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Overview
Originally published in 1990.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691607894 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1076 |
| Pages: | 236 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.80(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
Read an Excerpt
From Serf to Russian Soldier
By Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1990 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05585-5
CHAPTER 1
Conscription
One son is not a son.
Two sons are half a son.
Three sons are a son.
Of all the obligations imposed on the poll-tax population, none was more terrible or feared than military service. Nowhere was coercion in the relationship between the state and society more visible. For the Russian empire, the years from 1796 to 1815 were a time of almost continual warfare. The Napoleonic Wars were the most devastating, but Russia also became embroiled in conflicts with her traditional enemies: Sweden, Turkey, and Persia. From the Congress of Vienna until the Crimean War, Russia enjoyed relative peace and did not participate in any major European conflict. Despite the publicity it has attracted, the Hungarian campaign of 1849 was largely symbolic. There were full-scale wars with Persia (1826–28) and Turkey (1828–29). Closer to home were the Polish rebellion of 1830 and the continual fighting in the Caucasus. These engagements did not even approach the scope or importance of the Napoleonic Wars, but Russia still needed a large standing army to secure the empire's extensive landlocked borders and to support imperial expansion into Europe, the Caucasus, Siberia, and Central Asia. Patterns of recruitment in the first half of the nineteenth century reflected the steady increase in the size of Russia's armed forces. Between 1796 and 1815, eighteen levies produced 1,616,199 recruits. From 1816 until 1855, forty levies provided 3,158,199 recruits. In its role as the great land power of Europe, the Russian state effectively mobilized society's resources for military purposes, maintaining one of Europe's largest armies.
Popular Attitudes toward Conscription
As I drove into this village [Grodnya], my ears were assailed not by the melody of verse, but by a heart-rending lament of women, children, and old men. Getting out of my carriage, I sent it on to the post station, for I was curious to learn the cause of the disturbance I had noticed in the street.
Going up to a group of people, I learned that a levy of recruits was the cause of the sobs and tears of the people crowded together there. From many villages, both crown and manorial, those who were to be drafted into the army had come together here.
Unlike young nobles destined for service as officers, the typical recruit from the poll-tax population entered the army, not with the anxious anticipation of glory and adventure, but rather with a feeling of profound sorrow and dread. Conscription meant a sudden and final break from home and family with little chance of return. Depriving peasant society of able-bodied men, it could bring economic ruin to individual families. In 1825 M. M. Speransky noted that conscription was burdensome not just for the individual household, but for the country as a whole. In his view, every family ruined by conscription increased the number of orphans, promoted impoverishment, and harmed agriculture and industry. No wonder village youths regarded recruitment as a horror comparable to death. In an 1811 memorandum submitted to Alexander I, the noted admiral N. S. Mordvinov reported that upon learning of a levy "any young man will try to hide; [and] for this reason his relatives place him under guard, shackle him in irons, [and] treat him like a villain." An 1829 judicial decision also revealed the popular view of conscription as a familial tragedy. In 1828 Lieutenant Larionov accompanied a party of recruits from Penza province. During that time he granted brief leaves to eighteen recruits, who in return gave him money and gifts. At his trial Larionov admitted that
Although he knew it was strictly forbidden to grant recruits leaves to go home, their own and their relatives' earnest entreaties forced him to release a few for a short time — however, not out of cupidity, but solely out of a feeling of compassion for their tearful petitions. And who would not have done so, seeing before him petitioners wallowing in tears, evoking the name of God to allow them to bid farewell to wives, children, and relatives and to receive from them the assistance expected for the coming journey?
Whatever Larionov's real motives, the sense of personal loss suffered by the recruits and their families is clear.
Not surprisingly, outright resistance to conscription was a persistent problem. Whether one examines administrative corruption or trickery by clever peasants, all reveal society's desire to escape military service. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, officials complained about popular flight in response to the call for levies. A Senate ukase of 1798 attributed flight among recruits to the insufficient manpower available to guard them. Consequently, the Senate empowered governors to have the communities responsible for delivering the recruits supervise them until the military escort arrived. Even during Napoleon's invasion of 1812, flight from conscription continued. A prerevolutionary study of Riazan province suggests significant resistance to conscription, despite the threat to Russia's national existence. While there is evidence of popular loyalty to the tsar in this period, one cannot equate such loyalty with patriotism. For pre-reform society, military service was an obligation imposed upon the servile population by the state, and it reflected the coercive nature of service in the Petrine system.
Legislation from the reign of Nicholas I showed that flight from conscription remained a problem. In 1828 the State Council ruled that local authorities should send state peasants who hid to avoid service to recruiting stations, as soon as they reappeared or were caught. These men would then count toward their community's next quota of recruits. Even if such a man had passed the maximum legal age, he was still subject to service. Broadening this provision, an 1831 statute ruled that temporary exemptions from physical requirements, sometimes introduced to increase the number of recruits, also applied to runaways who were later found and handed over to the army. A law of 1845 penalized families and communities that concealed recruits, requiring them to provide two recruits instead of one. If no suitable man could be found, the head of the household was to be flogged or fined and resettled in Siberia. Despite efforts to make the family responsible for runaway recruits, flight from levies persisted, reflecting popular opposition to conscription.
Discussions in the War Council revealed just how seriously the government regarded the problem of flight. Concerned about the time it took to conduct a levy and deliver new recruits to their assigned regiments (about one year), in 1832 Nicholas I proposed a levy of reserve recruits. The proposal divided levies into two periods: in the first, recruits would return home to their usual occupations, so that in the second, when additional manpower was needed, authorities could quickly outfit them and send them to the army. But the War Council was so fearful of an increase in flight and self-mutilation, if recruits were permitted to return home for an unspecified time, it decided that the proposal would only further aggravate existing problems. According to the Council, large numbers of men vanished at the earliest rumors of a levy, forcing landlords and village communities to keep recruits under close guard until their delivery to the military.
Popular hostility toward conscription remained a major problem, but it is wrong to assume that the majority of eligible men fled at the prospect of military service. Most people accepted conscription obediently, if only because they had little opportunity to escape. It was in the interest of landlords and local communities to enforce the obligation; otherwise they had to deliver replacements or bear the cost of finding the runaway. In border regions where it was easier to flee abroad and where ethnic peculiarities made enforcement more complicated, the danger of flight was greater. Consequently, some border areas enjoyed special exemption from conscription. While Russia's military might provided positive proof of the absolutist state's ability to impose service upon society, officials identified popular flight as a basic reason for the inefficiencies and shortcomings of the recruitment system, attributing this flight to the long term of service and the harshness of military life.
Faced with the prospect of permanent separation from home and family, many potential recruits resorted to self-mutilation to avoid military service. There are no precise data on this problem, but legislation and discussions held in the Recruitment Committee revealed its seriousness. Catherine the Great's General Statute on Recruitment (1766) specified that persons guilty of self-mutilation be "mercilessly" punished. Subsequent laws continued this policy. In the reign of Alexander I, concern developed about punishing the innocent. As a result, sentences were lightened and the rules on verification tightened. The repeated appearance of new legislation suggests that self-mutilation persisted throughout the pre-reform era.
The popular imagination showed great ingenuity in developing methods of mutilation. As early as 1809 officials in Simbirsk province reported that in families with five or more laborers, underaged males and those eligible for service all suffered from injuries "which cannot be attributed to the natural effects of illness, but are absolutely premeditated." In 1813 the governor of Pskov province informed St. Petersburg that economic peasants in that province had mangy heads. Artificially transmitting this disease from generation to generation, they freed themselves from conscription. Fifteen years later the local medical board conducted an investigation and discovered that ten times fewer women suffered from mange than men and that men over thirty-five almost all had clean heads. Moreover, families with one or two laborers and serfs on neighboring estates rarely contracted the disease. The Ministry of Interior concluded that the only way to eliminate the disease (which could be cured in two or three months anyway) and, more important, to eliminate such deliberate evasion, was to accept recruits with mange. This proposal became law in 1828. The government could fight this stubborn resistance to conscription only by lowering physical standards.
The recruitment regulation of 1831 systematized the legislation combating mutilation. If a potential recruit injured himself, he was supposed to report his injury within three days and, if possible, present witnesses. If he did not report the injury, and twelve members of his community testified under oath that he intended to escape conscription, the police were to conduct an investigation. In cases involving private serfs, the landlord had only to report the crime. The law also specified the punishment for self-mutilation: twenty-five to fifty blows with lashes and assignment to service. Men unfit for service faced exile in a convicts' company or settlement in Siberia. To encourage enforcement, offenders who would have been fit for service counted toward the quota of recruits demanded from the landlord or local community. Providing a more systematic definition of the rules on self-mutilation, the recruitment regulation introduced stricter standards of verification.
Punitive measures still had scant effect, and self-mutilation continued. In 1836 a gendarme officer who observed two levies in Riazan province reported that recruits consciously mutilated their limbs to avoid service. Officials at the recruiting station also repeatedly found substances such as beeswax, lard, seeds, flies, and even arsenic in the ears of recruits. These objects produced a discharge indicating infection, which was sufficient grounds for rejecting a recruit. Similarly, high-level officials supervising the levy of 1843 noted the use of self-inflicted wounds to avoid service and claimed that among the recruits rejected for aural discharge, many had marks on their cheeks caused by pouring sharp vodka into their ears. This particular method of evasion was impossible to prevent and extremely difficult to prove. Other artificially induced physical disabilities reported in the early 1850s included prolopsus of the intestine, sores, and swelling of the face, neck, chest, and scrotum. This obvious willingness to inflict bodily harm in order to avoid military service revealed a high degree of popular despair in the face of service obligations.
The numerous legal enactments and continued evidence of self-mutilation show that the government was virtually powerless to control this popular action. National minorities were especially resistant to service demands. The Russian authorities claimed that Tatars, Jews, and other ethnic minorities automatically mutilated their children, so that it became impossible to prove any connection with conscription. The only way to prevent self-mutilation, officials argued, was to accept recruits who suffered from diseases and injuries (whether self-inflicted or not) like mange, deafness in one ear, and damage to the right eye or index finger. In a report of 1847, the minister of state domains argued that "whenever the government has permitted the acceptance of recruits with such diseases and physical defects, the diseases have disappeared in the people." A law of 1828 had permitted the acceptance of recruits with mange. Similarly, legislation from 1849 sought to combat ear wounds and feigned deafness and muteness. Authorities were to accept recruits "who have a simple outflow of purulent matter from the ears, without signs of a general diseased condition which could cause suppuration, as long as there is no localized pain in the parts of the auditory organ." During the Crimean War, when the army's need for manpower became especially acute, official instructions to doctors permitted the acceptance of recruits missing an index finger (without which a soldier could not fire his musket) or suffering from ear diseases that did not produce deafness or interfere with movement. Officials were not happy about accepting these recruits, who, they felt, would lower the moral and physical quality of the troops. In addition, they risked spreading infectious diseases among the already disease-ridden lower ranks.
According to official sources, the incidence of self-mutilation declined in the 1840s. The government attributed this to the lighter punishments for self-inflicted injury and, more important, to the practice of granting communities and landlords receipts for recruits proven guilty of self-mutilation. This practice, instituted in the 1830s, gave local communities an incentive to prosecute and prevent self-mutilation. Less plausible was the explanation offered by the minister of state domains, who claimed that the new lottery system effectively reduced both self-mutilation and flight from conscription. Once a man participated in the lottery, regardless of whether his number was drawn, he was freed from subsequent levies; hence peasants were less likely to maim themselves or their children and unnecessarily deprive the family of a fully able laborer. But the lottery was never applied to the whole empire, and whatever its benefits, it failed to ensure the administrative regularity that was supposed to reduce popular resistance to conscription. In wartime the need for recruits meant that peasants already subjected to the lottery might face recall and even be drafted out of turn. The continued inability to cope with evasion again found expression in 1851, when the Medical Department of the Ministry of Interior declared that the only effective way to combat self-mutilation was to establish the "sanctity of obligations to the fatherland" and "to instil in potential recruits feelings of duty about the high importance of the calling for which they are destined." Such a solution was hardly viable in pre-reform Russia, where the peasant's primary identification lay with the local community and where the fulfillment of service obligations by the poll-tax population depended on coercion and force.
Distributing the Burden of Conscription
The long term of service (twenty or twenty-five years) and the harsh conditions of military life made it very unlikely that a recruit would ever return home. In most cases conscription meant a sudden and final break with one's family and village community. Consequently, peasants were willing to risk permanent bodily injury and maim their children in order to avoid the clutches of the imperial army. High-level official discussions identified the long tour of duty and inequalities in distributing the burden of recruitment as the main reasons for evasion and the popular dread of service. As early as 1811, N. S. Mordvinov advocated reducing the term of service to twelve years and broadening the social base of recruitment. Mordvinov argued that the harshness of military obligations not only prompted flight, but also lowered the moral and fighting qualities of recruits. More significant, in the early 1850s the War Ministry examined the possibility of ending special exemptions from conscription among the poll-tax population. Although the Ministry was concerned more to enlarge the sources of manpower than to guarantee equality, most provincial governors responded negatively to the suggestion, noting that the government should honor traditional rights and privileges. In contrast, the governor of Novgorod curtly proposed that "all classes (sosloviia) without differentiation and including the nobility" should fulfill recruitment obligations in kind. This view was rare among high-level officials, who generally accepted exemptions and distinctions based on social origin as natural and just. What disturbed them was inequality of treatment within the poll-tax population itself, especially the inequality that resulted from deliberate evasion. In 1847 the minister of state domains reported that "to avoid conscription, Tatars damage fingers and auditory organs, so that they develop suppuration of the ears, and also [they] feign hernias and spread wounds over [their] bodies, as a result of which the recruitment obligation becomes unequal and arouses indignation among people who do not violate the law." The authorities painfully acknowledged this issue, for they could justify the terrible burden of military service only if it was apportioned equally among the lower classes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from From Serf to Russian Soldier by Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter. Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- LIST OF TABLES, pg. ix
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. xi
- INTRODUCTION, pg. xiii
- ONE. Conscription, pg. 3
- Two. Military Society and the State, pg. 26
- THREE. From Peasant to Soldier: Education and Training, pg. 55
- FOUR. The Limits of Bureaucratic Regulation: The Regimental Economy, pg. 74
- FIVE. Justice with Order: Autocratic Values and Military Discipline, pg. 96
- Six. Soldiers in Service: Expectations and Realities, pg. 120
- CONCLUSION. The Semi-Standing Army, pg. 149
- NOTES AND LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS, pg. 153
- SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 199
- INDEX, pg. 209