Image of an officer in the minds of the Russian public after the overthrow of autocracy

The purpose of the article is to reconstruct the image of the officer in the minds of the Russian public after the overthrow of autocracy. Achievement of the set goal includes the following tasks: to establish the reasons of emergence and consolidation of the image of the officer as the opponent of revolution in public consciousness, to identify specificity and dominant concepts at each stage of image formation of the officer of the Russian Army after the fall of monarchy and to define the consequences of establishment the officers as counter-revolutionaries. The methodology of the presented research is based on the achievements of military-historical anthropology. The use of discourse analysis was of direct importance for solving the tasks set in the present work. We consider discourse as a special way of communication and understanding of the social world. The use of discourse-analysis gave an opportunity to reveal the dominant concepts used in the characteristics of the officer corps during the shocks of revolution of 1917, and to determine the consequences of various social reality presentations for the Russian officer's destiny. The source base of the research consists of the materials of the national journalism published during the Revolution of 1917 on the pages of different periodicals such as "Speech", "Scout", "Russian Handicapped", "The Peoples case". Especially important for the reconstruction of the image were the memories of Russian military commanders A.I. Denikin, N.V. Ruzsky, P.N. Vrangel, K.M. Oberuchev and their contemporaries. In the course of the study, the author came to the conclusion that under the influence of a number of reasons an associative series was formed: officer, anti-revolutionary, bourgeois, servant of autocracy. We have detected that the process of forming and establishing the officer of the Russian army as anti-revolutionary has several conditional stages. The first stage (end of February - early April 1917) -the beginning of the formation and transmission of the image of the officer as an opponent of the revolution. The second stage (April-August 1917) - an attempt to rehabilitate the officer corps in the public eye. The third stage began with the suppression of the Kornilov Rebellion and marked the strong fixation of the image of the officers as anti-revolutionary. The author substantiates the idea that the figure of the Russian officer was in the center of the struggle of two opposing discourses, two representations of the social reality, one of which represented the officer as an opponent of the revolution and the establishment of democratic rights and freedoms, and another one, as a defender of the new political system in the fatherland. The confrontation between the two discourses was reflected in social practice and everyday life of Russian society during the revolution.

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