldiers implicated in the Decem-
brist revolts were despatched, the authorities tacitly tolerated a certain latitude
of thought. The commander in chief, Yermolov, had himself been among the
movement's 'patrons' and for that reason had an uneasy relationship with
Nicholas: 'I trust him least of all', the tsar had written in 1825.^121 In 1830 he
118 B. Eykhenbaum, Lev Tolstoy (Leningrad, 1928), i. 241; V. Shklovsky, Lev Tolstoy,
Moscow, 1963, p. 214; L. N. Tolstoy, Pol. sobr. soch., iv (1935), 3-120.
119 For example, Private lppolit Zavalishin, brother of the Decembrist, denounced 80 of his
comrades at Orenburg in 1827: Verzhbitsky, Revol. dvizheniye, pp. 90-4; cf. the case of a self·
proclaimed radical, N. P. Sungurov, in ibid., pp. 103-7, who in Moscow in 1831 denounced
several Polish officers who planned to join the rebels.
120 P. P., 'Vosp. kaval. ofitsera', p. 90.
121 Nicholas to Dibich, 12 Dec. 1825, RS 35 (1882), p. 196.