348 Towards a Modern Army, 1825-1874
opposition, stimulated by the revolt in November 1830 and then by the incorpor-
ation in Russian units of men from the formerly independent Polish Army. The
rebels enjoyed some sympathy among officers who hailed from the western
provinces with their polonized nobility. Many of the latter served together in
the Lithuanian rcgimcnt.^1 ~^8 There \Vere numerous desertions: one list of such
offences (which has not been published) contains 49 names and another 27;^159
we have neither a total figure nor a breakdown by rank, but it is safe to assume
that almost all those concerned were from the western provinces.
During the 1830s some Polish ex-officers who had been sent into exile, like
their emigre comrades, continued to plot the restoration of their country's
independence and won the sympathy of Russians serving in the armed forces.
One such was an ensign of aristocratic background, V. U rusov, stationed at
Astrakhan'. In 1834 he joined a Pole named Janiszewski in a plot to seize con-
trol of the town-or so at least the authorities, who got wind of the scheme in
time, alleged.^160 Four years later another young Russian officer, A. P.
Kuz'min-Karavayev, who had been educated in the Noblemen's regiment and
was then a sub-lieutenant in an infantry regiment, conceived the bold plan of
freeing from captivity in Vil'na one of the leading Polish prisoners: Szymon
Konarski, an ex-captain in the Polish army who had later become an under-
cover agent of the emigre organization Mloda Polska. Kuz'min-Karavayev,
together with several other junior officers and NCOs, held a number of
clandestine meetings on an estate near Zelva in Grodno province. The escape
plot was betrayed by another prisoner; Konarski was executed; and eleven of
his sympathizers, including Kuz' min-Karavayev, were court-martialled and
sentenced to terms of Siberian exile.^161
In the 1840s the government once again found itself facing dissent among
officers stationed in the capital. Several of them frequented literary evenings
attended by officials, students, and others at which the conversation turned to
sensitive matters such as serf emancipation. At least three distinct groups
existed, but there were links between them and historians have customarily
treated them together under the label 'Petrashevtsy'. M. V. Butashevich-
Petrashevsky was not a military man but one group of his associates did gather
around N. A. Mombelli,^162 a young guards lieutenant, and had a strong
military flavour: of the 43 men known to have attended his Monday gather-
us Verzhbitsky, Reva/. dvizheniye, p. 147.
15~ Ibid.; Beskrovnyy, Patentsial, p. 238.(^1) "° Verzhbitsky, Reva/. dvizheniye, p. 153; Fedosov, Reva/. dvizheniye, pp. 143-4. On Konar-
ski see S. Kieniewicz in Polski slawnik biagraficzny, Warsaw, Cracow, and Wroclaw, xiii
(1967/8), 477-9.
161 Verzhbitsky, Reva/. dvizheniye, pp. 160-72; fdr his subsequent fate: A. F. Smirnov, in A. I.
Herzen (Gertsen), Sabr. sach., xv (Moscow, 1958). 320.
162 Mombelli (1823-91) had studied in the Noblemen's regiment. His diary shows that he
developed a perceptive understanding of the nature of absolutist rule, but that his behaviour was
eccentric. Although a strong critic of corporal punishment (of which he gives a graphic eye-witness
description), he gave his own batman 50 strokes of the lash for being drunk, but then repented of
his action: Delo petrashevtsev, i. 243, 251-2, 258.