The Russian Revolution полностью

The uppermost elite of the late Imperial Army was made up of alumni of the Military Academies, especially the two-and-a-half-year course of studies at the Nicholas Academy of the General Staff, which prepared specialists for high command posts. Admission was open to officers with three years of active duty who passed with distinction an appropriate examination: only one in thirty applicants qualified. Social origin made no difference: here “the son of an emancipated serf served … together with members of the Imperial family.”* The 1,232 graduates of the General Staff School—Genshtabisty—on active duty in 1904 developed a strong esprit de corps, helping each other and maintaining a solid front against outsiders. The brightest among them were assigned to the General Staff, which had responsibility for developing strategic policy. The rest took command posts. Their preponderance among officers of general rank was striking: although constituting between 5 and 10 percent of the officers on active duty, they commanded, in 1912, 62 percent of the army corps, 68 percent of the infantry divisions, 77 percent of the cavalry divisions, and 25 percent of the regiments. All seven of the last Ministers of War were alumni of the General Staff Academy.⁷⁹

General Anton Denikin, the leader in 1918–19 of the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army, claimed that relations between officers and enlisted men in the Imperial Army were as good as if not better than similar relations in the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, and the treatment of the troops less brutal.⁸⁰ Contemporary evidence, however, does not support this claim. The Russian authorities insisted on observing very strict rank distinctions, subjecting soldiers to treatment that reminded some observers of serfdom. The men were addressed by officers in the second person singular, received an allowance of three or four rubles a year (one-hundredth of the pay of the most junior officer), and in some military districts were subjected to various indignities such as having to walk on the shady side of the street or to ride on streetcar platforms.⁸¹ The resentments which these discriminatory rules bred were a major cause of the mutiny of the Petrograd garrison in February 1917.

For the historian of the Revolution, the most important aspect of the late Imperial Army was its politics. Students of the subject agree that the Russian officer class was largely apolitical: not only did it not involve itself in politics, it showed no interest in it.† In officers’ clubs, political talk was considered in poor taste. Officers looked down on civilians, whom they nicknamed shpaki, most of all on politicians. Moreover they felt they could not uphold their oath to the Tsar if they became embroiled in partisan politics. Taught to regard loyalty to the powers that be as the supreme virtue, they were exceedingly ill prepared to cope with the conflicts that erupted in 1917. As long as the struggle for power was undecided, they stood on the sidelines. Once the Bolsheviks took over, many went into their service, since they were now “the authority” (vlast’), which they had been trained to obey. The specter of Russian Bonapartism, which so frightened Russian revolutionaries, was a figment of the imagination of intellectuals raised on the history of the French Revolution.

14. Dancing class at Smolnyi Institute, c. 1910.

After 1905 there emerged in the military a group of patriotic officers whose loyalty extended beyond the throne. Like the liberal bureaucrats, they saw themselves as serving the nation rather than the Crown. They were regarded with great suspicion.

The fourth instrument of tsarist authority, the gentry or dvorianstvo, was an eroding asset.*