Document created: 1 June 03
Air & Space Power Journal - Summer 2003

The Military History of Tsarist Russia edited by Frederick W. Kagan and Robin Higham. Palgrave Macmillan (http://www.palgrave-usa.com), 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010, 2002, 272 pages, $59.95 (hardcover).

This book, the first one-volume overall view in English of the development of Russia’s armed for-ces, consists of 13 monographs ranging from the rise of the Muscovite army of the 1400s to the collapse of the tsarist army in 1917. It is the companion to the editors’ follow-on volume The Military History of the Soviet Union, which covers the period 1918–91. The essays generally review successive periods of the army’s development. The collection, however, does include one piece on the tsarist navy, and several others mention significant naval developments. The editors are well qualified to produce this new-est addition to the existing works on Russian military history. Frederick Kagan, son of the eminent historian Donald Kagan, is an assistant professor at the US Military Academy at West Point and has authored several books on Russian military history as well as contemporary US defense policy and military readiness. Robin Higham, the co-editor, is professor of military history emeritus at Kansas State University and has served as the editor of the journals Military Affairs and Aerospace Historian. The authors of the essays are also well qualified in their own right.

The editors provide well-written introductory and summary essays. The former is a general over-view of Russian military history during this period. It presents the major factors- geographical vastness, ethnic diversity, natural resources, economic development, social development, and changing relationships with neighbors- that affected the development of Russia’s military forces and ensuing historical events. The authors of the subsequent essays then use these factors, to varying degrees, to discuss a particular period of development of the Russian military forces under the tsars (and tsarinas). Collectively, these essays are well written and very informative about Russia’s military history in the tsarist era, conveying especially well how political, social, and economic factors affected military development and the conduct of military operations. In the summary essay, the editors review these factors again in light of the preceding essays, noting the generally good conduct and fighting abilities of Russia’s army during the eighteenth century and its decline during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The authors of most of the essays provide areas for future historical research, especially now that Russian archives are more readily accessible to historians.

Throughout these essays, the reader finds two significant themes. First, the editors wish to dispel the view that the Russian army was historically incapable of winning wars, a view that developed from the decline of Russian military capability after 1854. They want the reader to understand clearly that the Russian army did win battles and wars in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries against the powers of those times, including Sweden, Turkey, and even Prussia and Napoleonic France. In doing so, Russia’s rulers obtained a vast and potentially rich empire, stretching from Eastern Europe to the Far East and from the Arctic to the Middle East and Central Asia. At the same time, the collected essays remind us that the attainment of this vast empire would also be a source of Russia’s relative military decline toward the end of the nineteenth century as it faced new, modernizing, and relatively more powerful enemies- Germany in the west and Japan in the east.

The second significant theme that permeates these essays is that a nation’s economic and social development has a significant effect on the development of its military power- armies and navies do not develop solely in the realm of politics. The Russian army scored great victories in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because its opponents were similarly armed and organized. The origins of the Russian military’s decline, as the essays point out, are found in its delayed social development (serfdom was not abolished until 1867, consequently depriving the army of an adequate source of recruits for a large, adequately trained reserve in the age of mass armies) and economic development. The latter had two aspects. First, inadequate economic development (movement toward capitalism and industrialization, as in the West) meant that Russian rulers after 1854 found themselves increasingly unable to afford military modernization (for example, equipping hundreds of thousands of soldiers with rifled breechloaders) and unable to produce modern weapons (Russia depended upon foreign arms when it went to war in August 1914). Therefore, as the latter essays point out, the Russian army after 1900 was inadequately trained and armed to face the more modern Japanese army in 1904–5 and the German army in 1914–17. However, the Russian army and some of its generals did do well against the Austro-Hungarian army in the early years of World War I.

As a whole, Kagan and Higham’s volume on tsarist military history stands as a well-written and easily read work on a very important topic. The emphasis on the social and economic factors that affected Russia’s military development is especially noteworthy. Judging from the discussion of the Soviet army found in the introductory and summary essays, as well as occasional references in some of the intervening essays, it appears that Kagan and Higham see similar influences in the creation and development of the Soviet army after 1917. Both the scholar and the general reader will find The Military History of Tsarist Russia good reading and good military history.

Lt Col Robert B. Kane, USAF
Maxwell AFB, Alabama

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.