age in battle as he rose through the ranks in the next few years and
became a lieutenant-general at the precocious age of twenty-nine. He
showed an aggressiveness worthy of Valerian Zubov or Tsitsianov
and some of Tsitsianov's harshness in his eagerness to invade Iran and
his refusal to spare the lives of the vanquished defenders of Talesh.^6
Continuity of a different sort was provided by the return to the
Caucasus of Gudovich, who succeeded Tsitsianov as commander-in-
chief in 1806 and held office for a little more than two years. He
could hardly be called a member of the Zubov-Tsitsianov circle since
he saw Valerian Zubov as a rival who had cheated him of the com-
mand of the 1796 expedition. Nonetheless, he had, on his own, de-
veloped many attitudes that resembled those of the circle—bellicosity,
contempt for Asians, and faith in the assumption that there were
simple solutions to complex problems.^7
Of the four other commanders-in-chief who participated in the
conquest of the eastern Caucasus, three had a brief period of ex-
perience as a subordinate to their predecessors. Alexander Torma-
sov (1809-1811) and Ivan Paskevich (1827-1831) were posted to
field commands under their respective precessors, Gudovich and
Ermolov. Philip Paulucci (1811-1812) spent a year as quartermaster
under Tormasov before replacing him. Only Nicholas Rtishchev (1812-
1816) moved directly into the position of commander-in-chief (after
nine years of retirement from government service). All four of these
commanders differed from the commanders from the Zubov-Tsitsia-
nov circle in that they occasionally saw good sides to their Muslim
adversaries and did not always prefer extreme force as the means to
their ends.^8 In addition, Paskevich had the rare distinction of achiev-
ing substantial victories in the conquest of Yerevan and the defeat
of Iran and the Ottoman Empire in the wars of the late 1820s. (He
went on to be the ruthless suppressor of uprisings in Poland in 1831-
1832 and in Hungary in 1849.)
Of all the commanders-in-chief who participated in the conquest
of the eastern Caucasus, Tsitsianov acquired the most prestigious
reputation. By comparison, Ermolov was hurt by his poor perform-
ance at the start of the second war with Iran and Paskevich by de-
feats in the growing war in the high Caucasus and the enmity of
Ermolov's influential admirers. Tsitsianov had an unusual gift for
persuading people to view all his actions in the most flattering light,
and his reputation was sanctified by his "martyrdom" outside the
walls of Baku in 1806. He was not only the hero of the struggle for
the Caucasus, he was the individual who did the most to determine
the character of the Russian takeover. He came to the Caucasus
Russia's Conquest of the Eastern Caucasus 71