Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917
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Foreign policy and the armed forces
costly) adaptation to the realities of warfare in eastern, central and southern
Europe.
A reliable source of military manpower was a central feature of that system.
In 1705 Peter introduced a new approach to conscription that, with modifica-
tions, was to endure until 1874. The country was divided into blocks of twenty
peasant households, and in every year each was required to supply a man
who was drafted for life into the army’s ranks. Serf owners, and in some cases
village communities themselves, were to make the selection. Of course, Peter
soon ignored the limits that the law of 1705 placed on military reinforcement,
and on numerous occasions both arbitrarily raised the numbers of draftees
called up and decreed additional special levies in response to the progress of
the war.
3
The recruiting procedures laid down in 1705 (as well as the frantic
deviations from them) resulted in the induction of over 300,000 men over
the next twenty years.
4
Despite its unfair and capricious implementation, this
method of recruitment stabilised under Peter’s successors. In 1775 Catherine
the Great changed the basic unit of conscription to the block of 500 peasant
males from which one recruit per year was exacted in peace, but as many as
five in wartime. In 1793 she also capped a private soldier’s military service at
twenty-five years, a measure that produced only a tiny class of retired veterans,
as the majority of recruits died or were disabled long before then. The basic
concept of the Petrine draft – compelling predetermined units of peasants to
replenish the army’s ranks on a crudely regular schedule – remained in place.
The system worked well enough to furnish the Russian army with more than
2 million soldiers between 1725 and 1801.
5
Because of the dramatic increase
in the population of the empire over the century, even larger intakes were
possible in times of crisis.
The recruitment system not only made it feasible for Russia to raise a
large army but also gave that army some qualities that differentiated it from
armies in the West. The first of these was the simple fact that it was wholly
conscripted, not partially hired. Until the French Revolution, most of the
great European powers maintained armies that included large proportions of
highly trained professional mercenaries. And mercenaries, however skilled,
manifested an alarming propensity to desert. The military manuals of the day
strongly advised against marching forces by night, or moving in the immediate
3 Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven and London: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1998), pp. 68–9.
4 William C. Fuller Jr, Strategy and Power in Russia 1600–1914 (New York: Free Press, 1992),
pp. 45–6.
5 John L. H. Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia 1462–1874(Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985), pp. 145, 165.
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vicinity of swamps and dense forests, in order to diminish the risk of mass
flight. By contrast, Russia’s post-Petrine commanders routinely engaged in
all of these manoeuvres, since the rates of desertion from the Russian army
were considerably lower than those that obtained in the French, Prussian or
Austrian ones.
6
This ought not to be taken to suggest that military service was popular
in rural Russia. Although a serf became legally ‘free’ when he entered the
army, conscription was a species of death. The recruit was torn away from
his native village, severed from the company of his family and his friends, and
was well aware that the chances were that he would never return to them.
Indeed, it became the custom for village women to lament the departure of
the recruits with the singing of funeral dirges.
7
Once a soldier had completed
his preliminary training and joined his regiment, he entered a milieu in which
irregular pay, shortage of supplies, epidemic disease and brutal discipline were
all too common.
Yet to enter military service was also in a sense to be reborn, for in the
soldier’s artel the Russian army possessed a powerful instrument for socialising
recruits and building group cohesion. Every unit in the army was subdivided
into artels, communal associations of eight to ten men who trained, messed,
worked and fought together. The artel functioned both as a military and
economic organisation, for it held the money its members acquired from
plunder, extra pay and hiring themselves out as labourers. In a sense, the artel
became a soldier’s new family, and it is significant that in the event of his death
it was his comrades in the artel, rather than his kinfolk, who inherited his share
of the property. Artels, which also functioned at the company and regimental
level, were reminiscent of the peasant associations back home with which
the recruit was already familiar, and consequently assisted his adjustment to
the rigours of his new environment and helped persuade him that the state’s
military system was legitimate.
8
The homogeneity of the army also facilitated a soldier’s identification with
military life. The overwhelming majority of private soldiers in the army were
Great Russian by ethnicity and Orthodox by confession. This was so because
the bulk of the empire’s non-Russian subjects were either excused from service
6 Walter M. Pintner, ‘The Burden of Defense in Imperial Russia, 1725–1915’, RR 43 (1984):
252.
7 Fuller, Strategy and Power,pp.167–73. Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, From Serf to Russian
Soldier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 110–11.
8 Wirtschafter, From Serf to Russian Soldier,pp.78, 148; Dietrich Beyrau, Milit
¨
ar und
Gesellschaft im Vorrevolution
¨
aren Russland (Cologne and Vienna: B
¨
ohlau Verlag, 1984),
pp. 347–8.
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in exchange for tribute, or organised in special formations of their own. This
was another respect in which the Russian army contrasted strikingly with the
armies of the West. At various points in the eighteenth century more than
half the troops in the service of the kings of Prussia and France were foreign
mercenaries. Since ethnic and religious homogeneity promoted cohesion, and
cohesion could translate into superior combat performance, contemporary
observers understandably viewed the homogeneity of the Russian army as
one of its greatest assets. A government commission of 1764 hailed the sense
of unity created in the army by a ‘common language, faith, set of customs and
birth’.
9
Certainly on many occasions Russia’s eighteenth-century troops did
perform outstandingly in battle, not merely against the forces of the Crimean
Khan and Ottoman Sultan, but even when matched against such first-class
Western opponents as Prussia. At Zorndorf (August 1758) during the Seven
Years War, the Russians killed or wounded over a third of the troops Frederick
the Great committed to the field and earned the awed plaudits of an eye-witness
for their ‘extraordinary steadiness and intrepidity’.
10
Of course an army must not only be recruited but also led. Peter I ini-
tially sought to engage capable military specialists abroad, but soon ordered
all males of the gentry estate into permanent service in the army, navy or
bureaucracy in his effort to ensure an adequate domestic supply of officers
and civil administrators. Moreover, in a series of decrees culminating in the
promulgation of the Table of Ranks in 1722, he established the principle that
acquisition of an officer’s rank conferred nobiliary status even on common-
ers. Yet the bulk of the officers continued to be drawn from the nobility, and
the officer corps became even more ‘noble’ as the century proceeded, despite
the fact that Peter III freed the nobility from the legal obligation to serve in
1762.Over90 per cent of all officers who fought at Borodino in 1812 were of
noble birth.
11
As for the nobles themselves, while the calling of the officer had
acquired the cachet of prestige among the wealthy strata of the elite, it was
also the case that there were large numbers of impecunious noblemen who
had no choice but to rely on government salaries for their livings.
Incompetence, mediocrity, peculation and even sadism were to be met
with within Russia’s eighteenth-century officer corps. An analysis of military-
judicial cases has revealed that the most typical grievances the soldiers voiced
9 Fuller, Strategy and Power,p.171.
10 Christopher Duffy, Russia’s Military Way to the West: Origins and Nature of Russian Military
Power 1700–1800 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 89–90.
11 Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar,p.125; D. G. Tselorungo, Ofitsery russkoi armii-uchastniki borodin-
skogo srazheniia. Istoriko-sotsiologicheskoe issledovanie (Moscow: Kalita, 2002), p. 73.
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about their commanders had to do with cruelty in the imposition of corporal
punishment on the one hand, and such economic abuses as withholding pay or
purloining artel funds on the other.
12
There were, however, also officers who
distinguished themselves by their honesty, fairness and paternalistic concern
for the wellbeing of their men. In any event, educational standards were low.
Certainly, there were the handful of military-technical academies that Peter I
had established, as well as some exclusive institutions of later foundation, such
as the Noble Land Cadet Corps. But there were not enough places in such
schools to accommodate more than a few hundred aspiring officers.
At the highest levels of military authority there was much to criticise, for
patronage and court politics were frequently decisive in the bestowal of a
general’s epaulettes, with predictable results. Yet eighteenth-century Russia
also benefited from the masterly leadership of some truly outstanding com-
manders. Confronted by foreign invasion in 1708–9 and 1812 respectively, Peter
I and M. I. Kutuzov figured out how to turn Russia itself, in all its immen-
sity, emptiness and poverty, into a weapon to grind down the enemy. Other
figures, including B. C. M
¨
unnich, P. A. Rumiantsev, Z. G. Chernyshev and
A. V. Suvorov, led the army to impressive victories over Tatars, Turks, Poles,
Swedes, Prussians and Frenchmen alike. M
¨
unnich smashed the Ottomans at
Stavuchany (1739) and was the first Russian commander ever to breech the
Tatar defences on the Crimean peninsula. Rumiantsev, a brilliant logistician
and tactician, routed the Turks at Kagul (1770) although outnumbered by over
four to one. Chernyshev, a talented military administrator no less than a strate-
gist, was instrumental in the capture of Berlin (1760). And in the course of his
extraordinary military career, the peerless Suvorov overwhelmed the Turks at
Rymnik and Focsani (both 1789), stormed Izmail (1790), forced the surrender
of Warsaw (1794) and defeated France’s armies in northern Italy (1799). His last
great military accomplishment – his fighting retreat through Switzerland –
became the capstone of his legend.
Yet even military commanders of genius cannot win wars unless their armies
are paid, fed, clothed and supplied. All of this requires money, and money had
been a commodity in relatively short supply in seventeenth-century Muscovy.
It was once again Peter the Great who devised expedients to extract more
cash from his oppressed subjects than ever before by saddling them with all
manner of new taxes. Here one of his most important innovations was the
poll (or soul) tax of 1718 that required every male peasant as well as most of
the male residents of Russia’s cities and towns to pay to the state an annual
12 Wirtschafter, From Serf to Russian Soldier,p.123.
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sum of 74 (later 70) kopecks. Owing to such fiscal reforms, as well as to the
growth in the size of the taxable population during his reign, he was able to
push state income up to 8.7 million roubles by the close of his reign. Whereas
military outlays had constituted roughly 60 per cent of state expenditure in old
Muscovy, under Peter they may have consumed between 70 and 80 per cent
of the state budget.
13
The army and navy continued to account for about half of
the Russian state’s expenses throughout the century until the 1790s, when the
empire’s territorial, economic and demographic growth combined to whittle
this figure down to roughly 35 per cent. By that point, net state revenues
exceeded 40 million roubles per annum, although it bears noting that there
had been considerable inflation over the previous seventy years.
14
TheRussianarmy of the eighteenth century, then, evolved into a remarkably
effective instrument of state power. It won the overwhelming majority of
Russia’s wars during the period and was the reliable bulwark of the state
against internal disorder, as in 1774 when it was employed to suppress the
massive peasant and Cossack insurrection of Emelian Pugachev.
The joists that supported Russian military success in this era were pre-
cisely the Russian Empire’s political and social backwardness by comparison
to Western Europe. Because Russia was an autocracy, and the country lacked
an independent Church or an ancient feudal nobility there were few imped-
iments to the ruthless exercise of governmental authority, which could be
used to requisition huge quantities of men, money and labour for the military
effort despite the meagreness of the resource base. In 1756 the Russian army,
if irregulars are included, was larger than the army of France, despite the fact
that the revenue of the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna was probably less than
one-fifth that of Louis XV.
15
It helped enormously that Russia was a society
organised in hereditary orders where institutions like serfdom and peasant
bondage of all kinds persisted long after they had been discarded in the West.
The subjugation of the peasants made it possible to count, tax and draft them,
as well as hold them (or their masters) collectively accountable if they failed to
perform any of their obligations. All of this meant that the Russian state could
more easily reenforce the ranks of the army with new draftees than could its
Western neighbours, particularly as the population of the empire increased.
This was no small matter, because Russian military casualties – as a result of
combat but even more so from disease – tended to be extremely high. If the
13 Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar,p.137.
14 Arcadius Kahan, The Plow, the Hammer and the Knout: An Economic History of Eighteenth-
Century Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 337, 341.
15 Fuller, Strategy and Power,pp.96, 105.
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Russian army was militarily effective, it was not necessarily militarily efficient.
Russia may have lost as many as 300,000 men during the Great Northern War
and may have taken another quarter of a million casualties during the Seven
Years War of 1756–63, a figure equal to two-thirds of the troops who saw service
in those years.
16
The military system also enabled the Russian state, in a pinch,
to make military efforts that were more robust than its Western rivals. In the
later stage of the Seven Years War after 1760, as France, Austria and Prussia
began to totter from acute military exhaustion, the growth in size of Russia’s
field armies in Germany did not abate.
17
And in 1812 a series of extraordinary
levies permitted Russia both to make good its losses and even enlarge the
forces it pitted against Napoleon. It has been calculated that 1.5 million men,
or 4 per cent of the empire’s total population, served in the army during the
reign of Alexander I.
18
Other than in Prussia, a military participation rate like
this one was inconceivable anywhere else in Europe.
For all of its success, however, the Russian military system had some weak-
nesses, which were already grave by the end of the eighteenth century and
became critically so in the next. To begin with, there was the issue of the
army’s size. Russia’s autocrats believed that they had to maintain a large army,
not only to support their geopolitical ambitions, but also as a matter of simple
security. Russia’s borders were longer than those of any other polity, and Russia
confronted potential enemies in Asia as well as in Europe. Moreover, there
was the question of the internal stability of the empire to consider. It was the
army that protected the autocracy from servile rebellion, and the deployment
of troops had to take into account domestic threats to the empire, no less than
foreign ones. The problem was that the larger the army grew, the harder it
became to foot the bill. As the Russian treasury was in constant financial dire
straits, tsarist statesmen were always preoccupied with finding economies in
the military budget.
One expedient was to make the soldiers themselves responsible for part
of their own upkeep. The state supplied the regiments with such materials
as leather and woollen cloth and then commanded them to manufacture
their own boots, uniforms and other articles of kit. It also authorised the sol-
diers’ artels to engage in ‘free work’ (that is, paid labour) on nearby estates.
Despite the fact that this arrangement diverted the troops away from military
16 A. A. Kersnovskii, Istoriia russkoi armii, vol. I (repr., Moscow: Golos, 1992), p. 63; John
L. H. Keep, ‘The Russian Army in the Seven Years War’, in Eric Lohr and Marshall Poe
(eds.), The Military and Society in Russia 1450–1917 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), p. 200.
17 Duffy, Russia’s Military Way,p.118.
18 Kersnovskii, Istoriia,p.204.
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exercises and opened egregious opportunities for larceny to dishonest regi-
mental colonels, ‘self maintenance’ (also known as the ‘regimental economy’)
endured within the army in one form or another until 1906.
Another tactic that the state employed to save money concerned housing.
In peacetime, for up to eight months of the year the army dispersed and was
quartered on the rural peasantry. Since the army therefore only ‘stood’ during
the four months it slept under canvas at summer bivouacs, the government was
relieved of the duty to construct (or rent) permanent barracks. This practice
naturally led to degeneration in the combat readiness of the armed forces,
a situation that was only ameliorated gradually as barracks accommodation
became more common in the early nineteenth century.
A final cost-cutting device involved settling a significant proportion of the
troops on farms where they would grow their own victuals as well as drill and
where their sons could be brought up to join the ranks as soon as they came of
military age. Using ‘land-militias’ to colonise (and thus to secure) dangerous
borderlandshadlong been practised inRussia,as wellas in such other European
countries as Austria. But Alexander I established an extensive network of
internal military colonies, which in 1826 were populated by 160,000 soldiers
and their families.
19
However, this experiment was an execrable failure: living
and working conditions were intolerable, and soldiers hated the harsh and
intrusive regimentation of every aspect of their lives. The massive uprisings in
the north-western military colonies of 1831 forced the government to institute
reforms that (inter alia) excused the ‘farming soldiers’ from the obligation of
military training.
A penultimate deficiency in the Russian military system was its inflexibility.
The imperial state often found it hard to concentrate its military strength in
the most crucial theatre when it went to war. Although the 1830/1 insurrection
in Poland assumed the character of a full-blown war, Russia was able to deploy
no more than 430,000 of its 850,000 troops there, in view of the magnitude
of the other foreign and domestic threats it felt it had to deter.
20
The optimal
solution to this problem would have been the introduction of military reserve
programme. This would have entailed a deep cut in the recruit’s term of
military service and a simultaneous increase in the percentage of draft-eligible
men taken into the army every year. In that event Russia might have been able
to diminish the number of troops it kept on active duty while building up a
19 V. G. Verzhbitskii, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v russkoi armii 1826–1859(Moscow: Izd. Sovet-
skaia Rossiia, 1964), pp. 118–19.
20 Frederick W. Kagan, The Military Reforms of Nicholas I: The Origins of the Modern Russian
Army (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 224–5.
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large reservoir of trained reservists on which it could draw in an emergency.
Yet the peculiarities of the Russian military system made a proper reserve
programme inconceivable. The Russian army had originally been designed
as a closed corporation, set apart from Russian society, that swallowed up
the peasants inducted into its ranks for good. There was no way in which a
civil society defined by hereditary estates and serfdom could have absorbed
or even survived an influx of a 100,000 or more juridically free demobilised
soldiers every year. Measures to assemble a class of reservists gradually (such
as the introduction of ‘unlimited furloughs’ in 1834) were only palliatives. If
serfdom and autocracy were the floor beneath Russian military power, they
also constituted its ceiling.
Finally, there is the question of military technology. The logic of the Russian
military system presupposed a low rate of military-technical innovation, and
the system consequently functioned best in an era when that held true. Over
time governmental decrees and entrepreneurial energy had made eighteenth-
century Russia mostly self-sufficient in the production of armaments. Russia’s
rich deposits of minerals were an advantage here, and for several decades in
the eighteenth century Russia led Europe in the output of iron. Although
improvements were made in the quality and performance of weapons, partic-
ularly artillery, during this period, overall the technology of combat remained
remarkably stable. The smooth bore musket was the standard infantry arm
under Alexander I just as it had been under Peter the Great. The relatively long
useful life of muskets – forty years was deemed the norm – obviously made
it easier for Russia to bear the cost of equipping its ground forces with them.
In fact, in 1800 the Russian state had issued at least some of its regiments with
muskets that had been in its arsenals since Peter’s time.
21
By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the Industrial Revolution
was making a major impact on the technology of war. Countries that neglected
to invest in the latest weaponry courted military disaster, as Russia herself
was to discover during the Crimean War. Unfortunately, Russia was a poor
country that could ill afford expensive rearmament drives. Her industrial sector
was insufficiently developed to manufacture the new ordnance, rifles and
munitions on a large scale. And the social, economic and political institutions
generated by autocracy were not particularly hospitable to modern industrial
capitalism either.
22
21 Pintner, ‘Burden of Defense’, 232.
22 Thomas C. Owen, Russian Corporate Capitalism from Peter the Great to Perestroika (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 8–9.
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Accounting for Russian military failure, 1854–1917
If it was military success that built up the Russian Empire, it was military defeat
that helped to bring the empire down. Russia’s great victory over Napoleon
seemingly validated the military system as it was and had closed the eyes of
many to its defects. Nicholas I (r. 1825–55) was personally devoted to the army,
desired to impose military order and discipline on his country as a whole,
and frequently turned to military officers to fill the most important posts in
the civil administration. Yet the army suffered from his neurotic obsession
with petty details and his penchant for staging massive parades and reviews,
which, though impressive, did little to enhance combat readiness. Nicholas
did manage to beat the Persians in 1828, the Ottomans in 1829 and the Poles
in 1831. Then, too, his Caucasian Corps fought credibly if unimaginatively
and indecisively in its interminable campaigns against the Muslim guerrillas
in Chechnia and Daghestan.
23
But when Russia had to battle Britain, France,
Sardinia and the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War of 1853–6 the
upshot was a military and political debacle. In its struggle with this powerful
coalition, the imperial government fell back on the methods of 1812 and by
means of extraordinary levies inundated the 980,000-man regular army with
over a million newly mobilised Cossacks, militia and raw recruits. But Russia
found it hard to bring more than a fraction of this strength to bear against the
enemy since hundreds of thousands of troops were pinned down in Poland,
campaigning in the Caucasus, guarding the Baltic frontier or garrisoning the
vast expanses of the empire. For much of the time, allied forces on the Crimea
peninsula were actually numerically superior to Russia’s. Russia’s principal
Black Sea Fortress, Sebastopol, fell in large measure due to the unremitting
pressure of the allies’ technologically superior siege artillery. During the con-
flict, which was the empire’s most sanguinary war of the nineteenth century,
that of 1812 excepted, 450,000 Russian soldiers and sailors lost their lives.
24
The
terms of the Peace of Paris of 1856, with their ban on Russian warships in the
Black Sea, were a humiliating infringement of Russia’s sovereignty, and left her
southern ports and trade perpetual hostages to the French and British fleets.
The Crimean War exploded one of the principle justifications for autocracy –
its ability to beget military power and security. The Crimean defeat not only
discredited the Russian military system but also destroyed confidence in the
empire’s entire panoply of political, social and economic structures.
23 See Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia
and Dagestan (London: Frank Cass, 1994).
24 John Shelton Curtiss, Russia’s Crimean War (Durham: Duke University Press, 1979),
pp. 455, 471.
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Under the new emperor Alexander II (r. 1855–81) fundamental domestic
reform wascomplemented bya policy of recueillement in foreign affairs. Russia’s
military leadership took advantage of the respite from major war to attempt
an overhaul of the entire military system. However, the army still did have
to cope with ‘small wars’ on the empire’s periphery. Although the capture
of imam Shamil in 1859 facilitated the eventual pacification of the Caucasus,
in 1863 the Poles rose in a serious rebellion that could only be suppressed
by brute force. There were also several campaigns in central Asia during the
1860s, 1870s and early 1880s. These solidified the military reputations of such
prominent generals as M. G. Cherniaev and M. D. Skobelev and effected
the submission to St Petersburg of Kokand, Bukhara, Khiva, Transcaspia and
Merv. The motivations behind this central Asian imperialism were complex
and confused, and ranged from a desire for more defensible frontiers, to a
concern for enlarging Russian trade, to a perceived need to concoct a paper
threat against Britain in India.
25
But a great deal of the impetus behind the
advance came from Russia’s ambitious military commanders there, who often
sparked off armed clashes with the Muslims in contravention of their orders.
When Russia’s next large-scale war erupted in 1877 against the Ottomans,
her military reforms had not yet come to fruition. Yet the protracted eastern
crisis that preceded its outbreak did permit the Russian military leadership
to develop its mobilisation, concentration and campaign plans with greater
than usual care.
26
Although Russia won the war, its military performance was
mixed. In the hands of excellent commanders, Russian forces were capable
of such magnificent actions as the seizure and defence of Shipka Pass and
the astounding Balkan winter offensive that brought the Russian army within
fifteen kilometres of Constantinople by January 1879.
27
But these triumphs
were to some extent counterbalanced by the failure of the three bloody
attempts to storm Plevna, the epidemic of typhus and cholera on the Caucasus
front, the total breakdown in army logistics and the appalling dimensions of
the butcher’s bill. Still worse, the other European powers, led by Germany,
colluded to prevent Russia from realising her entire set of war aims.
Germany was already the power that Russia feared the most. Since the
establishment of Bismarck’s Reich at the close of the Franco-Prussian War,
25 Seymour Becker, Russia’s Protectorates in Central Asia. Bukhara and Khiva,1865–1924(Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 23; Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian
Empire and its Rivals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 211.
26 David Alan Rich, The Tsar’s Colonels: Professionalism,Strategy and Subversion in Late Imperial
Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 157–8.
27 Bruce W. Menning, Bayonets Before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861–1914
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 77–8.
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