Introduction 5Certainly, one might question whether Russia had a state ideology before the
1830s, and if it did whether this was not as much religious-patriarchal as
militarist. It is also largely a matter of subjective judgement how far any of
these characteristics were present in excess of what was necessary for the coun-
try's defence, in view of its long exposed borders and the magnitude of the
threats to its security. Perhaps the significance of the militaristic features in
Russian society may be easier to assess in the light of the evidence adduced in
these pages. Two general points may be made in this connection. First, the
Russian military ethos differed in quality from the Prussian variety, which has
generally been taken as normative. Russia lacked a tradition of feudal
chivalry, a Standesgeist, which officers could invoke to justify their special
interests and views^7 -although in the later nineteenth century some efforts
were made to provide an artificial substitute for it. Second, militaristic traits
were not just a German import, a product of 'the decadent West', as some
chauvinistic writers have implied, but seem to have been of autochthonous
origin, a homespun response to the problem of maintaining 'order' in the face
of 'subversion'. To some extent, too, attitudes characteristic of serf-owners
carried over into the military domain-although this argument can be over-
worked. The pre-1861 Russian army was not simply an extension of the serf-
based rural economy; likewise its officers' mentality was more powerfully
shaped by professional experiences in the service than by childhood reminisc-
ences of some 'nobleman's nest'. Indeed, from the 1760s onward the military
ethos was often transmitted to the rural milieu by officers who retired to take
up farming, or their ex-NCO bailiffs, who embarked on ill-considered attempts
to systematize the management of their estates.
Since the reader will find little discussion in what follows of the warfare in
which the troops engaged, it may be as well to outline here the major occasions
when military power was used in support of the tsars' foreign policy objectives.
It was the principal ingredient, along with diplomacy, in bringing about the
remarkable territorial expansion which turned the insignificant principality of
Moscow into an empire covering one-sixth of the globe's land surface. War-
fare was almost continuous along this empire's remoter borders, although these
campaigns were generally small-scale and involved irregular (especially
Cossack) forces rather than regular troops. The amount of coercion applied
varied a great deal. As a rule the brutalities associated with the initial conquest
were succeeded by more statesmanlike policies-unless the natives rebelled, as
they frequently did. At the start of our period most of the people brought
under the tsar's 'high hand' were ethnically and culturally akin to their new
masters, and so assimilated fairly easily. But the so-called 'gathering of the
Russian lands' also involved absorption of fellow Slavs who were already
(^7) Cf., for Prussia, G. Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk: dos Problem des 'Mi/itarismus'
in Deutsch/and, i. Die altpreussische Tradition, 1740-1890, Munich, 1954, pp. 149-52; Ritter
offers some interesting observations on pre·l914 Russian militarism, ibid., ii. (1960), 98-114;
cf. also Stein, 'Offizier'.