Since the end of the 19th century and up to the present, databases representing statistics of wars waged by various states and taking place in certain regions have been used for quantitative and comparative studies both on the history of individual states and in the framework of general research on historical sociology. Such statistics, which include the nomenclature of wars, lists of battles, and estimates of casualties during combat operations, represent a very significant source material for further historical, sociological, and political science research. These statistics have been of particular interest in recent decades, when, as a result of the formation of extensive databases, it became possible to computer process data arrays and search for various correlations. But upon careful consideration of a number of the most reputable statistical studies and databases, it becomes clear that the material used in them is very heterogeneous. While statistical series related to demography and economics are usually quite representative due to a clear methodology, measurement system and the amount of data themselves, research on military statistics is still based on very limited material prepared at one time by a small circle of researchers. Statistical databases prepared by G. Bodart (1908) and P. Sorokin (1937) are still widely used in scientific circulation. These materials were collected for specific research purposes by one author or another and were not prepared as a general scientific database. Another problem arose due to the fact that the databases were characterized by limited sampling, both taking into account the range of regions and States under consideration, and taking into account the time periods covered. Peter Brecke rightly points out in this regard that even the nine most reputable computerized databases, which he used as the basis for compiling his own Conflict Catalog in 1996, covered only about one third of all known military conflicts in the world and did not include many military events in Russia and China., Japan, etc.[1] It should be noted that P. Breke compiled his consolidated database not for general scientific purposes, but for specific tasks of political science forecasting and building predictive models for the prevention of military conflicts.
These remarks are especially important due to the fact that the methodology for preparing a general scientific database differs significantly from the methodology for preparing statistical samples for specific case studies. For example, in the widely known and ongoing project on the history of wars "The Correlates of War Project"(COW)[2], launched in 1963 by the American political scientist J.D. Singer at the University of Michigan and further developed with the participation of M. Small, the level of combat losses is used as the main criterion. 2 thousand people per year. In our opinion, choosing the scale of losses as the basis for historical military statistics seems to be an unsuccessful approach. Firstly, because it is difficult to collect data with such accuracy even for current conflicts in the 21st century, not to mention the wars of previous centuries, which is why this rather detailed database begins only in 1815. Secondly, historians are well aware that until the middle of the 19th century. a very significant part of the losses of troops during wars (often even more than half) were non-combat (from illness, exhaustion on the march, desertion, etc.), and not purely combat losses, and one from the other is methodologically difficult to separate. Thus, the methodology based on determining the annual level of losses can be used to determine the impact of wars on society, but it is hardly applicable if the purpose of the study is the activities of states, i.e. military and political history at the state level.
In this historiographical review, we refer only to the most cited and mentioned scientific literature on the preparation and processing of statistical data on wars and battles. One of the first scientific reference books (chronological and statistical, as the author called it) on the history of wars was published in 1908.
G. Bodart's "Military historical lexicon", covering the period from 1618. (the beginning of the Thirty Years' War) and until 1905. (the end of the Russian-Japanese War)[3]. The first part of the book (pp. 49-600) describes battles (both land and sea), sieges and capitulations in chronological order, indicating the number of troops (in battalions, squadrons, guns and men) and losses (with the number of officers highlighted, and generals — even by name). The second part of the book contains statistical tables (pp. 601-913) based on the data of the first part. Based on this handbook, G. Bodart in 1916 He published one of the first well-known comparative statistical studies on military history in the literature: "Human losses in the wars of Modern Times: Austria-Hungary and France"[4] with a detailed analysis of losses by year and battle.
The next significant step in the development of military statistical research was the work "Is the war on the wane?" published in 1915. A study of the prevalence of wars in Europe from 1450 to the present day", prepared by F.A. Woods and A. Baltzli[5]. It provides statistics on military (participation in wars) and peaceful years for 12 major European states (including the Ottoman Empire) from 1450 to the First World War. An important statistical study of wars is contained in the third volume of Pitirim Sorokin's fundamental work "Social and Cultural Dynamics", published in 1937.[6] His method is based on a comprehensive comparison of the duration of military conflicts, the size of the armies involved in them, and the losses incurred for various countries and historical eras. In 1942 Quincy Wright's fundamental two-volume work "The Study of War"[7] was published (republished with the author's comments in 1965), which analyzes wars of various eras based on a complex interdisciplinary methodology that takes into account geographical, economic, social, cultural, historical, ideological and other factors. In the monograph by L.F. Richardson
"Statistics of deadly quarrels"[8] attempts to create mathematical models of conflict situations, taking into account various factors (including economic, political, and religious), demonstrating the likelihood and patterns of military conflicts in the world from the beginning of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. In D.S. Levy's work "War in the Modern System of Great Powers, 1495-1975"[9], an analysis of the participation of European great Powers in wars was carried out, for which the list of great powers was first justified with the dates of their stay on this list. Within the framework of the already mentioned project “Correlates of War”, data on many aspects of international politics and the military-political potential of states have been collected and presented electronically since 1816. The databases presented include the identification of sovereign States, a list of military conflicts and crises, the size of the armed forces of various States, and a number of other information about their potential.
In the 2000s, three consolidated English-language encyclopedias with extensive military statistics were published[10]. However, the electronic conflict catalog prepared by Peter Brecke, associate professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has become the most comprehensive and popular for use today[11]. The compilation of the conflict catalog began in 1996 by combining lists of military conflicts from nine well-known databases[12]. Thus, Peter Brecke tried to collect in his catalog all previously known military conflicts, except those that occurred before 1400. It is also worth noting the still unpublished works on military statistics by another American researcher Anthony Sutton, which contain a list of all military conflicts in the world from 1820 to 1970, in each of which more than 20 people died, mentioned by Peter Brecke[13].
From our point of view, the methods of preparation and use of statistical databases on military history that exist in the world scientific circulation contain fundamental methodological shortcomings, primarily due to the fact that, as we mentioned above, these databases were not prepared as general scientific. First of all, it should be noted that the generated databases contain either statistics of wars (military conflicts) or statistics of battles. Both approaches create great difficulties for data usage. The complexity of the methodological approach related to the list of wars lies in the fact that war itself, being a political phenomenon, is at the same time an ambiguous historiographical concept, and the nomenclature of wars is determined by military historiography. At the same time, historiographies of different countries often define and interpret the same wars and their periodization in different ways. Examples include the Livonian War of the sixteenth century, the Thirty Years' War, and the Napoleonic Wars. The consideration of each of these long-term military-political conflicts as a single war or a series of wars depends on the position of the researcher and the national historiographical schools that have developed in different countries. For Russian historiography, for example, the Livonian War of 1558-1583 appears as one long war, while for Poland and Sweden it is not one war, but a whole series of military conflicts of varying duration and with a changing composition of participants.
The lack of a single universally recognized nomenclature of wars in national historiographies is compounded by the fact that many wars, perceived as such from the perspective of the present, were not perceived as such by contemporaries of events. For example, the current concept of the "Caucasian War of 1817-1864" largely contradicts the perception of the events of those decades through the eyes of Russian contemporaries. Russian Russians participated in military operations in the Caucasus during this chronological period, there were both relatively "calm" years with combat skirmishes involving several dozen people on each side, as well as periods of major military campaigns that were integrated into the Russo-Turkish and Russo-Persian wars, and the number of those who participated in them. The troops numbered in the tens of thousands. But from the point of view of the methodology of war statistics, both "quiet" years and years of large-scale hostilities are regarded equally as years of war. Another example: with the same "weight" in the statistics of military operations by year, both campaigns in which the main armed forces of the state were involved (for example, for Russia, the 1812 campaign against Napoleon) and relatively small in number of troops involved (several battalions) campaigns of the Russian army in the war with Iran in 1810 fall. and 1811 .
In addition, not all military conflicts, even major ones, were accompanied by an official declaration of war and its official end through an armistice or peace agreement. These include almost all civil wars (whether in England, the USA, Russia, or China), many colonial wars, as well as internal local conflicts, such as the Caucasian War or the suppression of the Yemelyan Pugachev uprising. It is noteworthy that in one of the latest English-language encyclopedias of wars, compiled by Ch. Phillips and A. Axelrod[14], from those included in the encyclopedia of 1000 wars for the period after 1450. Only less than 300 have a start date in the form of a declaration of war and less than 400 have a completion date in the form of peace treaties (armistice).
The incompleteness and discrepancies of well-known authoritative databases on military conflicts can be illustrated by the example of statistics on wars involving medieval Russia and Russia. Thus, in the list of wars involving Russia in the work of Woods and Baltzli from 1700 to 1914 (before the outbreak of the First World War), there are only 53 military conflicts (including internal ones, such as the suppression of the Pugachev uprising). P. Breke's database for the same period contains 128 conflicts (wars) involving Russia[15]. For comparison, there are 137 of them in the new Runivers database. For periods before 1400 The difference will be much more significant: P. Breke counts 113 conflicts involving troops of Russian lands from 900 to 1400 (including external conflicts, princely strife, conflicts with the Pechenegs, Polovtsians and Horde), while the Runivers database lists a total of 674 conflicts over the same period. not counting the princely feuds. Another example: according to P. Sorokin's calculations, 106 civil strife and other internal conflicts (including uprisings) occurred in the Russian lands from 926 to 1510[16]. According to the database of princely feuds compiled within the framework of the Runivers project, until 1510 A total of 492 civil strife occurred in the Russian lands, each of which represented a military conflict. The significant incompleteness of foreign databases is also evident in the example of such a seemingly well-studied period as the reign of Ivan III (1462-1505): the list of Woods and Balzli for this period included 20 military conflicts involving Russia, 27 in the database of P. Breke. For comparison: in the latest database "During the reign of Ivan III, 43 military conflicts were identified. At the same time, it should be noted that it is possible to identify the largest number of military conflicts using archival materials. Thus, when compiling the Runivers database for the period from 1462 to 1502, O.A. Kurbatov based on archival research (including the study of bit records) Russian Russian troops have been involved in 43 military conflicts, while studies of Russian chronicle sources for the same period, conducted by Yu.V. Seleznev, give a lower figure: 34 conflicts. From the collected material it can be seen that the frequency of conflicts involving Russian troops is several times higher than the frequency of known conflicts involving troops from other European states. Consequently, the traditional statistics of European conflicts are far from complete.
Using the number of war years as a key criterion (i.e., a State being at war) also does not provide a sufficient picture of what is happening. It is also not uncommon in history for warring states to be at war politically and diplomatically, but during one year or even several years there was no military action between them at all, but no truce was concluded. For example, during the Russian-English war of 1807-1812 in 1810 and 1811. There was virtually no military action, although the state of war between Russia and Great Britain persisted, and peace between the two powers was concluded only in July 1812, i.e. after Napoleon's attack on Russia. Thus, the forced use of estimates of the total number of "military" and "peaceful" years in the history of a particular State can hardly in itself be an indicator of the degree of burden on the state. In addition, the intensity of the fighting of the French army and the frequency of military clashes in the era of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were fundamentally higher than in the era of the wars of Louis XIV, as J.A. Lynn rightly points out in his monograph "The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667-1714."[17]
The second approach, which is based on statistics of battles and major sieges and has been widely used since the beginning of the 19th century, has another significant drawback: due to the extreme number of battles and engagements, their complete statistics, as a rule, do not exist. The statistics of combat encounters of all types are well collected for major battles and also (sometimes in great detail) for individual wars and regions, but in general they are far from complete. The statistics of all military engagements of the Civil War in the United States, down to the smallest, during which at least one person was killed, is just the exception. To understand the degree of incompleteness of the English-language databases of battles and engagements (combat collisions), the following comparative data can be cited: for example, K. Wright in his work "A Study of War" for the period from 1700 to the beginning of the First World War counts 306 battles involving Russian troops[18]. For comparison, the Runivers database on the combat operations of Russian troops for this period contains information on 728 military campaigns, and the total number of identified military clashes during these campaigns is 5,792. Thus, only large-scale battles are counted (as K. probably does. Wright) creates a completely incomplete picture of the militant activity of the state. It is also often difficult to draw a scientifically based line between the concepts of "skirmish", "battle", "battle" and "siege". In addition, many military conflicts both before the twentieth century and in the twentieth and twenty–first centuries were fought in the format of so-called "small wars", i.e. historically significant and bloody conflicts in general, but without major military clashes that would be recorded in historiography.
The Runivers military history project is dedicated to the quantitative (quantitative) description and analysis of military history. In order to identify the level of involvement of a particular state in military operations, as well as the economic burden they create and the impact of military activity on political activity, we propose a special methodological approach within the framework of the military history project. We hope that the proposed new approach and the databases created on its basis will make it possible to provide researchers with statistics based on a better methodology that makes it possible to assess the extent to which the resources of the state military machine are being used. If a researcher is studying the impact of hostilities on the countries participating in them or on the regions in which they occur, it is necessary to take into account, first of all, not the time spent in a state of war (since declaring war in itself does not require resources), but the periods of actual hostilities, while it is desirable to assess their intensity. For this approach, a much better statistical unit of account would not be a war (military conflict), but a military campaign, which is defined as a set of military actions directly related to each other by a common plan and taking place in a local geographical theater of operations over a certain period of time (usually during a given year or time of year).
It is within the framework of individual military campaigns (rather than wars as a whole and not individual battles) that the state uses its economic and human resources through the military machine (military potential) to implement specific plans and solve tasks. Unlike wars, i.e. First of all, political conflicts, the descriptions of which were formed in historiography, as a rule, retrospectively, a military campaign is an event within the framework of a war (military conflict), which was planned by the military-political leadership of the state and therefore lends itself to a much clearer and more objective definition and description. In other words, the military campaign took place due to the fact that the state decided to conduct it. At the same time, the number of forces and means involved in the campaign can determine its absolute and relative intensity. Highlighting campaigns, therefore, seems simpler and clearer than highlighting wars and even individual battles. The absolute and relative correlation of military campaigns with each other, again, becomes possible and much clearer (unlike wars and battles), since the state deciding on the campaign allocated certain forces and means for each campaign in a particular theater of operations.
Our proposed approach can be described as a comprehensive continuous description of the work of the state military machine in terms of the formation of troops, their organization, composition, strength, deployment (both in peacetime and in wartime) and participation in hostilities. In order to achieve the necessary completeness, extensive additional research is required in this regard, since the qualitative and quantitative composition of the troops of a number of European states of Modern times is extremely poorly studied, especially in the periods up to the XVIII century. In this regard, the disappointing assessment of the situation given by the Swedish historian Jan Glet regarding statistics on the Spanish armed forces of the XVI–XVII centuries is indicative: "The problem of studying the Spanish financial and military state is that the size and composition of its armed forces have been studied surprisingly little. It would be a great advantage if the topic of this chapter were illustrated by tabular data on the size of the Spanish armed forces and their geographical distribution on various dates. Unfortunately, it is currently impossible to compile such tables. The total number of the army has never been calculated, the history of its organizational structure (armies, thirds and regiments) is uneven, and exhaustive historical lists of ships for the fleet and its regional divisions have not been compiled"[19].
The methodological approach based on the statistics of military campaigns that we propose has the following key advantages compared to the approaches described earlier:
1) lack of presentism — we define a military campaign not on the basis of late historiography, but on the basis of actual decisions made by the leadership of the armed forces of a particular country;
2) the ability to quantify the intensity of the campaign based on the absolute and relative size of the forces and means involved in it;
3) having a continuous picture of military construction, including the formation of troops, their deployment and movement, we see which part of its armed forces the state has involved in a particular campaign. This makes it clear what importance the government attached to this campaign during planning.
This approach is well applicable to the military history of centralized states, when the command of the armed forces is concentrated at the highest state level. For such States, it is possible to describe the military vehicles they have created and track their use year after year (taking into account the development of military systems and their capabilities). At the same time, it is possible to assess what absolute and relative share of the capabilities of its military machine the state directs for a particular military campaign. This approach is quantitatively well applicable for the period from 1700 to 1914, when the land armies of European states actually consisted of fairly uniform infantry battalions, cavalry squadrons and artillery batteries. Qualitatively, it has been applicable to most states since the end of the 15th century. And it can be applied to such centralized states as Byzantium or the Ottoman Empire for an earlier period. As for military operations at sea, for their statistics, instead of battalions and squadrons, the number of warships by their classes should be used (they have been appearing since the middle of the 17th century).
The main methodological problem of this approach is the differentiation of military campaigns. The fact is that from a military point of view, one campaign can be conducted in the same theater of operations (if there is a single leadership in this theater of operations), as well as several independent campaigns if there is no such unified leadership. This is a common situation in wars before the beginning of the 18th century. For example, when troops under the leadership of the ruler of a state appear in a theater of military operations, all other military units act in subordination and coordination with this army, but as soon as the ruler's troops leave the region, individual military units often begin to act independently. The question arises: should the military actions in the region then be considered as one campaign or several separate campaigns?
For medieval Russia before the 15th century, a clear identification and differentiation of military conflicts and campaigns (campaigns) is particularly difficult due to the fact that campaigns of princely squads could fully combine the features of both political (war) and purely military (campaign) events. The methodology of statistics of military conflicts in medieval Russia will be described in more detail in an article by the famous Russian historian Yu.V. Seleznev[20]. A special case can also be considered prolonged low–intensity military operations during the development of new lands and the establishment of state control over them (whether it was the advance of the European frontier in North America or the largely typologically similar discovery and development of Siberia in the XVI-XVIII centuries). The approach to describing the advancement of the frontier as a special type of annual military and political activity in one direction or another will be discussed in the article by A.Y. Konev.
From the point of view of military terminology of the XIX — early XX century. "Campagne" was translated into Russian by the word "campaign", and into German, similarly, "Der Feldzug". This concept has been used in Russian usage since the time of Peter the Great. In addition, in the everyday language of the officer corps, a "campaign" could mean a whole short—lived war, such as the "Russian-Turkish campaign of 1877-1878" or the "Hungarian Campaign of 1849." At the same time, "campaign" in this case no longer meant a literal march, but an organic part of the conflict, often localized by the place of action - a stage or period of the war, "the totality of military operations"[21].
There was an even more scientific definition of a campaign (campaign), born within the walls of military academies. According to the Encyclopedia of Military and Marine Sciences, it is "a collection of military sciences. operations that are directly related to each other and are determined by time and place. the department is known. wars." Here, a simple and organic explanation was complicated by the concept of "operation": "in time, it consists of several separate operations that develop sequentially one after another"[22]. This was necessary due to the peculiarities of the educational process, in which the whole meaning of staff work was embedded in the concept of "operation": "from the strategic deployment of the army on the starting line of the operation to the final solution of the latter through a victorious battle on the battlefield" ... etc., in other words, from the plan to its implementation[23]. The subject of "operational art" has become a key one in the training of officers of the General Staff, and the concepts of "campaigns" and "conflicts" have moved from the field of military practice rather into diplomatic or military history.
In Soviet military-scientific terminology, the concept of "campaign" was finally considered obsolete.: "A set of actions of an army (fleet) over long distances, including the movement of troops (ships) over long distances, conducting battles and battles, and constituting a certain period of the war (campaign) or the war as a whole"[24]. Campaigns continued to be considered a collection of military actions limited by calendar and theater of operations. However, an element of strategic planning has been added here: a campaign, like an operation or a war in general, must have a goal. However, they acquired similar strategic content only in the second half of the 18th century. The Soviet Military Encyclopedia traces the history of such "campaigns" up to the end of World War II, but it is obvious that from about the end of the 19th century. A series of strategic operations began to form the basis of the planning and conduct of military operations. The term "campaign" is used more as a descriptive term to link operations in a particular theater of operations conducted over a period of time (from one or two seasons of the year to several years, for example, the "North African campaign of 1940-1943").[25].
Thus, from the point of view of even such a conservative and applied discipline as Soviet military science, "campaigns" and "campaigns" refer to outdated terminology, which throughout history has not had a single clear definition: "The content of the concept of "Campaign" has changed depending on the changing nature of wars and the development of military affairs"[26]. If a campaign in a particular theater of operations could include several military campaigns, then the military campaign of one army could last for several seasons and years and even cover several remote theaters. For example, in 1697. Since the spring, General P.I. Gordon's unit took part in the fighting of the Third Azov Campaign (the Azov Theater campaign), and closer to the autumn it was transferred to the borders of Little Russia and allocated part of the troops for the Kazikermensk campaign (the Dnieper theater campaign).
Based on this, when describing the fighting of the X–XVII centuries. The "campaign" should be taken as the basic unit, and in the early period, the campaign was usually equal to the whole conflict. Since the time of Grand Duke Ivan III (1462-1505), a significant part of conflicts does not end with one campaign, and Russian troops in some cases move in concert in several directions. At the same time, each part of the army, due to the vastness of the territory of the Russian state, is going on its own campaign based on local resources, both in terms of money, supplies and ammunition, and in terms of mobilization. Thus, the totality of campaigns of a certain season of hostilities (winter or summer) acquires the character of what was called in the XVIII and XIX centuries. "Der Feldzug" or "Campagne".
However, the irregularity of such military campaigns does not allow us to reliably, without any exceptions, divide each military conflict of the XV–XVII centuries into a series of local campaigns. Even during the Time of Troubles, one campaign was often equal to one campaign in terms of goals, time frames, and theater of operations. For example, three campaigns were consistently directed against ataman Ivan Zarutsky, who in the summer of 1612 turned from the head of the First Militia into a "thievish" voivode, faithful to the ideas of imposture: winter 1612/13, spring-summer 1613 and summer-autumn 1614. Only the last of them has a somewhat broader character, since the military men of the Tersk prison rebelled against Zarutsky, who moved to Astrakhan at the news of the arrival of the main royal army.
The first conflict in which it becomes possible to consistently and reasonably identify campaigns in local theaters and with a certain time frame is, in our opinion, the Smolensk War of 1632-1634. Due to the length of the Russian-Polish border, the northwestern (or Dvinsky), central (Smolensky) and southwestern theaters of military operations stand out organically. At each of them, the leadership from both the Russian side and the enemy was special, and the plans of the parties rarely went beyond their theater of operations. The conventionality of the scientific division into campaigns here is expressed in the fact that in some theaters, due to different goals and forces involved, there could be several campaigns in one season, and one campaign — the Smolensk campaign of Boyar Shein — lasted for five seasons from the autumn of 1632 to the winter of 1634. In addition, the war was complicated by the movement of free Cossacks-Balashovtsev, whose liquidation also acquired the features of a separate campaign.
Russian Russian wars of 1654-1667, the Russo—Swedish wars of 1656-1658, the Russo-Turkish wars of 1672-1681 and 1686-1700 were described using the same principles: combining all the military operations in the local theater of operations during one (winter or summer) season into one campaign. Russian–Polish wars of 1654-1667, the Russian-Swedish wars of 1656-1658, the Russian-Turkish wars of 1672-1681 and 1686-1700. At the same time, conflicts such as the struggle against the Ukrainian uprising of 1668-1669 and the uprising of Stepan Razin of 1670-1671 still do not need to be divided into campaigns, since they were conducted in a more or less unified theater of operations and, in fact, are campaigns for the Russian army.
The largest number of one-time campaigns stands out in the course of what seemed to be the most insignificant of the mentioned conflicts: during the war against the Swedish King Carl X Gustav, military operations were conducted in Karelia (north of Ladoga), in Ingermanland, in Estonia and northern Livonia, on the Western Dvina (southern Livonia) and in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. This is a very interesting paradox that still needs to be understood. On the one hand, the reason for this was the specific military and political situation, when Swedish troops reached Krakow and Brest (the so-called "Flood" of 1655), and formally the garrison of the Lithuanian Slutsk began to belong to the troops of the Swedish Crown, along with the owner of the city, Bohuslav Radziwill. On the other hand, the fighting in these areas was conducted with varying degrees of intensity, sometimes completely fading away — for example, due to the plague epidemic, but even the movements of several enemy companies, if they took place in a specific local theater, force them to formally combine them into a separate campaign.
It is obvious that the criteria of "conflict", "campaign" and "campaign" proposed here are adopted for the convenience of scientific study of military operations and processing of large statistical data and therefore have the features of conventionalism. However, as the historiographical review of these concepts has shown, the criteria do not contradict the sources. The main thing is that the elements of systematization should benefit the scientific study of the subject — in this case, military operations. We can recall one of the relatively recent examples of the successful application of the author's development of military-historical terminology for the same purposes. Alekseev, systematizing the data of chronicles, various books and other sources about the military campaigns of Ivan III, consistently introduces the concepts of "rates", "rates of the high command" and "rates of the supreme High Command". Thus, he shows and analyzes the increasing complexity of the Grand Duke's managerial tasks: from conducting a single campaign through leading several campaigns against one enemy to simultaneously commanding a number of separate armies in different theaters and against different opponents[27].
The methodology of systematization and description of conflicts and campaigns, as well as the compilation of the nomenclature of military campaigns of the XVIII–XIX centuries in the Runivers database can be illustrated by the example of the era of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
The period 1792-1815 was a global conflict in which almost all the states that existed on earth at that time were involved. Military operations were conducted not only in Europe, where the center of the confrontation was concentrated, but also in North and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, India and the Indian Ocean, as well as in Southeast Asia (on the territory of modern Indonesia). All European states, including the small Liechtenstein, were involved in the conflict without exception. The only exception was Andorra, but its head was formally the French Emperor Napoleon.
The key constant confrontation during the period 1792-1815 was the Anglo-French conflict. Figuratively speaking, it was the pivot against which countries determined their participation in the conflict - on the side of France or on the side of Great Britain, while repeatedly changing sides of the conflict. Chronologically, the period 1792-1815 is divided into two parts: the Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. There is a short period of time between them, when France and Great Britain concluded the Peace of Amiens in 1802. But even this approach to periodization is not absolutely accurate, since the war of the First Anti-French Coalition began in April 1792, and Great Britain joined it only a year later, at the beginning of 1793. At the same time, the actual participation of British troops in the campaigns of the Revolutionary Wars remained relatively small for a long time. Great Britain contributed with subsidies, the participation of naval forces and relatively small land forces in various theaters of military operations (the Netherlands, Toulon, Egypt, Naples). It was only with the outbreak of the Peninsular War that the British army became the main driving force behind several campaigns in 1808-1814 in this theater.
The Runivers database distinguishes between conflicts and campaigns in a crucial point. A conflict is a confrontation between political actors, and a campaign is a physical military confrontation. If the subject of the conflict/war is the state, then the subject of the campaign is always the armed force, although not always representing the state (like, for example, the rebellious inhabitants of Vendee).
At the same time, campaigns do not exist by themselves — they necessarily organically enter into any conflict, or even into several conflicts at the same time. Campaigns can include (and most include) combat engagements of various scales or not at all, if there were none. At the same time, a military clash is considered as part of a campaign. In some cases, campaigns have been added to the database to describe individual combat encounters, for example, all the battles at sea between a small Danish fleet and British convoys in the Danish Straits in 1808-1814. formally combined into one long-running campaign. This approach is dictated by the logic of the database, in which a military clash cannot be directly part of the conflict, because the conflict, as mentioned above, is a political confrontation, and the campaign is a military one. Thus, a hierarchy of base facilities is being built from military clashes to conflicts.
The campaign is characterized by a single location (geographical region), participants, and chronological completeness of the process. In other words, the 1809 campaigns in Spain and Austria are different campaigns, because they are distinguished not only by their location, but also by their participants and different chronological frames. At the same time, when considering the campaign in Russia in 1812, there is a desire to single out as separate campaigns the fighting in the central (conditionally Moscow), southern (Volhynia) and northern (Dvina) directions. But these hostilities were closely linked, they began and ended in a single chronological framework, and in some cases the participants participated in battles in more than one direction.
The description of each conflict includes the Name (+ historiographical or additional), Region(s) (from a limited list), Start and End Dates (year), Parties to the conflict (States), Description and Theater of Military operations (in free form)
The description of each campaign includes Affiliation to the conflict, Name (+ historiographical or additional), Region(s) (from a limited list), Start and End Dates (year and month), Campaign Participants (armed forces and commanders), Description and Theater of Military operations (in free form).
All campaigns and conflicts in the database are named according to a single scheme, where the year and region of the campaign are indicated. But at the same time, the second name, adopted in historiography, has been preserved. Thus, the Patriotic War of 1812, by all formal signs, is not a war, but a campaign within the framework of the great war of 1812-1814, in which many countries even took part on both sides of the conflict.
Note that with our approach, any long-range campaign of the armed forces, even if not accompanied by military clashes, falls into the category of campaigns. From our point of view, this is correct, since the load on the military machine of a particular country practically does not depend on the presence or absence of military clashes (especially since this presence or absence may not depend on the will of the military command). Russian Russian army's Rhenish campaign in 1748, which went without battles, but significantly influenced the outcome of the War of the Austrian Succession, the Bosphorus expedition of the Russian Fleet in 1833, already mentioned above, etc.
We hope that the proposed methodological approach will allow the researcher to present much more complete military statistics based on highlighting campaigns and comparing them with each other in terms of the military burden on the state. Moreover, taking into account the fact that researchers from other scientific fields, using statistics of military operations, often do not understand the degree of its completeness or, conversely, incompleteness. In order to solve this problem, within the framework of the Runivers project on the military history of Russia, we have compiled for the first time complete bases of military operations based on descriptions of military campaigns in all periods of history from the beginning of Russian statehood (9th century) to the beginning of the First World War.
The collection of military statistics on campaigns, taking into account the forces and means involved in our project, is based on the units of measurement used by the contemporaries themselves. Since 1700, these have been homogeneous battalions and squadrons based on a regular strength structure. Military decisions are made precisely about the use of a certain number of battalions and squadrons in the theater of military operations. The collection and systematization of statistics on the military campaigns of a given state also provides interesting material for analyzing the military and political activity of the state. Using narrative sources alone in retrospect, without proper statistics, historians often cannot objectively assess the significance of an event that could have been deliberately exaggerated or, conversely, downplayed for propaganda purposes. This distorts the real picture in which the assessment of the situation and the adoption of military and political decisions took place. While statistics on the distribution of military forces and assets show us not propaganda intentions, but a real assessment of the military-political situation, intentions and decisions based on it at a given historical moment. This, in turn, allows for a much more objective and scientifically based historical analysis of military and political decisions. A classic example is the Crimean War of 1853-1856, during which the Crimean theater of military operations is traditionally presented as the main priority for Russian strategy. Meanwhile, an analysis of the deployment of the Russian armed forces throughout the Crimean War shows that no more than 20% of its army was in Crimea[28]. Even during the culminating moments of the defense of Sevastopol, the largest army groups of the Russian army remained on the western borders — from Bessarabia and Podolia to Volhynia, Lithuania and the coast of the Gulf of Finland, since it was these strategic directions (south-west, west and north-west) that were quite reasonably considered in the current situation, from the point of view of military and political the leaders of the Russian Empire, the most priority for defense against a possible attack, respectively, from Austria, Prussia, Great Britain and France.
More broadly, the analysis of objective military statistics based on campaigns, as well as the deployment of troops, both in wartime and in peacetime, makes it possible to analyze and evaluate the annual work of the state military machine (including the accumulation of funds, their distribution and use) over long time periods, measured in decades and even centuries.
The Runivers Military History project includes the following main components.
• Continuous qualitative description of the construction of the armed forces of Russia and other European countries from the middle of the 15th century to
the beginning of the XVIII century.
• A continuous qualitative and quantitative description of the formation and development of the armed forces of Russia and other European countries from the beginning of the 18th century to the outbreak of the First World War.
• For the period from 1700 to 1914, a continuous description of the deployment of the armed forces of Russia and other European states in both peacetime and wartime.
• A description of the use of the armed forces of European states in all military conflicts, based on campaigns and military engagements during them from the middle of the 15th century to the beginning of the First World War. Russian russians have a similar description of the participation of Russian troops in all known military operations for the entire period from the 9th century (from the beginning of Russian statehood) to 1914.
As a result of the work of a team of researchers within the framework of the Runivers project on military history, a comprehensive scientific approach has been developed that allows us to describe and evaluate the work of the state military machine "from the inside" based on extensive statistical databases on the combat operations of the troops of Russia and other European states from the Middle Ages to the outbreak of the First World War, including military conflicts, military campaigns (campaigns until the middle of the XV century) and military clashes[29]. Methodological features of the description and statistical analysis of military operations in Medieval Russia (9th century — the middle of the XV century) are revealed in the framework of this issue of the Historical Bulletin in an article by Yu.V. Seleznev, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Head of the Department of Russian History at the Historical Faculty of Voronezh State University[30].
Since the middle of the XV century, when in Russia, as in other European countries of the early Modern period, with the development of firearms and the emergence of a permanent "core" of the armed forces, functioning along with the feudal militia, a state mechanism for collecting and accumulating resources for conducting military operations was formed, it seems possible to move from the category of military statistics The "march" to the threefold hierarchy: conflict — campaign — combat clash. This approach is optimally applicable for understanding the qualitative characteristics of the military burden on the state, starting from the second half of the 17th century and up to 1914, when the armed forces, as a rule, had a fixed staffing structure. As for the First World War, during it both the structure of the armed forces of the European powers and the very nature of the conduct of hostilities changed so significantly that a different methodological approach is needed for their periodization, description and statistical evaluation. An article by S.G. Nelipovich, Candidate of Historical Sciences, Senior Researcher at the Center for Military History of Russia at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is devoted to this topic in this issue of the journal[31]. A special approach necessary to describe such a specific type of military and political activity of the Russian state in the XV-XIX centuries as the promotion of the frontier on the eastern, southeastern and southern borders is described in an article by Candidate of Historical Sciences, a leading researcher at the Institute of Problems of the Development of the North of the Federal Research Center "Tyumen Scientific Center of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences" By A.Y. Koneva[32].
The description of the history of the organizational structures of the armed forces is the next important component of the military historical project "Runivers". The databases already compiled and published on the Runivers website, as well as those in the process of compiling a database on the regiments of Russia and a number of other European powers of Modern times, are becoming more visible thanks to a number of works by researchers participating in the project published in this issue of the Historical Bulletin. To understand the transformation of the organizational structures of the Russian army in the XV–XVII centuries. Of particular value is the article by O.A. Kurbatov, Candidate of Historical Sciences, employee of the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts[33]. The structure of the issue also includes O.A. Kurbatov's latest research on the deployment of military garrisons in northwestern Russia at the end of the 17th and the first third of the 18th century.[34]
The main theoretical, methodological and practical aspects of preparing a database for the regiments of the Russian army in 1700-1914 are presented in the article by A.N. Chernenko [35]. Based on the data obtained, the author describes changes in the staffing structure and number of regiments, and provides a methodology for calculating the maximum number of Russian infantry and cavalry in conflicts and campaigns in the period 1700-1914. A separate study on the evolution of the light infantry of the Russian Empire, published on the pages of this issue of the journal, was carried out by I.E. Ulyanov[36]. The results of work on compiling databases of regiments of a number of European states of Modern times are presented in articles by A.N. Chernenko (English regiments)[37], I.Y. Kudryashova (French regiments)[38] and I.O. Parkhomenko (Prussian regiments)[39]. In addition to these databases and their descriptions, the project continues work on compiling databases of regiments of Sweden, Spain, Austria and a number of German states of the XVI–XIX centuries.[40] On the basis of already compiled and updated databases, research is planned on the annual financing of the regular army of Russia in the XVIII — early XX century, as well as England (Great Britain), taking into account the deployment of British regiments and participation in conflicts not only in Europe, but also beyond. In addition, within the framework of the Runivers military historical project, it is planned to publish comprehensive scientific monographs on the formation and evolution of the Russian armed forces in the XVI-XVII centuries and the promotion of the Russian frontier in the XVII–XIX centuries.
