378 Towards a Modern Army, 1825-1874
less than I per cent (this figure evidently excludes volunteers).^158 Those with
duly certified educational qualifications numbered a mere 35,000 or 1.7 per
cent-but another 411,000 (20.2 per cent) were literate, and their share was
rising. Deferments on educational grounds were in the range of only two to three
thousand a year.^159 A surprisingly high 51. 8 per cent of men liable to conscrip--
tion claimed privileges on family grounds; the proportion of men in these
categories who were called up was small: 1.7 per cent (35.6 per cent if one
includes childless married men).^160
The government succeeded in its primary purpose of building up a large
reserve. In 1876, when war broke out again with Turkey, its size exceeded 3/.i
million; ten years later, despite combat losses, it had doubled.^161 However, this
force was less well trained than the reformers had anticipated. The Russian
army had modernized its structure but it still lagged behind the forces of
potential European adversaries organizationally, technically, and psychologic-
ally. In an age of intensifying nationalism and imperiaiist rivalry these were
serious shortcomings. Moreover, instead of the reform drive being carried for-
ward with vigour, backed by commensurate changes in other areas of public
life, after 1881 an effort was made to reverse it. With this 'counter-reform', as
contemporaries called it, the Russian empire entered upon a period of decline
that ended in revolution.Were the seeds of its collapse sown in the Milyutin era, when tqe service state
was dismantled? It is easy, but facile, to blam~ Russia's failure to meet the
challenge of the modern world on the egoism of her social elite, or of certain
groups within it. Russian conservatives faced a very real problem: how to hold
together a rapidly fragmenting society at a time when absolutism by divine
right, the traditional source of political legitimacy, was losing credibility. "'
Throughout its history tsarism had been intricately bound up with the notion
of universal state service. The privileged classes had won a measure of freedom
from it in the eighteenth century; now, a hundred years later, similar if less
extensive rights were granted to commoners. These measures destroyed the
intellectual and moral justification for such service. Logically, the old
bureaucratic and militaristic state order should have given way to one based on
the principle of free contract, oriented to economic growth, in which political
power would be freely and openly bargained over by competitive, autonomous
social groups. But such a prospect did not seem either practical or attractive to
nineteenth-century Russians, whatever their station in life. Only a few intel-
lectuals embraced Western values eagerly. Instead officials, gentry landowners,
and even most of the intelligentsia launched into a self-destructive struggle to
redefine the state order in accordance with abstract principles of one kind or
ISB Ibid., pp. 76-7.
159 Zayonchkovsky, 'Podgotovka',-p. 198-.
160 Syrnev, Vseobshchaya voinskaya povinnost', pp. xix, 115.
161 Zayonchkovsky, 'Podgotovka', p. 199; Kcrsnovsky, Istoriya, ii. 404.