Imperial Russian Army

• 1. Introduction

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  The Imperial Russian Army stood, at the eve of the First World War, as the largest peacetime standing military force in all of Europe. With roughly 1.3 million men under arms before a single shot was fired in 1914, it dwarfed the armies of its rivals and neighbors. Then came mobilization. Within months that number swelled to 4.5 million, and by 1917 a total of 15 million men had passed through its ranks. How did an institution born from Peter the Great's sweeping reforms of 1699 grow into this colossal force? What held together an army that drew Catholic Poles, Muslim Tatars, Buddhist Kalmyks, Jewish conscripts, and Orthodox Russians under one banner? And what caused it, after enduring Napoleon's invasion and a catastrophic war with Japan, to dissolve almost overnight in the revolutionary upheaval of 1917?

• 2. Peter's Invention

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  In December 1699, Peter the Great signed a decree establishing the basis for conscripting soldiers across Russia, and the country's military would never be the same. Before Peter, the tsars had relied on the streltsy, hereditary musketeer corps first raised by Ivan the Terrible. They had once been effective, but by Peter's time they were widely regarded as unreliable and undisciplined. Peter swept them aside. Starting in 1700 he began replacing the streltsy with new Western-style regiments, organizing them on the model of his already-existing Guards regiments.

  Peter's 1716 military regulations gave the army its organizational backbone, and in 1718 he created the College of War to handle army administration. His model was German, but he introduced one distinctive twist: officers need not come exclusively from the nobility. Talented commoners could earn promotions that would eventually carry a noble title. That opening, however, was later shut. Catherine the Great abolished such promotions, and the nobility reasserted its grip on the officer corps.

  The term of service under Peter was for life. It was a commitment that defined a man's entire existence from the moment he was conscripted. Only in 1793 was this reduced to 25 years, then to 20 years plus five in reserve in 1834, and eventually to 12 years plus three in reserve by 1855. Each reduction reflected a gradual, grudging acknowledgment that soldiers were not merely instruments of state power but human beings with finite spans.

• 3. Suvorov's Unbroken Record

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  Alexander Suvorov is remembered as one of the few commanders in history who never lost a battle. His teacher, Pyotr Rumyantsev, had won victories at Kolberg, Larga, and most notably Kagul during the Russo-Turkish Wars. And Rumyantsev's own mentor, Pyotr Saltykov, had defeated Frederick the Great himself at the Battle of Kunersdorf.

  Suvorov's own record stretched across multiple wars and continents. From 1768 to 1774 he fought in the Russo-Turkish War and against the Bar Confederation. He spent years in the Crimea and the Caucasus, becoming a lieutenant-general in 1780 and a general of infantry by 1783. He fought the Turks again from 1787 to 1791, storming the fortress of Izmail among other strongholds. His role in defeating the Kościuszko Uprising helped secure Russia's expansion to the west.

  Then came his Italian campaign, which reversed Napoleon's gains of 1796 and 1797 while Napoleon himself was occupied in Egypt and Syria. Suvorov outmaneuvered and defeated the French Army of Italy in several engagements, including actions at the Adda, the Trebbia, and Novi. The subsequent Swiss campaign, launched at Austrian insistence, failed, but historians attribute that failure largely to the inept handling of his colleague Alexander Rimsky-Korsakov, whose forces could not hold their position. Suvorov's own list of battlefield victories includes Orzechowo, Kozludzha, Kinburn, Focsani, Rymnik, Krupczyce, Brest, Praga, and Muttental, among many others.

• 4. Napoleon and the Patriotic War

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  On the 23rd of June 1812, Napoleon's Grande Armee crossed the Neman River with 650,000 men, including 270,000 Frenchmen alongside soldiers from allied and subject powers. Napoleon framed the campaign as a Second Polish war, yet he made no concessions to the nearly 100,000 Polish troops who had joined his invasion force, reserving the option of Polish territory as a future bargaining chip with Russia.

  The Russian response was a strategy of scorched earth and retreat, broken only at the Battle of Borodino on the 7th of September. Both sides suffered heavily that day. Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov chose to abandon the field and preserve the army rather than defend Moscow. By the 14th of September the French captured the city, only to find it burning. Governor Prince Rastopchin had ordered it destroyed.

  Alexander I refused to negotiate. Napoleon, finding no clear victory and no peace offer, was forced to retreat. What followed was catastrophic. The Great Retreat cost the French 370,000 casualties, mostly from starvation and freezing temperatures, plus 200,000 captured. Napoleon narrowly avoided annihilation at the Battle of Berezina. By December, when the remnants recrossed the Neman at Kaunas, only 20,000 fit soldiers remained from the main army. Napoleon had already abandoned his men to rush back to Paris.

  The Russian pursuit drove west into Prussia, where General Ludwig Yorck von Wartenburg, commanding a Prussian corps that had served under Napoleon, switched sides in the Convention of Tauroggen. After Kutuzov died in early 1813, command passed to Peter Wittgenstein. By 1814 the Russian-led coalition had taken Paris, aided in part by the surrender of Marshal Marmont's exhausted troops before Napoleon could reinforce the capital.

• 5. Milyutin's Transformation

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  Russia's defeat in the Crimean War exposed how badly the army had decayed. Emperor Alexander II appointed Count Dmitry Milyutin as Minister of War, and what followed was the most thorough overhaul in the army's history. The reforms drew on the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 as their social foundation.

  Milyutin reorganized the Ministry of War for centralized leadership, rebuilt the medical, engineering, supply, and ordnance services, and placed the General Staff under the Ministry. He created junker schools as the primary source of new officers, opening them to both educated commoners and nobles. Up until his reforms, the army had no permanent barracks: troops were billeted in dugouts and shacks. That changed.

  On the 1st of January 1874 the emperor approved a conscription statute that made military service compulsory for all men at age 21. The term for land service was set at six years active plus nine years in reserve. Crucially, the law replaced the old system of drafting peasants into lifetime service with shorter terms that generated a pool of trained reservists. The decree of the 14th of January 1874 also exempted the Grand Duchy of Finland entirely, in exchange for an annual financial payment. Cossacks served under separate terms, and Muslim populations in Dagestan and Turkestan were also exempt, though they could volunteer.

  The share of non-noble officers in the army climbed from 4 percent in the 1860s to 44.6 percent in the 1890s. By 1912 just over half of the officers below the rank of captain were commoners. The general ranks, however, remained heavily aristocratic: hereditary nobles made up 91.9 percent of generals in the 1890s. Milyutin's post-Crimean reforms are credited with creating the Russian army as it would function into the 20th century.

• 6. The Many Peoples of the Army

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  On the 26th of August 1827, Nicholas I issued the Statute on Conscription Duty, which for the first time required all Russian males between ages twelve and twenty-five to serve twenty-five years in the armed forces. This included the massive Jewish population of the empire. Some families emigrated to escape the obligation. Others were targeted by khappers, agents employed by the government who kidnapped Jewish children for conscription. Reports noted that khappers frequently took children as young as eight, well below the legal minimum of twelve. By the time the empire collapsed, around 1.5 million Jewish soldiers had served.

  Cossacks occupied a uniquely complex position. Descending from Slavs who had chosen to live on the steppe rather than integrate with either Russia or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, they were organized into hosts named for their regional locations. In 1827, Emperor Nicholas I declared his heir the honorary ataman of all Cossacks. By 1832, the hosts were given ownership of their territories as imperial lands in exchange for military service. During World War I, Cossacks made up two-thirds of all Russian cavalry, contributing over 500,000 men. Of those, 200,000 were Don Cossacks.

  Latvian soldiers formed a distinct force beginning on the 16th of August 1915, when the Russian command began organizing Latvian Riflemen battalions. Initially eight battalions, each named for a city or region in Latvia, they were expanded into regiments on the 3rd of November 1916 and organized into two brigades. They took part in the Christmas Battles of late 1916 and won a victory against German troops.

  Bashkirs and Kalmyks had served against Napoleon. Denis Davidov specifically noted the arrows and bows wielded by the Bashkir fighters. Mounted Kalmyks and Bashkirs numbered in the hundreds among resources available to Russian commanders during the Napoleonic campaigns. Before the start of World War I, approximately 400 Muslim officers served in the Russian army, among them 30 generals.

• 7. Collapse and Revolution

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  The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 cracked the army's reputation and its internal cohesion. The first reservists mobilized for that conflict were older men, some of whom had never handled a Mosin-Nagant rifle, which had entered service in 1891. Younger, better-trained replacements did not begin arriving until after the Battle of Mukden in February 1905. The mobilization drew in more politicized men who spread revolutionary ideas through the ranks. Over 400 mutinies were recorded from autumn 1905 to summer 1906.

  By 1904 Russia was spending only 57 percent of what Germany and 63 percent of what Austria-Hungary spent per soldier. The army's share of the national budget had fallen from 30 percent to 18 percent between 1881 and 1902. From 1883 to 1903 the army suppressed over 1,500 internal protests.

  When World War I began, Emperor Nicholas II named his cousin Grand Duke Nicholas as Commander-in-Chief. At mobilization the army fielded 115 infantry divisions and 38 cavalry divisions, supported by nearly 7,900 guns. The war opened with the Russian invasion of East Prussia and Galicia. The campaign in East Prussia ended in defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg in 1914. The Brusilov offensive, however, achieved great success against the Austro-Germans.

  In March 1917, following the abdication of Nicholas II, the Imperial Army swore loyalty to the Russian Provisional Government. The formal status of the monarchy remained unresolved until September 1917, when the Russian Republic was declared. Despite catastrophic losses in offensive operations, most of the army stayed at the front. The final disintegration did not begin until early 1918, when the rebellious remnants evolved into the new Red Army. Among the last acts of the Cossack institution under the old order, two Don Cossack regiments led by Alexander Kerensky and Pyotr Krasnov attempted to stop the Bolshevik takeover in Petrograd during the October Revolution, and were defeated.