The Mind in the Machine 225It was Alexander I, too, who took stern measures to close the western border
to defectors, whether military or civilian. In the eighteenth century Poland had
been the favourite sanctuary; others were Moldavia, the Crimea, and the Don,
although after the collapse of the Pugachev insurrection the last area wa<; no
longer safe. Already Peter I had established a so-called 'cordon' along the
Polish border, which his successors maintained in being.^117 However, it seems
to have been fairly easy to evade the patrols that manned it. In the 1750s a
number of disgruntled South Slav immigrants serving in the new military
settlements in the Ukraine simply slipped across the frozen Dnieper by night,
taking their uniforms and ammunition with them.^118 Catherine II tried, not
without success, to induce deserters (and other fugitives) abroad to return to
Russia by promising them advantageous conditions,^119 but the cordon evidently
remained in existence until the last days of the Polish-Lithuanian Common-
wealth, for Mosolov recalls that he served in it in 1791.^120 After Kosciuszko's
insurrection a number of ostensibly 'Polish' soldiers who had been integrated
into the Russian army were discovered to be Russians after all. They were
sentenced to the gauntlet or the knout and, if they survived that penalty,
posted to units stationed in remote parts of the empire.^121 The same fate
generally awaited those who were recovered from refuges in Moldavia or the
Caucasus, although at first many of them were settled in New Russia.^122
With Poland's disappearance from the European map Austria and Prussia
became the most likely sanctuaries, but their governments, bound to Russia by
common dynastic and political interests, were unsympathetic to defectors
from that country. In 1810 the emperors Alexander and Francis signed a con-
vention on the reciprocal return of fugitives (some Austrian deserters having
previously been accepted into the Russian army), and later a similar agreement
was reached with the elector of Saxony, who was also grand duke of
Warsaw.^123 After the defeat of Napoleon the former arrangement was renewed
and other conventions concluded with Prussia and France.^124 The last of these
agreements was motivated by the fact that already by 1814 some 6,000 men,
among them 'senior NCOs decorated with crosses and medals', had deserted
from two corps that fought in France.^125
117 PSZ vii. 4489, 4695 (3 Apr. 1722, 19 Apr. 1725), xii. 9448 (30 Oct. 1747); cf., for the
Crimean border, viii. 5842 (27 July 1731).
11s Pishchevich, Zhizn ·, p. 418.
119 PSZ xvi. 11618 (19 July 1762), xvii. 12396 (I I May 1765).
120 Mosolov, 'Zapiski', p. 141.
121 Beskrovnyy, Russkaya armiya, pp. 435-6, citing archival sources.
122 6, 130 fugitives (including some civilians?) were returned from the Danubian Principalities
between 1782 and 1802 (excluding the war years 1787-91): Grosul, Dunayskiye knyazhestva,
pp. 25-7; Semenova, Rossiya i osvob. bor'ba, p. 85; Druzhinina, Sev. Prichernomor'ye, p. 65.
123 PSZ xxx. 23295 (9 Oct. 1808), xxxi. 24282, 24522 (I July 1810, 15 Feb. 1811); cf. xxvi. 20049
(9 Nov. 1801).
124 PSZ xxxiii. 25874 (5 June 1815), 25986 (8 Nov. 1815), additional articles (p. 342), 26266 (13
May 1816: Prussia), xxxiv. 26751 (24 Mar. 1817: Prussia), xxxviii. 29115 (14 July 1821: Austria);
cf. also P. S. Squire, 'Metternich and Benckendorff, 1807-34', SEER 45 (1967), pp. 135-62, esp.
p. 147. 125 Murav'yev [-Karsky), 'Zapiski', RA (1886), 2, p. 119.