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Nationality Policy and the Russian Imperial Officer Corps, 1905-1914

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Gregory Vitarbo
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Abstract

This article examines the imperial Russian army's attempt to formulate a comprehensive nationalities policy for its officer corps after 1905. The army sought to establish service quotas for each nationality according to its percentage of the empire's population. The professed goal of this policy was the preservation of the numerical, and thus cultural, predominance of Orthodox, ethnic Russian officers. Yet this attempt to fashion an officer corps both “imperial” and “Russian” exposed competing paradigms of service, loyalty, and identity among tsarist officers, raising broader questions about the relationship between army, state, and empire. Thus concerns of nationality and nationalism affected the officer corps more deeply than has been assumed. Gregory Vitarbo's work provides new insights into the intersection of military reform, nationality policy, and imperial ideology in the late Russian empire, while further illustrating suggestive linkages with contemporary pan-European trends concerning military practices, nationality politics, and cultural ferment.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 66 , Issue 4 , Winter 2007 , pp. 682 - 701
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2007

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References

I would truly like to thank the many people who helped me prepare this article, including William Rosenberg, Paul Werth, Ronald Grigor Suny, Mark von Hagen, Dominic Lieven, Joshua Sanborn, Eric Lohr, and especially my gracious colleagues in the Department of History and Political Science at Meredith College: Michael Novak, Daniel Fountain, and William Price.

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13. For just a few examples of the various and multifaceted critiques of the army, the officer corps, and society at large, see Krit, M., “Podgotovka ofitserov,” Voennyi sbornik, no. 8 (1914): 35–54 Google Scholar; Dmitrevskii, A., “Ideal ofitsera,” Voennyi sbornik, no. 7 (1912): 1–10 Google Scholar; and Evdokimov, L., “Patriotizm v poniatii narodov,” Voennyi sbornik, no. 4 (1914): 127-42Google Scholar. The progressive military journal Razvedchik contributed such articles as B. Zboromirskii, “'Natsional'naia armiia,“’ Razvedchik, no. 1075 (7June 1911): 356.

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15. Ibid., 71.

16. Von Hagen, , “The Limits of Reform,” 44–45 Google Scholar.

17. The materials and correspondence regarding this project are found in the Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv (RGVIA), f. 400, op. 15, dd. 2501, 2805.

18. Memorandum dated October 1905, no. 148. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2501,11. 6-8; see also RGVIA, f. 2000s, op. 2, d. 324,11. 92-110.

19. Acopy of the restrictions of 1888 is preserved in RGVIA, f. 2000, d. 2501,11. 38-44.

20. Ibid., 1. 6.

21. Ibid., 11. 7-8.

22. Slocum, , “Who, and When, Were the Inorodtsy?” 186 Google Scholar. The actual percentage of Great Russians was 44 percent; Sanborn, , Drafting the Russian Nation, 11 Google Scholar.

23. Weeks, , Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia, 195.Google Scholar

24. Slocum, , “Who, and When, Were the Inorodtsy? ” 173-76Google Scholar.

25. Memorandum dated 12 May 1906, no. 83. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2501,11. 49-50.

26. Russian military agents abroad were to collect the requisite information.

27. The journals covered numerous meetings of the commission during the period December 1906-January 1907. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,11. 140-52.

28. For more on the vexing Polish question, see Edelman, Robert, Gentry Politics on the Eve of the Russian Revolution: The Nationalist Party, 1907-1917 (New Brunswick, 1980)Google Scholar, and Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia.

29. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,11. 140-41.

30. Ibid., 11. 64-68.

31. The statistical findings were subsequently codified as separate bulletins for reference. Ibid., 11. 112-19.

32. Recent work has demonstrated that these officers may well have been unduly optimistic in their appraisals of their “assimilated” brethren. See again, for example, Brower and Lazzerini, eds., Russia's Orient, and Werth, Paul W., At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia's Volga-Kama Region, 1827—1905 (Ithaca, 2002)Google Scholar.

33. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15., d. 2805,11. 67-68.

34. Ibid., 11. 150-51.

35. Ibid., 1. 144.

36. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2501,1. 49.

37. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,1. 150.

38. Ibid., 11. 90-112

39. In fact, worries regarding the personal virtue of Russian officers were directly linked to the perceived failings of Russian masculinity, specifically an inability to deal with feminine influence. See Fuller, William C.Jr., The Foe Within: Fantasies of Treason and theEnd of Imperial Russia (Ithaca, 2006)Google Scholar. I thank an anonymous reviewer of this article for this point.

40. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,1. 91. Emphasis in the original.

41. Memorandum dated February 1907, no. 62. Ibid., 11. 165-67.

42. Memorandum dated 28 February 1907, no. 70. Ibid., 11. 171-73.

43. Such was the case with the Odessa, Priamur, and Caucasus military districts.

44. Report of the Vilensk military district, dated 29 May 1907, no. 1569. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,1. 207.

45. Report dated 21 June 1907, no. 17957. Ibid., 11. 258-62.

46. Such criticisms were included in the reports of the Priamur and Warsaw military districts, as well as those of the Main Military Medical Administration and the Main Administration of the Cossack Host.

47. Report dated 16 June 1907, no. 1612. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,11. 230-32. In contrast, the Vilensk military district agreed widi the use of language as a primary marker of nationality, noting that to consider as non-Russian those officers with non-Russian names, or even those who were non-Orthodox, who nevertheless spoke Russian and had received a Russian education and upbringing, would be “extremely unjust” to those officers and “harmful to the interests of the state.” Ibid., 11. 207-9.

48. Ibid., 1. 230.

49. The staff of the Priamur military district also cited the example of Germany to advocate the use of the officers’ society in this way. Report dated 10 May 1907, no. 10224. Ibid., 1. 210. For the German officer corps, see, for example, Craig, Gordon, The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640-1945 (New York, 1964)Google Scholar, and Clemente, Stephen, For King and Kaiser! The Making of the Prussian Army Officer, 1860-1914 (New York, 1992)Google Scholar.

50. In the words of István Deák, the Habsburgs sought to reach “beyond nationalism“ and remove this potentially divisive element as far as possible from the structure and ethos of the Habsburg military. See Deák, , Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848-1918 (New York, 1990)Google Scholar. It has also been argued that the Habsburgs succeeded in this endeavor only in a negative sense, cultivating a loyalty to the person of the emperor without any larger sense of duty to a Habsburg state, and also failing to meet the demands of military modernization and efficiency. See Solomon Wank, “The Habsburg Empire,” in Barkey and von Hagen, eds., After Empire, 45-b7. Weeks asserts more broadly that the nationalities “problem” in the Russian empire never reached the political and cultural proportions necessary to mandate a Habsburg solution. Weeks, , Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia, 195 Google Scholar. Moreover, Habsburg military failures, and their perceived roots in nationality policy, were a key factor in the tsarist army's categorical rejection of the Habsburg officer corps as a model to be emulated. I thank Dominic Lieven for this point. Nevertheless, both Habsburg and Ottoman policies offer suggestive alternatives to the tsarist army's own frustrating attempts to grapple with the dilemmas of ethnicity and nationality.

51. Report of the Odessa military district, dated 30 May 1907, no. 9948. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,11. 216-22. The report of the Warsaw military district agreed.

52. Report dated 7 June 1907, no. 1383. Ibid., 1. 223.

53. Report dated ljune 1907, no. 1108. Ibid., 11. 239-58. The reports of the Main Administration of the General Staff and the Caucasus military district also took this position.

54. For example, the reports of the Turkestan and Odessa military districts advocated the exclusion of the Finns, while the Warsaw military district noted that many Finnish officers had served honorably and with distinction.

55. Report of the Caucasus military district, dated 30 April 1907, no. 6305. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,11. 196-99.

56. Report dated 1 June 1907, no. 1108. Ibid., 11. 239-43.

57. Report dated 21 May 1907, no. 8358. Ibid., 11. 200-201.

58. Report dated 3 August 1907, no. 1892. Ibid., 11. 270-71.

59. Such concerns were echoed in other forums; see, for example, the article by a “Russkii Nemets,” “Inorodtsy v russkoi armii,” Razvedchik, no. 1222 (1 April 1914): 215-17.

60. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,11. 196-99.

61. As testimony to such hopes, see the memoir of Konstantin Khagondakov, a Kabardian officer from the Caucasus who served in the field during die Russo-Japanese War and later attended the General Staff Academy; his account provides fascinating insights into processes of imperial socialization and assimilation within the tsarist officer corps. The Khagondakov collection is found in the Bakhmeteff Archive, Rare Manuscripts Division, of Columbia University.

62. Report dated 5 June 1907, no. 8192. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,1. 229.

63. Ibid., 1. 199.

64. For a larger discussion of these issues, see Fuller, , Civil-Military Conflict, 3–46, 192-258Google Scholar, and Bushnell, “Tsarist Officer Corps, 1881-1914.“

65. Report dated 29 May 1907, no. 3387. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,1. 215.

66. Ibid., 1.91.

67. See again Fuller, Civil-Military Conflict. For example, in an age when stereotypes of national character retained broad currency and explanatory power, many Russian officers reflexively rejected the typically pedantic German model of rigid dogma and interchangeable automatons. See also Menning, Bruce W., Bayonets before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861-1914 (Bloomington, 1992), 200-21Google Scholar.

68. Memorandum dated July 1907, no. 287. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,11. 278-85.

69. Memorandum dated 18 April 1909, no. 92. Ibid., 11. 344-48.

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77. Sanborn, , Drafting the Russian Nation, 72 Google Scholar.

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79. Sanborn, , Drafting the Russian Nation, 20–29, 63-74Google Scholar.

80. See Holquist, Peter, “To Count, to Extract, and to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia,” in Suny, and Martin, , eds., A State of Nations, 111-44Google Scholar.