In 1812 a Russian army inflicted two decisive defeats on the Persian army. The resulting Treaty of Gulistan shifted tsarist borders 250 miles south and secured Russian control over Georgia and the Caspian Sea littoral. The commanding general, Piotr Kotliarevsky, received a second St. George Cross (the equivalent of the Victoria Cross) for this accomplishment—wounded in the battle, surgeons removed forty pieces of bone from his skull to save his life. The Persians were allied to Britain, who, fearing Russian and French designs on India, had sent a mission in 1810 headed by General John Malcolm, to the Shah. Charles Christie, a military advisor on the mission was killed in battle. Whereas Malcolm was an important agent of British policy in Central Asia and India, Christie was one of the first Europeans to travel and map the Afghano–Persian frontier. These achievements are normally logged into Russian and English history, but the men behind them were not native Russians nor Englishmen. Kotliarevsky was born into a lesser Ukrainian noble family in Kharkiv (Kharkov) province, while Malcolm and Christie were Scots. Like thousands of their countrymen, they served and made careers in the empires that ruled their native lands. A Ukrainian was Peter I's principal panegyrist. Scots wrote Rule Britannia and created “John Bull.”
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Stephen Velychenko (1997) studied this question.