Russian Officers and Politics during the Duma Monarchy Review of “Ofitserstvo volnuetsya…”: Rossiiskii ofitserskii korpus i publichnaya politika v 1905–1914 godakh [“The officers are worried...”: Russian officer corps and public policy in 1905–1914], by A.Yu. Fomin (Moscow: Nauka, 2024)

The review considers a monograph by A. Fomin, a researcher at the Department of Modern Russian History of St Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The monograph examines the political views of officers and their involvement in the country’s socio-political life during the Duma monarchy. The reviewer notes the author’s innovative approach to exploring a topic that has remained very little studied in historiography. The source base for the monograph under review includes military periodicals from 1905–14 along with related clerical records and memoirs. The author considers the history of Voennyi Golos [Military voice], Russia’s first private independent public military newspaper, and analyzes its political stance and influence on the officer corps. Considerable attention is paid to the activities of Staff Captain P. Mikhailov, who was sent by the military department to the State Duma to cover its work in the army press, and reveals his role in the genesis of the theory of “military conspiracy” on the eve of the February Revolution. A. Fomin highlights the beginnings of propaganda work in the army during the Duma monarchy. The review emphasizes the significant contribution of the monograph to understanding the participation of career officers of the Russian Imperial Army in the country’s political life during the pre-revolutionary period.

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