Needing to reconstitute his forces under the pressure of military emergency and protracted war, Peter invented a set of institutions to recruit, officer, equip, finance and administer his army that laid the foundation for the upsurge of Russia's military power during the eighteenth century. Although these new arrangements did not operate precisely as intended in Peter's lifetime, in the decades after his death they put down deep roots. There evolved a hybrid military system with both 'Western' and peculiarly 'Russian' characteristics. Partly by design and partly by improvisation, Russia devised a unique military system that represented a brilliant (if costly) adaptation to the realities of warfare in eastern, central and southern Europe.
A reliable source of military manpower was a central feature of that system. In 1705 Peter introduced a new approach to conscription that, with modifications, was to endure until 1874. The country was divided into blocks of twenty peasant households, and in every year each was required to supply a man who was drafted for life into the army's ranks. Serf owners, and in some cases village communities themselves, were to make the selection. Of course, Peter soon ignored the limits that the law of 1705 placed on military reinforcement, and on numerous occasions both arbitrarily raised the numbers of draftees called up and decreed additional special levies in response to the progress of the war.[125] The recruiting procedures laid down in 1705 (as well as the frantic deviations from them) resulted in the induction of over 300,000 men over the next twenty years.[126] Despite its unfair and capricious implementation, this method of recruitment stabilised under Peter's successors. In 1775 Catherine the Great changed the basic unit of conscription to the block of 500 peasant males from which one recruit per year was exacted in peace, but as many as five in wartime. In 1793 she also capped a private soldier's military service at twenty-five years, a measure that produced only a tiny class of retired veterans, as the majority of recruits died or were disabled long before then. The basic concept of the Petrine draft - compelling predetermined units of peasants to replenish the army's ranks on a crudely regular schedule - remained in place. The system worked well enough to furnish the Russian army with more than 2 million soldiers between 1725 and 1801.[127] Because of the dramatic increase in the population of the empire over the century, even larger intakes were possible in times of crisis.
The recruitment system not only made it feasible for Russia to raise a large army but also gave that army some qualities that differentiated it from armies in the West. The first of these was the simple fact that it was wholly conscripted, not partially hired. Until the French Revolution, most of the great European powers maintained armies that included large proportions of highly trained professional mercenaries. And mercenaries, however skilled, manifested an alarming propensity to desert. The military manuals of the day strongly advised against marching forces by night, or moving in the immediate vicinity of swamps and dense forests, in order to diminish the risk of mass flight. By contrast, Russia's post-Petrine commanders routinely engaged in all of these manoeuvres, since the rates of desertion from the Russian army were considerably lower than those that obtained in the French, Prussian or Austrian ones.[128]
This ought not to be taken to suggest that military service was popular in rural Russia. Although a serf became legally 'free' when he entered the army, conscription was a species of death. The recruit was torn away from his native village, severed from the company of his family and his friends, and was well aware that the chances were that he would never return to them. Indeed, it became the custom for village women to lament the departure of the recruits with the singing of funeral dirges.[129] Once a soldier had completed his preliminary training and joined his regiment, he entered a milieu in which irregular pay, shortage of supplies, epidemic disease and brutal discipline were all too common.
Yet to enter military service was also in a sense to be reborn, for in the soldier's artel the Russian army possessed a powerful instrument for socialising recruits and building group cohesion. Every unit in the army was subdivided into artels, communal associations of eight to ten men who trained, messed, worked and fought together. The artel functioned both as a military and economic organisation, for it held the money its members acquired from plunder, extra pay and hiring themselves out as labourers. In a sense, the artel became a soldier's new family, and it is significant that in the event of his death it was his comrades in the artel, rather than his kinfolk, who inherited his share of the property. Artels, which also functioned at the company and regimental level, were reminiscent of the peasant associations back home with which the recruit was already familiar, and consequently assisted his adjustment to the rigours of his new environment and helped persuade him that the state's military system was legitimate. [130]
The homogeneity of the army also facilitated a soldier's identification with military life. The overwhelming majority of private soldiers in the army were Great Russian by ethnicity and Orthodox by confession. This was so because the bulk of the empire's non-Russian subjects were either excused from service in exchange for tribute, or organised in special formations of their own. This was another respect in which the Russian army contrasted strikingly with the armies of the West. At various points in the eighteenth century more than half the troops in the service of the kings of Prussia and France were foreign mercenaries. Since ethnic and religious homogeneity promoted cohesion, and cohesion could translate into superior combat performance, contemporary observers understandably viewed the homogeneity of the Russian army as one of its greatest assets. A government commission of 1764 hailed the sense of unity created in the army by a 'common language, faith, set of customs and birth'.[131] Certainly on many occasions Russia's eighteenth-century troops did perform outstandingly in battle, not merely against the forces of the Crimean Khan and Ottoman Sultan, but even when matched against such first-class Western opponents as Prussia. At Zorndorf (August 1758) during the Seven Years War, the Russians killed or wounded over a third of the troops Frederick the Great committed to the field and earned the awedplaudits of an eye-witness for their 'extraordinary steadiness and intrepidity'.[132]
Of course an army must not only be recruited but also led. Peter I initially sought to engage capable military specialists abroad, but soon ordered all males of the gentry estate into permanent service in the army, navy or bureaucracy in his effort to ensure an adequate domestic supply of officers and civil administrators. Moreover, in a series of decrees culminating in the promulgation of the Table of Ranks in 1722, he established the principle that acquisition of an officer's rank conferred nobiliary status even on commoners. Yet the bulk of the officers continued to be drawn from the nobility, and the officer corps became even more 'noble' as the century proceeded, despite the fact that Peter III freed the nobility from the legal obligation to serve in 1762. Over 90 per cent of all officers who fought at Borodino in 1812 were of noble birth.[133] As for the nobles themselves, while the calling of the officer had acquired the cachet of prestige among the wealthy strata of the elite, it was also the case that there were large numbers of impecunious noblemen who had no choice but to rely on government salaries for their livings.
125
Lindsey Hughes,
126
William C. Fuller Jr,
127
John L. H. Keep,
128
Walter M. Pintner, 'The Burden of Defense in Imperial Russia, 1725-1915', RR 43 (1984): 252.
129
Fuller,
130
Wirtschafter,
132
Christopher Duffy,
133
Keep,