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Евгений Юрьевич Сергеев

Forfatter af The Great Game, 1856-1907: Russo-British Relations in Central and East Asia

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[Published in "Kritika," January 2004]
The sixty years between the end of the Crimean War and the outbreak of World War One were persistently difficult for Russia's military leaders and elite. With barely a decade in which to get its economic and social house in order before the emergence of unified Prussia-Germany in 1871, the army's senior officers labored to modernize the country's industrial capacity and reshape the empire's strategy to accommodate the emerging European order. From the early 1860s, Russian general staff officers foresaw the implications of the new Prussian; 1870/71 lent credibility to military reformers' call for change. They pressed for an overhaul of society from top to bottom: the liberation of the peasants and formation of a national army based on universal military service. The Franco-Prussian War accelerated the technical evolution in military hardware (improving rifles and increasing the range and accuracy of artillery), which imposed new industrial and tactical imperatives to accompany the strategic and operational ones. The mind-numbing problems of mass mobilization and war-by-railroad timetables became the central concern of the general staff. These were the professional issues that concerned Russia's military elite, men responsible for the security of the Empire, as it entered the 20th Century. Evgenii Iur'evich Sergeev has produced a study of that elite's relationship with the west during the Empire's final years.
Whether Russia's political and military elite comprehended the state's security dilemma, and whether Russia's leaders responded effectively to Germany's strategic challenge, is a matter of increasing interest to historians. Soviet historians laid the groundwork in this field between the 1950s and 1970s. In the 1980s, significant studies of the social composition of the Russian general staff broadened this framework. However, not until the opening of Russian archives were the first thorough reassessments of imperial security policy possible. Foremost in that work were William C. Fuller Jr. and Bruce Menning, who analyzed and described the strategic framework of organizational and doctrinal reform of the tsar's armies. Recently, historians have again drawn attention to the political and social aspects of Russian military reform: Joshua Sanborn's ground-breaking study of conscription -- a subversive force during both the tsarist and early Bolshevik periods and almost equally untamable by each regime -- is now a starting point for discussion of the formation of Russian national consciousness, mass politics, and even the fate of governments. Sergeev new study joins this field. He has previously studied imperial Russia's military diplomats and attachés, British and German policy in East Asia (1897-1903), and other issues in late imperial Russia's security.
Sergeev has undertaken an interdisciplinary study of the process of formation of an image of the west by Russia's military elite. He describes the composition, social structure, and activity of the Russian military elite (ch. 1) and its mentalite (ch. 2), with reference to the training, organization, and social position of military elites in a half dozen western European countries and the United States. In a dense block of sociological and psychological analysis he argues for the existence and characteristics of the so-called military mind (voennyi sklad uma). This Russian 'military mind' fashioned a particular view of the outside world, in terms of geo-political, ethno-religious, and socio-economic factors (chapters 3, 4, an 5, respectively). He concludes that domestically determined views -- 'neoslavism' foremost -- guided the military elite's views toward the west and thus influenced the relationship between the military and such imperial interests as Russification and pursuit of an East Asian destiny. Sergeev draws relatively selectively on materials from the Russian State Military-Historical Archive, but wrings from those some remarkable gems (embedded in the plentiful and extensive quotes from his sources). He has also drawn on obscure publications and manuscript sources to broaden the narrative. A specialist audience will, however, regret the relative brevity with which the author treats most of the questions this book should have answered.
Russia's general staff (which Sergeev identifies as a core component of the military elite) emerged under Dmitrii Alekseevich Miliutin (war minister, 1861-1881) at just the time Prussia consolidated its own staff organization. The general staff was without doubt the most important tool of late-19th and 20th century warfare and Russia's shared many characteristics with its neighbor's. That one modernizing change gradually removed from the hands of traditional elites most control over war planning and arrogated it to military technicians. Unlike other military reforms, Russian military reformers completed this project successfully (to the rising concern of Moltke and his general staffers, who watched closely). Post-Crimean military reform came to a conclusion with the Russo-Japanese War, which ignited a new and final round of military reforms. Unlike the post-Crimean period of self-examination, however, there was neither a steadying hand at the top of the military hierarchy nor a unifying professional vision of the military's shortcomings after 1905. Thus, reform proceeded in fits, starts, and reversals until the very eve of the Great War. On this, the central occupation of the Russian military elite in the early 20th Century, Sergeev is silent, and contributes nothing to explaining the deep cleavages that divided reformers within his 'military elite'.
Russian officers who influenced military modernization each had a particular perspective on Russia's western neighbors. Nikolai Nikoleavich Obruchev, erstwhile revolutionary in the early 1860s and chief of the general staff from 1881 to 1898, fundamentally reshaped the Russian army between the 1860s and his death in retirement in 1904. His perspective was Francophile: his spouse was French, he maintained a chateau in the Dordogne, and was an intimate of the leaders of the French general staff throughout his professional life. Aleksei Nikoleavich Kuropatkin, Obruchev's protégé, a keen mobilization planner and subsequently war minister up to the Russo-Japanese War, cut his spurs with General Cherniaev on the Central Asian frontiers, and later entertained ambivalent interest in the potential of the Eurasian heartlands -- even while enforcing Obruchev's steady focus on Germany as the greatest threat. Other officers -- Przhevalskii, Skobel'ev, and numerous others -- inspired the educated public's fantasies for imperial greatness in the crudest forms (all distractions from the general staff orthodoxy of the German danger). And even within the general staff, the commitment to systematic and specialized intelligence collection encouraged particularlist interests; one was the Asiatic Desk (analogous to one operating in the foreign ministry). It operated not always in harmony with the staff's core planning imperatives. Apart from all the technical specialists of the general staff, the capital St. Petersburg was garrison to more than a dozen Guards regiments, the officers of which were representatives of a particular complex of dynastically oriented, traditionalist values that necessarily influenced wider elite society. All these actors were members of Russia's 'military elite'. Obruchev rates one mention in Sergeev's book, little is noted about Kuropatkin's relationship with Cherniaev or the Pan-Slavic interests in Russian society, and the war planners of the Asiatic Desk are simply absent -- although all demonstrably exerted tremendous influence on Russia's strategic course and the opinion of elite society in Russia. How is this oversight to be explained?
The first difficulty Sergeev avoids is the one of definitions. By including in his collective, the 'military elite', elements as diverse as professionally trained general staff mobilization planners, noblemen of the Guards cavalry regiments, and military adventurers on the Central Asian steppe frontiers, the author creates a population of opinions so diverse as to be virtually undifferentiatable from the views of other privileged Russians. For the category 'military elite' have any analytical value, it must be more tightly defined than this; no part of the military elite, and in any case, had such philosophical uniformity. (Sergeev is, however, on very solid ground in contesting the frequent assumption that general staff officers held views not necessarily amenable to Guards cavalrymen. On the contrary, a Guardsman could embrace the modernizing implications of the war planning process as readily as anyone.) Where Sergeev partially succeeds is in describing the views of the west of politically active publicists-in-uniform. Sergeev's sources are weighed heavily in favor of the views of men (including military attachés) who feared of Russia's enemies and allies (France and, after 1907, Britain) and instead found strategic solace in something akin to unilateralism, in company with the 'neoslavs'. Sergeev's foremost responsibility should have been to assess precisely the differentiations that cleaved the Russian officer corps, a challenging research task but one that he could have managed on the basis of the RGVIA materials. A proper prosopography of Russia's military elite must await another researcher.
A second weakness lies in Sergeev's chronological boundaries, 1900 to 1914, which are inadequate as analytical markers. While any framework is necessarily artificial, this particular range fails Sergeev for two reasons. It has relieved him of the need to deal some thorny antecedents, such as the near catastrophic breakdown of the Obruchev system, or Russia's (and the military elite's) highly ambivalent relationships with Germany (on balance, inadequately attended to). How, for instance, did an institutional unanimity (by the 1880s) on the German danger give way seemingly overnight to entertainment of Asiatic dreams? David Schimmelpenninck's study of Russia's military orientalists tackles this problem, but Sergeev has simply avoided it. Second, his chronological framework forces him to make unwarranted assertions about the period and about the significance of 1900 in particular. His final chapter on modernization, for instance, opens (217-218) with the assertion that the new century marked a caesura for Russia's elite as it faced fundamental economic and social change. Historians from Petr Alekseevich Zaionchkovskii to William C. Fuller have made the more compelling case for the significance of the 1860s and 1870s to disruption of Russia's military elite.
Sergeev has undertaken a most ambitious task with his 250 page interdisciplinary survey of the Weltanschauung (if you will) of Russia's military elite. A work of twice the length could barely have done justice to such a challenge. He has, however, unearthed materials that will prove valuable to specialists of Russian military history and the history of ideas. For that reason alone this book will have to be consulted by any historian who wishes to tackle the problem of elite differentiation in late Imperial Russia.
… (mere)
 
Markeret
davrich | Jan 18, 2008 |

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