Blackwell Reference Online

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(1830–1905) Dragomirov was the dominant figure in Russian tactical thought between the Crimean War and the First World War. He entered the Semionvski Guards in 1849, and graduated from the general staff academy in 1856. From 1863 to 1869 he was professor of tactics at the Nicholas Academy of the General Staff, and in 1878 he returned to the Academy as its head. He left the Academy in 1889 to command the Kiev military district, whose chief of staff he had been in 1869–73. Dragomirov's tactical ideas were an amalgam of the Suvorov tradition and of his own observations while attached to the Sardinian army in the war of 1859. He argued that soldiers should be educated and encouraged rather than bullied and repressed. But he did so because he felt that morale was the key to battlefield performance. His service in the war against Turkey in 1877–8 did not lead him to a fuller recognition of the impact of new technology. In addition to his standard texts on tactics (1864 and 1879), he wrote histories of the wars of 1859 and 1866, and was the key figure in official works on training and field operations. See also plevna ; russia/ussr ; solferino ; suvorov . Modern Encyclopaedia of Russian and Soviet History , ( Gulf Breeze, Fl. , 1979 ), x . ... log in or subscribe to read full text