The Russian Revolution

6

Russia at War

Judging by the result of the war with Japan, which was defeat followed by revolution, it can hardly be disputed that for the men who in 1914 ruled Russia prudence dictated neutrality. The immediate cause of the Revolution of 1917 would be the collapse of Russia’s fragile political and economic structure under the strains of war. It can be argued, of course, that the deteriorating ability of tsarism to govern and the presence of a militant intelligentsia made revolution likely, war or no war. But even if this point is conceded, a revolution under peacetime conditions, without the mutiny of millions of conscripts, would likely have been less violent and would have offered moderate elements a better chance to pick up the reins of power. As will be shown below, some of Russia’s most perceptive statesmen realized this and desperately tried to keep their country out of the war.

Why, then, did Russia intervene? Russian opinion then and later has been prone to seek the answer in external influences—namely, Russia’s economic and moral commitments to her allies. Socialist writers attribute tsarism’s involvement to the pressures of Western democracies whom Russia owed vast amounts of money. For Russian conservatives, Russia acted out of a selfless devotion to the alliance: to fulfill her pledges to France and England and save them from defeat, she risked her own destruction. This sacrifice, however, is said to have earned her no gratitude, for when Russia subsequently found herself hard pressed by the Germans and fell prey to extremists supported and financed by them, the Allies failed to come to her assistance.

Such explanations are unconvincing. Imperial Russia entered into defensive alliances and honored her commitments neither in response to Allied pressures nor from altruistic motives, but from soundly perceived self-interest. Long before 1914 Russian statesmen had a good notion of the designs Germany had on her. These called for the dismemberment of the Empire and German economic mastery over Russia and her borderlands. Post-World War II archival research has confirmed that German political, military, and business circles regarded the breakup of Russia and control of her resources as essential to Germany’s global aspirations. Berlin assigned high priority to neutralizing the Russian military threat and the related prospect of a two-front war as well as to gaining access to Russia’s human and material wealth with which to match that of France and Britain.¹

Given Germany’s Russlandpolitik after the dismissal of Bismarck, the choice before the rulers of Russia was not whether to withdraw into isolation or to join in great-power politics, with all the risks that this entailed: that had been decided for her by Germany. Her choice lay between facing Germany alone or acting in partnership with France and possibly England. Posed in this manner, the question answered itself. Unless Russia was prepared to give up her empire, shrink to the territory of seventeenth-century Muscovy, and acquiesce to the status of a German colony, she had to coordinate her military plans with the Western democracies. The alternative was to stand by while Germany smashed France, as she was certain to do if her eastern flank was secure, and then transferred her armies east to dispose of Russia. This was well understood in Russia long before the outbreak of the war. In 1892, as the two countries were moving toward an alliance, Alexander III had observed:

We must, indeed, come to terms with the French, and, in the event of a war between France and Germany, at once attack the Germans so as not to give them the time first to beat France and then turn against us.²

A Russian historian summarizes his country’s position before 1914 as follows:

One must not forget that tsarist Russia prepared for the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary in alliance with France, which, it was expected, would in the initial period of the war bear the more difficult task of repelling the pressure of nearly the entire German army. France experienced a certain degree of dependence on the conduct of Russia, on the level of her effort in the fight against Germany [and] the distribution of her forces. The tsarist government, for its part, was no less interested than France in her armies surviving the first trial. This is the reason why the Russian command paid so much attention to the operations on the German front. One must also not leave out of account Russia’s striving to take advantage of the diversion of the main forces of the German army to the West to deal Germany a decisive defeat in the very first months of the war.… For this reason, characterizing the relations between Russia and France at the beginning of the war, it is more correct to speak of the mutual dependence of the Allies.³

After the crushing defeat which its forces had inflicted on France in 1870, Berlin had every reason to expect that France would sooner or later attempt to regain her traditional hegemony on the Continent. In itself, this prospect posed no fatal threat, since the war potential of France at the end of the nineteenth century was only one-half of Germany’s. But the matter looked differently if France had on her side Russia, which by virtue of her geographic location and large standing army was ideally suited to counterbalance German might. Immediately after the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War, when Russia and Germany were still on friendly terms, Helmuth von Moltke, the German chief of staff, warned his government of the prospect of a two-front war.⁴ This danger became near-certainty in 1894, when France and Russia signed an accord of mutual defense committing them to come to each other’s aid if attacked by Germany or one of her allies. After 1894, the General Staffs of Germany, France, and Russia concentrated on devising strategies that would turn the prospect of a two-front war to their best advantage.

Germany faced the more serious problem by far, since a general continental war would compel her to fight simultaneously in the west and east. To win such a contest Germany had to desynchronize, as it were, the expected enemy offensives and dispose of them one at a time. Should France and Russia (and, after 1907, England) succeed in coordinating their strategies, Germany faced a bleak prospect, for even her superb army could not cope with the combined forces of the other two great land armies and the world’s leading naval power. This consideration lay behind the Schlieffen Plan, on which the German military set to work in 1895 and which it kept on perfecting down to the smallest detail until the outbreak of World War I. The Schlieffen Plan required that Germany crush France before Russia fully mobilized, and then rapidly shift the bulk of her armies to the east. Its essential feature, its very precondition, was speed: speed of mobilization, speed of offensive operations, and speed of troop transfers. The plan posited a slow pace of Russian mobilization, expected to require 105–110 days, compared with the 15 days estimated for the mobilization of German and Austrian armies.⁵ This disparity—on paper, as much as three months—offered the opportunity to defeat the French before the Russians were able to come to their assistance.

The Schlieffen Plan provided for up to nine-tenths of the German effectives being allocated to the Western Front. Outflanking the short, heavily fortified, and topographically difficult Franco-German border, the right wing was to execute a wheeling movement across Belgium, encircle and capture Paris, and trap the main French forces. While this decisive campaign was in progress, the Russians were to be held at bay by the main mass of the Austro-Hungarians, reinforced with one-eighth or one-ninth of the German army, deployed along the northeastern frontier and in East Prussia. The Schlieffen Plan called for the French campaign to be completed within forty days of mobilization, by which time the Russian army would have less than half of its manpower under arms. Mobilization was the critical factor: the instant the Russians began to mobilize, the Germans had to follow suit or risk the collapse of their entire war plan.

The Allied staffs knew, in broad outline, what the Germans had in mind.⁶ After many false starts, the French General Staff adopted what came to be known as Plan XVII. This provided for a defensive posture against the anticipated German thrust through Belgium accompanied by a vigorous assault on the linchpin of the German wheeling operation in the center. This attack was to penetrate German territory and, by threatening to cut off the enemy’s right wing, bring the German offensive to a halt.

The success of Plan XVII depended on Russian assistance. It posited that the Russians would threaten Berlin as soon as the German mobilization was completed—that is, by the fifteenth day of the war. The Russian assault was to compel the Germans to withdraw troops from the Western Front before the issue there had been decided and bring about Germany’s collapse.

The Franco-Russian defensive treaty of 1894 did not spell out in detail the operational plans for the eventuality of war. These were worked out in talks between the General Staffs of the two countries which began in 1911. Immediately sharp differences of opinion emerged. The Russian strategic plan, first formulated in the 1880s, called for deploying major forces in central Poland, from where, protected by fortresses, they were to launch simultaneous offensives against Vienna and Berlin. This plan was substantially revised in 1909–10. The new version called for Russia to assume a defensive stance against the Germans and to throw her main forces against the Austro-Hungarians, who were judged inferior and from whose ranks she expected massive desertions of Slavic recruits.* General M. V. Alekseev, widely regarded as Russia’s ablest strategic thinker, believed that after beating the Austrians and advancing into Silesia, the Russians would be able to threaten the very heart of Germany.

The French thought that the Russians paid too much attention to the Austrians; they could contribute more to the common Allied cause by committing the bulk of their forces against the Germans, for once the Germans had been defeated, their allies would sue for peace. The French wanted the Russians to concentrate on the Germans and to attack them even before they had fully mobilized.

A compromise plan was agreed upon at inter-Allied conferences in 1912 and 1913. The Russians promised that by the fifteenth day of the mobilization order, with only one-third of their forces under arms, they would strike at the German armies either in East Prussia or on the approaches to Berlin, depending on where they were more heavily concentrated. To this mission they would assign two armies totaling 800,000 men. The French calculated that by the thirty-fifth day of the war such a strike would penetrate so deeply into German territory that the Germans would have no alternative but to transfer east sizable troop contingents to stop the Russian “steamroller,” and thus abort the Schlieffen Plan. Once this occurred, the outcome could no longer be in doubt because the vastly superior human and material resources of the Allies were bound to bring them victory.

Although the Russians, under French pressure (sweetened with promises of assistance in modernizing Russian armies and military transport), agreed to modify their strategic plan, they did not entirely abandon it. While assigning two armies to fight the Germans, they deployed four against the Austrians. Some military historians believe that this was a fatally flawed compromise, since the Russians lacked the forces to carry out offensive operations on so broad a front. As a result, they would fail to achieve their objectives against either enemy.⁷ There is reason to believe that adherence to their plan of 1909–10 would have enabled them to maul the Austrians so severely that the Germans would have had to rush to their assistance with massive reinforcements drawn from the west, as they, in fact, did, albeit on a more modest scale, first in the fall of 1914 and then again in the summer of 1916. The decision to stretch the Russian forces along an overextended front, backed by inadequate reserves, and to push them into a premature, poorly planned attack on East Prussia, may well have been one of the costliest Allied blunders of the war.

In order to improve the chances of Russian success, the French agreed to finance improvements in the country’s military infrastructure. They provided money to modernize the railway lines leading to the front as well as strategic roads and bridges, which gave the German High Command cause for apprehension.

Berlin was even more alarmed by the announcement made in 1912 in St. Petersburg of the so-called Great Military Program (Bol’shaia Voennaia Programma). Scheduled for completion in 1917, it called for major improvements in artillery, transport, and mobilization procedures. Although this undertaking, initiated in 1914, remained largely on paper, it threatened to enable the Russians to complete their mobilization in 18 days, with the result that the “Russians would be in Berlin before the Germans were in Paris.”⁸ So disturbed were some German generals and civilian leaders by this prospect that they contemplated a preventive war.⁹ During the diplomatic crisis which followed the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in July 1914, they were heard to argue that this gave them as good a pretext as any to fight. Colonel Alfred Knox, the British military attaché in Russia, believed that Russian military modernization plans might have been the decisive consideration that pushed the Germans to declare war on Russia and France in August 1914.¹⁰

Given the immense literature on the subject, the diplomatic antecedents of World War I need not detain us.¹¹ Speaking in the most general terms, the immediate cause of the war was Germany’s decision to support Austria in her struggle with Russia in the Balkans. This conflict was of long standing, but it became aggravated by the emergence in 1871 of the German Empire, which deprived Austria of northern outlets for her political ambitions, deflecting them southward, toward the Ottoman Empire. Russia, with her own designs on the Balkans, claimed the role of protector of the Orthodox Christians under Turkish rule. The two powers clashed over Serbia, which stood in Austria’s way in her drive on Turkey. In several previous confrontations in the Balkans, Russia had yielded, to the outrage of her conservative nationalists. To have done so again in the crisis that developed in July 1914 following the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, worded with deliberate insolence and backed by Germany, could have spelled the end of Russia’s influence in the Balkan Peninsula and possibly domestic difficulties. St. Petersburg, therefore, decided, with French concurrence, to support Serbia.

The critical Russian moves followed Austria’s declaration of war on Serbia on July 15/28, 1914. The exact course of events leading to the issuance of orders for general mobilization of the Russian armed forces—events which the Germans subsequently blamed for the outbreak of World War I—remains confused to this day. The Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Sazonov, felt that his country had to make some kind of military gesture to give credibility to her diplomatic efforts in support of Serbia. Under his influence, and against the advice of the military, who feared that it would cause disarray in the general mobilization plans, Nicholas II initially ordered on July 15/28 a partial mobilization in four of the thirteen military districts.* The step was meant as a warning, but it inevitably led to full-scale mobilization. If one is to believe the Minister of War, Vladimir Sukhomlinov, the Tsar hesitated, being in receipt of warnings from the Kaiser urging him not to act precipitously. His decision to proceed with full mobilization, taken on July 17/30 without the concurrence or even the knowledge of the Minister of War, seems to have been taken on the advice of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich (soon to be named Commander in Chief) and his protégé, the chief of staff, General N. N. Ianushkevich.¹² On July 18/31, the Germans sent Russia an ultimatum demanding that she stop massing forces on their frontier. They received no answer. The same day, France and Germany began to mobilize and on July 19/August 1 Germany declared war on Russia. Russia responded in kind the day after, and the fatal chain of events was set in motion.

How well prepared was Russia for war? The answer depends on the kind of war one has in mind: a short one, measured in months, or a long one, measured in years.

The General Staffs of all the major belligerents prepared for the kind of quick war that Germany had waged with such impressive success in 1866 against the Austrians and in 1870–71 against the French. The 1866 campaign lasted seven weeks; and while the war with France dragged on for half a year due to the resistance of beleaguered Paris, it was decided in six weeks. Each conflict culminated in a major battle. The expectation before 1914 was that a general war would also be settled in a matter of months, if not weeks, if only because the highly interdependent economies of the industrial powers were believed to be unable to withstand a conflict of longer duration. In the coming war, the decisive factor was expected to be the size and quality of the armed forces, both those on active service and those held in reserve. In fact, however, to everyone’s surprise, World War I came to resemble the American Civil War, turning into a protracted war of attrition in the course of which the determining factors proved to be the ability of the rear to supply the front with the human and material resources needed to replace staggering losses, as well as to maintain morale in the face of casualties and deprivations. By blurring the lines between the front and the rear, such a war called for the mobilization of national life and intimate cooperation among the belligerent countries’ military, political, and economic sectors. In that sense, it provided the supreme test of a nation’s vitality and cohesion. World War I lasted so long and proved so destructive precisely because the great industrial nations passed this test with flying colors.

Russia was reasonably well prepared for the short war that everyone expected. Her standing army of 1,400,000 men was the largest in the world, exceeding the combined peacetime forces of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Fully mobilized, she could field over 5 million soldiers; and behind these stood many more millions of able-bodied men who, if necessary, could be quickly trained and thrown into battle. Russian soldiers enjoyed a good reputation for courage and endurance, which made them formidable fighters when well led. The war with Japan had humiliated the Russian army, but it also benefited it in that alone of the European powers it had cadres of officers and noncommissioned officers with recent combat experience. Matters looked less promising in regard to weapons and other equipment. The Russians were very short of artillery, especially in comparison with the Germans. Transport was poor. The Russian navy, rebuilt after the debacle of Tsushima, in terms of tonnage the third largest in the world, was mediocre in quality and hopelessly deployed, with the bulk of the ships assigned to the Baltic to defend the capital, where they were certain to be bottled up by the Germans. Even so, for all its deficiencies, some of which the French sought to correct, judged in battle-ready terms Imperial Russia was a power to be reckoned with, and the French General Staff had good reason to rely on its support.

Russia’s military power, however, appeared in a very different light when assessed in terms of a protracted conflict. From this standpoint her prospects looked unpromising, owing to the weaknesses of her political system as well as her economy. The longer the war lasted, the more these weaknesses were bound to make themselves felt.

Russia’s single greatest asset, her seemingly inexhaustible manpower, loomed large in the eyes of her allies, who fantasized about hordes of barefoot muzhiki driving in a dense, unstoppable “steamroller” on Berlin. Russia, indeed, had the largest population of any European country and the highest rate of natural increase. But the implications of these demographic facts were misconstrued. It was precisely because Russia had such a high birthrate that an exceptionally large proportion of her population was below draft age: the 1897 census showed 47 percent of the male inhabitants to be twenty or younger.¹³ Second, a number of ethnic groups were exempt from military service: the inhabitants of Finland, the Muslims of Central Asia and the Caucasus, and, for all practical purposes, subjects of the Jewish faith.*

Even so, Russia had an impressive pool of manpower. If, nevertheless, during the war she would experience manpower shortages the cause lay in shortcomings of her military reserve system. These affected adversely not only the army’s combat performance but also the political situation, because the peasants hurriedly pressed into service in 1915–16 were the mutinous element that would spark the February Revolution.

Like the other continental powers, Russia adopted in the 1870s the German reserve system, under which young males, after active service, were placed in the reserve, subject to recall in the event of war. The Russian reserve system, however, left much to be desired. Professional officers, contemptuous of civilians, assigned low priority to reserve training. Even more compelling were fiscal considerations. Training eligible men for combat duty and then recalling them for periodic retraining was a costly operation that siphoned off funds from the regular army. As a result, the government favored the professional cadres and granted generous exemptions from military service: among those exempted were only sons and university students. This practice explains why such a large proportion of Russian manpower was not available when required during the war: the number of trained reserves was low compared with the potential manpower.

The procedures adopted by the infantry called for three years of active duty beginning at the age of twenty-one, followed by seven years of reserve status in the so-called First Levy and eight more in the Second Levy. After this, the reservist, now in his late thirties, spent five years in the National Militia (Opolchenie), following which all his military obligations ceased. But because refresher courses were given to reservists in a desultory manner, if at all, for all practical purposes the only reservists on whom the army could count were those in the First Levy: the remainder, men in their thirties and early forties, many years out of uniform, were of no more use than civilians without any military training. In the first six months of the war, Russia would field 6.5 million men: 1.4 million on active duty, 4.4 million trained reservists of the First Levy, and 700,000 fresh recruits. Between January and September 1915, the army would induct another 1.4 million reservists of the First Levy.¹⁴ Once this pool of trained manpower was exhausted—and this would happen one year after the outbreak of the war—Russia had at her disposal (apart from 350,000 reservists of the First Levy) only the Second Levy, the Militia, and newly inducted, untrained recruits: an impressive mass of millions, but neither in motivation nor in skill a match for the Germans.

Thus, subjected to closer scrutiny, the Russian “steamroller” appeared quite unimpressive. In the course of the war, Russia managed to mobilize a considerably smaller proportion of her population for active military duty than either France or Germany: 5 percent compared with Germany’s 12 and France’s 16 percent.¹⁵ To everyone’s surprise, in 1916 Russia ran out of manpower for her armed forces.¹⁶

The army that went into combat in August 1914 was a highly professional body, in some respects not unlike the British Expeditionary Force, with great emphasis on regimental esprit de corps. Its outlook, however, was pre-industrial and even militantly anti-industrial. The command staff, dominated by the Minister of War, Vladimir Sukhomlinov, and his appointees, modeled itself on Russia’s most successful general, the eighteenth-century marshal Alexander Suvorov, emphasizing offensive operations and hand-to-hand combat. It had little use for the whole technological and scientific dimension of modern warfare. Its preferred weapon was the bayonet; its favorite tactic, storming enemy positions without regard to casualties.¹⁷ Greatest value was attached to courage under fire—a quality for which the mechanized, depersonalized combat of World War I, after the initial battles, would provide few opportunities. The Russian High Command believed that too much reliance on technology and too scientific a calculation of the balance of forces adversely affected troop morale. Russian generals disliked war games: a game scheduled in 1910 was peremptorily called off an hour before it was to have started on orders of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich.¹⁸

The Russian soldier on whom, in the ultimate reckoning, everything depended was an uncertain quantity. For the most part, he was a peasant. Village experience, reinforced by army discipline, had taught him to obey orders: as long as these were given in a manner that brooked no opposition and carried the threat of punishment, he cheerfully obeyed. He faced death with fatalism. But he lacked inner motivation. As noted previously, he was a virtual stranger to the sentiment of patriotism. The failure of the Imperial Government to develop mass education meant that much of the citizenry lacked awareness of a common heritage and common destiny, which is its principal ingredient. The muzhik had little sense of “Russianness.” He thought of himself, not as a “Russkii,” but as a “Viatskii” or “Tulskii”—that is, a native of Viatka or Tula province—and as long as the enemy did not threaten his home territory, he had no quarrel with him.¹⁹ Some Russian peasants, on reading the Imperial Manifesto declaring war on the Central Powers, were uncertain whether it applied to their village. This lack of commitment accounts for the extraordinary number of Russians who during the war would either surrender or desert. The absence of a sense of national identity was, of course, aggravated in the case of non-Russian soldiers, such as the Ukrainians. If one considers further that the muzhik had his ears keenly attuned for the approach of the “Great Leveler” who would distribute land, it is clear that he made a good soldier only for as long as the Imperial regime held firmly together and enforced discipline. Any weakening of military discipline, any sign that the village was stirring, was likely to transform the men in uniform into rabble.

The British military attaché, Colonel Knox, who spent the war at the Eastern Front and got to know Russian soldiers probably better than any other foreigner, formed a low opinion of them:

The men had the faults of their race. They were lazy and happy-go-lucky, doing nothing thoroughly unless driven to it. The bulk of them went willingly to the war in the first instance, chiefly because they had little idea what war meant. They lacked the intelligent knowledge of the objects they were fighting for and the thinking patriotism to make their morale proof against the effects of heavy loss; and heavy loss resulted from unintelligent leading and lack of proper equipment.²⁰

“Unintelligent leading” and “lack of proper equipment” were, indeed, the Achilles’ heel of the Russian military effort.

The Ministry of War was entrusted in 1909 to General Sukhomlinov, whose only combat experience had been in the Turkish war of 1877–78, in which he is said to have displayed impressive courage. By the time he reached the pinnacle of his career he had turned into a courtier, a servitor of the old patrimonial kind, whose loyalty was not to the country but the dynasty. Good at amusing the Tsar with anecdotes, he enjoyed popularity at the Court for his devotion and bonhomie. As Minister of War, he was nowhere as incompetent as later charged, when he became a scapegoat for Russia’s defeats; and he was certainly not guilty of treason. But he did live far above his means and is known to have supplemented his modest income with bribes: after his arrest in 1916 it was discovered that he had in his bank account hundreds of thousands of rubles in excess of his salary.²¹ Perhaps his worst sin, however, was the refusal to grasp the requirements of modern warfare. For one, he rejected the “interference” of private citizens in the war effort and disdained the politicians and industrialists who wished to help prepare Russia for the coming war. For another, he carried out in 1912 a destructive purge of officers, popularly known as “Young Turks,” versed in modern warfare, among them his deputy, Alexis Polivanov, who in 1915 would replace him. By favoring officers of the Suvorov school and demoting more talented rivals, he bore heavy responsibility for Russia’s poor performance in the first year of the war.

The higher a Russian’s rank, the less likely was he to possess the requisite military qualities. Many of the generals were careerists more adept at politicking than fighting. After the 1905 Revolution, officers were advanced mainly on the basis of personal loyalty to the Imperial dynasty. Promotion to the post of commander of a division or higher had to be confirmed by a Supreme Examination Board (Vysshaia Attestatsionnaia Kommissiia), chaired by Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, which used dynastic loyalty as its main criterion. Photographs of Russian generals of the period show amiable, portly gentlemen, usually bearded, who must have made better dinner companions than combat leaders. According to Knox,

the bulk of the regimental officers of the Russian army suffered from the national faults. If not actually lazy, they were inclined to neglect their duties unless constantly supervised. They hated the irksome duty of everyday training. Unlike our officers, they had no taste for outdoor amusements, and they were too prone to spend a holiday in eating rather more and in sleeping much more.²²

23. General V. A. Sukhomlinov.

Some of the highest commanders of Russian troops in World War I, including chiefs of staff and heads of armies, had made their entire careers in administration and lacked any combat experience.

Field-grade officers were better, but in short supply. Because of the low pay and low prestige of officers (except in the elite Guard Regiments, open only to persons with the proper social background and wealth), the army had difficulty recruiting able young men into the service. There was a persistent shortage of junior-grade officers. The situation with noncommissioned officers was plainly disastrous. Inasmuch as few NCOs reenlisted, a high proportion of those on active service were privates given stripes after cursory training. They enjoyed little respect from the troops.

Russia’s capacity for waging a protracted war did not look much more promising from the economic point of view.

The one sector of the economy that was adequate to the demands of a war of attrition was agriculture. Throughout the war years, Russia would produce ample food surpluses, which allowed her to avoid food rationing. The suspension of grain exports and two successive bumper harvests (1915 and 1916) provided an abundant reserve of food. This was one of the reasons for the smugness with which many Russians contemplated the prospect of war. But, as will be noted later, this advantage was in good measure vitiated by the government’s difficulties in extracting grain from the cash-rich peasants who withheld it in anticipation of higher prices, and by the inadequacies of transport.

Russia’s industries and transport fell in nearly every respect short of the task that lay ahead of them.

Russia traditionally depended for the production of military equipment on government factories, a practice motivated by an unwillingness to entrust national security to civilians.* How poorly Russian state industries were prepared to cope with the demands of modern warfare may be illustrated by the following figures. At the end of 1914, with the initial mobilization completed, Russia had under arms 6.5 million men, but only 4.6 million rifles. To meet these shortages and compensate for combat losses, the army required each month a minimum of 100,000 to 150,000 new rifles, but Russian industry could at best provide only 27,000.²³ In the first months of the war, therefore, some Russian soldiers had to wait for their comrades to fall in order to arm themselves. Serious proposals were then advanced to equip the troops with hatchets mounted on poles.²⁴ Even after energetic measures had been adopted in 1915 and 1916 to involve civilian industry in war production, Russia lacked the capacity to manufacture all the needed rifles and had to import from the United States and Japan; even so, there were never enough of them.²⁵

Another serious shortcoming occurred in artillery ammunition, especially 76mm shells, the standard caliber of Russian field artillery, which the armed forces would expend at a much higher rate than the General Staff had anticipated. At the beginning of the war, Russian artillery was allotted 1,000 shells per gun. The actual consumption proved many times higher, with the result that after four months of combat the ordnance depots were depleted.²⁶ The most that existing manufacturers could provide in 1914 was some 9,000 shells a month.²⁷ The result was an acute shortage, which had the most adverse effect on Russian performance in the campaigns of 1915.

Transport was arguably the weakest link in Russia’s war preparedness: Alexander Guchkov, who would serve as Minister of War in the First Provisional Government, told Knox in early 1917 that the disorganization of transport had dealt the Russian cause a worse blow than any military defeats.²⁸ It was also the most difficult one to rectify under war conditions because of the time required to lay down railroad beds, especially in the cold northern regions. In relation to her territory, Russia fell far behind the other major belligerents: whereas for each 100 square kilometers, Germany had 10.6 kilometers of railways, France 8.8, and Austria-Hungary 6.4, Russia had a mere 1.1.²⁹ This was one of the major reasons for the slowness of her mobilization. According to a German expert, in Western countries a mobilized soldier had to travel 200–300 kilometers from his home to the induction point; in Russia the distance was 900–1,000 kilometers.* But even these dismal comparisons do not tell the whole story, because three-quarters of Russian railways had only one track. As soon as the war broke out, the army requisitioned one-third of the rolling stock, which left too little for industrial and consumer needs, eventually causing shortages of food and raw materials in areas remote from their sources of production.

Nothing better reveals the lack of foresight on the part of Russia’s leaders than their failure during peacetime to prepare transportation outlets to the West. It should have been evident for some time before hostilities that the Germans would seal off the Baltic and the Turks the Black Sea, leaving Russia effectively blockaded. Wartime Russia has been compared to a house to which entry could be gained only by way of the chimney.³⁰ Alas, even that chimney was clogged. Aside from Vladivostok, thousands of miles away and linked to central Russia by the single-track Trans-Siberian Railroad, Russia had only two naval outlets to the external world. One, Archangel, frozen six months of the year, was linked to the center by a one-track narrow-gauge railroad. Murmansk, far and away the most important port under wartime conditions because it was permanently ice-free, had no railway in 1914: a line to connect it with Petrograd was begun only in 1915 with the help of English engineers and completed in January 1917, on the eve of the Revolution.† This incredible situation is explainable in part by the unwillingness of the tsarist government to rely on foreign suppliers of military equipment and in part the incompetence of the Minister of Transport from 1909 to 1915, S. V. Rukhlov, a dyed-in-the-wool, anti-Semitic reactionary. In consequence, the Russian Empire, a great Eurasian power, found itself as effectively blockaded during the war as Germany and Austria. Much of the raw materials and equipment sent to Russia by the Allies in 1915–17 ended up stockpiled at Archangel, Murmansk, and Vladivostok for lack of transport.^‡ Inadequacies of railroad transport also bore heavy responsibility for the food shortages which afflicted the cities of Russia’s north in 1916 and 1917. Here, as in so many other respects, the mistaken expectation that the war would be short accounted for the initial shortcomings; but it was political and managerial failures that prevented Russia from overcoming these deficiencies once they had become apparent.

The Russian performance in a protracted war would also be hampered by flaws in the military command as well as in the relationship between the military and civilian authorities.

Although Russia had, in theory, a Commander in Chief of all armed forces, in practice the conduct of military operations was decentralized. The combat zone was divided into several “fronts,” each with its own commander and its own strategic plan. Such an arrangement precluded a comprehensive strategy. According to one authority, the function of headquarters was in large measure limited to registering the plans of operations of the commanders of the separate fronts.³¹

A statute of field administration, adopted at the outbreak of the war, vested the army command with full authority over territories in the zone of combat as well as military installations in the rear. In these areas, the command administered both the civilian population and the military personnel without even being required to communicate with the civilian authorities. The Commander in Chief was empowered here to dismiss any and all officials, including governors, mayors, and chairmen of zemstvo boards. In consequence of this procedure, designed for a brief war, vast regions of the Empire—Finland, Poland, the Caucasus, the Baltic provinces, Archangel, Vladivostok, and even Petrograd itself—were withdrawn from civilian control.³² Russia found herself administratively bifurcated. Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the Commander in Chief, said that Prime Minister Goremykin felt quite comfortable with this arrangement, believing it was none of his business to interfere with the areas in or near the theater of operations.³³

Paradoxically, some of Russia’s leading figures saw her economic backwardness as a source of strength. It was said that the advanced industrial countries had become so dependent on the supply from abroad of raw materials and foodstuffs, on the cooperation of the various sectors of their economies, and on the availability of skilled labor that they could not withstand the rigors of war. With her more primitive economy, Russia was less vulnerable to disruption: abundant foodstuffs and inexhaustible manpower enabled her to fight indefinitely.* The optimism did not go unchallenged. In 1909 Struve warned:

Let us say frankly: compared to Germany and Austria, which, realistically viewed, are our potential enemies, Russia’s weakness lies in her insufficient economic power, her economic immaturity, and the resulting financial dependence on other countries. Under modern conditions of military conflict, all the imaginary advantages of Russia’s natural or semi-natural economy will turn into a source of military weakness.… Theoretically, no idea is more perverse and none more dangerous in practice than the one which holds that the economic backwardness of Russia can bring some sort of military advantages.³⁴

Such “defeatist” arguments were ignored. When the Duma Defense Committee expressed concern over Russia’s industrial unpreparedness for war, the Court expressed displeasure and the matter had to be dropped.³⁵ Sukhomlinov got rid of Polivanov and the other Young Turks precisely because they wanted to establish working relations with the leaders of the nation’s economy, whom the Court suspected of political ambitions.

The Court and its bureaucracy, both civilian and military, were determined not to allow “society” to profit from the war to enhance its political influence. This attitude explains a great deal that would otherwise be inexplicable in the behavior of the tsarist regime in preparing for and conducting the war. The patrimonial spirit remained very much alive despite the introduction of a constitutional regime. Deep in their hearts, Nicholas, Alexandra, and their entourage continued to regard Russia as the dynasty’s private domain and to treat every manifestation of patriotic concern on the part of the population as intolerable “meddling.” A general recalled an incident illustrative of this attitude. During one of their conversations at Army Headquarters, the Tsar let drop the phrase “I and Russia.” The general had the temerity to correct: “Russia and you.” The Tsar looked at him and replied in a low voice, “You are right.”³⁶ But the patrimonial mentality would not die and there were times when the government found itself waging war on two fronts: a military one against the Germans and Austrians and a political one against domestic opponents. It was only under the pressure of military disasters that the Court finally and grudgingly made concessions to society and agreed to involve it in the management of the war.

Unfortunately for Russia, the attitude of society, as articulated in the Duma, was even more uncompromising. The liberal and socialist deputies undoubtedly wanted to do everything possible to bring victory, but they were also not averse to taking advantage of the war to promote their political interests. In 1915 and 1916, the opposition would prove unwilling to meet the Crown halfway, aware that the discomfiture of the government offered unique opportunities to strengthen parliament at the expense of the monarchy and bureaucracy—opportunities unlikely to recur once the war was over. In a sense, therefore, the liberals and socialists entered into an unwritten alliance with the Germans, exploiting German victories at the front to gain political advantages at home.

Thus, in the final analysis, Russia’s collapse in 1917 and withdrawal from the war was due, first and foremost to political causes—namely, the unwillingness of government and opposition to bury their differences in face of a foreign enemy. The absence in Russia of an overriding sense of national unity was never more painfully in evidence.

The tsarist government entered the war confident of its ability to keep society at bay. It counted on a quick triumph and a surge of patriotism to silence the opposition: its formula was “no politics until victory.” These expectations were initially fulfilled. Swept by an outburst of xenophobia not seen since 1812 when foreigners had last set foot on Great Russian soil, the country rallied behind the government. But the mood proved ephemeral. With the first major reverses, in the spring of 1915, as the Germans swept into Poland, Russia exploded with fury—not so much against the invader as against her own government—with a vehemence experienced by no other belligerent power in the face of defeat. This was the price tsarism had to pay for the semi-patrimonial system of government under which the bureaucracy, appointed by and responsible to the Tsar, had to bear the brunt of responsibility for whatever went wrong. This allowed the Duma to accuse the Crown of hopeless incompetence and even worse, treason. Military defeats, instead of drawing government and citizenry closer, drove them further apart than ever.

Such wartime rivalry between the establishment and society was unique to Russia. It had a disastrous effect on the mobilization of the home front. The unconquerable aversion with which the country’s political and business leaders and the bureaucracy viewed one another precluded effective cooperation. The bureaucrats felt certain—and they were not entirely mistaken—that the politicians meant to take advantage of the war to capture the entire political apparatus. Opposition politicians, for their part, believed—also with some justification—that in their eagerness to keep power the bureaucrats would risk military defeat, and in the event of victory liquidate the constitutional regime and restore unalloyed autocracy.

This rivalry is illustrated by an incident which occurred in the summer of 1915, at the height of the crisis caused by the debacle in Poland. As will be detailed below, in response to these reverses, believed caused by shortages of artillery ammunition and other matériel, the business community launched, with the government’s approval, an effort to organize private industry for war production. The leader of this effort was Guchkov. Though no stranger to political ambitions, Guchkov proved more than once that he was a devoted patriot. In August 1915 he received an invitation—as it turned out, the first and only one—to join the cabinet in a discussion of the role of private enterprise in the war. A participant described the scene that ensued as follows:

Everyone felt tense and uneasy. Guchkov looked as if he had wandered into the den of a band of robbers, and stood in danger of some frightful punishment.… As a result, the discussion was short, everyone seeming to be in a hurry to finish this not very agreeable encounter.³⁷

In the forefront of the forces determined to resist the attempts of the Duma and the business community to become involved in the war effort stood the Court, dominated by the Empress, and its most devoted servitors, led by Prime Minister Goremykin and General Sukhomlinov. When, in April 1915, at the start of the German offensive, Guchkov, accompanied by some Duma deputies, went to Army Headquarters at Mogilev to familiarize himself with the situation at the front, Sukhomlinov noted in his diary:

A. I. Guchkov is really sticking his paws into the army. At headquarters they cannot be unaware of this and yet they do nothing, apparently attaching no importance to the visit of Guchkov and some members of the State Duma. In my opinion, this may produce a very difficult situation for our existing state system.³⁸

Some bureaucratic diehards went so far as to regard the “enemy on the home front”—that is, opposition politicians—as more of a threat than the enemy on the battlefield. This “war on two fronts” proved more than the country could bear.

Few intellectuals realized Russia’s political unfitness for a war which most of them enthusiastically endorsed. At its outbreak, Russia’s literary establishment was seized with patriotic frenzy: virtually to a man they supported the war effort and exhorted the nation to victory.³⁹ Only some of the more experienced bureaucrats seem to have been aware of the immense dangers which war posed because of the fragility of the country’s political structure, its vulnerability to external humiliations, and the need for a strong army to preserve domestic order. One of them was Sergei Witte, who argued that Russia could not afford to risk defeat in battle because the army was the mainstay of the regime. He so eagerly pursued a Russo-German accord even after leaving office that his loyalties came under suspicion.⁴⁰ Stolypin, too, had urged an isolationist course to give Russia time to carry out his reform program; so did Kokovtsov.⁴¹

No one articulated more eloquently the foreboding of the high officialdom than the onetime Minister of the Interior and director of the Police Department, Peter Durnovo. In February 1914, Durnovo submitted a memorandum to Nicholas II on the dangers of war for Russia. This document, discovered and published after the Revolution, so accurately foretold the course of events that if its credentials were not impeccable one might well suspect it to be a post-1917 forgery. In Durnovo’s estimate, if the war went badly “a social revolution in its most extreme form will be unavoidable in Russia.” It will begin, he predicted, with all strata of society blaming the government for the reverses. Duma politicians will take advantage of the government’s predicament to incite the masses. The army’s loyalty will weaken after the loss in combat of professional officers: their replacements, freshly commissioned civilians, will have neither the authority nor the will to restrain the yearning of the peasants in uniform to head for home to take part in land seizures. In the ensuing turmoil, the opposition parties, which, according to Durnovo, enjoyed no mass support, will be unable to assert power, and Russia “will be thrown into total anarchy, the consequences of which cannot even be foreseen.”⁴²

From the first day of hostilities, the French bombarded the Russians with appeals to move against the Germans. The German assault on Belgium turned out to be conducted on a broader front and with larger forces than they had anticipated. France now found herself in great jeopardy, the more so because the assault on the German center, the key to Plan XVII, made little headway.

Russian mobilization, as planned, was completed by early November.⁴³ Nicholas wanted to lead the army into battle personally, but allowed himself to be dissuaded (for the time being) by the Council of Ministers on the grounds that reverses at the front would damage his prestige.⁴⁴ Since it was custom for the army’s supreme command to be entrusted to a member of the Imperial family, given the nearly autocratic powers accorded the Commander in Chief in the zone of combat, the post went to the Tsar’s uncle, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich. This appointment was received with some surprise, because even though the Grand Duke had graduated from the General Staff Academy and was popular with the military, he had not been involved in the preparation of strategic plans. Nevertheless, it was indubitably the best choice under the circumstances.⁴⁵ Nikolai was one of the few members of the ruling dynasty to be favorably viewed by public opinion, which credited him with persuading the Tsar to sign the October Manifesto. His very popularity, however, made him enemies at the Court: the Empress, in particular, suspected him of designs on the throne.

As agreed with France, Russia deployed two armies in the northwest. The First Army, commanded by General Paul-Georg Karlovich von Rennenkampf, a Baltic German, was stationed in the Vilno Military District. The Second, under General Alexander Samsonov, was deployed near Warsaw. Rennenkampf had participated in the Japanese war as division commander but had never led larger units. Samsonov had no combat experience.

The sources differ on Russian strategic intentions in July 1914, but the conduct of the operations suggests that they had initially planned to attack the Germans and the Austrians simultaneously in drives on Berlin and Vienna. According to one historian with access to the archives, the Russians changed their plans at the last minute under French pressure in favor of immediate operations against German forces in East Prussia. The hastily mounted East Prussian campaign was meant to eliminate the threat of a flanking movement against Russian armies advancing westwards in Poland and Galicia.⁴⁶ The strategic plan now put into effect called for the First Army to invade East Prussia from the east to pin down the bulk of the German forces deployed there, while the Second Army struck north, in the direction of Allenstein, to cut them off from Germany proper. Having accomplished these missions, Rennenkampf and Samsonov were to join forces and advance on Berlin. The two Russian armies enjoyed considerable preponderance in numbers (one and a half to one), an advantage somewhat offset by the fact that the terrain in which they were to operate, a region of lakes and forests, favored the defense. They attacked on the fourteenth day of mobilization, one day earlier than they had promised the French. It was a bravado performance, in the best Suvorovian tradition, which Samsonov’s chief of staff privately described as an “adventure.”⁴⁷

The Russians at first made good progress. Indeed, they advanced so rapidly that the forward units outran their logistic support. For lack of time to string telephone wires, they sent reports and received their orders by wireless, usually in the clear. The Germans intercepted these messages, obtaining from them a picture of Russian dispositions and movements which they were to use to deadly effect. The two Russian armies acted independently, without coordination, each eager for the laurels of victory.

The invasion confounded the Germans. Their commander in East Prussia, General Friedrich von Prittwitz, panicked and urged a withdrawal to the western banks of the Vistula, which would have meant abandoning East Prussia. Berlin, fearing the effect such a surrender would have on German morale and already troubled by the spectacle of refugees streaming from the east, ignored von Prittwitz’s advice. It relieved him in favor of the sixty-seven-year-old Paul von Hindenburg, whom it recalled from retirement. Hindenburg arrived at the Eastern Front on August 23 in the company of his chief of staff, Erich von Ludendorff. The two breathed new life into the shaken Eighth Army and drew up plans to trap Samsonov’s forces. The latter were heedlessly pushing toward Allenstein, dispersing in the maze of Masurian lakes and losing contact with Rennenkampfs units operating near Königsberg. Counting on Russian carelessness, Ludendorff decided on a gamble. He secretly withdrew most of the forces facing Rennenkampf, leaving the approaches to Königsberg virtually undefended, and sent them into the breach which had formed between the two Russian armies. This had the effect of isolating Samsonov. Had Rennenkampf realized what was happening and attacked, he would have stood a good chance of rolling up the German left and inflicting a disastrous defeat on the enemy. But Ludendorff gambled that he would not and he was proven right. On August 28, the Germans counterattacked against Samsonov’s army, trapping it in an area of marshes and lakes. The operation, in some respects the most decisive of World War I, was completed in four days: on August 31 the Russian Second Army, or what was left of it, surrendered. The Germans had killed or put out of commission 70,000 Russians and captured nearly 100,000 prisoners, at a loss to themselves of 15,000 casualties. Unable to bear the humiliation, Samsonov shot himself. Next came Rennenkampfs turn. On September 9, reinforced with freshly arrived units from the Western Front, Hindenburg took on the First Russian Army, forcing it to abandon East Prussia. In this operation, the Russians lost a further 60,000 men.*

One of the striking features of the East Prussian debacle was the casual reaction of the Russian elite—a nonchalance that passed for bon ton in the highest strata of the aristocracy. Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich was unperturbed by the loss in two weeks of one army and almost a quarter of a million men. When the French military representative at headquarters expressed sympathy over the Russian losses, he replied, “We are happy to make such sacrifices for our allies.” But Knox, who recounts this incident, thought the Russians had acted less out of concern for the Allies than plain irresponsibility: they were “just great big-hearted children who had thought out nothing and had stumbled half-asleep into a wasp’s nest.”⁴⁸

Many Russian participants and historians have claimed that their country’s disastrous invasion of East Prussia was a supreme self-sacrifice which, by compelling the Germans to withdraw troops from the Western Front at a critical juncture, aborted the Schlieffen Plan and made it possible for Marshal Joffre to launch the counteroffensive of the Marne that saved France. This claim does receive some support in both German and French sources. Erich von Falkenhayn, the German chief of staff, believed that the withdrawal of troops from the Western Front had an “evil influence … [that] can scarcely be exaggerated.”* Moltke, Falkenhayn’s predecessor as chief of staff, and Joffre, who headed the French General Staff, also attached importance to the Russian August offensive as contributing to the failure of the Schlieffen Plan.⁴⁹ But it has also been argued, possibly with better justification, that the failure of the plan was due less to the transfer of divisions to the east than to such factors as the exhaustion of the German troops advancing across Belgium, the overburdening of transport facilities, and the unexpected appearance of the British Expeditionary Force. The Schlieffen Plan has been denounced as unrealistic because it had ignored such possibilities. General Alexander von Kluck, the commander of the German First Army on the extreme right flank of the Belgian campaign, whose mission it was to envelop Paris, had no alternative but to swing his forces on a shorter axis that took them north instead of south of the French capital. This maneuver, which had nothing to do with the battles that were being waged at the time in East Prussia, saved Paris and made possible the Marne counteroffensive.†

The East Prussian victory greatly bolstered the morale of the Germans: for they had not only inflicted heavy losses on the Russians and saved their homeland from invasion but succeeded, with inferior forces and relatively small casualties, in stopping dead the Russian hordes. In a symbolic gesture, intended to avenge the defeat of the Teutonic Knights at the hands of the Poles and Lithuanians near the village of Tannenberg five centuries earlier, they designated their victory the “Battle of Tannenberg.”

These disasters did not have a correspondingly debilitating effect on the morale of the Russians because they were in some measure offset by their victories over the Austrians. In mid-August, Russian armies broke the enemy front in Galicia, forcing the Austrians into disorganized retreat. At the end of the month, at the very time when Samsonov’s troops were in headlong flight, the Russians approached the capital of Galicia, Lemberg (Lwow), which they captured on September 3. One hundred thousand prisoners of war and 400 artillery guns fell into their hands: they had put out of commission one-third of the Austro-Hungarian army. Before long, advance units of Russian cavalry, having crossed the Carpathian Mountains, reconnoitered the Hungarian plain, while the main Russian force approached Cracow and menaced Silesia.

24. Nicholas II at army headquarters: September 1914. Sitting by him, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the Commander in Chief. In rear on left, Generals Danilov and Ianushkevich.

Russian successes against the Austrians cast a shadow on German jubilation because of the danger they posed to Germany’s rear. In early September, responding to Austrian pleas, the German High Command hastily assembled a fresh army, the Ninth, which under Hindenburg was to attack Warsaw and threaten from the north Russian forces in Galicia.

The next seven months on the Eastern Front were spent on intense but inconclusive fighting, none of the principals enjoying enough power to gain a decision. Hindenburg’s advance on Warsaw was checked by Russian bravery and Austrian vacillation. The Russians, for their part, proved unable to penetrate into Silesia because of the threat to their flanks from the north, while the Germans lacked the forces to compel them to withdraw from Galicia. As the winter of 1914–15 drew to a close, the Eastern Front fairly stabilized.

It was then that the Russians began first to experience shortages in military matériel. As early as the end of 1914, one-half of the replacements reaching the front had no rifles.⁵⁰ In a major engagement fought near the Polish town of Przasnysz in February 1915, Russian troops charged the Germans virtually with bare hands:

The battle was fought under conditions which are scarcely to be paralleled from the history of modern war. Russia, hard put to it for munitions and arms, was unable to equip masses of the trained men that she had ready, and it was the custom to have unarmed troops in the rear of any action, who could be used to fill gaps and take up the weapons of the dead. At Przasnysz men were flung into the firing line without rifles, armed only with a sword-bayonet in one hand and a bomb in the other. That meant fighting, desperate fighting, at the closest quarters. The Russians had to get at all costs within range to throw their bombs, and then they charged with cold steel. This was berserker warfare, a defiance of all modern rules, a return to conditions of primitive combat.⁵¹

The Russians won this particular engagement, which helped to stem the German drive on Warsaw. But their casualties in the first five months of war were staggering: by December 1914 they had lost in killed, wounded, missing, and prisoners of war (mostly the latter) 1.2 million men, among them a high proportion of junior and noncommissioned officers for whom there were no ready replacements. In October 1914 and again in February 1915, the army called up 700,000 fresh recruits, men in their early twenties, who were given four weeks’ training and sent to the front. As yet the older reservists were spared.⁵²

The Russian army kept on massing reserves in the rear. To this end it adopted a policy that was convenient and cheap, but destined to have the most calamitous political consequences. While some of the inducted reservists were billeted and trained near the front, the majority—fully three-quarters—were housed in major cities in barracks occupied in peacetime by regiments, then in combat, to which they were assigned as replacements. This caused no problem as long as the regime held together, but later on, in early 1917, these urban reserve garrisons, filled with sullen conscripts from the National Militia, would become the principal breeding ground of revolutionary discontent.

After months of savage fighting, Russia wanted to make sure she would receive compensation for her sacrifices: she wanted, above all, Constantinople and the Straits, major objectives of her foreign policy since the eighteenth century. She was stimulated to demand this prize by the British action against the Turks in Gallipoli, which was designed to open a naval passage to Russia. Rather than welcoming this operation, which might free her of the blockade, and joining in it, as she had promised, Russia grew anxious about British designs on the area. On March 4, 1915 (NS), the Foreign Minister Sazonov dispatched a note to the French and British governments claiming for his country Constantinople and the Straits as a prize of war. The Allies reluctantly acceded to this demand from fear that Russia might sign a separate peace with Germany and limit her military operations to the Turks. A year later, in the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement between France and England, which provided for the division of the Ottoman Empire, Russia was allotted, in addition, generous territories in eastern and northeastern Anatolia.

Surveying the situation after three months of combat, the German High Command faced a bleak prospect. Schlieffen’s grand strategic design had failed: the Western Front had solidified, with neither side able to make significant advances. No quick victory was in sight here. Germany now confronted the prospect of a protracted two-front war, which her generals had worked so assiduously to avoid. Von Moltke the Younger, the chief of the General Staff at the outbreak of the war, concluded as early as the beginning of September 1914 that the war may well have been lost.⁵³

The only remaining hope of victory lay in knocking Russia out of the war. Moltke expressed a view that gained ascendancy toward the end of 1914: that the decision had to be reached on the Eastern Front because the French would not sue for peace as long as the Russians held on, but would do so once their ally had gone down in defeat. “Our general military situation is now so critical,” he advised the Kaiser in January 1915, “that only a complete and full success in the east can save it.”⁵⁴ An additional argument in favor of launching a major offensive in the east was to keep the demoralized Austrians from dropping out of the war and leaving Germany’s southeastern frontier exposed to Russian invasion. From these considerations, late in 1914, at the urging of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, but against the advice of Falkenhayn, the German High Command decided to launch early in the spring an all-out offensive against the Russians for the purpose of annihilating their forces and compelling them to sue for peace. German troops in the west were ordered to dig themselves in: thus began the static trench warfare that was to dominate operations there for the next three years. Concurrently, in utmost secrecy, the Germans began to transfer established and newly formed divisions to the east. By the time spring arrived they had assembled, south of Cracow, unbeknownst to the enemy, an Eleventh Army under General August von Mackensen, of ten infantry divisions and one division of cavalry. This army was reinforced in the months that followed, until by September 1915 over two-thirds of German combat divisions (sixty-five out of ninety) were deployed on the Eastern Front. In April, the Germans enjoyed a considerable advantage in manpower over the Russians and an overwhelming superiority in heavy artillery, forty German guns facing one Russian. The strategic plan called for a giant pincer movement: Mackensen, assisted by the Austrian Fourth Army, was to drive the Russians in a northeasterly direction, whereupon the German Twelfth Army would strike southeast from Pomerania. When the two met, they would have trapped up to four Russian armies, as well as cut off Warsaw.⁵⁵

The Russians were in poor shape to meet this threat. Their troops were exhausted. They lacked heavy artillery and had only two rounds of ammunition left for each field gun. Rifles and shoes were in short supply. Unprepared for what was to come, their troops took shelter in shallow dugouts that offered little protection against German heavy guns.

The German offensive opened in complete surprise on April 15/28 with a withering artillery barrage of several days’ duration: it was the first saturation shelling of the war, which would be repeated the next year on an even greater scale at Verdun and the Somme. In the words of Bernard Pares, the Russian troops were “overwhelmed by metal” that blasted them out of their improvised trenches. When the guns fell silent, German infantry, with Austrian support, struck at the Russians and sent them reeling eastward. Then and throughout the 1915 campaign, the Russians continued to communicate in the clear using wireless, which, in Falkenhayn’s understated verdict, gave the war in the east a “much simpler character than in the west.”⁵⁶ On June 9/22, the enemy recaptured Lemberg and approached Warsaw. There was no end to the tales of disaster pouring out of Poland and Galicia on the stunned Russian public, which had expected 1915 to bring decisive offensive operations on the part of the Allied armies.

25. Russian prisoners of war taken by the Germans in Poland: Spring 1915.

Still worse loomed ahead. Intelligence indicated that German forces in Pomerania and East Prussia were massing for an attack. Indeed, on June 30/July 12, the Twelfth German Army went into action, heading toward Mackensen’s advancing troops. A pincer movement was in the making: if allowed to close, the First, Second, and Fourth Russian armies would have been trapped. Although aware of this danger, Nikolai Nikolaevich and his staff hesitated. From the strategic point of view there was no alternative to evacuating central Poland. Politically, however, this was a most unpalatable and even dangerous course, given the effect it was bound to have on Russian opinion. In the end, strategic considerations prevailed. On July 9/22, the Russians began a general retreat, abandoning central Poland but escaping the trap that had been set for them. The fortresses in Poland, which had cost so much to construct and held a high proportion of the Russian heavy artillery, surrendered, some without putting up a fight. The Germans kept on pressing eastward, running into diminished resistance. They suspended offensive operations only at the end of September, by which time they had established a nearly straight north-south front running from the Gulf of Riga to the Romanian border. All of Poland as well as Lithuania and much of Latvia were in their possession. The Russian threat to the German homeland had been eliminated for the duration of the war.

To the Russians, 1915 brought unmitigated disaster, as painful politically and psychologically as militarily. They had lost rich lands that had been under their rule for a century or more, as well as Galicia, which they had conquered recently. Twenty-three million of the Tsar’s subjects—13 percent of the Empire’s population—came under enemy occupation. The defeats dealt a hard blow to the morale of Russian troops. Soldiers who had fought smartly against the Germans the preceding fall and winter now came to regard the enemy as invincible: the mere sight of a German helmet sowed panic in Russian ranks. The Germans, it was said, “could do anything.”⁵⁷ One effect of this sense of hopeless inferiority that spread in the Russian armies in 1915 was a readiness to surrender. In 1915 the Germans and Austrians captured over one million Russians, whom they sent to work in the fields. Russian troops began to show signs of demoralization. To appease them, General Ianushkevich unsuccessfully urged the government to issue a pledge that after victory every war veteran would receive twenty-five acres of land. Officers were heard to grumble about the failure of France and Britain to help Russia with diversionary attacks as Russia had done for their benefit the year before.

The old Russian army was no more. By the fall of 1915, the frontline forces were reduced to one-third of what they had been at the start of hostilities, 870,000 men at most. Nearly all the cadres of the Russian army of 1914, including most of its field officers, were gone; so was a good part of the trained reserves. It was now necessary to induct reserves of the Second Levy and the National Militia, made up of older men, many of them without previous training.

And yet it can be argued that the splendid German victory of 1915 led to the German defeat of 1918. The 1915 offensive on the Eastern Front had had a double objective: to destroy the enemy’s armies in Poland and force Russia to make peace. It attained neither goal. The Russians managed to extricate their forces from Poland and they did not sue for peace. The German High Command, summing up the lessons of the 1915 campaign, concluded that given the willingness of the Russians to sacrifice lives and territory without limit, they could not be decisively defeated.⁵⁸ This conclusion led Germany to put out peace feelers to Petrograd.⁵⁹ Second, the 1915 campaigns gave the British the breathing spell they needed to assemble a citizen army and place their industrial establishment on a war footing. When, in early 1916, the Germans resumed operations in the west, they found their opponents well prepared. For all its brilliant battlefield successes, therefore, the German campaign of 1915 must ultimately be classified as a strategic defeat, both because it failed to attain its military purpose and because it lost precious time. The debacle of 1915 may well have been Russia’s greatest, if unintended, contribution to Allied victory.

Civilians, however, rarely think in strategic terms. The Russian population knew only that its armies had suffered a humiliating defeat, one of the worst, if not the very worst, in their modern history. They were fed by the press an unremitting diet of disaster stories. From the moment the Germans launched their April offensive until they suspended operations half a year later, the country was in a state of mounting outrage. This at first found outlets in a quest for scapegoats; but as the extent of the debacle became known, clamor arose for a change in the country’s political leadership. By June 1915, the spirit of common purpose that had united the government and opposition in the early months of the war vanished, yielding to recriminations and hostility even more intense than the mood of 1904–5 when the Russians were reeling from Japanese blows.

Military historians have observed that in war demoralization and panic usually begin, not at the front, but in the rear, among civilians who are prone to exaggerate both defeats and victories.⁶⁰ So it was in Russia. Measures were taken to evacuate Riga and Kiev, and the government discussed the possible evacuation of Petrograd itself.⁶¹ In May 1915, a Moscow mob carried out a vicious anti-German pogrom, demolishing stores and business firms bearing German names. Anyone overheard speaking German risked lynching.

The public clamored for heads. The prime target of popular wrath and the obvious scapegoat was Sukhomlinov, who was blamed for the shortages of weapons and ammunition with which the military explained their reverses. Recent historical studies indicate that he was not to blame for these shortages⁶² and that the lack of artillery shells had been blown out of proportion to cover up more deep-seated shortcomings of Russia’s military establishment.⁶³ The Imperial couple were very fond of the War Minister, but demands for his dismissal became irresistible and on June 11 he was let go with a warm letter of thanks.⁶⁴ He was imprisoned a year later on charges of treason and peculation. Freed in October 1916, he was rearrested by the Provisional Government and sentenced to lifelong hard labor. He managed to escape to Paris, where he died in 1926.⁶⁵

The man who replaced him, General Alexis Polivanov, was cut from different cloth, a leading member of the Young Turks, who before the war had urged a more modern approach to warfare, with greater emphasis on military technology and the mobilization of domestic resources.⁶⁶ Sukhomlinov, whose deputy he had been, had kept him at arm’s length, suspecting him of conspiring with Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich and Guchkov against the Court and himself. Polivanov’s appointment suggested that the government had at last come to embrace the concept of a “nation in arms” and that Russia, like the other belligerent powers, was ready to proceed in earnest with the mobilization of the home front. But this prospect, of course, automatically incurred the enmity of the Empress, who could not bear Imperial officials “politicking” and viewed efforts to rally the nation as directed against the Crown. Rasputin also did not approve of him and busied himself looking for his successor.⁶⁷ On June 24, after she had met the new minister, Alexandra wrote:

saw Polivanov yesterday—don’t honestly ever care for the man—something aggravating about the man, cant explain what—preferred Sukhomlinov tho’ this one is cleverer, but doubt whether as devoted.⁶⁸

26. General A. Polivanov.

To further appease public opinion, Nicholas let go of other unpopular ministers. In June, he dismissed Nicholas Maklakov, the Minister of the Interior, then Vladimir Sabler, the Procurator of the Holy Synod, and Ivan Shcheglovitov, the Minister of Justice, all of whom public opinion regarded as incorrigible reactionaries. Their replacements were, for the most part, more acceptable. In this manner, the Court, without yielding to demands that it turn over ministerial appointments to the Duma, appointed officials likely to find favor with it. To further placate the opposition, Rasputin was persuaded to retire to his village in Siberia, until relations with the Duma, scheduled to reconvene in July, had been “settled.”⁶⁹

These measures failed to appease public opinion. Many Russians now concluded that their defeats were due not so much to personalities as to fundamental flaws in the “system.” This system, then, had to be thoroughly restructured if Russia were to survive.

Once World War I exceeded its expected duration and no quick decision seemed in sight, all the major belligerents took steps to mobilize the rear. Germany led the way, followed by Britain. A kind of symbiotic relationship developed between the public and private sectors to supply the military with all its needs. Something of the sort occurred in Russia as well, beginning in the summer of 1915, but here the relationship between the two sectors was hampered as nowhere else by mutual suspicion. As a consequence, the mobilization of the rear in Russia was only partially and imperfectly realized. This conceded, it must be emphasized that it is generally unappreciated to what extent the Imperial Government during the war allowed society a voice in the affairs of state and how much its concessions altered Russia’s political system.

By the early summer, the liberals and liberal-conservatives concluded that the bureaucracy was incompetent to manage the war effort. They wanted fundamentally to improve Russia’s military performance but, like the government, they never lost sight of the postwar consequences of wartime actions. The debacle of 1915 offered an opportunity to complete the 1905 Revolution, that is, to transform Russia into a genuine parliamentary democracy. The Duma opposition wanted the concessions wrung from the monarchy for the sake of victory to become so embedded in the country’s institutions that they would remain in place after victory had been won and peace restored. Its principal objective was to secure for the Duma the authority to appoint ministers, which would have the effect of subordinating to it the entire Russian bureaucracy.

The result was a tug-of-war. The government wanted society’s assistance, but it did not want to surrender to it the prerogatives it had managed to salvage from the 1905 Revolution, while the leaders of society wanted to take advantage of the war to realize the unfulfilled promise of that revolution. In the conflict that ensued, it was the government that showed the greater willingness to make concessions. It met with no response, however, each concession being interpreted as weakness and encouraging still greater demands.

The Duma sat in session until January 9, 1915, when it was prorogued, partly to forestall “inflammatory” criticism of the conduct of the war, partly to enable the government to legislate by means of Article 87. At the time, the Duma was told it would be promptly reconvened if the military situation required it. Such a situation had now arisen. Opposition leaders demanded a recall. The Empress opposed them and urged her husband to stand fast. “Deary,” she wrote him on June 25,

I heard that that horrid Rodzianko & others went to Goremykin to beg the Duma to be at once called together—oh please dont, its not their business, they want to discuss things not concerning them & bring more discontent—they must be kept away—I assure you only harm will arise—they speak too much.

Russia, thank God, is not a constitutional country [!], tho’ those creatures try to play a part & meddle in affairs they dare not. Do not allow them to press upon you—its fright if one gives in & their heads will go up.⁷⁰

But the pressures became too strong to resist, and Nicholas authorized Michael Rodzianko, chairman of the Duma, to reconvene the legislature for a six-week session.⁷¹ It was to open on July 19, the first anniversary of the outbreak of the war according to the Russian calendar.

The month and a half that lay ahead gave Duma deputies an opportunity to caucus. The initiative for these informal meetings came from the small Progressive Party, representing the wealthy and liberal industrial bourgeoisie. Its leaders hoped to repeat the achievement of the Union of Liberation and forge a broad patriotic front of all the parties save those of the extreme right and left. The military reverses had now driven into the opposition conservative elements that in peacetime would never have joined a cabal against the Crown. Participating, in addition to the Progressives, were the Kadets, Left Octobrists, and Left Nationalists. Such was the origin of the Progressive Bloc, which would soon gain a majority in the Duma and in 1916 decisively influence the events leading up to the Revolution.*

The main theme running through these discussions, known to historians largely from the reports of police informers, was that in her tragic hour Russia required firm authority, but that such authority could no longer be provided by the discredited bureaucracy: it could only come from a popular mandate, as represented by the Duma. This principle agreed upon, the participants nevertheless had difficulty formulating a concrete program. The more radical wing, led by P. P. Riabushinskii, Russia’s leading entrepreneur and spokesman for the Moscow business community, wanted to force the issue and compel the government to capitulate. A more moderate group, led by the Kadet M. V. Chelnokov, the head of the Union of Cities, preferred some sort of compromise.⁷²

The explosive atmosphere in which the Duma held its meetings in July and August 1915 cannot be appreciated without reference to the military disasters which accompanied them. By the time the Duma reconvened, the Russian armies had abandoned Poland and the enemy was in sight of Riga. The mood at headquarters in Mogilev was one of unrelieved gloom. General G. N. Danilov, the Quartermaster General and one of Russia’s most influential strategists, told a friend a few weeks earlier that one might as well give up all thought of strategy because the Russians had no capability to undertake active operations: their only hope lay in the “exhaustion of the German forces, good luck, and the protection of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker.”⁷³ At the cabinet meeting of July 16, Polivanov prefaced his remarks with the terse statement: “The country is in danger.”⁷⁴ Alexander Krivoshein, in charge of agriculture, told friends that the government resembled an “asylum.”⁷⁵

The Duma opened as Russian troops were evacuating Warsaw. The senile, universally despised Goremykin addressed the assembly in an uncharacteristically conciliatory tone, conceding that the government had a “moral obligation” to cooperate with it. When he finished, deputy after deputy, representing the entire spectrum of opinion save for the extreme right, assailed the government for its incompetence.⁷⁶

Notably virulent was the leader of the Trudovik group, Alexander Fedorovich Kerensky, who was destined to play a major role in the revolution. Kerensky, who was only thirty-three when the war broke out, was an ambitious lawyer and a rising star in Russian socialist politics.⁷⁷ He first acquired fame as a defense attorney in well-publicized political trials. A skilled orator, he had a hypnotic influence on crowds, but was without either strategic sense or analytic powers. In the Fourth Duma, he promptly rose to the fore as the most inflammatory speaker on the left. After the arrest in November 1914 of the Bolshevik deputies (whom he defended in court), he became the chief spokesman of the socialist factions, easily outshining the leader of the Menshevik deputation, the Georgian Nicholas Chkheidze. In 1917, with the publication of police dossiers on Kerensky, it became known that from the instant the war had broken out he rallied socialist intellectuals against the government and attempted to organize a workers’ soviet.⁷⁸ After the defeat of the Russian armies in Poland, Kerensky worked for the overthrow of the tsarist regime and the sabotaging of the war effort. In the fall of that year, he agitated against worker participation in the joint committees established to improve defense production (see below) and identified himself with the Zimmerwald resolution of anti-war socialists, in the drafting of which Lenin had played a major role. Indeed, by then there was little to distinguish him from Lenin, and in the eyes of the police he was the “chief ringleader of the present revolutionary movement.”⁷⁹ His biographer believes that in the summer of 1915, Kerensky, in association with his friend and fellow Mason N. V. Nekrasov, and Chkheidze, “came close to precipitating a revolution of the masses around ‘bourgeois’ leadership.”⁸⁰

In August 1915, Nicholas took two decisions which many contemporaries regarded as a death sentence on the dynasty. One was to dismiss Nikolai Nikolaevich and assume personal command of Russia’s armed forces. The other was to prorogue the Duma.

It is difficult to ascertain what moved Nicholas to take over the military command, for he made the decision in private and persisted in it, without explanation, in the face of solid opposition from most of his family and virtually the entire cabinet. A year earlier he had let himself be dissuaded from such a course; now he grew intransigent. One indubitable factor was concern for his beloved army. He may also have wished to inspire the country in the hour of its severe trials, and set an example by sharing the simple life of a soldier. Perhaps he also thought that his action would calm the political turmoil and put an end to rumors of a separate peace. He received vigorous support from his wife, behind whom loomed the sinister figure of Rasputin. Alexandra, for all her love and devotion to Nicholas, thought him a weakling, too soft to stand up to the politicians: with him away at the front, she could look forward to enhanced political influence with which to defend the monarchy’s prerogatives.

In this endeavor she was seconded by Rasputin. Rasputin, who is sometimes called a “mad monk,” was neither mad nor a monk. A peasant from western Siberia who probably belonged to the outlawed Khlysty sect, he was introduced to the Imperial family in 1905 by Nikolai Nikolaevich. He quickly gained their confidence with his ability, which probably involved hypnosis, to stop the bleeding of the hemophiliac Tsarevich. He also posed, with some success, as a “man of the people,” an unlettered but genuine voice of the Russian masses, who the Imperial couple liked to believe were staunchly royalist. Although his connections at the Court enabled him to behave with growing brazenness, until the fall of 1915 he had no political influence. Rumors of his boasting, drinking, and sexual escapades reached the Court, but both Nicholas and his wife dismissed them as the malicious gossip of their enemies.

It was very much in Rasputin’s interest to have Nicholas out of the way. In encouraging Nicholas to leave for the front, he thought of the influence and the money which would then lie within his reach. He knew that Nicholas tolerated him for familial reasons, but neither liked nor trusted him. With Nicholas out of sight, he could manipulate the Empress and become the regime’s eminence grise. To encourage the Tsar to leave, he spread rumors that Nikolai Nikolaevich, whom he came to count among his enemies, aspired to the throne.⁸¹ Later on, he would boast that he had “sunk” the Grand Duke.⁸² Having returned to Petrograd from his exile, he saw the Tsar on July 31 and August 4 and urged him to assume the supreme command. He followed this advice with telegrams.⁸³ Thus, a combination of patriotism and political intrigue seem the most likely reasons behind Nicholas’s fateful step.

If we cannot be entirely certain what caused Nicholas to assume command of the army, we know well why his advisers opposed his doing so. The Council of Ministers feared that the Tsar would jeopardize his prestige by taking charge of the army when its fortunes were at their lowest ebb. If, as was likely, further misfortunes befell the troops, the Tsar would bear personal blame.⁸⁴ Second, Nicholas had a reputation for being “unlucky”: born on Job’s name day, his coronation marred by the Khodynka tragedy, father to a single male heir who suffered from an incurable malady, he had lost the Japanese war and was the first Russian Tsar to surrender autocratic authority. What inspired confidence that a man with such a record could lead Russia to victory? Last, but not least, apprehensions arose that with Nicholas at the front, power would pass into the hands of the “German” Empress and her disreputable confidant.

Such considerations moved all those who had his interests at heart, except for Alexandra and Goremykin, to implore Nicholas to reconsider. Among them were the Empress Dowager, Polivanov, and Rodzianko, the latter of whom called this “the worst mistake” of Nicholas’s reign.⁸⁵ On August 21, the Council of Ministers sent Nicholas a collective letter begging him not to go through with his decision. Signed by most of the ministers, Goremykin excepted, it warned that the move “threaten[ed] … with serious consequences Russia, your person, and your dynasty.” The eight signatories concluded that they were unable to continue working with Goremykin and “were losing faith in the possibility of serving [the Tsar] and the Fatherland in a useful manner.”⁸⁶

Two days before his scheduled departure for the front, Nicholas met with the cabinet. Once again the ministers pleaded with him to change his mind. Nicholas, clutching an ikon and perspiring profusely, listened, then rose to his feet and said: “I have heard what you have to say, but I adhere to my decision.”⁸⁷ For the time being, he kept the rebellious ministers at their posts, despite their desire to be relieved, only to purge later those who had waxed especially eloquent on this occasion.

On August 22, Nicholas departed for Mogilev, where he was to remain, except for brief visits to the family, until late December of the following year. Here, he led a quiet, modest life which suited him better than the formality of the Court. He attended daily briefings, but did not interfere with military decisions, which he left to the chief of staff, General Alekseev, the actual Commander in Chief.*

By departing, Nicholas escaped the political storm raging in the capital. Throughout August, the metropolitan press waged a relentless campaign against Goremykin, demanding his replacement by a Prime Minister chosen by the Duma. Some newspapers carried lists of a putative “national” cabinet, similar to the one that would actually assume power in February 1917.⁸⁸

The political crisis came to a head on August 25, when the Progressive Bloc, now numbering 300 out of the Duma’s 420 deputies, made public a nine-point program.⁸⁹ Out of deference to the Nationalists, it was more moderate than many signatories would have liked, but it was an audacious document nevertheless. Its first and foremost demand was for a ministry that would enjoy “the confidence of the nation” and promptly agree with the legislature on a “definite program”—a demand that fell short of calling for a ministry chosen by the Duma and accountable to it. Next came a list of proposed measures subjecting the bureaucracy to legal restraints, eliminating the division of authority between the military and civilian administrations in matters not directly related to military operations, setting free political and religious prisoners, abolishing disabilities on religious minorities, including the Jews, granting autonomy to Poland and political concessions to the Finns and Ukrainians, restoring trade unions, and reviewing many existing laws.⁹⁰ It was to a large extent the platform that the Provisional Government would adopt on coming to power in March 1917. Thus, in terms of both personnel and program, the first revolutionary government may be said to have been conceived as early as August 1915, when tsarism was still in charge and revolution seemed a remote prospect.

The program of the Progressive Bloc had strong reverberations.⁹¹ The Council of Ministers came out in favor of negotiations with the bloc to determine the feasibility of a compromise. Most of the ministers were prepared to step down and give way to a new cabinet.⁹² The Council acted in defiance of Goremykin, who consulted regularly with the Empress and agreed with her that it would be best to request the Tsar to prorogue the Duma.

An extraordinary situation thus emerged in the last days of August 1915: liberal and conservative legislators, representing nearly three-quarters of a Duma elected on a very conservative franchise, made common cause with the highest officials appointed by the Tsar to call for the introduction of parliamentary democracy. Little wonder that the educated classes were seized with euphoria.⁹³

Nicholas, however, refused to surrender the power to appoint ministers, and this for two reasons, one practical, the other theoretical or moral. He did not believe that the intellectuals likely to fill ministerial posts in a parliamentary cabinet would know how to administer the country. He also convinced himself (or perhaps was convinced by his wife) that on the day of his coronation in 1896 he had sworn to uphold autocracy. In fact, he did nothing of the kind. The coronation ceremony demanded of him only a prayer in which no reference was made to the mode of government and the word “autocracy” (samoderzhavie) did not even appear.⁹⁴ But Nicholas believed otherwise and said on many occasions that giving up the authority to name the cabinet would have violated his oath of office.

He was furious with the politicians for plying their trade while the troops were being bled white. Determined not to repeat the mistake he believed he had committed in October 1905, he stood his ground. On August 28; Goremykin came to Mogilev. He was virtually the last holdout in the cabinet to refuse to join in the demands for political reform. When Rodzianko had complained to him that the cabinet was not acting decisively enough to dissuade the Tsar from going to the front, Goremykin had brushed him off, saying that the chairman of the Duma was taking upon himself an “improper” role.⁹⁵ He was alarmed by the anti-government speeches heard in the Duma, which the press broadcast nationwide. To deprive the opposition of a platform and to calm the situation in the country, he proposed to Nicholas to prorogue the Duma as soon as its six-week session was up. Nicholas assented and instructed Goremykin to adjourn the Duma no later than September 3: all the ministers, himself included, were in the meanwhile to remain at their posts.⁹⁶ This decision, taken by the two men without consulting the Duma and against the wishes of nearly the entire cabinet, was viewed as a slap in the face of Russian society. Foreign Minister Sazonov expressed a widespread feeling when he said that Goremykin must have taken leave of his senses to make such a recommendation to the Tsar.⁹⁷ The decision resulted in the isolation of Nicholas from virtually all the political and social circles in the country, except for sycophantic courtiers and politicians of the most extreme right.

Nevertheless, as the days went by the crisis subsided because in September the German offensive ground to a halt, lifting the threat to the Russian homeland. Newspapers favorable to the Progressive Bloc now began to argue that everything possible had been done and there was no point in pressing the government further. At the end of September, the Central Committee of the Constitutional-Democratic Party, the core of the Progressive Bloc, decided to postpone further demands for political reform until the conclusion of the war.⁹⁸ The conservative Kadet Vasilii Maklakov wrote a widely quoted article which provided the rationale for this course. He compared Russia to an automobile driven along a narrow and steep road by a thoroughly incompetent chauffeur. In it sits one’s mother (read: Russia). The driver’s slightest mistake will send the vehicle plunging down a precipice, killing all passengers. Among the passengers are capable drivers, but the chauffeur refuses to yield the wheel to them, confident that they will not seize it by force for fear of a fatal accident. In these circumstances, Maklakov assured his readers, you will “postpone settling accounts with the driver … until you have reached level ground.”⁹⁹ As was his habit, once the crisis was over Nicholas punished those who had dared to oppose him. In late September he dismissed the ministers who had been especially vocal in their opposition to his assuming military command: Alexander Samarin, the Procurator of the Holy Synod, who had drafted the Council of Ministers’ letter of August 21; Nicholas Shcherbatov, the Minister of the Interior; and Krivoshein. Shcherbatov’s successor, Alexander N. Khvostov, appointed in November, was widely regarded as a nominee of Rasputin—the first of several.¹⁰⁰ So once again—and now for the last time—Nicholas had managed to weather the storm and beat back a challenge to his prerogatives. But it was a Pyrrhic victory that isolated him and his appointees from nearly all of society. At a meeting of the cabinet that followed these events, Sazonov (who would soon lose his post as well) said that the government hung suspended in midair “without support either from above or from below,” while Rodzianko thought the country was a “powder keg.” Nicholas, Alexandra, and Goremykin succeeded in uniting against themselves nearly all of Russia’s political circles, achieving the seemingly impossible feat of forging a consensus between the revolutionary Kerensky and the monarchist Rodzianko.

The decisions which Nicholas took in August 1915 made a revolution virtually unavoidable. Russia could have averted a revolutionary upheaval only on one condition: if the unpopular but experienced bureaucracy, with its administrative and police apparatus, made common cause with the popular but inexperienced liberal and liberal-conservative intelligentsia. In late 1915 neither of these groups was capable of governing Russia on its own. By preventing such an alliance when it was still possible, Nicholas ensured that sooner or later both would be swept away and he along with them, plunging Russia into anarchy.

To compensate for its refusal to grant parliamentary democracy, the monarchy took steps to give representatives of society a greater voice in the administration. Such moves were inspired mainly by the realization that the shortages of war matériel could not be rectified without the help of the private sector. But there was also the hope that such concessions would deflect demands for political reform.

At a conference at headquarters in July 1915, General Alekseev listed in order of descending importance the shortages responsible for the Russian reverses: (1) artillery shells, (2) troop replacements, (3) heavy artillery, (4) rifles and rifle ammunition, and (5) officers. Deficiencies in manpower were the responsibility of the military. But the shortages of weapons and ammunition required expanding the base of war production to involve private industry; and this, in turn, called for the cooperation of the business community. Involving representatives of the legislature in defense production, while not essential, was considered politically prudent.

The idea of establishing joint boards of government officials, private entrepreneurs, and Duma deputies to deal with military shortages emerged at informal meetings of businessmen and political figures in Moscow and Petrograd in early May. Rodzianko, one of its most enthusiastic advocates, traveled to Army Headquarters to discuss it with Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich. The latter readily agreed and recommended it to the Tsar, who went along as well.¹⁰¹ Such was the origin of the Special Council for the Coordination of Measures to Ensure the Supply of Artillery to the Active Army. Sukhomlinov, then still Minister of War, viewed with misgivings the intrusion of non-official persons into affairs that, in his opinion, were none of their business, but he was given no choice and assumed the council’s chairmanship. This organization made it possible dramatically to increase the production of artillery shells in 1915. Its success led to the creation later in the year of other Special Councils.

In July, the cabinet agreed to introduce a mixed government-private board, modeled on the recently established British Ministry of Munitions, to mobilize the nation’s industrial economy for war, to be called the Special Council of Defense of the Country (Osoboe Soveshchanie po Oborone Strany). Nicholas approved this resolution and in August it was submitted to the two chambers of the legislature. The Duma majority enthusiastically welcomed it, even if the socialist spokesmen, Kerensky and Chkheidze, argued against the proposal for not going far enough.¹⁰² The Special Council promised to improve war production, but it also, and no less importantly, gave the Duma an opportunity to involve itself in the political process. To enhance its role further, the Duma recommended that three more Special Councils be established to deal with transport, food, and fuel.¹⁰³ Since each council was to have representation from the two legislative chambers, more councils meant that more deputies would participate in the war effort. The four Special Councils came into being at the end of August.

Of these, far and away the most important was the Defense Council. As with the other Special Councils, it was chaired by a minister, in this case the Minister of War, Polivanov. It consisted of 36–40 members, the majority private persons, including ten deputies each from the Duma and the State Council, four representatives of the Central Military-Industrial Committee (see below), and two from zemstva and Municipal Councils.¹⁰⁴ Rodzianko received virtual carte blanche to select the non-governmental representatives.¹⁰⁵ The Defense Council enjoyed broad authority. It lay in its power to confiscate private enterprises that were not performing satisfactorily, to hire and dismiss managers, and to determine wages. It held its first meeting on August 26, 1915, in the presence of Nicholas and Alexandra, and subsequently met twice a week.

To help implement the decisions of the Defense Council, the government authorized the creation of a Central Military-Industrial Committee (Tsentral’nyi Voenno-Promyshlennyi Komitet). Based in Moscow and chaired by Guchkov, it had the mission of bringing medium and small plants into war production. The committee opened some 250 branch offices throughout the country and through them placed orders for the production of artillery shells, hand grenades, cartridges, and other hardware. As a result of its efforts, around 1,300 small and medium-sized industrial establishments went over to war production.¹⁰⁶ Just as the government felt it necessary to invite the participation of private enterprise, so private enterprise found it desirable to secure the cooperation of industrial labor. To this end, the Military-Industrial Committee took the unusual step of inviting factories working for the military and employing 500 or more people to send worker representatives. Bolshevik agitators opposed this proposal and for a while discouraged worker participation,¹⁰⁷ but the Mensheviks, who enjoyed greater labor following, managed to overcome the boycott. In November 1915 there came into being the Central Workers’ Group (Tsentral’naia Rabochaia Gruppa), chaired by the Menshevik worker K. A. Gvozdev, which helped the Central Military-Industrial Committee maintain labor discipline, prevent strikes, and resolve worker grievances.¹⁰⁸ The participation of workers in industrial management and, indirectly, in the management of the war economy was without precedent in Russia, serving as yet another indicator of the social and political changes that the pressures of war had helped to bring about.

The leaders of the Military-Industrial Committees tended to exaggerate their contribution to the war effort: recent studies indicate that they accounted for only 2 to 3 percent of the defense procurements.¹⁰⁹ Even so, they played an important part in helping to break bottlenecks in certain sectors of the war economy, and it is unfair to describe them as “unnecessary,” let alone a “nuisance.”¹¹⁰

The achievement of the Defense Council and the Military-Industrial Committee can be demonstrated on the example of artillery ammunition. Whereas in 1914 Russian industries were capable of turning out only 100,000–150,000 shells a year, in 1915 they produced 950,000 and in 1916, 1,850,000. By then, shell shortages were a thing of the past. On the eve of the February Revolution, the Russian army Jiad more than enough artillery ammunition for its needs, estimated at 3,000 shells for each light gun and 3,500 for each heavy gun.* To speed production, the Defense Council in early 1916 nationalized two of the largest defense manufacturers, the Putilov and Obukhov plants in Petrograd, which had been plagued by poor management and strikes.

Of the three other Special Councils—Transport, Food Supply, and Fuel Supply—the first ranked as the most important. Its accomplishments included improving the railroad line from Archangel to Vologda by converting it from a narrow to a normal gauge, which tripled the freight it could carry from this port of entry for Allied supplies.¹¹¹ The council also initiated the construction of the railroad line to Murmansk.

While the immediate importance of the Special Councils lay in their contribution to the war effort, they also had a major political significance. In the words of the historian Maxim Kovalevskii, they were a “complete innovation”¹¹²—the first institutions in Russia in which private persons sat side by side on terms of equality with government functionaries. This went a long way toward the dissolution of one of the last vestiges of patrimonialism still embedded in the Russian state structure, which held that the administration of the realm was the exclusive domain of officials appointed by the Tsar and in possession of “rank.” It was a development perhaps less dramatic than granting the parliament the right to choose ministers would have been, but one scarcely less important in the country’s constitutional evolution.

A third organization created at this time to assist the government in running the war effort was the All-Russian Union of Zemstvo and Municipal Councils, known as Zemgor. The government, which in the past had forbidden national associations of self-government organs, now finally relented, and in August 1915 permitted the zemstva and Municipal Councils to form their own national unions to help take care of invalids and refugees. As if to emphasize its humanitarian mission, the Zemstvo Union (Zemskii Soiuz) adopted the Red Cross as its emblem. The chairmanship of this organization was assumed by Prince George Evgenevich Lvov, a prominent zemstvo figure who had directed a like effort during the war with Japan. Similar authorization was given concurrently to the Municipal Councils. In November 1915, the two groups combined into the Zemgor, which, with the help of many thousands of volunteers as well as salaried employees, assisted the civilian population to cope with the hardships of war. When masses of refugees fled into the interior of Russia from the combat zone (among them Jews forcefully evicted on suspicion of pro-German sympathies), it was Zemgor that took care of them. Bureaucrats and army officers dismissed these civilian busybodies as “zemstvo hussars.” Nevertheless, as in so many other areas of activity, the authorities had no choice but to rely on private bodies for lack of adequate resources of their own.¹¹³

In addition to these quasi-public private bodies, volunteer organizations of all kinds sprang up in Russia at the time, notably producer and consumer cooperatives.¹¹⁴

Thus, in the midst of the war, a new Russia was quietly taking shape within the formal structure of what on the war’s eve had been a semi-patrimonial, semi-constitutional state: its development resembled the vigorous growth of saplings in the shade of an old and decaying forest. The participation of citizens without rank alongside rank holders in governmental institutions and the introduction of worker representatives into industrial management were symptoms of a silent revolution, the more effective in that it was accomplished to meet actual needs rather than to realize Utopian visions. Conservative bureaucrats were dismayed by the rise of this “second” or shadow government.¹¹⁵ For the very same reason, the opposition brimmed with confidence. Kadet leaders boasted that the mixed and civic organizations created during the war would demonstrate so convincingly their superiority over the bureaucracy that once peace was restored nothing would be able to prevent them from taking charge of the country.¹¹⁶

*The Russians gained additional confidence in their ability to crush the Austrians from access to Austrian operational plans provided by their agent, Colonel Alfred Redl, who worked for them between 1905 and 1913. See William C. Fuller, Jr., in E. R. May, ed., Knowing One’s Enemies (Princeton, N.J., 1984), 115–16.

*This procedure followed the one adopted in the war with Japan, when Russia had also carried out a partial mobilization: L. G. Beskrovnyi, Armiia i flot Rossii v nachale XX veka (Moscow, 1986), 11.

*Russian Jews were, in theory, liable to military service. But because there were more men available for the annual draft than the services required, Jews had little difficulty buying their way out of conscription by bribing the examining doctors or the clerks in charge of birth certificates. In 1914–17, however, they were drafted en masse: it is estimated that some half a million Jews served in the Russian army during World War I.

*Beskrovnyi, Armiia i flot, 70. After the Japanese war, Russia also adopted the policy of not ordering abroad any military equipment that could be produced at home: A. A. Manikovskii, Boevoe snabzhenie russkoi armii v mirovuiu voinu, I, 2nd ed. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1930), 363.

*N. N. Golovin, Voennye usiliia Rossiia v mirovoi wine, I (Paris, 1939), 56–57. A. L. Sidorov in Ekonomicheskoepolozhenie Rossii vgody pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow, 1973), 567, calculates that in terms of territorial coverage, Russia’s railroad network was one-eleventh of Germany’s and one-seventh of Austria-Hungary’s.

†St. Petersburg, which sounded Germanic, was renamed Petrograd on the outbreak of the war.

‡In early 1915, the British attempted, without success, at Gallipoli to break through this blockade. See W. S. Churchill, The Unknown War: The Eastern Front (New York, 1931), 304, and John Buchan, A History of the Great War, II, (Boston, 1922), 12. Had the Gallipoli campaign met the expectations of Churchill, its main protagonist, the course of Russian history may have been very different.

*A leading proponent of this theory was I. S. Bliokh, whose six-volume study appeared in an English condensation as The Future of War (New York, 1899).

*Rennenkampf was captured in early 1918 by the Bolsheviks near Taganrog while helping General Lavr Kornilov. According to a contemporary newspaper, he was frightfully tortured and then shot: NZh, No. 83/298, May 4, 1918, p. 3.

*E. von Falkenhayn, Die Oberste Heeresleitung, 1914–1916 (Berlin, 1920), 17. In evaluating Falkenhayn’s assessment, however, it must be borne in mind that, convinced that Germany could gain victory only in the west, he had strenuously opposed offensive operations against the Russians. In his memoirs he could have hardly been expected to show impartiality toward Hindenburg, who in August 1916 replaced him as chief of staff.

†It must also be remembered that Hindenburg and Ludendorff destroyed the Russian Second Army without the help of reinforcements from the west. The latter arrived in time to help expel the Russian First Army from East Prussia.

*Sources on the Progressive Bloc have been published in KA, No. 1–2/50–51 (1932), 117–60, No. 3/52 (1932), 143–96, and No. 1/56 (1933), 80–135, as well as in B. B. Grave, ed., Burzhuaziia nakanune fevral’skoi revoliutsii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1927), 19–32. See further V. S. Diakin, Russkaia burzhuaziia i tsarizm v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny, 1914–17 (Leningrad, 1967), passim.

*Nikolai Nikolaevich went to the Caucasus as viceroy. He would play a minor role in the events leading up to the February Revolution.

*Sidorov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 117–19. As will be noted in the next chapter, a significant portion of the shells available in 1916–17 came from foreign suppliers.