Russian Military History Research Articles

The failures of Russian Aerospace Forces in the Russia–Ukraine war and the future of air power

ABSTRACT In the prelude to the 2022 Russia–Ukraine War, American intelligence had concluded the invasion ‘might take a few days longer’ than Russians expected, but not much longer. The Russian Aerospace Forces was expected to eliminate Ukraine’s air defense and pave the way for Russian troops. What explains the failures of the Russian Aerospace Forces to acquire air superiority? I explore three causal factors to understand these failures – Russian military history and its impact on Russia’s air doctrine, Russian intelligence failures, and Ukrainian resolve and innovativeness. I also highlight the causal role played by the United States in sharing critical intelligence.

Perpetuation of the Memory of Russian Military History Events in Russian Monuments of the 18th-19th Centuries: A Comparative Analysis

Perpetuation of the Memory of Russian Military History Events in Russian Monuments of the 18th-19th Centuries: A Comparative Analysis

The Head of the Сoncentration Сamps in White Omsk Pavel Nikolaevich Velizhanin (1859–1942)

The publication is a study into the life and professional path of Lieutenant Colonel P. N. Velizhanin — a regular officer, a participant of the First World War, decorated by six orders, who consecutively served in the Russian Imperial and White armies, and then in Soviet institutions. His biography, which has not been previously presented in the scholarship, vividly reflects the collisions of the era of social cataclysms. The research has been carried out on the basis of the theory of social adaptation, the anthropological approach and the historical and biographical methods as a methodological basis defining its genre. The article considers the issue presented in the article in connection with the historiography of the problem. The basis for the study was a complex of unpublished sources of an official nature discovered by the author in the funds of the Historical Archive of the Omsk Region and the archive of the Office of the Federal Security Service of Russia in the Omsk Region, among which of most significance were the track record of P. N. Velizhanin for 1919; Soviet questionnaires; investigative documents of the Cheka; materials of departmental office work related to military and special (Chekist) registration of the subject of the study in the 1920s. As a result, a controversial biography of P. N. Velizhanin is reconstructed with the highest level of detail. The conclusion emphasizes this officer’s relatively successful social adaptation in Soviet Omsk, whose military (and anti-Bolshevik) biography was complemented by the leadership of military penitentiary institutions. The publication may be of interest to a wide range of readers — to researchers into Russian military history, into Russian special services, into the Soviet society, into the repressive policy of the Soviet state, as well as to specialists in the field of practical genealogy.

РЕЧЕВАЯ СТРАТЕГИЯ ДИСКРЕДИТАЦИИ ОТЕЧЕСТВЕННЫХ ВОЕНАЧАЛЬНИКОВ В РУССКОЯЗЫЧНОМ СЕГМЕНТЕ ИНТЕРНЕТА

Statement of the problem. The study of the mechanisms of speech influence on the addressee is an important issue in linguistic research of modern political communication, which takes place in the context of conflict-generating communication between ideological opponents. One of the fields of information confrontation is Russian military history with its key events and iconic personalities. In our work, from a linguistic point of view, we consider the speech strategy of discrediting Russian military leaders. Negative-evaluative means of language are analyzed, as well as stylistic techniques aimed at updating negative information about them and providing a psychological impact on readers. The study of conflict-generating texts about Russian military history allows us to describe the features of the actualization of linguistic units in them that can lead to the creation of a conflict, which can beused in the development of measures to prevent possible social tensions. The purpose of the article is to identify and provide a linguo-pragmatic analysis of conflict-generating texts about Russian military leaders. Methodology (materials and methods). The material for the study was the conflict-generating texts about Russian military leaders posted on the Russian-language segment of the Internet. The main methods of analysis are the method of linguo-pragmatic analysis, the method of linguo-stylistic analysis, the method of contextual analysis. Research results. In the course of the work, a number of speech tactics of the discrediting strategy are identified: the tactics of demythologization, ridicule, equating to the followers of an ideology based on violence, etc. Defamation and irony are distinguished as the most frequent techniques. The predominance of vocabulary with negative evaluative connotations is noted.

The military history of Romanov Russia

This article is a historiographic essay that examines some of the scholarly studies that have been published since the opening of the Russian archives and libraries to military historians of the Romanov period (1613–1917) of Russian history. While the basic narrative of Russian military history has not been significantly altered or transformed, gaining access to an enormous amount of new sources resulted in the development of a deeper, more nuanced understanding, of the rise and fall of the imperial Russian empire. Readers now can learn much more about traditional issues ranging from strategy, operations, tactics and logistics to the education, training, and financing of the army than was possible during the Soviet period.

SOF Utilization in Contemporary Competitive Spaces

ABSTRACT Russia’s resurgent military power, its willingness to utilize force, and its assertive foreign policy in Moscow’s perceived sphere of influence has quickly become a major U.S. security concern. Calculated and proactive efforts by U.S. SOF in Russia’s near abroad, those missions which focus on bolstering societal resiliency, deterrence, and resistance capabilities, will deny Moscow uncontested access to these geopolitical territories in its near abroad and immediately impose cost on Russia. To be effective in these complex goals, U.S. SOF must utilize a more expansive and holistic view of Russian military history and strategy, as well as a macro whole of government approach to contest malign influences. Additionally, more resilient allies who are willing and aptly trained, outfitted, and supported are necessary to blunt Moscow’s hybrid influence and resist a Russian occupation if necessary. These collective efforts will guarantee Moscow no quick or inexpensive victory and immediately allow the U.S. and her allies to compete with and impose cost on Russia.

Memory Policy and Historical Science: Scientific Results of the Year Dedicated to the Centenary of the Republic of Bashkortostan

The article explores the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of Bashkortostan in the context of the politics of memory and historical science. The major scientific events dedicated to the anniversary are analyzed. The authors turn to an analysis of the ideology and content of the International Scientific Forum “Unity. Citizenship. Patriotism”, which was held on March 22–23, 2019 in Ufa. Within its framework several topics were discussed: features of the legal status of the Bashkir people in historical retrospective; the Soviet project as an experience of nation-state building; the role of industrial modernization for the fate of the peoples of the USSR; spiritual and cultural development of the peoples of Russia in the 20th century; Bashkortostan in Russian military history in the 20th century; socio-economic realities and development prospects of Bashkortostan at the turn of the millennium; and national policy as a tool to strengthen common identity in the Republic of Bashkortostan. Next, the concept of the Russian nationwide Scientific and Practical Conference “Republic of Bashkortostan: History and Present”, held on October 9–10, 2019, is considered. The aim of the conference was to comprehend the issues of the historical development of Bashkortostan, to study the centuries-old experience of its development as a republic, and to analyze the modern development of our region.

Obrazy otechestvennoj voennoj istorii v sovetskoj propagande v nachal'nyj period Velikoj Otechestvennoj vojny (iyun'dekabr' 1941 g.)

Obrazy otechestvennoj voennoj istorii v sovetskoj propagande v nachal'nyj period Velikoj Otechestvennoj vojny (iyun'dekabr' 1941 g.)

The ‘Turkestan Generals’ and Russian Military History

This article is a short collective biography of six so-called ‘Turkestan Generals’, all of whom played a prominent role in the Russian conquest and administration of Central Asia. These campaigns are usually seen as marginal to the military history of the Russian empire in the nineteenth century, but they were central to the reputations of three of the most prominent generals of the period, who became important public figures – Cherniaev, Skobelev, and Kuropatkin. The article shows that this was not accidental, but the product of a carefully constructed narrative in Russian military historiography.

The Russian Officer Corps and Military Efficiency, 1800–1914

Dmitrii Nikolaevich Kopelev, Na sluzhbe Imperii: Nemtsy i Rossiiskii flot v pervoipolovine XIX veka (Serving the Empire: Germans and the Russian Fleet in the First Half of the 19th Century). 338 pp. St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii universitet v Sankt-Peterburge, 2010. ISBN-13 978-5943800962. Gudrun Persson, Learning from Foreign Wars: Russian Military Thinking, 1859-1873. iv + 208 pp. Solihull, UK: Helion, 2010. ISBN-13 978-1906033613. 25.00 [pounds sterling]. John W. Steinberg, All the Tsar's Men: Russia's General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898-1914. xvii + 384 pp. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010. ISBN-13 978-0801895456. $60.00. It is widely acknowledged that war is a continuation of politics other means, to borrow one of Carl Clausewitz's well-known sayings. Recent developments, such as changes in the Russian political environment, together with anniversaries and commemorations of past great wars, including the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, have helped revive interest in such politics by other means. Still, Russian military history--when judged against the overwhelming proportion of the research devoted to varied political, social, and cultural issues--has been extremely unfashionable among Russian and Western scholars for decades. (1) Now it is regaining its positions. The three books under review here mark this emerging shift in historiography. The authors examine the Russian army--and furthermore address the issue of military professionalism, more specifically its origin and functioning. The book Dmitrii Kopelev, a scholar known for his works on pirates of the 16th-18th centuries, takes on a rather conventional topic for early modern Russian military history: the German officer corps in the early 19th-century Russian navy. (2) However, this is not yet another attempt to rethink the degree of foreign influence on Russia's domestic development. Nor is it just an echo of the old debates about foreign domination (zasil'e) in Russian governmental structures. Rather, Kopelev's book reaches toward modern cultural anthropology in an attempt to gain an understanding of the Russian self observing the other. Kopelev focuses on German professional and family clans in the Russian navy and demonstrates that the idea of German domination was not a stereotype. According to his analysis, German origin truly did provide certain social and career advantages for naval officers who achieved the highest ranks more often and faster than Russians through nepotism and a patronage system that Kopelev defines as networks of trust (seti doveriia). It was a well-built scheme of integration based on sophisticated family networks, the widespread support of the German community and particular marital strategies. The system ultimately created influential circles that involved navy commanders and members of the imperial court. Kopelev draws on specific cases such as the admirals Ivan Krusenstern and Fedor Litke to show that even such outstanding naval careers were not based entirely on exceptional merits and personal abilities. Kopelev places great emphasis on the methods of social integration, such as education at the Naval Cadet Corps (Morskoi kadetskii korpus) in Kronstadt. He explores patterns of assimilation, such as name changes, Russian-language usage, and conversion to Orthodoxy. It was common for people of German origin to alter their names according to Russian standards. In Russian service, Adam Johann von Krusenstern became Ivan Fedorovich Kruzenstern, Friedrich Benjamin Liitke adopted the name Fedor Petrovich Litke, and Fabian Gottlieb Thaddeus von Bellingshausen came to be known as Faddei Faddeevich Bellinsgauzen. The religious identities of these naval officers of German origin varied; for example, in 1828 nearly a third of ethnic German officers were Orthodox. Despite their social and professional unity, German seamen in Russian service were not a fully homogeneous group but formed a complex intermixing community. …

A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812–1945 , and: Voennyi faktor v povsednevnoi zhizni russkoi zhenshchiny v XVIII–nachale XX vekov , and: Reforming the Tsar’s Army: Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution (review)

Reviewed by: A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812–1945, and: Voennyi faktor v povsednevnoi zhizni russkoi zhenshchiny v XVIII–nachale XX vekov, and: Reforming the Tsar’s Army: Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution Gregory Vitarbo Stephen M. Norris, A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812–1945. 291 pp. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006. ISBN-13 978-0875803630. $40.00. Pavel Petrovich Shcherbinin, Voennyi faktor v povsednevnoi zhizni russkoi zhenshchiny v XVIII–nachale XX vekov [The War Factor in the Everyday Life of Russian Women from the 18th to the Beginning of the 20th Centuries]. 507 pp. Tambov: Iulis, 2004. ISBN 5984010081. David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye and Bruce W. Menning, eds., Reforming the Tsar’s Army: Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution. 374 pp. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN-13 978- 0521819881. $75.00. In different ways the three works reviewed here posit the centrality of warfare in shaping the course of modern Russia’s historical development. Although warfare exerted a profound influence upon the history of most, if not all, European states in the modern era, wars both large and small played a crucial role in the foundation, expansion, and later collapse of both the tsarist and Soviet empires. If so with war, so it was also with the institution tasked with waging it, the military. As both the primary instrument and the prop of tsarist power, the military played a crucial role in the regime, not only in providing for the physical security of the state but in profoundly influencing political structures, methods of governance, and conceptions of authority. Furthermore, the scope of the military’s interaction with society was arguably broader than that of any other institution. As Bruce Menning and David Schimmelpenninck contend in their introduction, the kinds of military reforms that they analyze in Reforming the Tsar’s Army “have affected Russian society more thoroughly than perhaps any other society during the modern era” (3). The influence was reciprocal. From conscription to repression to local administration, some form of military experience was shared, and hence in part shaped, by nearly every tsarist subject. In light of this, it is telling that in his contributing essay to Reforming the Tsar’s Army, David McDonald still feels compelled to make the case for [End Page 668] the inherent value and broader relevance of military history in the Russian context. He first identifies some of the causal factors responsible for the continuing “outsider status” of Russian military history: the complex nature of the military itself (“a society within a society”), restricted archival access, political antipathies among scholars toward the tsarist regime, and a larger disdain for military history itself. One might also add the emphasis on social history in the 1960s–70s and the linguistic “turn” of the 1990s—movements that, as a rule, did not prioritize analysis of the military. In response, McDonald persuasively suggests a “closer relationship between Russia’s military, political-institutional, and social history than is often evident in the scholarly literature” (307–8). In particular, he notes how the essays in Reforming the Tsar’s Army illustrate several compelling themes: the influential role of the military in shaping the institutions, personnel, and political culture of the tsarist state; the connections between these essays and recent historiographical trends regarding new areas of thematic and chronological focus; and military historians’ engagement with broader conceptual motifs in approaching the late imperial period, including “change vs. continuity” and “Russia vs. the West.” All three of the works under review develop these themes in a number of ways. First, they display an appreciation for the breadth and complexity of the experience of warfare in the Russian context. From diverse perspectives they address the nexus of military, state, and society in a wide variety of forms, including conscription policies, strategic planning, technological modernization, popular culture, imperial ideology, and the unique experience of women. Moreover, all three explicitly emphasize a long and broad historical arc, explore the evolution of this dynamic interaction over multiple decades, and introduce comparisons with developments in...

A Military History of Russia From Ivan the Terrible to the War in Chechnya (review)

Reviewed by: A Military History of Russia From Ivan the Terrible to the War in Chechnya Walter C. Uhler A Military History of Russia From Ivan the Terrible to the War in Chechnya. By David R. Stone. Westport, Conn. Praeger Security International, 2006. ISBN 0-275-98502-4. Maps. Index. Pp. xiv, 259. $49.95. David Stone, Professor of Russian History at Kansas State University, has written his latest book in order to accomplish two primary objectives: (1) To cover both Russian and Soviet military history in one volume for the first time, and (2) to provide an accessible military history of Russia for use by military historians. Underlying his second objective is Professor Stone's belief that the discipline of military history suffers from a tunnel vision in which "military history starts with the U.S. Civil War, and it stretches from the Mississippi River to central Europe" (p. ix). It's his opinion that a military history that excludes the rest of the world, especially Russia, "is inherently incomplete" (ibid.). His secondary objectives include: (1) a cursory examination of the battles, campaigns, and wars in Russia's history; and (2) the illumination of "the complex and reciprocal relationship between military and society in Russia" (ibid.). Although arranged chronologically, each chapter in Stone's book examines Russia's struggles to overcome social, economic, and technological backwardness, which were exacerbated by the militarization of Russian society, which, in turn, was necessitated by the requirement to defend vast amounts of open territory. According to Stone, "from its beginnings, Russia has been a society organized for war" (p. xii). Although there is little in Professor Stone's survey that is new to the student of Russian military history, it is grounded in sound scholarship. Moreover, by avoiding entangling details, Stone is able to achieve his objectives. His survey is well written and completely accessible to the educated layman. That's not to say, however, that the book is without its flaws. For example, [End Page 542] Stone employs the term "absolutism" to describe the rule of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, but defines it in European terms: "Absolutist rulers sought to eliminate or disarm all domestic rivals for power, whether powerful regional elites or obstructionist representative institutions, in order to increase their capacity to wield power" (p. 30). Yet, Stone also refers to a "particular Russian brand of absolutism" devoted to "improving the efficiency and extractive capacity of the Russian state in order to boost its power" (p. 44). Moreover, he appears to be unaware of recent scholarship on Russian absolutism, which "emphasizes cooperation between the tsar and the ruling elite and between Russia's central government and the provinces" (Chester Dunning and Norman S. Smith, "Moving Beyond Absolutism: Was Early Modern Russia a 'Fiscal-Military' State?" Russian History/Histoire Russe 33 [Spring 2006]: 39). Stone also is quite mistaken when he alleges that President Reagan's "Star Wars" missile defense plan "terrified the Soviet leadership" (p. 237). Nevertheless, Stone concludes his splendid history by putting it to use. He compares previous fifteen-year spans of military revitalization—under Peter the Great, under Dmitrii Miliutin, and under Joseph Stalin—with Russia's martial renaissance since 1991. Thus, his conclusion: "Seen in historical perspective, the outlook is gloomy" (p. 246). Walter C. Uhler Russian-American International Studies Association Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Copyright © 2007 Society for Military History

Reforming the Tsar's Army: Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution by David Schimmelpenninck s> van der Oye Bruce W. Menning (review)

344 SEER, 83, 2, 2005 even mention that '[t]he history of Russian photography began in Odessa' (P. II 2).Nonetheless, thiswork'svisualvirtuosity,which will make it usefulto historiansand teachersof late imperialRussian historyalike,is sadlylet down by the accompanying texts' disparatenatureand failureto provide answersto many basic questions. Merton College, Oxford TIMOTHY S. J. PHILLIPS Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, David and Menning, Bruce W. (eds). Reforming theTsar'sArmy: MilitagyInnovation inImperial Russia fromPeterthe Great totheRevolution. Woodrow Wilson Center Series. Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, Washington D.C. and Cambridge, 2004. xi + 36I pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. ?45.00: $65.00. RUSSIANmilitary history, for long a neglected field, has boomed of late, notablyin the United States.This volume containsfifteenessaysby specialists, allbutthreeofthemNorthAmerican,who focuson problemsof administrative reform.Three other contributorsseek to situatethis somewhat dry, recondite topic in a generalhistoricalcontext. Severalof these scholarsalsohave articles in 7The Militay Histogy of Tsarist Russia,ed. F. W. Kagan and R. Higham (New York and London, 2002), to which this forms a worthy pendant. Oddly, though, there are no maps. It is 'grosslyexaggerated', saysGudrunPersson(p. 151), to see the imperial Russian armyas a 'bastionof conservatism';neverthelessmuch herebearsout the conventional view. Time and again reform efforts were frustrated by courtiers or bureaucratswho clung to unrealistic, outdated notions. We are not offered an adequate picture of this opposition in these pages, although impersonal obstacles to reform, such as the empire's vast size and ethnic diversity,do receive attention. Paul Bushkovitchreminds us that Peter I had to take many senior commanders from the old boyar aristocracy, likely to resenthisinnovations,ratherthanfromsocialupstartsorforeignprofessionals. Although he refrainsfrom saying so, this does not seem to have had adverse effectsin the field. Marching smartlyforwardto the end of the century, Bruce W. Menning shows how GrigoriiPotemkin,as virtualtsarof southernRussia, skilfully adapted strategy to frontier conditions and took a common-sense approach to his troops' welfare. Unhappily most of these advances did not outlive him. Alexander I's martial shortcomings emerge clearly. The elaborate statute of January I812 on administration of the Active Army, studied here by Frederick W. Kagan, seems to have had little practical import in the subsequent campaign; indeed, Menning attributesRussia'svictory largely to good fortune [and] improvisation'(p. 284) aided, of course,by Napoleonas follies. Supplies were woefully inadequate, but just how far the newly establishedMain Staffwas to blame remains unclear. Nicholas I's obsession with militaryaffairsyielded mountainsofpaper, but againwith limitedresults. Dmitrii I. Oleinikov (Moscow) rescues the Caucasian wars from undeserved oblivion, pointing out that Chechen tribesmen had (some!) better weapons REVIEWS 345 than the Russians (p. 2IO),which obliged the latter to make improvements. But he does not ask himself whether well-attested Russian atrocities against civilians stimulated resistance: here M. Gammer's study of I994, not cited, would have added balance. The reforms associated with Alexander II's long-serving War minister, Dmitrii A. Miliutin, naturallywin pride of place. Robert F. Baumann deals expertlywith the way the I874 universalmilitaryservicelawwas implemented in practice. Forall its inequitiesthe measurewas 'fundamentallysound [. . .] a catalyst for civic improvement'; notably, it promoted social mobility and by 191 I 49 per cent of officers were non-nobles (pp. 32, 23). In a pioneering study Mark von Hagen examines conscription's ethnic impact. Certain minoritieswere exempted and othersdiscriminatedagainst,but by 19I7 these 'privileges'had been radically curtailed and there were several non-Russian units. The role of railways in mobilizing such masses of men was crucial (Jacob W. Kipp, pp. 82-103). Though much was achieved, it was never enough, and already the war with Turkey (I877-78) exposed Russia's weaknessin thisrespect.Nor was the high command up to the mark,since the reformers,who rightly pushed for a bold offensive strategy,were worsted by the grand-ducallobby. David A. Rich shows that the conservativessuffereda major (hitherto disregarded)setback in i887, when the Main Staff devised 'Russia's first truly viable war plan' based on specialized knowledge rather than 'the prerogatives [. . .] of the dynastic regime' (p. I84). Once again, however, the reformers' success was temporary, as the Russo-Japanesewar would amply demonstrate. After I905, rescued from ignominious defeat by the diplomats, Russia's militaryleadersvigorouslydebated organizationalchanges to boost efficiency, but the result was an uneasy compromise. Menning commends the...

What’s New in Russian Military History and Why You Should Care

What’s New in Russian Military History and Why You Should Care Josh Sanborn (bio) Bruce W. Menning, Bayonets Before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861–1914. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992 (cloth) and 2000 (paper). 334 pp. ISBN 0-253-21380-0 and 0-253-21380-0. $45.00 and $22.95. William C. Fuller Jr., Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600–1914. New York: Free Press, 1992. 557 pp. ISBN 0-684-86382-0. $25.00. Oleg Rudol′fovich Airapetov, Zabytaia kar′era “russkogo Mol′tke”: Nikolai Nikolaevich Obruchev (1830–1904). St. Petersburg: Izdatel′stvo “Aleteiia,” 1998. 301 pp. ISBN 5-89329-037-2. David Alan Rich, The Tsar’s Colonels: Professionalism, Strategy, and Subversion in Late Imperial Russia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. 293 pp. ISBN 0-674-91111-3. $49.95. When one thinks of neglected approaches to the study of the Russian past, military history rarely comes to mind. In mass market publications and on television, military historians are, to say the least, well represented. At Borders Bookstore and on the History Channel, the feats and defeats of Russian arms occupy a large share of the space devoted to Russian history. One would also be hard pressed to argue that military history has been ignored in scholarly treatments of the Russian past. Military explanations have been adduced (and in many cases have become orthodox) for many important "social" events in Russian history, such as the implementation of serfdom and its later abolition.1 Nevertheless, there is a sense among active military historians that the most recent work in military history, by junior and senior scholars alike, remains unread by most of the field. Many scholars, of course, feel underappreciated, but [End Page 615] there seems to be something a bit more substantial about the complaints of military historians that their subject is ignored by the rest of the profession. To take just one example, a series of excellent edited collections on late imperial Russian history appeared in the 1990s, yet virtually none included articles on military history. Russian military intellectuals, line officers, and soldiers were involved in the "quest for public identity," in the development of the professions, in activities that can only be called subversive of the autocratic political system, and in the engagement with "Russia's Orient." But military history is at the center of none of the articles in the major collections on those themes that have appeared over the past decade.2 At a time when new historical paradigms are being formed as a result of the "cultural turn" and the opening of the Russian archives, this lack of integration is damaging not only to the professional egos of military historians but to the quality of scholarship for years to come. The sense of exclusion is felt acutely by many of my colleagues in military history, even the successful ones. One scholar who began his career in military history advised me – too late to make any difference in my choice of dissertation topic, but early enough to prompt years of anxiety – that studying the army had two major drawbacks. First, your classes fill up with young men who want to show you sketches of warplanes, and second, no one reads your work. At that point, I had had no luck getting funding to do research for a dissertation that foregrounded the notion of "militarization." After dropping that word from the title of my project, I received the next four grants for which I applied.3 From that point forward, I was careful to make clear to anyone who asked that I was not writing a dissertation that could be called "military history," even though the focus of my manuscript was military conscription. This caution is widely shared. In 1994, the American Historical Association found itself in the awkward position of awarding its Birdsall prize in military history to a bright young historian named Leonard Smith, who admitted on the first page of his book on the French [End Page 616] Army mutinies of 1917 that he "fretted endlessly about being tagged a 'military historian'" as he wrote the text.4 Smith's fretting is understandable. He was probably correct to sense...

АРМИЯ ИМПЕРИИ – ИМПЕРИЯ В АРМИИ: ОРГАНИЗАЦИЯ И КОМПЛЕКТОВАНИЕ ВООРУЖЕННЫХ СИЛ РОССИИ В Хvi – НАЧАЛЕ ХХ ВВ.

SUMMARY: The article focuses on the history of the Russian army in imperial context, in particular, on “national” and regional component within the imperial army, its formation throughout the process of imperial extension, its role in both defense and internal government of the empire and problems that heterogeneous composition of the imperial army posed for the empire’s integrity and military management. The author starts with an observation that the Russian imperial army lacked uniformity, suggesting that this was a persistent factor of Russian military history from the 16 th century (Cossacks and the Tatar regiments) until the end of the ancien regime . The author devises a typology of national and irregular regiments, which complemented the main regular forces recruited from the empire’s “titular nationality.” The first type was represented by the armed forces of the autonomous regions of the empire (the Kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Finland) and Russia’s protectorates in Central Asia (Bukhara and Khiva). A short lived Lithuanian Corpus falls within this category for it was dominated by the Polish element and its fate was tied to the history of the army of the Kingdom of Poland. The author concludes that that type of military formations mainly served to articulate the political autonomy of respective regions and nationalities but their military efficacy and political loyalty were doubtful. The second type was represented by “national” regiments, which constituted a part of the regular army but were recruited from a particular region or people of one nationality. The most representative examples include the Cavalry-Muslim regiment, Daghestani Cavalry regiment, the Crimean-Tatar Squadron. Those regiments were part of the internal policy of cooptation of the borderland elites into the imperial elite, their special status and continuity with the indigenous traditions (very often that of nomad way of life and war) lessened the harsh effect of integration of respective borderland nationalities into the Russian imperial society and state. They were also used as a valuable asset for regional wars, in particular, the Caucasian war. The third type consisted of irregular national formations, namely the Cossacks and militia recruited from non-Russian nationalities. They were usually necessitated by the military needs of the empire during the extensive and arduous campaigns, such as the war of 1812, the Crimean war, and the Russo-Turkish wars of 1828–1829 and 1877–1878. A subsection is devoted to the history of the Cossack forces, which are viewed from the viewpoint of their multiethnic character and role as frontier guard and settlers. The author concludes that the heterogeneous structure of the Russian imperial armed forces served the varying needs of the empire, which engaged in both interstate and regional (within the empire) war efforts. The article demonstrates that the history of the imperial army should not be viewed only from the viewpoint of its defense function. In fact the army was an important tool for internal imperial government. One aspect of the latter is the role that non-Russian military regiments played in symbolic representations of the Russian monarchy and government, epitomizing imperial diversity in unity.

The Battle at Kulikovo Field

Abstract There is an enormous literature devoted to the battle at Kulikovo Field, one of the most significant events of Russian military history in the medieval period. New important research has recently been added to this literature in connection with the six hundredth anniversary of the battle.1 But several questions require additional discussion. The sources that recount the events of the battle confront scholars with unresolved problems. It has been assumed, for instance, that armies of roughly equal size faced each other at Kulikovo.2 However, the view that the military forces of Old Russia and the Mongol Horde were equal requires critical examination. There are different viewpoints regarding the coalition of Russian princes that defeated the Horde in 1380. We will examine this question in greater detail.