imperialism, reform and strategy: russian military statistics, 1840-1880

Imperialism, Reform and Strategy: Russian Military Statistics, 1840-1880Author(s): David RichSource: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Oct., 1996), pp. 621-639Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4212235 .

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SEER, Vol. 74, No. 4, October I996

Imperialism, Reform and Strategy:

Russian Military Statistics,

I 840-I 880' DAVID RICH

A DECADE after the Crimean War, Nikolai Obruchev, the most influential strategic thinker in late imperial Russia, wrote: 'Russia, leaning on Asia, seems with respect to Europe the greatest of powers, invulnerable either from the rear or the flanks.' The empire was, however,

conveniently accessible from the west, where the Baltic and the Black Sea coastlines are open to hostile assault by fleets and amphibious landings [desenty], and in the center between Lolangen and the Troianov Banks, by any land army.

The western frontier strip from Finland, through the Baltic provinces, Poland, Volynia, the Crimea to the Caucasus, constituted in Obruchev's view a great, vulnerable zone for the empire, a tempting target for the only enemies he could imagine the Germanic powers. Convenient concatenation of all of Russia's security concerns into a single geographical zone, however, did not reassure this obscure but rising officer: those very borders were the least defensible of all, geographically, and the weakest areas politically. He continued:

The centre is formed by Tsarist Poland. It penetrates deepest of all into the body of Europe and contains the most inflammatory material of all [our western borders]. To inflict a mortal blow on Russia her enemies are presented every opportunity, foremost in Poland.2

Obruchev's study became part of the corpus of works that guided the Russian general staff's strategic views for a quarter century. The studies which made up that corpus, most of them by Obruchev, defined the empire's enemies in geographically specific terms, centred entirely on

David Rich is visiting Assistant Professor of Russian History at Georgetown University in Washington, DC

i The Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, in Washington, DC, supported this research and writing with a Long-Term Research Scholarship, I994-I995. My personal thanks to Al Rieber, Mike Smith, and two anonymous readers for their most useful comments.

2 Rossisskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv (hereafter RGVIA), F. 401, Op. 2-926

(I872), d. 19, 11. 300-OI: 'Concerning railroads essential to the military', i868, original emphasis.



622 DAVID RICH

Central Europe. Obruchev introduced this unambiguous evaluation into the management of Russian strategy and transmitted it to every 'General Staff' designated officer who passed through the Nicholas Academy of the Imperial General Staff.3

However, until Obruchev's ascent in I88I to the head of the staff, few restraints on those officers prevented them from fastening their attention on areas of no concern, strategically. Some of the officers whom Obruchev helped to train at the academy eventually embroiled the Russian Empire in activities that dissipated the army's resources and tested the patience of other great powers, even after German unification had galvanized Obruchev's strategic opinions. Those officers' initiatives brought Russian forces into the heart of Central Asia, an area the general staff never considered strategically vital to the realm's security. Paradoxically, it was the information first gathered by general staff officers that focused Obruchev's attention on Russia's untenable position in Central Europe and prepared the way for imperial penetration of the Amu and Syr Daria basins. In both theatres the general staff's work began with information gathering which had first assumed an earnest, scientific character in the i 840s, and occupied its members almost exclusively into the i 85os.

The I 86os were a decade of military reform and the revitalization of military statistics. However, for strategic planners the challenge that Russia's international position posed suggested that data collection per se served no military purpose: in the absence of a strategic context, statistical data was purposeless or, more accurately, a growing distrac- tion. The unification of Germany in I 870/71 provided Russia with its strategic focus and introduced to the army's information collection work an element of urgency. Birth of the Kaiserreich also transformed defense of the Transvistulean region (Privislianskii krai)4 into the general staff's most important responsibility. From I870 onward military statistical work diverged from 'civil' scientific research, each having its own goals and interests. Staff attitudes infused with positivism and scientism between the I 84os and I 86os guided the general staff through its development of new techniques (most notably, the process of modern mobilization planning) which kept the Russian empire a

I The term, 'general staff' is used here as convenient shorthand for the army's highest central strategic-planning bodies. The principal of those was the Main Staff (Glavnyi shtab), though all substantive strategic decisions were taken in the Military-Scientific Committee ( Voenno-uchenyi komitet VUK) under the Chief of Main Staff, until the I 88os. Although structurally and administratively Russia did not possess a 'general staff' in the more familiar German sense, it certainly did in terms of the authority and responsibility vested in the GlavShtab and VIJK.

4 This is the usual translation of the region's Russian designation. It is, however, also geogtaphically imprecise. More accurately, as viewed from St Petersburg, the area should be called the 'Cisvistulean region'.



IMPERIALISM, REFORM, AND STRATEGY 623

credible great power into the new century. Yet those same attitudes also underwrote activities that drained scarce resources in Asiatic adventures, even after the staff's institutional focus shifted decisively to the western border.

Two army organs, the military-scientific committee and the general staff academy, shared unequal control of the staff's information collection cycle. The committee served as the 'advanced scholarly- scientific section for military art and for the diffusion of military- scientific information into the forces.5 Although dominated in its early years by two technical specialties (artillery ballistics and military engineering) VUK acquired responsibility for all matters of potential interest to the army that involved research and the sciences. In Russia as in Prussia-Germany, the core of general staff work was military statistics, but in Russia it was a field, by I850, with decades of effort behind it, though little of quality to show. Military statistics was basic data accumulation military, economic, foreign, domestic. The government's near-universal ignorance of the realm confronted the general staff with limitless possible lines of inquiry.

Natural science, founded on observation (data collection) and analysis, had its corollary among the social sciences in the field of 'statistics'. Rather than a tool for measuring precision, a development that gradually emerged in German academic, engineering and scientific circles in the I 830s,6 the 'statistic' in the mid- i gth century comprised a branch of political science dealing with the collection, classification, and discussion of facts bearing on the condition of the state or community. In contrast to 'political arithmetic', which had a numerical character, statistics were primarily qualitative and descriptive. Most European writers (in particular the Germans) considered statistics both a science of the social life of man, and a method of investigation.7 Among those working in the field were the Germans von Mayr and Haushofer, the Frenchman Gabaglio, and later the Polish railroad developer, banker and statistician Jan Bloch (I. S. Bliukh). Bloch viewed statistics as an independent sociological science which he designated 'demographics', itself a fundamental component of Russian military statistical practice. This taxonomy underlined a perspective shared by these pioneers, of the role for state use of enumerative tools to account for its resources, both human and material. The tendency

5 PSZ, i,pp. 32, 2 24-97 I; established in I 8 I 2. 6 Kathryn M. Olesko, 'The Meaning of Precision: The Exact Sensibility in Early

Nineteenth-Century Germany', The Values of Precision, ed. M. Norton Wise, Princeton, I995.

7 M. V. Ptukha, Ocherki po istorii statistiki v SSSR, 2 vols, Moscow, 1959, ii, pp. 8, 30-3I; see also the entry in Encyclopedia Britannica, ioth edn, and discussion in Thomas Richards, The ImperialArchive. Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire, London, 1993, introduction.



624 DAVID RICH

towards application of probability to 'large numbers' statistics began in England later, with the work of Quetelet; the departments of government in London finally adopted large-number statistical analysis around the turn of the twentieth century.8 Although Russia after I 840 increasingly lagged behind Prussia and western Europe in military- related economic development, its general staff pioneered the main technology on which modern mobilization planning would eventually feed, information management, starting with collection. Lacking clearly articulated strategic ambitions, however, its activity in that sphere would wander for some decades, unfocused on specifically military needs.

In St Petersburg, military-statistical work had been driven since I 836 by Nicholas's decision to publish a Milita?y-Statistical Survey of the Gubernii and Oblasti of the Russian Empire, that would encompass all of the Empire's sixty-nine administrative areas.9 Nicholas ordered war minister Chernyshev to compose and then to update regularly the Survey, composed of a general statistical and geographic section and a part containing specialized data for war ministry use.'0 Before the Crimean War the Survey appeared in three editions exclusively for use by the war ministry, its directorates, and the general staff. The Survey's strength lay in the clarity with which it documented the vast range of conditions that pertained in European Russia; yet it remained too general to assist any military planner much, and information on non-European regions was practically useless.

For decades after its founding in i 832 the general staff academy, nursery of all military statistics, endured a studied neglect by the rest of the military establishment. Nicholas's jaundiced view of the general staff and academy's usefulness and loyalty cast a pall over service in the general staff corps. Increasing imperial disfavour starved the academy of resources and candidates. Until the outbreak of the Crimean War and then Nicholas's death the academy inducted and trained only a small fraction of the staff officers the army required:

8 Theodore M. .Porter, The Rise of Statistical 7Thinking, I820-I900, Princeton, I986, pp. 5-6. In the early nineteenth century, development of measures of precision, and in particular error theory (a precursor to mid-century statistical practice) had a powerful impact on geodesy, one of the Russian general staff's principal scientific interests, in view of that science's importance to ballistics. Also: s.v. 'Statistique', La Grande Encyclopedie, notes the distinct form (but not branch) of statistics called 'geographic statistics' which closely approximated the balance of Russian nineteenth-century practice.

9 Departament general'nogo shtaba, Voenno-statisticheskoe obozrenie gubernii i oblastei Rossiiskoi imperii, St Petersburg, I849. For the war ministry's decision to publish: RGVL, F. 401, Op. 5, d. 4I7, 1. 83: 'Preface to the Report on Military-Statistical Work', n.d (late i864/early i 865)+ 'O RG VIA, F. 401I, OP. 5, d. 41I7,11. 83 + ob.




Numbers of General Staff Academy Graduates, i 834- I 86011

Year cohorts Graduates

i834-i840 8

i84I-i845 74 I846-I850 75 i85i-i855 99 I856-I860 238

If the general staff academy was military statistics' nursery, its curriculum demonstrated a degree of sophistication and depth unrivalled in almost any other Russian institution of higher learning. This accounts for the unusually large number of radical young guards officers attracted to the academy in the i 840s and i 850s, just when it was suffering most under Nicholas's displeasure. Nikolai Obruchev, future Chief of Main Staff, was not least among these radicals: after participating in the creation of the first Land and Liberty (Zemlia i volia) group, as well as the Velikoruss circle, he refused orders to rejoin his division in suppression of the I863 Polish uprising. As a protege of Dmitrii Miliutin, his career rebounded despite thesefauxpas.'2

The breadth of the academy's curriculum explains its attraction. Young, well educated and privileged officers, no less than their civilian contemporaries, digested European romanticism, positivism, and eventually scientism, tendencies which the academic curriculum only reinforced: foreign and Russian languages, political and military history, strategy and tactics, fortifications, geography, military statistics

I N. P. Glinoetskii, Istoricheskii ocherk Nikolaevskoi akademii general'nogo shtaba, St Petersburg, I 882, 'Osoboe prilozhenie', 'List of Graduates'. 12 For provocative (though overdrawn) considerations of the Obruchev paradox see Adam

B. Ulam, In the Name of the People. Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionagy Russia, New York, I977, pp. 6i, 71-72, 9I-94; Bruce W. Menning, Bayonets before Bullets. The Imperial Russian Arny, i86i -I9I4, Bloomington, IN, pp. I7-I8; George F. Kennan, Fateful Alliance. France, Russia, and the Coming of the First World War, New York, I984, p. 14. E. Willis Brooks, 'The Improbable Connection: D. A. Miliutin and N. G. Chernyshevskii', Jahrbucherftir Geschichte Osteuropas, 37, I, I989, pp. 2I-43, offers the most balanced view of Obruchev. One sketch of Obruchev, of limited use on this question, is from archival material: A. Barbasov, 'Russkii voennyi deiatel' N. N. Obruchev', Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, I5, 8, I973, pp. I00-05. Mementos of Obruchev's life include: 'N. N. Obruchev', Russkaia starina, I0, October I908, pp. 55-62; A. Bil'derling, 'Nikolai Nikolaevich Obruchev', Voennyi sbornik, I9I I, I, pp. I-20. Kennan believed Obruchev's personnel papers were not extant, but see the intriguing note on this: 0. R. Airapetov, 'K sud'be arkhiva N. N. Obrucheva', Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, ser. 8, 'Istoriia', I993, 2, p. 8o. The biographical void may be filled by a dissertatsiia in preparation at Moscow State University by Oleg Rudol'fevich Airapetov. My thanks to Willis Brooks for the Vestnik citation.



626 DAVID RICH

and administration, and mathematics.'3 Courses in Arabic, Turkish, Farsi and Tatari supplemented compulsory study of German and French, and a separate division of Topography and Geodesy (with supplementary courses in physical geography) produced many of the empire's best trained cartographers, surveyors and geodesists, men with strong inclinations towards a positive view of the power of scientific and systematic use of knowledge. Civilian and military faculty arrived from the universities, and the most promising academy graduates returned to the Suvorovskii Prospekt institution for decades- long service as instructors and researchers.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that such officers comprised a minority of each academy class. Not every staff officer could benefit from a strong command of geodesic and geographical theory, or wished to apply their education to military statistical work. For instance, captain M. I. Dragomirov spent most of I858 and I859 travelling for study and research in western Europe, with tours to Algeria, Egypt and England, where he observed and wrote on topics of interest to the staff and academy. He did not remain concerned with military statistics upon his return to the capital. Instead, he received in I 86o an appointment to teach tactics at the academy and devoted himself to tactical theory; he returned to serve as director of the academy years later.'4 Academy education served virtually no practical purpose for a certain captain M. D. Skobelev, who graduated with the lowest grade in his class in geographic studies, and had no intention of making his name behind a desk. Skobelev's results are instructive, though probably unusual: he excelled in strategy, military history, Russian and foreign languages, and fortifications; he was at the bottom of his class in military statistics and artillery theory (ballistics), as well as geography. Why? Perhaps because his education before the academy had been at home, an unusual background for an academy student by the i86os.15 His later fame and glory rested not on intellect but on dash, blind fearlessness, and an arrogance fed by near-perpetual battlefield success. Reflection, patience, and self-discipline attributes more fitting of a general staff officer were not his.

The partnership between civil and military institutions of learning and scholarship was nowhere of greater practical importance than on

13 The Academy has been examined in the pre-revolutionary literature, and repeatedly in western studies over the last two decades (though, interestingly, Soviet historians added little). The works, inter alia, of Erickson (Edinburgh), Steinberg (Ohio State) and Van Dyke (Edinburgh) pertain.

14 RGVIA, F. 544, d. 469 (materials on his study abroad); Menning, Bayonets before Bullets, 38-39.

15 RGVIA, F. 544, d. 670: 'General examination list of officers of the Practical Course (second year)', contains an interesting tabulation of the grades of all i 868 graduates in each subject.




the farthest undefined frontiers of the empire, because only there could young general-staffers put their education and training to meaningful use. As geographers and cartographers, they accompanied scientific expeditions under the auspices of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society (IRGO) into Siberia and the Urals, the Tien Shan mountains, Mongolia, north-western China, Tibet, and along the Amu and Syr Daria systems into Central Asia. 16 And the organization of the society, founded in I845, was an attractive home for aspiring military statisticians. Each of the society's four divisions accommodated genshtabisty -cartographers, geodesists, statistical researchers -whose names pepper the pages of the society's 'Bulletin'. By I848, twelve of the approximately seventy-five new members inducted were of the general staff, and the head of the society's Russian geography section was Colonel A. P. Bolotov, a genshtabist.'7 When IRGO sponsored an expedition of exploration general-staff officers inevitably joined the party.

General-staff officers also carried out their work independently of the society, attending to the massive task of mapping the fifty guberniias of European Russia (work that remained incomplete into Alexander II's reign). Cartographers established the first small-scale trigonometric and hypsometric surveys of European Russia and the Caucasus, and general staff officers at the academy and on field staffs collected vast (if occasionally error-ridden and invariably unstandardized) amounts of information on population, agriculture, weather, transportation, and innumerable other topics that might interest St Petersburg. Although a theoretical methodology for this work would be codified at the Academy in the I840s, the practical aspect of data collection - the field work was haphazard and the material collected often remained unreliable and unverifiable. Until ministry organs in St Petersburg had concrete, practical ends against which to apply its data there could be little basis on which to introduce uniformity. Articulation of a theory of military statistical work, and then imposition of rigorous standards to the work two decades later, came largely from one officer, Dmitrii Miliutin.

In the early I840s Captain Miliutin joined the academy faculty as instructor in military statistics and geography. Miliutin's dissatisfaction with the state of his field by I845, when he assumed responsibility for

16 P. P. Semenov (Tian'-Shan'skii), Istoriia poluvekovoi deiatel'nosti imperatorskogo russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva I845-I895, 3 vols, St Petersburg, I 896, I: chs 3-5 (esp. pp. 26-40); Ptukha, Ocherki, II, pp. 27-28.

17 IRGO's sections were: i: Mathematical geography and cartography; ii: Physical geography; iII: Ethnography, anthropology and historical geography; and iv: Statistics and political geography. The place of the geographical sciences was particularly prominent, just as they were in general staff education and employment. Membership tabulation from Semenov, Istoraia, I, pp. 8-1 2; see also Ptukha, Ocherki, II, p. 27.



-628 DAVID RICH

all geography instruction, led him to develop (in fact, to invent) military statistics. He turned the field into a coherent discipline in his books, which became the standard texts in the Academy.18 He presented his new course as an amalgamation of the geographical sciences (cartography, geography, geodesy) with all other scientific and social- scientific information relevant to military affairs.'9 The longer he reflected, Miliutin wrote from retirement,

the more I became convinced that to create a special military 'science' from purely geographical matter was unthinkable [... .] From this I came to the conclusion that [geographically-based] strategic analyses [ ...] comprised only one of the many aspects of a general study of the military capacity of nations. Thus, only through comprehensive research [vsestoronnee issledovanie] could one establish the subject and goal of scientific teaching. In this sense it would be not military Geography, but a special offshoot of Statistics, which might be termed 'Military Statistics'.20

This military statistics programme might in the twentieth century be called military intelligence; it possessed both a numerical and a descriptive aspect and relied on every available means of collection. Miliutin broke the programme into three sections: statistical data concerning a state's material resources (finances, territory, national populations, state organization); analysis of the state's armed forces and of their military institutions; and information concerning territorial provisions of authority for defensive or offensive war.2'

Miliutin's First Experiences of Militagy Statistics was both an agenda for future general-staff development through training, and the theoretical basis for the staff's research methodology. The work's two volumes examined first the 'Political and Military Foundation of the North German Confederation' and second, 'Prussian Military Statistics'. Miliutin rejected historically predetermined social development as a basis for solving military problems. Instead, he insisted that the correct method (using social scientific research and statistics) had but one aim: to elucidate the process of social change itself. Knowledge could then

18 Kriticheskoe issledovanie znacheniia voennoi geografJi i voennoi statistiki, St Petersburg, I846, and Pervye opyty voennoi statistiki, 2 vols, St Petersburg, I847-48. Miliutin's contribution to the science of surveying is found in Rukovodstvo k s"emke planov s prilozheniem matematiki, St Petersburg, I831.

19 Ptukha, Ocherki, I, 204-05. In mid-I845 Miliutin became head of the third instructional department (III Vospitatel'noe otdelenie), a position which offered him greater freedom to revise the curriculum, and marked the point at which he began to shape the character of the Academy: RG VI4, F. 544, d. 275, concerns his I845 assignment.

20 P. A. Zaionchkovskii, 'D. A. Miliutin', in Dnevnik D. A. Miliutina, 4 vols, Zaionchkovskii, ed., Moscow, 1947-50, I, pp. II-12 (original emphasis). Brooks's work on Miliutin's Vospominanie materials (Manuscript Division, Russian State Library, Moscow) is crucial for the period between I84I and i856: E. Willis Brooks, 'D. A. Miliutin: Life and Activity', Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University, I970, I I 2-36; Ptukha, Ocherki, I, p. 234, credits Miliutin with creation of military statistics as a distinct sub-field of statistical science.

21 Zaionchkovskii, 'D. A. Miliutin', p. I4.




be used to guide one course of development or another.22 Miliutin transmitted not only the theory of statistical work, but also its essential positivistic underpinnings, to his students at the Academy for a decade. In I856, as a Major-General, he transferred to the Caucasus for duty as Prince Bariatinskii's chief of staff where he oversaw the pacification of the mountain peoples, even while he directed the comprehensive mapping of the viceregal territory two militarily inseparable objectives. Without knowledge, control was impossible. At the Academy two of his star pupils, Obruchev and Lieutenant-Colonel Aleksei Maksheev, succeeded him in the military statistics department. Their impact on the teaching of military statistics was to expand its range to incorporate the states adjoining the Russian empire. Widening the compass of military statistics had always been implicit in Miliutin's work; the second volume of his textbook on statistical theory glossed Prussia as its case study. Nevertheless, the individual experience of Miliutin's successors was of great importance to the impulse to study Russia's neighbours. And, despite the addition of a more pronounced military character to statistical research, the differentiation among purely scientific, broadly statistical, and narrowly intelligence goals in military-statistical work was erased or more accurately, remained unrecognized by general-staff officers. Among genshtabisty, perhaps no one embodied the complex interconnection among these three areas better than Aleksei Maksheev.

Maksheev graduated from the Academy in the mid-i84os. In I847 he joined one of the first scientific expeditions under IRGO auspices, to chart the northern Caspian area, the Aral Sea coastline, and the lower-middle reaches of the Syr Daria.23 He conducted leisurely survey work for fourteen months. Some of his compilations entered the archive of IRGO; the parts of his study of military character went to the VUK archive and the general-staff Academy's library where they were used in planning work and pedagogical exercises. The broader scientific aspects, however, did not reach a wider public for another half century, until three years after his death.24 Upon his return to St Petersburg Maksheev joined the faculty at the Academy, where he taught applied military statistics. In the Academy he supported the introduction of new courses in Arabic, Farsi, Turkish and Tatari, and promoted the establishment of a cash prize (i ooor, an extraordinary sum) for the

22 Carl Van Dyke, Russian Imperial Militagy Doctrine and Education, i832-I9I4, New York, 1990, p. 2 I, described this philosophy and Miliutin's 'scientific positivism'. 23 Semenov, Istornia, I, pp. 27-3I; L. S. Berg, Istoriia russkikh geograficheskikh otk?ytii, Moscow,

I962, pp. 144-52. The poet Taras Shevchenko, better known for his Ukrainian nationalism and exile, also joined the crew to make sketches of the Aral Sea coastline. On this odd partnership see A. Lur'e, 'Taras Shevchenko i Aleksei Butakov', Krasnyiflot, I 946, p. 57.

24 A. I. Maksheev, Puteshestvie po Airgizskim stepiam i Turkestanskomu kraiu, St Petersburg, I 896.



630 DAVID RICH

graduating officer who produced the best Persian manuscript. Most of the new kafedgy began instruction during the Crimean War.25 After the war he also travelled in the west to attend courses in Berlin, at the College de France (Sorbonne) and the Conservatiore des arts et metiers in Paris.26 The Academy thus trained prospective general-staff officers not only in the theory of statistical analysis and compilation, and gave them exotic linguistic skills to do fieldwork abroad, but also acculturated them with an attitude of inquisitiveness toward surrounding areas (especially if relatively unknown and uncharted). The trans-frontier zone, westward or southward, was to be known first and foremost.

Other departments of Russian government began consolidation of information management (that is, general statistical activities) around i 86o, long after the war ministry. The Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) gradually became a centre of statistical activity as a result of its involvement in the Great Reforms, and emancipation in particular. MVD created a Central Statistical Committee in I858, in conjunction with that work. The ministry's statistical activities, under N. A. Miliutin (the future war minister's brother), came under a new Statistical Council; general non-agricultural statistical work fell under the statistics section, headed after I86o by IRGO leader and geographer P. P. Semenov-Tian'-Shan'skii. In I86o Semenov's section absorbed the superior statistical committee and he became director of the state's Central Statistics Council, composed of academicians and representatives of other ministries and departments. In his capacity as MVD's lead statistician Semenov was an energetic force behind statistical enumeration of the empire. He became director of the state Central Statistical Committee in I864, and advocated a statistical survey of Russia's population (its first census, I897), possibly his greatest achievement. Government statistical work after I864, however, resisted further consolidation owing to bureaucratic recalcitrance and, more importantly, increasing statistical specialization. The council remained largely powerless to co-ordinate and promote standardized methods of collection and analysis

25 RGVJA, F. 544, d. 321 for memoranda between the war ministry chancellery, Department of the General Staff, and director of the Academy on the proposals to establish language training and hire permanent instructors, I849; d. 377, for initial activities of new language kafediy, mid- i 8sos.

26 Maksheev found particularly interesting the courses on Administration de statistiques industielles, and read extensively in French statistical theory. To observe its application he also visited French Algiers and Egypt in I 858. He brought his observations together in an essay, '0 voennoi statistike v Rossii', which appeared in the pages of the Vestnik of IRGO in I859. RGVIA, F. 544, Op. i, d. 469, for Maksheev's and Dragomirov's reports from Paris, London, and elsewhere.



IMPERIALISM, REFORM, AND STRATEGY 63I

throughout the government.27 In terms of both data and methodology the war ministry led the government in the drive to enumerate the Russian empire, but also defined its own goals in the collection and management of information.

The Russian general staff could hardly be blamed for incom- prehension of the Empire's position in Europe after the Crimean War; no European statesman quite appreciated the extent of inversion of international relationships imposed by the I856 Treaty of Paris, or anticipated the complications those would arouse before i 870-7I. A new tsar, Alexander II, was determined to salvage the realm, and introduced caution into Russia's international posture by avoidance of commitments that would stress the unreformed state's taut resources and creaky mechanisms. He abandoned Nicholas I's policy towards Turkey: Russia would no longer strive to be the state which the Ottoman government most feared. Until almost the end of the century, Russian foreign policy (though not always the actions of its servants) abjured unilateral change at the Straits. Alexander also scorned his father's vigorous hostility toward nationalist revolution abroad, a shift that contributed to the great trauma of his reign, the I863 Polish uprising. Nevertheless, caution in foreign policy provided the war ministry with two decades of relative calm during which it remade itself.

According to Obruchev, the entire course of military reform between I856 and I868 served two objectives: economization and statistical reform. Obruchev wrote that the war minister addressed the problem of military economy and expense by massive force reductions, and by the redeployment of forces out of the Polish salient (which exposed Russia's strategic weakness in the western borderlands). The widespread reorganization of the central military administrative and planning organs was, therefore, for the purpose not of economy, but for the reform of the military-statistical apparatus.28 General-Adjutant Sukhozanet, war minister at the beginning of Alexander II's reign, acted in I857 on a proposal of the quartermaster-general, General- Adjutant Baron Lieven, to make all data collected by general-staff officers available to the rest of government (and even society), in view

27 Daniel Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform: The Ministgy of Internal Afairs in Imperial Russia I802-I88I, Cambridge, MA, I98I, PP. 38-40. Despite its promising start MVD did not then adopt workable deloproizvodstvo (work management process) for routine information management, even by the mid- i 86os. This constrained effective use of its data.

28 In the 'Basic Memorandum' (Osnovnaia zapiska, January I880) - possibly the most influential strategic document in late-Imperial Russian history Obruchev wrote:

After the Crimean War the government, wishing to relieve national burdens, took up a system of more equally distributing the army on the state's territory and, spreading the billeting of forces toward the east, displaced [the army] not only to the Volga, but units were placed even beyond the Volga onto the banks of the Kama River. (Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossii [hereafter AVPR], F. I 38, op. 467, ed. khr. 76- I 883,11. 7).



632 DAVID RICH

of its 'practical use' to Russia.29 VUK published its general statistics for the public under the title The Statistical Description, and the department's 'restricted use' edition as T7he Militagy Survey of Statistics, both guided by Lieven and Major A. I. Lavrent'ev.30 Lieven, who was also professor of military statistics at the Academy, drafted a new regulation to govern this statistical work (I857), and Lavrent'ev compiled and taught a new course on military surveys at the Academy, based on Miliutin's theory of military surveying and statistics. That same year military-statistical survey work resumed in two-thirds of Russia's guberniias and oblasts; all the work, when published, was 'open to examination (glasnost') and the verdict of scholarly criticism',3' presumably in the hope of rendering the work both more useful and of higher quality. By early i 86o general staff officers had produced fourteen Statistical Descriptions (with another ten in advanced preparation) and five Militagy Surveys.

The war ministry passed under the stewardship of Miliutin in i 86 i. Although most of Russia's military leadership and officer corps laid blame for the Crimean defeat elsewhere, Miliutin, Obruchev, Maksheev, and a rising group of younger officers from the general staff academy saw the rot close at hand. When the army's administration searched for hard data with which to analyse Russia's failure they found only fragmentary information to help them, and the tradition- bound opinions of many observers offered reformers nothing. The war ministry, though ahead of other ministries, lacked some basic, reliable information on the object of its responsibility. The million-strong army remained incomprehensible to St Petersburg.32 It had not taken a disastrous war to illuminate this ignorance for those who were already concerned about the army's condition. Military reform in general, and

29 RGVIA, F. 40 I, Op. 5, d. 417, 11. 83-86: Appendix to 'Report of GUGSh, III Otdelenie, 24 August I 864'. This was one of the first explicit declarations that military statistics would not serve primarily military ends, but state ends.

30 On the Statisticheskoe opisanie and Voennoe obozrenie, see: RGVLA, F. 40I, Op. 5, d. 4I7, 11. 3 + ob: 'On the execution of military-statistical work of the General Staff up to the present time', 20 December I863, signed by Lt.-Gen Prince N. S. Golitsyn, head of the central statistical office of the war ministry. Lavrent'ev joined the military-scientific committee in the mid-i86os and also succeeded Chernyshevskii as editor of Voennyi sbornik (as well as Russkii invalid), Miliutin's main organs for reformist thinking. 31 RGVL4, F. 40I, op. 5, d- 417,11- 4ob-5- 32 Similar conditions pertained throughout the Russian government, and use of statistics

to correct the problem occurred in other ministries only gradually. Few other sections of the government had yet awoken to the pressing need to gather and maintain statistical information on their areas of responsibility. The finance ministry began systematic work on statistical matters only a decade later, and the great Zemstvo statistical projects got underway only in the i 88os. See A. Stanziani, 'Statisticiens, zemstva et Etat dans la Russie des annees i88o', Cahiers du Monde Russe et Sovietique, 32, October-December I99I, pp. 445-68; I. V. Kozlov, Petr Petrovich Semenov-Tian'-Shan'skii, Moscow, I983, pp. 43-44. After the general staff, the departments that developed the most intense engagement with systematic data- collection were those involved in railroad development the Ministry of Communications (MPS) and the finance ministry.




statistical work especially, had been the responsibility of the military- scientific committee for decades, but being a component of the general staff it too had operated under the cloud of Nicholas's suspicion, circumstances that constrained its jurisdiction.

Under Miliutin's regime, military statistics made an immediate impact in the organizational reform of the war ministry. The new minister enlisted statistically trained staff officers to compile data with which he demolished traditionalist opponents of reorganization. Lofty institutional politics and problems per se, however, were not the concern of most young general staff officers. The colonels and lieutenant- colonels, most of them in their early- to mid-thirties, carried on with their staff work with little concern for the high political tensions at Miliutin's level.33 Their principal peacetime occupation was military statistics, and the army's genshtabisty had returned to it immediately following the Crimean War. In I 856 a group of military topographers and geodesists joined Semenov's first expedition across the border into China and the Tien Shan mountains, charting areas never before seen by western men; General N. N. Murav'ev (another IRGO member) led the first scientific (and military) expedition down the Amur River.34

Nevertheless, Miliutin's faith in the power of his information ensured continuing specialization of military statistics and its divergence from other areas of general knowledge after Crimea. Miliutin's first organizational initiative was to form a personal advisory group around thirty-two year old Obruchev (professor of military statistics at the Academy and just returned from eighteen months of study and underground radical activity in France and with Ogarev's circle in London). Obruchev's later fame lay in his rise to leadership of the Main Staff (i88i) and initiation of the French 'project' in the early I89os; his early activities also demonstrated his important part in military reform. With Obruchev's counsel, in I863 Miliutin directed VUK to give 'a more rational and systematic direction to the military-scientific activity of the general staff in connection with statistics, military history and topography'. It directed 'the learned (uchenyi) activity of [officers of ] the General Staff and Corps of Topographers within all branches, staffs and specialties'.35 The committee was nominally under the Chief of

33 Contemporary memoirs of junior genshtabisty offer no insight into reorganization; the articles appearing in Voennyi sbornik generally illuminated only the outcome - not the course of the reforms.

34 W. Bruce Lincoln, Petr Petrovich Semenov-Tian-Shanskii, Newtonville, I980, pp. 26-32; J. N. L. Baker, A History of Geographical Discovegy and Exploration, New York, I 967, pp. 234-39. In fact, exploration continued uninterrupted under IRGO auspices from the society's establishment through the Crimean War.

35 More precisely, Miliutin reestablished VUK as the 'Consultative Committee' (Soveshcha- tel'nyi komitet) from I 862 to I 867 to control closely the organizational reform; it reverted to its earlier title and broader functions when it finished work on organizational reconfiguration.

20



634 DAVID RICH

Main Staff, Geiden (an early IRGO member) and all of its members were general officers. However, Obruchev, first as the committee's Head of Chancellery and then Executive Secretary, guided the agenda, as Miliutin probably intended from the start.36

In the early I 86os the general staff began to re-evaluate its ways and means in all aspects of information management. VUK and Obruchev not only assisted Miliutin in the preparation of his reforms but set a new agenda for basic information-gathering. The relationship between the goals of reform and information-gathering (as between military operations and cartographic surveying) was more than casual. From the very beginning of Miliutin's tenure VUK focused on internal obstacles to reform, pre-eminent among which was the dearth of useful (and sometimes, any) data about the Russian army and the state's resources, not to mention on Russia's neighbours. And with rare exception, when Miliutin faced conservative opposition to his reform agenda (as he did continually into the I 87os), he attacked his opponents with better statistics than they had. The specialized information collected for Miliutin in the early i 86os was distinct in quality from the general data available to the ministry. In I 863, Prince Golitsyn described every war ministry statistical project finished between i826 and the Crimean war as 'unsatisfactory, incomplete, incorrect' in a word, useless.37 Disappointment with that work stretched to the heart of the organism: 'raw, fragmentary and unsatisfactory' is how Maksheev characterized the preceding twenty-seven years of work on military statistics.38 The basic data even about the army itself, gathered during that period, had been 'neither researched nor even formally analysed' yet. The problem, Maksheev wrote, lay in the management and organization of the entire effort. Although Golitsyn thought it logical that all statistical work should be performed within a single general- staff department, he observed that in fact almost everyone had some hand in gathering whatever data they thought fit.

Golitsyn wrote to Miliutin: Everything begins in the General Staff Academy; however, a general military statistical education should be supplemented by study of the theory and sources of military statistics. The essential step of criticism and scholarly appraisal of quality must not be supplanted by reproach. At the same time,

36 Stoletie voennogo ministerstva, I, PP. 453-54; [RGVIA], Putevoditel', Moscow, I979, I, PP. 86-87. '7 RGVIA, F.401, OP. 5, d. 417, 1. iob.: 'On the Execution of Military Statistical Work in

the General Staff'. 38 RGVL4, F. 401, OP. 5, d. 4I7, 1. 74: 'Opinion of Colonel Maksheev on the military-

statistical work undertaken by the general staff, introduced for consideration by the consultative committee', 25 January i864. Forty-two-year-old Maksheev succeeded Miliutin as professor of military statistics at the academy; he was a close personal friend of Miliutin's and soon a member of VUK.




while each student must be judged equally on [his] statistical work, the appraisals should also identify those of real talent for future positions in the Academy.39

Echoing Golitsyn, Maksheev declared that the collation process had to be organized by function, rather than according to the previous system of gathering data simply for its own sake. Furthermore, the statistics once compiled and analysed, had to be published in a usable form. Among his five final recommendations he urged a reshaping of the military administration in conformity with the statistical requirements of the army; the adoption of a uniform system for the collection and compilation of statistics; and the formalization of foreign intelligence gathered by attaches, general staff officers, and 'by other means' (presumably, covert espionage and agents).40 Golitsyn, in his earlier survey of statistical work had likewise proposed a better integration of attaches into the collection cycle, particularly for information on the theory of military statistics in Prussia and Austria.4'

Not only data collection, but even preparation of military maps and topographical surveys of the empire (including the European part) was in relatively poor condition, though for reasons of paucity and insufficiently large scale rather than quality. Cartographic studies were a significant component of general-staff qualifications from the I830s. Yet even into the I 87 Os military maps of the potential European theatre of operation were adjudged inadequately detailed and, in some cases, out of date, and Russian military cartographers had only just begun to grapple with the colossal task of mapping the non-European parts of the empire.42

It was precisely the objective of universalism, nurtured in the I840s and i850s, that gave the war ministry the tools for reform after i86I. Every general-staffer, even if no longer a practicing statistician, shared a common background of education and field training. This was the core of general-staff 'culture'. That, however, was not enough. Up to the late I 86os Russian general staff officers, while continuously involved in geography, topography and statistics, lacked clear direction or purpose. Just who was Russia's enemy after Crimea? What was the meaning of data, lacking an explanatory vision of Russia's strategic condition? Although VUK oversaw the reorganization and systematization of statistical work during the I 86os, it did not conjure

39 RGV4, F. 40I, OP. 5, d. 47,1. 6ob. 40 RGVL4, F. 40I, Op. 5, d.47,11. 770b-8iob. 41 RGVIA, F. 40I, Op. 5, d. 4I7, 11. I6ob-I7. 42 William C. FullerJr, Strategy and Power in Russia I600-I9I4, New York, I 993, 277 (citing

RGVIA, F. 400, Op. 3, d. 371, 11. I-9 ff., 'Concerning the correction of military maps, I874-75'). On the establishment of map depots: AVPR, F. Sekretnyi arkhiv, Op. 467, d. I4, 11. 20 I-o6 (Lessons of I870).



636 DAVID RICH

up a strategic agenda that might guide all its work. General-staff officers carried on, without reference to the sort of priorities that a clear strategic consensus might have determined. Consequently, much of the data proved irrelevant or required revision, especially after I870/71, while lacunae continued to blind military planners to the geographical challenges of the Transvistulean area. General staff officers developed what one officer called a 'keen sense of strategic reality' only between I 870 and I 876, first from Prussia's success, and then following another Eastern crisis later that decade.43 Russia's General Staff corps, however, brought the new strategic reality to bear on its area of responsibility only after delay.

No general-staff officer could overlook the importance of the geographical and strategic change that occurred in central Europe between i866 and I870. While diplomats and statesmen could act in accordance with the fraternal principles of conservative monarchical solidarity (a policy on Russia's part that began to re-emerge in the mid- i 86os), general staffs on all sides dealt with the potentialities that sprang spontaneously not only from the problem of state defence, but also from the sorts of 'technical' questions then being asked of general staffs: what was the military and strategic potential of railway? what was the most efficient and effective organizational form for an army? what was the strategic condition of the realm? In each case, a general staff had to evaluate, first, the potential of the state's neighbours; intentions of those neighbours were not a concern. Merely the existence of a united Germany made it, inevitably, Russia's first and most important security concern. Knowledge of Germany (and Austria-Hungary) gradually came to supplant the general staff's interest in universalist natural history and exploration.

The evolution of the main staff's responsibilities, from technical research bureau to war and mobilization planning staff, was a result of two developments. First, the staff developed high technical competence from its pioneering work in data-gathering and statistical analysis. The staff's labours marked its members as experts, and their near-monopoly in strategic questions assured them influence and autonomy. Of more dramatic impact, however, was Prussia's example of the potent edge a modernized, scientific general staff could give to a state's army with good war planning.

Episodic evidence of Russia's growing anxiety towards Prussia- Germany dated from the days and weeks following Sedan. Miliutin commissioned Obruchev to articulate the new conditions in Central Europe, and he carried those strategic apprehensions vigorously to the

43 RGVIA, F. 40I, Op. 5, d. 4I7, 11. 138-I44ob: Lieutenant-General F. A. Fel'dman to Chief of Main Staff Obruchev, January I889.




councils of state. The most important forum, the so-called 'secret strategic conference' of March i 873,44 proved a final test of Miliutin's military-statistical labours. With a large application of specialized data Miliutin overcame the opposition of virtually all other members of the conference to secure the Emperor's approval for universal military service (instituted I January I 874) and for an ambitious and aggressive programme of railroad construction in the western military districts. Six years later, Miliutin's protege Obruchev (on the eve of assuming leadership of the main staff) convincingly argued that Russia's security concerns lay in the west and nowhere else. He elevated Germany to the pinnacle of the army's strategic attention in early i88o, and received the war minister's and Alexander II's signatures of approval. The war ministry's fears centred on Poland, and were so deep as to eclipse all other strategic interests or possibilities. Given the fact 'that Tsarist Poland has come to be under virtual permanent blockade' from the neighbouring Germanic powers, thanks to their strategically superior railroads, and the fact that Russia could not afford to station sufficient forces in Poland for economic reasons, the state had to focus its attention -and resources -on the western frontier if the realm were to be saved.45 Obruchev identified the defence of the Polish lands with the vegy existence of the core of tsarist Russia, while at the same time recognizing that Russia's internal grip on the Transvistulean territories was tenuous at best.46 These were the conflicting conditions that governed Russian strategy until the i89os when alliance with France made successful defence of Poland an imaginable possibility for the first time in twenty years, and a gradual detente with Britain finally curtailed Russian military and scientific - penetration of the southern

44 The importance of this conference to the Empire's international and strategic development was first noted only recently: Fuller, Strategy and Power, ch. 7. P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Voennye reforny i86o-i87o-kh godov v Rossii, Moscow, I952, wrote of the conference as a struggle between proponents of reform and reaction, and focused on the problem of field army reorganization and universal military service; those debates, however, occupied only the final week of the month-long gathering. 45Highly classified Main Staff documents throughout the i 88os and I89os refer to this

five-page document, Obruchev's 'Basic Memorandum', as the conceptual foundation of subsequent strategic and mobilization planning. Curiously, neither the otherwise thorough P. A. Zaionchkovskii, nor the great military historian L. G. Beskrovnyi, found (or alternatively, appreciated the importance of) the document. It appears not to have survived in RGVI4, as the only extant copy I have seen is in AVPR, F. I 38 Sekretnyi arkhiv, Op. 467, d. 76-I883, 11. 7-9. War minister Vannovskii submitted it to the foreign ministry, finally, during Saburov's vigorous efforts on behalf of a Russo-German alliance in I883. The war ministry's strong objections to those approaches rested on the strategic road map developed by Obruchev, who also drafted Vannovskii's objection to the Russo-German agreement!

46 Ted Weeks's study of Russia's policy towards Poland underlines the fear that impelled measures against Polish culture, language, religion, and economy: Theodore R. Weeks, 'Defining Us and Them: Poles and Russians in the "Western Provinces", I 863-19 I 4', Slavic Review, 53/I, 1994. Without reference to the army's desperate geo-strategic view of Poland, however, Russian fears make no sense. The imperative imposed by Obruchev and his colleagues was the source of all Russian policy toward Poland after i 863.



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borderlands. From i 88o onwards the main staff devoted its energy to creation of a viable mobilization plan. Staff officers spread out across the western districts to gather precisely the data that Obruchev's staff dictated. Finally, under Obruchev's young protege, A. N. Kuropatkin, Russia received its first credible mobilization schedule for general war against Germany after six years of labour, in I 887.

Intelligence collection and information gathering, as well as war planning, were the preserve of the most basic field of Russian military staff work: military statistics. Habits of systematic accumulation of information began in the I 840s in the training of staff officers at the Nicholas Academy of the General Staff, at a time when Emperor Nicholas's unremitting animus towards a higher military staff effectively excluded general-staff officers from most routine staff activities (much less command positions), such as preparation for war. Their alternative employment, military-statistical work, brought them to the frontier of natural science and geographical exploration and produced vast amounts of data on Russia and all its borderlands and neighbours. But the search for knowledge also drew the attention and imagination of many members of the state's elite, not towards Galicia and Silesia, but towards Russia's Central Asian borderlands. The general staff's view of the outside world, both that portion where the empire's fate would be decided strategically and other areas where Russia's elites could imagine an imperial destiny, drew on an institutional commitment to universal and specialized knowledge implicit in military-scientific work, and military statistics in particular.

A culture of knowledge began to shape the identity of the general- staff corps by the end of the I840s, and a commitment to the business of information gathering came to exert strong influence on the development of Russian strategic thought. Data-collection activities occupied general staff officers in every guberniia of the empire, and beyond its borders on scientific expeditions. Vigorous scientific activity alone could not have ameliorated the military debacle Russia met in the Crimea in I854-56, though properly conducted staff work may have. With Nicholas's death, however, the staff reclaimed its proper role in military planning, and applied well practiced expertise in information management to the new challenges of strategic preparation.

'The pursuit of knowledge is the vanguard, not the rearguard, of the pursuit of power': the recording of empire was tantamount to controlling it and the effort to record rested on the myth of a unified body of knowledge universal and particular - which would in turn hold together the 'vast and various parts of the Empire'.47 The problem

4 Richards, ImperialArchive, introduction.




of visualizing empire has concrete and scientific expressions as well as literary and mythological ones. Empire as 'state in overreach', though not a terribly useful analytical concept, characterizes well the context in which the Russian general-staff searched for information during the middle third of the nineteenth century. Without knowledge of populations, environment, climate or even maps of core or periphery, the tsar's officers were virtually blind to their area of responsibility. Many of them understood this bracing fact. Making no distinction between areas of strategic importance and regions of (mere) scientific curiosity, general-staff surveyors set forth across the realm and its borders -to learn. To the west they gained remarkable intelligence on Prussian and Austrian military preparations; to the south they scouted the routes later used by conquerors. In both cases, first motives were the same: universal knowledge. But they only came to distinguish between vital and peripheral strategic issues when the unification of Germany finally justified their professional existence.



imperialism, reform and strategy: russian military statistics, 1840-1880

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