A second impediment to military progress in the late imperial period was that vital reforms were often inconsistent, incomplete or distorted in implementation. The military conscription reform provides a good illustration. Miliutin clearly saw that Russia's traditional approach to military recruitment had become dangerously obsolete in an era of mass politics and mass armies and had to be scrapped. By dint of arduous political struggle Miliutin and his supporters were able to secure the promulgation in 1874 of a law that instituted a universal military service obligation in Russia. Henceforth the majority of the empire's young men would be eligible to be drafted into the army as private soldiers, regardless of the estate or social class to which they belonged. Miliutin was intent on accomplishing three goals with the statute of 1874. First, since it involved simultaneously widening the pool of prospective draftees and cutting the term of active service, it would give the army the modern system of military reserves that Miliutin regarded as an indispensable precondition for victory in any future European war. Second, Miliutin anticipated that the act would indirectly promote literacy and an elevation in the cultural level of the empire's population, for it also decreased the term of service required of any draftee in accordance with his education. Although the standard period of service was set at seven years, a man with a university degree had to spend only six months with the colours, and a secondary school graduate only a year and a half. Even the most rudimentary primary education shaved three years off the term of active duty. Third, because the law proclaimed military service to be a universal obligation, Miliutin hoped that the new system would eventually produce a culture of citizenship in Russia. The common experience of service was supposed to break down the distinctions of estate, class and rank, thus stimulating dynastic loyalty, unity and patriotism. He strongly believed that an army that evinced those traits would be immeasurably superior to one remarkable chiefly for its bovine obedience.
The statute of 1874, and its subsequent modifications, clearly did ameliorate the Russian Empire's military manpower problem. In 1881 the active army comprised 844,000 troops and in 1904 in excess of a million.[154] By 1914 the active army numbered 1.4 million men and the active reserve 2.6 million, while over 6 million more were enrolled in the various classes of the territorial 'militia' (opolchenie). But it nonetheless deserves emphasis that the overwhelming majority of young men in the empire never received military training at all under the 1874 conscription system. The 1874 law had introduced a universal obligation to serve, not universal military service, and contained articles granting exemptions for nationality, profession and family circumstances that were more liberal than those that obtained in any other major European country. There were several reasons for this, but as a partial upshot, while in late- nineteenth-century France four-fifths of those draft eligible passed through the army's ranks, and in Germany, over half, in Russia barely 25 per cent- 30 per cent of any given age cohort of 21-year-old males received military training.[155] This meant that in Russia it was impossible for the army to act as a 'school for the nation' in the same way as armies are said to have done elsewhere in Europe. Nor was the concept of equal citizenship well served by the radically reduced length of service awarded to men with educational qualifications. Moreover, when the casualties started to mount in the First World War the empire experienced an authentic military manpower crisis.
It was true that the post-reform army was more heterogeneous than the army of the eighteenth century had ever been, and not just from the standpoint of social class or 'estate'. Despite the 1874 law's grant of exemptions to a variety of national minorities, as time passed the army increasingly became a multiethnic force. In addition to Russians, Jews, Poles, Latvians, Estonians, Germans, Georgians, Baskhirs and Tatars were all represented in its ranks, as were men from the Northern Caucasus and Transcaucasia after 1887. The government tried to mitigate the effects of ethnic dilution by decreeing that 75 per cent of the personnel in the combat unit had to be Great Russians, but that target could not have been met without counting Ukrainians and Belorussians as such.[156] In any event, it is clear that military service in the post-reform era did not build unity across ethnic lines any more successfully than it did across the boundaries of juridical class. Ethnic minorities met with considerable discrimination within the army, and it did not help much when in the 1890s the state adopted a policy of Russification in the borderlands, particularly Poland and Finland.[157] Given the temporary nature of military service, as well as the heterogeneity within the ranks, the soldier's artel could no longer perform the integrative function as well as it had prior to the Crimean War.
A third obstacle to the modernisation of the army in the post-reform era had to do with its leadership. The Russian army consistently experienced more difficulty in attracting and retaining capable non-commissioned officers than did any other first-class army in Europe. In 1882 the army had only 25 per cent of the senior NCOs it needed, and in 1903 there was still a deficit of 54 per cent.[158] With respect to the officer corps, the problem was not so much quantity as quality. Nobles continued to dominate the highest echelons of command, and at the turn of the century over 90 per cent of the empire's generals came from hereditary noble families. Yet of the 42,777 officers then on duty almost half had been born commoners.[159] While this statistic may reveal something about social mobility in late Imperial Russia, it also reflects a much more ominous trend: the relative deterioration in the officer corps' pay, perquisites and status that occurred over the last decades of the ancien regime. The salary schedule for regular Russian army officers was set by law in 1859 and changed little over the next forty years, with two unpleasant results. First, the purchasing power of an officer's compensation tended to erode with the passage of time. But second, by the 1890s Russian army officers not only found themselves underpaid by comparison with their counterparts abroad, but also lagging behind civilian bureaucrats at home. In these circumstances, and given the opportunities available in the growing private sector, is it any wonder that the army began to lose out in the competition to recruit the most talented, and best-educated young men for its officer corps? Of course, there still remained wealthy aristocrats for whom a posting to one of the prestigious guard regiments was socially de rigueur. Yet in the non-exclusive regiments, especially those of the army infantry, the proportion of officers who were both humbly born and poorly schooled rose steeply. Of the 1,072 men holding commissions in 1895 whose fathers had been peasants, 997 or over 93 per cent were clustered in the army infantry.[160]
154
P. A. Zaionchkovskii,
155
DavidR. Jones, TmperialRussia'sForcesatWar',inAlanR. Millet and Murray Williamson (eds.),
157
One aspect of that policy was the state's effort to dissolve the separate Finnish army, and draft Finns under the same regulations that applied to other groups. This initiative was met with stiff resistance. P. Luntinen,
159
A. I. Panov,