ishment for their uncooperativeness, but he never made good his
threat. Even in the dispute involving Kars and Nakhjavan, Russian ac-
tion was limited to the defense of the pashalik; no punitive measures
were taken against Nakhjavan. This situation changed dramatically
once Paul Tsitsianov took charge of Caucasian affairs in 1803. There
could no longer be any doubt about the permanence of Russia's in-
volvement in Caucasian affairs. As for the style of that involvement,
Tsitsianov was indifferent to the idea of making Russia admired but
he was fiercely determined to make it feared.
Tsitsianov belonged to an inbred group whose members held key
offices in the Caucasus for a generation. These men served under
Valerian Zubov in the 1796 campaign and became great admirers of
his. Tsitsianov added the severity of his methods to the goals he
shared with Zubov in setting the tone of this group. Another member
of the circle, Peter Butkov, returned to head the chancellery of the
province of Georgia from 1801 to 1803 and helped Platon Zubov
draft the plan for the administration of the province. He went on to
hold a variety of administrative posts in European Russia and was
eventually given the honors of membership in the Academy of Sciences
and the Senate (a nonlegislative body with administrative and judicial
functions). He spent many years writing a history of the Russian con-
quest of the Caucasus and justified the conquest in terms similar to
the Zubovs'.^4 Next to Tsitsianov, the best known veteran of the 1796
campaign was Alexis Ermolov, who served with distinction in the war
against Napoleon from 1812 on and returned to the Caucasus in 1816
as commander-in-chief and ambassador to Iran. Like Tsitsianov, he
was arrogant, cruel, contemptuous of Muslims, and not nearly as
great a commander as he believed himself to be. His career was ended
in 1827 by a series of defeats inflicted by the Iranians at the start of
the second war with Russia. A number of less prominent veterans of
the Zubov-Tsitsianov circle also returned later to the Caucasus.^5
Other officers who did not participate in the 1796 campaign still had
the opportunity to imbibe the Zubov-Tsitsianov spirit as they worked
their way up through the ranks during years of service in the Caucasus.
Foremost among this group was Peter Kotliarevskii, the victor over
Iran at Asianduz (1812) and conquerer of Talesh, the decisive battles
of the First Russo-Iranian War. He was the son of a village priest who
had been persuaded to make the boy a soldier by Ivan Lazarev, who
passed through the village. Kotliarevskii entered the army at fourteen,
became Lazarev's adjutant when Lazarev was made commandant of
the Russian garrison in Georgia (1799), and—after Lazarev's murder
(1803)—became adjutant to Tsitsianov. He showed a reckless cour-
70 Russia's Conquest of the Eastern Caucasus