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129 claimed was trained in accounting, later agreed to serve as an assistant accountant in that college. Thus, the attempts to recruit personnel to the colleges from among the thousands of Swedish officers in Russian captivity were only successful in fourteen cases.^®'* Of these fourteen men, the majority were from Germany and the Baltic provinces, while only three came fromSweden proper. Nikolaus Hoffman stated in a memorandum to the Senate that he had served for a long while “in offices in Stockholm and at other places in the provinces,” after which he had served four years as a field commissary. “Therefore,” wrote Hoffman, “it is so well known to me how incomes are collected and how they are allocated in accordance with ukazes and customs that I can even see from the accounts when the tax collector is doing the right or the wrong thing.” Hoffman, who was “somewhat knowledgeable in Russian,” applied for a position in the revizion-kolAnother Swede was Andreas Krocka, who had once studied at Malmö common school, and who was said to have had quite a lot of cameral experience. After serving for two years as a treasury scrivener with a field office, he had been named by the kammarkollegium first to the position of field accountant with the chief field commissariat and then to that of field commissary. Krocka, who had also learned Russian while a prisoner of war, had “thoroughly committed himself to serve in His Tsarist Majesty’s service continually and faithfully. The third Swede in the group, finally, was Joachim Richert from Skåne. Richert had first served as a clerk in the Swedish local administration and had subsequently gone into the military as a second lieutenant in a dragoons regiment. It is said that he had “a good knowledge of German and Swedish and considerable experience with Russian. The prisoners of war brought to St. Petersburg were examined by the vice presidents of the kamer-kollegiia, revizion-kollegiia, and iustits-kollegia (von Nieroth, von Brevern, and von Schmiden), as well as by rcpresentatives of the other colleges. The results of their examination, which was conducted with thirteen of the prisoners, since the fourteenth, Ditlev »«•* Ibid., 1. 215. See G. A. Nekrasov, “Russko-shvedskie kul’turnye sviazi v pervoi chetverti XVIII veka,” Skandinavskii sbornik, 22 (1977), 192. In the lists of the Swedish prisoners of war captured in connection with the battle of Poltava, one finds not only officers, noncommissioned officers, and private soldiers, but also civilian administrative personnel in the Swedish army, such as commissaries, accountants, assessors, lawyers, bookkeepers, cashiers, secretaries, scriveners, clerks, and so on. TsGADA, f. 248 delo 605 11. 213v, 217. Ibid., 1. 213V. Ibid., 1. 214; TsGADA, f. 248 delo 654 1. 95. y - Peteraou 363 ” 366 ” 367 :IG4 H66

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