The Russian army

The Bibliothèque Nationale, however, preserves photo albums not only on the army of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, but also on those of other contemporary great powers. For example, of the Russian Empire. But while the previous album presented the soldiers of the Monarchy in only nineteen pictures, The Russian Army, compiled in 1892, contains a hundred large photos (it is worth clicking!). A telling difference. We are ten years after the German-Austrian-Italian Triple Alliance which isolated Russia, and four years after the first French loan to Russia, thanks to which the Russian Empire could begin the large-scale modernization of its army. In 1891, seventy-nine years after Napoleon’s defeat in Russia, for the first time the French fleet sails into the naval station of Kronstadt where, in the presence of Tsar Alexander III, for the first time they play in Russia the Marseillaise, which previously was considered a criminal offense. At the time of the compilation of this album they sign, to counterbalance the Triple Alliance, the first version of the Franco-Russian Alliance, which becomes final two years later, in 1894. Two more years later, on 5 October 1896 the first foreign trip of the newly crowned Russian imperial couple – as we have already shown it – leads to Paris. And from here the road is straight to the point when, twenty years later, in 1916 the people of France would meet on French soil the Russian army, hitherto only known from photos like those of this album. But this will be already the subject of another post.









In the second picture of the last row we find a cuckoo’s egg. In 1892 you would have searched in vain in the Russian army for the figure which strikingly looks like an operetta soldier. According to its caption, this is the uniform of the Preobrazhensky Regiment – at the time of its foundation, that is, in 1683. The regiment, founded by Peter the Great in the village of Preobrazhenskoye near Moscow as a personal guard, distinguished itself in a number of campaigns, and was considered the most elite formation of the Russian army. Only young aristocrats could be members of it – including the composer Mussorgsky. The regiment was disbanded after the October revolution. Its members first fought in Denikin’s army on the South Russian front, and then joined the émigré Russian army, founded in 1924 by Wrangel in Serbia and existing until the 1990s. But this is again another new story waiting to be told soon here along Río Wang.