cations with the troops in the Caucasus and threaten the coastal
provinces under the shah's control. Modest though this fleet was,
the Iranians had nothing to match it.
Quite a few of the officers who served in the eastern Caucasus
were well-trained soldiers of considerable personal courage. There
were men such as Major-General Peter Nesvetaev, an infantry officer
who had distinguished himself in Catherine's second war with the
Ottoman Empire and then in Poland before being sent to the Cau-
casus in 1804. There his achievements included the conquest of
Shakki. Another able commander was Colonel Kariagin, who in
June of 1805 was trapped with his 400 men in a small fort in Qara-
bagh by an Iranian force of 10,000 to 20,000. The Russians held
out for a week of bitter fighting during which Kariagin, his subor-
dinate (Major Kotliarevskii), and more than a hundred of his men
were wounded. Many others were killed and at least 57 surrendered.
When he ran low on food, water, and ammunition, and had only 150
soldiers fit for combat, he agreed to surrender. During the truce he
had requested on the pretext of obtaining his superior's permission
to surrender, he led his men in a nighttime escape into the nearby
mountains, where Armenians gave him food and shelter.^1 Kotliar-
evskii went on to become an even better known hero of the war in
the Caucasus. He fought in many of the important battles of the
era, from the storming of Ganjeh—during which he was gravely
wounded—to the final battles of Aslanduz and Lankaran, in which he
commanded the victorious Russian troops. At Lankaran, he preferred,
as usual, to be in the thick of things rather than command from a
safe distance and, as a result, suffered a serious head wound that left
him incapacitated for the remaining thirty-eight years of his life. The
Russian army was also supplemented by contingents formed by new
subjects, such as the Qarabaghis, who fought alongside the Russians
in 1805, and the Georgians, who participated in Tsitsianov's sieges of
Yerevan and Baku.
However, Russia's advantages were more apparent than real. Every
one of its strengths counted for less than expected, and a host of un-
forseen problems complicated matters still further.
The most obvious problem was that Russia could not devote its
full attention to the war against Iran because Russia was also at war
with France (1805-1807 and 1812-1815), the Ottoman Empire (1806-
1812), and, briefly, Sweden (1808-1809). (Russia was also officially
at war with Britain from 1807 until 1812, but there were no military
clashes between the two states. The disruption of trade with Russia's
principal commercial partner was the most serious repercussion of
100 The War, 1804-1813