BETWEEN AUTHORITY AND SOCIETY: SOLDIERS-FUGITIVES OF THE RUSSIAN ARMY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE 19TH CENT.

The paper presents analysis, grounded on the archive sources and legislative acts, of the reasons of the soldiers’ desertion from the regiments of the Russian Empire regular army. The research supplies scholarly interpretation and estimation of this phenomenon by the contemporary Ukrainian historians’ publications. The chronological order reflects the evolution of the military and civil legislation introduced with the aim of suppressing the soldiers’ wish to quit the military service as well as the local population’s sympathy with their fate realized by hiding and helping the fugitives while the latter was qualified as criminal cases at that time. The military commanders of the middle level collaborated with the provincial executive, police and court institutions concerning the search, finding and punishment of the fugitives with the following sending them to fine mouths and labour battalions. Objective analysis of deserting has become one of the key objectives of the present research. It explicated repressive character of the actions undertaken by the officials from the civil law enforcement agencies and officers from the regular army. Besides, there have been contradictions and conflicts between representatives of different strata of society in Right-Bank Ukraine where the army fugitives got into, in particular, motivation for denunciation, people hunting for money, getting even of village officials with their fellow villagers etc. Deserting has been proved to be one of the numerous drawbacks in the imperfect serf mechanism of the Russian state military mechanism.