This volume examines how Imperial Russia's armed forces sought to adapt to the challenges of modern warfare. From Peter the Great to Nicholas II, rulers always understood the need to maintain an army and navy capable of preserving the empire's great power status. Yet they inevitably faced the dilemma of importing European military and technological innovations while keeping out political ideas that could challenge the autocracy's monopoly on power. Within the context of a constant race to avoid oblivion, the impulse for military renewal emerges as a fundamental and recurring theme in modern Russian history.

The early modern Russian army emerged from contacts with Mongols, the Caucasus, and Siberia, yet held its own against adversaries such as Sweden, Turkey, and China.

Profiles the Romanov Dynasty tsar as one of Russia's most forward-thinking rulers, documenting his efforts to redefine history by bringing freedom to his country, and describing the series of assassination attempts that eventually ended his life.

Force Structure, Tactics, and Modernization of the Russian Ground Forces The mighty Soviet Army is no more. The feckless Russian Army that stumbled into Chechnya is no more. Today's Russian Army is modern, better manned, better equipped and designed for maneuver combat under nuclear-threatened conditions. This is your source for the tactics, equipment, force structure and theoretical underpinnings of a major Eurasian power. Here's what the experts are saying: "A superb baseline study for understanding how and why the modern Russian Army functions as it does. Essential for specialist and generalist alike." -Colonel (Ret) David M. Glantz, foremost Western author on the Soviet Union in World War II and Editor of The Journal of Slavic Military Studies. "Congratulations to Les Grau and Chuck Bartles on filling a gap which has yawned steadily wider since the end of the USSR. Their book addresses evolving Russian views on war, including the blurring of its nature and levels, and the consequent Russian approaches to the Ground Forces' force structuring, manning, equipping, and tactics. Confidence is conferred on the validity of their arguments and conclusions by copious footnoting, mostly from an impressive array of primary sources. It is this firm grounding in Russian military writings, coupled with the authors' understanding of war and the Russian way of thinking about it, that imparts such an authoritative tone to this impressive work." -Charles Dick, former Director of the Combat Studies Research Centre, Senior Fellow at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, author of the 1991 British Army Field Manual, Volume 2, A Treatise on Soviet Operational Art and author of From Victory to Stalemate The Western Front, Summer 1944 and From Defeat to Victory, The Eastern Front, Summer 1944. "Dr. Lester Grau's and Chuck Bartles' professional research on the Russian Armed Forces is widely read throughout the world and especially in Russia. Russia's Armed Forces have changed much since the large-scale reforms of 2008, which brought the Russian Army to the level of the world's other leading armies. The speed of reform combined with limited information about their core mechanisms represented a difficult challenge to the authors. They have done a great job and created a book which could be called an encyclopedia of the modern armed forces of Russia. They used their wisdom and talents to explore vital elements of the Russian military machine: the system of recruitment and training, structure of units of different levels, methods and tactics in defense and offence and even such little-known fields as the Arctic forces and the latest Russian combat robotics." -Dr. Vadim Kozyulin, Professor of Military Science and Project Director, Project on Asian Security, Emerging Technologies and Global Security Project PIR Center, Moscow. "Probably the best book on the Russian Armed Forces published in North America during the past ten years. A must read for all analysts and professionals following Russian affairs. A reliable account of the strong and weak aspects of the Russian Army. Provides the first look on what the Russian Ministry of Defense learned from best Western practices and then applied them on Russian soil." -Ruslan Pukhov, Director of the Moscow-based Centre for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST) and member of the Public Council of the Russian Federation Ministry of Defense. Author of Brothers Armed: Military Aspects of the Crisis in Ukraine, Russia's New Army, and The Tanks of August.

Bayonets before Bullets is the first comprehensive institutional and operational history of the Imperial Russian Army during the crucial period of its modernization, 1861-1914. Bruce W. Menning surveys the development of organization, doctrine, and strategy from the aftermath of Russia's defeat in the Crimean War through the wars against Turkey in 1877-1878 and Japan in 1904-1905, to the eve of World War I. Describing how the Russian army organized, trained, and armed itself to fight during a critical era of change, Menning weaves analysis of reforms in technology and military art with lively accounts of combat operations and portraits of the personalities involved. Enhanced by superb battlefield maps, operational diagrams, and rare photographs of the leading Russian military commanders, Bayonets before Bullets provides a fascinating account of how the Imperial Russian Army struggled to modernize in a Darwinian world that dealt harshly with those who failed to adapt to changes in technology and military art.

Here is the first social history devoted to the common soldier in the Russian army during the first half of the 19th-century--an examination of soldiers as a social class and the army as a social institution. By providing a comprehensive view of one of the most important groups in Russian society on the eve of the great reforms of the mid-1800s, Elise Wirtschafter contributes greatly to our understanding of Russia's complex social structure. Based on extensive research in previously unused Soviet archives, this work covers a wide array of topics relating to daily life in the army, including conscription, promotion and social mobility, family status, training, the regimental economy, military justice, and relations between soldiers and officers. The author emphasizes social relations and norms of behavior in the army, but she also addresses the larger issue of society's relationship to the autocracy, including the persistent tension between the tsarist state's need for military efficiency and its countervailing need to uphold the traditional norms of unlimited paternalistic authority. By examining military life in terms of its impact on soldiers, she analyzes two major concerns of tsarist social policy: how to mobilize society's resources to meet state needs and how to promote modernization (in this case military efficiency) without disturbing social arrangements founded on serfdom. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Many books chronicle the remarkable life of Russian tsar Peter the Great, but none analyze how his famous reforms actually took root and spread in Russia. By century's end, Russia was poised to play a critical role in the Napoleonic wars and boasted an elite culture about to burst into its golden age. In The Revolution of Peter the Great, James Cracraft offers a brilliant new interpretation of this pivotal era.

This is the first study of the military experience of some one to one-and-a-half million Jews who served in the Russian Army between 1827, the onset of personal conscription of Jews in Russia, and 1917, the demise of the tsarist regime. The conscription integrated Jews into the state transforming the repressed Jewish victims of the draft into modern imperial Russian Jews. The book contextualizes the reasons underlying the decision to draft Jews, the communal responses to the draft, the missionary initiatives directed toward Jews in the army, alleged Jewish draft evasion and Jewish military performance, and the strategies Jews used to endure military service. It also explores the growing antisemitism of the upper echelons of the military toward the Jews on the eve of World War I and the rise of Russian-Jewish loyalty and patriotism.

In a definitive new account of the Soviet Union at war, Alexander Hill charts the development, successes and failures of the Red Army from the industrialisation of the Soviet Union in the late 1920s through to the end of the Great Patriotic War in May 1945. Setting military strategy and operations within a broader context that includes national mobilisation on a staggering scale, the book presents a comprehensive account of the origins and course of the war from the perspective of this key Allied power. Drawing on the latest archival research and a wealth of eyewitness testimony, Hill portrays the Red Army at war from the perspective of senior leaders and men and women at the front line to reveal how the Red Army triumphed over the forces of Nazi Germany and her allies on the Eastern Front, and why it did so at such great cost.

This psychologically penetrating revisionist account of the life and rule of Rusia's 18th-century Tsar-reformer develops an important theme - that is, what happens when the drive for "progress" is linked to an autocratic, expansionist impulse rather than to a larger goal of human emancipation? And, what has been the price of power - both for Peter and for Russia?