ABSTRACT
Non-Russian soldiers first participated in Russian military campaigns as allies or auxiliaries. The two-century-long efforts of successive Grand Princes of Moscow to unite the numerous Russian city-states to break Mongol domination resulted in the establishment of the modern Russian state by the fifteenth century. Although a policy of mobilizing non-Russian nationalities obviously increased the available military manpower pool, it also presented command and control problems because of historical, linguistic, and cultural differences. Segregating national minorities in their own ethnically distinct units mitigated the language problem and also allowed the deployment of ethnically antagonistic units to suppress rebellions in any given area of the state. The conscription policy remained focused primarily on the Russian population through the eighteenth century. This practice was codified in the Imperial Decree of May 17, 1798, which specified that recruits were to be "native-born Russians." The application of conscription continued to be restricted in practice, however, apparently because of distrust of some non-Slavic ethnic minorities.
