New Generations and the Hopes of Empire: Youth Premilitary Training in Early-Twentieth Century Eurasia

Abstract In the early-twentieth century, state institutions and voluntary associations in the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Romanov empires envisioned a “new generation” of imperial subjects to reinvigorate patriotism serving as the bond between state and society. Anxieties linked to military inadequacy vis-à-vis other empires combined with the fear of social unrest and moral disorder, which drew increased attention on the discipline of youth. In those three Eurasian empires, forms of premilitary training involving children and teenagers (mostly aged six to nineteen) emerged from private initiatives and were quickly coopted by imperial authorities. The article discusses institutions like Türk Gücü in the Ottoman Empire, the Poteshnye Roty in the Russian Empire, and the Reichsbund der Jugendwehren und Knabenhorte in the Habsburg monarchy. Although their visibility in illustrated magazines and other media grew rapidly in the early 1910s, those projects mirrored the empires’ difficulties in implementing activities throughout vast territories. Premilitary training caused frictions between ministries and raised new issues of belonging and loyalty in those multiethnic societies. Eventually, the envisioned militarized imperial youth did not prove particularly effective in the framework of the First World War. However, those initiatives reveal a crisis in politics of difference as they reinforced activism in the name of empire albeit mostly limited to the empire’s respective “dominant” group: Sunni Turks, Catholic Germans, and Orthodox Russians. In so doing, premilitary training tested forms of mass mobilizations and remained a reference with which post-imperial societies in the republics of Turkey and Austria as well as the Soviet Union had to reckon.