Yes and no. While the Imperial Russian Army had a strong non-Russian character to it both by tradition and necessity, there were also very strong discriminatory practices in conscription and promotion.

One of the anomalous features of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century was that although it was a great power it also was one of the more ethnically heterogeneous polities of the period. The 1897/8 All-Russian census had found that Great Russians composed only 45% of the empire's total population. Such a detail would have come as no real surprise to the Army who had known for some time that the armed forces were quite polyglot in spite of exemptions from conscription given to Muslims, various ethnic colonists like the Volga Germans, and the various "Small Peoples" of Siberia. While the Miliutin reforms of the army of the 1870s had expanded conscription to hitherto exempted groups like Jews, the War Ministry also implemented ceilings on the ethnic make-up of units to prevent them from becoming majority non-Russian.

These recruiting policies were no so much a break from tradition so much as an evolution of them. The Miliutin reforms systematized a number of practices in the pre-Great Reforms tsarist military. The Romanovs had pioneered elements of mass conscription even before the French levée en masse of 1789 while at the same time according special status to various inorodtsy (subject peoples- ie non-Russians) groups. These privileges could range from exemption from conscription in exchange for higher taxes, the formation of a group's own military forces, or favorable positions within the Romanov state hierarchy. The Baltic Germans for example, were an exemplar of the latter group. This national minority (who themselves were a minority in the Baltic ruling over a non-German majority) tended to have a higher level of education than Russian counterparts and had by 1800 established a tradition of state service to the Romanovs. As with the Cossacks, the Baltic Germans would frame their service to the Tsar in highly personal, quasi-feudal terms. Emperor Nicholas I summed this up by claiming that the difference between a Baltic German noble and a Russian one was that the former was loyal to the Tsar while the latter served the state. Baltic Germans made up a sizable portion of the Empire's officer corps during the Napoleonic Wars so much so that a number of Russian officers grumbled in the retreats of 1812 that the "Germans" were retreating from Napoleon without a fight. Finns, Baltic Germans, Ukrainians, and Poles all reached high-rank during the nineteenth century. The Navy's officer corps in particular drew heavily from the Baltic Germans.

But acceptance of such men did not mean that the War Ministry held a progressive attitude towards promoting national minorities. There was an increased skepticism in the corridors of power towards the loyalties of the Baltic Germans with German unification and the French alliance. The Miliutin reforms also sought to claw back the various privileges given to inorodtsy such as Jewish exemption from conscription. But although the state now conscripted non-Russians and non-Orthodox in unprecedented numbers, it did little to accommodate these men's ethnic background. Of the Empire's multiple faiths, the War Ministry only begrudgingly tolerated Baltic or Finnish Protestantism among its soldiers. Jewish recruits could not keep kosher nor would Catholics be allowed to openly worship as the state associated the Latin church with Polish disloyalty. In the case of Jewish conscripts and volunteers, antisemitism still trumped competence for promotions. While the War Ministry allowed Jews to petition for promotion to officer rank, albeit with many objections from the Interior Ministry, only a grand total of 9 Jews gained commissions to the lower officer corps between 1874-1914. Flag officers of non-Russian background were often highly Russified despite their non-Russian names or religious background. Two of the First World War's more prominent Baltic Germans, Roman von Ungern-Sternberg and Paul von Rennenkampf,were not only distantly related, but both men also identified quite strongly with the Russian Empire and its tsar.

Thus while the Romanov armed forces did open up the officer corps to some non-Russians, it was often on terms that were far from progressive. The Russian imperial military was a transnational institution and more than 25% of its total strength was non-Russian. However, while the recruiting base was transnational, the ethos behind promotion and running the military was not. Non-Russians serving always had an asterisk behind their names and the War Ministry and the Romanov state at large was more than ready to scapegoat non-Russians in the ranks for military disasters. Even the Miliutin reforms, which were to drag the military into the modern era after the Crimean debacles, regarded incorporating more non-Russians into the ranks as a regrettable necessity. Even though men like von Ungern-Sternberg served the state faithfully, the Empire's institutions never fully acknowledged such loyalty.

Sources

Menning, Bruce. Bayonets Before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861-1914. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Petrovsky-Shtern, Yohanan. Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917: Drafted into Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 2014.

Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, David. Reforming the Tsar's Army: Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution. Washington, D.C. [u.a.]: Woodrow Wilson Center Press [u.a.], 2004.