Tamara A. Taruntaeva

Master degree student of the Department of History and Archaeology of the Tula State Lev Tolstoy Pedagogical University

Tula State Lev Tolstoy Pedagogical University

(Tula, Russia)

Abstract. The article is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of the army of the Russian Empire as a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional social institution. There is a large number of works that studied and systematized information about the armed forces of the Imperial period in Russian historiography. However, almost no one had touched upon the question of the Imperial character of the army in a proper sense. The purpose of this research is to analyze the works of Russian historians on this problem. It considered two groups of works: the general fundamental works on the history of the armed forces of the Russian Empire and the articles with a "local approach" dedicated to individual social or ethnic groups in the army. As a result of the analysis, it was revealed that the first ones do not have a conceptual understanding of the Russian army as the armed forces of the Empire. They only mention its heterogeneous ethno-confessional composition "in passing". The second group of studies is mainly represented by the works of regional researchers and local historians, representatives of the peoples whose role in the army they write about. These are mainly small articles devoted to the consideration of a particular aspect of state policy in relation to the methods of recruitment of the army in different chronological periods, the position of various social groups in the armed forces. At the same time, these articles pay much attention to highlighting the role of a particular nation in Russia's military victories. Such works are characterized by a subjective approach, which is expressed in overestimating the role of one's own people and belittling the importance of representatives of others. Therefore, the question of the army of the Russian Empire as a complex institution in its ethno-confessional structure still remains open due to insufficient research and the presence of ambiguous approaches.
Keywords: historiography, army, empire, nation building, nations, peoples.

Full text of the article (PDF)


For citation: Taruntaeva, TA 2020, ‘The review of historiography on the issue of army formation in the Russian Empire’, Tula Scientific Bulletin. History. Linguistics, issue 2 (2), pp. 29–43, URL: http://tula-vestnik.ru/pdf/2020/vipusk_2_15_12_20.pdf (in Russ.)

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