Welcome to the deep dive. We are so glad you
are here with us today. I want you to start by
picturing a scale that, well, a scale that almost
defies human comprehension. Right. Imagine a
military force so unbelievably massive that over
the course of just a few years, specifically
during World War One, it managed to mobilize
15 million men. Which is, I mean. 15 million.
It is a staggering number to wrap your head around.
It really is. That is not just a large army.
That is the entire population of a medium -sized
country, you know. uprooted from their lives,
all marching into a single imperial banner across
this sprawling, multi -continental empire. Exactly.
When you hit a figure like 15 million, you aren't
just talking about battlefield tactics anymore.
You are talking about the complete mobilization
of a society's food, its transportation, its
economy, and its culture. And that is exactly
our mission today. We're going to unpack the
fascinating, chaotic, and highly dramatic history
of the Imperial Russian Army. We will be tracing
its entire lifespan from its formal founding
by Peter the Great in 1721 all the way to its
total catastrophic collapse during the 1917 revolution.
OK, let's unpack this. To set the baseline for
this deep dive, we really have to look at what
this army actually represented. This isn't just
a chronological list of generals and troop movements.
No, definitely not. What we are examining is
the story of how a massive empire tries and ultimately
fails to modernize a highly rigid, deeply unequal
society. And crucially, how it attempts to use
the military as its primary tool to force that
modernization upon its people. To really understand
how they got to that point, we actually had to
step back a little bit before Peter the Great
to look at the army's precursors. The Streltsy.
Yes, the Streltsy. Back then, the Russian Tsars
relied on these hereditary musketeers. They were
originally raised by Ivan the Terrible in the
16th century. And at first, they were a highly
effective fighting force. They were. But over
the decades, the role became hereditary. Fathers
passed their positions down to their sons, and
they essentially became this localized, entrenched
political class. They turned into a massive political
headache for the Tsars. The Streltsy became completely
unruly, highly undisciplined, and just incredibly
unreliable. Right. They functioned almost like
a Praetorian guard that could launch rebellions
or heavily influence who sat on the throne. If
Russia was going to compete on the rapidly evolving
European stage, relying on a localized hereditary
militia simply wasn't going to cut it. So Peter
the Great looked at these unruly musketeers and
realized he needed a complete overhaul. He wanted
a modern Western -style regular army. Which meant
a draft. A brutal draft. In December of 1699
he introduced this quota -based conscription
system. The government started drafting peasants
and townspeople based on the number of households
in a settlement and eventually they shifted to
drafting based on total population numbers. And
that draft fundamentally altered the social fabric
of the Russian countryside. I couldn't believe
it when I read the details of this. Yeah. If
you were a peasant who got tapped on the shoulder
in the 18th century, it was a lifetime sentence.
Literally life. You were in the army for life.
Wait, how did the local economy even function
if you're pulling all these able -bodied men
out of the workforce for their entire adult lives?
It was economically devastating for individual
villages. When a man was conscripted, he was
essentially considered dead to his community.
It wasn't until 1793 that they generously, and
I use that word loosely, reduced the term to
25 years. Which is still a lifetime for a peasant
back then. Exactly. But from the perspective
of the imperial government, that ruthless approach
to build a standing army yielded undeniable military
results on the global stage. They were willing
to sacrifice local agrarian productivity to build
an unstoppable military machine. Unstoppable
is the perfect word for it because by the late
1700s, this army had become a total European
juggernaut. Oh, absolutely. Just look at General
Alexander Suvorov. He led Russian forces from
the 1760s through the 1790s. The historical record
highlights him as one of the very few generals
in all of recorded history. who never lost a
single battle. Not one. He fought the Turks.
He fought the Poles. He campaigned in the Crimea,
the Caucasus, and marched his men all the way
into Italy and the Swiss Alps. He was the living
symbol of the rising dominance of this new military
structure. Dominance is fleeting, though, especially
in Europe during the turn of the 19th century.
The tactics that worked brilliantly for Suvorov
eventually ran headlong into the dawn of modern
warfare. So we enter the early 1800s. Despite
Suvorov's earlier successes, the Russian army
was still operating under an ancient regime mindset.
Very much so. Essentially, they were clinging
to the old medieval style feudal order. There
was no permanent military formation above the
regimental level. The senior officers were almost
entirely recruited from aristocratic circles
by birthright, not merit. And the common soldiers
were treated terribly. Regularly beaten and violently
punished just to instill discipline. So when
they finally clashed with the dynamic, fast -moving
forces of Napoleon and the French Empire. They
hit a brick wall. They did. The Russians and
their Austrian allies suffered a massive, crushing
defeat at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805. If
we connect this to the bigger picture, Austerlitz
forced a brutal reckoning. Napoleon wasn't fighting
like an 18th century aristocrat. He was moving
massive corps of men rapidly across the continent.
That threat culminated in 1812 when Napoleon
invaded Russia with a ground army of six hundred
and fifty thousand men. Six hundred and fifty
thousand. The logistics of simply feeding that
many horses and soldiers was a nightmare for
the French. And the Russian commander, Field
Marshal Kutuzov, knew exactly how to exploit
that vulnerability. Right, because Kutuzov knew
he couldn't beat Napoleon in a straight up traditional
European battle. So he didn't try. He traded
space for time. The famous scorched earth policy.
Yes. The details of this retreat are just apocalyptic.
Imagine being a Russian peasant and watching
your own army burn your lands, your crops, and
your villages as they retreated eastward. They
fought one incredibly bloody battle at Borodino,
but then Kudasov kept retreating, leaving the
road to Moscow wide open. And when the French
finally arrived in Moscow in September, expecting
a formal surrender and a warm place to spend
the winter, they found that the Russian governor
had ordered the city burnt to the ground. They
willingly destroy their own cultural heart just
to deny it to the enemy. It is a level of commitment
that completely broke Napoleon's strategic framework.
Emperor Alexander I absolute refused to capitulate.
Refused. So there Napoleon was sitting in the
smoldering ashes of Moscow realizing he had no
food. The brutal Russian winter was setting in
and he had no clear path to victory. And so began
the Great Retreat. The French army starved, they
frozen the snow, and they were constantly harassed
by Russian troops the entire way back. Out of
that initial 650 ,000 strong invasion force,
by the time they dragged themselves back across
the Niemen River in December, only 20 ,000 fit
soldiers remained. 20 ,000 from 650 ,000. The
sheer loss of human life in that campaign is
difficult to even fathom. It really is. What's
fascinating here is the stunning reversal of
fortune that followed. Kutuzov traded space for
time and the strategy worked so flawlessly that
by 1814 Russian troops weren't just defending
their own borders, they were marching all the
way across Europe and physically occupying Paris.
Wow. That victory established Russia not just
as a survivor, but as a premier continental power.
They essentially became the military backbone
of the Holy Alliance, which was a coalition of
conservative monarchs actively working to crush
any new revolutionary movements in Europe after
Napoleon's defeat. They were riding high, seeing
themselves as the saviors of Europe. But complacency
is dangerous. It always is. Following the Napoleonic
Wars, Emperor Nicholas of Hyde kept the army
incredibly large. By the 1850s, it numbered over
1 .1 million troops. But the main focus of this
massive army had completely devolved. They stopped
innovating. Exactly. Instead of tactical innovation,
they became obsessed with parades, uniforms,
and highly choreographed artificial war games
overseen by the emperor himself. They were polishing
their boots and perfecting their marching steps
while the rest of the world was industrializing
its warfare. They were still relying on a massive,
poorly supplied army of serfs, shaving 25 -year
terms. And the reality check for that stagnation
arrived in the form of the Crimean War in the
1850s. Russia suffered a humiliating defeat on
its own soil against a modern industrialized
coalition of British, French and Ottoman forces.
That defeat was the ultimate wake up call. It
ushered in an era of massive sweeping reforms.
Spearheaded by the Minister of War. Count Dmitri
Militin. Right. Following the emancipation of
the serfs in 1861, Militin looked at the military,
realized it was fundamentally broken, and tore
it down to the studs. He completely reorganized
the Ministry of War, overhauled the military
training system, and basically forged the Russian
army as it would look going into the 20th century.
His absolute masterpiece was the conscription
statute of 1874. It wasn't just a military tweak.
It was a complete societal paradigm shift. Here's
where it gets really interesting. Militan's 1874
law made military service compulsory for all
21 -year -old males in the empire. And when we
say all, we mean all, even the nobility. Which
is wild for that era. Imagine being a 21 -year
-old drafted from a poor village and suddenly
you're part of a system where an aristocrat might
also be drafted as an enlisted soldier if they
didn't actively choose to become an officer.
Plus, the term of service was massively slashed.
Instead of decades. Right. The active land army
term was reduced to just six years, followed
by nine years in the reserve. The strategic brilliance
of that move cannot be overstated. By utilizing
short -term conscripts, you are constantly cycling
young men through the military giving them modern
training and sending them back into civilian
life. creating a massive hidden pool of trained
reservists. Exactly. Reservists who could be
rapidly mobilized in wartime. It allowed the
empire to maintain a slightly smaller, much more
affordable standing army during peacetime without
sacrificing their overall military potential.
Milutin didn't stop at the enlisted ranks either.
He radically changed the officer corps. He opened
up new military training academies called junker
schools. Which were very different from the old
system. Night and day. Unlike the old elite cadet
corps that were basically reserved for the sons
of wealthy nobles, these junker schools were
open to educated commoners. It was literal social
mobility via the sword. In the 1860s, non -noble
officers made up just 4 % of the officer corps.
A 4 %? But by the 1890s, that number had jumped
to nearly 45%. And by 1912, just over half of
all the officers below the rank of captain were
commoners. That is a profound demographic shift
for a highly stratified society, but we also
have to look at the cultural reality on the ground.
Right, the regimental culture. For the individual
soldier, the regiment was the absolute center
of their universe. Joining a regiment meant entering
a family with its own deep traditions, guided
by the overriding motto, for faith, czar, and
fatherland. The main value instilled in these
men wasn't necessarily independent tactical brilliance.
It was absolute, unquestioning obedience to the
officers and the emperor. Even with that influx
of commoner officers, the old class divides were
still deeply entrenched in the daily life of
the army. Military regulations literally regarded
enlisted soldiers as second -class citizens.
They were expected by the noble -born officers
to accept terrible living conditions, poor food,
and harsh treatment without a single complaint.
But as the 19th century ended, the demographics
of the draft changed. You had newly literate,
urban, working -class conscripts entering the
ranks. no longer uneducated serfs, and they started
having much higher expectations for their basic
human rights and how they should be treated.
You can see the tension building. Oh, definitely.
You have a modernizing military machine colliding
with an archaic social structure, and that tension
becomes even more complex when we zoom out to
look at the sheer diversity of the Russian Empire.
The Imperial Russian Army was essentially a vast
tapestry of minorities, and the Ministry of War
had to constantly balance this. They instituted
policies to ensure that non -orthodox soldiers
made up no more than 30 % of any single regiment
purely to maintain cohesion and prevent localized
uprisings. Within that tapestry, some groups
carved out incredibly unique roles. Like the
Cossacks. Let's talk about the legendary Cossacks.
These were steppe cavalrymen who lived on the
frontiers of the empire. In exchange for their
military service, the Russian government gave
their communities, known as hosts, ownership
of their territories. They're a semi -regular
force. Right. They actually had to provide their
own horses, their own saddles, and their own
uniforms, but they were absolutely vital to the
military structure. By World War I, the Cossacks
made up two -thirds of the entire Russian army
cavalry, contributing over 500 ,000 men to the
war effort. Their role in the empire, however,
was incredibly complex. On one hand, the central
government frequently used Cossack regiments
as mounted police to violently crush civilian
protests and labor strikes. That gave them a
very dark, popular image as the Tsarist government's
enforcers. But on the other hand, many Cossacks
strongly resented being used this way. Right,
some of them actively opposed putting down protests
and desired more autonomy from the central government.
They were not just a monolith of blind loyalty
to the Tsar. The empire's diversity also brought
some truly amazing, almost surreal moments on
the battlefield. Think back to the 1812 war against
Napoleon. Generally, Muslim subjects in places
like Turkestan or Dagestan were exempt from the
mandatory draft. though many volunteered. But
during the French invasion, Muslim Bashkirs and
Buddhist Kalmyks fought in the Russian army.
And get this, the Bashkirs were fighting the
French Grande Armée, wielding bows and arrows.
It's incredible. Napoleon's light cavalry, armed
with modern firearms, was literally facing off
against mounted archers on the plains of Russia.
It is a fascinating clash of eras happening on
a single battlefield. And even though Muslim
populations were mostly exempt from peacetime
conscription later on, many still volunteered
for special units. Like the Savage Division.
Yes. During World War I, there was the famous
Caucasian Native Cavalry Division, often called
the Savage Division, which was primarily made
up of Muslim volunteers from the Caucasus region
and became renowned for their effectiveness.
The empire's treatment of its minorities also
had an incredibly dark side, particularly when
it came to the Jewish population. In 1827, Emperor
Nicholas I issued a conscription statute that
specifically targeted the massive Jewish population,
requiring them to serve those brutal 25 -year
terms. It's worth pausing here just to note that
as we look at these historical policies, the
atrocities committed, and the eventual revolutions
they sparked, we are strictly following the factual
historical record. Our goal isn't to take a political
stance on the past, but to impartially report
on the brutal realities these groups actually
faced and how those realities shaped the military.
Because the reality of that 1827 decree was deeply
horrifying. The explicitly stated goal of Nicholas
R .I. was forced assimilation. He wanted to strip
these individuals of their religion and culture
and mold them into loyal subjects. Because Jewish
families naturally tried to hide their sons to
escape this fate, the government employed specialized
kidnappers known as cappers. These cappers were
paid bounties to snatch Jewish children off the
streets to fill the military quotas. They frequently
ignored the legal minimum age of 12, kidnapping
boys as young as eight years old, pulling them
away from their families forever. and forcing
them into the military machine. By the time the
empire ultimately collapsed, roughly 1 .5 million
Jewish soldiers had been forced to serve under
this incredibly oppressive system. Which raises
an important question. What happens when you
build an army out of a populace that is deeply,
fundamentally unhappy with its government? The
cracks in the ice of this empire began to widen
significantly at the dawn of the 20th century.
Despite all of Milutin's reforms, the military
share of the state budget had been steadily falling
for decades. The cracks fully fractured in 1904
when the empire stumbled into the Russo -Japanese
War. It was a logistical and tactical disaster
from the word go. The mobilization process was
a complete mess. The first reservists they called
up were the older men who had minimal recent
training. Some of these older recruits had never
even held the new 1891 Mosin Nagant rifle they
were supposed to be taking into combat. And this
ties exactly back to the danger of arming an
unhappy populace. The mobilization for the Russo
-Japanese War brought older, urban, heavily politicized,
working class men right into the ranks of the
military. These men had been exposed to the labor
movements. And they spread revolutionary ideas
among the younger troops. Combine that political
unrest with a humiliating defeat by the Japanese
military and the result was explosive. Between
the autumn of 1905 and the summer of 1906, the
Russian army suffered over 400 separate mutinies.
The military was literally fracturing from the
inside. But the Tsarist government managed to
violently suppress the mutinies and barely hold
the structure together right up until the ultimate
breaking point. World War I. When war broke out
in 1914, Russia had the largest peacetime standing
army in Europe, sitting at about 1 .3 million
men. But upon mobilization, they tried to scale
that up to a staggering 4 .5 million troops almost
overnight. It was a logistical nightmare that
the Russian infrastructure simply could not handle.
They were sending millions of men to the front
lines, but they didn't have enough rifles to
arm them. They didn't have enough artillery shells
to support them. They didn't even have enough
food to feed them. You had situations where soldiers
were sent into the meat grinder of modern industrialized
warfare on the Eastern Front, essentially told
to wait for a comrade to fall just so they could
pick up a weapon. The casualties were astronomical.
And that brings us to the final collapse in 1917.
Amid the massive casualties, the severe food
shortages back home, and the Russian Revolution
breaking out in the streets of Petrograd, the
Imperial Russian Army finally dissolved. Though
what is remarkable is how long it actually held
on before breaking. Yes. Even after the February
Revolution and the formal abdication of Tsar
Nicholas II in March 1917, the majority of the
old army somehow remained intact. The soldiers
swore loyalty to the new provisional government,
and incredibly, they stayed on the front lines
against Germany and Austria -Hungary for several
more months. It wasn't until early 1918. that
the command structure completely disintegrated.
And when it finally broke, it shattered into
pieces that turned violently on each other. The
remnants of the Imperial Army went in wildly
different directions. For example, the Latvian
riflemen, who had been formed in 1915 and won
major bloody battles for the Tsar, overwhelmingly
joined the Bolshevik faction and became a highly
effective key part of the new Red Army. Meanwhile,
other former imperial officers and elite units
formed the core of the anti -Bolshevik White
Army, plunging the entire region into a devastating
multi -year civil war. So what does this all
mean for you listening right now? Why does the
rise and fall of this specific army matter in
the grand scheme of history? It matters because
the Imperial Russian Army was never just a tool
of war. It was a perfect magnified mirror of
the society that built it. It shows us that you
cannot compartmentalize modernization. The Russian
Empire tried to build a modern 20th century military
machine while aggressively maintaining a rigid
18th century autocratic social structure. They
wanted highly educated, capable soldiers who
could operate modern artillery and logistics,
but they still wanted to treat those same men
as subservient second -class subjects with no
political voice. When you try to modernize the
technology and tactics of a military without
modernizing the political and social rights of
the people serving in it, the machine eventually
breaks. The pressure simply has nowhere else
to go. It is a profound lesson in the limits
of brute force and autocracy. And as we wrap
up today's deep dive, I want to leave you with
one final deeply ironic thought to mull over.
We talked earlier about Dmitry Milutin's sweeping
reforms and how he desperately needed to expand
the officer corps to handle the massive new reserve
pools. To do this, he created a one -year volunteer
option. This allowed highly educated men to serve
a single year in the ranks and then quickly take
an exam to become reserve officers. It turns
out that a massive percentage of the men who
took advantage of this program were university
students. And in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, those universities were hotbeds of
highly radical anti -Sarist revolutionary views.
So consider the incredible irony here. In its
desperate systemic push to modernize and expand
its massive military machine, the Russian Empire
inadvertently provided formal, high -level military
command training to the exact same revolutionaries
who would eventually use those very skills to
help tear the entire empire down. Thank you for
joining us on this journey today. Keep questioning,
keep learning, and we'll see you on the next
Deep Dive.