The Imperial Russian Army, 1725–1796

Abstract

The modern Russian military tradition was born in the era of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. In large part, that tradition owes its origins to the achievements of the Imperial Russian Army, an institution that came to occupy a position of preeminence in eighteenth-century Russian society exceeded perhaps only by the monarchy and the Orthodox Church. Externally, the army was instrumental in ruining Poland, relegating Sweden to the status of a second-rate power, and wrecking Ottoman hopes for a resurgent Turkish hegemony in pontic Europe. This was “the golden age” of Russian military history in which great captains poured out their army’s blood and Russian gold in a series of largely successful challenges to Europe’s foremost military masters, among them Charles XII of Sweden, Frederick II of Prussia, and Napoleon and the marshals of revolutionary France. At the same time, internally, no segment of Russian society, whether it be church, nobility, peasantry, or even the government, was proof against the omnivorous demands of the Russian military behemoth. An ironic part of the army’s eighteenth-century legacy was that it grew to exert an improbable mastery over both the conquerors and the conquered. Still another part of the legacy, recalling the exploits of generals from Peter to Suvorov, has endured to fire the imagination and enthusiasm of subsequent generations.