In the Autumn of 1749, Catherine and her rather unsatisfactory husband, the Grand Duke Peter, were still under the thumb of the Empress Elizabeth, but the unsatisfactory husband was allowed to indulge his passion for hunting and hunting dogs and was spending the quality time with the huntsmen which he was not spending with his young wife.
As it happened, there was a headstrong lieutenant, by name Yakov Baturin, from the Butirsky Regiment stationed nearby, inter alia an indebted gambler, although this last was common enough among officers in armies of the day. The lieutenant got in with the huntsmen and managed to secure an interview with the Grand Duke. An interview which turned out to be treasonous and the Grand Duke had the wit the back out fast.
A little while latter, Baturin was arrested and racked, during which racking he confessed his treasonous plotting. It was decided that the Grand Duke was in no way to blame for this plotting, but Baturin was sentence to life in the Schlűsselburg Fortress. The Russians, oddly, considering their brutality in other ways, were not as keen on hanging people as we were at that time.
After twenty years of this, Baturin escaped, was recaptured and sent to Kamchatka, from where he escaped again and was eventually killed in some brawl on the island of Formosa.
Which all seemed a bit improbable to me last night. And even if it were true, how could Massie or anyone else have possibly known about it? So this morning I take a quick peek at google.
Yakov and Baturin both seem to be common enough names in Russia, but the only relevant returns from google are references to this same book. No corroboration at all, although we do learn, en passant as it were, that google have it digitised. Does Massie get royalties for my click?
And while the leading returns from google are again from this very book, the Butirsky regiment is real enough, founded during the army reforms of 1642. So of an age with the oldest and most illustrious units in our own British Army.
The fortress seems to be real enough too, with the illustration taken from the Adelaide Advertiser of Saturday 12th March, 1910.
So far so good.
But what sort of a fortress would allow someone who had been rotting there for 20 years to escape? When we are told by prison reform people today that as little as eight years in a modern prison is quite long enough to make someone permanently rotten?
And then who would bother to keep records in far-off Kamchatka? A very wild and woolly place at that time, although it has now been reached by streetview, which offers pictures of suburban Kamchatka (somewhere around gmaps 53.060805,158.61626) which might easily have come from suburban London, with their new build houses looking very much like anyone else's.
And how on earth would anyone know that some obscure Russian fugitive was killed in Formosa in the 1770's or the 1780's? Another rather rum place at that time, the scene of much feuding between various waves of immigrants from mainland China and the aboriginals. An already post-colonial place with the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese of the 17th century having been kicked out, amidst much chopping off of heads.
PS: according to wikipedia, Formosa was once rich in a special sort of deer, the hides of which made very good armour for the Samurai, riches which led the Japanese to take an interest in the place.
No comments:
Post a Comment