The Imperial Russian Army in Peace, War, and Revolution, 1856-1917

By Roger R. Reese

University Press of Kansas, 2019

Reviewed by Michael P. Kihntopf

Russian Enlisted Men in Galicia

Roger R. Reese is a professor of history at Texas A&M University.  He has written a number of works about the Russian Army under Josef Stalin’s leadership. In The Imperial Russian Army in Peace, War, and Revolution, Reese destroys many paradigms formed by Russian scholars who saw autobiographical accounts of the Russian Revolution, written in the 1920s and 1930s by disenfranchised imperial generals as beyond question accurate. His premise is that the soldiers’ rebellion in 1917 was not due to the defeats in the Great War as so many scholars contended. Instead, the roots of rebellion are deep, dating back to the Crimean War (1853–56) and the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Moreover, those roots were nurtured by the reforms of War Minister Dmitri Miliutin (1861–81). 

The Russian Army’s performance during the Crimean War was dismal. Miliutin identified two major factors in that performance: 1) the basis for recruiting officers and 2) officer education.  Those two reforms, along with the serfs’ emancipation, were like the big bang in the creation of the universe. Prior to the reforms, commissions were handed out to the nobility based on connections.  Consequently, the officer ranks were the dominion of the nobility whose position was bestowed on them by the tsar and not the Russian state. Therefore, their allegiance was to the tsar for continued privileges. Reese calls this an army of honor. In that army, connections to the royal family were the sources of promotions. 

Miliutin, however, wanted an army of virtue in which merit and education under state regulations was the basis for advancement. Military schools were opened to non-nobles. This brought the officer class into conflict with themselves. Nobles, contending that the protection of the tsar and not the preservation of the state was the military’s responsibility, resented non-nobles, who saw a state system of promotion that discriminated against them. This conflict was heightened during the Great War when the need for officer replacements led to the rank and file, whom the nobles considered still peasants, receiving commissions.

Reese’s research in this area takes into consideration letters and diaries of that time along with family histories. Most of these sources had never been used for various reasons—including the tight hand of the Russian archives. His quotes from this material peppered throughout the book are well selected and highly informative, as are his statistics for showing how temporary officers began to dominate the army command structure. I was particularly amazed at the high degree of education the quotes from non-nobles showed and which destroyed another preconceived notion that there was very little literacy among that class. 

A Group of Russian Officers Somewhere on the Eastern Front

The serfs’ emancipation threw another brick into the window of Russian history. With the emancipation and a universal service law, the army began to lose the exclusiveness of peasants in the soldiers’ ranks.  In 1900, peasants accounted for 90% of the ranks. By 1914, the peasant percentage was reduced to 60%. Artisans and craftsmen from rural life made up 16.7% and urban workers 7.87%.  These new categories of soldiers were literate and more worldly. Since the creation of the Russian army, most officers had been taught to see soldiers as not men but children who required stiff discipline.  

With the entry of better-educated soldiers and more socially adept individuals, the soldiers began to agitate for better conditions. Corporal punishments procedures were rewritten, as was the sole authority for administering such punishment which had resided in non-commissioned officers and officers under the aegis of the regimental commander. The rank and file simply expected more, and this too called into question the autonomy of the tsar.

Reese weaves a very compelling argument for showing that soldiers were always dissatisfied with their conditions. He maintains that the rebellions came from within the army,  rather than as a result of agitation from political factions outside of the army. The officer corps could have dealt with the problems but lacked a unity because of social differences: nobles did not want to cooperate with non-nobles.  The ranks’ deterioration was not caused by the introduction of soldiers’ soviets in 1917.

     

The Imperial Russian Army in Peace, War, and Revolution is a real eye-opener to me, and I’m sure that others interested in this theater of the Great War will be just as amazed. Reese’s research in statistics for officer losses not due to battle is quite shocking, as is the revelation of the lack of education among the majority of upper ranks. The work will temper anything that I might write about the Russian army hereafter.  

Michael P. Kihntopf