242 Gentlemen to Officersbeginning of her reign 41.3 per cent of 402 staff officers and above in active
service whose names have been recorded were non-Russians. The proportion
wa~ highest among iieutenant-generals (63. 7 per cent) and lowest among first
majors (34.3 per cent)-not counting the field-marshals, all of whom were
Russian.^63 Catherine tightened up the procedure for admitting cari~idates
from abroad and made a point of filling the leading posts with Rus~ians.
Those who bore German names often gave the empire excellent service: F. W.
Bauer, for example, was responsible for re-establishing the General Staff in1770.^64 But it was around this time that a nationalistic mood began to make
itself felt, for reasons that had less to do with the actual alien 'presence' than
with the general trend of ideas. There was a natural reaction against the
cosmopolitanism of Catherine's court.^65 In a memorandum which be evidently
wrote 'for the drawer' Lieutenant-General S. M. Rzhevsky (1732-82) made 17
fundamental criticisms of conditions in the army. In the last of these he
exclaimed: 'Why do we need such a multitude of foreign officers?' and went
on to allege that many of them were professionally incompetent ('valets and
teachers dressed up as servitors of the Crown') and that they oppressed worthy
native sons, who were forced to take less prestigious jobs in the civil admin-
istration.^66 To this conservative spokesman the only rightful place for
dvoryane was in the armed forces, occupying the positions of command to
which he thought they were entitled by birth and tradition. A purge of
foreigners, he might have added, would have also helped to alleviate the super-
numerary problem. For chauvinistic arguments of this kind were most likely to
appeal precisely to unemployed and semi-educated scions of the gentry-not
least those adolescents whom one writer termed 'super-supernumeraries'.^67
Most would-be officers had only a brief and unsystematic domestic education.
A few attended regimental or garrison schools^68 or, later in the century, a
private college set up at Shklov, near Smolensk, by Major-General S. G.
Zorich, an amiable but notoriously unprincipled officer with court connec-
tions. 69 Another notable 'nursery' for future officers was the boar~school
(pension) attached to Moscow University. The professional-military educa-
tional institutions for which Peter I had laid the groundwork were slow to
develop. A major step forward was taken in 1732, when the so-called Nobles'
Land Cadet Corps was established in St. Petersburg. It was modelled on the6J Lebedev. Russkaya armiya, pp. 4-69; conveniently tabulated by Duffy, RUS$/a's Military
Way, p. 147.
64 PSZ xvi. 12014 (14 Jan. 1764); Duffy. Russia's Military Way, p. 146.
65 Walicki, History, pp. 14-34; de Madariaga, Catherine, p. 540.
66 Rzhevsky, 'O sostoyanii", p. 361.
67 Von Hupel. Beschreibung, p. 43.
68 Denisov. 'Zapiski', p. 22; Mosolov, 'Zapiski', p. 126.
69 Glinka, Zapiski, p. 138; Pishchevich, Zhizn', p. 28. On Zorich, whose real name was
Nerazic, see Helbig, Russische Gunsrlinge, pp. 275-9; Tuchkov, Zapiski, pp. 150-7; RBS vii.
466-7.