Courts of Honour in the Late Imperial Russian Army

Abstract

SEER, Vol.84, No. 4, October 2006 Courts of Honour in the Late Imperial Russian Army PAUL ROBINSON Introduction IN I894 Tsar Alexander III of Russia agreed to a remarkablepiece of legislation entitled 'Rules governing the investigation of quarrels between officers'.These rulesfor the firsttime grantedsocietiesof officers in militaryunits the right to dismiss from the service any of their comrades who refusedto defend their honour by fightinga duel. At a time when armieselsewherein the Westernworld either had outlawed or were trying to outlaw duelling, this Russian move seems bizarrely anachronistic,a reversionto very ancient ideas of militaryhonourjust as the First World War and the Russian revolutions and Civil War were about to change the face of warfareforever. This article examines the concept of honour in the late Imperial RussianArmy as it was manifestedin the societiesof officersmentionedl above, which were commonly known as 'courtsof honour'. It surveys the origins and workingsof the courts and the logic which led to the law of I894, then examines the impact of the law, and the fate of the courts in the aftermath of the Russian revolution. It concludes that these courts of honour were successfulin inculcatinga strong sense of honour into Russian officers,but that this was not always a beneficial outcome. Honour in theImperial Russian Army The most immediate problem one confrontswhen discussingthis subject is determiningexactly what people of the time meant by 'honour'. Space does not permit a detailed analysisof theories of honour here, but it is necessaryto note that the concept is rife with paradoxes and contradictionsand defieseasy explanation.'Althoughsome commentators disagree with the following typology, most definitions of honour divide it into two aspects internalhonour, which is similarto integrityand conscience, and externalhonour, which is closerto reputation, Paul Robinson is an associate professor in public and international affairs at The University of Ottawa, Canada, and until recently was a lecturer in the Department of Politics at The University of Hull. I As Frank Henderson Stewart concluded at the end of a book-long study of the subject, 'The more closely one looks at honor, the odder it seems'. Frank Henderson Stewart, Honor, Chicago, IL, 1994 (hereafter, Stewart, Honor),p. 145. PAUL ROBINSON 709 name, and face.2 This was the approach adopted by P. A. Shveikovskii, the author of a I912 booklet about Russian courts of honour. According to Shveikovskii: Honour is that inner feeling of human worth, which, on the one hand, inclinesus to direct our life and activityin accordancewith the demands of reason, conscience, the prescriptionsof Christianlaw and the rulesof moral righteousnessestablishedby society, and on the other hand inspires in us a desire that others should consider us people worthy of respect. This understandingof honour contains two factors:first -the inner feeling of a person's own worth, and second the attitude of people to him as a personality i.e. society'sopinion of him.3 Complications may arise when the demands of conscience (internal honour) conflict with those of public opinion (external honour). In such cases what matters is what anthropologists call the 'honour group', that is, the group of people whose good opinion one wishes to gain, and whose values one has internalized as one's own. In the instance studied here Russian army officers -the honour group was the officer corps of the army or, more narrowly, the regiment to which the officer belonged. Honour was defined by fellow officers and enforced by them. It is important to note that the views of the honour group matter more than those of society as a whole. In this case, if society disapproved of duelling, but the officer corps required it, then an officer had no choice but to duel if he was to retain his honour. Outside Russia, nineteenth-century European moralists maintained that the truly honourable man should abide by the dictates of his own conscience regardless of public opinion. The English writer Samuel Smiles, for instance, commented that: 'Conscience [...] is the very essence of individual character. The man whose first question [...] is "What will people say?" is not the man to do anything at all.'4 Russian military theorists, by contrast, believed that internal and external honour were related, that the former was in part...