This splendid monograph traverses Muscovy’s final century through the prism of a steadily accruing mound of foreign-language literature Moscow collected on military affairs. Rusakovskiy presents us the fundamental dilemma on gauging a society, in which five percent of the population was literate and in which there was no formal, secular educational system, that nonetheless successfully competed militarily. To what degree were the Russians capable not only of disseminating, reading, and fathoming involved texts that demanded accurate translation, and implementing their practices, but along the way altering their reading culture? Can we arrive at quantitative and qualitative judgments on the extent to which theoretical and instructional literature not only aided but transformed the seventeenth-century Russian military, narrowing the gap between it and certain European military establishments? To what degree might have experience and informal communication superseded book knowledge?
His book divides into three sections on imported treatises, the pivotal role of Foreign Affairs Chancellery (posolʹskii prikaz) translators, and Peter the Great’s engagements with foreign military literature. The archival source base is impressive. Rusakovskiy drew upon no less than twenty-six Russian archival funds in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kazan, nineteen of them from the Moscow Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts. Supplementing them are German, Romanian, Swedish, and US archives; he uses nine languages. Nestled in his extensive bibliography are 123 published primary sources dating back centuries.
Rusakovskiy’s forensic document examination is fine. His great knowledge of Middle Russian paleography is apparent from his conveyance of archival document contents’ meanings and razor-sharp attentiveness to different scribal hands’ identity. He uses bookbinding analysis to help authenticate books’ provenience, and laboriously sorts out the often-times unclear arrival dates in Moscow of foreign, military texts. His understanding of the military terminology of the day is deep, one example being fortification components.
Rusakovskiy injects pertinent biography about the numerous foreign composers of military tracts. Two major authors, Leonhard Fronsperger and Johann Jacobi von Wallhausen, penned the eclectic Kriegꞵbuch and the down-to-earth and respectably disseminated Kriebskunst zu Fuꞵand. These increasingly numerous genre writings attracted the attention of Tsars Mikhail, Aleksei, Fedor, and Peter, some even belatedly like Joseph Boillot’s Artifices de feu. The 1690s saw a sharp rise in the importing and translation of western military treatises thanks to Peter’s unquenchable military fascinations. The readers’ market varied considerably depending upon print-runs and distribution. Readership varied enormously. Some volumes only tsars read, while others members of various groups bought and read. Rusakovskiy commendably supplies a social breakdown for them.
The Russians knew that reformed tactics and operational planning generated promising implications for geo-political outcomes. Staying abreast of western military art meant learning new expressions to plumb close-order drill, new model military innovations, engineering and fortification, explosives, firearms production, logistics, modern cartography, and manuals’ compositions. The sea of Muscovite illiteracy compounded these dauntingly conceptual tasks. One key take-off moment was the introduction in the 1630s of “military learning” (ratnoe or voinskoe uchenie), to undergo subsequent, multiple iterations. Unlike the sixteenth century, Ottoman military arts no longer appealed and there was pushback. Juraj Križanić despised whole-hearted adoption of western ways, including those in the military sphere, though his admitted lack of expertise in military affairs disinclined contemporaries from taking him too seriously.
Rusakovskiy does not slight Russian bureaucracy as a locomotive for change in Muscovite armies. He correctly positions the Foreign Affairs Chancellery as the ganglion collecting and translating the military literature from abroad. The posolʹskii prikaz’s largely foreign-born translation corps adeptly translated Dutch and German, used in realms the Russians regarded as the most militarily advanced.
In comparison to the infantry and cavalry, fortification and siegecraft theory and strategy seem not to have figured much in the literature the author examines. There was no Muscovite figure like Vauban, for the simple reason that the Russians at this time did not need their own military intellectuals, assuming they could have trained them. It was the various chancelleries that discharged fortress construction planning, funding, and construction, a reminder that Muscovy’s civil administration subsumed functions discharged elsewhere by non-bureaucratic public and private spheres. The government hired foreigners, whether as mercenaries or fortress construction designers like Antoine de Laval in the 1690s.
Some comments on improvements are as follows. Authorial awareness of the service class structure in Muscovy seems weak; using “aristocracy” and “gentry” is misleading. Observation and verbal exchange with mercenaries in the field as well as among Moscow-based Russians Rusakovskiy feels had the upper hand over dissemination of book knowledge. Although a qualitative assessment is inherently impossible to prove, he is probably right. What counted for inserting western military innovations were the several chancelleries and their informed state secretaries and clerks.
The Muscovites, in one classic example of the “Russian road,” achieved military progress, even parity, despite not knowing of or using Hindu-Arabic numbers, trigonometry, and improved measuring instruments. His is a valuable contribution on the late Muscovite and early Petrine military and an absorbing description of how intellectual stimulation did assist in Early Modern social change.
