conclusion was that the Light Brigade must have been drunk. (See Cecil Woodham-Smith's The Reason Why, and Kinglake.)
[21]Whatever may be said of his opinions, Flashman's information about the plight of the Russian serfs in the 1850s is entirely accurate, and is borne out by several other contemporary authorities. The best of these are perhaps Baron von Haxthausen, whose The Russian Empire, appeared in 1856, and Shirley Brooks's The Russians of the South (1854). They also corroborate his descriptions of Russian life in general, as does The Englishwoman in Russia, by 'a Lady ten years resident in that country', published in 1855. Savage and Civilised Russia, by 'W.R.' (1877), is an informative work; two largely political tracts by S. Stepniak, Russia under the Tsars (1885) and The Russian Peasantry (1888), contain useful material and interesting bias; and the Memoirs of the celebrated Russian radical, Alexander Herzen (1812-70), give an illuminating insight into the serf mentality. Like Flashman, he observed how his family's land serfs 'somehow succeed in not believing in their complete slavery', and contrasted this with the plight of the house serfs who, although they were paid wages, had their existence destroyed and poisoned by 'the terrible consciousness of serfdom'.
[22]Captain Count Nicholas Pavlovitch Ignatieff was later to become one of Russia's most brilliant agents in the Far East. He served in China, undertook daring missions into Central Asia, and was also for a time military attache in London. There is evidence that early in the Crimean War he was serving on the Baltic, and this must have been shortly before his encounter with Flashman. He was twenty-two at this time.
[23]For confirmation, and other details of Harry East's military career, see Tom Brown at Oxford, by Thomas Hughes (1861).
[24]The commander of Prince Vigenstein's Hussars in 1837 was, in fact, Colonel Pencherjevsky.
[25]If anything, Flashman's description of the punishments meted out to Russian serfs by their owners appears to be on the mild side. The works cited earlier in these notes contain examples of fearful cruelty and the carelessness with which extraordinary penalties were sometimes imposed—Alexander Herzen gives instances of atrocities, and also recalls the psychological misery caused when his father, a nobleman, ordered a village patriarch's beard to be shaved off. Turgenev the novelist, another nobleman who saw serfdom at first hand, described how his mother banished two young serfs to Siberia because they failed to bow to her in passing—and how they came to bid her farewell before leaving for exile. (See A. Yarmolinsky's Turgenev the Man.)
[26]It was a folk-saying—and may still be—that one could tell a true Russian by the fact that he would go with his neck open and unprotected, even in the coldest weather.
[27]It is interesting that Pencherjevsky had heard of Marx at this time, for although the great revolutionary had already gained an international notoriety, his influence was not to be felt in Russia for many years. Non- Communist agitators were, however, highly active in the country, and no doubt to the Count they all looked alike. (p.164.)
[28]Flashman seems to suggest that this incident took place in February, 1855. If it did, then Tsar Nicholas I had only weeks, and possibly days, to live: he died on March 2 in St Petersburg, after influenza which had lasted about a fortnight. There is no evidence that he visited the south in the closing weeks of his life; on the other hand Flashman's account seems highly circumstantial. Possibly he has confused the dates, and Nicholas came to Starotorsk earlier than February. However, anyone scenting a mystery here may note that while the Tsar died on March 2, he was last seen in public on February 22 at an infantry review. (See E. H. Nolan's History of the War against Russia.)
[29]The Khruleff and Duhamel plans were only two in a long list of proposed Russian invasions of British India. As far back as 1801 Tsar Paul, hoping to replace British rule by his own, agreed to a joint Franco-Russian invasion through Afghanistan (Napoleon was at that time in Egypt, and the French Government were to pave the invaders' way by sending 'rare objects' to be 'distributed with tact' among native chiefs on the line of march.) The Russian part of the expedition actually got under way, but with the death of the Tsar and the British victory at Copenhagen the scheme was abandoned.
[30]General Duhamel's plan for an invasion through Persia was first put to the Tsar in 1854, and was followed in early 1855 by General Khruleffs proposed Afghan-Khyber expedition. The details of the two plans, as given by Flashman, correspond almost exactly with the versions subsequently published as a result of British intelligence work (see Russia's March to India, published anonymously by an Indian Army officer in 1894). Indeed, at various points in Flashman's account Ignatieff repeats passages from Duhamel and Khruleff almost verbatim.
[31]The 'soul tax' was simply a tax on each male, of 86 silver kopecks annually (see J. Blum's Lord and Peasant in Russia). If a serf died, his family had to continue to pay the tax until he was officially declared dead at the next census. Blocking the family stove was a common inducement to pay.
[32]It is probably mere coincidence, but one of V. I. Lenin's immediate ancestors bore the surname Blank.
[33]'… with his belt at the last hole'. Obviously a corpulent Cossack, or one near retiring age. It was a rule that the Cossacks wore belts of a standard length, and were not permitted to grow stouter than the belt allowed.
[34]Leaking Russian stoves could be highly poisonous. At least three British officers were killed by fumes ('smothered in charcoal') at Balaclava in the first week of January 1855. (See General Gordon's letters from the Crimea, Jan. 3-8, 1855.)
[35]The serf rising at Starotorsk may have astonished Flashman, but such rebellions were exceedingly common (as he himself remarks elsewhere in his narrative). More than 700 such revolts took place in Russia during the thirty years of Nicholas I's reign.
[36]Fort Raim was built on the Syr Daria (the Jaxartes) in 1847, the year after Russia's first occupation on the Aral coast, and was immediately raided by Yakub Beg. The Russian policy of expansion followed the fort's establishment, and their armed expeditions eastward began in 1852 and 1853.
[37]Yakub Beg (1820-77), fighting leader of the Tajiks, chamberlain to the Khan of Khokand, warlord of the Syr Daria, etc. (See Appendix II.)
[38]Izzat Kutebar, bandit, guerrilla fighter, so-called 'Rob Roy of the Steppe'. (See Appendix II.)
[39]'Khan Ali' was Captain Arthur Conolly, a British agent executed at Bokhara in 1842, along with another Briton, Colonel Charles Stoddart. They had been kept in terrible conditions in the Shah's dungeons, but Conolly was told his life would be spared if he became a Muslim, as Stoddart had done. He refused—his words quoted by an eye-witness were: 'Do your work.'
[40]The language would not be pure Persian, as Flashman suggests, but the Tajik dialect of that language— the Tajiks, being of Persian origin, considered themselves a cut above other Central Asians, and clung to their traditional language and customs.
[41]Presumably such works as England and Russia in Central Asia (1879), Central Asian Portraits (1880), by D. C. Boulger, and Caravan Journeys and Wanderings, by J. P. Ferrier. These, and companion volumes, give in addition to biographical details an account of the occupation of the Eastern lands by Russia, which had its origins in the agreement of 1760, when the Kirgiz-Kazak peoples, under their khan, Sultan Abdul Faiz, became nominal subjects of the Tsar, receiving his protection in return for their promise to safeguard the Russian caravans. Neither side kept its bargain.
[42]The Russian expansion into Central Asia in the middle of the last century, which swallowed up all the independent countries and khanates east of the Caspian as far as China and south to Afghanistan, was conducted with considerable brutality. The massacre at Ak Mechet (the White Mosque), by General Perovski, on August 8, 1853, took place as Yakub Beg describes it, but it was surpassed by such atrocities as Denghil Tepe, in the Kara Kum, in 1879, when the Tekke women and children, attempting to escape from the position which their men-folk were holding, were deliberately shot down by Lomakin's troops. In this, as in other places, the Russian commanders made it clear that they were not interested in receiving surrenders.
[43]It is customary nowadays for Russians to refer to this expansion as 'Tsarist imperialism'; however, it will be noted that while the much-abused Western colonial powers have now largely divested themselves of their empires, the modern Russian Communist state retains an iron grip on the extensive colonies in Central Asia which the old Russian empire acquired.
[44]The Mongols were said to be descended from a sky-blue wolf. Flashman's Khokandian friends seem to have used the term rather loosely, possibly because many of them were part Mongol by descent. Incidentally, much of Kutebar's speech at this point is almost word for word with a rallying-call heard in the Syr Daria country at the
