Incompetence, mediocrity, peculation and even sadism were to be met with within Russia's eighteenth-century officer corps. An analysis of military- judicial cases has revealed that the most typical grievances the soldiers voiced about their commanders had to do with cruelty in the imposition of corporal punishment on the one hand, and such economic abuses as withholding pay or purloining artel funds on the other.[134] There were, however, also officers who distinguished themselves by their honesty, fairness and paternalistic concern for the wellbeing of their men. In any event, educational standards were low. Certainly, there were the handful of military-technical academies that Peter I had established, as well as some exclusive institutions of later foundation, such as the Noble Land Cadet Corps. But there were not enough places in such schools to accommodate more than a few hundred aspiring officers.
At the highest levels of military authority there was much to criticise, for patronage and court politics were frequently decisive in the bestowal of a general's epaulettes, with predictable results. Yet eighteenth-century Russia also benefited from the masterly leadership of some truly outstanding commanders. Confronted by foreign invasion in 1708-9 and 1812 respectively, Peter I and M. I. Kutuzov figured out how to turn Russia itself, in all its immensity, emptiness and poverty, into a weapon to grind down the enemy. Other figures, including B. C. Miinnich, P. A. Rumiantsev, Z. G. Chernyshev and A. V Suvorov, led the army to impressive victories over Tatars, Turks, Poles, Swedes, Prussians and Frenchmen alike. Munnich smashed the Ottomans at Stavuchany (1739) and was the first Russian commander ever to breech the Tatar defences on the Crimean peninsula. Rumiantsev, a brilliant logistician and tactician, routed the Turks at Kagul (1770) although outnumbered by over four to one. Chernyshev, a talented military administrator no less than a strategist, was instrumental in the capture of Berlin (1760). And in the course of his extraordinary military career, the peerless Suvorov overwhelmed the Turks at Rymnik and Focsani (both 1789), stormed Izmail (1790), forced the surrender ofWarsaw (1794) and defeated France's armies in northern Italy (1799). His last great military accomplishment - his fighting retreat through Switzerland - became the capstone of his legend.
Yet even military commanders of genius cannot win wars unless their armies are paid, fed, clothed and supplied. All of this requires money, and money had been a commodity in relatively short supply in seventeenth-century Muscovy. It was once again Peter the Great who devised expedients to extract more cash from his oppressed subjects than ever before by saddling them with all manner of new taxes. Here one of his most important innovations was the poll (or soul) tax of 1718 that required every male peasant as well as most of the male residents of Russia's cities and towns to pay to the state an annual sum of 74 (later 70) kopecks. Owing to such fiscal reforms, as well as to the growth in the size of the taxable population during his reign, he was able to push state income up to 8.7 million roubles by the close of his reign. Whereas military outlays had constituted roughly 60 per cent of state expenditure in old Muscovy, under Peter they may have consumed between 70 and 80 per cent of the state budget.[135] The army and navy continued to account for about half of the Russian state's expenses throughout the century until the 1790s, when the empire's territorial, economic and demographic growth combined to whittle this figure down to roughly 35 per cent. By that point, net state revenues exceeded 40 million roubles per annum, although it bears noting that there had been considerable inflation over the previous seventy years.[136]
The Russian army ofthe eighteenth century, then, evolved into a remarkably effective instrument of state power. It won the overwhelming majority of Russia's wars during the period and was the reliable bulwark of the state against internal disorder, as in 1774 when it was employed to suppress the massive peasant and Cossack insurrection of Emelian Pugachev.
The joists that supported Russian military success in this era were precisely the Russian Empire's political and social backwardness by comparison to Western Europe. Because Russia was an autocracy, and the country lacked an independent Church or an ancient feudal nobility there were few impediments to the ruthless exercise of governmental authority, which could be used to requisition huge quantities of men, money and labour for the military effort despite the meagreness of the resource base. In 1756 the Russian army, if irregulars are included, was larger than the army of France, despite the fact that the revenue of the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna was probably less than one-fifth that of Louis XV[137] It helped enormously that Russia was a society organised in hereditary orders where institutions like serfdom and peasant bondage of all kinds persisted long after they had been discarded in the West. The subjugation of the peasants made it possible to count, tax and draft them, as well as hold them (or their masters) collectively accountable if they failed to perform any of their obligations. All of this meant that the Russian state could more easily reenforce the ranks of the army with new draftees than could its Western neighbours, particularly as the population of the empire increased. This was no small matter, because Russian military casualties - as a result of combat but even more so from disease - tended to be extremely high. If the
Russian army was militarily effective, it was not necessarily militarily efficient. Russia may have lost as many as 300,000 men during the Great Northern War and may have taken another quarter of a million casualties during the Seven Years War of 1756-63, a figure equal to two-thirds of the troops who saw service in those years.[138] The military system also enabled the Russian state, in a pinch, to make military efforts that were more robust than its Western rivals. In the later stage of the Seven Years War after 1760, as France, Austria and Prussia began to totter from acute military exhaustion, the growth in size of Russia's field armies in Germany did not abate.[139] And in 1812 a series of extraordinary levies permitted Russia both to make good its losses and even enlarge the forces it pitted against Napoleon. It has been calculated that 1.5 million men, or 4 per cent of the empire's total population, served in the army during the reign of Alexander I.[140] Other than in Prussia, a military participation rate like this one was inconceivable anywhere else in Europe.
For all of its success, however, the Russian military system had some weaknesses, which were already grave by the end of the eighteenth century and became critically so in the next. To begin with, there was the issue of the army's size. Russia's autocrats believed that they had to maintain a large army, not only to support their geopolitical ambitions, but also as a matter of simple security. Russia's borders were longer than those of any other polity, and Russia confronted potential enemies in Asia as well as in Europe. Moreover, there was the question of the internal stability of the empire to consider. It was the army that protected the autocracy from servile rebellion, and the deployment oftroops had to take into account domestic threats to the empire, no less than foreign ones. The problem was that the larger the army grew, the harder it became to foot the bill. As the Russian treasury was in constant financial dire straits, tsarist statesmen were always preoccupied with finding economies in the military budget.
One expedient was to make the soldiers themselves responsible for part of their own upkeep. The state supplied the regiments with such materials as leather and woollen cloth and then commanded them to manufacture their own boots, uniforms and other articles of kit. It also authorised the soldiers' artels to engage in 'free work' (that is, paid labour) on nearby estates. Despite the fact that this arrangement diverted the troops away from military exercises and opened egregious opportunities for larceny to dishonest regimental colonels, 'self maintenance' (also known as the 'regimental economy') endured within the army in one form or another until 1906.
136
Arcadius Kahan,
138
A. A. Kersnovskii,