28-l The Alilitary Settlements<:rn which it was based.^35 Some crirics expected it to end in bloody catastrophe.
In 1820 a civilian official termed rhe settlers 'new stref'tsy who in time will lead
Ru~sia to revolution ... the fire will start in thesf" Rcrnrsed settlements;
already now a single spark would suffice to set everything ablaze'.^36 This was
an alarmist view, although as we shall see presently soldiers and peasants alike
did put up strong resistance to the scheme. The settlers' revolutionary poten-
tial was a source of hope to some dissident ·t>fficers, but they were unable to
make use of it.37 •·
.\lore typical was the concern expressed by an officer of conservative lean-
ings to the effect that soldiers and peasants who received an education, yet
were denied the right to own property, were likely to revolt.^38 Many senior
officers opposed the scheme on professional grounds-and not just because
they associated it with the tsar's unpopular favourite. Commenting in 1817 on
some draft regulations compiled by Arakcheyev, Barclay de Tolly prophesied
that if soldiers turned their hand 'from the rifle to the plough or sickle, their
military spirit can be expected to vanish completely'. I. I. Dibich (von
Diebitsch) reckoned that 'a century of uniformity in thought' would be re-
quired for success.^39 Both these men were experienced generals-of Baltic Ger-
man extraction-who took a common-sense view. Other conservatives were
more self-interested. A. Ya. Storozhenko, a senior staff officer, thought it
wrong for commoners to be educated at the state's expense and feared that the
settlers' agricultural produce would compete preferentially with that of private
landowners.~^0
Alexander I knew that his scheme was unpopular and suspected the critics'
motives. This was one reason why it was introduced gradually and almost by
stealth-although this only stimulated fears about its ulterior purposes and
helped to spoil the chances of achieving its ends. The clearest statement of
what the tsar intended was not made until 1821, by which time implementation
of the project was well under way. It came in a formal charter (gramota) issued
to the Ukrainian Ulan regiment-not a general decree (ukaz):
to ease [the peasants'] transition to the military estate and to make [the soldiers') service
kss burdensome ... We have formed the irrevocable intention to settle each regiment
on the land, ~ithin a certain district, and to provide that its intake shall be drawn exclu-
5i\ely from the inhabitants of that district.^41
Before we can evaluate the military settlements as they existed in reality, and
not just in the official mind, some idea must be given of their territorial extent
'5 VD vii. 162 (Raeff, Decembrist Movement, p. 152).
'~ N. .\I. Longinov to S. R. Vorontsov, Oct. 1820, ·Jz pisem', p. 364; cf. pp. 404-5.
;-.\lazour. First Russ. Revol., p. 45; Fedorov, Soldatskoye dvi;:.heniye, p. 69.
'' Sh-:hepetil'nikov, in S VM iv (I, i, ii), app. 15; Ferguson, 'Settlements', p. 205.
'" Shchepecil"nikov (SVM iv), p. 108 (full text in VS (1861), 6, pp. 335-63); cf. Yevstaf'yev,
·0Htani_1·e, pp. 45-51; Ferguson, 'Settlemems', p. 142.
"" Storozhenko, 'lz zapisok', pp. 455, 475-6; Pipes, 'Colonies', p. 217.
•1 PSZ xxxiv. 26803 (18 Apr. 1817); cf. xxxiv. 26843 (8 May 1817), xxv. 27512 (26 Aug. 1818).