Military history of the Russian Empire

Once they became adults, the boys with whom Peter staged the fights would become his commanders and closest military advisers, eventually forming the core of Russia's first two elite guard units, the Preobrazhensky and Semenovsky regiments.

These two regiments contained the core of the Russian nobility, and became training grounds for young nobles, who served as rank-and-file soldiers to learn military life before becoming officers elsewhere.

Russia suffered from an acute lack of expertise, a problem Peter mitigated by going to the foreign quarters in Moscow; there, in a relaxed environment far removed from the throne, he learned the particulars of such things as shipbuilding, navigation, military formation, and the erection of fortifications.

[12] Peter established new schools and training grounds for the officer elite that was to lead the Russian army, and dispatched large numbers of men abroad to learn under foreign masters.

His trip was stopped short of a planned passage through Italy by news of a streltsy rebellion at home, and Peter rushed back to Russia in 1698, along with 750 foreigners he had recruited for Russian industry.

With utmost daring, in July 1700 Charles crossed the straits to Denmark with 15,000 men, carrying the fighting into the heart of their territory; the Danes, utterly defeated, surrendered within a month.

Caught off-guard, thinly stretched, and vulnerable to penetration by the skilled Swedish army, the ensuing battle quickly turned into a rout, with the panicked Russian troops attempting to swim over the frigid Narva River, many drowning in its freezing waters.

The Battle of Narva, as it came to be called, was a crushing defeat for Peter's young army, with the vast majority of the Russian forces destroyed and nearly all of its siege equipment captured.

Historians still argue as to whether or not Charles should have pressed his pursuit of the broken Russian enemy; had he chosen to pursue Peter, he might vary well have forced a quick victory and changed the outcome of the war.

At the end of 1701, Sheremetev met a vastly outnumbered Swedish force on the field at Erastfer in Livonia, soundly defeating them; he repeated the feat again at Hummelshof in July 1702.

This was not the first uprising in the enstrangled relations between Russia and the cossacks, but it followed the same pattern; the rebellion spread across the south widely, and at its climax may have involved as many as 100,000 men, but was ill-organized and badly led.

Charles was well aware of the redoubts that Peter had dug, and had reasoned that, to avoid being bogged down and losing the element of surprise, he would rush past them as quickly as he could, and accept the resulting losses, even leaving the bulk of his artillery behind to speed his movement.

The Swedish right wing led the ensuing attack; as in earlier battles, the veteran troops outfought the Russians, collapsing them back and seizing supporting cannon as well.

Upon declaring war, Peter ordered the construction of the Caspian Flotilla and sailed down the Volga to command a joint land-sea campaign that took the city of Derbent, before being forced to return to Astrakhan for supplies.

The Russian forces fought on, facing little resistance, without Peter's involvement, taking Resht late that year and Baku the next before Persia finally sued for peace.

[36][37] The next leading candidate to the throne, as chosen by the Privy Council, was Anna Ivanovna, who was the daughter of Peter's late brother Ivan V. The primary reason for their choice was her political weakness as a woman and widow, something that the Council moved aggressively to take advantage of; they declared that they would approve her crowning only if she gave up the power to make and amend taxes, declare war, control the army, grant and revoke estates, and appoint people to high positions in the government.

However, the plan did not come to fruition; the Russian nobility was terrified by the prospects of such a shift in power, as were the palace guard regiments, and with their collective force Anna was able to tear up the restrictions placed on her and dissolve the Council for good.

France was unable to support its distant ally—the largest French force during the war, deployed off of the Baltic, consisted of just 2,000 men—and consoled itself by attacking Austria instead, sparking major action in the Rhineland and across Italy.

Münnich divided the Russian troops into two groups, a main army under his command aiming to attack Perekop at the mouth of the Crimea, and a smaller detachment under Lacy moving towards Azov.

Lacy infiltrated Crimea again in 1737 with 40,000 men (passing over the narrow western sandbars instead of through Perekop) and again shattered and pillaged the region, but as with Münnich's attack the previous year, suffered from disease and thirst, and thus was forced to withdraw.

The army had suffered enormously from disease, and for all the men and money that the war cost Russia only gained some sparsely populated steppe north of the Black Sea, and the old prize of Azov, under the condition that it would remain unfortified.

Firstly, it showed how much the Russian army had advanced, as it easily beat back larger Ottoman forces during the war; Münnich had been overly ambitious, but his assumptions on the superiority of his troops were not misplaced.

[clarification needed] Noting her cousin's distaste for her and consolidating her control over the guards, Peter the Great's daughter, Elizabeth, executed a bloodless coup and took the throne.

He drilled the army in the same tactics used by Fredrick the Great, but his success carried more to his cavalry then to the infantry, as Russia lacked the officer expertise to fully achieve the Prussian model.

[50][52] The situation was salvaged only by a one Pyotr Rumyantsev, later to become Catherine the Great's foremost general; he rallied the Russian forces in the center, driving the Prussians back and ending the threat of a decisive breakthrough and defeat.

Although he escaped with the majority of his forces intact, by the end of the year it was clear that the Prussian's military situation had not improved; rather, Frederick had lost many of his best troops, and the Russians and Austrians had demonstrated a newfound ability to nullify his tactics.

The terms of the treaty fell far short of the goals of Catherine's reputed "Greek project": the expulsion of the Ottomans from Europe and the renewal of a Byzantine Empire under Russian control.

Other Cossacks, various Turkic tribes that felt the impingement of the Russian centralizing state, and industrial workers in the Ural Mountains, as well as peasants hoping to escape serfdom, all joined in the rebellion.

A group of officers commanding about 3,000 men refused to swear allegiance to the new tsar, Alexander's brother Nicholas, proclaiming instead their loyalty to the idea of a Russian constitution.

Curtiss finds that "The pedantry of Nicholas' military system, which stressed unthinking obedience and parade ground evolutions rather than combat training, produced ineffective commanders in time of war."