What Was the Russian Serf Army?
The first Peter-the-Great recruitment (1st “conscription” nabory) was ordered by the Senate on 8 March 1705 and called for 30,000 men, of whom 10,000 were to come from the gentry. The next call was 169,000 men in 1706; the next, 100,000. In the first 21 years of conscription, 284,187 men were registered as rekrut and shipped from their villages to the assembly points at the provincial capitals. The term rekrut was a Russification of the German Rekrut; the service term was for life in 1705, and that remained the law until 1793. The demobilised or discharged soldier was the otstavnoy soldat (a kantonist son of a soldier was bound to the army from birth). Between 1700 and 1725 about 35 percent of the male population born in 1690–1700 was registered for the rekrut, and 75 percent of the registered men did not survive their term of service (Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar, 1985; Hellie, The Economy and Material Culture of Russian Serfs, 1982).
The serf army was the conscript army of an empire in which about 50 percent of the population (and 70 percent of the European Russian population) was legally krepostnye — privately owned serfs.
The recruiting system
Under the 1705 conscription statute, the pomeshchik (landlord) presented the state with a quota of recruits from his dvorovye lyudi (household serfs) and krest’yane (peasant serfs). The quota was set in proportion to the number of male dushi (souls) in the estate — about 1 recruit for every 200 souls. The landlord selected, paid the transit, and pocketed the zachislennye (the tax-payments of the soul). The recruit was, until 1861, the property of the landlord; the state received the labour, not the person. The 1834 Statute of Conscription (Voinskii Ustav) reduced the term to 20 years for the infantry and 25 for the navy. The death rate in the first year of service averaged 6–8 percent and rose to 14 percent in the first year of a campaign (Keep, 1985; Moon, The Russian Peasantry 1600–1930, 1999).
The numbers
The Russian army fought the 1812–1814 campaigns with about 1.1 million men in the field, of whom 600,000 were rekrut of the 1805–1812 cohort. The 1812 campaign of the 1st Western Army under Barclay de Tolly alone lost 38,000 men killed, wounded, and missing. The 1853–1856 Crimean War cost Russia 312,500 casualties, of whom 128,800 were killed. Of the 1.2 million Russian troops that crossed the Pruth on 1 June 1877, 120,000 were killed, wounded, or missing in the first six months. The 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War was the last Russian war fought by the rekrut (Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, 1974; Figes, The Crimean War, 2010).
The ending of the system
The Milyutin Statute of Universal Military Service, signed on 1 January 1874 and amended by the Statute of 1910, ended the rekrut system. The new conscription was a personal obligation, not a pomeshchik’s quota. The term was reduced to 6 years in the army and 7 in the navy, plus 9 years in the zapas (reserve). The 1874 conscripts were taken by ballot from the male population aged 21; the dvoriane (hereditary nobles) had a 2-year educational deferment; the raznochintsy (clergy’s sons, the meshchanstvo) had a 4-month educational deferment; the kantonisty were abolished in 1856. The mir (peasant commune) was no longer involved in the selection. The first conscripts under the 1874 statute were registered in November 1874. The army that fought in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 and the Great War of 1914–1918 was, in the legal sense, no longer a serf army (Milyutin, Istoriya voyny 1877–1878 gg., 1877–1880; Keep, 1985; Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 1980).
The cultural legacy
The serf army left a deep mark on Russian literature, music, and visual art. Leo Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches (1855) are the first Russian account of modern war by a writer who had actually been under fire as a soldier of the line. The veteran-soldier of the gentry is a stock character in Turgenev (The Hunting Sketches, 1852), Goncharov (Oblomov, 1859), and Lermontov (A Hero of Our Time, 1840). The songs of the rekrut — “Когда я на почте служил ямщиком”, “Солдатушки, бравы ребятушки” — were the Russian popular music of the 1830s–1860s. The disbandment of the disbanded-soldier communities (the soldatskie poselki) was the moment the kantonist system reached the villages. The 1874 statute did not abolish the social stigma of army service; it abolished the legal form of it (Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 2002; Wagner, The Tsarist Legal System, 1974).