An Age of Reform 357
note that historically the okruga were somewhat reminiscent of the pre-Petrine
razryady. The idea of building up a trained reserve had been in the air for
decades; nevertheless Milyutin's programme heralded a veritable revolution in
military affairs-indct:d in Russian society as a whole. Universal (but selective)
conscription held out the prospect of a democratic citizen army on the French
model-this in an autocratic empire where the mass of the people had yet to
become fully-fledged citizens. In such armies officers and men performed their
duty out of a conscious loyalty to the nation-state, an abstract entity, rather
than from a natural awe of the personal authority invested in an absolute
monarch and his appointees. Conscription also implied that soldiers should be
educated and propetly looked after, and that they had rights as human beings
which should be protected by the military judicial system.
Such ideas could not be spelled out fully, even in a confidential memoran-
dum to the tsar. Both Alexander II and Milyutin were half-afraid of them.
They wanted above all to consolidate the monarchy, whereas a conscript army
would undermine it. Thus from the start the reform effort suffered from an
underlying ambiguity and its implementation was bound to be half-hearted.Nothing illustrates this ambiguity better than the controversy that surrounded
the reformers' efforts to introduce an element of glasnost' into the shaping of
military policy. The establishment of a new professional journal, outside the
jurisdiction of military censorship, had been recommended to the tsar by
Ridiger in 1855.^33 The idea was particularly dear to the heart of Milyutin. In
June 1856 he sent a memorandum to the deputy War Minister, A. A. Katenin,
in which he deplored officers' literary tastes, or lack thereof; the new
periodical, he suggested, should accustom them 'painlessly' to the habit of
reading by combining general educational matter with information of a more
limited and official character; and its price should be low. He clearly had in
mind the successful journal Morskoy sbornik ('Naval Miscellany'), published
under Admiralty auspices with the patronage of the enlightened Grand Duke
Constantine Nikolayevich.^34 Another year elapsed before the idea was taken
up by senior officers of the Separate Guards Corps, who held that either police
or military censorship would unduly restrict the journal's scope and that they
themselves would ensure it did not go too far. Alexander concurred. Early in
1858 he abolished the Military Censorship Committee3^5 and then approved a
scheme which allowed the guards staff to choose the editors of the prospective
Voyennyy sbornik ('Military Miscellany'). Major-General A. P. Kartsev turned
to none other than N. G. Chernyshevsky, the country's leading radical journ-
alist.^36
33 Danilov, in SVM i. app. p. 40. There already existed a periodical, Voyennyy zhurnal.
published by the Committee on Military Education, and a newspaper, Russkiy invalid. but both
were narrow in scope and dry. For a fuller account of the following episode, Keep, 'Chernyshevsky'
(forthcoming); Koz'min, 'Chernyshevsky'; Makeyev, 'Chernyshevsky-redaktor'.
34 Lincoln, Vanguard, pp. 146-8; Beyrau, 'Leibeigenschaft und Militarverfassung', p. 198.
35 11 PSZ xxxiii. 32819 (I Mar. 1858).
36 Kartsev was then Chief Quartermaster of the Guards Corps. For his biography see E. W.