Service in the Petrine army and its successors* was very much a mixed bag. One of Peter I's innovations, and one that made Russia's military unique up through the Napoleonic Wars was that he sought to establish a large, permanent force structure that made the Army a major institution within the Russian state. This meant that recruiting for the military embraced both volunteerism and increasingly a type of conscription or blood tax imposed upon peasant communities, the largest source of manpower reserve the Russia state possessed. The Russian Army was also atypical in terms of the length of service, initially life, but limited to 25 years in 1793 and were garrisoned away from their native villages to discourage desertion.

The typical serf-recruit drafted would have a funeral service in his community before he mustered to his regiment. This funeral service was quite deceptive from the position of the twenty-first century and it is dangerous to take the idea of a funeral for the living at face value. Firstly, given the size of the empire, the limited transportation infrastructure, and the tactic of stationing the formations away from where they were recruited, it was highly unlikely a soldier could ever return home to his native village. Secondly, entering into the army meant leaving one's native estate (soslovie) and entering into a new soslovie class. The soslovie table of ranks in the eighteenth century was not as hardened and defined as it would become in the nineteenth, but military men, even lowly infantry men, were in a separate social estate set up for military service. This estate status was inheritable and was in evidence in many of the garrison towns that serviced the Russian state. It's important to remember that garrison duty was much more the typical life of a soldier than one of constant battles and garrison life became one of the focal points of a soldier's new life. The children of soldier's wives could enter into garrison schools, first founded in 1721, that fast tracked young boys for military service. Similarly, off duty soldiers were legally allowed to practice a trade and if they were allowed to muster out, often became tradesmen. This estate system imparted to the Russian army a much greater and cohesive institutional character than many of its contemporaries and the long-term service helped add to the Russian military estate as a distinct class in Russian society.

However, just because the Russian armed forces were a special military estate does not mean that the tsarist state looked fondly upon them. Pay was very much in arrears and quite meager as many general and officers felt that the troops in garrison would spend it on drink and other surly pursuits. Discipline was very rough and corporal punishment was the norm. Cooking the rations of food provided was usually left up to the soldiers themselves, who broke up into small groups called artel usually run by a corporal elected by the ranks. The artel would organize supplements of vegetables and meat to the rations of bread, rye, or barley the commissaries provided. The organization of these supplemental foodstuffs led to collective sharing of excess pay, gambling windfalls, plunder, or other forms of currency and the artels acted as form of a bank for the regiment. This system created a degree of self-sufficiency within the Russian army and was something many foreign commentators observed that the Russian rank and file had an amazing recuperative ability and ability to march great distances in good order.

That said, there are also a lot of overlap between the life of the average Russian soldier and a number of his European contemporaries. Corporal punishment was quite the norm in most European armies at this time and low pay, or any pay, was a common complaint of soldiers regardless of which state they served. The relative inaccessibility of sources on the Russian army, both because of the language barrier and the administrative poverty of the imperial Russian bureaucracy left a relatively small archival base, ensured that demi-Orientalist depictions of the Russian army by those who fought it have remained relatively unchallenged in a lot of popular literature. The Russian army was in many respects the equal of its contemporaries and in some ways, their superior. The Russian artillery arm started strong under Shuvalov's reforms of the 1740s and remained typically much stronger than its European counterparts. The institution was able to promote individuals like Suvorov whom was just as capable a general as any. The hypothetical serf recruit entered into an institution that reflected the unique conditions of the Russian empire, but shared a lot of experiences in common (low pay, corporal punishment, boredom of garrison life, etc.) with his contemporaries.

*note, much of this largely applies to the later eighteenth century as there simply is more data on the army of the later Romanovs than the Petrine period.

Sources

Duffy, Christopher. Russia's Military Way to the West: Origins and Nature of Russian Military Power, 1700-1800. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.

Keep, John L. H. Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462-1874. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.

Wirtschafter, Elise Kimerling.From Serf to Russian Soldier. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990.