ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the dilemma of officer training — the delicate balance in recruitment between what was educationally desirable and what was practically possible — affected one yunker school, that in Helsinki. Russian military literature about yunker schools in the 1860s and 1870s, much of it by Bobrovsky, who headed the relevant section of the Main Administration of the Military Educational Institutions from 1864 to 1875, tells a story of gradual but steady progress, of rising standards in spite of difficulties in recruitment. The Helsinki Yunker School was started in December 1846 as the School of the 22nd Infantry Division to provide Finnish yunkers entering that formation — the principal Russian garrison in Finland — with instruction in the Russian language and in military science. In September 1864, at the start of the 1864/65 academic year, the commander of the Helsinki Yunker School reorganized the teaching to meet the requirements of the new yunker schools.
