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The military uniform carried little prestige in Russia. Salaries were too low to permit officers who had no independent means to aspire to a gentleman’s life: with a monthly wage of 41.25 rubles, an infantry second lieutenant earned not much more than a skilled worker. Officers of field rank could barely make ends meet or even feed themselves properly.77 Foreign observers were struck by the lack of a sense of “honor” among Russian officers and their willingness to tolerate abuse from superiors.

The most prestigious service was with the Guard Regiments, commissions in which required social standing as well as independent income.78 Nearly all the officers serving in the Guards were hereditary nobles: their system of cooptation kept out undesirables. Guard officers billeted in comfortable quarters in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Warsaw enjoyed certain privileges, among them accelerated promotion. These, however, were gradually whittled down, and abolished by the time World War I broke out.

The uppermost elite of the late Imperial Army was made up of alumni of the Military Academies, especially the two-and-a-half-year course of studies at the Nicholas Academy of the General Staff, which prepared specialists for high command posts. Admission was open to officers with three years of active duty who passed with distinction an appropriate examination: only one in thirty applicants qualified. Social origin made no difference: here “the son of an emancipated serf served … together with members of the Imperial family.”* The 1,232 graduates of the General Staff School—Genshtabisty—on active duty in 1904 developed a strong esprit de corps, helping each other and maintaining a solid front against outsiders. The brightest among them were assigned to the General Staff, which had responsibility for developing strategic policy. The rest took command posts. Their preponderance among officers of general rank was striking: although constituting between 5 and 10 percent of the officers on active duty, they commanded, in 1912, 62 percent of the army corps, 68 percent of the infantry divisions, 77 percent of the cavalry divisions, and 25 percent of the regiments. All seven of the last Ministers of War were alumni of the General Staff Academy.79

General Anton Denikin, the leader in 1918–19 of the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army, claimed that relations between officers and enlisted men in the Imperial Army were as good as if not better than similar relations in the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, and the treatment of the troops less brutal.80 Contemporary evidence, however, does not support this claim. The Russian authorities insisted on observing very strict rank distinctions, subjecting soldiers to treatment that reminded some observers of serfdom. The men were addressed by officers in the second person singular, received an allowance of three or four rubles a year (one-hundredth of the pay of the most junior officer), and in some military districts were subjected to various indignities such as having to walk on the shady side of the street or to ride on streetcar platforms.81 The resentments which these discriminatory rules bred were a major cause of the mutiny of the Petrograd garrison in February 1917.

For the historian of the Revolution, the most important aspect of the late Imperial Army was its politics. Students of the subject agree that the Russian officer class was largely apoliticaclass="underline" not only did it not involve itself in politics, it showed no interest in it.† In officers’ clubs, political talk was considered in poor taste. Officers looked down on civilians, whom they nicknamed shpaki, most of all on politicians. Moreover they felt they could not uphold their oath to the Tsar if they became embroiled in partisan politics. Taught to regard loyalty to the powers that be as the supreme virtue, they were exceedingly ill prepared to cope with the conflicts that erupted in 1917. As long as the struggle for power was undecided, they stood on the sidelines. Once the Bolsheviks took over, many went into their service, since they were now “the authority” (vlast’), which they had been trained to obey. The specter of Russian Bonapartism, which so frightened Russian revolutionaries, was a figment of the imagination of intellectuals raised on the history of the French Revolution.

14. Dancing class at Smolnyi Institute, c. 1910.

After 1905 there emerged in the military a group of patriotic officers whose loyalty extended beyond the throne. Like the liberal bureaucrats, they saw themselves as serving the nation rather than the Crown. They were regarded with great suspicion.

The fourth instrument of tsarist authority, the gentry or dvorianstvo, was an eroding asset.*

Like the bureaucracy, the Russian gentry descended from a medieval service class which had performed for the princes a great variety of missions, principally military duty.82 Their service was lifelong and compensated mainly by income from fiefs, worked by serfs, who technically remained the Crown’s property. They were not a nobility in the true sense of the word because they had no corporate rights: such benefits as they enjoyed were perquisites of service. The dvoriane rose to a privileged position in the late eighteenth century when the monarchy, eager to divert their attention from politics, admitted them into partnership. In return for the gentry conceding the Tsars complete control over the sphere of high politics, they were given title to their estates as well as de facto ownership of the serfs (then about one-half of the population) and granted a corporate charter of rights, which included release from the obligation of bearing state service. The Golden Age of the dvoriane was between 1730 and 1825. Even then, the vast majority lived in poverty: only one-third had landed estates with serfs and of that number only a minority had enough land and serfs to live in any style.83 Many rural gentry were hard to distinguish from their peasants.

The decline of the Russian gentry began in 1825, as a consequence of the Decembrist Revolt in which young members of the most distinguished noble families took up arms against the monarchy in the name of constitutional and republican ideals. Stung by this “betrayal,” Nicholas I increasingly came to rely on the professional bureaucracy. The economic death knell of the dvorianstvo rang in 1861 when the monarchy, overruling gentry opposition, emancipated the serfs. For although the number of gentry who owned serfs was not very large and most of those who did had too few to live off their labor, the monopoly on serf ownership was the most important advantage which that class had enjoyed. After 1861 the gentry retained certain valuable benefits (e.g., assured admission into the civil and military service), but even so it began to lose status as a privileged social estate.