What Was the Imperial Russian Army?
The Imperial Russian Army was the land warfare branch of the armed forces of the Russian Empire, one of the largest and most powerful military forces in modern history. Between Peter the Great’s reforms of the early eighteenth century and the empire’s collapse in 1917, the army stood at the heart of Russia’s expansion, defense, and development, leaving a deep imprint on the empire’s political, social, and economic life (see Menning, Bayonets before Bullets, 1992, for the institutional history of the imperial Russian army).
The origins of the army
The army’s story begins with the military reforms of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century. The forces Peter inherited were still medieval in character — noble cavalry at the core, semi-professional infantry, and assorted auxiliaries — and they could not sustain prolonged warfare on a large scale. When Sweden crushed the Russians at the Battle of Narva in 1700, early in the Great Northern War, the case for reform became impossible to ignore.
Peter answered by building a modern regular army. Its foundation was conscription, introduced in 1705, under which the state and court peasants had to supply set numbers of recruits. The men taken initially served for life and were formed into European-style regiments with uniform dress, weapons, drill, and discipline. Alongside this, Peter set up military schools, brought in Western military specialists, and obliged the Russian nobility to serve either in the army or in the civil administration.
The organization of the army
From bottom to top, the army’s structure ran regiment, division, corps, army. At the base stood the regiment of roughly 1,000 to 2,000 men — the army’s tactical building block — under a colonel, whose staff handled the unit’s training, discipline, and administration.
Two or more regiments, together with attached artillery, cavalry, and other arms, made up a division, the principal formation for operational maneuver, normally led by a general. Two or more divisions plus supporting elements in turn formed a corps, the level at which strategic maneuver was conducted, usually under a lieutenant general.
At the summit stood the army itself: several corps with reserves and supporting services, generally commanded by a full general and serving as the principal strategic formation. In the First World War the key strategic groupings were the Northern, Western, and Southwestern Fronts, each comprising several armies.
Recruitment and service
The Russian army was primarily recruited by conscription. The conscription system, established by Peter the Great, required the state and court peasants to provide a certain number of recruits each year. The conscripts served for life in the early period, although the period of service was gradually reduced to a fixed term of 25 years. The Milyutin reform of 1874 replaced this system with universal military service, under which conscripts served six years on active duty followed by service in the reserve, for a total liability of fifteen years.
The conscription system was supplemented by the recruitment of volunteers, particularly for the technical and special units. The Russian army also relied heavily on the use of auxiliary forces, including the Cossack hosts and the various irregular units.
The conscription system was a major burden on the Russian population, and the recruitment of the conscripts was an important source of social tension. The conscripts were often the most able-bodied young men from the peasant households, and their absence from the villages was a major hardship for their families. The conscription system was also an important source of the political and social tensions that would eventually contribute to the revolution of 1917.
The officer corps
Officers came overwhelmingly from the nobility, for whom a commission was a recognized route of social advancement. Young noblemen commonly began their careers in the prestigious Guards regiments in St. Petersburg, which functioned as a kind of finishing school for the imperial elite. The Guards carried political weight as well: they figured repeatedly in palace coups, and which candidate they backed often helped decide who occupied the Russian throne.
Officer training centered on the Page Corps, the Cadet Corps, and the specialized academies for artillery, engineering, and general-staff work. At the top of this hierarchy stood the Imperial Nicholas General Staff Academy, the elite institution that prepared officers for the general staff and counted many of Russia’s foremost commanders among its graduates.
Major campaigns
Over two centuries the army campaigned almost continuously. The opening chapter was the Great Northern War with Sweden (1700-1721): victory at Poltava in 1709 and the Treaty of Nystad in 1721 made Russia a great European power with a foothold on the Baltic Sea.
Against the Ottoman Empire, Russia fought again and again — in 1768-1774, 1787-1792, 1806-1812, 1828-1829, and 1877-1878. The decisive contest was the war of 1768-1774, whose concluding Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca opened the Black Sea to Russia.
The nineteenth century’s defining campaign was the struggle against Napoleon in 1812-1814. The defeat of the Grande Armée in Russia in 1812 changed the course of European history, and the campaigns of 1813-1814 carried the army to the occupation of Paris and the restoration of the European order.
In the twentieth century the supreme test was the First World War, which cost the army catastrophic losses even as it produced notable successes, the Brusilov Offensive of 1916 chief among them (see Stone, The Eastern Front 1914-1917, 1975).
The legacy of the army
As a defining institution of the empire, the army’s influence reached far beyond the battlefield and into the making of the Russian state itself. It employed vast numbers of people, educated the elite, opened paths of social mobility, and stimulated the wider economy: equipping it with rifles, ammunition, and uniforms spurred the growth of Russian industry, while moving and supplying it drove railway construction and the modernization of the roads.
Alexander Suvorov, who died in 1800 without a battlefield defeat in sixty years of service, and Mikhail Kutuzov, who preserved the army after Borodino and wore out Napoleon in the retreat from Moscow, became canonical exemplars of Russian military excellence. Their portraits hung in every Russian barracks and their campaigns were studied at the General Staff Academy. When the Soviet state needed military heroes, it looked first to these imperial commanders: Stalin revived the Order of Suvorov and the Order of Kutuzov in 1942 for officers who had distinguished themselves in the defence against Germany.