Social Policy of the State in Relation to Families of Lower Ranks in Russia in the 17th – 19th centuries

Social support for military personnel and their families in Russia in the 17th -19th centuries is an important component of the process of transforming the army into a powerful tool for the modernization of Russian society.In conditions when a person's status was determined by his social origin, the life of a soldier's family was regulated not by its traditional role, but by the position of the head of the family on active service.In return, military service provided the wife and children of lower ranks with rights and freedoms inaccessible to other members of the community, providing it with a special legal status.The reverse side of this process was the transformation of the soldier's family into the property of the military department, deciding their life and fate based on their own ideas about the needs and capabilities of the state.According to them, the army, in addition to its main purpose, turned into a kind of social institution with a slowly forming system of social security, the actions of which were completely insufficient for the effective solution of the tasks set and demonstrated the inability of pre-reform Russia to meet the state's needs through spontaneous development.Nevertheless, the awareness of the growing responsibility of the state to the lower ranks and the expansion of the number of duties towards them, with a constant burden on the state budget, demonstrated the paternalistic approach that permeated the imperial social order.When the opportunities offered by the state did not correspond to real conditions, they defined new types of activity legally available to an individual member of the soldier's family.Using the offered opportunities, despite all the cruelty and contradictions of the state policy in a state of forced social mobilization, the families of the lower ranks developed new strategies, attempted to find conditions for satisfying their needs and independently adapting to changing living conditions.Their fates reflected the dynamics underlying the interaction of the state, society and its institutions and determined ideas about the rationality and effectiveness of the existing social order.