Another tactic that the state employed to save money concerned housing. In peacetime, for up to eight months of the year the army dispersed and was quartered on the rural peasantry. Since the army therefore only 'stood' during the four months it slept under canvas at summer bivouacs, the government was relieved of the duty to construct (or rent) permanent barracks. This practice naturally led to degeneration in the combat readiness of the armed forces, a situation that was only ameliorated gradually as barracks accommodation became more common in the early nineteenth century.
A final cost-cutting device involved settling a significant proportion of the troops on farms where they would grow their own victuals as well as drill and where their sons could be brought up to join the ranks as soon as they came of military age. Using 'land-militias' to colonise (and thus to secure) dangerous borderlands had longbeen practised in Russia, as well as in such other European countries as Austria. But Alexander I established an extensive network of internal military colonies, which in 1826 were populated by 160,000 soldiers and their families. [141] However, this experiment was an execrable failure: living and working conditions were intolerable, and soldiers hated the harsh and intrusive regimentation of every aspect of their lives. The massive uprisings in the north-western military colonies of 1831 forced the government to institute reforms that (inter alia) excused the 'farming soldiers' from the obligation of military training.
A penultimate deficiency in the Russian military system was its inflexibility. The imperial state often found it hard to concentrate its military strength in the most crucial theatre when it went to war. Although the 1830 /1 insurrection in Poland assumed the character ofa full-blown war, Russia was able to deploy no more than 430,000 of its 850,000 troops there, in view of the magnitude of the other foreign and domestic threats it felt it had to deter.[142] The optimal solution to this problem would have been the introduction of military reserve programme. This would have entailed a deep cut in the recruit's term of military service and a simultaneous increase in the percentage of draft-eligible men taken into the army every year. In that event Russia might have been able to diminish the number of troops it kept on active duty while building up a large reservoir of trained reservists on which it could draw in an emergency. Yet the peculiarities of the Russian military system made a proper reserve programme inconceivable. The Russian army had originally been designed as a closed corporation, set apart from Russian society, that swallowed up the peasants inducted into its ranks for good. There was no way in which a civil society defined by hereditary estates and serfdom could have absorbed or even survived an influx of a 100,000 or more juridically free demobilised soldiers every year. Measures to assemble a class of reservists gradually (such as the introduction of 'unlimited furloughs' in 1834) were only palliatives. If serfdom and autocracy were the floor beneath Russian military power, they also constituted its ceiling.
Finally, there is the question ofmilitary technology. The logic ofthe Russian military system presupposed a low rate of military-technical innovation, and the system consequently functioned best in an era when that held true. Over time governmental decrees and entrepreneurial energy had made eighteenth- century Russia mostly self-sufficient in the production of armaments. Russia's rich deposits of minerals were an advantage here, and for several decades in the eighteenth century Russia led Europe in the output of iron. Although improvements were made in the quality and performance of weapons, particularly artillery, during this period, overall the technology of combat remained remarkably stable. The smooth bore musket was the standard infantry arm under Alexander I just as it had been under Peter the Great. The relatively long useful life of muskets - forty years was deemed the norm - obviously made it easier for Russia to bear the cost of equipping its ground forces with them. In fact, in 1800 the Russian state had issued at least some of its regiments with muskets that had been in its arsenals since Peter's time.[143]
By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the Industrial Revolution was making a major impact on the technology ofwar. Countries that neglected to invest in the latest weaponry courted military disaster, as Russia herself was to discover during the Crimean War. Unfortunately, Russia was a poor country that could ill afford expensive rearmament drives. Her industrial sector was insufficiently developed to manufacture the new ordnance, rifles and munitions on a large scale. And the social, economic and political institutions generated by autocracy were not particularly hospitable to modern industrial capitalism either. [144]
Accounting for Russian military failure, 1854-1917
If it was military success that built up the Russian Empire, it was military defeat that helped to bring the empire down. Russia's great victory over Napoleon seemingly validated the military system as it was and had closed the eyes of many to its defects. Nicholas I (r. 1825-55) was personally devoted to the army, desired to impose military order and discipline on his country as a whole, and frequently turned to military officers to fill the most important posts in the civil administration. Yet the army suffered from his neurotic obsession with petty details and his penchant for staging massive parades and reviews, which, though impressive, did little to enhance combat readiness. Nicholas did manage to beat the Persians in 1828, the Ottomans in 1829 and the Poles in 1831. Then, too, his Caucasian Corps fought credibly if unimaginatively and indecisively in its interminable campaigns against the Muslim guerrillas in Chechnia and Daghestan.23 But when Russia had to battle Britain, France, Sardinia and the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War of 1853-6 the upshot was a military and political debacle. In its struggle with this powerful coalition, the imperial government fell back on the methods of 1812 and by means of extraordinary levies inundated the 980,000-man regular army with over a million newly mobilised Cossacks, militia and raw recruits. But Russia found it hard to bring more than a fraction of this strength to bear against the enemy since hundreds of thousands of troops were pinned down in Poland, campaigning in the Caucasus, guarding the Baltic frontier or garrisoning the vast expanses of the empire. For much of the time, allied forces on the Crimea peninsula were actually numerically superior to Russia's. Russia's principal Black Sea Fortress, Sebastopol, fell in large measure due to the unremitting pressure of the allies' technologically superior siege artillery. During the conflict, which was the empire's most sanguinary war of the nineteenth century, that of 1812 excepted, 450,000 Russian soldiers and sailors lost their lives.24 The terms of the Peace of Paris of 1856, with their ban on Russian warships in the Black Sea, were a humiliating infringement of Russia's sovereignty, and left her southern ports and trade perpetual hostages to the French and British fleets. The Crimean War exploded one of the principle justifications for autocracy - its ability to beget military power and security. The Crimean defeat not only discredited the Russian military system but also destroyed confidence in the empire's entire panoply of political, social and economic structures.
141
V G. Verzhbitskii,
142
Frederick W Kagan,
144
Thomas C. Owen,