The Committee for the Wounded

August 18, 1814

Gogol’s Dead Souls features a famous episode in which local officials in the provincial town the protagonist Chichikov is visiting are trying to figure out just who this fellow is and why he is purchasing deceased serfs. At one point the postmaster suddenly comes up with the idea that Chichikov is in fact a certain Captain Kopeykin, and he launches into a story about said captain:

“After the campaign of eighteen-twelve, my good man,” the postmaster began, despite the fact that the room contained not just one good man, but a whole six of them, “after the campaign of eighteen-twelve, there was a Captain Kopeykin sent back among the wounded. It may have been at Krasny and it may have been at Leipzig, but imagine – he had his arm and leg torn off. Well, back then they didn’t make any of those, you know, provisions for the wounded; that something-or-other fund for invalids was put in place, in a manner, much later. Captain Kopeykin sees that he has to work, but the only arm he has is his left one. He pays a visit to his father back home and his father says: ‘I have nothing to feed you; I, you can imagine, am barely able to come up with bread for myself.’ And my captain Kopeykin decided to set out, my good man, to Petersburg to see whether the sovereign might show him any monarchical mercy: ‘here it is, so on and so forth, in a manner of speaking, I sacrificed my life and spilled my blood…’ ”

Kopeykin, of course, was not granted a pension and winds up turning to a life of crime. In the final version of Gogol’s novel, the postmaster’s story is cut short when his audience reminds him that, seeing as how Chichikov has all his limbs, he could not possibly be the one-armed, one-legged brigand Kopeykin. In earlier drafts, however, the story continues and has Kopeykin escaping to America and writing a letter to the tsar, who is moved to set aside “capital for invalids” – a fund to aid wounded veterans.

In reality, of course, nobody needed the colorful Kopeykin to understand that Napoleon’s invasion and the campaigns that followed left in their wake legions of severely disabled Russian Army veterans. A few months after the arrival of Russian troops in Paris and Napoleon’s capitulation, on August 18, 1814 (which happened to be the first anniversary of the bloody Battle of Kulm), Alexander I established the Committee for the Wounded. Later, on the hundredth anniversary of his reign in 1877, this charitable organization was renamed in Alexander’s honor.

At first, only “indigent crippled officers,” unable to survive on their pensions and therefore in need of additional financial assistance, were eligible to apply for relief, and it was only later that the committee began to address the needs of the “lower ranks.” Back then, when social “safety nets” were unheard of and most people with disabilities could, at best, count on relatives, friends, or individual benefactors for help, the Committee for the Wounded provided a much needed source of assistance for a great many people. This was especially important since the Russian Empire was often at war, and every time the tsar sent troops to the Caucasus, the Balkans, Central Asia, or the Far East, a fair number of them were bound to come home with debilitating injuries.

The Committee for the Wounded, often referred to as the Committee for Invalids (the Russian cognate is still used for anyone with a disability), was provided with generous resources. In addition to its founding capital, the state mandated contributions from the most varied government agencies. The Committee also received support from private individuals. Its head, Pavel Pezarovius, donated all proceeds from his magazine The Russian Invalid (Русский инвалид) to the fund. Problem solved.

But, Russia being Russia, there were bumps in the road. In 1853, it was discovered that the Committee’s funds were being egregiously misappropriated. By then, the kind and honest Pezarovius was quite old, and his closest assistant, Alexander Politkovsky, as investigators reported in meticulous detail, had squandered 1,108,546 rubles and 1¾ kopeks – a fantastic sum for the time (when 35 rubles a month was a good white collar wage). At first, apparently, Politkovsky had intended to return the money. He kept a notebook in which he had his secretary record the amounts that he had “borrowed.” Later, probably upon realizing he had taken more than he would ever manage to return, he ordered that the notebook be burned and began to dip into the fund with total abandon. How he thought he would get away with his pilfering is unclear, but after his embezzlement came to light and the ensuing scandal, Politkovsky took his own life and a number of Invalid Committee members were punished. The misappropriated sums were fairly quickly replaced with fresh contributions.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the Committee for the Wounded paid out pensions and issued loans to officers and soldiers, assisted their families, paid for their children’s education, placed the most impoverished veterans in almshouses, and helped pay for monuments to those killed in battle. Overall, it performed a vast and important service. All this, of course, came to an end after the 1917 revolution. The Bolsheviks certainly had no intention of taking care of the tsar’s wounded, and in 1918 the Committee was disbanded.

Alas, the Soviet government did not do much for its own wounded veterans either. After World War II, virtually all severely disabled veterans quickly vanished from the streets of Soviet cities. The sight of armless and legless men begging on street corners or singing laments in trains was not consistent with the image of a great and victorious country. Many disabled veterans with no one to care for them were packed off to Valaam Island in the far North, to a “sanatorium” that in fact was something between an almshouse and a prison for those maimed while defending the motherland.

Today, veterans organizations uniting those who fought in Afghanistan or Chechnya do try to assist their wounded comrades, but we frequently read articles about twenty-first century Captain Kopeykins, embittered avengers who never received the government benefits they deserved.

In Moscow’s Metro system, one often sees armless or legless men in military dress wheeling or walking their way through subway cars, looking for a handout. Whether they are genuine veterans who have not been given an adequate pension or con men playing on people’s sympathies can be hard to judge. People tend to be generous with those who have a story about their war wounds. Apparently they have no trouble believing that the government cannot be counted on to care for the country’s veterans.