Russia Against Napoleon

27 V. V. Shchepetil’nikov, Komplektovanie voisk v tsarstvovanie imperatora Aleksandra I, SVM, 4/1/1/2, SPB, 1904, pp. 55–62. The average age of conscripts into the Moscow Dragoons in 1813 was 28 – four years above the peacetime average. See RGVIA, Fond 489, Opis 1, Ed. Khr. 2442, fos. 94–119: note that, although the document states that the men joined in 1812, in fact very many did so in 1813. Forty per cent of conscripts into the Kherson Grenadier Regiment in late 1812 and 1813 were married: see RGVIA, Fond 489, Opis 1, Ed. Khr. 1263. The folio numbers are indecipherable but the list of new recruits comes after the formuliarnyi spisok of NCOs on fos. 43 ff.

28 V. A. Aleksandrov, Sel’skaia obshchina v Rossii (XVII-nachalo XIX v.), Moscow, 1976, pp. 244–5.

29 I. I. Prokhodtsov, Riazanskaia guberniia v 1812 godu, Riazan, 1913, p. 119. RGVIA, Fond 1, Opis 1/2, Delo 2636, fo. 11, for the ministry’s circular urging recruit boards to check the records submitted by the state peasant administration.

30 V. Lestvitsyn (ed.), ‘Zapiski soldata Pamfila Nazarova’, RS, 9/8, 1878, pp. 529–43.

31 These records are held in the British Library as Additional Manuscript 47427 of the Lieven papers.

32 On the estate, see Edgar Melton, ‘Household Economies and Communal Conflicts on a Russian Serf Estate, 1800–1817’, Journal of Social History, 26/3, 1993, pp. 559–86.

33 On Staroust, see BL Add. MSS. 47424, fos. 47–53. Melton, ‘Household Economies’, p. 569, for the Leontev case, in which the estate management’s efforts to allow the wife of a conscripted man to be the breadwinner and keep his land were rejected by the commune. All other individual cases are drawn by me from Add. MSS. 47427.

34 Charlotta’s instructions for the ‘wealth tax’ are in BL Add. MSS. 47427: they and the lists providing sums to be raised from each household are contained in fos. 122–41. See also Melton, ‘Household Economies’, p. 569.

35 RGVIA, Fond 1, Opis 1/2, Delo 2636, fo. 53.

36 S. E. Charnetskii, Istoriia 179-go pekhotnago Ust-Dvinskago polka: 1711–1811–1911, SPB, 1911, p. 26.

37 I used above all the service records (formuliarnye spiski) in RGVIA. The regiments covered were: the Kherson (Ed. Khr. 1263) and Little Russia (Ed. Khr. 1190) Grenadiers; the Murom (Ed. Khr. 517), Kursk (Ed. Khr. 425), Chernigov (Ed. Khr. 1039), Reval (Ed. Khr. 754), Selenginsk (Ed. Khr. 831) and Belostok (Ed. Khr. 105) infantry regiments; the 29th (Ed. Khr. 1794), 39th (Ed. Khr. 1802) and 45th (Ed. Khr. 1855) Jaegers; His Majesty’s Life Cuirassier Regiment (Ed. Khr. 2114), the Iamburg (Ed. Khr. 2631), Siberia (Ed. Khr. 2670), Moscow (Ed. Khr. 2442), Borisogleb (Ed. Khr. 2337) and Pskov (Ed. Khr. 212) Dragoon regiments and the Volhynia Lancers (Ed. Khr. 2648). In addition, the appendices of three regimental histories have lists of officers giving dates when they were commissioned. These are the Guards Jaegers (Istoriia leib-gvardii egerskago polka za sto let 1796–1896, SPB, 1896, prilozheniia, pp. 56 ff.); the Guards Lancers (P. Bobrovskii, Istoriia leib-gvardii ulanskago E.I.V. gosudarnyi Imperatritsy Aleksandry Fedorovny polka, SPB, 1903, prilozheniia, pp. 140 ff.); Her Majesty’s Life Cuirassier Regiment (Colonel Markov, Istoriia leib-gvardii kirasirskago Eia Velichestva polka, SPB, 1884, prilozheniia, pp. 73 ff.). In all there were 341 new officers, of whom 43 per cent were former sub-ensigns or junkers. This does not comprise all the newly commissioned officers in these regiments, since some of the service records are from January or July 1813. That also biases the results towards men who had served as noble NCOs.

38 Istoriia leib-gvardii egerskago polka, prilozheniia, pp. 56 ff., is a mine of information.

39 Of the new officers surveyed, 20 per cent were formerly non-noble NCOs. In fact a handful of these men were nobles but had not yet reached even the rank of sub-ensign or junker. But this was far fewer than the twelve non-noble NCOs commissioned into other regiments, so the statistic of one in five holds good. In reality Russian society was more blurred than the sharp legal distinctions between estates admitted. A halfway house was the many petty Polish noble NCOs from lancer regiments who received commissions in the Russian lancer units which in 1813 were created out of some dragoon regiments.

40 SIM, 2, no. 249, Alexander to Wittgenstein, 26 Oct. 1812 (OS), pp. 119–21.