Tsarist Officers Research Articles

Ivan Khandoshko. Restitution of Ukrainian Cultural Heritage: Relevance of the Present

The challenges of the present force us to delve as deeply as possible into our past, bringing back from oblivion everything that will help us to restore historical justice and enrich Ukrainian culture. The article is dedicated to the description of the figure of the virtuoso violinist Ivan Yevstakhiiovych Khandoshkin in the light of his Ukrainian origin. He has been considered as the founder of Russian violin school until recently. The heritage of I. Khandoshkin has been still interpreted by Russian researchers exclusively as a component of Russian musical culture and all the details of his works, emphasizing the Ukrainian origin of the composer, are concealed. After all, this case has not been an isolated one, because in this way, at the expense of many names of Ukrainian origin, the so-called Russian culture is created, enriched and asserted. The work of Ukrainian composer and musician Mykhailo Stepanenko, who has emphasized the Ukrainian origin of the artist, presented the Ukrainian sounding of his name – Ivan Ostapovych Khandoshko, and confirmed his spiritual belonging to Ukrainian culture, manifested in his violin works, becomes a stimulus for this scientific investigation. There is also another Ukrainian, the tsarist officer Vasyl Myrovych, a descendant of the closest assistant and associate of Hetman Ivan Mazepa, Pereiaslav colonel Fedir Myrovych. Vasyl Myrovych has been executed by the tsarist government for the attempt of a coup d’état. Therefore, I. Khandoshko’s dedication of one of his best sonatas to the Ukrainian Vasyl Myrovych is another confirmation of the Ukrainian essence of the composer. Studying additional musicological and historical sources we have managed to clarify and enrich information about the life and works of I. Khandoshko, which is on the article authoress opinion of a great importance both for Ukrainian violin performance in particular and for the entire musical culture of Ukraine in general.

Apollon Kruse (1891—1967): a sketch of the early period of his life

This article examines the early period of the life and career of the Russian and Soviet military man Apollon Kruse, who became a general first in the White and then in the Red Army and escaped every kind of repression. During the Revolution of 1917, Kruse, like many other career officers of the Russian Imperial Army, faced the problem of further professional development. Contrary to popular belief, for a significant number of the officers, military service in one or another post-imperial army was primarily associated with the maintaining of the elite status and gaining new career opportunities. Traditionally, apolitical behaviour of the officers and their commitment to specific corporatism principally allowed them to switch from one army to another one without difficulty. The trajectory of their service was determined by their personal characteristics (first of all, their origin and worldview). These circumstances in particular gave rise to a whole range of identities that could change, depending on the situation. Kruse’s example highlights the evolution of a former tsarist officer and suggests a new approach towards the nature of conformity in his elite group. The article is based on previously unknown archival documents.

A Russian Officer with Polish Roots in Czechoslovakia. On the Seventieth Anniversary of Vladimír Hejmovský’s Victory in the Grand Pardubice Steeplechase

Vladimír Hejmovský (Russian: Vladimir Geymovsky) was a tsarist officer in Russia who fought on the side of the Whites against the Bolsheviks. After arriving in Czechoslovakia in 1923, he became an officer in the Czechoslovak army. He was also a passionate equestrian who managed to win the Grand Pardubice Steeplechase in 1951 – when he was nearly sixty years old. But he would never again achieve a similar sporting achievement. Czechoslovakia’s State Security (StB) sought to get rid of him for his earlier anti-Bolshevik activities (and his activities in the Russian émigré organization Victor), which they succeeded in doing in September 1952

The history of the Imams of the Caucasus and the Gunoy community in the collected works of the late 19th century

The article examines the content of two of the four narratives of the Gunoic collection of works of the late 19th century. The first work devoted to the activities of the three imams – Gazi-Muhammad, Gamzat-bek and Shamil – received the conditional name «History of the Imams»; the second is dedicated to the ancestor of the Chechen community Gunoy, his descendants and their movements in the region – «History of Gunoys». The material is written in Arabic graphics with elements of adjam. Compiled, according to the colophon, in 1316 AH (1898–1899) for Mazhir Ganukaev, a native of Gunoy. Before the direct translation of the texts of the essays, the author of the article carried out a brief analysis of the content of the sources, based on a comparison of their content with the data of documents or legends. The information in the «History of the Imams» was compared with the data from the reports of the tsarist officers – direct participants in the events described in the essay – or the commanders of the Caucasian army and confirmed by them, with the exception of the cases indicated in the author's analysis. The content of the «History of the Gunoy» is supported by references to other researchers, including pre-revolutionary (Iv. Popov). The publication of the translation and the study of the content of these narratives are being made for the first time. The sources reveal previously known historical information and supplement them with new details, acting as an additional source on the history of the North Caucasus and Chechnya, in particular.

К проблеме трудоустройства бывших офицеров армии Российской империи в РСФСР в 1918 – начале 1920-х гг. (на материалах Тамбовской губернии)

The establishment of the power of the Bolsheviks entailed the problem of social adaptation to the new political and socio-economic realities, first of all, representatives of the former privileged groups of the population, including former officers. An important component of this process was their work for the Soviet government. In Russian historiography, the issues of using former officers (military experts) on the fronts of the Civil War have been studied in sufficient detail. At the same time, there aren’t many studies that inspect the activities of this professional group of the population in rear military institutions and in the civil service. The study of this aspect makes it possible to significantly supplement the ideas about the position of the former officers in Soviet Russia. The purpose of the study is to analyze the structure of occupations of former officers of the Imperial Russian army on the territory of the Tambov province in the early years of Soviet power. The features of the civil and military service of former officers, areas of employment, the attitude of the party and state bodies of the new government, employers towards them are studied. The conclusion is formulated about the ambiguity of the process of integration of former officers of the Russian Imperial Army into the new Soviet society. In the early years, especially during the Civil War and intervention, the new government recruited former tsarist officers into the ranks of the Red Army, using their professional knowledge and combat experience, while continuing, meanwhile, to consider them “class aliens”.

Учет и призыв бывших офицеров Российской императорской армии в Красную армию в годы Гражданской войны (по материалам Тамбовской губернии)

The civil war and intervention necessitated a general mobilization in the controlled territories. There was an acute problem of manning the Red Army with qualified command personnel, including former tsarist officers (military experts). The purpose of the study is to consider the pro-cedure for conscripting former officers of the army of the Russian Empire to command positions in the Red Army during the Civil War. The problems of military mobilization work during the Civil War, including the involvement of former officers of the tsarist army in the Soviet service, have been studied to a greater extent at the all-Russian level. The regional specifics of the activities of organizations that carried out the registration and conscription of former officers, the problems of evading former officers from conscription and bringing them to justice for such acts are analyzed. It is concluded that in the course of the growing armed confrontation at the front, the Soviet military registration authorities went from a partial call-up of certain categories of military experts to a general total mobilization of all fit-for-service officers of the old army who lived on the territory of the RSFSR. The high level of education and qualifications of the majority of former officers allowed them to successfully cope with their duties in the civil service. This circumstance led to disagreements between the civil and military departments on the drafting of certain employees from among the former officers into the army.

Gra na dwa fronty, czyli rozważania o lojalności. Tomasz Łubieński w okresie powstania listopadowego i Zygmunt Sierakowski na drodze do powstania styczniowego

Double-dealing, or considerations of loyalty. Tomasz Łubieński during the November Uprising and Zygmunt Sierakowski on the way to the January Uprising Tomasz Łubieński (1784–1870) is a hero of the Napoleonic campaings, active politically and enonomically in the Congress Kingdom. After the November Night, he worked to stop the insurrection movement and reconcile with Russia. His military activity in 1831 raises doubts as to his full involvement. The only member of the November Uprising generalship, after an audience with Nicolas I, was released, and then he continued his opportunist career. The dominant feature of the attitude was calculation, permeating a double betrayal (of the king‑tsar, a revolted nation) and, in accordance with principle of two consciences, double loyalty to the Russian monarch and own fellow countrymen. Zygmunt Sierakowski (1827–1863), during his penal service on the Orenburg line, decides to take up te career of a tsarist officer in order to use the opportunities thus gained for the benefit of the national irredent. After graduating from the Academy of the General Staff in St. Petersburg, a specialized employee of the Ministry of War tries to be “Wallenrod of the reform of the tsarist empire” as well as “Wallenrod of the Polish independence underground”. Loyalty to the Cause resulted in a “double existence” on the verge of mental exhaustion, and his heroic sacrifice made him a martyr for his countryman, an example of treason, falsehood and hypocrisy for Russians.

Poles in the Tsarist Officer Corps in the 19th Century. Can a Soldier’s Loyalty be Reconciled with “The Idea of Being a Good Pole”?

Poles in the Tsarist Officer Corps in the 19th Century. Can a Soldier’s Loyalty be Reconciled with “The Idea of Being a Good Pole”?

Cross-cultural contact in Manchuria: approaches to lives in between, 1900s–1950s

ABSTRACTThis article aims to uncover the lives of some of the individuals who, through the occupational and personal choices they made, moved between the Chinese and Russian societies of Manchuria (Northeast China) in the first half of the twentieth century. The Chinese Eastern Railway, which passed through the region and was central to its economy, provided the main framework for Chinese–Russian contact. Headquartered in Harbin, the Railway generated a need for interpreters and translators, while it also offered opportunities for commercial go-betweens. Russian schools employed Chinese teachers for language instruction. After a change in the balance of power, by the 1920s, Manchurian warlords hired former tsarist officers and soldiers into their armies. The article compares the functions of intermediaries in this region to the better-known examples of Shanghai, Canton and Hong Kong. Research on ‘compradors’ has been more often conducted in these geographical settings, whereas the roles of cross-cultural intermediaries in late imperial and republican China still remain relatively unexplored.

The FSB literati: the first prize winners of the Russian federal security service literature award competition, 2006–2018

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) intervention in the process of popular culture production in Russia. After briefly discussing the KGB precedent, I focus on the FSB annual art awards established in 2006. Although these awards include six categories and three prizes per each category plus honorable mentions, due to the length limitations, I focus only on the first prize winners of the literature award (awarded for fiction, nonfiction, and journalism). The key questions I investigate are, first, what kinds of literary works the FSB deems worthy of the first prize and, secondly, what the FSB literary taste conveys about the self-image that it has sought to construct for domestic and international audiences as well as about its strategic orientation. I conclude that the FSB has a predilection for spy fiction based on real historical events and personalities. Some of the first prize winners are biographies and reference books, but the majority can be categorized as historical fiction. Not surprisingly, they depict self-confident and patriotic intelligence officers who ultimately, though not without a lot of effort, overcome the assorted villains: the tsarist officers, the criminal gangs, the corrupt officials and turncoats in contemporary Russia and, last but not least, the CIA operatives. Curiously, though they generally deal with the threat from the West, many FSB-awarded historical novels are set in the Russian Central Asian or Far Eastern regions. The emerging thematic patterns reveal the contours of the present and future FSB strategic orientation.

THE BEGINNING OF NAIB BAISUNGUR’S ACTIVITY IN PEOPLE’S LIBERATION STRUGGLE IN DAGESTAN AND CHECHNYA IN THE 19th CENTURY

The article covers the long-term participation of the legendary Naib Baisungur from Benoy in the people’s liberation struggle under the command of Imams Gazimuhammad, Shamil and Sheikh Tashav-Haji from Endirei. Basing on archival documents, published sources and field data collected by the author and Chechen researchers in the mountains of Dagestan and Chechnya for the last 30 years, the author analyzes military talent, unfailing courage, bravery, organizational skills, kind and noble human qualities of the leader of the mountaineers Naib Baisungur from Benoy. The author emphasizes that Baisungur participated in the people’s liberation struggle under the leadership of the first Imam Gazimuhammad until September 1832, the second Imam Gamzatbek until September 1834, Sheikh Tashav-Haji until 1843 and under the leadership of Imam Shamil until August 1859. After Shamil’s captivity, from the end of 1859 till February 1861 he continued to lead the liberation struggle of the mountaineers. Among all Imam Shamil’s companions (naibs, murids, muftis, kadis, teachers) Baisungur from Benoy held a specific place, he supported and helped Shamil for more than 30 years. He took an active part in the formation and development of the Imamate state at all stages of its construction. For thirty years Baisungur headed the Benoy society, he was the chief of the Benoy society, the naib of Imam Shamil, he participated in many battles against the tsarist troops. In these battles he lost an eye, an arm and a leg. Baisungur overcame all imaginable hardships of the cruel war, and he always remained a living example of unfailing courage and bravery for all Dagestan and Chechen people. He was a particularly bright person, he enjoyed great respect and authority from Imams Gazimuhammad, Shamil, Gamzatbek, many companions of the Imams, and the peoples of Dagestan and Chechnya. The tsarist officers and generals admired him. This is evidenced by many field data, folk songs, legends, stories of old residents, folk sayings in the Chechen, Avar, Kumyk and other languages collected by the author in the villages of Dagestan and Chechnya.

The Jews and the evacuation of Russians from the Kingdom of Poland in 1915

It is estimated that during the first year of the war about 1,200,000 people were evacuated from the Kingdom of Poland (including tsarist officers, Russian teachers, officials, Orthodox clergy, workers from military factories and railroaders). The attempt to estimate the number of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Poland who were forced to move to Russia due to the war events is not easy. It is estimated that up to the moment when the Central States started to occupy the whole country, 800,000 to 1,000,000 people – besides ethnic Russians – were either forced to move or voluntarily left Poland, but those figures include also the part of Galicia occupied by the Russians. The data considers mostly Poles, and it’s difficult to establish the number of refugees of other nationalities, especially the Jews, who were often sent from place to place and did not leave the territory of the country. Accepting the most often quoted total number of 1,000,000 people displaced from the ‘Russian Poland’, Lithuania and Galicia and taking into consideration the fact that the Polish rescue organisations did not register and did not know about the fate of all the evacuated people, we may estimate the number of the escapees from ‘Russian Poland’ as 750,000 – 850,000 thousand. According to the statistics prepared by the Jewish aid committees in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev and Odessa for the day of 20 May 1915, 526,000 Jews from the Kingdom of Poland, the Lithuanian provinces, the Volhynia, Podole and Kurland, as well as the occupied part of Galicia were exiled, evacuated or escaped because of the approaching troops. According to some sources, ca. 340,000 of them were inhabitants of the Kingdom of Poland. The evacuation of Russians in 1915 was accompanied not only by the most violent expulsions, but also by scorched earth policy. The peasants and the Jews were among those who suffered the most. However, for the Jews from Poland and Lithuania the war and evacuation was one of the most difficult experiences they had ever encountered. It turned out that the tsarist army was a true pillar of anti-Semitism, but robberies and destructions caused by the army were escalated by the local population.

From partisan war to the ethnography of European Turkey: the Balkan career of Ivan Liprandi, 1790–1880

ABSTRACTThe Balkan entanglements of the Great Powers have long interested historians of war, diplomacy, and nation-building in South-Eastern Europe. Although tsarist officers played a central role in Russian policies in the region, historians have rarely treated their writings as expressions of specifically military concerns and preoccupations. The present article seeks to fill this gap by reconstructing the Balkan career of Ivan Liprandi, a Russian officer, partisan leader, and self-styled expert on the European part of the Ottoman Empire during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The article traces Liprandi’s effort to turn his direct experience of partisan warfare into knowledge and place that knowledge at the disposal of the Russian military command. Liprandi’s remarkable Balkan career testifies to the growing interest of the Imperial Russian military in the ethno-confessional profile and political attitudes of the local population as factors contributing to victory or defeat. Liprandi’s statistical and ethnographic writings on the Balkans are also indicative of the nexus between the military and civilian forms of knowledge that emerged in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

Dobra Ziemskie Narodowe Wiszniów i ich zarządcy

National Good Earth or landed estates existing in the period of the Polish Kingdom, included the in sites of former crown lands. These numerous estates were owned by of the National Treasure. I discussed estate in Wiszniowie (Wiśniew in the present) located in the district Siedlce, is an example of national properities. Property in the Wiśniew is an example the nineteenth-century, a Polish village is located under Russian partition. Grange was their central location (house) inhabited mostly by the owner or lessee. Grange was center of administration and representative. The owners of these goods was the Treasury of the Kingdom but nevertheless they were repeatedly put a lease of or even included in the donation.This article is primarily a response to a question about which ones the village belonged in the nineteenth century to the property and who, when and to what extent o managed to land estates in Wiszniów. We also brings the people associated with these assets, and provides information about legal ways to acquire such assets owned lease or as a donation. The land reform of the countryside in the Polish Kingdom, the beginning of a longterm possession of the property by the Tsarist officers from the lineage of Maniukin. Their reign lasted time until the end of First World War.

Where Was the Conscience of the Revolution? The Military Opposition at the Eighth Party Congress (March 1919)

This article examines the debates and decisions of the military section of the Eighth Party Congress of March 1919, only released in Izvestiia TsK KPSS in 1989-90. It rebuts the standard interpretation of the military section (usually referred to as the Military Opposition) as a minority platform opposed to the use of former tsarist officers in the Red Army, most notably proposed in R. V. Daniels's The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (1960). Instead, I argue that the debates were more concerned with the military's increasing autonomy at the expense of party control. These fears were compounded by the introduction of the mass conscription of an apolitical peasantry at a time of extreme instability. This indiscriminate conscription had alarmed many Red Army party workers, who were only too aware of the dangers of arming an unconscious peasant mob. In addition, the article lays bare the beginning of the longer-term conflict between Iosif Stalin and Lev Trotskii and demonstrates Stalin's early influence within the party membership.

The Horrors of War: Representations of Violence in European, Oriental, and “Patriotic” Wars

As military men living in a particularly belligerent period, Russian officers at the turn of the 19th century had ample opportunity to experience the manifold aspects of war. Any reader of their military diaries and memoirs knows how rarely their authors venture beyond the subjects of strategy and tactics, let alone describe the death and suffering that are common in times of war. Nevertheless, Russian war literature from the late 1700s and early 1800s contains a significant number of testimonies about the perceived transgressions of normal military experience. These transgressions, called here the of were both unusual enough to arrest attention and unsettling enough to generate specific discursive strategies that helped the diarists and memoirists cope with their traumatic impact. Sensitivity to the of war is a variable defined, on the one hand, by the historically changing character of warfare and, on the other, by the individual's idea of the acceptable forms of violence in war. Although war suspends the existing political and social order, it is often conducted in accordance with certain rules--for example, feudal warfare based on notions of aristocratic honor or 20th-century international conventions prohibiting the use of poison gas and explosive bullets. The boundary between acceptable and unacceptable forms of violence is defined in different ways by different social groups and societies, often as a function of the timing of their encounters with modernity. The modern mind has an ambiguous attitude toward war. It exhibits a mounting uneasiness about the inhumanity of war, yet may succumb to the temptation of the idea of total war as a means to end all such warfare. (1) As narrating subjects become more sensitive to the of they sometimes employ elaborate discursive strategies to overcome their potentially traumatic influence and to continue fighting. Whereas accounts of horrors reveal the increasingly unsettling character of warfare, the discursive treatment of these can make the continuation of war possible. Over the course of 18th- and early 19th-century European campaigns, tsarist officers adopted elements of the code of conduct characteristic of the ancien regime--a set of unwritten principles that channeled violence and minimized the destructive impact of war on civilian populations. (2) At the same time, a series of campaigns against Ottoman Turkey confronted the tsarist officers with the barbarities of oriental warfare, which further strengthened their commitment to the of regular war. The European and Turkish campaigns constituted two alternative varieties of Russian war experience that were taking shape by the time of what became known as the Patriotic War of 1812. Napoleon's invasion was the war in centuries to affect the Russian interior; it accordingly led to an unprecedented mobilization of society beyond the military class. It forced the rationalistic sensibilities of the educated Russians to confront the of the first total which called into question the wisdom of ancien regime warfare and challenged the earlier perception of the civilian population as neutral and uninvolved. Based on Russian memoirs and diaries of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the present article discusses three major aspects of contemporary war experience and analyzes discursive techniques that helped the tsarist officers deal with the of war. First, I highlight the role of the European campaigns of the Russian army in the emergence of the military intelligentsia, who became committed to the of regular warfare and condemned transgressions of these rules by their own soldiers. Next, I analyze the construction of the Ottomans as an oriental Other, whose way of fighting Russian officers found both spectacular and barbarous. Finally, it explores Russian memoirs and diaries of the War of 1812, in which portrayals of unacceptable forms of violence both sustained and suspended the discourse of patriotic struggle against unprecedented foreign invasion. …

Major-General G. V. Burman and the Creation and Development of Russia's Air Defense System in World War I

As Russia prepares to formally commemorate the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I by unveiling a memorial to its ‘heroic dead’ in Moscow next year, this article will examine the role of one of its, until comparatively recently, long-forgotten heroes, who played a significant role in the organization and development of the country's air defense system, Major-General G. V. Burman. Not only will the article throw light on the activities of one of the more significant former Tsarist officers who played an important role in the defense of both the Russian Empire and the young Soviet republic, but the article will also open a new chapter in the analysis of the creation, organization, and role of the air defense system of one of the major combatants during the First World War.

Nationality Policy and the Russian Imperial Officer Corps, 1905-1914

This article examines the imperial Russian army's attempt to formulate a comprehensive nationalities policy for its officer corps after 1905. The army sought to establish service quotas for each nationality according to its percentage of the empire's population. The professed goal of this policy was the preservation of the numerical, and thus cultural, predominance of Orthodox, ethnic Russian officers. Yet this attempt to fashion an officer corps both “imperial” and “Russian” exposed competing paradigms of service, loyalty, and identity among tsarist officers, raising broader questions about the relationship between army, state, and empire. Thus concerns of nationality and nationalism affected the officer corps more deeply than has been assumed. Gregory Vitarbo's work provides new insights into the intersection of military reform, nationality policy, and imperial ideology in the late Russian empire, while further illustrating suggestive linkages with contemporary pan-European trends concerning military practices, nationality politics, and cultural ferment.

The Russian Officer Corps in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1792-1815 (review)

Reviewed by: The Russian Officer Corps in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1792–1815 Jonathan Grant The Russian Officer Corps in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1792–1815. By Alexander Mikaberidze. El Dorado Hills, Calif.: Savas Beatie, 2005. ISBN 1-932714-02-2. Illustrations. Tables. Charts. Bibliography. Pp. lxvi, 480. $64.95. While many thousands of volumes have been written detailing the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleonic eras, the Russian army has not been as thoroughly studied in the Western language scholarship. Alexander Mikaberidze seeks to help fill this void by presenting a much-needed reference work on the tsarist officer corps of the period. The book consists of two parts. First, the author provides an essay giving an overview of the officer corps. Here he paints a collective portrait of the corps from the time of Peter the Great through 1815. Using very effective tables and charts, the essay tracks officer origins, enlistment, promotions, literacy, and education. The economic and social dimensions, such as serf and estate ownership, noble status, and national composition, also receive due attention. Finally, the essay concludes with explanations of ranks and military orders. Out of this collective portrait, the author finds that by 1812, despite being overwhelmingly noble in social origins (86.5 percent), 77 percent of Russian officers owned neither property nor serfs, and almost all foreign officers held no assets within Russia and depended on their salaries to sustain themselves. The author also finds that by the 1812 campaign the tsarist officer corps had become dominated by Russian nobility (1,579 Russian nobles compared to [End Page 504] only 45 foreign nobles). The second part, which comprises the bulk of the volume, consists of over eight hundred biographies of junior and senior officers. Entries address all the generals, many colonels, and even some lieutenants. Beginning with Andrey Ivanovich Abakumov and concluding with Peter Yakolevich Zykov, each officer's origins, education, and military career are systematically detailed. This work represents a significant scholarly contribution to the field of Napoleonic studies generally and Russian history specifically. Russian specialists and general Europeanists will benefit from the information that Mikaberidze has judiciously culled from the files of the Russian State Military Historical Archive. The entries, ranging from a single paragraph to several pages, are concisely written and highly informative. The author has put at our fingertips an easily accessible encyclopedia, and in the process has accomplished his mission of bringing the Russian army out of the shadows and into the light of mainstream western scholarship. Jonathan Grant Florida State University Tallahassee, Florida Copyright © 2006 Society for Military History

P. A. Zaionchkovskii: High Society Subversive

P. A. Zaionchkovskii:High Society Subversive David Saunders (bio) L. G. Zakharova, Iu. S. Kukushkin, T. Emmons, eds. P. A. Zaionchkovskii (1904–1983 gg.): Stat′i, publikatsii i vospominaniia o nem. Moscow: Rossiiskaia politicheskaia entsiklopediia (ROSSPEN), 1998. 463 pp. ISBN 5-86004-136-5. No Soviet historian deserved a festschrift more than Petr Andreevich Zaionchkovskii (1904–83), but the closest he came to one in his lifetime were things like a personal entry in the third edition of the Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia and the publication of a list of his writings on his seventieth birthday (see the first of the two bibliographies at the end of the work under review, 453). In September 1994 a number of his colleagues, pupils, and friends – Russian, American, German, and Japanese – gathered at Moscow State University to remedy the omission. After a brief preface by Iu. S. Kukushkin (3–4), the resulting miscellany contains a substantial introduction by Larisa Zakharova (5–20); two chapters from the monograph Zaionchkovskii was working on at the time of his death (24–98); 15 reminiscences (101–93); 17 scholarly articles in fields related to Zaionchkovskii's own (197–449); and lists of appraisals of the historian and of his own publications (453–54, 455–61).1 The book invites reflection both on Zaionchkovskii as a person and on the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian Empire to which he devoted himself. I "Fate would appear to have prepared P. A. Zaionchkovskii for almost any career other than an academic one."2 On his father's side he was a Russified Polish nobleman (his grandfather was called Czes∏aw [5]). Through his paternal grandmother he was related to Admiral P. S. Nakhimov, one of the three great defenders of Sevastopol' in the Crimean War (114, 122, 172). Although, after paying off their debts, his forebears received only about a ruble for the part of [End Page 167] their land in Smolensk that they had to sell to peasants at the abolition of serfdom (170), they managed to hold on to their relatively prominent place in tsarist society. Two of Zaionchkovskii's uncles rose to the rank of privy councilor (173).3 His father, an army doctor, tried to ensure that the young Zaionchkovskii would perpetuate the family tradition of service to the state by sending him to military schools in Moscow and Kiev (5). These schools gave Zaionchkovskii an affection for the tsarist officer corps which never left him. He "never cried so much" as when Denikin fell back from Kiev in 1918 (135; or, more likely, from Orel in 1919 [173]); he confessed to a Communist Party recruiting officer in 1931 that if he had been a little older at the time of the Civil War he would have gone to fight for the Whites on the Don (123, 173); he wrote two monographs on pre-revolutionary military matters and was engaged on a third at the time of his death; he recalled incidents from his schooldays in that final monograph (35–36, 60–62, 64–65); he talked his way past the guards at the Malinovskii Tank Academy in Moscow in 1982 to take a final look at what had been the first of his military schools (171–72); and he was reading Denikin's memoirs when he died in the Lenin Library in 1983 (19). Many contributors to the volume under review convey a sense of the importance Zaionchkovskii attached to the soldier's belief in precision, duty, honor, and formal manners. Some speak also of his religiosity and monarchism, which seem to belong to the same code of ethics. A person of Zaionchkovskii's background and beliefs could not gain admission to a Soviet institution of higher education in the years immediately after the revolution. In the 1920s and 1930s he worked as a fireman, on the railways, and as a metalworker. In 1931, however, he joined the Communist Party; in 1937 he took his first degree as an extramural student at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History; and in 1940 he took his candidate's degree there and started work as a junior professor at the Moscow Regional Pedagogical Institute. According...