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Fear: Soldiers and Emotion in Early Twentieth-Century Russian Military Psychology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Jan Plamper
Jan Plamper*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin
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Abstract

This article provides an analysis of the locus of fear in military psychology in late imperial Russia. After the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 Revolution, the debate coalesced around two poles: “realists” (such as the military psychiatrist Grigorii Shumkov) argued that fear was natural, while “romantics” upheld the image of constitutionally fearless soldiers. Jan Plamper begins by identifying the advent of modern warfare (foreshadowed by the Crimean War) and its engendering of more and different fears as a key cause for a dramatic increase in fear-talk among Russia's soldiers. He links these fears to literature, which offered—most prominentiy in Lev Tolstoi's Sevastopol Sketches (1855)—some of the vocabulary soldiers could use to express their fears. Mikhail Dragomirov's fear-centered military theory during the Great Reforms was the next milestone. Plamper closes by sketching the history of fear after World War I, from Iosif Stalin's penal battalions to the rehabilitation of military psychology under Nikita Khrushchev and beyond.

Type
Emotional Turn? Feelings in Russian History and Culture
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 68 , Issue 2 , Summer 2009 , pp. 259 - 283
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2009

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References

Research for this article was supported by Sonderforschungsbereich 437 “Kriegserfahrungen: Krieg und Gesellschaft in der Neuzeit” at die University of Tubingen. It was written in 2007-08 during a fellowship at Historisches Kolleg, Munich, and revised at Ute Frevert's Center for the History of Emotions at Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, with generous support from a Dilthey Fellowship (Fritz Thyssen Foundation). My greatest debt is to Kim (Jacqueline) Friedlander for extensive comments on substance and style, and for letting me read her dissertation before it became publicly available. For their comments I would also like to thank Dietrich Beyrau, Frank Biess, Ol'ga Edel'man, Jochen Hellbeck, Susan Morrissey, Monique Scheer, Benjamin Schenk, Irina Sirotkina, Mark D. Steinberg, and Glennys Young. The two epigraphs are taken from [V P.?] Prasalov, “NeskolTco slov k stat'e V. Polianskogo—'Moral'nyi element v oblasti fortifikatsii,'” Voennyi sbornik 54, no. 5 (1911): 89, and Dmitrevskii, A. [M.], “Vospitanie voina mozhet byt’ tol'ko v styde nakazaniia, a ne v strakhe nakazaniia,” Voennyi sbornik 56, no. 10 (1913): 100 Google Scholar.

1. Petrov, Mikhail, 1812 god: Vospominaniia voinov russkoi armii; iz sobraniia Otdela Pis'mennykh Istochnikov Gosudarstvennogo Istoricheskogo Muzeia, eds. Petrov, F. A. et al. (Moscow, 1991), 180 Google Scholar. Thanks to Ingrid Schierle for pointing me to this source.

2. Ibid., 183. Sorevnovanie k chesti at this point indeed signified “striving for honor“ (rather than “ambition“).

3. Voitolovskii, L. N., Po sledam voiny: Pokhodnye zapiski. 1914-1917 (Leningrad, 1925), 69 Google Scholar. The opening of the discursive gates regarding soldierly fear was accompanied by professions made by soldiers, officers, and doctors that fear escaped all attempts at verbalization. Consider, for instance, diis Russian soldier who suffered a surprise attack by an enemy soldier in World War I: “He attacked me from behind, and there are no words to describe my fear.” Fedortschenko, Sofja, Der Russe redet: Aufzeichnungen nach dem Stenogramm, trans. Eliasberg, Alexander (Munich, 1923), 19–20 Google Scholar.

4. On the “boundaries of what could be said,” see foundational texts of Begriffsgeschichte, such as Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Tribe, Keith (Cambridge, Mass., 1985)Google Scholar; Koselleck, , The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Presner, Todd Samuel et al. (Stanford, 2002)Google Scholar; and Steinmetz, Willibald, Das Sagbare und das Machbare: Zum Wandel politischer Handlungsspielräume. England 1780-1867 (Stuttgart, 1993)Google Scholar.

5. Medical case records are the major lacuna in the documentary record; they only become available for the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-1940 and are used in the publications of Zhuravlev, D. A., such as “Osnovnye etapy razvitiia gosudarstvennogo voennogo zdravookhraneniia Rossii,” Voenno-meditsinskii zhurnal, no. 2 (2004): 4–12 Google Scholar.

6. The literature on shell shock is considerable and still growing. For a study of multiple countries, see Micale, Mark S. and Lerner, Paul, Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930 (Cambridge, Eng., 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Russia, see Astashov, A. B., “Voina kak kul'turnyi shok: Analiz psikhopatologicheskogo sostoianiia russkoi armii v Pervuiu mirovuiu voinu,” in Seniavskaia, E. S., ed., Voenno-istoricheskaia antologiia: Ezhegodnik (Moscow, 2002), 268-81Google Scholar; Lee, Jacqueline [Kim] Friedlander, “Psychiatrists and Crisis in Russia, 1880-1917” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2007)Google Scholar; Friedlander, , “Approaching War Trauma: Russian Psychiatrists Look at Batdefield Breakdown during World War I,” Newsletter of the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (University of California, Berkeley) 21, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 3–4, 19-22Google Scholar; Fridlender, Kim [Jacqueline Friedlander], “Neskol'ko aspektov shellshock'a v Rossii, 1914-1916,” in Smirnov, N. N. et al., eds., Rossiia i pervaia mirovaia voina (materialy mezhdunarodnogo nauchnogo koUokviuma) (St. Petersburg, 1999), 315-25Google Scholar; Merridale, Catherine, “The Collective Mind: Trauma and Shell-Shock in Twentieth-Century Russia, “Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 1 (January 2000): 39–55 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Seniavskaia, Elena S., Psikhologiia voiny v XXveke: Istoricheskii opyt Rossii (Moscow, 1999)Google Scholar; Sirotkina, Irina, “The Politics of Etiology: Shell Shock in the Russian Army, 1914-1918,” in Brintlinger, Angela and Vinitsky, Ilya, eds., Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture (Toronto, 2007), 117-29Google Scholar; Phillips, Laura L., “Gendered Dis/ability: Perspectives from the Treatment of Psychiatric Casualties in Russia's Early Twentieth- Century Wars,” Social History of Medicine 20, no. 2 (August 2007): 333-50CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. For Britain, see Leese, Peter, Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers oftheFirst World War (New York, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For France, see Roudebush, Marc, “A Battle of Nerves: Hysteria and Its Treatment in France during World War I” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1995)Google Scholar; Michl, Susanne, Im Dienste des “Volkskorpers“: Deutsche und französische Ärzte im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen, 2007), pt. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Germany, see Lerner, Paul Frederick, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890-1930 (Ithaca, 2003)Google Scholar.

7. On the 1874 military reform and Russian mass conscription, see Benecke, Werner, Militar, Reform und Gesellschaft im Zarenreich: Die Wehrpflicht in Russland 1874-1914 (Paderborn, 2006)Google Scholar. One might also emphasize that in the creation of the national army, service in this army and death for the nation become endowed with different meaning. If in armies of paid mercenaries, fear forms part of an act of economic free will, much as a miner's death is part of his autonomous economic decision and therefore silenced, the paid soldier does not talk about his economic decision. Only once this risk becomes not his own but part of a decision made by a larger body—the nation—can a discursive space be opened for talking about it.

8. This is inspired by Robin, Corey, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (New York, 2004), 11–12 Google Scholar. One might also point to the emergence of pacifism in the nineteenth century. As soon as a choice other than war became a thinkable way to solve conflicts, the hardships of warfare and its ever-looming end, death—as well as the attendant fear—became options.

9. As Joanna Bourke put it, “psychiatrists, clinical psychologists and social workers were highly valued for ‘curing’ men who experienced stress in killing. These social scientists also provided crucial changes to the military terminology: ‘cowardice’ (with its accompanying need for execution or punishment) became ‘shell shock’ and then ‘anxiety states' (which called for treatment, albeit stigmatizing).” Bourke, Joanna, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (New York, 1999), 82 Google Scholar. The locus classicus for the interiorization thesis is Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Howard, Richard (New York, 1965)Google Scholar, but also Foucault, , Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York, 1977)Google Scholar.

10. See Brooks, Jeffrey, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton, 1985)Google Scholar; McReynolds, Louise, The News under Russia's Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press (Princeton, 1991)Google Scholar. The first Russian crime story (detektiv) appeared in 1866. See Franz, Norbert, Moskauer Mordgeschichte: Der russisch-sowjetische Krimi 1953-1983 (Mainz, 1988), 67 Google Scholar. For the establishment of a similar link between the rise of the genre of gothic novels and new fear modes, see Fisher, Philip, The Vehement Passions (Princeton, 2002), 9–11 Google Scholar.

11. On the connection between Stendhal and Tolstoi, see Schwarz, Gottfried, Krieg und Roman: Untersuchungen zu Stendhal, Hugo, Tolstoj, Zola und Simon (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), esp. 85Google Scholar. Also see Manning, Clarence A., “The Significance of Tolstoy's War Stories,“ PMLA 52, no. 4 (December 1937): 1161-69 (I am grateful to Benjamin Schenk for directing me to this literature)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Tolstoi's Sevastopol’ Sketches were widely received. To get an inkling of how shocking (because realistic) die description of soldiers’ emodons seemed to contemporaries, consider writer Aleksei Pisemskii's letter to his friend, playwright Aleksandr Ostrovskii, about “Sevastopol’ in May“: “Horror takes hold of you, your hair stands on end just from imagining what is happening there. The story is written in such a relentlessly honest manner that reading it becomes almost unbearable. Definitely read it!” Pisemskii, A. F., “Pis'mo A. N. Ostrovskomu ot 26 iulia 1855 goda,” in A. F. Pisemskii: Materialy i issledovaniia (Moscow, 1936), 82 Google Scholar.

12. Tolstoy, Leo, The Cossacks and Other Stories, trans. McDuff, David and Foote, Paul (New York, 2006), 196 Google Scholar.

13. Ibid., 196-97.

14. Ibid., 242.

15. Ibid., 231-32, 326.

16. Ibid., 199. On Angstlust, see Kiesow, Rainer Maria and Korte, Martin, eds., EGB: Emotionales Gesetzbuch. Dekalogder Gefühle (Cologne, 2005), 34–38.Google Scholar

17. Tolstoy, , The Cossacks and Other Stories, 254-55Google Scholar.

18. This is probably due to the nonmilitary disciplinary backgrounds of most historians of psychiatry. There are exceptions to this downplaying of the military's role. See Friedlander, “Psychiatrists and Crisis in Russia, 1880-1917“; Wanke, Paul, Russian/Soviet Military Psychiatry, 1904-1945 (London, 2005)Google Scholar; Gabriel, Richard A., Soviet Military Psychiatry: The Theory and Practice of Coping with Battle Stress (New York, 1986)Google Scholar. These accounts also differ from the story of professsionalization Julie Vail Brown tells in her pioneering “The Professionalization of Russian Psychiatry: 1857-1911” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1981).

19. This is based above all on Friedlander, “Psychiatrists and Crisis in Russia, 1880- 1917.” Also see Brown, “The Professionalization of Russian Psychiatry: 1857-1911“; Gabriel, Soviet Military Psychiatry; Sirotkina, Irina, Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880-1930 (Baltimore, 2002)Google Scholar. On psychology, see Daniel Philip Todes, “From Radicalism to Scientific Convention: Biological Psychology in Russia from Sechenov to Pavlov” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1981); Seniavskaia, Psikhologiia voiny v XX veke. On psychoanalysis, see Etkind, Aleksandr, Eros nevozmozhnogo: Istoriia psikhoanaliza v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1993)Google Scholar; and Miller, Martin A., Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (New Haven, 1998)Google Scholar.

20. These roots in internal medicine led to the curious fact that such medical journals as Voenno-meditsinskii zhurnal continued to feature psychiatric articles under a rubric of “internal diseases” well into the twentieth century and long after psychiatry had become an established branch of medicine.

21. This is attested by its move out of the confines of purely medical and psychiatric “scientific” journals into the premier military journal, Voennyi sbornik, and by its influence on other branches of knowledge and the arts—literature, painting, and theater. On this, see Etkind, Eros nevozmozhnogo, and Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius.

22. For the number of shell-shocked soldiers, see Wanke, , Russian/Soviet Military Psychiatry, 18 Google Scholar. For the quote by the American military psychiatrist, see Richards, R. L., “Mental and Nervous Diseases in the Russo-Japanese War,” Military Surgeon 26 (1910): 177 Google Scholar. The western reception of die Russian experience with mental illness in the Russo-Japanese War was based not only on the exchange of expert knowledge but also on the treatment of Russian officers in German psychiatric sanatoria. On this, see Hofer, Hans-Georg, Nervenschwäche und Krieg: Modernitätskritik und Krisenbewältigung in der österreichischen Psychiatrie (1880-1920) (Vienna, 2004), 205 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Russo-Japanese War is often regarded as World War Zero but in fact many wars have been tagged the “first” modern war (most recently the Napoleonic wars), see Bell, David A., The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston, 2007)Google Scholar. Thus the definition of what constitutes a modern war and, even if one agrees on the criteria, the designation of war, is exceedingly dif ficult as the boundaries are fluid. For a statistics-based argument that premodern wars were more modern than modern wars if the number of involved civilians is the criterion, see Langewiesche, Dieter, “Eskalierte die Kriegsgewalt im Laufe der Geschichte?” in Baberowski, Jorg, ed., Moderne Zeiten? Krieg, Revolution und Gewalt im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2006), 12–36 Google Scholar.

23. According to Angela Brintlinger, “they also aggressively wrote their own history and, by the late nineteenth century, constructing those histories had become a primary source of their legitimacy.” Thus history or, rather, a lineage psychiatrists identified for themselves was meant to provide stability for a profession that still felt insecure about itself. See Brintlinger, Angela, “Writing about Madness: Russian Attitudes toward Psyche and Psychiatry, 1887-1907,” in Brintlinger, and Vinitsky, , eds., Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture, 173 Google Scholar.

24. See Shcheglov, A., “Materialy k izucheniiu dushevnykh rasstroistv v armii,” Voenno- meditsinskii zhurnal 77, no. 11 (1899): 863 (Nasse), 870 (Arndt)Google Scholar; Shaikevich, M. O., “K voprosu o dushevnykh zabolevaniiakh v voiske v sviazi s Russko-Iaponskoi voinoi,“ Voenno-meditsinskiizhurnal 85, no. 6 (1907): 276-92Google Scholar; Shaikevich, , “Kvoprosu o dushevnykh zabolevaniiakh v voiske v sviazi s Russko-Iaponskoi voinoi,” Voenno-meditsinskii zhurnal 85, no. 9 (1907): 86 (fear as a shorthand for a panoply of pathogenic factors)Google Scholar.

25. See, e.g., Gadziatskii, F. Kh., “Dushevnye rasstroistva v sviazi s politicheskimi sobytiiami v Rossii,” Voenno-meditsinskii zhurnal, 86 no. 9 (1908): 97 Google Scholar.

26. Shumkov, G., “Filosofskaia pokornost’ sud'be i boleznennoe malodushie,” Voennyi sbornikbl, no. 1 (1914): 109 Google Scholar.

27. Chetyrkin, Roman, Opytvoenno-meditsinskoipolilsii, Hipravila k sokhraneniiu zdorov'ia russkikh soldat v sukhoputnoi sluzhbe (St. Petersburg, 1834), 66 Google Scholar. Polilsiia in the title signified early modern Policey rather than the contemporary “police.” The very first mentioning of strakhwas a case unrelated to our concerns, namely a description of a “negro [negr]” who lost consciousness in London when lying on the operating table for aneurysm and was found dead after the operation, literally as a result of “fear.” “Deistvie strakha,” Voennomeditsinskii zhurnal2 (1823): 285-86.

28. Chetyrkin, , Opyt voenno-meditsinskoi politsii, 62 Google Scholar.

29. Ibid., 66. Emphasis in the original.

30. On organy chuvstv and obman chuvstv, see, e.g., Gadziatskii, F. Kh., “O vliianii dushevnobol'nykh drug na druga,” Voenno-meditsinskii zhurna, 177 no. 12 (1898): 1555, 1567Google Scholar.

31. Kislov, A., Voennaia nravstvennost’ (St. Petersburg, 1838), 32, 79, 47Google Scholar. Consider also die rich lexicon of an ideal soldier's emotional traits, presented on a mere two pages: nenavist’ towards the enemy, zapal'chivost', smelost', revnost’ k dolzhnosti, chuvstvo obiazannosti. Ibid., 72-73. The taxonomy of feelings, to be sure, is still confused and replete with non sequiturs: despite the religiosity and patriotism with which soldiers are supposedly universally equipped by birth, the decisive, superordinate feeling of “good nature” or “virtue“ (velikodushie) is variable according to soldier, which is why, when faced widi danger, not all soldiers exhibit “fearlessness” (neustrashimost1) and some fall prey to the worst of all fasoldierly feelings, “timidity” (robost1). See ibid., 105-6, 58, 67-68, 77-78. Kislov also distinguishes between khrabrost', which he considers an innate quality, and muzhestvo, which he describes as a product of training. See ibid., 69-70.

32. See ibid., 92, 90, 98. On honor and the duel, see also Frevert, Ute, Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel (Cambridge, Eng., 1995)Google Scholar; Reyfman, Irina, Ritualized Violence Russian Style: The Duel in Russian Culture and Literature (Stanford, 1999)Google Scholar. The quote by Petrov from the War of 1812 cited at the beginning of this article is a typical expression of this culture of honor. On the pre-Petrine culture of honor, see Kollmann, Nancy Shields, By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca, 1999)Google Scholar.

33. Dragomirov came not from psychiatry but from military theory, and yet he belongs in this genealogy because military psychologists (not so much psychiatrists, but the borders between psychologists and psychiatrists were fluid anyway, as we have seen) learned and cited from him liberally.

34. See Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. (New York, 1910-1911), 8:466.

35. Dragomirow, Michail Iwanowitsch, “Ausbildungund Erziehung,” in Dragomirow, Michail Iwanowitsch, Gesammelte Aufsdtze: Neue Folge, trans. von Tettau, Freiherr (Hannover, 1891), 19 Google Scholar. On Dragomirov, see also Sanborn, Joshua, “The Short Course for Murder: How Soldiers and Criminals Learn to Kill,” in Athens, Lonnie and Ulmer, jeffery T., eds., Violent Acts and Violentization: Assessing, Applying, and Developing Lonnie Athens’ Theories (Oxford, 2003), 109 Google Scholar. To be sure, the axiom of a survival instinct as a soldier's most basic feeling has a longer genealogy, going back to Aleksandr Suvorov and Carl von Clausewitz.

36. Dragomirov, M.I., “Podgotovka voisk v mirnoe vremia (vospitanie i obrazovanie),“ in Dragomirov, M. I., Izbrannye trudy: Voprosy vospitaniia i obucheniia voisk (Moscow, 1956), 625 Google Scholar.

37. “The express enemy of self-denial is self-preservation. [ … ] In fact we are not dealing with two different forces, only with two poles of the same power: the self-denial of the individual is the precondition for the self-preservation of the masses.” Dragomirow, “Ausbildung und Erziehung,” 19. This dialectic proved highly influential and had cameo appearances as, inter alia, the instinct of self-preservation versus patriotism in V. Zaglukhinskii, “Psikhika boitsov vo vremia srazheniia,” Voennyi sbornik 54, no. 1 (1911): 87.

38. Dragomirow, “Ausbildung und Erziehung,” 31. But according to Dragomirov and in line with the liberalism of the Reform era, the fear that officers inspired in soldiers could also cause harmful soldierly fear. Only just, law-abiding behavior on the part of officers could keep this particular fear of soldiers in check: “Is there anything we should scorn more in the soldier than the kind of fear that paralyzes spirit and will? This is why soldiers must be led in such a way that the feeling of fear can develop in their souls as rarely as possible, for he who fears his own men, is taught to fear the enemy, too.” Dragomirov, , “Podgotovka voisk v mirnoe vremia,” 605 Google Scholar.

39. This was, at heart, a conservative view. In a similar vein, forty years later one conservative doctor argued that Russia was lucky to boast a 50-plus percent illiteracy rate among its soldiers, because this guarded against the corrosive effects of education, which invariably had such negative consequences as critical attitudes toward officers. See Zaglukhinskii, , “Psikhika boitsov vo vremia srazheniia,” 89 Google Scholar.

40. See also Menning, Bruce W., Bayonets before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861-1914 (Bloomington, 1992)Google Scholar.

41. “Emotional regime” is from William Reddy, who defines it as “the set of normative emotions and the official rituals, practices, and emotives that express and inculcate them; a necessary underpinning of any stable political regime.” Reddy, William M., The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, Eng., 2001), 129 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is possible that other armies developed similar emotional regimes; the role of elan in the French army is worth studying from this perspective (I owe this point to Chad Bryant).

42. Quoted from Golovin, N. N., Issledovanie boia: Issledovanie deiatel'nosti i svoistv cheloveka kak boitsa (St. Petersburg, 1907), 52 Google Scholar. Note also Skobelev's pointing to his heart; on “soldier's heart,” see Howell, Joel D., “'Soldier's Heart': The Redefinition of Heart Disease and Specialty Formation in Early Twentieth-Century Great Britain,” in Cooter, Rober, Harrison, Mark, and Sturdy, Steve, eds., War, Medicine and Modernity (Stroud, Eng., 1998), 85–105 Google Scholar. Another general, Petr Parensov, confessed after the Russo-Turkish War: “It was only then that I noticed Turks, only Turks, who were closing in on me from all sides; there were none of our own soldiers in the redoubt. I was all alone. I admit, terror took hold of me [Priznaius', uzhas okhvatil menia].” P. D. Parensov, Iz proshlogo: Vospominaniia ofitsera General'nogo Shtaba (St. Petersburg, 1901-1908), 2:135, quoted in Golovin, Issledovanie boia, 141.

43. See the summary of “O. Kots's” 1873 article in Berliner klinische Wochenschrift, “O vliianii strakha na razvitie bolezni,” Voenno-meditsinskii zhurnal 51, no. 9 (1873): 10-11. In their later historical efforts, Russian psychiatrists came up with a causal link between fear and nervous disorders that dated as far back as Jean Étienne Dominique Esquirol, Johann Christian August Heinroth, and Karl Christian Hille, Allgemeine und specielle Pathologie und Therapie der Seelenstorungen (Leipzig, 1827). See Shcheglov, , “Materialy k izucheniiu dushevnykh rasstroistv v armii,” 862 Google Scholar.

44. For the avtoreferat, see Ozeretskovskii, A., “Ob isterii v voiskakh,” Voenno-meditsinskii zhurnal 69, no. 11 (1891): 371 Google Scholar. Ozeretskovskii was later often presented as the Russian discoverer of male hysteria. See, for example, Pospelov, , “K voprosu ob isterii u soldat,“ Voenno-meditsinskii zhurnal 76, no. 8 (1898): 1138 Google Scholar.

45. Ozeretskovskii, , “Ob isterii v voiskakh,” 371 Google Scholar.

46. See la. Gorshkov, P., “K kazuistike psikhozov sifiliticheskogo proiskhozhdeniia,“ Voenno-meditsinskiizhurna l76, no. 8 (1898): 1168 Google Scholar; Erikson, E., “Dva sluchaia tiazheloi isterii napochve samovnusheniia,” Voenno-meditsinskii zhurnal 80, no. 11 (1902): 4185 (“Incidentally, the patient himself traces his [fits], not to his head injury or wounds, but to strong fright [ne ushibu golovy i raneniiam, a sil'nomu ispugu]“).Google Scholar

47. Enval'd, M. V, “Dve doktriny boevogo vospitaniia voisk,” Voennyi sbornik 54, no. 1 (1911): 101-6Google Scholar.

48. Infamously, in Germany the minority opinion of psychiatrist Max Nonne and others that the war merely acted as a catalyst for preexisting psychological disorders and the state was thus freed from its monetary obligation to shell-shocked soldiers was elevated to majority status at the September 1916 military psychiatry congress in Munich, whereas the majority opinion of Hermann Oppenheim that the war itself was the cause of mental disease and hence the state responsible for pension claims was relegated to a marginal position. On this, see Lerner, Hysterical Men. It is also important to note that Russia never had the same kind of prolonged debates about compensation for industrial injuries that sowed the ground for German doctors’ attitudes during World War I.

49. See, e.g., Sh—[ = most likely Grigorii Shumkov], “'Za’ i ‘protiv’ voennoi psikhologii,“ Voennyi sbornikbb, no. 8 (1912): 72.

50. Ibid., 76. In line widi die liberalism of the military psychiatric establishment, Shumkov at times seemed to believe in straightforward enlightenment: If doctors only properly explained to soldiers that their physiological signs of fear before combat were normal, soldiers would not consider themselves sick and would condnue fighting. “Sometimes before a battle, during the waiting period when die fighting has yet to start, about 6-8 percent are incapacitated, because they seriously believe they are sick. These are honest people, not shirkers, who are convinced that they have fallen ill (heart, breathing, involuntary defecation). But dieir illness is the product of ignorance about the psycho-physiological processes in dieir agitated organisms [pri volneniiakh].” Ibid., 81. Shumkov's liberalism might also stem from his peasant background. See G. E. Shumkov, Vosproizvedenie dvigatel'nykh razdrazhenii aktivnogo kharaktera v zavisimosti ot istekshego vremeni. (Eksperimental'no-psikhologicheskoe issledovanie po metodu ob“ektivnoi psikhologii). Dissertatsiia na steperi doktora meditsiny. Iz psikhologicheskoi laboratorii Akademika V. M. Bekhtereva (St. Petersburg, 1909), 163.1 am grateful to Kim Friedlander for this source.

51. Sh—, “'Za’ i ‘protiv’ voennoi psikhologii,” 80. A. Dmitrevskii basically concurred with Shumkov's views but begged to differ in one aspect: yes, all soldiers experience fear and it is important diat they know it; however, not its expression but its suppression must be encouraged, because if expressed, fear becomes like a virus and infects all other soldiers—Dmitrevskii demanded “that nobody express his fear, because diis is awfully infectious.” Dmitrevskii, A., “'Za’ i ‘protiv’ psikhologii g-na Sh-a,” Voennyi sbornik 55, no. 11 (1912): 96 Google Scholar.

52. Consider, for instance, the elaborate catalogue of soldiers’ emotions in Sh—, “Emotsii strakha, pechali, radosti i gneva v period ozhidaniia boia,” Voennyi sbornik 57, no. 2 (1914): 109-18.

53. Shumkov, , “Dushevnoe sostoianie voinov v ozhidanii boia. (Po nabliudeniiam ofitserov). Voenno-psikhologicheskii etiud,” Voennyi sbornik 56, no. 5 (1913): 100. Emphasis in the originalGoogle Scholar.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid., 90.

56. Ibid., 100.

57. Ibid., 101.

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid., 102.

62. Druzhinin, K. M., Issledovanie dushevnogo sostoianiia voinov v raznykh sluchaiakh boevoi obstanovkipo opytu russko-iaponskoi voiny 1904-05gg. (St. Petersburg, 1910), 4–6 Google Scholar.

63. Ibid., 14.

64. Ibid., 60.

65. Ibid., 29.

66. Ibid., 17.

67. In 1910 Vladimir Polianskii announced in a footnote that his colleague, Shumkov, was working on a taxonomy of fear: “The doctor and psychiatrist G. E. Shumkov in one of the meetings of the ‘military psychology’ section of the Obshchestvo revinitelei voennykh znanii aired an approximate classification of the term of the emotion of year according to its manifestation in the human organism.” Polianskii, , “Moral'nyi element v oblasti fortifikatsii,“ Voennyi sbornik 53, no. 11 (1910): note on 136Google Scholar. Emphasis in the original.

68. See Rezanov, A. S., Armiia i tolpa: Opyt voennoi psikhologii (Warsaw, 1910)Google Scholar; Shumkov, G. E., “'Vzdragivanie’ liudei pri deistvii artileriiskogo ognia (Voenno-psikhologicheskie etiudy),” Voennyi sbornik 57, no. 12 (1914): 59–92 Google Scholar; Shumkov, G., “Chuvstvo trevogi, kak dominiruiushaia emotsiia v period ozhidaniia boia,” Voennyi sbornik 56, no. 11 (1913): 95–100 Google Scholar; Dmitrevskii, A., “Trevozhnoe ozhidanie—boiazlivoe ili opasnoe ozhidanie,” Voennyi sbornik 57, no. 1 (1914): 103-6Google Scholar; Shumkov, G., “O vydelenii chuvstva trevogi v samostoiatel'noe chuvstvo,” Voennyi sbornik 57, no. 4 (1914): 121-26Google Scholar; Shumkov, G., “Psikhika boitsov pod pervym artieleriiskim obstrelom (Voenno-psikhologicheskii etiud),“ Voennyi sbornik 57, no. 7 (1914): 121 Google Scholar; Shumkov, G., “Ugnetenie psikhiki voinov artieleriiskim ognem (Voenno-psikhologicheskii etiud),” Voennyi sbornik 57, no. 8 (1914): 105 Google Scholar; Shumkov, G., “Rol’ chuvstva trevogi v psikhologii mass, kak nachala, niveliruiushchego individuarnosti,” Voennyi sbornik 57, no. 9 (1914): 85–94 Google Scholar.

69. Indeed, the discussion about true heroism often centered on the distribution of medals like the Order of St. George. See, for example, Dmitrevskii, A., “Mozhno igrat’ na slabykh strunakh, no ne vospityvat'v nikh,” Voennyi'sbornik 57, no. 4 (1914): 117-18Google Scholar.

70. As one author put it, there is such a thing as innate bravery, but “natural bravery is seldom sensible bravery.” Nikulishchev, B., “Moral'nyi element v oblasti voennogo iskusstva (Opyt psikhologicheskogo issledovaniia),” Voennyi sbornik 55, no. 1 (1912): 14 Google Scholar.

71. Shumkov, G. E., “Geroi terpeniia: Voenno-psikhologicheskii etiud,” Voennyi sbornik 54, no. 2 (1911): 148-50Google Scholar.

72. Zaglukhinskii, , “Psikhika boitsov vo vremia srazheniia,” 87 Google Scholar.

73. Ibid., 86. By “soul” he had in mind a transcendental, religiously infused entity.

74. Druzhinin, , Issledovanie dushevnogo sostoianiia voinov, 42 Google Scholar.

75. Polianskii, , “Moral'nyi element v oblasti fortifikatsii,” 101 Google Scholar.

76. Ben Shephard has astutely observed about novelist Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy (and the study that served as its inspiration, Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, andEnglish Culture, 1830-1980 [New York, 1986], chap. 7) that we tend to overestimate the importance of humane psychiatrists, such as Rivers, the hero of Barker's novels. See Shephard, Ben, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 109 Google Scholar.

77. See, e.g., Prasalov, “Neskol'ko slov k stat'e V. Polianskogo,” 85-95; continued in Voennyisbornik54, no. 7 (1911): 87-104.

78. This is not to say that the suggested hardline solutions lacked procedural, legal regularity. Much of the discussion focused on forensic medicine, especially the definition of recruits as unfit for military service due to mental feebleness according to paragraph 24, lit. A of the statute military psychiatrists operated with. In a similar vein, imperial Russian officials often ascribed suicides of serfs to fear of (corporeal) punishment by their landlords. See Morrissey, Susan K., Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 2006), chaps. 3-5, esp. 126-27Google Scholar.

79. Butovskii, N., O sposobakh obucheniia i vospitaniia sovremennogo soldata, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg, 1888)Google Scholar, quoted in Shumkov, , “Chto delat’ s porochnym elementom v armii?“ Voennyi sbornik 54, no. 11 (1911): 112 Google Scholar. This was not yet dedovshchina, which emerged later.

80. Shumkov, , “Chto delat’ s porochnym elementom v armii?” 116 Google Scholar.

81. Dmitrevskii, “Vospitanie voina mozhet byt’ tol'ko v styde nakazaniia, a ne v strakhe nakazaniia,” 100. Emphasis in the original. Also see Dmitrevskii, , “Mozhno igrat’ na slabykh strunakh,” 116 Google Scholar.

82. In one author's words, “In periods of imminent combat people turn into machines and, if properly guided, are capable of showing such elemental force, such examples of total self-sacrifice and great heroism, that no obstacles can stop them on their path. In these minutes the quality of leaders becomes ever more important, for unconscious activism, automatism, also has a negative side: under the influence of some negative factor the elemental pushing forward can reverse its direction and turn into running back that is just as hard to stop.Yet the example of the leader, the brave leader, spreads as quickly as a psychological infection (suggestibility is heightened) and can again provoke a forward rush.“Polianskii, “Moral'nyi element v oblasti fortifikatsii,” 101-2. Such books as Rezanov's Armiia i tolpaand N. A. Uchach-Ogorovich's Psikhologiia tolpy i armii (Kiev, 1911) are indicative of the new importance of crowd theory. Also see Beer, Daniel, “'Microbes of the Mind': Moral Contagion in Late Imperial Russia,“ Journal of Modern History 79, no. 3 (September 2007): 531-71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beer, , Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880-1930 (Ithaca, 2008)Google Scholar.

83. On rumors as viruses in the batde of Mukden, see Zaglukhinskii, , “Psikhika boitsov vo vremia srazheniia,” 98 Google Scholar.

84. Dmitrevskii, A., “Da, voin (rytsar’) bez strakha i upreka—dostizhimyi ideal (Otvet g-nu Sh-vu),” Voennyi sbornik 56, no. 6 (1913): 99 Google Scholar.

85. Dmitrevskii, A., “Logikabolgarskikh uspekhovi… poeziia russkoi chuvstvitel'nosti,“ Voennyi sbornik 56, no. 7 (1913): 115 Google Scholar. This was a shared European sentiment. For Germany, see, e.g., Radkau, Joachim, Das Zeitalter der Nervosität: Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler (Munich, 1998)Google Scholar; Ullrich, Volker, Die nervöse Grossmacht: Aufstieg und Untergang des deutschen Kaiserreichs, 1871-1918 (Frankfurt am Main, 1997)Google Scholar.

86. Foucault's concept of discourse in the archaeological method up to the 1975 publication of Surveiller etpunir (Discipline and punish) was infamously murky about causality, prompting two sympathetic early interpreters to complain that “the causal power attributed to the rules governing discursive systems is unintelligible.” Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1982), xxiv. His later understanding of discourse in the genealogical method also elided causality. As one commentator has written, “The genealogist/historian looks for beginnings, not origins. This for Foucault was an essential distinction. Origins imply causes; beginnings imply differences.” Patricia O'Brian, “Michel Foucault's History of Culture,” in Hunt, Lynn, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, 1989), 37 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87. This potential is embodied, for example, in Pinker, Steven, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (New York, 2007)Google Scholar.

88. See my Geschichte und Gefiihl: Grundlagen der Emotionsgeschichte (Munich, 2010).

89. See Merridale, Catherine, Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 (New York, 2006), 70–71, 98, 108-10, 135-38Google Scholar.

90. On this, see Seniavskaia, Psikhologiia voiny v XX veke; Gabriel, Soviet Military Psychiatry.

91. Hints at the connection between espionage, fear-inducing biological weapons, and western anxiety drugs can be found in Kouzminov, Alexander, Biological Espionage: Special Operations of the Soviet and Foreign Intelligence Services in the West (London, 2005)Google Scholar. Also see the review by Tucker, Jonathan B., Moscow Times, no. 3127 (18 March 2005): 4 Google Scholar.

92. Glassman, Mark, “The Changing Battlefield; When Grace Flees under Fire,” New York Times, 25 July 2004 Google Scholar. Thanks to Susan Morrissey for this reference.