218 The Imperial Century, 1725-1825
control of the khanate and foreshadowed its annexation in 1783) may be sensed
from the following incident. In 1778 ensign N. Rachkovsky of the Illyrian
Hussars, en route from Bensug to Kiprili with four guns, got drunk, handed
over command of his unil i.o an NCO, and stayed behind \vith t'.•.'c hussars, a
Cossack, and three Kalmyks. They came across three Tatars, of whom 'they
beat two with whips and then took them to a hollow some way from the town
and shot with a pistol'; the Cossack thereupon killed the third man and 'com-
mitted tyranny' on their corpses, 'driving his pike into their chests'. The crime
was dealt with by regular military judicial procedures, both Suvorov and
Rumyantsev advocating death sentences, but the final decision on the case is
not known. so In fairness it should be added that after their incorporation into
the empire the Tatars were treated by the authorities with relative liberality.^81
The campaigns which Russia fought in Transcaucasia during the early nine-
teenth century were likewise characterized by great ~~rocity. The soldiers
approached Persians, and later the non-Christian peoples of the Caucasus,
with preconceptions formed during centuries of warfare against Tatars and
Ottomans. The annals of the long struggle against the Caucasian mountaineers
are filled with tales of massacre and looting. In 1816 one general (Delpozzo)
promised his troops that 'the wives, children, cattle and [other] things they
capture shall be their property'; and thirty years later another senior officer
reported that 'all booty became the property of the unit concerned'.^82 This was
a colonial war in which terroristic measures were deemed 'hecessary and
legitimate; Peter I's regulations on the disposal ofloot were not suspended but
instead were tacitly ignored. Native adversaries were seen in the same light as
domestic insurgents such as the followers of Pugachev, and treated accordingly.
Even with regard to the peaceful civilian population of the empire's
heartland Russian soldiers sometimes behaved like occupiers. Many a land-
owner had cause to rue the day when troops were quartered on his property.
The men's contempt for the servile population was often reinforced by their
unhappy experiences in rural billets which we have already noted. A French
diplomat put this point succinctly. On enlistment, he wrote, the peasant recruit
became
a new being who no longer has anything in common with the village he has left. The
army becomes his fatherland and his family. [The soldiers'] common fate and the
reciprocity induced by the service create that proud fraternity we have had ample occa-
sion to observe.^83
80 TsGVIA, V-UA, ed. khr. 226 (1778-80), II. 49-49v.
81 De Madariaga, Catherine, pp. 364-6. Fisher (Crimean Tatars, pp. 70-80) gives a severer
judgement.
82 Potto, Utverzhdeniye, iii. 68 (Kabarda, 1804), 75, 156 (Chechnya, 1805, 1816); cf. von
Klaproth, Reise, i. 398-9 (Kabarda, Yerevan, 1804-5), 571 (Cherkessia); Murav'yev [-Karsky], 'lz
zapisok', RA (1895), 3, p. 320; A. I. Gagarin, 'Zapiski o Kavkaze', VS 288 (1906), 3, p. 320.
83 Bois-le-Comte to Montmorency; 5 Sept. 1822, MAE, Met D, Russie 40 (1821-2). f. 160; cf.
'Memoire sur la situation de la Russie' (1845), ibid., 43 (1835-48), f. 222': 'the soldier is no longer
of the people but constitutes a nation apart'.