«National issue» in the Russian army (based on domestic journalism materials)

At the beginning of XX century the problems of everyday life, traditions and life of the imperial army were actively discussed on the pages of Russian periodicals. One of the debatable issues was theme of the degree of trustworthiness and devotion to the Fatherland and the Throne of non-Russians who served in the army. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct views and arguments of supporters of expelling non-Russians from the army and their opponents. Through publicistic articles, they acquainted the general public with their views. In the present work, journalism is understood to mean works whose purpose is not only to express, but also to form public opinion on topical issues of modern life. The sources of the research were journalistic articles and notes published at the beginning of the XX century in “Russian Wealth”, “Russian Herald”, “Military Compendium”, “Russian Disabled” and other periodicals. One of the fundamental methods of this research is a discourse analysis, which made it possible to reveal the hidden meanings of journalistic texts and their purpose in specific historical conditions, and their possible interpretation by readers. We found that the most unreliable elements in the army were Jews, Poles, Finns, Latvians and Armenians. But with a negative attitude to representatives of different nationalities, the Jews were declared the main enemies of the Russian army. This fact led to the identification of the “national issue” and “Jewish issue”. The article analyzed the myths about servicemen of Jewish origin. The pages of Russian periodicals actively cultivated the idea, that the Jews were the ethnic group, the most deviated from serving military service. Supporters of the expelling of Jewish nationality representatives out of their army characterized the Jewish soldier as poorly trained, unreliable, subject to the influence of revolutionary ideology, contributing to moral decay and increased crime in the troops. This work reconstructed the views of the Jews defenders, the discourse of their texts and rhetoric. We came to the conclusion that all, without exception, publicists used political, scientific and ideological discourses to confirm their point of view. The combination of different types of discourse in the journalistic texts allowed them to strengthen their arguments and influence the formation of public opinion. In many ways, the political campaign of excluding non-Russians from the army, unfolded on the pages of the civil and military periodicals, was not justified. In the army family, the “national question” was not as acute as it was presented in the press.

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