Jntroductwn 3the brunt of the sacrifices that the service state demanded. By 'soldiers' we
mean primarily the men in the ranks, but the officers have not been neglected.
The armed forces were both the instrument and the victim of coercive state
policies, and so an investigation of the internal life of the troops can tell us a
lnt ahn11t the entire political and social system of which they formed an
integral part.
The tsarist state may in our view quite properly be characterized, over most
of its long history, as manifesting both despotic and militaristic features.
These are contentious terms, frowned on by some contemporary social scien-
tists, and therefore their employment here calls for a word or two of explana-
tion. Neither term is used in an emotive or value-laden sense. The extensive use
of force by those in authority (as officials and landlords as well as members of
the armed forces and 'specialists in violence') was after all a fact of life in
Russia for centuries, and no good purpose is served by ignoring it. This use of
force 'from above' had its counterpart in acts of rebellion-notably the four
great Cossack-peasant uprisings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
but also countless smaller disturbances-in which the disadvantaged or
oppressed sought to wreak vengeance on their overlords. The agents of
authority also encountered a good deal of passive resistance from the simple
folk with whom they had to deal. Violence was never far from the surface of
Russian social life, particularly in the countryside, and members of the armed
forces were often to be found on either side of the firing-line.
The reasons for the pervasiveness of conflict are fairly evident. They may be
sought first of all in the inhospitable natural environment, which made the
struggle for physical survival a desperate matter for most people; and then in
the country's cultural isolation and backwardness, allied to the lack of a
developed legal and institutional order that has already been mentioned. These
factors and others besides helped to shape a political culture that, at least prior
to the reforms of the 1860s, was characterized by a great deal of official
arbitrariness (proizvol) and corruption. The evils of absolute government
loomed larger in Russia than they did elsewhere in Europe at the time. They
were the target of criticism by a growing number of enlightened individuals
from the 1790s onward, among them a fair proportion of military men, but
their efforts to change _things were not particularly successful. One sym-
pathizes with the aggrieved subaltern who during Nicholas l's reign lamented
that 'in Russia everything is secret and false'.^3
To categorize either Muscovite or Imperial Russia as 'despotic' tout court
would be unjust, but to deny that despotic elements existed in public life is to
err also. The problem is to ascertain their importance-and to weigh the part
which the armed forces played in sustaining the system.^4 Undoubtedly some
3 Mombelli, in Delo petrashevtsev, i. 308.
4 In its time C.-A. Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism: a Comparative Study of Total Power (New
Haven and London, 1963) evoked lively controversy among Russian specialists, as has A. Yanov's
The Origins of Autocracy: Ivan the Terrible in Russ'hm History (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and
London, 1981); see the author's reply to his critics in SR42 (1983), pp. 247-52, and E. L. Keenan