320 The Military Settlements
the army. Wortman points out that they 'had not received legal training and
regarded the law as little different from other commands, requiring no special
respect or understanding'.^110 Such an outlook set them apart from the growing
number of professional bureaucrats who had been trained in the elements of
jurisprudence and were impregnated with a new ethos, one that put less em-
phasis on reverence for authority and more on fidelity to abstract ideals.
Individuals of this type were, like Venediktov, reluctant to enter the armed
forces, since they found its mores uncongenial, and those who did so usually
resigned their commissions within a few years. Of the chief procurators, that
is, officials in the Senate who were principally responsible for law enforce-
ment, only I 0 per cent had military experience in 1856, as against 36 per cent
thirty years earlier, and their average length of service in the forces had declined
from eleven years to eight.^111
Civilianization was a ~low process, to be sure, but an ineluctable one. Euro-
pean intellectual inOuences had long since been percolating into the Russian
elite, and the ideologues of 'official nationalism' could offer no credible alter-
native philosophy. Moreover, 'men of various ranks' (raznochintsy) were
gradually ousting dvoryane from their established positions in the official
world. The days of the service state were numbered as surely as those of serf-
dom. The army was a major bulwark of conservatism, but in 1854-5 the war
brutally exposed its deficiencies, as it did the shortcomings of the Nicolaevan
system as a whole. It placed reform inexorably on the agenda. The army's per-
vasive presence in Russian society, which the military settlements epitomized,
stood revealed as an impediment to maintenance of the empire's great-power
status. In the next quarter-century the topical question was to be: would the
reformers be allowed to complete their task? But the underlying, less obvious
problem was whether the autocratic order could survive such an effacement of
the military, on whose coercive power Russia's government had rested for so
long.
11<1 Wortman, Le~ul Co11.\cto11s111?\, p. 92.^111 Ibid., p. 57.