ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the Russian army as a socio-economic and political institution—the most important in the land after the autocracy itself. The influence of the French Revolution on this body of many hundreds of thousands of men has been little studied, and such work as there is suffers from distortion. Some historians, both Soviet and western, have argued that Russia was affected directly and immediately by radical ideas, that the country should be seen as part of an 'Atlantic' zone caught up in the wave of revolutionary events. Russia had to expand her army greatly to meet the revolutionary and Napoleonic challenge. The Soviet historian E.A. Prokof'iev has convincingly argued that Decembrists stood for a citizen army in which all able-bodied males should serve the reformed state—an idea clearly borrowed from the French revolutionaries, but not achieved in Russia until 1918.
