Aleksey Petrovich Yermolov - Legacy

Legacy

Yermolov is a highly controversial historical figure. He is respected by Russians for his military skills, and hated by many Caucasus nations for his brutality.

In Russia, he was famous for military prowess, bravery and strategy. His charismatic leadership of imperial armies was romanticized in poems by Alexander Pushkin, Vasily Zhukovsky, and others.

However, in the Caucasus (with the exception of Ossetia), Yermolov is infamous for atrocities he had committed.

As Caucasus expert Charles King puts it:

Ermolov was a quintessential frontier conqueror. He was the first to employ a comprehensive strategy for the subjugation of the Caucasus highlands, and his brutal methods would be used, in one form or another, by tsarists, Bolsheviks, and Russian generals into the twenty-first century.

Ermolov was the most celebrated and, at the same time, the most hated of Russian commanders in the Caucasus theater. To St.Petersburg society he was the gallant, Latin-quoting senior officer. For generations of indigenous mountaineers he was the dreaded "Yarmul" who razed villages and slaughtered families. Although he gained the supreme confidence of one Tsar, Alexander I, he was treated with suspicion by another, Nicholas I. He was responsible for implementing a series of policies that were at the time hailed as vehicles for civilizing the benighted Caucasus frontier but today might very well be called state-sponsored terrorism.