Russia Against Napoleon_ The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace - Dominic Lieven [67]
Probably the most radical change introduced during Arakcheev’s two years as minister concerned the treatment of recruits. Under the system he inherited new recruits were delivered straight to their regiments, where they received all their military training. This was particularly difficult in wartime but even in normal circumstances the shock of sudden immersion in their regiments could be too much for the peasant recruits. Very heavy sickness and mortality rates resulted. To avoid this, a new system of Reserve Recruit Depots was established in October 1808. Men would be given their initial military training for nine months in these depots. The tempo of training was rather slow, discipline relatively mild and the training cadres were in any case entirely devoted to this task, rather than being subject to the other pressures of regimental service. Arakcheev expressed the hope that this would do something to ease the inevitable psychological stress when – as he put it – a peasant was torn from his accustomed village life and subjected to the totally different society and disciplines of the army.12
In January 1810 an important new institution was created at the heart of Russian government. The new State Council was Speransky’s brainchild. It was designed to debate and to advise the emperor on all legislation and budgets, and to oversee the ministries. Mikhail Speransky saw the State Council as the first step in the complete transformation of central government. This never happened, but major changes in the ministries’ structure and responsibilities were also under way in these years. In these circumstances it was difficult to predict in which institutions most power would lie. Alexander offered Arakcheev the choice of either remaining minister of war or becoming chairman of the military committee of the new state council. Arakcheev chose the latter, commenting that he preferred to supervise rather than be supervised. Since the new war minister, Barclay de Tolly, was junior to Arakcheev and to some extent owed his promotion to him it may be that Arakcheev believed that he would retain a degree of indirect control over the ministry. In fact, however, Barclay soon showed that he was very much his own man and quickly became Alexander’s chief military adviser, thereby earning the enmity of Arakcheev, who was intensely jealous of anyone who rivalled him for the emperor’s favour.13
Though his family originated from Scotland, Barclay was in reality a member of the German professional middle class. His ancestors had settled in the Baltic provinces, but Barclay himself was brought up by relatives in the German community of Petersburg. The dominant Lutheran values of his childhood home were obedience, duty, conscience and hard work. He reinforced these values and his own place within the German community in Russia by marrying his cousin, as commonly happened in this era. At the age of 15 he entered Russian military service as an NCO, being promoted to officer rank two years later. Better educated than the normal officer drawn from the Russian gentry, he rose on merit and at modest speed. It took him twenty-one years to rise from cornet to major-general. His skill and courage in the East Prussian campaign of 1806 won him promotion to lieutenant-general, brought him to Alexander’s attention, and secured him a key role in the subsequent war with Sweden. Urged on by Arakcheev, Barclay invaded southern Sweden from Finland across the ice of the Gulf of Bothnia in March 1809, thereby helping greatly to bring Swedish resistance to an end. A grateful monarch