In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we explore a little‑known but revealing corner of Russian history: the military press during the reign of Alexander II.
After the humiliating defeat in the Crimean War, it was clear that Russia’s army – and the autocracy that sustained it – needed fundamental change. Alexander II, who came to power as the war dragged on, embarked on a series of “Great Reforms”, most famously the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. But reform was always a balancing act between modernisation and the preservation of autocratic power.
Nowhere were these tensions sharper than in the military press. Historian E. Willis Brooks, in an essay from the collection *Reforming the Tsar’s Army*, examines how War Minister D. A. Milyutin used newspapers and journals to communicate new ideas to officers and conscripts – while struggling to control the very voices he had unleashed.
Publications like *Ruski Invalid* (The Russian Veteran) and *Voyeny Sbornik* (Military Review) were meant to be loyal instruments of state policy. But as they sought readers and relevance, their editors – some of them former utopian socialists – began to clash with government censors and even the Tsar’s ministers. The result was a chaotic, semi‑autonomous press that both advanced reform and exposed its contradictions.
We look at the founding of new military journals, the explosion in readership, and the uneasy partnership between M
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