 However, through several hundred Russians who did make their way to fight for the Transvaal, upon arriving they were often shocked by the corruption of the Transvaal government, its state of disorganization, and the casual brutality of the Afrikaners towards blacks.One Russian volunteer, Yevgeny Augustus, wrote that the Transvaal had become "a paradise for adventurers and rogues of all kinds" as thousands of men from all over the world, many of them disreputable, arrived in the Transvaal to fight in the war.The majority of the Russians who fought for the Transvaal were Russian Jews who come before the war to take advantage of the booming economic conditions caused by the Witwatersrand Gold Rush.