ABSTRACT
In 1905, army units were called out to aid civil authorities 3,893 times, involving about 2,800,000 men. Had those soldiers not been available, or had they refused to fire, the tsarist regime could not have survived the year. To focus only on the army's repressive role is to overlook one of the principal elements of the 1905 Revolution. Because neither Western nor Soviet interpretations of 1905 and 1906 provide a place for military rebellion, giving proper weight to the mutinies entails substantial redrawing of our picture of the revolution as a whole. This chapter demonstrates the need for such a reinterpretation by presenting statistics on the incidence of rebellion within the armed forces, and assessing the impact of such mutinies in 1905 and 1906. There were as many units in 1906 as in 1905 in which discipline disintegrated without a formal mutiny occurring, and in contradistinction to 1905 these undisciplined units included the Guards.
