The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming!

SYW Russian Brigade (click to enlarge the view)

Well, sort of, they will be here eventually as part of the Minden Miniatures figure range, but Fritz doesn't like to wait so He has started building his own Russian army using various Minden French, Crann Tara Piedmont, and RSM Russian figures to cobble an army together.

By the way, Minden already has two different Russian artillery crews and four different cannon models in the range. We also have the Marshal Fermor personality figure. The Russian musketeers and grenadiers are next in the sculpting queue so hopefully we will see some greens by the end of the Summer.

Yesterday I decided that I wanted to start on a regiment of Russian Horse Grenadiers. RSM makes the mounted trooper, but no command figures. So I used some Minden Hanoverian Horse command figures and swapped heads with some RSM Russian horse grenadiers to create the following command figures:

Horse Grenadier Conversions: Hanoverian Horse Command figures with head swaps from the RSM Horse Grenadier figures.

Another view of the horse grenadier conversions. In addition to the head swaps, I also used some green putty to fill in the jacket open of the trumpeter and standard bearer since they wore "single breasted" buttons down the front of the coat, whereas the officers wore a normal looking military coat without lapels.

Pictured below are a couple of photos of my first painted Horse Grenadier sample, done last evening before going to bed. I made one mistake on the painting: the horse furniture should be a fawn yellow color so I will have to go back and repaint it. All horse grenadier regiments have the fawn yellow horse furniture, all dragoons have cornflower blue horse furniture, and all cuirassiers have red horse furniture. That makes it sort of easy to paint, doesn't it?

RSM Horse Grenadier Trooper with a Minden medium officer's horse.

Same as the first picture, but seen from the reverse side. The sword has to be glued on separately and is kind of a pain in the derriere to work with, so I only glued swords onto one trooper and left the other 8 troopers open handed. I also left off the carbine, which should be on the right side behind the hand holding the sword.

I also swapped out the smaller RSM horses for some of the Minden medium horses walking, and I think that the two make for a perfect match. I really like the way that the sample figure turned out - I always paint one figure of a unit complete before tackling the rest of the unit because I want to see how it will turn out and find out if there are any difficult bits to paint. The finished figure then provides me with a sort of painting template to use on the rest of the figures.

I'm looking forward to starting painting of the horse grenadier command figures to see how the conversion works looks when painted.

What is next?

I might be able to make a 12-figure squadron of Russian dragoons using the excess horse grenadier bodies and the tricorned Hanoverian officer heads, but that is a lot of work.

After completing 24 horse grenadiers, I might tackle some RSM Cossacks, which look very nice, but put them on Minden or Fife & Drum light horses rather than RSM horses. The Minden horses kind of bring a certain uniformity to the project, which I like. I was looking at some of my old Connoisseur Russian Cossacks and these are small and thin enough to use with the RSM and Minden figures too.

I have to paint several more Russian gun crews to man my howitzers. One interesting item that I gleaned from Christopher Duffy's lecture on the Russian army at this year's SYWA Convention, was that the Shuvulov Howitzers were used as battalion guns because they were so effective at close range. So I might have to use Secret Howitzers for all of my battalion guns.

Russian vs. Prussian Actions, Encounters and Kleine Krieg in the East

I have been perusing Kronoskaf frequently in order to build up some knowledge about the Russian theater of war during the SYW. I'm finding that there was actually quite a bit of action going on in between the big battles (Gross Jagersdorf, Zorndorf, Kay and Kunersdorf). I always wondered what was going on in Poland during the SYW. The answer: quite a lot of small actions, raids and battles that might have been, but were never fought.

For example, in 1761 the Prussians sent a large "raiding force" of 20,000 men under Zieten to close in on Posen and destroy the Russian supply magazines there. They got close, but had to retire back to Breslau so as not to get cut off by the main Russian army.  In 1758 I believe, there was an opportunity for the Prussians to defeat the Russian army in detail near Posen and if General Dohna had been a little bit more enterprising, he might have defeated three different Russian columns had he moved faster, but by the time he got his army moving, the Russians had consolidated their army to full size.

There is even an incident where the Prussians, under Platen, went into Poland on a cattle raid and had a cattle drive of 200-300 cattle plus an equal number of sheep! Wouldn't that make for a fun scenario, a Western Cowboy style cattle drive in 18th Century Poland-Pomerania.

Comments Are Greatfully Received (and requested, please)

Finally, I hope that I can encourage my readers to leave some comments after reading this blog entry. Here is a little secret: blog authors crave receiving and reading comments. This blog is so much better when it can be a little bit interactive. I know that a lot of readers choose to be "lurkers", i.e. people who like to read the blog, but maybe are too shy to engage in commenting. Don't be shy, leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Old Glory 1805 Russians - from a different era.