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Russian Jews were first conscripted into the Imperial Russian army during the reign of Nicholas I in an effort to integrate them into the population of the Russian Empire. Conscripted minors were to serve, in practical terms, for life. Although this system was abandoned by his successor, the conscription experience remained traumatic in the popular memory and gave rise to a large and continuing literature that often depicted Jewish soldiers as heroes. This imaginative and intellectually ambitious book traces the conscription theme in novels and stories by some of the best-known Russian Jewish writers such as Osip Rabinovich, Judah-Leib Gordon, and Mendele Mokher Seforim, as well as by relatively unknown writers. Olga Litvak teaches European and Jewish history at Princeton University. She writes and lectures about the cultural life of Eastern European Jewry. Born in Soviet Russia and educated in the US, she is a New Yorker by conviction..
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A standard source for more than three generations of Civil War scholars, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy remains the authoritative study of the Confederate draft. In this landmark book, Albert Burton Moore uses conscription to illustrate a central paradox of the Confederacy: in order to protect its commitment to states' rights, the Confederacy was forced to adopt tactics of centralized government. Charting the strength of Confederate forces before and after conscription's implementation in 1862, Moore examines the system's daily operations, troublesome procedures for substitutions and exemptions, and ultimate collapse. He conveys the controversy surrounding conscription by quoting from acerbic and sometimes eloquent arguments for and against conscription put forth by governors, congressmen, newspaper editors, and soldiers. Although Moore credits Confederate conscription with a high degree of success, he blames it for causing friction between state governors and President Jefferson Davis, dissension between state and national judicial systems, and bureaucratic problems of colossal proportions. William Garrett Piston's new introduction places the volume in its historical context and underscores one of the most remarkable features of the study - Moore's forthright admission that a large number of Southerners did not support the Confederacy..
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How did Russia develop a modern national identity, and what role did the military play? Joshua Sanborn examines tsarist and Soviet armies of the early twentieth century to show how military conscription helped to bind citizens and soldiers into a modern political community. The experience of total war, he shows, provided the means by which this multiethnic and multiclass community was constructed and tested. Drafting the Russian Nation is the first archivally based study of the relationship between military conscription and nation-building in a European country. Stressing the importance of violence to national political consciousness, it shows how national identity was formed and maintained through the organized practice of violence. The cultural dimensions of the "military body" are explored as well, especially in relation to the nationalization of masculinity. The process of nation-building set in motion by military reformers culminated in World War I, when ethnically diverse conscripts fought together in total war to preserve their national territory. In the ensuing Civil War, the army's effort was directed mainly toward killing the political opposition within the "nation." While these complex conflicts enabled the Bolsheviks to rise to power, the massive violence of war even more fundamentally constituted national political life. Not all minorities were easily assimilated. The attempt to conscript natives of Central Asia for military service in 1916 proved disastrous, for example. Jews; also identified as non-nationals, were conscripted but suffered intense discrimination within the armed forces because they were deemed to be inherently unreliable and potentially disloyal. Drafting the Russian Nation is rich with insights into the relation of war to national life. Students of war and society in the twentieth century will find much of interest in this provocative study..
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Finding the manpower to defend democracy has been a recurring problem. Russell Weigley writes: "The historic preoccupation of the Army's thought in peacetime has been the manpower question: how, in an unmilitary nation, to muster adequate numbers of capable soldiers quickly should war occur." When the nature of modern warfare made an all-volunteer army inadequate, the major Western democracies confronted the dilemma of involuntary military service in a free society. The core of this manuscript concerns methods by which France, Great Britain, and the United States solved the problem and why some solutions were more lasting and effective than others. Flynn challenges conventional wisdom that suggests that conscription was inefficient and that it promoted inequality of sacrifice. Sharing similar but not identical diplomatic outlooks, the three countries discussed here were allies in world wars and in the Cold War, and they also confronted the problem of using conscripts to defend colonial interests in an age of decolonization. These societies rest upon democratic principles, and operating a draft in a democracy raises several unique problems. A particular tension develops as a result of adopting forced military service in a polity based on concepts of individual rights and freedoms. Despite the protest and inconsistencies, the criticism and waste, Flynn reveals that conscription served the three Western democracies well in an historical context, proving effective in gathering fighting men and allowing a flexibility to cope and change as problems arose..
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This volume contributes to the comparative study of military conscription. Issues discussed include: a conceptual clarification of conscription as distinguished from volunteerism and militia service; the emergence of the citizen soldier model; patterns of anti-militarism before World War I; conscription in third world armies; gender-issues in relation to military service; the present phenomenon of child soldiers in Africa; the decline of conscript armies in Western Europe. A review section discusses the contribution of rational choice theory to the analysis of conscription into military forces..
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