About this episode

This episode explores the role of military journalism in Russia during the reign of Alexander II and the tensions between reform and autocracy.

In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we explore a little‑known but revealing corner of Russian history: the military press during the reign of Alexander II. After the humiliating defeat in the Crimean War, it was clear that Russia's army – and the autocracy that sustained it – needed fundamental change. Alexander II, who came to power as the war dragged on, embarked on a series of "Great Reforms", most famously the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. But reform was always a balancing act between modernisation and the preservation of autocratic power. Nowhere were these tensions sharper than in the military press. Historian E. Willis Brooks, in an essay from the collection *Reforming the Tsar's Army*, examines how War Minister D. A. Milyutin used newspapers and journals to communicate new ideas to officers and conscripts – while struggling to control the very voices he had unleashed. Publications like *Ruski Invalid* (The Russian Veteran) and *Voyeny Sbornik* (Military Review) were meant to be loyal instruments of state policy. But as they sought readers and relevance, their editors – some of them former utopian socialists – began to clash with government censors and…

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