THE ROMANOVS’ MILITANT CHARITY: THE RED CROSS AND PUBLIC MOBILIZATION FOR WAR IN TSARIST RUSSIA, 1853-1914

This dissertation analyzes the creation and evolution of the Russian Society of the Red Cross to understand the possibilities for and limits to the development of civil society in authoritarian political structures. Founded in 1867, the Russian Red Cross’s chartered mission was to provide civilian medical aid for wartime relief. By signing the Geneva Convention of 1864, tsarist Russia embraced a European humanitarian movement geared toward aiding individuals wounded in war and victims of natural disasters. Over the next five decades, the Red Cross grew into one of the largest charities in tsarist Russia. This study reveals how the ruling Romanov family and members of educated society found a common space in which both parties could promote the empire’s welfare by tending to its neediest subjects. However, Russia’s decision to mobilize educated society for national relief proved to be a double-edged sword for the tsarist regime. During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 and Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, limited funds, bureaucratic mismanagement, and scandals in the press incited members of educated society to demand greater oversight of Russia’s Red Cross, calls that undermined the political regime’s legitimacy during moments of crisis. Despite these challenges, the Red Cross did provide an avenue for women to enter the nursing profession, although Russian nurses never achieved the professional status enjoyed by their colleagues in the West. Given that one part of the Red Cross’s mission involved delivering medical aid to belligerents in foreign conflicts, members of the tsarist state and society used this organization as a unique instrument with which to conduct “soft power” imperialism by dispatching teams of doctors and nurses to intervene in conflicts in the Balkans and Africa.Doctor of Philosoph

The instruction of youth in late Imperial Russia: vospitanie in the cadet school and classical gymnasium, 1863-1894

This thesis uses memoir and pedagogical literature to juxtapose the experiences of students who attended two different types of secondary school - the cadet school and the classical gymnasium - in Russia during the reigns of Alexander II (1855-1881) and Alexander III (1881-1894). It examines how students and teachers evaluated educational policies by the Ministries of War and Education during a period of reform and reaction. Seeking to train an independently minded officer and ensure loyalty to the autocratic state, the Russian Ministry of War paid great attention to providing its students with an ideal school experience centered on familial relations between teachers and students, progressive pedagogical innovations, and extracurricular activities. In contrast to the Ministry of War, the Ministry of Education viewed its students' political attitudes with suspicion and attempted to limit their exposure to radical thought through the teaching of classical languages and the classroom use of rote memorization and stern disciplinary measures. As a result of these two different approaches to secondary education, former military cadets professed loyalty to their alma maters for having provided them with an ideal schoolhouse environment and youth experience, while former civilian students decried the Ministry of Education's efforts to shape them and upheld self-education as the necessary supplement for the incomplete instruction they had received in the classroom