By 1914 Russia had Europe's largest peacetime army, and 15 million served
The Imperial Russian Army lasted from 1721 to the revolution of 1917. On the eve of the First World War it was the biggest standing army in peacetime Europe, around 1.3 million men, and mobilisation swelled it to 4.5 million. Across the war some 15 million Russians passed through its ranks.
Its roots lie in the seventeenth century. Earlier tsars depended on the streltsy, hereditary musketeers first raised by Ivan the Terrible, who had grown undisciplined, plus peasants called up in wartime. From 1631 Russia began forming regiments of the new order on Western European lines: infantry, dragoons and cavalry known as reiters, often led by foreign officers. By 1681 there were 33 regular regiments of 61,000 men and 25 dragoon and reiter regiments of 29,000, more than half the army.
Peter the Great turned this into a modern force. Conscription arrived in December 1699, filling quotas per settlement, first by households and later by population; the recruits were not volunteers. From 1700 he replaced the streltsy with Western-style regiments modelled on his Guards, issued military regulations in 1716 and set up a College of War in 1718. Unusually, talented commoners could become officers and gain noble rank along the way, a door Catherine the Great later closed.
The empire's forces combined a standing army with a state militia, and the standing army itself included regular troops plus Cossack and Muslim units governed by separate rules. After the Napoleonic Wars the active army held at just over 1 million men, rising to 1.7 million during the Crimean War.
In March 1917, after Nicholas II abdicated, the army swore loyalty to the Provisional Government, though the monarchy's formal status was only settled when a republic was declared that September. Even after the February Revolution most units stayed at the front, weak in attack but intact. The old army only started to fall apart in early 1918.
Source: Imperial Russian Army
