I. Officers and Men in the Russian Army

Deeply religious, steadfast in battle, instinctively deferential to his officers—this was the established image of the Russian soldier at the opening of the twentieth century. The central tenet of Tsarist military ideology was that the army served “Faith, Tsar and Fatherland,” with officers as intermediaries between the simple soldier and the more distant founts of authority, God and Tsar. This was not mere prescription: Russian officers assumed the men trembled at the mention of God and routinely invoked divine sanctions when instructing soldiers in their obligations. Even observers whose job it was to penetrate the official myths took creed for reality. Analyzing the Russian army’s sources of strength, a Japanese military attaché wrote in 1903 that since the Tsar was anointed of God, “to serve the Emperor is the same as serving God: to oppose the command of the Sovereign, or in other words, the orders of officers, is the same as opposing the will of God.” Superimposing Japanese myth upon Russian, he added that because of the religious fervor of the Russian peasant soldier, Russians held death in contempt— to die in battle was, after all, to die for God.¹

Theology aside, almost everyone agreed that the Russian soldier was of surpassing quality—patient, enduring, brave, obedient—the kind of human material yearned for by officers the world over. This image of the Russian soldier had taken shape soon after the Russian army appeared on the battlefields of central Europe in the eighteenth century; foreigners had marvelled at the Russian soldier’s barbaric capacity to withstand fire. When General Henry Lloyd wrote that Russian infantry “cannot be defeated, they must be killed,” and Frederick the Great remarked that “it is easier to kill these Russians to the last man than to defeat them,” they were stating what was after the Seven Years War conventional wisdom.² Inevitably, awe of the furor Russicus waned as Russia’s string of eighteenth-century triumphs ran out in the nineteenth century, and as technological and social change produced new styles of combat and a new appreciation for rank-and-file initiative. Nevertheless, Major Von Tettau, a German General Staff officer who had made a close study of the Tsarist army, wrote after spending two months in the field with the Russians in 1903: “Full of selflessness and loyalty to his duty, nourishing trust in his commanders, the Russian soldier is material that is scarcely to be found in any other army in the world. “ True, most Russian soldiers were illiterate, but they “do everything with a will, are distinguished by endurance, are unassuming and always satisfied and jolly—even after labor and deprivation.”³

Both the German and Japanese observers identified the relationship between officers and men as a major ingredient of Russian military strength. Tsarist officers agreed. The model commander was a father to his men, and officers of all ranks were enjoined to exhibit paternal solicitude (and paternal severity) toward their charges. The Japanese attaché took the officers’ image of themselves, too, for fact, and believed that military paternalism was a carryover, not at all a bad one, from serfdom: “The Russian soldier is convinced that he and his officer are different kinds of people, that the latter is his lord, and that the officer knows more than he.” Officers, in turn, took a great interest in their men, provided both military and moral guidance, and withal, “officers love their soldiers, and there is a firm bond between them.”⁴

Foreign officers saw the Russian army much as it wished to be seen, but also as most Tsarist officers, to their subsequent undoing, believed it to be. It is easy enough to point to discrepancies between myth and reality, and to find satisfactory metaphores for the Russian army’s weakness in its nineteenth-century practice: whatever the bonds between officers and men, at mid-century Russian soldiers practiced musketry without targets, at the end of the century they marched in boots that disintegrated on the road to battle. Yet even the most fatuous and selfserving myths tell us something important about the Russian army. What needs examining is not the true measure of religiosity, selflessness, benevolent paternalism, and other qualities attributed to officers and men, but what it was about the Tsarist army that produced beliefs so misleading, and so widely shared by Russian officers and their foreign interlocutors.

The Two Russias and the Army

One feature of the Russian army that the Japanese attaché got right was the soldiers’ belief that officers and men were “different kinds of people.” In 1903, 89 percent of the conscripts were rural in origin; 65 percent were tillers of the soil, 18 percent were classified as “artisans and tradesmen” (and could come either from cities or villages), 2 percent were factory workers. Not all soldiers were Russian, but in 1903 73 percent were Russian or other Orthodox Slavs. In all but the technical units, the typical soldier was a Russian peasant.⁵ The connection between the Russian soldier’s martial virtues—largely passive—and his peasant background is clear: peasants arrived in the army fatalistic and inured to hard work and hardship.⁶

The officer corps was more heterogeneous. It had never been composed exclusively of the nobility, at least not since the days of Peter the Great. As of 1721, at least 17 percent of officers in the line infantry and cavalry were not of noble origin; the proportion of commoners probably remained at roughly the same level until the end of the eighteenth century, when the Russian army—and the officer corps—expanded rapidly during the Napoleonic wars. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the hereditary nobility supplied only half the officer corps, as it did in 1895, when only 30.8 percent of Tsarist officers (but 97.3 percent of full generals) were hereditary nobles.⁷ Yet the invariance of the proportion noble in the second half of the nineteenth century masked a gradual change in the economic status of the noble officers. Due to the impoverishment of the nobility and the declining social prestige of the officer corps, the noble officer was less and less likely to be landed. By 1895, only 33 percent of Russia’s full generals owned any property at all (and that usually not property in land); only 15.2 percent of lieutenant generals, 10.2 percent of the major generals on the General Staff, and 5.2 percent of the colonels on the General Staff owned any sort of property. The proportion with sizable holdings was much smaller, and among officers of lower rank the percentage of property owners must have been minuscule. Outside the socially exclusive Guards regiments, the typical officer—whether noble or not—was penurious.⁸

It was difficult to differentiate between officers who were and were not noble not only because their incomes were identical, but also because they shared a common life style. In an attempt to instill noblesse in the increasingly declassé officer corps, military schools in the latter part of the nineteenth century taught the social graces, and for the same purpose the government instituted regimental courts of honor and, in 1894, dueling for officers. Courts of honor and dueling sustained a cult of the uniform that impelled officers to behave in at least some respects like old regime nobles. Moreover, all officers indulged in varieties of social activity—heavy drinking, gambling, and other forms of boisterous behavior—that may with certain allowances be considered characteristic of the stereotypical Russian nobility. For all that, it is misleading to think of Russian officers—even most of those born to the degree—as impoverished nobles, or even as a group with a sense of unity.⁹ Officer and soldier were not “different kinds of people” because one was an epigonous noble, the other a raw peasant. The difference was more fundamental than that.

Whatever his lineage, the officer came from Europeanized Russia, the peasant soldier from traditional Russia. This most fundamental of all divisions within Russian society dated from Peter the Great’s reign. Peter quite deliberately cut the ties of the Russian elite to traditional Russia when in 1698, just back from Western Europe, he personally took scissors to the beards and loose garments of his startled nobles, ordered that suits of English fashion be hung at Moscow’s gates, and commanded nobles and officials to copy them. Western fashion, almost immediately assimilated at court and in the bureaucracy, had by the late eighteenth century become standard even for provincial nobles on their isolated estates. But it was not then or later adopted by peasants, or by much of the tradition-bound merchantry or urban lower classes. So obvious were the implications of sumptuary differences that in the late 1870s the inferior classes were warned off from the fashionable Tauride Gardens in St. Petersburg by a sign reading “entrance forbidden to persons in Russian dress” (this in the capital of the Russian empire).¹⁰ By the second half of the nineteenth century, nobility and elite were no longer coterminus, and not all of those who dressed in the Western manner belonged to the social, political, or cultural elites. Nevertheless, the meanest clerk in an ill-fitting frock coat lived in the ambit of the fashionable aristocratic salon rather than the world of the peasant hut.

Manner of dress, of course, stood for a complex of social and psychological traits. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the domestic architecture, diet, and entertainments of the two Russias diverged in parallel with their dress. So did their language. That the late eighteenth century elite was as much at home in French as in Russian is less important than the fact that the Russian used in official society evolved until it became, as Alexander Herzen noted in 1851, “an undifferentiated flux of noise” to the peasant who had to make sense of it.¹¹ (The language of the army was equally foreign to the peasant conscript.) Behind the two Russian languages stood different ways of perceiving the world. However many exceptions there may have been, and however misleading the terms may be, the European Russian mentalité was rational and linear in a way that the peasant mentalité—nourished on the closed seasonal cycle and the arbitrary intrusion of the elements— was not.¹²

Not that the Russian peasant or peasant conscript was dull or necessarily illiterate. Indeed, the statistics on conscript literacy in the early twentieth century are impressive: roughly 50 percent of all draftees were judged literate by the army.¹³ Even allowing for the fact that the army counted a conscript literate if he could not sign his name but could decipher a few syllables, this is a remarkably high figure given the state of Russia’s primary school network—many literate conscripts had not attended public or church schools. Peasants had understood since at least the 1860s that the world was changing around them and that literacy and numeracy were essential for survival, and they had sought education even when formal schooling was unavailable. However, peasants acquired only the minimum of education necessary for self-defense, and they adopted enrollment strategies that ensured the education their children received would not threaten traditional village society.¹⁴

Russian peasants had always sought to deflect or propitiate the forces that intruded on the village, and they continued to do so at the turn of the century, adapting the village economy to the increasingly dynamic market while retaining the traditional social and economic functions of household and village. Urban goods and items of urban fashion—from galoshes and short jackets (incongruously combined with traditional garb) to brick construction—increasingly penetrated the village, urban names did not. The one reflected the hegemony of city over village, the other the peasants’ unshaken sense of separate identity. Indeed, one could gauge the distance between peasant and European Russian by the names they bore: the peasants’ Akulina and Fekla were unthinkable in polite society, the Olga and Elena of the city notably unpopular in the village. At the close of the nineteenth century, many peasants still lacked surnames; conscription boards assigned them by fiat.¹⁵ Peasant Russia was changing, just as peasant societies have always responded to pressure from the urban world that dominates them. But peasant Russia continued to stand apart, tenaciously and deliberately, from European Russia. When peasant conscripts arrived in their units, the confrontation between officers and men was a confrontation between two different cultures.

That confrontation continued throughout the five or so years (fluctuating between six and four from 1874 to 1905) peasants served. The cultural schism within the army withstood even the efforts of Dmitrii Miliutin, a military reformer whose interests extended to social and political reform, to transform the Tsarist army into a modern, professional force and to make of the army a tool for achieving national unity. Miliutin served as Minister of War from 1861 to 1881, a period during which first the fresh impression of Russia’s humiliation in the Crimean War, and then the stunning display of prowess by the Prussian army, created opportunities for reforms that a deeply conservative military establishment and a hesitant government would otherwise have blocked. Miliutin radically overhauled the system of military administration, attempted to bring Russian arms up to the Western standard, oversaw a revision of the regulations on tactical training, and sought to improve the quality of the Russian officers corps by establishing a new system of officer training schools that could for the first time provide formal military education for all officers and facilitate the advancement of talented commoners. Equally important to Miliutin was to improve the quality of enlisted personnel and eliminate the stigma of servility from service in the ranks.¹⁶

Prior to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, military service had itself been a particularly brutal variant of serfdom. In the standing army created by Peter the Great, service was for life, a term later reduced to 25 years. State peasants and the taxable urban population were subject to conscription along with serfs, and in the army they were all enserfed. Length of service alone marked the soldier as a social outcast—if he survived his term he had no home to which to return—while the fact that the children he sired while in service were the property of the army underscored his status as chattel. This was a reality recognized in the rituals and laments with which peasants took leave of conscripts (the conscript lament itself emerging together with the standing army). The conscript’s family feasted as if in memory of the dead, the conscript went on a socially sanctioned drunken spree while the womenfolk lamented at home, and finally the conscript paid his last respects to his relatives and friends, each of whom fed him and lamented over him.¹⁷ The earliest extant lament for conscripts, recorded by Radischev in the late eighteenth century, illustrates the motif of loss and abandonment that persisted in the genre down to 1914:

Child of my heart, to whom are you abandoning me?

To whom are you entrusting your parents’ home?

Our fields will be overgrown with grass, our hut with moss.

I, your poor old mother, must now wander the world.

Who will warm me in my decrepitude, who shade me from the heat?

Who will give me food and drink?¹⁸

The conscript lamented not only the loss of family, but also his lot in the army:

The spring torrents will pour out,

Our bitter tears will flow,

During training, parent, during torment.

They will beat us, unfortunates, without mercy,

They will beat us, parent, until we bleed,

Unto death they will beat our miserable heads,

They will drive us, poor soldiers, through the gauntlet.¹⁹

“Beaten unto death” was a frequent refrain in the conscripts’ laments, “bitter” the invariable epithet evoking the soldier’s fate. The songs, sayings, and lore of military service were grim.²⁰ They were also reasonably accurate, though the folk vision gave little place to the monotonous routine of army life. Brutally beaten, degraded, utterly defenseless, the soldier in the serf era was the lowest and most unfortunate element in Russian society.

If the soldier serf was appropriate—inevitable, really—in a serf society with a standing army, he was no longer appropriate, either socially or militarily, after the Emancipation. The length of service meant, for one, that it was impossible to establish a reserve system: the annual draft was low, the number who annually completed their service lower still, and those mustered out of the army were in any case too old for further soldiering. The impossibility of adding significant numbers of trained reserves to the army during war had contributed to Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War, and even before he became War Minister Miliutin urged that service be shortened and a proper reserve system be introduced. Shorter service would require more intensive training, which could best be effected by raising the educational level of the soldiers—by teaching illiterate draftees how to read and write, and by drafting more literates (who because of the correlation between literacy and social class were largely exempt from the draft). For military reasons alone, then, Miliutin believed that service must be shortened, liability to conscription made universal, and soldiers taught to read and write. Moreover, Miliutin had concluded as early as 1839 that more humane treatment of soldiers would improve the army’s fighting capacity.²¹

But Miliutin had a broader, though unstated, purpose in urging these reforms. He had come of age when the Slavophiles were preaching that peasants were the bearers of Russian national character, when writers— Turgenev the most illustrious of them—had made peasants fit subjects for literature, and when the spokesmen for “official nationality” had insisted on the virtues of the “organic unity” of the Russian people. National character and the uniqueness of Russian society were the coin of discourse in intellectual circles in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, though the rediscovery of the peasant and the new appreciation for “organic unity” were themselves oblique testimony to the fundamental disunity of Russian society. Indeed, “Westernizers” had argued that only if Russia adopted Western social and political principles would the Russian peasant ultimately be lifted from the mire and debilitating social divisions be eliminated. Though Miliutin associated with Slavophiles and “official nationalists,” and shared some of their views on Russian exceptionalism, his vision was more that of liberal Westernizers who looked to the government to steer Russia toward national unity through social and political reform. And just as he hoped that the Emancipation and other reforms in civilian society would make all Russians equal subjects of the Tsar and citizens of a united Russia, so Miliutin wished to use the army for national as well as military purposes. To educate soldiers and to make even the nobility liable to the draft (which was conceivable only if the term of service were reduced and conditions of service altered) would make the two Russias one within the army and foster unity in the nation at large.²²

Among Miliutin’s first steps as Minister of War was to eliminate the most obvious marks of the soldier’s debasement. In 1862 he abolished the gauntlet and sharply curtailed corporal punishment. The conscripts of 1863 (the first after the Crimean War) were not required to stand naked for hours awaiting medical inspection but were allowed instead to wear shifts, their foreheads were not shaved to signify they had been taken, and they were not dressed in convicts’ garb as they proceeded to their units.²³ Miliutin also went a long way toward turning the army into the school of the nation in the narrow sense. Immediately after the conclusion of the Crimean War, officers began to teach literacy classes in the winter months; the initiative seems to have been taken by junior officers gripped by the same missionary zeal that led their civilian contemporaries to teach Sunday classes for urban workers, but the Ministry of War seconded their efforts. Advocates of educating soldiers believed literacy would improve morale and morality, provide soldiers with a conscious appreciation of their obligations and rights, broaden their intellectual horizons, and even make it possible for conscript NCOs to achieve officer rank. Although in the 1860s not all regiments provided instruction in reading and writing, by the end of the decade reports arriving at the Ministry of War indicated that 50 percent of enlisted personnel were at least able to read, and that 28 percent could write. Military inspectors concluded that these figures were inflated and should be reduced by one-third, but even so the level of literacy in the army far surpassed the meager attainments of conscripts prior to service: in the late 1860s fewer than 10 percent of those drafted could meet the army’s minimal test of literacy. Progress in elementary education continued in the 1870s, and in 1875 literacy instruction became mandatory for all illiterate conscripts.²⁴

It was more difficult to introduce short-term service, a reserve system, and universal liability to the draft: generals believed that only long years in the army made reliable soldiers, while the nobility fought any loss of privilege. In the 1860s Miliutin circumvented opposition to short-term service by giving soldiers permanent leave after seven or eight years in the ranks; only after 1870 did resistance to the principle of short-term service and universal liability soften. The crucial convert to Miliutin’s point of view was a former Minister of Interior, Valuev, who had been in Western Europe in 1870 and had witnessed the mobilization of the Prussian army during the Franco-Prussian War. Even with Valuev’s support, it was not until 1874 that six-year active duty and universal liability became law (certain family situations secured exemption, enrollment in an educational institution earned deferment). The length of active service was reduced in proportion to the conscript’s level of education because Miliutin believed that the most productive members of society should be permitted to contribute to national development as quickly as possible. Additionally, those with a secondary or higher education who volunteered were rewarded with an even shorter term in the line (as little as a year), and could then qualify for admission to the officer corps. The details of the regulations for volunteers were heatedly contested, because conservatives feared that too many commoners would become officers by this route. But the principle of national unity triumphed over the tradition of class privilege in this matter as in the new conscription law in general. Echoing what Miliutin had long argued, Alexander II proclaimed in his manifesto on universal liability to military service that “The strength of the State . . . is based chiefly on the moral and intellectual qualities of the army, which can be fully developed only on condition that the defense of the country has become the common task of the people, and when all, without distinction of rank or class, unite in the sacred cause.”²⁵

Miliutin’s reforms achieved at least a part of their military purpose— after 1874 the army could be rapidly expanded in time of war—but the reformed army did not foster social cohesion. After Miliutin’s resignation in 1881, even schooling in the most restricted sense fell into disfavor. During the 1880s literacy instruction became optional, and by the 1890s had largely been abandoned. Miliutin’s successor, Petr Vannovskii (Minister of War 1881-1898) suspected that education was harmful for soldiers, a view shared by many officers. Officers were as likely as not to make fun of soldiers who had the itch to read, and junior officers who continued after 1881 to view the dispensation of enlightenment as a part of their mission were mistrusted by their superiors and occasionally ordered to desist. Even when mandatory courses in literacy were reinstituted in 1902 (and then only in the infantry and artillery), officers satisfied the higher staffs by routinely writing up fictional accounts of classes taught.²⁶

Neither Russia ever accepted the notion that in the ranks of the army all were equal. The reaction of the nobility to the 1874 reform was typified by the mass resignation of young nobles without military education who were marking time as junkers in the Guards before receiving commissions. Required under the new rules of service to spend a year in the ranks as volunteers and risk treatment as ordinary soldiers, they preferred to find alternative careers.²⁷ The young nobles need not have worried. Members of the educated classes who served in the ranks, either as volunteers or under other circumstances, never became a leaven in the soldier mass. Peasant conscripts were suspicious of them, while officers assigned them light duties (in company offices, for instance) and treated them as social equals.²⁸

Officers could not treat volunteers as they did ordinary soldiers because, as Captain Anton Denikin (later to lead the Whites against the Reds) wrote in 1903, they could not conceive of soldiers as fellow men.²⁹ The soldiers’ inferiority was codified in military regulations: soldiers were forbidden to smoke in public (or in the presence of officers), to ride first or second class on the railroad (this regulation was adjusted to technological change in 1908, when soldiers were additionally forbidden to ride inside street cars), or to enter buildings where alcoholic beverages were served.³⁰ Signs in major cities and garrison towns banned “soldiers and dogs” from walking on major streets, in public gardens, or in some cases on sidewalks.³¹

More important than the myriad restrictions on the soldiers’ behavior and movements was the mentality that underlay them. Officers addressed soldiers not with the polite “you” (vy) but with the familiar “thou” (ty), used with animals, children, and social inferiors. When progressive officers pointed out that use of the familiar demeaned soldiers, most officers responded that it had always been thus, while a few argued learnedly that use of the polite form was a Petrine innovation and as such foreign to the Russian village.³² True enough—and soldiers understood that the familiar denoted their inferiority as members of peasant Russia. Regimental commanders gave newly commissioned officers private tuition in the use of “multi-story” Russian curses, explaining that soldiers could not be made to do anything unless they were roundly abused.³³ The incidence of physical abuse had declined by the late nineteenth century, but there was nothing out of the ordinary in an officer striking a soldier. Striking a volunteer or any other soldier from educated society was, of course, unthinkable. The peasant soldier understood that in the matter of beatings as in the familiar, his inferior standing derived from his social origin rather than his military rank—it was as natural to him as to his officer that he, but not the ex-student, would be beaten before he left the army.³⁴ These attitudes, deeply imbedded in Russian society, survived the Miliutin and all subsequent military reforms. The reform of military institutions did not alter the character of Russian society, rather it was Russian society—in particular the two cultural systems that coexisted in it—that shaped the army as a social institution, the psychology of officers and soldiers, and the views they had of each other.

The Tsarist Army’s Peasant Economy

Some Tsarist officers believed that, whether or not formal education were provided, service in the army “civilized” peasants. As one put it, the conscript’s military career began “with a bath and a haircut,” then proceeded to “cleanliness and neatness in dress.” Conscripts were “taught to speak, look, turn and move with military precision,” and they learned new words and concepts—the intricate grammar of the military hierarchy, the catechism of the soldiers’ duties and military virtues. In sum, “the wholly rough-hewn and rude peasant conscript receives, in the broad sense of the word, a human finish.”³⁵ The attitude toward peasant soldiers revealed in that statement is one more illustration of the cultural abyss that divided officers and men, but if phrased in neutral terms the proposition is superficially plausible. It accords with the view of military sociologists and modernization theorists that service in the army—an institution with a formal hierarchy, abstract rules, and precisely defined patterns of behavior—instills not only “new habits of dress, of cleanliness, of teamwork,” but even “a new personality,” “a new sense of identity.”³⁶ But the Tsarist army did not remake the peasant personality, and not just because civilian cultural patterns overrode formal military institutions: the structure of Tsarist military service itself sustained peasant habits and peasant attitudes.

The regimental economy rather than military training shaped the soldier’s duties. This was the result ultimately of Russia’s relative socioeconomic backwardness, but more specifically of the fact that in the late nineteenth century the government restrained military spending in order to finance economic and social development. Russia’s military budget did grow steadily, from 256 million rubles in 1881 (206 million in 1882, a more representative year) to 326 million rubles in 1902, but this represented a declining share of the national budget: from 30 percent in 1881 (26 percent in 1882) to 18 percent in 1902. As William Fuller has shown, the Russian army, with nearly a million men, received in the period 1881-1902 just barely more money than the German and French armies, which were not much more than half as large as the Russian. In 1893, Russia spent only 57 percent as much per soldier as Germany, only 63 percent as much as France.³⁷ Indeed, it was in the maintenance of soldiers that the greatest economies were made. Striving to achieve parity in armaments, the Ministry of War economized on the upkeep of soldiers and so transferred the financial pressure downwards: tactical units were forced to be, in large measure, self-supporting.

A typical line regiment spent annually up to 5,000 rubles more than it received from the Ministry of War, but the cash deficit was less important than the deficit in kind covered by the liberal use of soldier manpower for nonmilitary purposes. The commissariat provided basic foodstuffs, or money for the purchase of comestibles on the market, but to maintain an adequate diet regiments cultivated their own gardens and orchards wherever feasible, and even kept some cattle. The commissariat provided the raw material for boots and uniforms, but the regiment produced them (in 1907, 12 percent of all enlisted personnel— 150,000 soldiers—spent their duty hours tailoring). Prior to 1906, the commissariat provided neither money nor raw materials for blankets, coats, felt boots, utensils, or other necessities; these the regiment had to produce or acquire on its own. Every regiment maintained workshops staffed by soldiers permanently detailed to production, but soldiers from line companies as well did duty as tailors, cobblers, carpenters, cooks, and gardeners. They also served as stable hands, singers, musicians, church attendants, batmen, and lackeys in the officers’ club.³⁸

During the eight or nine months a regiment spent in its barracks, forty or more of the one-hundred-odd men in a company spent their time on these duties. Since most other soldiers were on guard or serving as duty orderlies, the total number of men free for the training prescribed in the regulations was low: one officer estimated that on an average day only one or two soldiers, in rare cases as many as ten, were free for drill; another figured five to eight men were available for drill on most days, twenty in exceptional circumstances.³⁹ Only in the three months of summer camp was an appreciable number of men free for training, and even then roughly half the strength of the regiment was left at winter quarters for sentry duty, barracks repair, and other housekeeping chores. What with guard duty, rehearsals for review, and miscellaneous details, not much time was left for drill even in camp.⁴⁰ Military training, clearly, was near the bottom of the regiment’s priorities. What training a soldier received was episodic, and it is not difficult to believe a report that, after the four months of intensive post-induction drill a Russian soldier’s military skills steadily deteriorated, reaching a low point just before he was discharged into the reserves.⁴¹

Liberal employment of men for production and upkeep seriously impaired training but still left the regiment woefully short of money to obtain needed supplies. Funds could be diverted from budgeted expenditures to unbudgeted but more pressing needs; though illegal, this was an unavoidable necessity in every unit.⁴² Yet the money available for misappropriation was itself inadequate. The only resource a regiment had in relative abundance was labor, so commanders dispatched soldiers to earn money in the civilian economy through “vol’nye raboty” (“civilian work”). After the summer encampment, soldiers spent a month or two working away from their units; part of the money earned went into the regiment’s coffers, part the soldiers were allowed to keep for themselves.⁴³ The detrimental impact of vol’nye raboty on military efficiency was obvious. As General Dragomirov, commander of the Kiev military district, wrote in 1899,

In July enlisted men are usually off mowing hay, working in forests, on railway lines and on construction in the cities; they ruin their clothing; they acquire an external aspect entirely unsuitable [for military service], they become unaccustomed to discipline and lose their military bearing.⁴⁴

Between 1900 and 1902, serious consideration was given to banning this migratory labor entirely, but regimental finances dictated otherwise. Dragomirov, who strongly favored a ban, concluded that this was impossible—the money soldiers earned was needed to purchase supplies. Another officer noted that he had to issue blankets to his men from the unit’s permanent stores, the stores had to be replenished to the regulation level, no money was allocated for this, so there was no alternative to collecting money soldiers earned.⁴⁵ The money earned was considerable: regiments acquired an average of 3-5,000 rubles. In 1900, soldiers in the Warsaw military district brought 500,000 rubles back to their regiments, in 1903 they returned with over 600,000 rubles. There being no alternate source of revenue, migratory labor continued, though work that might endanger the soldiers—such as operating agricultural machinery—was forbidden. Only in the St. Petersburg military district were vol’nye raboty banned, in 1900.⁴⁶

The austerity that the Ministry of War transferred to the regiments was in turn passed down to the soldier; as the regiment had to produce its own goods and finance much of its operations, so the soldier paid for much of his kit. Until 1906, soldiers provided for themselves soap, spoons, boot brushes and polish, oil and rags for cleaning rifles, in many units blankets, bedlinen, shirts, and so forth. Some small funds were distributed to soldiers so they could obtain necessities that the army was supposed to issue (unlike those in the foregoing list) but for one reason or another did not; these funds never covered the market cost.⁴⁷

The most burdensome expenses were associated with the soldier’s boots. According to regulations, soldiers were to receive two pairs of boots per annum, but since regimental commanders preferred to amass stocks, soldiers had to make do with one pair. And army-issue boots were renowned for their poor quality, lasting no more than three months—they did, quite literally, disintegrate. As one officer wrote, after summer camp and maneuver, “soldiers are in most cases barefoot.”⁴⁸ That was not hyperbole. Another officer described the Chinese landscape after a Russian detachment marched through in 1900:

The entire road was strewn with the boots of the 2nd battalion, which had preceded us. These implements of soldiers’ torment, specially designed by the commissariat, lay about with only the remainders of soles, like sharks with their teeth bared.⁴⁹

Since soldiers could not get by without boots (were indeed required to keep them in proper shape), they had no choice but to repair boots at their own expense, which could run to as much as 4 rubles per year even if the work were done by the company cobblers.⁵⁰

The cost of repairing boots was alone greater than the soldier’s pay. Prior to 1906, a Russian private received 2 rubles 70 kopeks per year (as against 13 rubles in the French army, 36 rubles in the German army). According to one officer’s computation, the soldier’s minimum annual budget in 1903 was 23 rubles 58 kopeks, producing a deficit of 20 rubles 88 kopeks. Another officer came up with a minimum budget of 10 rubles 86 kopeks by eliminating, among other things, repair of boots (it was the soldier’s fault if his boots wore out, he should be expected to pay for repairs himself), tobacco (harmful), and entertainment outside the barracks (soldiers can sing and play games inside the barracks, and they ought not to mix with civilians in any case).⁵¹ The budgets officers drew up tell us as much about officers as about the soldiers’ expenses, but all agreed that soldiers needed a great deal more money than they were paid.

Soldiers obtained the money they needed from a variety of sources. They kept a part of the money earned through seasonal labor. Many received money from home, but usually not enough to cover expenses; at least half of the soldiers in a unit were “in need” even after family subsidies. Soldiers also sold part of their daily 3-pound bread ration; officers, embarrassed by soldiers and civilians haggling over the price of bread just outside the barracks, attempted in vain to end the practice. The 30 or so kopeks per month soldiers earned in this way exceeded their monthly pay of 22½ kopeks. As a last resort, soldiers begged on the streets.⁵²

As hard as his lot was, there is no reason to believe that the Russian soldier experienced it as special hardship, still less as something traumatic or psychologically disorienting. The psychological burdens were confined to the four months of intensive training after induction.⁵³ After that, the soldier’s life resembled the familiar peasant routine. Poverty itself was familiar, as was the spectrum of quite unmilitary daily activities. Like the village, the regiment tried and failed to be selfsufficient, and like the village, the regiment had to participate in the market economy. Individual soldiers marketed what surplus they had, but since their surplus was meager they joined the migratory labor force to augment their own and the regiment’s income.

Even the seasonal rhythm that shaped life in the village was replicated in the army. Units set off for the summer encampments in early May. Field exercises, the most exhausting part of the annual cycle, ended in late July or early August. At that point, soldiers who had completed their term were discharged from service; a few others were given leave; most of the rest set off in search of work (the number of men present in the regiment fell from 1,800 to about 300). Training was supposed to resume in mid-October, but with soldiers off doing one thing and another no start could be made until mid-November—and then end-of-year holidays intervened. What training there was took place in the four months between the new year and the onset of field exercises, but soldiers spent most of their time doing the chores required to keep the regimental household in working order.⁵⁴ Not only was military life as cyclical as peasant life, the modulations of the two cycles were virtually identical.

The Moral Economy: Exploitation, Distance, Incomprehension

The underfunding of the army (or, reading the equation the other way, the excessive size of the military establishment) would by itself necessarily have produced something like the regiment’s peasant economy, but the regimental economy also reflected (and shaped) the officers’ attitude toward their men. Regiments had been employing soldiers to produce provisions and supplies since the formation of the regular army in the eighteenth century, in that early period as much because of logistical as of budgetary difficulties. By the early nineteenth century at the latest, regiments—taking advantage of the expansion of the market economy and the rising demand for mobile labor—were adding to their resources by hiring out soldiers for part of the year, and by mid-century regimental commanders required companies to earn a specified sum through contract labor. After the Napoleonic wars, Alexander I sought to make a virtue of necessity by converting much of the army into farming settlements (“military colonies”): if soldiers devoted yet more time to production, a larger army could be maintained. In modified form, some of these settlements lasted through the Crimean War. Even soldiers not in the settlements spent a good part of the year in agricultural labor, helping out the peasants on whom they were quartered. When the army moved into regular barracks in the late nineteenth century, agricultural labor became less common (the regimental gardens remained as a vestigial legacy of the soldier cultivators), while artisanal production became relatively more prominent. But soldiers were still hired out for harvesting, and as new labor markets opened—in railroad construction, for instance—soldiers moved into them, too.⁵⁵ Irrespective of the specific needs of the regimental economy, cumulative military practice dictated that soldiers constituted a labor resource to be deployed in whatever way provided maximum advantage to the regiment. While in the early 1900s some officers worried that production cut into training, to most the regimental economy seemed part of the natural order of things: this was the way the regiment had always operated, hence the way it was supposed to operate.

A direct corollary of the functioning of the regimental economy was that officers dealt with soldiers chiefly as units of labor. Because of the authority military regulations vested in officers, the soldier as laborer was indistinguishable from a serf. General Dragomirov observed in 1900 that “so-called ‘civilian work’ is in essence forced labor, with overtones of serfdom. Formerly the serf-owner hired out his own peasants, now the military commander does the same.”⁵⁶ Another officer added that not only did contract labor “accustom the commander to view his men as serfs; from this it is but a short step to the use of soldiers as free labor.”⁵⁷ Short indeed, though “civilian work” was only a contributory factor. The colonel in Saratov who in the early 1900s hired out the men and carriages of his regiment for funeral corteges was atypical only in his inventiveness: colonels all over the empire looked on their regiments as estates to be exploited as they pleased. The proceeds from such operations might benefit the colonel personally, or they might provide money for regimental needs, but in either case soldiers were an economic resource free for the using. Officers of all ranks employed soldiers in their private gardens or as household labor, ordered up household goods from the regimental workshops, and used their men to build comfortable cottages at summer encampments.⁵⁸ From appropriating the soldiers’ labor it was but another short step to appropriating their money. Officers occasionally pocketed the money soldiers received from home, in some cases they kept the soldier’s pay. When soldiers were given money to purchase supplies, they could be required to buy from their commanders, who took a middleman’s cut.⁵⁹ Even the military press admitted that officers who contracted their men out as labor gangs received kickbacks from landlords (because the going rate for soldiers was about half the rate for civilian labor) or took a cut of the soldier’s earnings for themselves.⁶⁰

Appropriation of the soldiers’ labor and earnings was essential to the functioning of the regiment, but the exploitation of soldiers went beyond economic necessity. Officers felt free to use their men for personal gain because they considered them not military subordinates but inferior beings. Officers knew in their bones that regulations against theft and graft did not apply to their operations with peasant soldiers to any greater degree than did regulations against abusing soldiers physically. It did not occur to officers to end or conceal their exploitation of free soldier labor because the conventions of educated Russian society did not apply to dealings with peasants: officers had an unquestioned right to treat their men as a servile work force. Soldiers took this rule for granted, too: just as soldiers expected officers to strike them, so they expected officers to exploit them economically. As the soldier proverb had it, “Soldiers’ calluses fill officers’ bellies.”⁶¹ Soldiers translated even the impersonal operations of the regimental economy into personal terms. To them it made no difference whether money earned through vol’nye raboty went to the regimental coffers or the captain’s private account, no difference whether money budgeted for food was diverted to the gaming table or barracks repair. Soldiers believed that every time money passed through their officers’ hands, officers gained and soldiers lost.⁶² Lamented the conscripts of northern Russia:

From the Tsar good food is delivered,

From the good Tsarina drink is provided,

Among officers it’s at once divided.⁶³

That officers did frequently take advantage of their men could only confirm the soldiers’ perception that their social inferiority was calculated into every transaction.

If economic exploitation was one of the axes ordering relations between officers and men, social distance was the other. The principal items in the soldier’s time budget were economic chores and sentry duty, and neither required the physical presence of officers. The Sergeant Major handled what little training there was while officers tended the books. Not only were soldiers left to themselves, the soldier community was—within the framework of externally imposed duties— autonomous and egalitarian. Neither characteristic is normal in modern armies, and neither would have been possible had there been a proper hierarchy of noncommissioned officers. In the Tsarist army, there was only a rudimentary hierarchy within the soldiers’ world, because there were very few long-term NCOs. Miliutin had recognized that the rapid training required in a short-service army depended upon the retention of a permanent cadre of noncoms, but no combination of inducements could persuade Russian soldiers to reenlist in adequate numbers. In the late 1870s, two-thirds of the Sergeant Majors were first-term conscripts, as were almost 90 percent of the other NCOs (corporals not included). By the early twentieth century, the Sergeant Major was ordinarily a reenlistee, and in a small proportion of companies one or two of the other NCOs were, leaving the Tsarist army with proportionately fewer reenlisted NCOs than any other European army: slightly more than one per company, as against twelve long-term NCOs in a German and six in a French company. All other noncom slots were filled by literate conscripts given some extra training, but they were NCOs only on paper. The conscript NCO might be a natural leader because of his greater literacy, but ordinary soldiers did not consider themselves subordinate to him in a military sense.⁶⁴ Except for the Sergeant Major, who wielded immense power and was the intermediary to the distant world of officers, all the men in the company were equals.

Within this company of equals, soldiers formed groups in the manner of all peasants away from their village. The most informal was the zemliachestvo (Landsmannschaft), a group of conscripts from the same region (induction centers sent men to the same units every year, regiments received conscripts from a limited number of districts, so no soldier was without zemliaki—Landsleute—in his unit). The zemliachestvo had no formal structure or functions, but it did provide the soldier with his primary set of associational ties and reinforced his identity as a peasant from such and such a district.⁶⁵ The zemliachestvo was an exclusive group, while all soldiers belonged to the company artel’. In the army, the artel’ was primarily a messing arrangement, but it functioned in much the same way as the civilian artel’. The company chose an artel’shchik—their spokesman, treasurer, and purchasing agent—who was responsible for obtaining food and sundry other soldiers’ necessities with funds provided by the company commander and the soldiers themselves. Within limits, soldiers determined what the company purchased. The company artel’ did not have production or contracting functions within the regiment as did the artel’ formed by peasants who left their village in search of work: the Sergeant Major, rather than the artel’shchik, was responsible for allocating work assignments. On the other hand, groups of soldiers were frequently permitted to constitute themselves as an artel’ to search out and conclude contracts for “civilian work,” and in that capacity the soldier artel’ was identical to any artel’ formed by peasants or day laborers.⁶⁶

Soldiers valued the autonomy and self-management that was customary in the company, and invariably the most detested officers were those who supervised their men closely. It was the fact of officer intrusion in the barracks that soldiers resented, not the results. Units in which officers took an interest in the welfare of their men were the best clothed, the best shod, and the best fed, but that made no difference to soldiers. They preferred—and performed best for—the officer who let his unit run itself, even if they suffered some privation in consequence.⁶⁷ Soldiers disliked improving officers for the same reason that peasants disliked improving landlords: they saw in better management only new methods for exploiting them. Since they believed that officers always sought to cheat them, soldiers could make sense of officer intervention in the soldiers’ affairs in no other way. Suspicion was suspended only in the case of a very few officers, generally fresh out of military school, who were transparently eager to be decent to their men. But soldiers did not understand these young idealists any better than they understood officers whose main interest was efficiency: to the soldier, the idealistic young lieutenant was a chudak, a combination simpleton and eccentric, someone to be treated kindly, even protectively, but not to be taken seriously.⁶⁸

From improving officers to the seasonal cycle, from the zemliachestvo to migratory labor, the world of the Russian soldier bore a strong resemblance to the world of the Russian peasant. Whatever the formal tables of military organization and the prescriptions of the training manuals, the soldier spent his time performing chores much like those he did at home, earned money as he had at home, and worked according to the peasants’ seasonal rhythm. Human relations in the army were familiar, too. Peasants knew that the world beyond the village was full of snares, that every stranger and everyone in Western garb wished to prey upon the peasant, just as urban, educated, official Russia (the three were the same to peasants) taxed, conscripted, and otherwise arbitrarily exploited peasants. In the army, officers—educated and official Russia by definition—preyed on soldiers, and one had to be on guard against their wiles. Peasants sought to deal with gentry and officials from a distance; soldiers preferred officers not to meddle in the company. By and large, officers played the role peasant soldiers assigned them—powerful outsiders who battened on soldiers but generally did not meddle in the company’s internal affairs. The regiment was physically unlike the village, the soldier was far from home and—by the early twentieth century—quite likely in or near a city, but the economic and social structures of military service sustained his peasant mentality.

There were variants on this basic pattern. Life in the cavalry, engineers, and artillery differed in some details from life in the infantry, and the cossacks were in a class by themselves. The Guards variant deserves special mention, not just because service in the Guards had unique features, but also because of their political significance as the core of the capital’s garrison. Both the officers and the men of the Guards were exceptional. Soldiers were selected for height and physique (and matched to units by hair color and physical type), officers were chosen for lineage and wealth. Postings in some Guards regiments passed from father to son, all officers had to be wealthy enough to function in high society (an outside income of 100 rubles per month was considered the minimum in the least expensive regiment), and the officers of a regiment could veto a candidate if he did not meet their social standards.⁶⁹ Nevertheless, Guards regiments operated in much the same way as line regiments: the same preoccupation with economic chores (Guards regiments had the largest gardens in the army), the same “civilian work” (until 1900), the same seasonable cycle.⁷⁰ The cruder forms of exploitation were lacking—Guards officers had no need of the soldiers’ pittance—but the soldiers of the Guards provided the same pool of free labor as in the line.

However, Guards officers were not mere exploiters of soldier labor, they also provided patronage. Officers paid for sumptuous rations on regimental and company holidays (only in the Guards did companies have traditional feasts), extra rations and extra vodka or beer on other special occasions, and for the occasional company visit to the brothel. Guards officers bought their men special items of equipment (in the Guards cavalry, for instance, new white gloves for conscripts after they had passed their first test of horsemanship), and they provided Christmas trees and distributed Christmas presents. Guards officers might also give emergency financial assistance to the families of their men.⁷¹ Soldiers in the Guards understood that their officers’ munificence was exceptional, but the practice of patronage had analogues in peasant society: periodic manorial feasts and the lord’s protection in an emergency as a means to retain fealty, that is, in exchange for the right to control and exploit a subject population. Many Guards officers no doubt had learned this method of treating inferiors on their family estates. So long as patronage was forthcoming, the exchange worked in peasant society, and it worked in the Guards.

If a steady flow of patronage set the Guards apart, so did the Imperial presence. Every regiment had Grand Dukes on the roll, and these royal officers contributed their share of patronage. And, because of the Tsar’s traditional attachment to the Guards, and because of rotating sentry duty at the various imperial residences, Guards soldiers periodically set their eyes upon the Tsar himself. The Tsar strolling through the palace might even speak to a soldier, in which case the Imperial words were reported in a regimental order of the day.⁷² This physical proximity to the Tsar brought soldiers respect in their native villages, but also some puzzlement. One Guards officer reported (how accurately is hard to say) that even in the early twentieth century his men returning from leave related that the villagers did not understand how a soldier could survive sight of the Tsar, because the Tsar always sat on a golden throne and radiated light so brilliant that to behold it was to be struck dead.⁷³ The men of the Guards were not so naive as that, at least not after they had lived through their first glimpse of the Tsar, but they were certainly awed, and felt privileged to serve in the Guards. Yet the soldier in the Guards remained a peasant, in his attitude toward the Tsar as in the cycle of his duties and his relations with his officers—a privileged peasant, but a peasant nonetheless.

And so the two cultures of Russia, traditional and European, met in the army, but did not join. The cultural barrier that stood between officers and men transcended the hierarchical division between authority and subordination, and it was impermeable. Not only did officers and men not understand each other, they did not know that they did not understand. Soldiers misread the intentions of efficient and idealistic officers. They understood condescension and exploitation well enough, but not that there might be some purpose beyond personal enrichment in their officers’ actions. For their part, the officer who believed that nightly readings from the regimental history entertained and edified his men and who never used his fists, and the officer who believed one had to hit a soldier to get his attention but read edifying tales written in a language closer to the soldiers’ own, were equally distant from their men, yet both believed they had established rapport. Officers genuinely believed that the ritual dialogue in which they frequently engaged soldiers—”What province are you from?” “What village?” “Do you have a girl waiting at home?”—established bonds of understanding and trust.⁷⁴ While a number of critically minded officers appreciated the defects of the regimental economy, very few found fault with relations between officers and men. Aside from infrequent theft and beatings, they saw— whether writing in 1900 or 1925—only a benevolent paternalism that produced mutual affection. One who did detect a discordant note was the reactionary General Petr Krasnov. In his novelistic account of life in the Tsarist army, Of Dvuglavogo Orla k krasnomu znameni (From Double Eagle to Red Flag), a soldier of worker background explains to his squadron commander why an officer could never be close to his men:

“What sort of conversations do you have with the soldiers?—’What province are you from?’ . . . ‘And your district? County?’ ‘Are your parents alive? Your trade?’ Just as though you were a magistrate or police officer. The soldier dislikes that. You ought to tell them about yourself .... But of course you can’t . . . Your life is different . . . And he can’t tell you the truth about himself. How could he tell you that he stole twenty kopeks from a peddler, or that he sold a ration of oats to a baker, or jabbed his horse with a pitchfork while he was goofing off?”⁷⁵

In the same novel, one officer remarks: “Horses are beasts, the men are beasts, ignorant. Both are incomprehensible, but strong. Suppose they decide to make war on us?” To which another replies: “Hit them on the snout, nothing will happen.”⁷⁶ Only in an emigré novel would it occur to an officer even to suggest that soldiers might rebel. Virtually without exception, officers considered their men childlike (or, in the Guards, “simple childlike giants”), naive, sometimes deceitful, nearly always stupid, and utterly dependent upon officers. Were officers wrong? If asked what he was doing or why he was doing it, the soldier could not explain himself. Asked the name of a nearby village, or how to get to headquarters, the soldier replied, as per military formula, “I cannot know” (ne mogu znat’), the standard answer to all questions.⁷⁷ The soldier’s stupidity was writ large—which was just what the soldier intended. Avoiding a direct response, or responding only after careful consideration, was a defensive reaction. The soldier—as one officer at least understood—”has been taught this wisdom by life and discipline. He knows from experience that officers sometimes pose treacherous questions.”⁷⁸ The wisdom of stupidity was peasant wisdom. As Tolstoy once remarked to Maxim Gorky,

In real life muzhiks [peasants] speak stupidly, awkwardly, at first you can’t tell what they’re trying to say. That’s done on purpose, the desire to lead the other man on is always concealed beneath the apparent stupidity of their words. A true muzhik never shows what’s on his mind straight away, that wouldn’t suit him. He knows people approach a stupid person simply and guilelessly, and that’s just what he wants. You stand revealed before him, he sees all your weak spots at once. He is mistrustful, he is afraid to tell his secret thoughts even to his wife.⁷⁹

Tolstoy exaggerated: not all peasant stupidity was art. There was much beyond the village that was genuinely incomprehensible to peasants, just as there was a great deal about the officer and his world that baffled soldiers. Yet even in this regard obstinate stupidity masked the extent of the soldier’s secret insecurities from the officer whom he mistrusted.

Dissembling was not unique to Russian peasants and soldiers, and Russian officers were not alone in being deceived. What made the soldiers’ deception of their officers so convincing was that it was not really deception at all. Soldiers were genuinely submissive to their officers, they did behave like devious and dependent children. They endured hardship and risked their lives without audible complaint. Uncle Tom behavior was instinctive to the peasant, and to the soldier who was a peasant in all but dress, whenever he had to deal with the educated and the powerful. Transferred to the army, the peasant method of coping with gross disparities in power appeared as exemplary discipline and commendable deference to paternalistic officers—precisely the traits that Russian and foreign officers identified as the principal virtues of the Tsarist army. There was little difference here between genuine and simulated deference, and the difference if any was irrelevant in the routine of military life. So long as they saw no way to escape the clutches of the powerful, peasant and soldier submitted to the inevitable, to all appearances meekly. Even the soldiers were not fully aware of their deeper urge to cast down the European Russia that oppressed them.