were ordered by the war ministry to check these records and at least in Riazan province – for which the sources are exceptionally full – the records were actually submitted along with the conscripts to show that due process had been observed.29
Pamfil Nazarov was a state peasant conscripted into the army in September 1812. His memoirs are a unique insight into conscription as seen from below. Nowhere in the memoirs does Nazarov suggest that his recruitment was unjust. On the basis of his family’s previous record of conscription and of the number of its adult males the Nazarov household was in line to provide a recruit. As was always the case, the peasant communal government targeted households, not individuals. It was up to the household itself to decide whom to send into the army. In this era most peasant households were extended families, including a number of married brothers and their children. It was notorious that the head of the household generally sent his nephews and even brothers into the army rather than his own sons. But in the Nazarov family it was clear that Pamfil was the only possible choice. Both his elder brothers were married: one had children, the other was weak. His younger brother was still under age.
Pamfil on the contrary was a strong, unmarried lad of 20. None of his family wanted to lose him: an atmosphere of misery reigned for days, with both Pamfil and his mother in particular sometimes overcome with tears. In September 1812 Napoleon was marching into the Russian heartland. Pamfil’s own province, Tver, was threatened and Moscow fell in the midst of his induction into the army. Pamfil was untouched by any feeling of patriotism or awareness of the broader political context, however. Instead he was possessed by numb misery and fear at the prospect of being ripped out of his accustomed world of family and village, and thrust into the alien and brutal life of a soldier. Resigned fortitude, and in Pamfil’s case prayer and obedience to God’s will, were his only support, as was true of the overwhelming majority of peasant conscripts in these years.
Pamfil was accompanied by his brothers and grandfather to the recruit board in the town of Tver. The governor of Tver province presided ex officio over the board and himself inspected Pamfil briefly. The medical inspection was barely more thorough. Once Pamfil stated that he was in good health it amounted to no more than a check on his teeth and a brief glance at his body. There followed immediately the two great induction rituals of the Russian conscript: Pamfil’s forehead was shaved and he took the military oath. Within a few days the recruits were sent to Petersburg: given the need for speed they travelled by cart. Once assigned to his regiment Pamfil Nazarov experienced some of the other typical aspects of the young conscript’s rite of passage. The shock of being thrust so suddenly into an alien and harsh world made him very ill: during his two-week fever his money and clothes were stolen. A fist in the face from a junior NCO for whom Pamfil refused to do an illegal favour was also typical, as was a caning when he made a mess of his first shooting practice with powder and lead.
Nevertheless, not everything in Pamfil Nazarov’s military life was pure suffering and shipwreck. The Grand Duke Constantine personally inspected the new recruits and assigned them to their regiments in Petersburg. At 1.6 metres Pamfil was too short for the Preobrazhenskys or Semenovskys, but Constantine assigned him to the light infantry of the Guards, meaning in this case the Finland Regiment. As a Guardsman Pamfil got better pay and a real uniform, rather than the shoddy recruit uniform which was the lot of most conscripts in 1812–13. Service in the Guards was no picnic: the Finland Guards suffered heavy casualties at both Borodino and Leipzig. Nevertheless the Guards regiments were in general held in reserve: service in them on campaign was not the weekly meat-grinder experienced by some regiments of the line infantry. Though wounded at Leipzig, Pamfil Nazarov was back in the ranks by the fall of Paris and he and his comrades took pride in their achievement. Unlike most men conscripted in 1812 he was to see his family again: as a reliable and exemplary Guardsman he was allowed three home leaves in the eleven years following the war. Even more unusually, Pamfil learned to read and write while serving in the Finland Regiment. When he retired after twenty-three years of service in the Guards he became a monk and was one of only two private soldiers in the Russian army of this era to write his memoirs.30
So long as recruits met the height and medical requirements, on private estates the government left it to the landowners to decide which of their serfs to send to the army. Richer peasants, and indeed most of their middling neighbours, preferred to put the burden of conscription on poorer villagers, who paid less of the village’s collective tax burden. The landowner might share the view of the peasant commune that conscription should be used to rid the village of marginal or ‘uneconomic’ families. On the other hand, some aristocratic landowners did attempt to uphold fair conscription procedures and to protect vulnerable peasant families. Whether they succeeded depended greatly on their estates’ managers because wealthy aristocrats owned many properties, and were themselves in any case most often to be found in Petersburg, Moscow or on service. Success might also depend on the nature of peasant society on a specific estate. Particularly in the more commercialized and less purely agricultural estates, it might be hard for a distant landowner to control the richer peasants.
The more than 70,000-hectare estate of Baki in Kostroma province was one of Charlotta Lieven’s ten properties.31 Hundreds of kilometres north of Moscow, Baki was no place for agriculture. The 4,000 or more peasants who lived on the estate were self-sufficient as regards food but the estate’s wealth was derived from its enormous forests. The richer peasants were in reality merchants: they owned barges on which they shipped the produce of the forests down the Volga, sometimes all the way to Astrakhan on the shores of the Caspian Sea. One of Baki’s wealthiest peasants, Vasili Voronin, owned many barges and employed scores of peasants. The clerk of the peasant communal administration, Petr Ponomarev, was his son-in-law. As the only truly literate peasant on the estate Ponomarev was a very powerful intermediary between the two worlds of the estate manager and the peasantry. In 1800–1813 Voronin used his power to ensure, for example, that conscription never touched his family, their clients, or men who worked for him. The estate steward, Ivan Oberuchev, accepted the Voronins’ power. Maybe there was an element of corruption here. Maybe Oberuchev just wanted a quiet life. Perhaps he would have argued that he was defending his employers’ interests by recognizing the realities of power on the estate.32
Charlotta Lieven’s instructions had been that the entire peasant community in its assembly should determine which households were eligible for conscription and that these families should then draw lots to decide the order in which their members would be called up. She had also ordered that smaller households must be spared. In 1812–13 these principles were ignored. Many sole breadwinners were targeted for conscription, with tragic consequences for wives and children left behind, for a family without an adult male lost its right to land. In Staroust, one of the estate’s many villages, six men were conscripted and two of them were the only adult males in the household. As bad was the case of the Feofanov brothers, of whom two out of three were conscripted in 1812. Meanwhile the Makarov family, the cocks of the village with seven eligible males, not merely provided no recruits in 1812–14 but had never done so for the fifty years that recruitment records had existed on the estate.33
In 1813 Charlotta Lieven dismissed the estate manager and replaced him by Ivan Kremenetsky, who had previously worked as Barclay de Tolly’s private secretary in the war ministry. Kremenetsky’s subsequent investigation revealed that fifty households on the estate had provided no recruits in the more than three decades for which records existed. Kostroma was part of the third militia district: unlike in the first two districts, only part of its militia was embodied. Subsequently the government required forty new army recruits from Baki in order to equalize the burden of conscription across the country on private and state peasants.
Charlotta von Lieven ordered that exemption certificates – each costing 2,000 rubles – should be bought in place of all forty recruits and that the households who had failed to provide recruits in the past should pay for them. Seventeen peasant households contributed 2,000 rubles each, which was roughly the annual salary of a Russian major-general. It says something about the confusing reality of Russian society at that time that seventeen illiterate peasants from the backwoods of Kostroma could pay such large sums without ruining themselves. Though in the short run a sort of justice had prevailed, in the longer term Kremenetsky’s tactics united the richer peasants against him and made the estate unmanageable and bankrupt. There was probably a moral to be drawn from this story. The emperor could not govern early nineteenth-century Russia without the nobility’s support. Probably Baki, a microcosm of the empire, could not be governed, or at least effectively exploited, without the cooperation of its wealthy peasants.34
The emperor and Arakcheev were acutely aware of the need to get reinforcements to the field armies urgently. Harassed by the war minister, who was himself under pressure from the emperor, the governor of Novgorod responded in early March 1813 that he was enforcing conscription with great strictness but that in his province some villages were well over 700 kilometres from the provincial capital and at this time of year the ‘roads’ were a sea of mud.35 No excuses saved the governor of Tambov province, who was dismissed in December 1812 for slowness and incompetence in running the recruit levy.
The governors themselves put pressure on their subordinates, and above all on the internal security troops, to complete the recruit levies as quickly as possible. These troops were usually of poor quality and hugely
