Resistance, Repression, and Reform 307consider this tradition in the following pages, for the underlying reason why
the military settlements had become obsolete by mid-century was this: they
wt:i t: uul uf ~lt:p with the trend towards proiessionai specialization. A modern
state needed to be ruled by officials, not by officers.
During the eighteenth century the Russian army beat a slow retreat through the
empire's institutions of government. Not until the fir\t decade of Alexander I's
reign was there a decisive shift away from the employment in dvil posts of
serving officers (or those who had just resigned their commissions). Even so
much of the Imperial administration continued to wear a martial look right
down to the Reform era. Apart from simple inertia-a force always to be
reckoned with in Russian history-there were four main reasons, which were
mutually reinforcing, for this state of affairs. First, the armed forces were the
only available source of manpower, given the fact that the gentry preferred to
join the armed forces and that the higher levels of the civil service, like the
officer corps, were all but closed to commoners. Second, the various military
academies produced a fair crop of officers with at least a smattering of general
as well as professional education; the universities and other civilian higher
schools, which developed only after the 'cadet corps', yielded better trained
men, but at first far too few of them. Third, the tasks of government were for
a long time seen as predominantly coercive in nature, and therefore individuals
with a military background seemed to be well suited to perform them. Fourth,
the army needed to renew its commanding personnel every so often in order to
remove 'dead wood' and maintain efficiency; and it faced an additional prob-
lem in the presence on its rolls, at least in peacetime, of large numbers of super-
numeraries. Few of those who retired or were excluded on grounds of age,
wounds, or incompetence, or who fell victim to one of the periodical economy
drives, had an assured private income. If they were not to die in poverty they
had to be found jobs they could handle which would provide them with a
reasonable income.
In the course of the eighteenth century more and more officers transferred
from military to civilian service (and sometimes back again). Indeed, this
almost became the normal career pattern. As the taste for civilian employment
grew, ambitious young noblemen would put in a spell with their regiment and
then, having obtained some experience of the wider world, would apply for
discharge and appointment to a civil-service position-with the statutory pro-
motion on completion of the minimum service term. Except in wartime such
requests were as a rule freely granted, since the state's broader interests were
well served by them, even though the army suffered from the high turnover
rate, and such transfers led to many complaints about unjustified advances in
rank (see ch. 10).
The employment of men with a military background in the bureaucracy was
the most obvious way, but not the only one, in which the army's influence was
brought to bear upon the administration. Some branches of the economy