ys was
active in improving the moral and technical efficiency of the Russian
officer-corps, especially of the staff officer. In 1889 Dragomirov
became commander-in-chief of the Kiev military district, and
governor-general of Kiev, Podolsk and Volhynia, retaining this post
until 1903. He was promoted to the rank of general of infantry in 1891.
His advanced age and failing health prevented his employment at the
front during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5, but his advice was
continually solicited by the general headquarters at St Petersburg, and
while he disagreed with General Kuropatkin in many important questions
of strategy and military policy, they both recommended a repetition of
the strategy of 1812, even though the total abandonment of Port Arthur
was involved therein. General Dragomirov died at Konotop on the 28th of
October 1905. In addition to the orders which he already possessed, he
received in 1901 the order of St Andrew.

His larger military works were mostly translated into French, and his
occasional papers, extending over a period of nearly fifty years,
appeared chiefly in the _Voienni Svornik_ and the _Razoiedschik_; his
later articles in the last-named paper were, like the general orders he
issued to his own troops, attentively studied throughout the Russian
army. His critique of Tolstoy's _War and Peace_ attracted even wider
attention. Dragomirov was, in formal tactics, the head of the "orthodox"
school. His conservatism was not, however, the result of habit and early
training, but of deliberate reasoning and choice. His model was, as he
admitted in the war of 1866, the British infantry of the Peninsular War,
but he sought to reach the ideal, not through the methods of repression
against which the "advanced" tacticians revolted, but by means of
thorough efficiency in the individual soldier and in the smaller units.
He inculcated the "offensive at all costs," and the combination of
crushing short-range fire and the bayonet charge. He carried out the
ideas of Suvarov to the fullest extent, and many thought that he pressed
them to a theoretical extreme unattainable in practice. His critics,
however, did not always realize that Dragomirov depended, for the
efficiency his unit required, on the capacity of the leader, and that an
essential part of the self-sacrificing discipline he exacted from his
officers was the power of assuming responsibility. The details of his
brilliant achievement of Zimnitza suffice