The article is devoted to amateur theatre as one of the factors that contributed to the high level of linguistic development of the military schools' cadets in Russia. Many of the military education ideologists were convinced that theatre influences on the development and improvement of the speech abilities of an individual expanding the ways of its manifestation and self-realization. Both in the metropolitan and provincial military schools and academies were created conditions for development of amateur theatres. Often cadets wrote plays themselves and some of them later became writers and journalists.