Uniforms of Russian Army during the years 1825-1855. Vol. 3: Dragoons, Horse-jagers, Lancers & Hussars

by Aleksandr Vasilevich Viskovatov, Mark Conrad (Translator)

This volume is related to the Russian Army during the zar Nicolas Ist era, and are about the uniforms cavalry in use from 1825 to 1855. Compiled at Saint Petersburg during the year from 1837 and 1851, the Historical Description of the Clothing and Arms of the Russian Army has had an enormous impact and great importance for the study on the history of Russian costume and uniformology development over the past centuries .There are various ancient editions of the work but Mark Conrad's translation is the first one and the best, remaining true to the original structure and essential style of the text. Conrad's comprehensive translation is an indispensable resource for today's historian, strategists, and scholars. The Viskovatov's enormous work is based on a great quantity of archival documents and contains four thousand colored and b/w illustrations. It is composed by 30 or 34 volumes (1st edition 1-30, St. Petersburg, 1841-62, and 2nd edition Vols. 1-34, St. Petersburg - Novosibirsk - Leningrad, 1899-1948). The topics discussed start from the early czars until the late nineteenth century. Our new edition has enriched the book with the we revised and colored many of the images so far available just in black and white, as well we found some rare color plates with the collaboration of private collectors. These, together with the first ever English translation, make our collection exclusive and of great value.

184 pages, Paperback

Published September 13, 2017

About the author

Александр Васильевич Висковатов

Aleksandr Vasilevich Viskovatov was a Russian military officer, historian and bibliographer. Born into a noble family in Saint Petersburg, he graduated with high honors from the elite Page Corps in 1824 and began his service in the artillery before transferring to the Imperial Gendarmerie. Over the next three decades he rose to the rank of major-general and held staff and command posts in St. Petersburg’s guard units, earning a string of imperial orders for his administrative and organizational work.
Beyond his military career, Viskovatov was one of 19th-century Russia’s most prolific historians of warfare. He edited and contributed to more than fifty volumes of detailed campaign monographs, battle descriptions and archival collections—among them multi-part “Historical Descriptions of Russian Wars,” “Chronicle of Cavalier-Grad,” and studies of the Russo-Persian and Russo-Turkish conflicts. His painstaking compilations of orders of battle, officer lists and first-hand reports made him a foundational figure in Russian military historiography.
Viskovatov is also regarded as the founder of Russian uniformology. From 1842 onward he published the first systematic studies of military dress, badges and insignia—producing manuals, periodical articles and a classification scheme that remained authoritative for decades. His 1854-56 two-volume “Illustrated Outline of Russian Army Uniforms” and subsequent journals set the standard for uniform research in Europe as well as his homeland.
He combined scholarly rigor with an administrator’s eye: as editor of the journal “Military-Encyclopedic Dictionary” and curator of numerous archival collections, he preserved thousands of original documents and firsthand memoirs. Viskovatov died in 1858, leaving behind a vast reference legacy that underpins today’s studies of Imperial Russia’s armies, uniforms and campaigns.