It is the Tambov historian Pavel Petrovich Shcherbinin’s achievement to have rescued from near oblivion a whole category of the tsar’s subjects – soldiers’ wives and families – and thereby to have made a signal contribution to the social and cultural history of Imperial Russia. His amply proportioned study focuses on the daily life of Russian women, mainly but not exclusively during successive armed conflicts, viewed “through the prism of micro-historical analysis,” in order to disclose “the real past of the ‘little’ individual, the ‘simple’ average family” (P. 220). Though familiar with the theories of radical Western feminists and even, as he modestly says, an incipient “genderologist,” Shcherbinin scarcely refers to their writings and would presumably reject as reductionist the claim that, for example, the army authorities’ well-known reluctance to allow women more than an auxiliary role stemmed from the unconscious anxiety that their presence would undermine “masculine dominance.”^[1] The approach taken here is more conventional. The author draws on an uncommonly broad range of sources: not just official papers, memoirs, and the like, which to some extent have been exploited by earlier writers, but also ethnographical materials, ecclesiastical journals, and especially the holdings of local archives in Tambov and elsewhere. All of this adds color and texture to his account, which brings into scholarly discourse a vast amount of new information and opens up some exciting perspectives. Commendable, too, is Shcherbinin’s humanistic empathy for female victims of the state’s incessant quest for military manpower. Right down to the Miliutin reforms of 1874, as indeed later too, “militarism demanded ever new sacrifices and ignored … the problems and views of the populace” (P. 30).
In the pre-reform era soldiers’ wives and progeny, like veterans, belonged to a distinct if barely recognized social estate (soslovie) and were technically even War Ministry property. In 1858, they were said to number nearly half a million souls, 40 percent of them female – probably an underestimate, since many evaded statistical control. Once a recruit was handed over to the army, his spouse typically gave him up for dead, since she was unlikely to see him again. Leave was rarely granted and returning veterans, few in number, generally met a cool reception from relatives and fellow villagers, for whom they represented an extra drain on limited resources. All too often the soldier’s wife or widow would run off with some other man and start a new family. Widows qualified for a once-and-for-all grant of cash or foodstuffs, if they had young children to support and were without alternative sources of income, but due to bureaucratic incompetence this aid did not always materialize. Ever keen to save money, the state adhered to the fiction that soldiers’ dependants would be cared for by in-laws or else make do somehow by their own efforts. But local authorities were niggardly in providing land allotments or other assistance, so that these unfortunates frequently lapsed into destitution or left to seek jobs elsewhere. Some could survive only by selling their bodies, for “in Russia the growth of prostitution was directly bound up with processes of militarization” (P. 70). Soldiers were among the chief patrons of city brothels, and as elsewhere in Europe the spread of venereal disease in the armed forces stimulated official efforts to bring the sex trade under control. One would gladly have heard more about what they did to the womenfolk in their rural billets.
The plight of soldiers’ children was only slightly less grim, for on coming of age they were legally obliged to enlist. Some youngsters were placed in special schools, where they at least received a minimum of care, but life in these institutions was harsh and many mothers tried to conceal their offspring’s existence. This was but one example of the passive resistance that ordinary folk offered to the state’s excessive demands. However, these individual actions had no discernible effect on policy (Pp. 114-124). Shcherbinin is hard on officials, landowners, and senior churchmen for their indifference and lack of charity towards these miserable outcasts, in this echoing the criticisms leveled against the absolutist order by pre-revolutionary intellectuals and their Soviet successors. But our natural indignation needs to be offset by recognition that in the early modern era the idea of an interventionist “welfare state” had yet to be born; one must resist the temptation to pass anachronistic judgements.
During the nineteenth century the climate of opinion gradually changed. Many relief initiatives were undertaken privately, and after the Great Reforms both central and local government bodies became more conscious of the active role they could and should play in alleviating social distress. Just why this happened is not too clear from this account. Partly it seems to have been a matter of emulating Western practice, but basically it stemmed from the slow maturation of civil society. In particular, the Miliutin reforms replaced the rekrutchina with a fairer, socially more inclusive system of selective conscription, and soldiers who now enjoyed a shorter service term were less isolated from civilian life than before. Shcherbinin justly notes that the new system also produced negative results: for instance, married men with young children lost their earlier normal exemption from service, while their wives continued to face humiliation and poverty; hence the old derogatory appellation soldatka survived (Pp. 171-172). Nor did the reforms do away with red tape (“as was often the case in Russia, the authorities’ benign initiatives drowned in bureaucratic obstacles”): officials would often act irresponsibly, rejecting or side-tracking women’s pathetic petitions on some trivial pretext (P. 180).
Even so, by the early twentieth century soldiers’ wives and widows were acquiring consciousness of their rights and a willingness to stand up for them. By 1905, during the war with Japan, they read newspapers and even staged occasional riots (bab’i bunty), freeing reservists and smashing government buildings (P. 215). These activities owed much to the example set by radicalized (male) soldiers, a point missed here. During World War I wives at last received maintenance payments (payok), but the suffering went on for longer and economic disruption was on a far greater scale. This explains their participation in the events of 1917, which lie outside the author’s frame of reference. Shcherbinin’s main conclusion is that the wars, which brought Russian women so much misery, helped them in the long term “to realize themselves … and achieve equality of status both professionally and in society generally” (P. 269). The proposition that women’s emancipation in Soviet Russia owed more to war than to regime change is familiar from recent Western research and probably correct, but deserves further investigation.
All along a few women had been actively engaged in military affairs as medical personnel. Already under Nicholas I volunteers formed societies to care for wounded soldiers, and they proved their worth in the Crimean (“Eastern”) war. As elsewhere, their members initially encountered a good deal of prejudice among (male) officers, especially when they exposed corruption in the supply department, but eventually their beneficent role came to be reluctantly acknowledged. Women in the Russian branch of the Red Cross rendered yeoman service in the conflict with Turkey of 1877-1878: over a thousand nurses performed front-line duty, dressing wounds and even rescuing wounded from the battlefield; many died from typhus. Shcherbinin shows that behind the façade of patriotism and religiosity this humanitarian movement pursued enlightened secular goals of professional advancement and recognition of women’s rights. Even the well-connected “ladies’ committees” nominally in charge come out well, for unwittingly they fostered modern attitudes they could not foresee or control. They became a vehicle for civic activity and “turned into autonomous organizations that gave Russian women a new status and mentality” (P. 471). The volunteers’ motives were mixed, and in 1904-1905 a small minority of “bad eggs” sufficed to give the “sisters of mercy” a bad name, not least among the common soldiers for whom they sacrificed so much; and the same phenomenon could be observed during the Great War. Thus there are shadows in Shcherbinin’s generally uplifting narrative, which staggers to a sad finale in the Civil War of 1918-1920 when, alas, the combatants failed to heed humanitarian principles. For the empire’s later years, source materials are far more abundant since military affairs were discussed in the press with considerable freedom.
Not overlooked here are the very few women who, following in the footsteps of the redoubtable Natalia Durova, actually engaged in combat. Hanna Hacker tells us that soldiers in the Austro-Hungarian army feared these Amazons who, so rumour had it, went into battle wearing skirts that left their knees bare^[2] – a case of the wish being father to the thought. These exploits climaxed in the well-known “women’s battalions” of 1917. Maria Bochkareva emerges as a disciplinarian fanatic who brutalized subordinates and drove them to flight. Some who joined her outfit did so “from personal grief or disappointment in love; others fled from their husbands’ blows and humiliations,” while others sought just to escape the boredom of provincial life (Pp. 439-440). Their actual military value was slight.
Shcherbinin might well have arranged his material more economically, for his volume is too long and contains a good deal of repetition. Nevertheless it should prove invaluable to students, not least of the comparative aspects of the problem: for example, how did practices in Russia differ from those in other European states with a “military preponderance,” such as Prussia/Germany and Austro-Hungary? Also of considerable use will be the electronic database he has compiled of information on soldiers’ marital habits, family size, etc., which inter alia reveals that in the early nineteenth century more soldiers were married than had previously been thought (P. 92). The history of everyday life is a growth area today, both in Russia and the West,^[3] and this research should include further work in the field explored in these pages.