25

The imperial army

william c. fuller, jr

It is difficult to exaggerate the centrality of the army to the history of the Russian Empire. After all, it was due to the army that the empire came into existence in the first place. It was the army that conquered the territories of the empire, defended them, policed them and maintained internal security all at the same time. It was the army that transformed Russia into a great power, for it was the army that built the Russian state.

Yet if the army built the state, the state also built the army, and there was a symbiotic relationship between these two processes. By any reckoning the creation of a strong army was an extraordinary achievement, for in the middle of the seventeenth century Russia did not enjoy many advantages when it came to the generation of military power. To be sure, comprising over 15 million square kilometres in the 1680s, Muscovy was extensive in land area, but the population of the country, probably less than 7 million persons, was relatively small, and widely dispersed. Distances were vast, roads were execrable, the climate was insalubrious and much of the soil was of poor agricultural quality. Total state income amounted to a paltry 1.2 million roubles per annum and the country as a whole was undergoverned.1 Industry was underdeveloped, and Muscovy had to import both iron and firearms.2 Still worse, Russia lacked any natural, defensible frontiers and was hemmed in from the south, west and north by formidable enemies – the Ottoman Empire, the Khanate of the Crimea, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Kingdom of Sweden.

In view of its numerous weaknesses and vulnerabilities, it is not surprising that Muscovy generally fared poorly in military confrontations with its neighbours during the seventeenth century, enduring defeat after defeat at the

1A. A. Novosel’skii and N. V. Ustiugov (eds.), Ocherki istorii SSSR. Period feodalizma. XVIII v. (Moscow: Izd. AN SSSR, 1955), p. 438.

2Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 355.

530

The imperial army

hands of the Swedes, Poles and Tatars. Of course, Russia did manage some successful expansion in this period, such as the acquisition of left-bank Ukraine by the terms of the Truce of Andrusovo (1667). However, this gain owed more to the Cossack rebellions and Swedish invasion that had crippled Poland than it did to any conspicuous Russian military prowess. While Russia did engage in military modernisation during the century, for example by augmenting the traditional cavalry levy with Western-style infantry units, the problem was that the state was capable of mobilising for discrete campaigns only and lacked the resources and stamina necessary for protracted war.

Slightly more than 140 years later, towards the end of the reign of Alexander I, the picture was completely different, for a succession of impressive military victories had resulted in the dramatic expansion in the political influence, population and size of the Russian state. In 1825 Russia’s standing army of 750,000 men was the largest in the Western world. By that point Russia’s land area had grown to 18.5 million square miles, and her population to 40 million. A full third of that population growth was directly attributable to conquest and annexation.

Understanding Russian military success, 1700–1825

The key element in Russia’s transition from military debility to military capability was learning how better to mobilise both material resources and, even more importantly, human beings in the service of the army. This involved a frightening intensification of the coercive exploitation of all classes of people in Russia society from top to bottom. It was Peter the Great who was responsible for inaugurating the change. In 1700 in combination with Saxon and Danish allies, Peter launched what he thought would be a short and easy war against Sweden. In September of that same year, however, King Charles XII of Sweden annihilated Peter’s army at Narva, capturing almost its entire artillery park. Over twenty years of war between Russia and Sweden ensued.

Needing to reconstitute his forces under the pressure of military emergency and protracted war, Peter invented a set of institutions to recruit, officer, equip, finance and administer his army that laid the foundation for the upsurge of Russia’s military power during the eighteenth century. Although these new arrangements did not operate precisely as intended in Peter’s lifetime, in the decades after his death they put down deep roots. There evolved a hybrid military system with both ‘Western’ and peculiarly ‘Russian’ characteristics. Partly by design and partly by improvisation, Russia devised a unique military system that represented a brilliant (if

531

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 modifications, 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

3Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 68–9.

4William C. Fuller Jr, Strategy and Power in Russia 1 600–1 91 4 (New York: Free Press, 1992), pp. 45–6.

5John L. H. Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia 1 462–1 87 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 145, 165.

532

The imperial army

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

6Walter M. Pintner, ‘The Burden of Defense in Imperial Russia, 1725–1915’, RR 43 (1984):

252.

7Fuller, Strategy and Power, pp. 167–73. Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, From Serf to Russian Soldier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 110–11.

8Wirtschafter, From Serf to Russian Soldier, pp. 78, 148; Dietrich Beyrau, Militar¨ und Gesellschaft im Vorrevolutionaren¨ Russland (Cologne and Vienna: Bohlau¨ Verlag, 1984), pp. 347–8.

533

Foreign policy and the armed forces

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 initially 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 commoners. 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. Over 90 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 militaryjudicial cases has revealed that the most typical grievances the soldiers voiced

9Fuller, Strategy and Power, p. 171.

10Christopher Duffy, Russia’s Military Way to the West: Origins and Nature of Russian Military Power 1 7 00–1 800 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 89–90.

11Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar, p. 125; D. G. Tselorungo, Ofitsery russkoi armii-uchastniki borodinskogo srazheniia. Istoriko-sotsiologicheskoe issledovanie (Moscow: Kalita, 2002), p. 73.

534

The imperial army

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 commanders. 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 immensity, emptiness and poverty, into a weapon to grind down the enemy. Other figures, including B. C. Munnich,¨ 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. Munnich¨ 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 strategist, 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.

535

Foreign policy and the armed forces

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

The Russian army 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 precisely 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 impediments 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

13Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar, p. 137.

14Arcadius Kahan, The Plow, the Hammer and the Knout: An Economic History of EighteenthCentury Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 337, 341.

15Fuller, Strategy and Power, pp. 96, 105.

536

The imperial army

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 weaknesses, 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 soldiers’ 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

16A. 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 1 45 0–1 91 7 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), p. 200.

17Duffy, Russia’s Military Way, p. 118.

18Kersnovskii, Istoriia, p. 204.

537

Foreign policy and the armed forces

exercises and opened egregious opportunities for larceny to dishonest regimental 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 borderlands had long been practised in Russia, as well as 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

19V. G. Verzhbitskii, Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v russkoi armii 1 826–1 85 9 (Moscow: Izd. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1964), pp. 118–19.

20Frederick 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.

538

The imperial army

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 eighteenthcentury 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, particularly 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

21Pintner, ‘Burden of Defense’, 232.

22Thomas C. Owen, Russian Corporate Capitalism from Peter the Great to Perestroika (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 8–9.

539