All the Tsar's Men: Russia's General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898-1914
Bibliographic record
Abstract
John W. Steinberg. All the Tsar's Men: Russia's General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898-1914. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010. xvii, 383 pp. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. $60.00, cloth.John Steinberg's monograph is a welcome addition to the study of the Russian Imperial Army in the twilight of the Romanov epoch. Steinberg's main argumentative thrust is that despite achieving a significant level of professionalism, the Russian Imperial General Staff officers, whom Steinberg refers to as the brain -trust of the army, failed to attain political and social autonomy in the Tsarist regime, an autonomy that was necessary to reform the army and prepare it for the upcoming war. Nicholas II and the whole framework of autocracy threw a shadow over the modernizing efforts of dynamic General Staff officers. In a way, the same dilemma faced the activities and the development of the Soviet General Staff after the collapse of Tsarist regime.The book focuses on the education, training, and military performance of the General Staff officers and the evolution of the Nicholas Military Academy. The first chapter puts Russian military professionalism into a broader context. The second chapter examines the education received by members of the Russian General Staff including the intimidating list of exams they faced, the challenges of linking theory to practice, the struggle to outline a unified military doctrine, and the key handicap of strategy being defined by the weak and ignorant Tsar, rather than by officers of the army (p. 68). The next chapter gives examples of the training of the staff officers and competing theoretical visions of the aging General Mikhail Dragomirov and General Aleksei Kuropatkin. Kuropatkin organized massive military manoeuvres at Kursk in 1902, which subsequently revealed major shortcomings in the education and training of Russian officers and soldiers. The manoeuvres also revealed the meddling of the Imperial suite in military affairs. Chapter 4 analyzes the performance of the Russian army in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) in light of the failure of the army to come to grips with many of the problems exposed during the 1902 military manoeuvres. Chapter 5 outlines plans to reform the Imperial Army after the Man chu ri an debacle, and the discussion of whether the Nicholas Academy should be a place of universal or specialized military education. The author points to how most of the reforms undertaken after 1905 failed to refashion the army into a modern military instrument.The next chapter is devoted to education and the curriculum of the military academy. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".