Elitism—especially when based on nothing but caste—can be fatal. This a central lesson of Roger Reese's new book, which traces attempts to reform the Russian Imperial Army from its defeat in the Crimean War to its collapse during the Great War. Reese tells an overwhelmingly pessimistic story of missed opportunities and those who were supposed to lead retreating into their own sense of self-satisfaction. The nobility's self-serving narrative of innate ability and privilege based on noble birth is the fatal flaw that undid an army and an empire. The book tenaciously follows its argument and engages with a number of major debates in the military history of the Russian Empire.

Reese's book is reminiscent of István Deák's classic Beyond Nationalism—drawing a portrait of the Imperial Army, its place in society and how this changed over a period of key transitions. The work represents the exploitation of the explosion of memoirs by ultra-conservatives that had been hidden in Soviet archives and have been published in the last decades due to interest in the Whites as alternative, nationalist path through Russia's twentieth century. The author uses these texts as evidence in what amounts to a four hundred-page indictment of their authors and the system that they fought to defend. (Interestingly, the work relies almost entirely on published sources and the author does not cite any Russian archival work of his own.)

The central tenets of Reese's argument are that the army failed to shift from one based on honor (fealty to the tsar and noble status) to one based on virtue (meritocracy); the nobility was more focused on maintaining its privilege than modernizing the army, officers were never apolitical, and there were essentially two separate armies—the experiences of officers and soldiers were so different as to create almost discrete institutions in what should have been a unified organization. Even as the officer corps expanded to include a majority of non-nobles, the old nobility held the highest positions and mobilized to protect their powerbase. Reese also traces how soldiers’ experience and expectations changed during this period of reform, ultimately concluding that the army failed to adapt to the social realities of the end of serfdom. Officers continued to treat their soldiers as men with no rights or autonomy, even as a growing discourse of citizenship (especially after the 1905 Revolution) and recruitment outside the peasantry increasingly led to draftees who expected the army to recognize their human dignity. Reese's officers emerge as boorish men who are indifferent to the suffering of those under their command, demonstrating little to no interest in military science, and more concerned with living well than waging war. When their own incompetence led to indiscipline, they blamed the changing times and resorted to harsh discipline, including corporal punishment, rather than embrace necessary reforms.

The book is structured in three acts. The first investigates the army as an institution from 1856–1904, sketching its composition and mentality during Dmitrii Miliutin's reforms. The second looks at the army in action in 1878, 1904, and how it reacted to the 1905 revolution and its aftermath. The third act follows the army to its death in the Great War and Russian Revolutions. At times the tome becomes quite repetitive, which could be seen as a feature or a bug. Reese is arguing for successive waves of failed or at least inadequate reform, so it makes sense that history repeats itself in the text. However this sometimes makes for turgid reading. Nevertheless, this structure does make the final collapse all the more powerful, as things finally do change—dramatically and catastrophically.

This is a solid piece of old school military history, laser focused on proving its argument. As such, the book is a very useful reference but is engaging with a very different set of concerns, questions, and literature than the mainstream of Russian imperial and fin-de-siècle European historiography. This is neither a strength nor a weakness, but an important context to evaluate this volume. Reese effectively compares the Russian army with the German, British, and occasionally French militaries to answer the question of why the Russian army and officer corps collapsed in the Great War while other states (even on the losing side) could maintain an esprit-de-corps in the face of the carnage of total war and introduction of mass-society into the ranks. In Reese's interpretation, the Russian state failed to turn the Great War into an existential national moment and ultimately perished as a result.

This book will serve specialists well as a comprehensive English-language treatment of an important topic.