by Tom Anderson
Yet not all Americans accepted Ward’s solution to the conflict. Many regarded it as an admission of weakness and were incensed by the ‘treacherous’ Cherokee scheme to build Indian solidarity. Among them was a New Yorker named Stephen Martin, who published Whither the Imperial Supremacy of America? (better known as American Supremacy) in 1818 to criticise America’s military defeats and what he saw as the corrupt aristocratic culture that had permitted them. In the short term, he and his book remained obscure in the public eye. But thirty years later would be another matter…
Map: The Empire of North America in the Year 1815
Chapter #95: The Celestial Vampire
“What is a civil war? A conflict in which the right side always wins, of course, because only the side that won will survive to write the history books. Quite different is a mere rebellion, where there was never more than one side at all, only a few scattered murderous traitors credulous enough to oppose the established social order. In contrast, therefore, to a war of secession, which is both the patriotic uprising of oppressed freedom-loving sons of the land, and also the shameful failure to crush the violent insurgency of a gang of treacherous rapine predators in human form who would tear a nation asunder for their own petty goals. At the same time.
Now, strangely enough, any given conflict may appear to be one of these three categories at first, but as time passes, its identity may shift, until one day what was a war of secession has become merely an extended civil war, and then as decades are folded into a vague gestalt by the fading of the popular memory, just a minor rebellion, not worthy of remembering. Perhaps it took longer than some to crush, but perhaps not, too; how many think to look in the history books? And how many who do think to consider that what they have read might not be the gospel truth from God Almighty on high? Not only among the proletariado, but including many of the burguesía and those higher still.
Small wonder that so many of the kings of the world have taken advantage of this human attitude to rewrite history and even news of current events to reflect the version of the truth that they which to promote. One should not mistake this for necessarily a process in which a small ruling cabal knows the real truth and lies to its people to control them, as is sometimes grossly overstated by certain individuals. While there is some truth to this impression, often even the ruling classes truly believe their own version of the truth, and a thinking individual in the depths of despair might be tempted to consider the Abyssal philosophy that there is in fact no objective truth, only what men make for themselves. But I caution the reader to stand aside from such foolishness. An objective truth certainly exists, and on the Day of Unity all men will finally know it. But until that time, I must rebut the view of Sr. Solovera that we Men of Society must necessarily eschew this potent weapon of the Enemy. I agree with Sr. Caraíbas: we cannot afford to disregard any weapon, whether it be physical, alienistical or otherwise, when we know that that weapon could make the difference between our bringing about the Day and our forces being crushed beneath the Enemy’s heel, as the world suffers another thousand years of the Long Night.
So, then, let us reconsider the portrayal of certain past conflicts…”
- Dr Enrique Carrera Palma, writing in 1871
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From: “The Great Eastern Adventure” by Pavel Nikolaiyevich Khlebnikov (1972, English translation 1984)—
Depending on one’s point of view, the epic journey of the military expedition dubbed the Great Eastern Adventure was either a comedy of errors or a series of unpredictable disasters being mitigated as competently as possible by a remarkably gifted command staff. As usual the truth lies somewhere in between, though many historians would consider the latter view to be closer to what really happened.
The notion of shifting more than seventy thousand troops from the heart of Russia all the way to her distant Far Eastern possessions was radical enough, courageous enough (some might say ‘stupid enough’). Nonetheless it was not embarked upon as an unthinking folly, as foreign commentators might paint it. It is true that Emperor Paul and Prince Voloshin backed the plan at least partly because it got rid of an army which had been raised to fight a war against the Ottomans which had never materialised. Those troops vanishing off to a distant clime where vague reports of great victories could easily be fabricated was infinitely preferable to sending the conscripts home to their villages to tell of how what had been painted as a vast crisis had petered out to nothing. The court knew their Aesop well enough to discern that it would be very dangerous to let the Emperor be seen as the boy who cried wolf. Next time the peasants might not take the call to arms so seriously, and Russia could suffer because of it.
Despite this out-of-sight, out-of-mind motivation, much thought was nonetheless put into the organisation of the expedition. In part the assignation of so many gifted thinkers to the command can also be partly attributed to the desire to get rid of them; the Russian Army was as crustily conservative by default as any other, and its generals were happy to send away those few among their number who loudly advocated for new ideas and reforms based on the events of the late civil war and the war still raging to the west. In overall command was the scholar-general Evgeny Serafimovich Kuleshov; the nativist reforms and propaganda that the Emperor had embarked upon in response to the civil war meant that only a Muscovite could be considered for such a trumpeted position. Kuleshov had also commanded Kazanian Tartars in Russian service against the Kazakhs in the past, which provided at least a vague experience-based justification for an eastern post.
With Kuleshov came many German and Italian officers displaced by the Jacobin Wars who were eager to bring their own organisational skills to the army, but while the Emperor might favour them, he knew he could not be seen to do so due to the wave of popular nativist fervour he himself was attempting to ride. This was then an elegant way to dispose of men such as Vittorio Dragonetti, a Venetian exile who had spurned a Neapolitan offer of a command after the downfall of the Republic and had now found himself in Russia via, of all places, the Ottoman Empire. Dragonetti was an unashamed student of Jacobin thinking both political and military, believing in the old adage that the most important thing was to know the enemy. In this he was out of step with many not only in Russia but also in the Germanies, his own native Italy, and beyond, who treated actual knowledge of the enemy as being analogous to a disease that would infect the naive scholar with the madness of Robespierre. Nonetheless Dragonetti now found himself in a position where there were no censors to make vague threats, and so was able to draw upon what he had learned. He dared employ the mathematical theorems developed by Coulomb to calculate the optimum options for planning the army’s route and logistics.
Another scholar-soldier who rose to prominence was Ludwig von Lenbach, a Bavarian officer who had resigned his Austrian service in disgust after “Emperor” Francis’ failure to liberate his land from the rapacities of Lascelles, yet too alarmed by the brutality of “Der Führer” to openly side with Hiedler. Exile had proved the only option, and now Lenbach lived like a dead man walking, his wife dead at the hands of one of Lascelles’ butchers and his brother hanged like a dog by Hiedler’s Kleinkriegers for some imagined treason. He had nothing left to live for. Some men would have hurled themselves carelessly into bloody battle to forget the ache within; Lenbach did the same with his own more scientific mode of warfare. He would pore over logistical figures by candlelight, performing calculations so continuously that he was promptly labelled “The Automaton” by his fellow officers, a reference to Wolfgang von Kempelen’s famous device.[211]
Throwing a group of such individuals together, many of them suffering from severe egotism and introversion,[212] was inevitably going to create some conflicts. Nonetheless, Kuleshov proved a sufficiently skilled and charismatic leader to knock heads together where necessary and keep the peace not only between his ‘nest of primo uomos’[213] but between them and the blunter, more traditional Russian officers who made up the majority of the command staff
. They had quite enough problems to overcome without the late civil war breaking out again between them.
Fortunately, as Kuleshov had himself planned, facing the hardships of the journey together helped weld the disparate parts of his force into a coherent unit. Based on the rational approach taken by his scholars and the experience of his veterans, Kuleshov decided to take what at first seemed to be a quixotic if not suicidal route, choosing the most northern of the established routes and setting off in midwinter. However, there was method in his madness; not only did this mean his army was forced to face the common enemy of cold earlier on, but it meant the swamps and rivers were frozen, making it much easier for the army to cross. It would have been different if it had been only a Pacific Company trade caravan, but the Eastern Adventure expedition was encumbered with field artillery and vast numbers of supply wagons.
Everything was planned down to the last detail, with the contemporary cultural Russian lackadaisical approach to precise timing being whittled out of both officers and men by iron discipline. Supply rationing was strictly enforced, with those soldiers to be found guilty of corruption or of raiding the countryside being shot without trial. It was ruthless even by the standards of the Russian Army, but it worked; Kuleshov and his subordinates had successfully managed to create the opposite of a Jacobin maraude, an army which could be trusted to stand starving in front of a banquet and not touch one crumb. Well, an exaggeration perhaps, but it served them well in the long run. An increased vodka ration was used to reward a certain period of good conduct without infractions, providing a carrot beside the stick, though Lenbach despaired that the men had become so competitive that “they are in danger of killing themselves through the relentless pursuit of virtue!” In other words, they were drinking themselves to death thanks to their vastly increased vodka ration.
The expedition had always been troubled – any such great military endeavour is – but problems set in for real in November 1807, when they attempted to cross the Yenisei River only to discover that the fords were still uncrossable by their heavy artillery and wagons. Kuleshov considered his options: whether they might wait for a full freeze to set in, or attempt to winter in the town of Krasnoyarsk on the river. But Lenbach covered a slate with numbers and convinced the general that such schemes were impossible; the food rations they had taken on in Tomsk would inevitably rot or run out before conditions became good enough (and Lenbach had calculated it by individual item!). They could try, but Kuleshov would lose between 10% and 40% of his army to starvation and the loss of discipline succeeding that. “You might as well pick one man in ten, or more, and order them to drown themselves in the river now; it would save time,” Lenbach commented with typical bluntness.
Kuleshov revised his plans in response. With a heavy heart, the army turned and returned to Tomsk, wintering in that Siberian town which was already two centuries old. Tomsk was nonetheless not large enough to feed the army for more than a fortnight (as Lenbach explained with yet more chalked diagrams), so Kuleshov worked with the Governor to negotiate with the local natives for more supplies. However, as the Governor explained, Jangir Khan’s new Great Khanate now commanded at least nominal allegiance from most of the local steppe peoples. While the army was indeed resupplied before setting out once more on a more southerly route, Kuleshov had also inadvertently brought his force to the attention of Jangir Khan.
Therefore, when the vanguard of the expeditionary force was travelling through Russian Khakassia, attempting to discern a possible route north of the Altai Mountains and south of the Yenisei watershed, it was intercepted by a small Kazakh horseback army led by Jangir Khan’s brother Abul and drawn chiefly from their own Middle Jüz.[214] The Kazakhs did not engage the Russians in hostility, but shadowed them for some nights and demonstrated their swiftness and manoeuvrability as an all-nomad force, in contrast to the sluggishness of the Russian leviathan. After this pointed display, Abul approached the vanguard under parley and met with General Kuleshov. Kuleshov’s experience with the Kazakhs served him well, albeit it had mostly been with the Little Jüz to the west, who had been driven back by the Russians after raiding Russian towns a generation before. Nonetheless these encounters did mean that Kuleshov avoided faux pas that many in his shoes would have made. Abul said that Jangir might consider allowing the Russians through his own land, but it would require a Kurultai, a council of leaders and advisors, and it would take time to gather them. Kuleshov was well versed in this sort of thing; since time immemorial Russians had had to deal with what they saw as the tiresome Turkic and Mongol custom of consulting on everything. Indeed the word had given rise to the Russian word kuterma, meaning ‘running pointlessly in circles’.
Kuleshov decided that getting Jangir on side was worth the wait, and arranged for Abul to send out messengers bringing supplies so that the army might wait on the border of Russian Khakassia and the lands now under Jangir’s control. In so doing, Kuleshov was forced to disperse the army somewhat, but was careful to ensure a chain of command and constant vigilance, wary of Kazakh treachery. Perhaps Abul did consider such a betrayal – though he did not of course show it, he was naturally wary of such a large Russian army on his doorstep – but he paid close attention to Kuleshov’s moves and concluded that this army might be run in an unorthodox manner, but was still one he recognised as tightly disciplined. It could not be taken on in small groups: Kuleshov had been careful to ensure a redundant system of horseback messengers between camps as a poor man’s Optel system. Certainly the Kazakhs could withdraw their aid and starve it out, but Abul appears to have concluded that while the Russians would eventually starve, they would probably go conquering in the process and smash the fragile unity his brother and father had worked so tirelessly to build.
So for that reason, when Jangir Khan and his subordinates trickled in throughout 1808, the ruler of the Kazakh hordes did not seek to destroy this alarming force of men of the west. Instead he sought to divert it; talks with Kuleshov reassured him that the Kazakhs were not the Russians’ target. Not this time at any rate. They seemed intent on poking their noses into the Chinese Empire. Jangir considered that somewhat foolhardy at first thought; no matter how fierce and powerful a nomad chieftain of the steppes was, he always owed homage to the Son of Heaven and his fabled realm. His own father Ablai Khan had submitted himself to the Daguo Emperor in 1780 and saw no shame in such.[215] Oh, the Dzungars might raid the Empire’s frontiers… yes, those Dzungars, the ones Jangir had such… plans for… but that was a different kettle of fish to the audacious schemes the Russians casually described.
Jangir had of course heard vague rumours of the civil war that was beginning to rage in the faraway heart of the Empire. He did not know enough to judge of their veracity, however.
Now, the more detailed stories he heard from the Russians convinced him that war was really tearing apart the Empire in a way it had not since the Manchu invasion that the singers still spoke of in the clan gatherings, the invasion that had created the current regime. Well, if one bunch of so-called barbarian nomads could set themselves up as rulers of the high-and-mighty Chinese…!
Jangir dismissed the mad dream, but nonetheless saw the Russians as an opportunity rather than a problem, a sentiment echoed by General Kuleshov in his own journal. He discussed the idea of a combined attack on the ‘New Great Wall’ to break through into Chinese Turkestan, from which the Russians could then traverse the country to support their fellows. Kuleshov was doubtful, knowing from his Khakassian contacts that the network of fortresses making up the ‘wall’ approached European standards of defensibility and remained well-manned despite the civil war. It would be easy for the Russians to bog down there and be left to starve by the more nimble Kazakh armies.
Instead a different approach was hammered out over three months of shared campfires and surprising conviviality. The Kazakhs had had mostly good relations with the Russians for years, but it had never approached this level. Kazakh khans – or rather successful Kazakh khans –
had been expert in playing the strong empires of Russia and China off one another, leaving them to lead their free nomad life in the middle. Now, though, China wobbled, and Jangir knew that if he was to follow his ambitious heart and take advantage of that giant’s stagger, he must first secure his flank against the Russians. To that end, Jangir and Kuleshov (at one point sending for the Governor of Tomsk to help back him up) reached an agreement to set provisional borders in the west. The Russians agreed they would not support any other nomads against the Kazakhs as they had in the past. In exchange, Jangir pledged both not to bring large armies near the Russian frontier. After all, they would both be engaged elsewhere…
In the end Kuleshov let Jangir ‘borrow’ a small part of his army, including artillery and their skilled operators, to help him in his planned conquest of Dzungaria and attempt on the Great Wall. In return the Kazakhs gave them safe passage, an escort of native guides, and routes for suitable passes through the Altai Mountains into Mongolia instead. Though a hard road, Kuleshov was convinced his ‘primo uomos’ could make it possible.
