Abstract
The reign of Nicholas I was rich in important developments in Russian military policy, some of which, such as the predominant position the War Ministry attained as a result of the administrative reforms, would endure for decades after Nicholas’s death. Yet history has long portrayed this period as a dark age of the Russian army and of the Russian state. Official nationality1 the expansion of censorship, the creation of the “secret police,” and the suppression of liberalism and revolution at home and abroad are the policies for which his reign is known. Of the army it is generally said that the “parade-ground atmosphere” and “devotion to mindless drill” robbed what had been a fine army of its fighting skills and reduced it to a shell fit only for passing in review. The army’s inability to defend the Crimean peninsula in 1853–1855 is taken to be an indictment of Russia’s entire military policy for the previous quarter-century.
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Notes
“Nationality” is an unfortunate translation of “narodnost’” as it conjures up notions of nationalism that were completely alien to the concept that Nicholas and Uvarov had in mind. “Official nationality,” however, has come to be the established translation for the cultural program that Nicholas initiated, which is indicated by the title of one of the most important works on the subject: Nicholas Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).
Bruce Lincoln, Nicholas I, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989), p. 151.
N. K. Shil’der, Imperator Nikolai Pervyi, ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie, vol. I (St. Petersburg: 1903), pp. 583–84.
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987).
Cited in John Shelton Curtiss, Russia’s Crimean War (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1979), p. 500.
Cited in S. S. Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr II, ego zhizn’ i tsarstvovanie, vol. I (Saint Petersburg: 1903), p. 183.
From a War Ministry report of 1870, cited in Robert F. Baumann, “The Debates over Universal Military Service in Russia, 1870–1874” (Ph. D. diss., Yale University, 1982), p. 3.
M. I. Bogdanovich, Istoricheskii ocherk deiatel’nosti voen-nago upravleniia v pervoe dvadtsati-piati-letie blagopoluchnago tsarstvovaniia Gosu-daria Imperatora Aleksandra (1855–1880 gg. ), vol. I (Saint Petersburg: 1880), Appendix 4, gives the strength of the regular forces as 1,777,656 officers and men as of 1 January 1856; Appendix 7 gives the strength of the militia as 358,328 as of 1 January 1856; and Appendix 24 gives the strength of the Cossack units as 161,632 as of 1 January 1856; for a total of 2,297,616 officers and men in the armed forces at the beginning of 1856.
Forrestt A. Miller, Dmitrii Miliutin and the Reform Era in Russia (Charlotte, North Carolina: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968), pp. 28–29.
Williamson Murray, “Clausewitz: Some Thoughts on What the Germans Got Right,” in German Military Effectiveness (Baltimore: Nautical and Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1992), p. 193ff.
See Alfred J. Rieber, ed., The Politics of Autocracy: Letters of Alexander II to Prince A. I. Bariatinskii, 1857–1864 (Paris: Moulton and Co., 1966), introductory essay.
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© 1999 Frederick W. Kagan
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Kagan, F.W. (1999). Conclusion. In: The Military Reforms of Nicholas I. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299576_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299576_11
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