The Russian General Staff and Asia, 1800-1917 by Alex Marshall (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS I33 Marshall, Alex. The Russian GeneralStaffandAsia, 1800-igiy. Roudedge Studies in theHistory ofRussia and Eastern Europe, 4. Roudedge, London and New York, 2006. xii + 274 pp. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?75.00. Too oftenmilitary history isheld tobe a narrow, specialist subject, sometimes a history of technological change, a litanyof ever-more efficient ways of killing people, sometimes a blow-by-blow account of a battle or campaign. Only rarely is the history of an army, fleet or other military institutionmore fully integrated into thewider social and intellectual history of the societywhich it is supposed to defend. It is hard to over-estimate the importance of the military in the Government, diplomacy and administration of the Russian Empire, particularly in the bureaucratic nineteenth-century state, but this is perhaps insufficientlyreflected in the historiography. The most notable con tributions to date have come fromJohn Keep, William Fuller, Allan Wildman and Bruce Menning, and Alexander Marshall's book on theRussian General Staff and theAsiatic Frontier is an immensely valuable addition. Based on extensive research in the Military-Historical Archive in Moscow, as well as on the (often very numerous) publications of the officers of the General Staff themselves, it ispartly a work of institutionalhistory, itselfan under-researched area in Russia, tracing the rise and decline of the Asiatic Department of the General Staffwhilst also covering the development of theNikolaevskii Academy of the General Staff and other specialist educational institutions. Marshall's focus however is the formation of the elite of theRussian military, theGeneral Staff, and the emergence within itof a distinct Asiatic cadre of military orientalists {Voennye Vostokovedy). Given the role of themilitary innot only defending and waging war on the Empire's Asiatic frontiers, but also administering them,Marshall is quite justified in entitling chapter two 'The Emergence of a Colonial Military Elite'. He shows how, as a consequence of the professionalization of the officer corps in theMiliutin era, officerswho won their spurs inwars along theAsiatic frontier were often preferred to aristocrats and courtiers for important com mands and bureaucratic positions, culminating in the appointment of the quintessential Turkestanskii General Alexei Kuropatkin as Minister ofWar from 1898 to 1903 (pp. 44-45). The third chapter deals with Russian military con quests inAsia from the early eighteenth century to the annexation ofKushka in 1885, and Marshall then examines the growth ofmilitary intelligence and the acquisition of 'colonial knowledge' by the officers of the General Staff along the vast Asiatic frontierswhich resulted. China and the Far East, the Caucasus and Central Asia each have a chapter dedicated to them, and Marshall is skilled at showing how developments on one frontier could lead to innovations on another, whilst never forgetting that the amount of attention devoted toAsia was normally in inverse proportion to that lavished on the Empire's vulnerable Western frontier. Marshall is, inmy view, entirely correct to see the lengthywars in the Caucasus as the key to understanding the development of Russian military and colonial ideas in the nineteenth century (p. 43), and inparticular growing official hostility to Islam. When combined with the humiliation of defeat in 134 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 200g theRusso-Japanese War in 1904-05, which caused Kuropatkin to formulate the doctrine of the 'Yellow Peril' as the greatest strategic threat to Russia (pp. 95-96), this increasing paranoia clouded the judgement of theGeneral Staff. In his conclusion Marshall shows (pp. 183-88) how in theperiod leading up to the FirstWorld War 'The Myopic Guard' was distracted from the more serious threat in Europe by their concerns over pan-Islamism and the modernization of the Japanese and Chinese armed forces, not to mention growing tensions with the British over Afghanistan which (asJennifer Siegel has shown in her Endgame, London and New York, 2002) were not resolved by theAnglo-Russian agreement of 1907.He concludes with some observa tions on the continuities of attitudes and personnel amongst military oriental ists into the early Soviet period, embodied most clearly in thefigure ofAndrei Evgenievich Snesarev, the tsaristGeneral Staffs leading expert on Afghani stan and British India, who would become the rector of the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow from 1921until his arrest in 1930 (p. 190). There are the...