Collective portrait of officers from the Tambov province in the Siberian Rifle Regiments on the eve of and during the First World War

The article is devoted to the study of the main socio-professional and family and demographic indicators of officers from the Tambov province in the Siberian Rifle Regiments on the eve of the First World War and their life trajectories during the war. The research is based on pre-war unpublished sources on the personnel of these military units from the Russian State Military History Archive, as well as on documents from the Military Department of the First World War related to the registration of losses and awards for officers.
The methodological block is presented by a combination of prosopography and microhistory, which allows achieving the research’s aim – to identify and analyse the common features and private nuances in the biographies of officers.
The author analyses the officer corps on the scale of branches of the armed forces, military educational institutions, districts and the army as a whole, basing on the research’s results of small officer groups. Moreover, the methods, combination allows getting out of some stereotypes about officers of prerevolutionary Russia in Soviet and modern Russian historical science, as well as considering the problem from another scientific point of view.

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