The article considers seven concepts of spontaneous social associations developed in Russian military psychology in the pre-revolutionary period. The authors of some of them (A. E. Snesarev, N. A. Ukhach-Ogorovich) consistently opposed the army and the crowd, others (A. S. Zykov, N. N. Golovin, A. S. Rezanov), in line with the ideas of collective psychology of that time, likened the army to the crowd, attributing similarity of properties to them, others (D. D. Bezsonov, G. E. Shumkov) implemented an individual approach, describing as the same influence on the psyche of a fighter of extreme conditions of the combat and the crowd. It is noted that the historical and psychological reconstruction of the main approaches of representatives of the military-psychological thought of the Russian Empire to the study of the crowd is of interest not only in the context of identifying the stages of development of Russian science, but also for further research of irrational aspects of the activity of spontaneous social associations.