The Mind in the Machine 227character, perhaps involving Ukrainian autonomist sympathies as well as con-
cern for Cossack rights. In any case it is doubtful whether the action may be
properly categorized as a mutiny.
The first real mutiny in the Imperial Russian army seems to have occurred at
Chuguyev (Slobodskaya Ukraina) in 1819. It will be examined in chapter 13,
since it involved the military settlers. We may also leave for later discussion the
celebrated protest staged in the following year by men of the Semenovsky
guards regiment in St. Petersburg against excesses by their commander, Colonel
Shvarts. The latter was a nominee of Arakcheyev, the principal architect and
commander-in-chief of these colonies. As we shall see, even these disturbances
were relatively minor affrays which did not threaten the security of the
absolutist state or the military system that was its principal bulwark.
On the whole the Russian soldier remained a submissive cog in the vast
machine of which he formed part-remarkably so, in view of the deprivations
and injustices to which he was subjected and the lack of any effective procedure
for settling grievances. He was reasonably well integrated into his martial
environment, even though he might not share its prevailing values and beliefs.
Psychologically and culturally, as well as from a legal and social aspect,
soldiers comprised a distinct caste with its own mores and life-style. They had
lost touch with their civilian origins, yet shared the peasants' fundamental
world outlook, particularly their faith in a religious Utopia. This faith implied
a radical restructuring of the existing socio-economic and political order and
posed a latent threat to the absolutist regime; but its ulterior significance
would not become apparent until the twentieth century. In the meantime these
hard-pressed men found solace in the hope that divine or monarchical justice
would set the world aright.