The Imperial Russian Army in Peace, War, and Revolution, 1856-1917 by Roger R. Reese (review)

In the preface to the book reviewed here, the author expresses the wish that some of his opinions about the Imperial Russian Army will spark a debate. They likely will, if only because he minimizes the impact the Great War had on it and is somewhat too critical in his assessment of previous scholarship on the same topic, such as John L.H. Keep's Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462–1874 (1985), Allan K. Wildman's The End of the Russian Imperial Army (1980), Bruce Menning's Bayonets before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861–1914 (1992), and John Bushnell's Mutiny amid Repression: Russian Soldiers in the Revolution of 1905–1906 (1985).

In this well-written, though unnecessarily repetitive monograph, Roger R. Reece makes the following key points: (1) There existed a division—"a hierarchy of snobbery" (30)—between socially elite and wealthy officers concentrated in the Guards regiments, who wanted to maintain an army that rewarded men on the basis of birth rather than competence (an "army of honour," loyal to the monarch and the monarchical principles), and those, drawn from all sectors of society and in ever larger numbers due to the involvement of the empire in several major wars, who desired to transform it into one based on merit (an "army of virtue," whose members' first loyalty was to the people, the nation, and the state). The latter naturally resented the privileges the social elite had acquired through connections at court. Unfortunately for Russia, though, the transition to a modern professional army, with its bureaucratization of career patterns, was still incomplete by the time World War I broke out. This clash of values prevented the officer corps from acting as a unified body and affected the overall performance of the army. (2) Despite Tsar Alexander III's prohibition on engaging in politics, the officer corps was always political in the sense that its members, who were not isolated from mainstream society, recognized that the military was an interest group and, as a result, fought for its interests—a trend particularly noticeable during the constitutional period (1906–1914), when officers began to pay attention to Duma politics. (3) The Miliutin reforms, introduced by the minister of war in the wake of the disastrous Crimean War (1853–1856), improved conditions of service for soldiers, but only marginally so; they still had to deal with—and accept—inadequate food in terms of both quantity and quality, very low pay, lack of comfort in their barracks, and the occasional use of flogging—a reality that did not endear the tsars or to the autocratic system to them (4). Despite major changes in Russian society following the emancipation of the serfs (1861), most officers did not change their attitudes toward the soldiers, whom they cheated, exploited, and brutalized; indeed, given their mindset of social superiority and their patronizing attitude, they rarely viewed them as human beings, let alone as citizens. (5) The stress of World War I served as the catalyst for soldiers to act on their resentments. More literate and more politicized than their fathers and grandfathers, they were not as motivated to fight on the traditional basis (for the Orthodox faith, the tsar, and the motherland) and to accept all the privations that war entailed as they had been in previous wars. At the same time, the war discredited the government because it incurred so many casualties and seemed to be both pointless and unwinnable. An increased desertion rate, fraternization with and surrendering to the enemy, faked illness, and self-inflicted wounds were good examples of poor morale in the army. Appeals to patriotism as a rule failed to motivate the men; worse still, the recourse to the death penalty to shore up discipline only further alienated them. Furthermore, by blaming the mutinies on radical agitators, the...