ABSTRACT
A colonel in the Tsarist army by the name of A. Rittikh wrote in 1893 that service in the army turned ignorant peasants into civilized human beings. The peasant conscript’s military career began “with a bath and a haircut,” then proceded to “cleanliness and neatness in dress.” At the same time, conscripts were “taught to speak, look, turn and move with military precision.” They learned new words and concepts. In sum, “the wholly rough-hewn and rude [peasant conscript] receives, in the broad sense of the word, a human finish.” 1 This has a familiar ring. What Col. Rittikh thought of as the civilizing process we have lately called modernization, and it has been argued that service in the armed forces is one of the routes through which peasants in underdeveloped countries are modernized. To take just one example, Lerner and Robinson have observed that the Turkish army performed a modernizing function in the 1950’s because for the army to absorb large quantities of sophisticated weaponry Turkish soldiers had to be educated in its use and maintenance. An important byproduct of this military schooling was that Turkish soldiers “acquired new habits of dress, of cleanliness, of teamwork. In the most profound sense, they acquired a new personality.” The army became “a major agency of social change precisely because it spread … a new sense of identity — and new skills and concepts as well as new machines. Young Turks from isolated villages now suddenly felt themselves to be part of the larger society.” 2
