Nationality Policy and the Russian Imperial Officer Corps, 1905-1914Author(s): Gregory VitarboSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 66, No. 4 (Winter, 2007), pp. 682-701Published by: The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20060379Accessed: 04/06/2009 07:20
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Nationality Policy and the Russian Imperial Officer
Corps, 1905-1914
Gregory Vitarbo
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the visionary Russian war min
ister Dmitrii Miliutin concluded that the key to modernizing the army was
to create a patriotic, civically conscious soldiery in service to a unified,
equally patriotic nation. Although this ideology of a united army and so
ciety, "the nation in arms," was believed to underpin the military might of
such powers as Germany and France, it was a quite radical prescription for
Russia itself. Like other reformist bureaucrats, Miliutin saw his work as
part of a broader "nation-building" project within the tsarist empire; the
Universal Service Statute of 1874 was to establish the dual foundations of
this project. Over time, the legislation was intended to bridge the social,
political, and cultural divide between what were in effect the two nations
of Russia?a small westernized elite and a mass of peasants?as well as to
equalize obligations and opportunities between the dominant Russian na
tionality and the numerous non-Russian peoples of the empire.1 Nevertheless, the triptych of war, defeat, and revolution in the years
1904-1906 demonstrated that Miliutin s far-reaching reforms, themselves to an extent diluted by his more conservative successors, had yet to achieve
their desired results. The perceived revolutionary tendencies of reservists,
coupled with numerous mutinies involving regular units, provided a jarring
counterpoint to the myth of the loyal Russian peasant-soldier.2 Moreover, the violent unrest that had swept non-Russian areas of the empire called
into question Miliutin's vision of cultural and political assimilation via mil
itary service. As such, concerns regarding the relationship between na
tionality, patriotism, and civic duty became even more pressing in tsarist
military circles in the post-1905 period. Such concerns were directed not only toward the soldiery, but toward
the imperial officer community itself. In the decade following 1905, the
War Ministry embarked upon an ambitious attempt to formulate a com
prehensive nationality policy for the officer corps. The project sought to
establish service quotas for each nationality according to its percentage of
I would truly like to thank the many people who helped me prepare this article, including
William Rosenberg, Paul Werth, Ronald Grigor Suny, Mark von Hagen, Dominic Lieven,
Joshua Sanborn, Eric Lohr, and especially my gracious colleagues in the Department of
History and Political Science at Meredith College: Michael Novak, Daniel Fountain, and
William Price.
1. Concerning Miliutin's vision and the enormous difficulties involved in implement
ing it, see Robert F. Baumann, "Universal Service Reform and Russia's Imperial Dilemma,"
War and Society 4, no. 2 (September 1986): 31-49; Forrest A. Miller, Dmitrii Miliutin and the
Reform Era in Russia (Nashville, 1968); and P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Voennye reformy 1860-1870
godov v Rossii (Moscow, 1952).
2. See Alan K. Wildman, The End of the Imperial Russian Army: The Old Army and the Sol
dier s Revolt (Princeton, 1980), 3-40; and John Bushnell, Mutiny amid Repression (Bloom
ington, 1985).
Slavic Review 66, no. 4 (Winter 2007))
Nationality Policy and the Russian Imperial Officer Corps, 1905-1914 683
the empire's overall population; its professed goal was the preservation of
the numerical, and thus spiritual and cultural, predominance of Ortho
dox, ethnic Russian officers. Yet the attempt to fashion an officer corps at once truly "imperial" and "Russian" via quotas exposed fluid and compet
ing ideals and traditions regarding paradigms of service, loyalty, and iden
tity among tsarist officers; in turn, such efforts raised broader questions about the relationship between army, nation, and empire. The project's brief history thus provides fresh perspectives on the intersections between
military reform, nationality policy, and imperial ideology under the tsarist
regime, offering new insights into the wider nexus of military moderniza tion and political, social, and cultural development in the last years of the
Russian empire. It further illustrates the suggestive linkages between the Russian experience and contemporary pan-European trends concerning military practices, nationality politics, and cultural ferment.
As Theodore Weeks observes, in the late imperial period tsarist offi cialdom "found itself forced to deal with an issue quite foreign to its con
servative and dynastic mentalit?: nationality."3 Recent studies have exam
ined the vagaries of tsarist nationality policy and the experience of non-Russian peoples within the empire,4 while related works have sought to explore, in both historical and theoretical terms, the meanings of state,
empire, and nation under the tsarist autocracy.5 Yet the issue of national
ity was a particularly complicated one for the army. As Mark von Hagen notes, sentiment regarding nationality "is one of the most elusive aspects of late imperial military culture to document; evidence is scant and con
tradictory and invariably filtered through the experiences of World War I, the Revolution, and the Civil War."6
3. Theodore Weeks, "Defending Our Own: Government and the Russian Minority in
the Kingdom of Poland, 1905-14," Russian Review 54, no. 4 (October 1995): 550. 4. John Slocum, "Who, and When, Were the Inorodtsy?'The Evolution of the Category
of 'Aliens' in Imperial Russia," Russian Review 57, no. 2 (April 1998): 173-90; Theodore
Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western
Frontier, 1863-1914 (DeKalb, 1996); Andreas Rappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic
History, trans. Alfred Clayton (Harlow, 2001); Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen, eds., Af
ter Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires (Boulder, Colo., 1997); D. Brower and E. Lazzerini, eds., Russia's Ori ent: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700-1917 (Bloomington, 1997).
5. See, for example, Mark von Hagen, "The Russian Empire," in Barkey and von Ha
gen, eds., After Empire, 58-72, and especially the ambitious work of Ronald Grigor Suny: Suny, "The Russian Empire," in Barkey and von
Hagen, eds., After Empire, 142-54; Suny, "Ambiguous Categories: States, Empires, and Nations," Post-Soviet Affairs 11, no. 2
(April-June 1995): 185-96; and Suny, "The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, 'Na tional' Identity, and Theories of Empire," in Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds.,
A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York, 2001 ). See also Peter Gatrell, "Ethnicity and Empire in Russia's Borderland History," Historical
Journal 38, no. 3 (1995): 715-27; and Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (New Haven, 2001).
6. Mark von Hagen, "The Limits of Reform: The Multiethnic Imperial Army Con
fronts Nationalism, 1874-1914," in David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye and Bruce W.
Menning, eds., Reforming the Tsars Army: Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution (New York, 2004), 34.
684 Slavic Review
In particular, despite Miliutin's vision, ongoing attempts to reconcile
the demands of the nation in arms paradigm with the existing social and
political structure of the empire proved difficult. Throughout the late im
perial period non-Russian ethnic and national groups continued to oc
cupy an anomalous place due to "certain facts of life in the Empire. Many
inorodtsy were far from ready for assimilation and Russia lacked the means
to bring about rapid change in their social situation."7 Various groups re
mained exempt from conscription altogether, others were subject to cer
tain restrictions or enjoyed special status, while efforts to either create spe cial "native" units, raised via voluntary recruitment, or to integrate them
into the regular army remained haphazard and limited.8 As such, the sta
tus, role, and future of various non-Russian, non-Orthodox nationalities
remained a pressing question in an empire that had only expanded since
the promulgation of the Universal Service Statute.9
Regarding issues of nationality among officers, a different set of dy namics prevailed. The multiethnic, multireligious officer corps had long
occupied a crucial place, structurally and ideologically, within the edifice
of the regime. Officers cultivated enduring traditions regarding their
prominent status, the unique bond between tsar and military servitor, and
the role of the army in establishing and maintaining the empire as a great
European power. Notable among these traditions was the role of the offi cer corps in serving as a mechanism of assimilation and imperial integra tion for non-Russian nationalities and elites.10 At the same time, it is a tru
ism that Russian officers received little indoctrination in monarchist,
nationalist, or any other unifying ideology. Peter Kenez concludes that
"officers possessed no sense of belonging to a common institution," while
"concern for their loyalty was purely negative and preventive."11 William
Fuller has argued that what he terms the "negative corporatism" of the
tsarist officer corps provided only a "fictive unity."12 Whatever positive for
7. Robert F. Baumann, "Subject Nationalities in the Military Service of Imperial Rus
sia: The Case of the Bashkirs," Slavic Review 46, nos. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 1987): 502.
8. See again Baumann, "Universal Service Reform and Russia's Imperial Dilemma"
and "Subject Nationalities in the Military Service of Imperial Russia." See also Baumann,
"Universal Service Reform: Conception to Implementation, 1873-1883," in Schim
melpenninck van der Oye and Menning, eds., Reforming the Tsars Army, 11-33.
9. See P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Samoderzhavie i russkaia armiia na rubezhe XIX-XX stoletii,
1881-1903 (Moscow, 1973) ; Joshua Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscrip
tion, TotalWar, and Mass Politics, 1905 -1925 (DeKalb, 2003); von Hagen, "The Limits of Re
form," 34-55; and J. E. O. Screen, "The Finnish Army, 1881-1901: A National Force in a
Russian Context," Slavonic and East European Review 70, no. 3 (July 1992): 453-76.
10. Von Hagen, "The Limits of Reform," 37. See also J. E. O. Screen, "The Entry of
Finnish Officers into Russian Military Service, 1809-1917" (PhD diss., University of Lon
don, 1976) ; John Armstrong, "Mobilized Diaspora in Tsarist Russia: The Case of the Baltic
Germans," in Jeremy R. Azrael, ed., Soviet Nationality Policy and Practices (New York, 1978),
63-104; and Hans-Peter Stein, "Der Offizier des russischen Heeres im Zeitabschnitt zwis
chen Reform und Revolution (1861-1905)," Forschungen zur osteurop?ischen Geschichte 13
(1967): 351-63. 11. Peter Kenez, "A Profile of the Prerevolutionary Officer Corps," California Slavic
Studies 7 (1973): 131,156. 12. William C. Fuller Jr., Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881-1914 (Prince
ton, 1985), 26-29. John Bushneil describes in even harsher terms a purely negative and
Nationality Policy and the Russian Imperial Officer Corps, 1905-1914 685
mulations of service existed were largely framed around particular regi ments or other subgroups within the army, while an officer's loyalty was
professed to the tsar himself, not to the "nation," empire, or state.
As noted, the events of 1904-1906 graphically exposed the fragility of imperial unity and identity, with rebellion among the soldiery and vio
lent unrest among minority nationalities. Defeat and revolution also had a
profound effect upon the officer community's sense of self, fractured
though it was. Looking inward, the army itself had been rent by perceived
disloyalty among fellow officers, with reservists and Poles singled out for
particular blame. Looking outward, many officers saw a regime that had
seemingly abandoned them on the field, while the civilian public first ques tioned and then violently repudiated their service. The proper interpreta tion and response to all of these events became a regular topic of debate
within the military press.13 Historians have traditionally argued that only a
small group of elite officers engaged larger questions regarding the nature
of the army and its relationship to the society and polity of imperial Russia.
But broader segments of the officer community now began to do so.
In his wide-ranging analysis of the army's responses to such challenges of "nation-building," Joshua Sanborn focuses upon the conceptual para
digms with which officers confronted the multifaceted "dilemma of di
versity" the empire presented them. He argues that prevailing attitudes
toward non-Russian minorities, situated within evolutionary paradigms of
historical development and a fundamental belief in the assimilating and
"civilizing" powers of Russian culture, were increasingly becoming in
flected with racialist, Social Darwinist, and Marxist conceptual categories then popular in western Europe. As such, categories of nationality and
class were gradually challenging the importance of those of estate and re
ligion, while increasing tensions between "ethnic" and "civic" nationalists
within the army.14 Analyzing post-1905 conscription policies, Sanborn ar
gues that, as a result, the army leadership, as it had since 1874, "preached (and believed in) the long-term goal of the multiethnic nation while prac
ticing short-term imperial policies of ethnic discrimination."15
When applied to the officer community itself, however, the paradigms Sanborn describes raise unique questions. Reformers recognized the po
tentially subversive implications of the "nation at arms" model within an
imperial setting, while the dictates of both civic and ethnic nationalism
clashed with the dynastic ethos that had traditionally governed the officer
corps. In his excellent survey of the nationality question and the military,
often violent caste mentality directed at a public deemed innately hostile toward the mili
tary and its values. Bushnell, "The Tsarist Officer Corps, 1881-1914: Customs, Duties, In
efficiency," American Historical Review 86, no. 4 (October 1981): 753-80.
13. For just a few examples of the various and multifaceted critiques of the army, the
officer corps, and society at large, see M. Krit, "Podgotovka ofitserov," Voennyi sbornik, no. 8 (1914): 35-54; A. Dmitrevskii, "Ideal ofitsera," Voennyi sbornik, no. 7 (1912): 1-10; and L. Evdokimov, "Patriotizm v
poniatii narodov," Voennyi sbornik, no. 4 (1914): 127-42.
The progressive military journal Razvedchik contributed such articles as B. Zboromirskii, "'Natsional'naia armiia,'" Razvedchik, no. 1075 (7June 1911): 356.
14. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, 63-75.
15. Ibid., 71.
686 Slavic Review
von Hagen notes the resulting cognitive dissonance. Officer memoirists
asserted that with the exception of Jewish soldiers and Polish officers, dis
crimination was nonexistent and "the national question as such did not
really exist" within the army; at the same time, regulations severely re
stricted the service conditions of Polish officers, while rising pan-Slavist and Russian nationalist attitudes increasingly alienated heretofore loyal groups such as the Baltic Germans.16
Finally, the October Manifesto, with its guarantees of civil rights, per sonal freedoms, and legal equality had dramatically transformed the
broader context of the relationship between state and society, autocracy and citizen. Military servitors were thus compelled to reexamine the place of the army within this new political order and to redefine the relation
ship between officer, regime, and the civilian public.
The project to formulate a comprehensive nationality policy for tsarist
officers was a direct response to such pressures, yet it was essentially that? a response. One can cite Sanborn to argue that the efforts of the army in
this regard were relatively proactive and visionary. Nevertheless, military institutions are in general inherently conservative organizations, and the
power of tradition, custom, and inertia exercised a potent influence. The
resulting bureaucratic history of the nationalities project itself speaks to
the complexity and difficulty of the issues involved.17 Initiated in 1905
within the jurisdiction of the Main Staff, the project ultimately dragged on
for eight years through various administrative departments of the army. The actual task of drafting the requisite new regulations was given to spe cial commissions, first under the chairmanship of General Frolov and
then under General Dukmasov and their various subcommittees. Yet
memoranda and reports were consistently and extensively rewritten, re
flecting difficulties and tensions regarding both fundamental principles and the mechanics of implementation. Moreover, particularly in the early
phases, a larger sense of urgency and haste prevailed due to justifiable fears of the attitude that the newly established Duma might adopt toward
such a project. Lastly, once the Dukmasov Commission had finished its
work, the results were deemed so unsatisfactory that the entire project was
subjected to comprehensive review and revision. These very difficulties,
however, attested to the political, social, and cultural imperatives that
complicated efforts to define the relationship between military service, national identity, and political loyalty.
A Main Staff memorandum of October 1905 summarized the primary issues and goals at stake regarding the initiation of the nationalities pro
ject.18 It emphasized the need to protect the status of the officer corps as
an imperial and Russian institution, while reconciling the corps with the
new legal and political realities, such as the manifesto on equality of citi
zenship and the ukaz on freedom of confession issued in December 1904.
16. Von Hagen, "The Limits of Reform," 44-45.
17. The materials and correspondence regarding this project are found in the Rossi
iskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv (RGVIA), f. 400, op. 15, dd. 2501, 2805.
18. Memorandum dated October 1905, no. 148. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2501,11. 6-8;
see also RGVIA, f. 2000s, op. 2, d. 324,11. 92-110.
Nationality Policy and the Russian Imperial Officer Corps, 1905-1914 687
Specifically, the memorandum referred to existing restrictions on the ser
vice of various groups of non-Orthodox officers. In place since 1888, these
regulations limited the overall representation of such officers within
the army, as well as severely restricting service opportunities for them
both in their home regions and in technically sensitive branches such as
the engineering corps.19 Recognizing that such restrictions no longer answered the "general spirit" of the times, the memorandum asked rhe
torically whether and to what degree a new set of restrictions should be es
tablished within the army "for military servitors belonging to one or an
other nationality."20
Correctly anticipating criticism that such efforts would certainly violate the very "general spirit" they had just recognized, the authors of
the memorandum took as their underlying rationale and defense a fun
damental principle: the unique nature of the military community. As the
memorandum asserted, the army had historically comprised "a corpora tion, substantially differing from others, both in the tasks assigned to it
and in the bases of organization conferred upon it." Thus, regarding the
question of the overall composition of the officer corps and specific rights of service for its members, the Main Staff proposed "an entirely special
provision: advantage in all respects for persons of the native [korennogo]
population of the empire," and certain restrictions for those belonging to
other nationalities.21 Specifically, the memorandum proposed percentage ratios as the basis for such restrictions.
The larger assumptions and goals that were to govern the nationalities
project were thus made clear from the beginning. The army's unique sta
tus justified exceptional measures to maintain its integrity and mission, even if such measures seemingly violated prevailing norms of social equity and political justice. Indeed, throughout the documentary record of the
project, a recurring theme was the explicit recognition that specific poli cies, even imperial ukazy, should apply differently, or not apply, to the mil
itary; in turn, military policies were in no way to be construed as relevant to other institutions. Moreover, the assertion that the army must remain
essentially Russian?russkaia?was, as the memorandum implied, at least one interpretation of the "nation at arms" paradigm. If "Russia" consti
tuted the dominant nation within the empire, so too should its people and
"spirit" dominate the army, especially the officer corps. Regarding the non-Russian nationalities, the proportional linkage of population per
centages and quotas within the officer corps was also presented as "fair":
less service than warranted by their numbers would be shirking, more
would be potentially dangerous. Tellingly, the term rossiiskii rarely ap
peared in the documentary record of the project. Such assumptions and assertions betrayed anxiety as well as confi
dence, however. As John Slocum notes, the results of the imperial census
of 1897, published from 1898 to 1905, called into question the very "dom inance" of the Russian nationality; only by including Ukrainians and Be
19. Acopy of the restrictions of 1888 is preserved in RGVIA, f. 2000, d. 2501,11. 38-44.
20. Ibid., 1. 6.
21. Ibid., 11. 7-8.
688 Slavic Review
lorussians could "Russians" be considered a majority of the population.22 The formal recognition of such a large percentage of non-Russians within
the empire would thus provide an undercurrent of urgency to the na
tionalities project. Yet, the subsequent work of the Frolov and Dukmasov
commissions would also bear witness to Weeks' assertion that "Russian of
ficialdom, without fail, insisted that the majority of the state's population (some two-thirds of the total) was 'Russian'" and behaved accordingly.23
The goal of the nationalities project would be to institutionalize and pre serve this essential "Russianness"; no one asked what would happen with
the next census.
If the army leadership saw its working assumptions and larger goals as justified, the commissions themselves were nevertheless faced with
serious obstacles in translating restrictions based upon the fairly clear
principle of religious confession into regulations founded upon the more abstract principle of nationality. Again, invaluable context is pro vided by Slocum; he makes several salient points regarding the evolution
of the meaning and use of the term inorodtsy in both formal administra
tive application as well as public parlance. First, the term evolved fitfully over time, flexibly serving the varying needs and exigencies of the state
and its officials. Moreover, he emphasizes that a term initially framed
with a view toward religious difference took on a more overtly linguistic and ethnic cast in the later years of the empire. Finally, he notes the
"slippage" of the application and content of terms designating those
non-Russian and/or non-Orthodox, both in public discourse and even
in administrative practice, as the years went on; there was increasing confusion over who exactly were inorodtsy, why they had been desig nated thus, and what that should connote in terms of political and social
participation in the empire.24 The evolution of the nationalities project bore witness to such broader
trends. In a memorandum prepared for War Minister Aleksandr Rediger in May 1906, the Main Staff declared the initial draft project created by
General Frolov's commission unsatisfactory. 25 The suggested restrictions
upon non-Russian nationalities were deemed excessively expansive and
harsh, the language of the various proposals was judged overly general and imprecise, and several key issues remained unresolved. In a larger and revealing point, the memorandum questioned directly whether such
a broad issue as the military service of various nationalities, concerning as
it did the entire populace of the empire, could be resolved by military leg islation alone. If so, however, the memorandum judged the Frolov draft a
starting point only; a thorough and detailed reworking of the nationalities
project was necessary, based in part upon the relevant experience and
policies of other European powers such as Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, and Great Britain.26 Lastly, the memorandum suggested that over
22. Slocum, "Who, and When, Were the Inorodtsy?" 186. The actual percentage of
Great Russians was 44 percent; Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, 11.
23. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia, 195.
24. Slocum, "Who, and When, Were the Inorodtsy?" 173-76.
25. Memorandum dated 12 May 1906, no. 83. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2501,11. 49-50.
26. Russian military agents abroad were to collect the requisite information.
Nationality Policy and the Russian Imperial Officer Corps, 1905-1914 689
sight of this work be given to a new commission charged with producing, not general proposals, but actual draft legislation.
The Dukmasov Commission thus undertook direction of the project late in 1906. Throughout its subsequent work, commission members con
tinually referenced the professed yet elusive goal of reconciling the na
tionalities project with the new realities of the post-October Manifesto or
der; failure to do so had been identified as the primary fault of the Frolov
draft. As the journals of their deliberations attest, however, they were be
set by the same difficulties.27 As a necessary first step to any comprehensive reforms, the commission first undertook a detailed review of the existing
religious regulations of 1888. It quickly discovered, however, that these
regulations were not a product of any coherent design or guiding princi
ples. Instead, like so much of tsarist legislation, they were largely the result
of administrative routine and bureaucratic inertia. In fact, the commission was forced to admit that the restrictions had originally not been drafted on
the basis of religion at all (with the exception of Muslims), but against the
threat of political separatism. Specifically, they had originally been applied to Polish Catholic officers, those persistent thorns in the imperial side, and
had only gradually been extended to other minority religions.28 General
Dukmasov went so far as to note that "only as a result of an editing error in
several headings" in the text of these regulations could they even be con
sidered restrictive measures according to religion. Nevertheless, commis
sion members voted overwhelmingly in favor of the necessity of retaining restrictions upon "nationalities and non-believers added to the empire by the labors and blood of the native Russian population."
29
In its quest to preserve what it termed the "national character" of the
army, however, not the least of the commission's difficulties was how to
define precisely what constituted nationality. A lack of specific criteria in
this regard was recognized as another major fault of the Frolov draft, yet even in the commission's own deliberations and reports the terms nat
sionaV nost'', narodnost', and plemia were variously used to denote nation
ality. A special "subcommittee on the national [plemennom] composition of the army and indications of nationality" was thus duly appointed to
study the matter in depth. As its formal report made clear, the subcom mittee's efforts met with mixed success, yet they provide a striking illus
tration of Slocum's charting of the elusive and changing criteria used to
distinguish Russian and non-Russian.30 The subcommittee first sought to
investigate the composition of the army by nationality, using data from the census of 1897, as well as actual rates of military service among various
groups, as a guide. In addition to collecting statistical information re
garding those nationalities subject to general conscription, it also pro vided a breakdown of the empire's population by native language and
27. The journals covered numerous meetings of the commission during the period December 1906-January 1907. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,11. 140-52.
28. For more on the vexing Polish question, see Robert Edelman, Gentry Politics on the
Eve of the Russian Revolution: The Nationalist Party, 1907-1917 (New Brunswick, 1980), and
Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia.
29. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,11. 140-41.
30. Ibid., 11. 64-68.
690 Slavic Review
identified those provinces with small Russian populations.31 This infor
mation was to aid the subcommittee in its more difficult task: to establish
criteria by which a subject's nationality could be determined.
The subcommittee's final numbers were clear and precise?an ideal
army of 82 percent Russians, 7 percent Poles, 3 percent each Lithuanians
and Turko-Tatars, 2 percent Germans, 1 percent each Armenians and
Finns?but its report emphasized that due to prevailing strategic, geo
graphic, economic, and logistical realities, such exact percentages would
be impossible to enforce at every level and unit of the army. Maintaining such percentages within the officer corps itself would be "incomparably easier," but even then the report recommended observing a general rule
of no fewer than 75 percent Russians per unit instead of "pedantic preci sion" in this regard.
The actual process of defining and distinguishing these various na
tionalities was even less precise. The subcommittee identified language,
religion, and native region as primary markers of nationality, although each indicator was recognized as problematic in and of itself. Even in the
case of the Russians, whose "spirit" was to imbue the officer community as
a whole, nationality was recognized to be both more and less than ethnic
ity. For example, the subcommittee suggested that Moldovans and "other
Slavs" be counted as Russians; certain Finnic peoples, Turko-Tatars of the
Volga region, and other groups who were "significantly Russified" should
also be considered Russian.32 The criteria for regarding an individual or his
family as "Russified" or otherwise assimilated were themselves imprecise? cited as proof was a century or more of dwelling in the central provinces,
long use of Russian in the home, schooling in Russian institutions, and so
on? but there was simply a recognition that certain groups were obviously "Russian," while others were just as obviously not. In effect, the subcom
mittee invoked an interpretation akin to the U.S. Supreme Court's defini
tion of pornography, concluding that they would simply know a Russian
when they saw one. Yet, as evidence of enduring attitudes, the subcommit
tee assumed that conversion to Orthodoxy meant Russification.
If efforts to define the dominant nationality were so problematic, other nationalities were often no less difficult to categorize, particularly in
light of the sheer diversity?in terms of geography, culture, religion, and
level of "civilization"?presented by the various imperial minorities. In
the end the subcommittee's report recommended language spoken at
home and long-term place of residence {rodina) as the primary markers
of national identity, yet suggested that other relevant factors and evi
dence, such as religion, be considered as well. In exceptional circum
stances, family name or, occasionally, external features (in the case of
Mongols, Jews, or Armenians) could also be used. The report recognized
31. The statistical findings were
subsequently codified as separate bulletins for refer
ence. Ibid., 11. 112-19.
32. Recent work has demonstrated that these officers may well have been unduly op timistic in their appraisals of their "assimilated" brethren. See again, for example, Brower
and Lazzerini, eds., Russia's Orient, and Paul W. Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission,
Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia's Volga-Kama Region, 1827-1905 (Ithaca,
2002).
Nationality Policy and the Russian Imperial Officer Corps, 1905-1914 691
that in practice the determination of an officer's nationality would pro ceed on a case by case basis, using documentation and personal evidence
provided by the officer in question. In cases of doubt the subcommittee
recommended that the issue be resolved by a committee, rather than by a
sole commander.33 When presented with these recommendations, the
larger commission was not entirely satisfied but, like the subcommittee, saw no way to improve greatly upon them.34
Even assuming that nationality could be determined successfully, the
commission found that more prosaic matters of implementation, includ
ing issues of staffing and oversight, raised a myriad of problems. For ex
ample, a recurring question was whether to codify the restrictions and nu
merical percentages into formal legislation or simply to enforce them
through informal control of appointments and promotions. The com
mission ultimately ruled in favor of codifying whatever policies were even
tually adopted, arguing that surreptitiously manipulating personnel poli cies would be both unfair and offensive to the dignity of serving officers
and would give rise to a host of difficulties in the future.35 Other such
questions were raised. What to do about the status of the allegedly perni cious Jews, an issue that indeed motivated and occupied much of the com
mission's deliberations? Was it sufficient to maintain quotas for the officer
corps as a whole, or should separate units also directly reflect the correct
nationality percentages? It was quickly recognized that such a staffing
policy would represent, in terms of administration and logistics, a bu
reaucratic nightmare. Even successful implementation would present un
welcome difficulties. For example, the earlier Main Staff memorandum
criticizing the Frolov draft had noted that with the shift from restrictions
based upon religion to those based upon nationality, a 20 percent com
plement of Catholic officers would be reduced to just 6 percent Poles, pos
sibly resulting in a marked shortage of officers.36
Finally, particularly sensitive was the question of whether additional
restrictions should be imposed for the highest command positions. In its
deliberations, the commission ultimately decided against formal restric
tions, although it explicitly reaffirmed a guiding principle of the 1888 reg ulations: "to maintain the true spirit of patriotism in the army, it would be
necessary for the higher ruling personnel not only to know the language, customs, ways, and way of life of the numerically dominant nationality
[plemeni], but for them to descend for the most part, if not exclusively, from that same nationality [and] be imbued with a realization of the need to introduce all other nationalities into the life and spirit of the dominant
nationality."37 In the end the Dukmasov Commission distilled all of these concerns
into a comprehensive draft project that incorporated several fundamen
tal proposals.38 For the empire's constituent nationalities, the principle of
33. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15., d. 2805,11. 67-68.
34. Ibid., 11. 150-51.
35. Ibid., 1. 144.
36. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2501,1. 49.
37. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,1. 150.
38. Ibid., 11. 90-112.
692 Slavic Review
proportional representation within the officer corps, based upon the per
centages enumerated above, would be established. More important, these restrictions were to be applied to all nationalities, both those previously unaffected by the religious restrictions (such as Lutherans) and those not
subject to general conscription, such as certain Muslim peoples in Central
Asia and the Caucasus. As a measure of extra caution, it was proposed that
national minorities be restricted from service in their own homelands and
surrounding provinces and that existing restrictions on their service in
"sensitive" areas?including the engineering and technical services, fortress units, teaching institutions, and the Cossack hosts?be extended.
Further, nationalities were grouped and graded according to their politi cal reliability, with the most unreliable, such as Poles and Armenians, sub
ject to extra restrictions during service. Language and place of familial
residence were to be the primary markers of national identity, as well as
religion when appropriate. Lastly, in recognition that even officers an
swered to a higher power than God, tsar, and country, Russian officers
married to Poles or Armenians and stationed in the homelands of these
nationalities were to be counted among these suspect groups.39
Regarding implementation, it was decided not to extend the restric
tions down to the level of students in the cadet corps, but to uphold them
for those seeking entry into the higher military academies. Stringent re
strictions would apply to the staffs of all educational and administrative in
stitutions. Nationality quotas would be applied down to the level of the
company as far as was practical, with the general proviso that Russian of
ficers represent no less than 75 percent of a unit's complement. Finally,
separate additional restrictions would be maintained for staff officers and
particularly for positions of command, starting at the company level. All
of these proposals were to respect the project's guiding imperative that "in
order to ensure the safety, unity, and security of the state the army should
be strictly national, that is Russian [russkoiu] "40
However, the commission's draft project received particularly harsh
criticism when forwarded to the Main Staff in early 1907. In a draft mem
orandum prepared for War Minister Rediger, the authors commented
acidly that the commission had essentially ignored the principles of the
October Manifesto and its fundamental guarantees of the rights of citi
zenship and religion. The memorandum also criticized specific proposals
regarding further restrictions upon inorodtsy officers and their appoint ments once in service, the extension of restrictions to the manifestly loyal Germans, and the inadequate criteria for defining nationality, which were
deemed "more than shaky." In a larger sense, the memorandum noted that
there were many non-Russians serving in high posts of responsibility who
were excellent officers, yet would now be subject to arbitrary restrictions.
Most damningly, the memorandum emphasized that the commission "had
39. In fact, worries regarding the personal virtue of Russian officers were directly linked to the perceived failings of Russian masculinity, specifically
an inability to deal with
feminine influence. See William C. Fuller Jr., The Foe Within: Fantasies of Treason and the End
of Imperial Russia (Ithaca, 2006). I thank an anonymous reviewer of this article for this
point. 40. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,1. 91. Emphasis in the original.
Nationality Policy and the Russian Imperial Officer Corps, 1905-1914 693
allowed itself to be guided by political considerations," particularly in its
harsh appraisals of the Finns and Armenians, and had forgotten that the
existing restrictions had only been imposed out of "extreme necessity" and
with "narrowly utilitarian goals."41 As such, the Main Staff concluded that
the nationalities project in its present form was unacceptable. It thus rec
ommended that the draft be forwarded to the various military district com
manders, as well as the heads of the various administrative institutions, for
comment and revision. A heavily redacted, somewhat softened version of
the memorandum was subsequently approved by War Minister Rediger.42 The replies given by these commanders, some of whom convened
their own commissions to study the issue in depth, provide some of the
most compelling reading in the record.43 Although almost all claimed
agreement with the overall goal of the project ("a truly Russian army") a
host of criticisms were raised.44 These criticisms both echoed and ampli fied concerns that the Dukmasov Commission itself had raised, as well as
the negative assessments provided by the Main Staff. In particular, the
commanders pointed to those same tensions between criteria of national
ity, expectations of loyalty, and models of duty that had bedeviled the
commission's work.
Regarding the fundamental motivations behind the project, at least
two commanders agreed with the Main Staff and questioned the wisdom
of instituting even stricter restrictions at a time when citizenship and free
dom of religion had only just been granted; they too wondered whether
such legislation was not a violation of the letter, and certainly the spirit, of
the new political order. The report of the Main Artillery Administration
noted pointedly that as equality of nationality, no less than freedom of re
ligion, "was a necessary element of civil liberty in general," it made little sense to substitute a new set of restrictions for the old.45
A number of commanders further remarked upon numerous poten tial difficulties in implementation, difficulties that were sure to result in cases of both individual injustice and harm to the army as a whole. Not
surprisingly, numerous respondents commented on the unsuitability of
the criteria and procedures for defining nationality; they were, as the
commission itself recognized, imprecise, subjective, and not appropriate for every case.46 Fearful of potential abuses, the staff of the Warsaw mili
tary district observed that "many officers absolutely Russian in spirit [po dukhu] are found in the army. Yet by formal definitions it would be nec
essary to number them among the non-Russians."47 The staff thus sug
41. Memorandum dated February 1907, no. 62. Ibid., 11. 165-67.
42. Memorandum dated 28 February 1907, no. 70. Ibid., 11. 171-73.
43. Such was the case with the Odessa, Priamur, and Caucasus military districts.
44. Report of the Vilensk military district, dated 29 May 1907, no. 1569. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,1. 207.
45. Report dated 21 June 1907, no. 17957. Ibid., 11. 258-62.
46. Such criticisms were included in the reports of the Priamur and Warsaw military districts, as well as those of the Main Military Medical Administration and the Main Ad
ministration of the Cossack Host.
47. Report dated 16June 1907, no. 1612. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,11. 230-32. In
contrast, the Vilensk military district agreed with the use of language as a
primary marker
of nationality, noting that to consider as non-Russian those officers with non-Russian
694 Slavic Review
gested instead that the regimental officers' societies be the ones to control
appointments to their unit, as was done in Germany, while commanders
would monitor the overall percentages of inorodtsy. Its report noted that
this would certainly be a more reliable mechanism to achieve the desired
goals: the officers' society "will more easily have an understanding of an
officer's nationality and way of thinking."48 In this regard the German of
ficer corps was often cited in admiration as a homogenous body that
maintained its strictly aristocratic Prussian ethos without any exclusionary laws whatsoever, both by successfully assimilating the middle classes to
this ethos and through the power of the officer societies.49 The implica tion, of course, was that the Russian officer corps lamentably possessed
no such organic, unifying ethos. It is noteworthy in this sense that little
mention was made of two alternative models of reference: the multina
tional Habsburg officer corps and the Young Turk movement in the Ot
toman army.50
Other commanders suggested that interviews with a potential officer's
friends, family, and future comrades would be able to provide a truer pic ture of that elusive identity of nationality. Several reports suggested that
regardless of the criteria used, an officer's nationality should be deter
mined once and for all upon entry into service, and his respective rights and restrictions made clear to him.51 This would preclude potential mis
understandings and indignities in the future course of his career.
In a related sense, echoing the criticism of the Main Staff, the reports noted that artificial restrictions imposed from above, particularly upon
long-serving and high-ranking officers, could do nothing but serve as in
sults to the personal honor and professional dignity of military servitors.
names, or even those who were non-Orthodox, who nevertheless spoke Russian and had
received a Russian education and upbringing, would be "extremely unjust" to those offi
cers and "harmful to the interests of the state." Ibid., 11. 207-9.
48. Ibid., 1. 230.
49. The staff of the Priamur military district also cited the example of Germany to ad
vocate the use of the officers' society in this way. Report dated 10 May 1907, no. 10224.
Ibid., 1. 210. For the German officer corps, see, for example, Gordon Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640-1945 (New York, 1964), and Stephen Clemente, For King and
Kaiser! The Making of the Prussian Army Officer, 1860-1914 (New York, 1992). 50. In the words of Istv?n De?k, the Habsburgs sought to reach "beyond nationalism"
and remove this potentially divisive element as far as possible from the structure and ethos
of the Habsburg military. See De?k, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the
Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848-1918 (New York, 1990). It has also been argued that the Habs
burgs succeeded in this endeavor only in a negative sense, cultivating
a loyalty to the person
of the emperor without any larger sense of duty to a Habsburg state, and also failing to meet
the demands of military modernization and efficiency. See Solomon Wank, "The Habsburg
Empire," in Barkey and von Hagen, eds., After Empire, 45-57. Weeks asserts more broadly
that the nationalities "problem" in the Russian empire never reached the political and cul
tural proportions necessary to mandate a Habsburg solution. Weeks, Nation and State in Late
Imperial Russia, 195. Moreover, Habsburg military failures, and their perceived roots in na
tionality policy, were a key factor in the tsarist army's categorical rejection of the Habsburg
officer corps as a model to be emulated. I thank Dominic Lieven for this point. Neverthe
less, both Habsburg and Ottoman policies offer suggestive alternatives to the tsarist army's own frustrating attempts to grapple with the dilemmas of ethnicity and nationality.
51. Report of the Odessa military district, dated 30 May 1907, no. 9948. RGVIA, f. 400,
op. 15, d. 2805,11. 216-22. The report of the Warsaw military district agreed.
Nationality Policy and the Russian Imperial Officer Corps, 1905-1914 695
Such restrictions might even spur political discontent, pushing heretofore
loyal, useful, and productive officers into the camp of political opposition or even separatism. This was indeed perhaps the most prevalent theme in
the various responses. The report of the Kiev military district, while ex
pressing agreement with the project's goals, nevertheless remarked that "it
is impossible to recognize [such] restrictions as just in those rare circum
stances when a completely worthy officer" of non-Orthodox faith would
be denied command of a company or some other post.52 The report thus
recommended maintaining nationality quotas for the army as a whole, but
not for separate units. Other reports adopted a more restrictive interpre tation. The Main Engineering Administration argued that as the primary function of the cadet corps was to provide a loyal and reliable cadre of fu
ture officers, the restrictions according to nationality should logically be
extended to cadets.53 Yet the commission itself had rejected such a step,
perceiving the cadet corps to be a powerful agent of socialization and ac
culturation into both the military ethos and the Russian spirit. Further, just about every commander raised an objection to the pro
posed restrictions on behalf of a nationality they considered solidly loyal and dependable, particularly those who would be subject to restrictions
for the first time. The problem was that few of these pleas for special con
sideration matched. Although some supported the outright exclusion of
the Armenians and Finns from the officer corps, others defended the
Finns, as well as the Latvians, as loyal and productive servitors until the re
cent unpleasantness of 1905.54 Not surprisingly, the status of the Baltic
Germans provoked some of the strongest disagreement in this regard. Several commanders argued that imposing restrictions on such a mani
festly loyal group ("true sons" of Russia, as one report put it), buttressed
by a proud tradition of military service, would constitute both a collective
insult and a measure extremely counterproductive to the interests of both
army and state.55 In contrast, the report of the Main Engineering Admin
istration argued that "despite possible references to their complete loy
alty, attested to by their age-old and devoted service," considerations of fairness and the principles of the legislation itself demanded that the Ger
mans be treated no differently than any other nationality.56 Predictably, the closest points of unanimity among the respondents involved a deep suspicion of Poles and a visceral hostility to Jews, which the Dukmasov
Commission itself shared; the only question was whether to maintain the most severe restrictions upon Jews or to exclude them from military ser
vice entirely, as suggested by the Moscow military district and others.57
52. Report dated 7 June 1907, no. 1383. Ibid., 1. 223.
53. Report dated 1 June 1907, no. 1108. Ibid., 11. 239-58. The reports of the Main Ad
ministration of the General Staff and the Caucasus military district also took this position. 54. For example, the reports of the Turkestan and Odessa military districts advocated
the exclusion of the Finns, while the Warsaw military district noted that many Finnish of
ficers had served honorably and with distinction.
55. Report of the Caucasus military district, dated 30 April 1907, no. 6305. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,11. 196-99.
56. Report dated 1 June 1907, no. 1108. Ibid., 11. 239-43.
57. Report dated 21 May 1907, no. 8358. Ibid., 11. 200-201.
696 Slavic Review
Other commanders questioned this correlation between nationality and loyal service in more pointed fashion, obliquely referring to the fail ures of Russian nation building among its own people. The report sub
mitted on behalf of the commander of the Guards Corps noted that, al
though he agreed in theory with the principle of preserving the unity of
the officer corps' composition "in both national [plemenno] and religious
respects," such a policy would only be successful if "the influx of native
[korennykh] Russians wishing to devote themselves to military service was
significantly greater than the demand." The report noted, however, that
in practice "the love of military service in some non-Russians is stronger than among the native Russian population."58 The baleful influence of an
allegedly pacifist, cosmopolitan elite society, hostile to martial values and
immune to the demands of imperial loyalty, was an all-too-common
lament among tsarist officers.
To buttress this point, the report emphasized that the restrictions on
the Baltic Germans were entirely unnecessary, citing their complete loyalty and impeccable tradition of service, particularly in several of the proud
Guards regiments. This example was used to pose a broader objection. Not
ing that many Baltic Germans remained Germans in name only, the report observed that "military service has always served as the best means for the
Russification [obruseniia] of non-Russians." While it lamented the existing "deficiencies in Russian patriotism," in pointed contrast to the level of na
tional awareness in Germany, the report concluded that such sweeping re
strictions, affecting all nationalities indiscriminately, were mandated nei
ther by the existing situation nor by the necessities of state security. Instead, the report proposed limiting restrictions to certain sensitive posts, and only for manifestly unreliable nationalities.59
Such attitudes were no doubt shaped by the particular atmosphere of
the Guards, that traditional bastion of the imperial service ethos. In fact, in recognition of this special status, the Frolov draft had initially planned to exempt the Guards entirely from the new restrictions. Not surprisingly, concerns regarding the assimilating role of military service figured even
more prominently in the reports of commanders on the frontiers, who were regularly confronted with issues of nationality and thus particularly sensitive to "imperial" concerns. These commanders pointed out with dis
may that the draft legislation proposed to extend restrictions even to
those nationalities not subject to the Universal Service Statute and argued that this would be counterproductive from both a military and an impe rial point of view. The report of the Caucasus military district, com
manded by General Illiarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, noted that the Geor
gians were distinguished by their love of military service and had provided
many brave and devoted officers, while a whole range of Caucasian Mus
lim peoples?Kabardians, Chechens, Tatars?also served willingly as
both excellent officers and soldiers.60 As the extension of universal service
58. Report dated 3 August 1907, no. 1892. Ibid., 11. 270-71.
59. Such concerns were echoed in other forums; see, for example, the article by a
"Russkii Nemets," "Inorodtsy v russkoi armii," Razvedchik, no. 1222 (1 April 1914): 215-17.
60. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,11. 196-99.
Nationality Policy and the Russian Imperial Officer Corps, 1905-1914 697
to such peoples was "only a matter of time," having their own native offi
cers to serve as living examples and symbols of the advantages of military service was thus invaluable.61 This would doubtless contribute to the uni
fication of the various Caucasian Muslim peoples "under the protection of Russian power [derzhavy], tying them to Russia and gradually preparing them for the transition" to general conscription. The report of the
Turkestan military district, commanded by General Nikolai Grodekov, raised similar concerns on behalf of the Turkmen.62 The Caucasus staff
thus concluded that extending the new restrictions would instead only lead to "verbal attacks upon the army and government" and "dissension
and discontent within the officer corps itself." This would hardly con
tribute to the "union [sliianiiu] and unification of the various nationali
ties" of the empire but would instead "further reinforce the hostile atti
tude of these nationalities towards us."63
Finally, all of the above reports emphasized in different ways the pow erful role of honor in defining the behavior and self-perception of tsarist
officers. Yet the proposed nationality restrictions illustrated how difficult
it was in practice to disentangle considerations of honor from those of
duty, function, and service.64 For example, in its report, the Main Admin
istration of the General Staff, alleged bastion of a rigidly professional and
meritocratic ethic, came out strongly in favor of the draft project, endors
ing the most severe restrictions upon minority nationalities.65 The pro
ject's architects, too, sought to justify the nationalities project, perhaps
torturously, on the grounds of professional imperatives, citing the army's fundamental mission of ensuring "the safety, unity, and security" of the
state.66 However, many of the commanders canvassed emphasized that
such seemingly arbitrary restrictions would be perceived very differently
by individual officers of the line.
These commanders thus spoke in different ways to the peculiar ten
sion between professional and what one could call "patrimonial" para
digms of service in the tsarist officer corps. In the former, an officer's sta
tus and identity were framed according to criteria of thorough training, functional specialization, and occupational performance; in the latter,
personal integrity, devotion to the sovereign, patronage connections, or
social status could all serve as integral components of self-identification.
Even the most professional armies never completely succeed in eliminat
ing the influence of such "subjective" factors ostensibly irrelevant to "ob
jective" standards, while William Fuller notes that professional and cor
61. As testimony to such hopes, see the memoir of Konstantin Khagondakov, a Kabar
dian officer from the Caucasus who served in the field during the Russo-Japanese War and
later attended the General Staff Academy; his account provides fascinating insights into
processes of imperial socialization and assimilation within the tsarist officer corps. The
Khagondakov collection is found in the Bakhmeteff Archive, Rare Manuscripts Division, of Columbia University.
62. Report dated 5 June 1907, no. 8192. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,1. 229.
63. Ibid., 1. 199.
64. For a larger discussion of these issues, see Fuller, Civil-Military Conflict, 3-46,
192-258, and Bushneil, "Tsarist Officer Corps, 1881-1914."
65. Report dated 29 May 1907, no. 3387. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,1. 215.
66. Ibid., 1.91.
698 Slavic Review
poratist conceptions of role and duty could indeed coexist in any one of
ficer. As the commanders' reports show, however, the conflict between these two paradigms was still especially raw within the Russian imperial
army.67 In sum, the above reports addressed from various perspectives the dif
ficulties inherent in regulating service and engineering loyalty according to rigid formulas and fixed quotas. They emphasized the contradictions
between collectively ascribed and individually assumed identities, be
tween public and private personas, between the influence of domestic up
bringing and the socializing milieu of military life, and between the rights of citizen and subject. The commanders in question realized that the de
mands of fairness and professionalism frequently clashed with those of
national purity, that the socializing milieu of the military might be more
powerful than the influence of birth and family, and that the institutional
interests and traditions of the army might override the regime's broader concerns regarding the new social and political order. As they empha sized, for the individual officer the relationship between duty, honor, and
loyalty resisted simplistic, or collectivist, definitions.
The Main Staff duly submitted a memorandum to the war minister in
July 1907 summarizing these responses. While the staff emphasized gen eral agreement on the project's core goals, it also noted the diverse opin ions and recommendations put forth, deeming many of them impossible to systematize.68 Pointing out that it had no power to revise the work of the
Dukmasov Commission, the staff thus suggested calling a special confer
ence to resolve the problem. A later memorandum to the war minister in
spring 1909, however, noted that the chief of the Main Staff had declined
to call this conference, preferring to leave the matter open pending fur
ther review.69 The project's more ambitious goals were thus temporarily abandoned. The issues involved were eventually recognized to be so diffi
cult and complex that the Dukmasov Commission's work was later trans
ferred to the Lukomskii Commission, whose mandate was to examine the
relationship among nationality, citizenship, and military service for
the army as a whole. Confronted with the same fundamental dilemmas, the
Lukomskiii Commission too was unable to reach any policy conclusions
before the outbreak of war fundamentally altered the entire landscape of
military decision making.70 In the meantime, the regulations of 1888 were to remain in effect, but
the documentary evidence suggests they were not consistently observed.
The army thus issued new temporary regulations in 1913 that explicitly re
verted to the exclusionary principle of religious faith. Once again, these
67. See again Fuller, Civil-Military Conflict. For example, in an age when stereotypes of national character retained broad currency and explanatory power, many Russian offi
cers reflexively rejected the typically pedantic German model of rigid dogma and inter
changeable automatons. See also Bruce W. Menning, Bayonets before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861-1914 (Bloomington, 1992), 200-21.
68. Memorandum dated July 1907, no. 287. RGVIA, f. 400, op. 15, d. 2805,11. 278-85.
69. Memorandum dated 18 April 1909, no. 92. Ibid., 11. 344-48.
70. For a detailed examination of the work of the Lukomskii Commission, see San
born, Drafting the Russian Nation, 25-29, 63-74.
Nationality Policy and the Russian Imperial Officer Corps, 1905-1914 699
regulations maintained general limits on non-Orthodox officers and spe cial restrictions upon various nationalities regarding service in technical
units and sensitive branches of the army. On the eve of war, nationality
policy within the imperial officer corps had come full circle.
Ironically, in the end a good many of the anxieties that underpinned the nationalities project may well have been unwarranted. Examining
Zaionchkovskii's statistical data on the ethnic and national composition of
the late imperial officer corps, Walter Pintner observes that 80-85 per cent of officers in 1903 identified themselves as Russian Orthodox (again,
religion, not nationality, was the basis of ascription), while other groups? Poles, Baltic Germans, Georgians?represented small minorities. His
conclusion: "it is quite clear that the Imperial Russian officer corps was a
Russian show."71 Nevertheless, the history of the nationalities project at
tests to the salience of a noted historian's assertion that the Russians will never solve any of their various "nationality questions" until they solve the
"Russian question" first. In other words, they must decide as a society and
culture whether they wish to be an equal member of a true multinational
polity, to rule as the dominant nationality in an imperial formation, or to
create a unitary
Russian nation-state.72
What he said of the post-Soviet era applies perhaps even more
strongly to late imperial Russia. Military reforms such as the Universal Ser
vice Statute and the nationalities project were part of a broader effort on
the part of leading statesmen and bureaucrats to answer this fundamental
question, by dealing with the challenges of cultural and separatist nation
alism, building a more coherent administrative and legal structure for the
empire, and responding to what they saw as the increasing assaults upon the political and cultural dominance of the Russian people. Yet, as a rule, such efforts only resulted in increased tensions between regime, society, and its component nationalities.73 Such tensions would only become mag nified in the cauldron of World War I.74
These tensions were perhaps most striking, and potentially most
threatening, within the officer community itself. It was here where reali ties most closely, if not perfectly, matched imperial ideology and rhetoric, in its promise of the equality of subjects, opportunities for advancement, and rewards for loyal servitors. As several officers quoted above noted,
military service had traditionally been a primary mechanism in the assim
71. Walter Pintner, "The Nobility and the Officer Corps in the Nineteenth Century," in Eric Lohr and Marshall Poe, eds., The Military and Society in Russia, 1450-1917(Boston,
2002), 250; Zaionchkovskii, Samoderzhavie i russkaia armiia, 96-99.
72. Roman Szporluk, "Dilemmas of Russian Nationalism," Problems of Communism 38, no. 4(1989): 15-35.
73. See again von Hagen, "The Russian Empire," 58-72.
74. See von Hagen, "The Russian Imperial Army and the Ukrainian National Move
ment in 1917," Ukrainian Quarterly 54, nos. 3-4 (1998): 220-56; Sanborn, Drafting the Rus
sian Nation, 74-82, 114-31; Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign
against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); Peter Gatrell, A Whole
Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington, 1999) ; Nick Baron and
Peter Gatrell, eds., Homelands: War, Population, and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia, 1918-1924 (London, 2004).
700 Slavic Review
ilation of various nationalities in the best and truest sense, transmitting an
ethos of loyalty, an awareness of imperial greatness, and that most cele
brated gift, Russian culture. Nevertheless, the army leadership's concerns
regarding the faithfulness and reliability of its own servitors were only in
creasing and intensifying after 1905. In addition, such concerns were
spreading within the officer community as a whole.
The efforts of the Frolov and Dukmasov commissions testified to this
ambivalence. Fear of minority nationalities and the separatist tendencies
they might bring was certainly a primary motivation in their work. Yet
these commissions also took as their fundamental premise the existence of a "Russian spirit" that, however elusive to define, was nevertheless a
powerful agent of imperial socialization; hence the effort to reconcile
these conflicting convictions by establishing quotas according to the prin
ciple of nationality. Yet these commissions unexpectedly discovered that
their fundamental assumptions regarding the equation of national iden
tity, patriotic loyalty, and military service were rife with tensions.
The commissions' efforts thus provide valuable insights into the rela
tionship between nationalism and military modernization, while also
complicating recent conclusions regarding tsarist nationality politics. As
Weeks and Slocum have argued, tsarist nationality "policy" was essentially
haphazard and reactive in its formulation; as Weeks and Rappeler have
emphasized, it was primarily conservative in its goals and design.75 In par ticular, Weeks argues that the Russian state and its servitors resisted any radical reformulations of patriotism and legitimacy. He concludes that
neither was ever forced "to reconsider their own national/state identity. To the end the Rossiiskaia Imperiia behaved as if it were simply russkaia,"
yet Russian in the prenationalist sense of an ancien r?gime, not in the sense of modern nationalism.76
Yet the deliberations of these commissions demonstrate that Russian
officers, the tsar's most loyal servants, were indeed actively examining and
debating their own "national/state identity." As Sanborn argues, for the
army leadership, nationality polices were at once conservative, regarding short-term application, but essentially transformative, in the sense of
long-term goals of assimilation and nation building. Yet, as he concludes, "the mixture between empire and nation pleased no one and antagonized
everyone," not least Russian nationalists themselves.77 So it was with the
nationalities project. While somewhat more heavy-handed than Miliutin's
policies, it nevertheless represented an attempt to achieve his vision of a
"national" and "imperial" army. Yet while committed to a "national" army, the commissions, and especially those evaluating their work, continually invoked traditional understandings and paradigms of "empire" and the
relationship between Russian and non-Russian peoples. As such, the pro
ject's ultimate failure testifies to the inherent challenges involved in rec
75. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia, 195-99; Slocum, "Who, and When,
Were the Inorodtsy V 173-75; Rappeler, Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History, 247-48,
347-48.
76. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia, 195.
77. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, 72.
Nationality Policy and the Russian Imperial Officer Corps, 1905-1914 701
onciling western-derived concepts of nation, state, and nationalism with
imperial political traditions and social realities. Acquiring and deploying advanced weaponry, for example, was, if not easy, then usually manage able. In contrast, effecting broader transformations within the autocratic
polity, society, and culture was far more problematic.
Lastly, the brief history of the nationalities project offers insights into
broader processes of modernization in late imperial Russia, as well as pan
European patterns of development. In recent years several historians have
sought to emphasize continuities instead of disjunctures between the
tsarist and Soviet periods, arguing that various Bolshevik policies of state
craft, including surveillance, deportation, and what von Hagen calls "the
mobilization of ethnicity," actually had their antecedents in tsarist prac tices.78 In turn, these practices, brought on by the common demands of
the Great War, closely paralleled the experience and policies of the other
warring European states. Sanborn argues that the roots of such practices must be located even farther back, in the prewar period itself.79
The efforts of the Frolov and Dukmasov commissions support this view
and suggest that concerns of nationality and nationalism affected the of
ficer corps itself more deeply than has previously been assumed. The im
plications were profound. The paradigm of service demanded by the
modern unitary nation-state, embodied in the citizen-soldier, was essen
tially antithetical to the "imperial" tradition of service, framed as it was
around concepts of subject and servitor. Notably, within a multiethnic
polity, efforts at categorization and classification were a necessary prereq uisite to actual state policies based upon nationality, be they policies of pro
motion, discrimination, deportation, or even annihilation.80 The trau
matic mobilizations of the Great War, the 1917 Revolution, and the civil war
certainly accelerated the elaboration and implementation of such policies. Yet the fact that the tsarist officer community had already turned the criti
cal lens of nationality upon itself could not bode well for the Russian army, at least in its imperial guise.
78. Mark von Hagen, "The Great War and the Mobilization of Ethnicity in the Russian
Empire," in Barnett R. Rubin and Jack Snyder, eds., Post-Soviet Political Order: Conflict and
State-Building (London, 1998), 34; Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia's
Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); and Lohr, Nationalizing the Rus
sian Empire. 79. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, 20-29, 63-74.
80. See Peter Holquist, 'To Count, to Extract, and to Exterminate: Population Statis
tics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia," in Suny and Martin, eds., A State of Nations, 111- 44.