DOI 10.51255/2311–603X_2025_3_19

A. Yu. Fomin. War and the “Smuta”: The Military Department’s Struggle to Preserve the Army’s
Loyalty in 1905–1907 // Petersburg Historical Journal, no 3, 2025, pp. 19–29

Abstract:

The unsuccessful war with Japan and the onset of revolution placed the Russian military
authorities and officer corps in a challenging position. The challenge of the era was to combat the spread of revolutionary propaganda among the troops. For the government, the army was its last bulwark in the fight against the revolution after its humiliation in Manchuria, but there was a real threat of revolutionary unrest spreading to the army itself. These circumstances led the military authorities to realise the necessity of fighting the revolutionaries using their own methods — namely, printed counter-propaganda and oral patriotic agitation. Since 1906, a special subdivision of the military department — the Committee for the Education of Troops under the Military Council — had been examining printed matter intended for the troops and selecting publications that were useful from the authorities’ point of view. Dozens of books and brochures, as well as military newspapers and magazines with a patriotic slant, were approved by the Committee for the Education of Troops. The committee believed that official government publications would not be able to compete with the revolutionary and opposition press and therefore relied on private publications for support. Enterprising publishers were eager to offer the government their help in combating revolutionary propaganda in the hope of making a profit. However, the Ministry of War ultimately recognised the ineffectiveness of this approach. Soldiers were far more interested in anti-government propaganda that largely reflected their own sentiments than in conservative publications.

Key words: Russo-Japanese War, Russian Revolution of 1905, Smuta, officers, military department, propaganda, Committee for the Education of Troops under the Military Council, A. N. Kuropatkin, A. F. Rediger.

Author:

Fomin, Anton Yurievich — Candidate of Historical Sciences, Research Fellow at Saint Petersburg
Institute of History of Russian Academy of Sciences (Saint Petersburg, Russia).
E-mail: a.fomin1511@gmail.com
ORCID: 0000-0002-4118-6089

References:

Ayrapetov, O. R. Na puti k krakhu. Russko-yaponskaya voina 1904–1905 gg. Voenno-politicheskaya istoriya [On the Way to Collapse. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Military and political history. In Russ.]. Moscow, Algoritm, 2014. 496 p.

Fuller, W. C. Jr. Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia 1881–1914. Princeton, 1985. 336 p.

Fomin, A. Yu. Pervaya russkaya revolyutsiya i ofitsioznaya voyennaya pechat’ [The First Russian Revolution and Paragovernmental Military Press. In Russ.]. In Uchenyye zapiski Novgorodskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. 2019. No. 3, p. 9. https://doi.org/10.34680/2411–7951.2019.3(21).9

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