[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 time of the Russian advance.
[45]The military rockets devised by Sir William Congreve were used in the War of 1812, and those described by Flashman were obviously similar to this early pattern, which continued in use for many years. The Congreve was a gigantic sky-rocket, consisting of an iron cylinder four inches in diameter and over a yard long, packed with powder and attached to a fifteen-foot stick. It was fired from a slanting trough or tube, and travelled with a tremendous noise and a great trail of smoke and sparks, exploding on impact. Although they could fly two miles, the rockets were extremely erratic, and throughout the first half of the nineteenth century frequent modifications were made, including William Hale's spinning rocket, and the grooved and finned rocket, which could be fired without a stick.
[46]The secret society of Assassins, founded in Persia in the eleventh century by Hassan el Sabbah, "the Old Man of the Mountains", were notorious for their policy of secret murder and their addiction to the hashish drug from which they took their name. At their height they operated from hill strongholds, mostly in Persia and Syria, and were active against the Crusaders before being dispersed by the Mongol invasion of Hulagu Khan in the thirteenth century. Traces of the sect exist today in the Middle East.