Excerpts from: The Tsarist Officer Corps, 1881-1914: Customs, Duties, Inefficiency

By John Bushnell

 

Drinking

Almost without exception, the officers in the novel are given to bouts of solitary or collective drunkenness, and each has, in addition, his own personal vice. One cheats at cards, another despoils teenaged girls, others steal from their men or from company funds. All are bored to death (literally in some cases) of military service, but they lack the talent to earn an honest living and hold civilians in contempt. Only the fear of disgrace at the annual review rouses them from cynical indifference to their vocation: in the weeks preceding they beat their men (again literally) into a suitable parade-ground semblance of military efficiency. Apart from the review, only drink, cards, scandal, and violence punctuate the tedium of the officers’ lives

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Drunkenness was widespread and heavy drinking was the norm. There is literally no officer memoir, published or unpublished, that does not report either individual cases of drinking to incapacitation (with no negative consequences for the officer’s career) or a uniform pattern of heavy drinking. Almost invariably, the memoirs attribute heavy drinking to the peculiar environment of the units in which it was reported. Officers in Siberia were notorious drunks because there was nothing to do. Officers in Poland drank inordinately because units were based, for strategic purposes, far from major cities. Over the length and breadth of Russia’s provinces, officers drank because they were in boring provincial towns and outposts. Such special circumstances, then, were in reality the norm. The truly exceptional circumstance not conducive to drunkenness was, according to contemporary opinion, a posting in one of the few large, cosmopolitan cities: fathers in military families often instructed their sons to join regiments in big cities, where entertainment could be found outside the mess. But there was much drinking even in the big cities. Officers in the elite St. Petersburg guards regiments and the fashionable Moscow regiments staged regular all-night, regimental drunks and routinely drank to excess in restaurants.

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"You know, I've found that army men are the best and most educated people, at least in this town." - Masha, Act II

 

The evidence certainly does not indicate that most tsarist officers were habitually drunk, but it does show that drinking was a standard component of the officers’ daily routine. It is, therefore, not surprising that officers scarcely noticed the genuine alcoholics in their midst or that official efforts to combat alcoholism were ineffective.

 

Everywhere the officer who did not drink was considered odd, drinking to stupefaction was part of the initiation ritual for young officers newly posted to a regiment, and junior officers who drunk but moderately were likely to be reproved by their commanders. So strongly was officer inebriation that not to drink was, under certain conditions, taken as an act of political deviance. A monarchist officer recalled that during the turmoil of 1905 “revolutionary” officers ostentatiously shunned vodka, while monarchists “served conscientiously, drank conscientiously,” gambled, and otherwise comported themselves in a way befitting proper officers. Heavy drinking, then, was in no way considered incompatible with the proper performance of duties; it was a prescriptive norm and, if necessary, was learned.

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Other Vices

Theft, misappropriation, and graft were also acquired social norms. At the least, officers learned by example that they could get away with theft. Company commanders stole from their men either by not handing over pay (this was considered risky because it inevitably became public knowledge) or by helping themselves to the money that soldiers’ families sent to their sons to defray the costs of service. Everyone in charge of purchasing and supplies had an opportunity for misappropriation and graft, and a large proportion of officers profited in this way. The higher the rank and the more responsible the position, the easier it was to steal.

 

Unlike drinking, officer theft was formally deviant behavior, and it was not flaunted. Nevertheless, the available evidence indicates that it was much more than episodic. Theft had a venerable lineage in the tsarist army, and the tradition remained vital to the last for the good reason that it was functional. Officers were poorly paid, and married officers especially found their financial circumstances difficult. Theft, however, was the complement less of low pay than of the expenses necessary to maintain the proper officer lifestyle - regimental dinners, fine wines in the mess, flowers for the ladies of the regiment on all appropriate occasions, and so on. Drinking and gambling debts, which had somehow to be met, were not the least item in the officer budget. Guards officers, however, apparently did not avail themselves of the opportunity for petty theft and graft, since their obligatory social expenses were so great that only officers with an outside income of one hundred or more rubles per month gained admittance to guards regiments. (Command-rank grafters did include officers of guards background.) Although features of the regimental economy provided a suitable framework for and some training in officer theft, there was nothing in the economic, still less in the military, functions of the tsarist regiment that mandated theft of the personal sort under consideration here. Theft was bound up in the social behavior of the officer corps. 

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Social Endogeny

The social endogeny of the officer corps facilitated the transmission of such behavioral norms. Observers often noted the tendency of tsarist officers to spend their time exclusively in each other’s company (a tendency certainly not unique to the tsarist army). One’s fellow officers alone set the standards for appropriate behavior. Two-thirds of the officers were bachelors, which likewise contributed to the homogeneity of social mores (married officers might live a life apart from the mess; bachelors did not). Junior officers, whose socialization was crucial to the maintenance of custom, were especially likely to be single, because tsarist military regulations proscribed marriage before age twenty-eight. A crude caste mentality augmented the exclusivity stemming from social arrangements. Officers saw themselves as a breed apart from civilians, a view they acquired, if nowhere else, in the military schools. Wrote one officer of his newly commissioned brethren, “One not infrequently has occasion to observe how a young man, at even a faint hint that his words are disbelieved, exclaims in a flash of indignation, ‘You are being addressed by an officer!’ - in other words, if something is said by an officer, no one dare doubt its truth.” The sense of caste that was instilled in the military schools and sustained by corporate tradition involved more than cherishing the honor of the uniform.

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Role of Women​

The relative scarcity of wives helped perpetuate traditional officer mores, but it accentuated the importance of the few in circulation. General A. I. Denikin described the activities of “Mother commanders, the partners of the patriarchal commanders, who conjointly with their spouses appointed and dismissed, quarreling, making up, marrying, and baptizing the military families in their charge. Others reported that wives at time superseded the authority of their husbands, especially in blocking promotion of officers who neglected to court their daughters at regimental balls or who committed other, more serious indiscretions. Wives below command rank were the social focuses for coteries of bachelor officers, and in one regiment the wives held a formal lottery to allocate arriving officers. Such social groupings could undermine a regiment’s military functions, as in the case of a very junior, but recently arrived, officer who was appointed regimental adjutant because the choice of a more appropriate candidate would have impossibly antagonized one or the other of the matriarchal camps that divided regimental society. The strongest and perhaps strangest evidence of the key position of wives in the structure of officer society comes from accounts of the Russo-Japanese War. Command-rank wives reportedly accompanied their husbands to the front and rode about just behind the lines; other wives, attached to the medical service, joined their husbands at the line during lulls in the fighting and there commanded the same attention that they had in peacetime. The rules of politesse may have required deference to the ladies, but social ritual impinged directly upon military function.

 

Honor

Like deference to women, defense of honor was a major feature of the collective identity of the officer corps. An insult to the officer’s person, his regiment, the army as a whole, or the tsar required instantaneous response. General Dragomirov urged that “the slightest hint of an insult by deed [should elicit] immediate reflex retribution with arms.” The officer involved decided whether or not his honor had been impugned, but it was best not to take too narrow a view, since a regimental court of honor determined subsequently whether or not an officer had reacted properly and expelled any officer judged indecisive. As a consequence, officers murdered civilians who showed a lack of respect in restaurants or on the street; they set their soldiers upon insolent cabbies - the pretexts for taking revenge were infinite.

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The tsarist officer’s code of honor was rigid and the rules of his decorum refined, but they had - as should now be evident - a remarkably narrow range of application. As one officer observed, should a civilian be so much as discourteous even to a junker (an officer candidate), the insult would be immediately punished. An officer who was insufficiently decisive would without fail be compelled by a court of honor to challenge the civilian to a duel. Yet officer society tolerated embezzlers, grafters, and gigolos. In fact, an officer could do just about anything without risking expulsion, on the sole condition that he never besmirch the reputation of his unit by permitting his behavior to become known to civilians. Any officer seen drunk on the street, who became known in civilian society as a thief, or whose sexual escapades with socially prominent women became a public scandal would be asked to leave the regiment. What went on within the regiment was another matter.

 

Tsarist officers lived by firmly established rules that emphasized corporate honor but allowed considerable leeway for drunkenness and theft, to name only two of the officer corps’ most striking traits. The various social norms were interrelated - drunkenness and gambling with theft; theft with the costly attributes of politesse; politesse with the central role of wives and caste honor; caste honor with social endogeny; social endogeny with the maintenance of drinking customs; and so on. Thus mutually reinforced, the social patterns were deeply imbedded in officer society. None contributed to military efficiency, and some (theft and the role of women, in particular) manifestly subverted efficiency. The officers’ social mores, in other words, suggest that their lives did not revolve around their military mission.

 

Unity and Functionality

What stands out is the relative uniformity of social mores in the officer corps. This is an important point, because tsarist officers themselves ordinarily had little sense of unity: the divisions among them were multiple and deep. Despite all of the differences among them, tsarist officers - from the guards cavalry in St. Petersburg to the sappers in the Caucasus to the humblest infantry outpost in Siberia - shared a common pattern of social behavior. Viewed from without, officers were all of a type. The officers’ corporate behavior patterns provided a unity of which they themselves could scarcely conceive. 

 

One Commander described hiss Horse Grenadiers as resembling nothing so much as convivial, high-spirited, yet hard-working fraternity brothers. But within the space of three years, the regiment’s thirty-six officers were involved in a series of incidents that bely such a characterization. In one two-week period, three officers committed suicide - two for unknown reasons, one because of gambling debts that could not be covered. The epidemic of suicides left their Commander the only functioning officer in the squadron; the squadron commander, though still among the living, was awaiting transfer to a desk job and absented himself from his duties. Then two of the Horse Grenadiers’ well-loved officers fought a duel; both were soon compelled to quit the regiment. Finally, a lieutenant celebrating his twenty-first birthday murdered a soldier left temporarily in charge of the officers’ mess because the soldier refused to give him a bottle of champagne on credit; the lieutenant had already reached the two-hundred-ruble maximum of indebtedness to the mess. He was broken to the ranks.

 

Six of the thirty-six officers of the Horse Grenadiers - by Voronovich’s account a happy, industrious group in a crack regiment - fell by the wayside in three years. So a high rate of peacetime attrition is not a mark of social health, especially since that attrition was the result not of accident, biology, or performance ratings but of the social norms central to officer life. Attrition in the Horse Grenadiers in this brief span seems to have been higher than average, but not unusually so. Other memoirs tell much the same story.

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Memoirs, letters, and literature depict not just the social demoralization of officer life but also - an in equal measure - indifferent performance for military duties. The literature mentions, even more frequently than drinking, the incompetence of command personnel and the absence of a military tone among all the other officers. Contemporaries claimed that the vast majority were indifferent to even the most basic elements of tactics. Tactical gaming repeated the same problems from standard texts year after year, and “tactical discussions” in winter months ordinarily did not go beyond the study of regulations. Officers demanded as little of their men as they did of themselves. Training focused on the manual of arms and close-order drill. Training so unchallenging and so routinized could be, and was, entrusted to the sergeants-major; officers merely dropped in now and again to see how things were going.

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The routine of training and exercises was both pointless and monotonous, and it quite understandably bored the line officers to stupefaction. Observers frequently noted that there was no level of initiative at any level of command. Some traced tsarist officers’ lack of efficiency and initiative to uninspiring instruction at military schools, but most newly commissioned officers arrived in their units with a natural zeal to prove themselves. Once in the regiments, however, they immediately ran up against deeply rooted views and customs that have raised pro forma execution of duties, idleness, and sloth to a cult, while exertion and a serious attitude provoke scowls from the commander and irony from comrades. Young officers quickly mastered the art of inefficiency.

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Wider Perspective

One potentially serious objection to this analysis is that it describes a system with a built-in tendency toward equilibrium and that it therefore cannot account for or be reconciled with the historical evolution of the tsarist army. Certainly there were great improvements in the tsarist army, even in the second half of the nineteenth century - better administration, vastly improved weaponry, better officer education, even better performance of duties by officers. What has not changed was the degree of functional specialization in the army. If that of other continental armies, by the early twentieth century only tsarist regiments baked their own bread, procured their own meat, vegetables, and fodder, and used the soldiers’ earnings in the civilian economy to purchase food. Only in the tsarist army did infantry and cavalry make their own uniforms, use their own money to purchase blankets and bed linen, repair and furnish their own barracks, and build their own summer encampments. Consequently, in no other European army did line officers have even an approximation of the management and procurement duties that tsarist officers shouldered, and in no other army were colonels and the higher staffs so intimately involved in the details of supply. Less functional specialization is evident, too, in the failure of the Russian GSOs to perform duties customarily associated with a general staff. Certainly the tsarist army of 1914, or even 1904, was in all material respects superior to the army of 1855. These elements of modernity, however, were set in a premodern framework. The undoubted improvements that had been introduced did not alter the pattern of a tsarist officer’s duties or the criteria by which his efficiency was rated. The inefficiency of the tsarist army, and of its officer corps, inhered in the system rather than in the details.