burned the wheat fields and cut all communication between Tsit-
sianov and Georgia. The 200-man contingent sent to fetch supplies
from Georgia was surrounded by 6,000 Iranians and most were
killed (of the few survivors, most were enslaved). Finally, with a large
proportion of the Russians dead wounded, another thousand ill, and
the rest weakened by five weeks of living and fighting on half-rations,
the Russians retreated. Their troubles were not over. They were still
short of food and water; so many of their pack animals had died that
the beleaguered soldiers had to haul the baggage themselves; and
Iranian raiders harried the retreat, picking off stragglers and setting
fire to the parched fields. Not even Tsitsianov tried to claim this as a
victory. (An indication of the extent of the Russian losses is the ab-
sence of an official report of their own battle casualties for the siege
or the campaign as a whole.)^41
There were few other large-scale undertakings until the closing
months of the war. The 1805 Russian campaign to take Anzali and
cross Gilan to Qazvin forced the Iranian government to curtail its ac-
tivities on the Caucasian front in order to concentrate on Gilan. The
precaution turned out to be unnecessary, since the Russians became
bogged down in the Gilani swamps after leaving Anzali and were
soon defeated by the provincial army. After Gudovich's failure at
Yerevan three years later, both sides limited themselves to the strategy
that suited them best: the Iranians raided enemy territory while
avoiding pitched battles; the Russians concentrated on defending
populated areas from those raids. Each side enjoyed occasional suc-
cess. Raids frequently ended with a retreat hastened by the arrival of
Russian reinforcements. However, such retreats did not affect the
Iranians' capacity to stage more raids. For example, a Qarabaghi fort
located on the route used by the Iranians in many of their raids was
the scene of some of the most intense fighting in the summer of 1810.
A regiment led by Kotliarevskii took the fort from an Iranian garri-
son by storm. Once in possession of the fort, the Russians could not
prevent the Iranians from raiding the surrounding countryside or re-
moving the inhabitants to the south bank of the Aras. Although the
Iranians suffered heavy losses when they attempted to retake the
fort, they were able to continue raiding as late as November and car-
ried off several score inhabitants and thousands of animals.^42
As the war dragged on, there seemed to be no end in sight. Some
of the principals on both sides realized this. In the spring of 1812,
Fath 'Ali remarked to the British ambassador, Gore Ouseley, that,
since the Russian position in the Caucasus was defensive, it would
not be burdensome for the Iranians to sustain the current level of
The War, 1804-1813 121