In the materials of the military censor, letters about the war comprise only 2 to 5 percent of the correspondence. These sources have several peculiarities. An important supplement to the censorship materials is the correspondence between army staffs during the period of moral crisis in the army (the 1915 retreat the fraternization of the spring of 1916 and the soldiers’ mutinies in late autumn 1916 and winter 1917). The main sources are the military censorship materials as well as the reports of the commissars with the armies at the fronts (for 1917). The existing sources reflect the detailed character and transformation of the moods of the Russian army during the war. However, their attitudes were also shaped by their military experience as part of a modern technical, total war. The pre-war social experiences of the soldiers influenced their attitudes during the war.
This article analyzes the reasons and dynamics at play in the attitudes of the Russian army during the course of the war. The theory of a conspiracy, “the blow of a stab in the back”, which deprived the army and the country of an inevitable victory, made its rounds again. At the same time, a number of works distorted ideas about the course of the war, and all manner of fabrications and fantasies about the prerevolutionary condition of Russian society were spread. Psychology, or even the psychopathology of a warring person, ended up in the spotlight in academic literature. Only recently has there been a deviation from the “class” pattern, in an analysis of the attitudes of the Russian army. Right up to the present day, Russian researchers prefer to assess this war predominantly from geopolitical, political, economic, or rather “macro” indicators, leaving the “humane”, personal, and psychological component of combat actions aside.
In an analysis of the revolution in Russia, Soviet authors, following ideological notions, avoided showing the human reaction to an inhumane war. The war only served to increase the number of burdens, to deliver the masses of soldiers to their deaths, and to unite soldiers’ anti-war sentiments in the form of public protest. According to such an approach, the revolution had deep socioeconomic and sociopolitical causes.
When this was done, the conscious, class nature of the main groups of the Russian army was stressed in the literature – the workers and peasants, “those dressed in military overcoats”. In Russian (Soviet) literature, this theme was subordinated to the question of revolutionary movement in the army. The mood in the Russian army during the First World War has been traditionally examined in the literature as one of the causes leading to the Russian Revolution of 1917.
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