A. I. Chernyshev: A Russian Lycurgus

Abstract

If it can be said that the Cossacks of nineteenthand twentieth-century Russia owed the shape and scale of their existence to the designs of any individual, then that individual was Prince Aleksandr Ivanovich Chernyshev (1785-1857). In successive capacities as cavalry commander, aidede-camp to two tsars, military reformer, and war minister, he led Cossacks into battle, stressed their continuing importance in the post-Napoleonic military order, presided over a local reform effort within the Don Cossack Host, then bore responsibility for imposing the Don pattern on the other Cossack hosts of the Russian Empire. Thanks largely to Chernyshev, those Cossacks who no longer formed the cutting edge of the colonization effort survived the passing of the frontier to become a special military class. Within a continuum of Cossack development, Chernyshev's contribution represented a culmination of policies, the origins of which are usually identified with another prince and military reformer, G. A. Potemkin.1 Despite Chernyshev's importance both to the Cossacks and to a larger world of military administration, he remains a neglected figure in the historical studies of pre-reform Russia. No satisfactory biography exists of the man who remained a confidant of two Emperors of quite different temperament, who rose to head simultaneously the State Council and the Committee of Ministers, and who for a quarter century (1827-1852)