Muslims in the Russian Army: Colonial Accommodation and the Limits of Empire, 1874–1917 by FranziskaDavies. Imperial Transformations – Russian, Soviet and Post‐Soviet History. London: Routledge, 2025. xvi + 233 pp. $190.00. ISBN 978‐1‐03‐290893‐9

In this book, Franziska Davies presents the first comprehensive English-language study of Muslim soldiers in Russian military service in the late imperial period. Her ambitious monograph explores the issue of Muslim military service from a variety of angles, including military reform, recruitment policies, accommodation of religious practices, citizenship, and the lived experiences of Muslim soldiers. It takes into account all the Muslim regions in the empire: Crimea, the Volga-Ural region, the Caucasus, the Qazaq steppe, and Central Asia. Davies’s book draws upon sources held at numerous archives, periodicals, and Turki-language manuscript sources. This enables her to provide a multifaceted view of the Russian military’s policies toward its Muslim recruits. Early in the book, Davies positions Russia’s 1874 military reform in the context of national and imperial armies during the nineteenth century. She argues that while many states used military service as a tool for transforming subjects into citizens by instilling a shared sense of identity, loyalty, and purpose, the Russian government never envisioned its army as a laboratory for citizenship. Rather, Russia’s military policies were designed to preserve the hierarchies between its Slavic, Orthodox subjects and its non-Slavic, non-Orthodox subjects. Moreover, the Russian government concerned itself primarily with being able to recruit sufficient troops and with keeping purportedly uncivilized and disloyal peoples out of its armies. One of the book’s most important contributions to Russian imperial studies is Davies’s reassessment of what “tolerance” meant in the Russian imperial context. She argues that “the state’s insistence that it was a tolerant entity was an ideological concept to legitimize its rule over non-Russians. […] it did not change the basic colonial structure of the state based on the principle that Russians were superior to non-Russians” (p. 10). For Davies, Russia’s claim to tolerance was not an expression of benevolence; it was a tool for legitimizing and perpetuating inequality between Russians and non-Russians in the empire. One of the Russian government’s powers over its non-Russian subjects was the power to grant religious tolerance or take it away. The superficiality and inefficacy of Russia’s religious tolerance toward Muslims in the army was made painfully clear in the soldat baetlary, narrative songs written by Volga-Ural Muslim soldiers about their military service. The soldiers who wrote these songs (from the 1870s to 1917) repeatedly portrayed military service as a grave misfortune and the Russian military as a place hostile to Islam and Muslim soldiers. Muslims in the Russian Army is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 examines the military reform of 1874 in the context of Russia’s Great Reforms and military reforms throughout nineteenth-century Europe. Chapter 2 details Russia’s policies toward Islam in the army, with a focus on Muslim chaplains, Muslim holidays, oath-taking, and dietary requirements. In this chapter and the ones that follow it, Davies presents the diversity of Russian policy among different Muslim communities and regions. The Volga-Ural Muslims were the most often recruited into the Russian army and offered the fewest accommodations. Crimean Tatars and Caucasian Muslims were recruited on a more limited basis but sometimes received greater accommodations to cultivate their loyalty to the empire. Central Asian Muslims and Qazaqs were excluded from military service altogether due to the Russian government’s ongoing perception of them as potentially disloyal and unfit for military service. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 explore Russian policy toward Muslims in the army during the Russo-Turkish War from 1877 to 1878, the period from 1905 to 1914, and the First World War. These three chapters also use sources from the soldiers themselves to reconstruct the experiences of Muslim recruits in each of these periods. Davies concludes that the purpose of the Russian army was to “subdu[e] as many ethnicities and communities as possible to the interest of the imperial state” (p. 202). The Russian army, as envisioned by Russia’s military leaders, was primarily an instrument for colonization and “civilizing” of Russia’s non-Russian peoples. Having shown the wide disparities between imperial officials’ understanding of how Muslims felt about the army and the feelings that Muslims themselves expressed about military service, Davies argues for the need for historians to decenter ethnic Russian and Russian official voices when studying Russian imperial and Soviet history. This approach would allow for a fuller, more nuanced view of Russia’s past and present. Muslims in the Russian Army is a well-researched work and will be welcomed by scholars in the fields of Russian history, military history, and comparative colonial studies.