ABSTRACT
A colonel in the Tsarist army by the name of A. Rittikh wrote in 1893 that service in the army turned ignorant peasants into civilized human beings. The peasant conscript's military career began "with a bath and a haircut", then proceded to "cleanliness and neatness in dress". At the same time, conscripts were "taught to speak, look, turn and move with military precision". One immediate consequence of reducing the conscript's term of service was that military training had to be greatly compressed: the leisurely development of military skills possible in the pre-reform army had to give way to more intensive instruction. It is reasonable to ask how these reforms affected peasant conscripts. Furthermore, in the late 19th century Dragomirov's precepts on training were gospel: soldiers were not simply to be drilled; they were to be made to internalize military discipline, to think about and understand the rationale behind the military system.
