Equally interesting is the light that Professor Beskrovny's volume sheds on military historiography as practiced in the former Soviet Union. This was an era when historians of the Imperial armed forces had a difficult time in meeting the conflicting demands placed upon them. On the one hand, as "Soviet patriots" they were expected to celebrate the age-old struggles of the Russian and other peoples of the USSR against foreign invaders. It was, after all, an article of faith that their past wars (with the occasional exceptions such as that against Japan in 1904) were waged for self-defense, and that the Russian "art of war" matched and usually surpassed that of the other Great Powers. Historians therefore celebrated A.V. Suvorov (1730-1800) and M.I. Kutuzov (1745-1813) as leaders of genius, the Russian army's victories of 1812-1814 as the triumph of the Russian people, Russia itself as the land which led the way in developing military aviation, and so on.
On the other hand, the precepts of Marxism-Leninism dictated that these same historians recognize that all wars are fought for the selfish interests of the ruling classes, that this was true of the wars of Imperial Russia, that only those of the Soviet Union were an exception, and that the nature of the tsarist army reflected the "class" nature of that state. This last, in spite of the reforms introduced in the 1860s-1870s, was regarded as becoming increasing backward during the nineteenth century. At the same time, the "imperialist" nature of the tsarist regime increased the demands placed on a military machine that was falling ever more behind those of the other great industrial states. As a result, the Imperial army proved incapable of sustaining the impact of modern war and, along with the semi-feudal regime it defended, collapsed in the debacle of 1914-1917.
Historians of the tsarist army had to thread their way through this mass of contradictory dictates. Foremost among them was Professor Liubomir Grigorevich Beskrovny (1905-1980). The son of a Kharkov school teacher, he himself chose an academic career. Graduating from the Kuban Pedagogical Institute in 1930, he began his teaching career in the local school and museum systems. He joined the Red Army in 1942, first fought on the Southwestern Front against the Germans, then became a teacher in the Moscow Rifle and Machine-Gun School, and finally joined the faculty of the Frunze Military Academy. At this last he taught the course in the "history of the military art" while developing new programs in the sources, historiography and methods of teaching military history. These interests are reflected in such major works as his Readings in Russian Military History (1947), A Review of Sources for the History of the Russian Military Art from the Earliest Times to the First World War (1954), Russian Military-Theoretical Thought in the XIX and the Beginning of the XX Centuries (1960), and A Review of the Military Historiography of Russia (1962). In addition, he involved himself in research in cartography and military geography, and in 1946 was part of the group of scholars who prepared the Atlas of Maps and Sketch Maps on Russian Military History.
Beskrovny's work won him promotion to the rank of colonel in 1948 and a doctorate in history in 1950. During this period he published a number of articles on the history of military education and thought in the 1700s, which eventually provided a basis for his Russian Army and Fleet in the XVIII Century (1958). In the meantime in 1951, the same year he became a full professor at the Frunze, he published his study The Patriotic War of 1812 and Kutuzov's Counteroffensive. By the time he was demobilized and left the Frunze Academy in 1955 Beskrovny was committed fully to chronicling the history of the tsarist army. Furthermore, once he had reworked his book of 1951 into The Patriotic War of 1812 (1962), he was ready to turn his attention to the rest of the nineteenth century. Again a number of articles followed, and again they culminated in more extensive studies: the present Russian Army and Fleet in the XIX Century (1973); Russian Military Art in the XIX Century (1974), and his last major and posthumous study, The Russian Army and Fleet at the Beginning of the XX Century (1986).
By the time of his death in 1980 Professor Beskrovny had become a distinguished and leading scholar who had headed major research groups in both history and geography in the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences USSR. Apart from his colleague P.A. Zaionchkovskii, he was without peer in his mastery of the military historiography and archival sources on his period. But whereas Zaionchkovskii was interested largely in the army as a social institution and had interests that embraced the whole range of Russian society during the period 1855 to 1900, Beskrovny remained focused on the details of Imperial Russia's developing military organization and the campaigns it waged. As such, he was a military historian first and always, and eminently well suited to write the present work.
When assessing Beskrovny's contributions, his students and colleagues stressed the fact that his own experiences as a soldier and officer had done much to inform and deepen his understanding of the organization and events to which he devoted a life of study. They also give credit to role of "Marxist-Leninist methodology" in his analysis. And formally at least, Beskrovny was a member of the Communist Party since 1945. That this had an impact on the manner in which he presented his research is beyond doubt, but his own real beliefs regarding the value of this methodology must remain a matter of conjecture.
That he disliked the imposition of ideological and doctrinal imperatives to some extent is indicated by his reworking of his 1951 book on the Patriotic War of 1812. In its original version it (like other works of the day) twisted history to provide historical justification for the concept of the "strategic counteroffensive." Adopted by Joseph Stalin to explain the great retreats of the Red Army during 1941-1942, this concept became a basic plank in the dictator's post-war "military doctrine," and so an obligatory part of all military analyses. But in the wake of the freer intellectual atmosphere created by Nikita Khrushchev's program of "de-Stalinization," Beskrovny like other military historians could abandon at least one distorting lens imposed by earlier ideological constraints.
Whatever the depth of his adherence to Marxism-Leninism, formal obedience to its dictates was an absolute necessity for any scholar who wished to see his work published and to make any kind of career within the Soviet academic system. Beskrovny accordingly accepted as given Friedrich Engels' truism that a nation's military capabilities depend "on material, that is, economic circumstances, on human resources, and weapons which, in turn, depend on the quality and size of a nation's population and on its technology." It was in accord with this precept that he subtitled the present study "The Military-Economic Potential of Russia." But having quoted Engels in his introduction, Beskrovny's text does little to elucidate the political and socio-economic context of the military developments which he chronicles. Indeed, these topics are touched upon only in as much as they directly effect a particular problem (e.g., financing the military, strategic railways, etc.) or decision (e.g., on weapons acquisitions, numbers conscripted, etc.).
While a nation's military power may depend on its own economic and social conditions, any calculation of that power is of necessity a comparative exercise. In this regard Beskrovny also is elliptic at best. Apart from occasional comments, his discussion largely ignores the more general European-wide, strategic context of the military developments he chronicles. When reading this work we must bear in mind the political, economic and social trends that threatened to undermine Russia's position as a great power, trends that were ever-present in the minds of the military planners. If the empire's position seemed secure before 1850, after the Crimean War (1853-1856) these same trends forced reform upon the tsarist government. Despite these, by the 1880s-1890s its planners were facing a desperate struggle to keep up with the Western powers, a position repeated a century later.
Despite their significance, those seeking full discussions of these trends, and of the constraints which they placed on Imperial Russia's policy-makers, will have to turn elsewhere. To some extent this may have seemed acceptable to Beskrovny since he could assume that his Russian readers would be familiar with the social, economic and political history of Russia in the nineteenth century. This is well-covered in works of a number of Soviet scholars, and most notably by those of P.A. Zaionchkovskii. The same is to some extent true as well for English-language readers thanks to work of Nicholas Riasanovsky, Terence Emmons, Daniel Field, Walter Pintner, and so on. Readers seeking to understand the full impact of Russian social and economic developments on the military should turn to these authors, as well as the more specialized military works such as those of William F. Fuller, Jr. (on strategic planning and the army and society), Bruce Menning (on theoretical and tactical developments) and Peter Gattrell on the military economy, which provide full accounts without a Marxist interpretation.
There are dangers in dealing with national military histories in a vacuum, rather than in the full context of the international and domestic environment in which statesmen and military leaders must operate. Beskrovny himself undoubtedly was well aware of this, but he nonetheless chose to focus his attention elsewhere. By so doing he was able to concentrate on "facts" and so avoid most of the Marxist-Leninist precepts and constraints that bedeviled the attempts of his colleagues who examined Imperial Russia's political, social and economic development, or its international position. But in examining the "nuts and bolts" of the Russian military and naval organizations he has gleaned a truly massive compendium of data from archives that long have been unavailable to many Soviet, let alone most Western scholars, military and otherwise.
It is here that the great value of Professor Beskrovny's volume is found. Although he adds little new to the interpretation of the "facts" he presents, he has provided us with an invaluable "handbook" on all important aspects of Russia's armed forces during a period of major change. As suggested above, this was the period when the system created by Peter the Great's "military revolution", which had guaranteed Russia's place in European politics since 1725, was being eroded by advances in military as well as industrial technologies. This was, of course, a Europe-wide phenomenon. But for Russia any attempt to meet the new demands, which became an imperative after the humiliation of the Crimean War, entailed changes that hitherto were perceived as avoidable. Indeed, it is the qualitative differences between the problems faced by the tsar's military planners before and after that conflict that give real meaning to Engel's formula when applied to their state.
When placed within this context, the wealth of data provided by Beskrovny assumes great importance. He himself does not seek to recount the course of the debates that raged within Russian officialdom and led to decisions that either stymied or promoted reforms. Rather, he seeks only to detail the military consequences of these decisions, and in the process he allows his readers to trace the evolving state of the Imperial armed forces. Within this work, for instance, a student will find a chronological digest of statistics on the size of the Russian army and fleet that demonstrates clearly the consequences of the decision to abandon the Petrine system of conscription and, in 1874, to adopt D.A. Miliutin's system of an army based on short-term conscripts and reservists. The same is true for the navy and apart from manpower Beskrovny's account permits one to follow shipbuilding programs during the transition from sail to steam, and from wooden walls to modern armored battleships. He also provides data on the administrative and command structures of both services, and of all aspects of their supply systems and programs for weapons acquisition.
Indeed, the wealth of data provided is such that there is no material aspect of the Imperial armed forces on which a curious student will not find illumination. Apart from the topics mentioned, Beskrovny outlines the successes and failures met in developing the military educational system for officers, the changes in the training given enlisted men, and the ups and downs of Russia's fortresses. Similarly, those who normally would ignore a military "handbook" nonetheless will find a veritable mine of production data from what we now call the "military-industrial complex," on the progress made by various railway building programs, on the spread of the telegraph network, on the introduction of steam transportation on Russia's inland waterways, and so on, and so on.
Clearly, then, Beskrovny has produced a work of rare value, and one that can serve as a starting point for further research in any number of aspects of Russian military and social history. Indeed, its significance is indicated by the fact that similar compendiums of data are available for no other army of this or most other periods. Furthermore, in an age when historians often are driven by ideological concerns other than those of Marxism-Leninism, and when reputations are made by manipulating the available data so as to produce new and astounding interpretations that aim at destroying the reputations of past historians, Beskrovny provides a salutary example. For whatever the value of efforts at "model-building" or reinterpretations of the available facts, the historian also is responsible for uncovering new "facts" in a continuing search for whatever "historical truth" may be possible.
Without efforts to this end even the most influential "faddish" schools of today will in their turn be replaced by those of tomorrow. At best their works will be transformed into historiographical "facts" that are of interest to the historian of "ideas" alone. In contrast, those studies with a factual base that expands our general fund of "historical facts" will retain their general utility, regardless of their bias. That this is true with regard to the present volume will be apparent from even a cursory glance at its contents. True, in the future some of Beskrovny's data may be expanded or corrected. Even so, his massive labors in his nation's archives and his own high standards of scholarship insure that this book long will be a standard guide for students of both Russian and general military, economic, and social history in the 1800s.
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