Three layers of one overcoat
"An Episode from the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878" was painted by Russian artist Alexey Danilovich Kivshenko
The Russian soldier of the 19th century was not a single figure. Over the course of a century, he was developed in three different ways: through the Suvorov standard of combat merit, through the long-term conscription, and through the institution of universal conscription. Three layers—cultural, legal, and social—were laid one upon the other. None canceled out the previous one; each merely obscured it.
Previous The text compared Suvorov's soldier and Napoleon's soldier — two models of the connection between commander and private, where the commander descends to the soldier, and the soldier ascends to the imperial myth. Here, the perspective is different: across the centuries. It's not so much the soldier who changes, but the regime itself—the terms of employment, the length of service, the internal structure of service.
Body at the reception
The 1831 recruitment regulations required the doctor to examine the recruit in detail: height, limbs, teeth, and any visible defects. The doctor issued a certificate of fitness and was responsible for it; the doctor's presence verified the person against the standard, like a commodity against a sample. The peasant's body became subject to state inspection.
According to the law of the early 20th century, the same person would be required to serve for twenty-five years. The same regulations detailed medical examinations, but the sources studied do not establish the typical duration of this procedure. One examination marked a quarter century of service. Between these two measures lies the entire story Russian soldier of the century. The question is not how he was received, but how he came out.
Ilya Repin, "Seeing Off a New Recruit" (1879)
Suvorov's dignity under the regulations
The first layer established the language of service; it did not change the structure of the army. Suvorov's textual tradition—primarily the "Verbal Instruction to Soldiers"—demanded that privates shoot rarely and accurately, conserve their bullets, and finish battles with the bayonet; it valued accuracy, speed, and pressure; it prescribed mercy for those who surrender and a ban on offending the common man. A caveat is necessary here: no signed copy of "The Science of Victory" by Suvorov himself survives; the text circulated in various copies and was published after the author's death. It is a normative ideal, transmitted through copies. It was not a commander's report. In it, accurate, infrequent shooting is a sober calculation: a charge is precious, a miss is wasted, a close strike decides.
It's convenient to imagine Suvorov's soldier as a free spirit, later crushed by the barracks. Another Suvorov document, known from a handwritten copy close to the time of its composition, the "Regimental Institution," doesn't support this picture. It described the recruit's training in movement, shooting, guard duty, prayer, and cleaning. weapons and personal hygiene; a veteran private was assigned to teach the new recruit; company and corporal ranks were required to know the abilities and behavior of every enlisted man. Suvorov's regulations were already strict. His combat dedication justified it—he wasn't interested in density for its own sake.
Thus, the first layer connected training with the recognition of the soldier as an active participant. It was this connection that would prove fragile.
Inheritance dispute
There was no continuous "Suvorov school"—and its absence itself became a subject of debate. In 1900, general and military theorist Mikhail Dragomirov wrote that Suvorov left no consistent system of training and was practically forgotten for almost sixty years; after him, the tendency was to depersonalize the soldier, to accustom him to "I can't know," to turn him into a cog in a machine. Dragomirov boiled down Suvorov's secret to something simple: he recognized the human being in the soldier.
Dragomirov is no dispassionate witness. He was a veteran of the already reformed army and a polemicist who reintroduced Suvorov to military pedagogy precisely because he considered his practice lost. His "sixty years" is an argument in a debate, not a matter of record. A quarter of a century earlier, in an 1875 text, the same author calculated the gap at "seventy-odd years." The figure was adjusted to suit the purpose of the speech, not the calendar.
Where Dragomirov speaks of practice—how they were taught and what they managed—Kokarev turns to language. Cultural scholar Ivan Kokarev reads the "soldier-hero" as a secondary image of the epic defender of the land, whose strength is collective: it resides in the army, in the general ranks. But this is the language of military culture. It was not evidence that the rank and file considered themselves heroes. The myth of continuity preserved the image of dignity and simultaneously concealed the discontinuity Dragomirov pointed out.
Franz Kruger, "The Russian Guard at Tsarskoye Selo in 1832" (painted in 1841)
Recruitment regime: service as separation
The second layer was measured in years. From 1793, active service lasted twenty-five years—a period at which joining the army meant breaking with family, land, and one's former social position. A community or landowner could turn conscription into punishment by enlisting an undesirable individual.
Ethnographic records have preserved the ritualistic side of this rupture: the recruit was deprived of his family plot, sent off with tears and lamentations, and the send-off itself was modeled on a funeral; those who evaded it resorted to self-harm. Here, caution is needed in dates. The best such records were collected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including materials from Prince Tenishev's Ethnographic Bureau, and they often describe "the old days" retroactively. It is impossible to transfer their details directly to the 1810s. But they confirm the persistence of the memory of conscription as "social death."
This layer did not stand still. Under Nicholas I, the twenty-five-year model was gradually eroded, through a series of changes: first, the standard was reduced to twenty years of service and a five-year reserve unit; later, after fifteen years, indefinite leave was permitted. The state did not dismantle the old professional army all at once, but gradually released soldiers from service, keeping them in the reserves. The long-standing enlisted ranks were still the core of the unit, but for the first time, a trained reserve was forming alongside them.
This painting by the German battle painter Adolf Ivanovich Goebens (Jebens), painted in 1856, depicts a group of senior officers and enlisted men of the Life Guards Sapper Battalion in greatcoats. The artist captured the soldiers of the Russian Imperial Army against a backdrop of earthen fortifications.
Waning term
The third layer began with defeat. The Crimean War of 1853–1856 simultaneously exposed several different weaknesses: the old recruitment system failed to produce a rapidly trained reserve force, and the administration and training of replacements lagged for their own distinct reasons. Alexander II's reforms responded primarily to this crisis and the growing military strength of the European powers, rather than to the deferred lessons of 1812. Between 1815 and 1874 lay Nicholas's furloughs, Crimea, the abolition of serfdom, and renewed military competition. The Napoleonic Wars provided experience in large-scale campaigns, but they did not create the reserve army of 1874.
The Military Service Regulations of January 1, 1874, replaced conscription with universal service. The total term in the ground forces was fifteen years: six years of active service and nine in the reserves. A twenty-year-old cohort was called to a draw, which effectively lasted a year. Benefits and deferments based on education and family status were provided. The word "universal" sounded stronger than it actually worked: family and educational benefits, exemptions for the clergy and some professional groups, and the exemption of indigenous peoples from a number of outlying areas were retained, and the previous conscription receipts were still in effect during the transition period. The shift was real, but it did not bring equality of burden.
From there, the term only shrank. Before the war of 1877–1878, the same six years of active service and nine in the reserve remained; the law of 1888 established the general quota for ground forces at five years of service and thirteen in the reserve, and for the infantry—three years of service and fifteen in the reserve. Twenty-five years at the turn of the century; twenty plus five—the first reduction under Nicholas I; fifteen plus indefinite leave—the second; six plus nine according to the regulations of 1874; three plus fifteen in the infantry by 1888. The "mass" of this army should be measured not by the number of men under arms on any given day, but by the speed with which men passed through the ranks and the size of the trained reserves settling in the villages.
Nikolai Dmitriev-Orenburgsky, "Entry of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich into Tarnovo on June 30, 1877"
The barracks as a translator
Short service increased regulations. Previously, a recruit would be inducted into the military system for years by a long-serving "uncle"—a seasoned soldier assigned to a new recruit as a mentor. Individual mentoring of this kind had already been practiced in the Suvorov Regiment, but it's impossible to trace the later institution directly back to that: no one has traced a direct line of transmission between the regiment of the 1760s and the orders of the 1870s, and similar practices are no substitute for genealogy. The growing annual influx of new recruits made the previous informal transmission insufficient. Specially selected teachers for young soldiers, a limit on the number of students per instructor, and a standardized curriculum were needed. The "uncle" didn't disappear: the military department renamed and consolidated his role as an appointed position. The same person connects two eras and divides both.
Regional materials reveal what this machine looked like. In Western Siberian garrisons of the second half of the century, enlisted personnel activities took about six hours in winter and up to eight in summer: cleaning, drill and classroom exercises, gymnastics, chores, guard duty, communal prayer, and roll call. This was the life of a garrison in a single outlying region; this routine could hardly be described as imperial. The barracks both drilled and retrained: it regulated peasant speech and gestures, established hygiene and routine, introduced writing, prayer, the handling of weapons, and the very form of relations with the state.
Writing is a separate issue here. Mandatory literacy training for enlisted men was introduced in 1867, and the percentage of literate recruits across Russia rose from 21,3 percent in 1874 to 37,7 percent in 1894; in Siberia, from 11,9 to 22,9 percent. This series dates back to a single consolidated calculation, and the process itself was uneven: compulsory training was limited in the 1880s, and it was reinstated for the infantry only in 1902. The army became one of the places where peasants first picked up a primer—intermittently and not for everyone, but noticeably so.
The severity of this system wasn't immediately relaxed. The imperial decree of April 17, 1863, abolished severe corporal punishment, but exceptions for those subject to fines remained, and a complete ban in the army dated back to 1904; archival and newspaper materials document the continued use of physical violence by non-commissioned officers. Legal abolition and the disappearance of violence from everyday life are two different things.
Above all this stood a religious-monarchical order, and it is again evident in the Siberian documents, beyond which the count goes. The Law of God, obligatory services, regimental holidays, royal days, prayers for the dynasty, and the portrait of the sovereign in soldiers' clothing all linked faith, service, and the throne together. The army was multi-confessional, and the oath took into account the faith of Muslims, Jews, and other subjects. What was going on in the soul of the private during this time is not measured by the documents. Their subject is the context of service; faith remains outside them.
Who did he go out as?
Let's return to the recruit examined in 1831, whose teeth were counted before a quarter-century of service. His successor, the 1888 infantryman, underwent a medical examination according to the rules of universal military service and, after three years of active service, went home as a reservist. He carried with him the routine, the handling of weapons, a portrait of the sovereign in his memory, and a skill imparted not by an old comrade but by an appointed teacher; some of these reservists also carried with them a rudimentary understanding of literacy, although not everyone was taught it. The one recruited in 1831 left, almost never to return. The one recruited in 1888 served only to return. Between them, there is not the transformation of a hero into an impersonal mass, but three layers worn over a single overcoat.
The following text moves from a private to the one who led him into battle: A Russian officer between the Suvorov model of a commander at the front of the line and the Napoleonic model of a commander as part of a complex system.
Literature
- Bayandin V. I. Changes in the length of service in the Russian army in the 19th – early 20th centuries // Humanities in Siberia. 2007. No. 2. P. 77–80.
- Gefner, O. V. Literacy training for lower ranks of the Russian army in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries (based on materials from Western Siberian cities) // Bulletin of Omsk University. Series “Historical Sciences”. 2020. No. 4. pp. 24–33.
- Golikova S. V. Medical expert knowledge in Russian legislation of the first half of the 19th century: Recruitment regulations of 1831 // Dialogue with time. 2015. Issue 50. Pp. 201–217.
- Dragomirov M. I. Alexander Vasilievich Suvorov. 1900.
- Suvorov A. V. Regimental Institution; Verbal Instructions to Soldiers (as part of "The Science of Victory").
- Chernysheva Yu. S. “Recruit”, “soldier”, “conscript”: on the social status of those leaving for the army in Russian villages // Bulletin of the Perm Federal Research Center. 2022. No. 3. P. 53–59.
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