The Eastern Front 1914-1917
Page 40
3,793
3,273
In other words, the harvest of 1917 ought to have been enough to supply all needs, even leaving out of account the reserves that 21 out of the 44 provinces involved claimed to have.
Part of the difficulty in actually carrying out the operation of supplying that section of the country that did not live in the grain-producing areas was brought about by transport; the railways, overburdened in wartime, could not make sufficient grain available both to towns and army: a problem, however, also distorted by legend, to a degree that deserves separate discussions. Certainly, the towns did not benefit from the constant harvests of peasant Russia, but found themselves, on the contrary increasingly deprived of food. In 1913–14 they had taken 390 million poods of grain. In 1915–16 they got 330 million; and in 1916–17, 295 million, although in these years their population, swollen by natural increase, refugees, and migrant labour, increased by one-third. In January and February 1917, Moscow and the Central Provinces as a whole received less than a third of what they needed; by mid-summer, they were receiving 6,256 waggons of grain per month of the 30,000 they were supposed to get. In December, 1916, Petrograd had got 524,000 poods of grain in place of the 3,740,000 it needed, and in January forty-nine grain-waggons per day of the eighty-nine it needed. This was the vital factor in revolution, from March until the end of the year; and it became all the greater in its effects, since the quantities that were delivered were not divided up fairly, or even, sometimes, divided up at all. Suppliers sometimes held it back, at all levels, so as to profit from the inevitable price-increase: rye rose in price in Moscow from a base of seventy-six kopecks per pood in 1914 to 333 per cent in March 1917 and 666 per cent in the autumn. Government attempts to control prices usually caused havoc. The bakers in Petrograd complained that they could not afford to bake bread at the declared price, because that price was out of joint with the price of fuel; and yet if the government tried to control fuel-prices, it would merely provoke a dry-up of fuel-supplies. Moscow and Petrograd developed all the revolutionary symptoms of a town under siege, but without the physical presence of the enemy that usually enforced unity for the duration.22
Many explanations—other than the false one of too little grain—were advanced for the dry-up of food-supplies. It was said that the army had taken up too much of the grain. But the armed forces, in reality, took less than had been exported before the war. In 1913–14, 640 million poods of grain had been exported from the area in question; thereafter, exports declined to a trivial figure (in 1916–17, not three million poods). Army demand rose from eighty-five million poods in 1913–14 to 600 million in 1915–16, and fell again in 1916–17 to 485 million. The chief factor was that the peasantry were not marketing grain as before. About twenty-five per cent of the total harvest had been marketed before the war; but by 1916–17, only fifteen per cent was marketed, although urban demand had risen by a third. Where 1,200 million poods had come on the market in 1914, 978 million did so in 1915 and 794 million in 1916. Less than 300 million went to the towns, the rest more or less completely to the army; and the country’s animals got a third as much again as towns and army put together.
The peasants preferred to use their grain for livestock or for their own consumption, because inflation had gradually forced this course upon them. Theoretically, they should have benefited from the high food-prices of wartime; in some areas near the large towns, they no doubt did so. But most of the grain was produced in scattered villages, remote from a railway-line and without easy access to markets. The grain would be collected by a local dealer, with a hut to store it and a cart to carry it: this, not the peasant who produced the grain, was the ‘kulak’. He would sell it in turn to a larger dealer, who would perhaps pass it on to a bank—and banks, in 1916, held forty per cent of the country’s grain-reserve, doling it out according to government willingness to increase the prices. Any profit that the grain acquired would thus stick to innumerable scales, and the peasant would be left with little, unless he were near enough to the market himself, and able to by-pass dealers and banks. To start with, peasants certainly went on selling, to make up for the loss of cottage-industries, or the rise in prices of manufactured items they might wish to buy. But inflation in the summer of 1916 drove prices of this type of item far above what the peasant could pay. In Simbirsk, for instance, a pair of boots that cost seven roubles before the war cost thirty in 1916; in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, calico products rose to 319 per cent of their pre-war price in September 1916; horse-shoe nails, which cost three roubles and forty kopecks the pood in 1914 rose, early in 1916, to forty roubles. There was a ‘scissors-crisis’, not unlike that of the 1920s, when the price of manufactured items went so far above the prices that the peasant (as distinct from the dealer) would obtain for his produce that many peasants simply relapsed into subsistence: hiding their grain, where they could, or giving it out to animals, where they could not. Government institutions for collecting grain failed;23 a beginning was made, ineffectively, with requisitioning-squads; in the end, the only part of the economic mechanism that functioned with efficiency was the Black Market, and after a time even it was adversely affected by inflation. A crude system of barter, sometimes through co-operatives, sometimes by ‘bag-men’, replaced the money-exchange; and it was with this system that the Bolsheviks got through their worst crisis.
It was characteristic of the times that men should have misunderstood the difficulties of grain-supply. These difficulties were variously written down, by civilians to the army, by anti-semites to speculators,* by revolutionaries to landlords and ‘kulaks’, by liberal economists such as Struve to blundering price-controls, and—most bizarrely of all—by Antsiferov to peasant prosperity. The greatest and longest-lasting such explanation also happened, not altogether coincidentally, to be the one that seemed to remove most of the political heat from the issue: it was claimed that the railways were insufficient to transport the country’s grain, because wartime needs, particularly those of the army, cut across grain-supply. The grain-crisis was thus said to have been caused by a railway-crisis. But the evidence suggests that, if anything, it was the other way about.
Army transport authorities ran the railways of the front area which, generously interpreted by them, came to encompass about a third of the rolling-stock, and that part of the country ‘west of the meridian Saint Petersburg—Sevastopol’. The wastage with which these lines were run was notorious: generals wrestled for supply-waggons, and were slow in forwarding empty ones; battles of competence developed; crazy prudence reigned as regards speed and length of trains; unloading was never efficiently carried out. Even so, army transport, as a whole, did not add an extra strain to the railways. The railways of that part of Russia had served importing from, and exporting to Germany, or the needs of western provinces that were quite soon occupied by the Central Powers, and that in any case suffered from an immediate drop in economic activity as soon as war came. The army’s railway-traffic did little more than take up slack created by this drop, in Poland and elsewhere, as exporting to Germany (and of course importing) came to a stop. In 1913, these lines had taken ninety-three million passengers and 3,381 million poods of freight. In 1915 they took army traffic similar in scale: ninety-five million passengers, 3,304 million poods of freight; in 1916, 112 million and 3,763 million respectively. There were of course temporary crises of some severity, notably with the evacuation and retreat of September 1915, which caused a general railway-crisis in the country. But army movement alone was no greater than the civilian movement of that section of the country before the war, and, for much of the time, army movement was less.
The rest of the country ought, then, to have had as much rolling-stock available for its purposes as before the war. Indeed, it should have had more, because grain-exporting, which had taken a substantial number of waggons and locomotives in 1913, came to an almost complete stop: in the second half of 1913, 712,000 waggon-loads of grain had to be shifted, but in the equivalent period of 1914, only 353,000.
But this advantage was obscured by further legendry, to the effect that the country’s railways fell into disrepair, and that the amount of rolling-stock available declined. Neither assertion had a germ of truth in it. On the contrary, the ministry of transport became the greatest spender in Russia, after the war ministry, and its expenditure rose from 400 million roubles in 1915 to 1,100 million in 1916. In all, it spent 2,500 million roubles during the war, and acquired a great deal of mileage and rolling stock. By 1917, 4,000 kilometres of new line, 1,195 of doubletracking, and 1,500 of gauge-broadening had been undertaken; a further 5,000 had been prepared for future construction, and 3,500 were already being built. Rolling-stock followed this pattern. Although the Germans, occupying the western part of the country, made off with a considerable amount of rolling-stock, the quantity of rolling-stock available in Russia actually rose throughout the war, with American imports and Russian construction. In 1918, there were 18,757 locomotives and 444,000 waggons as against 17,036 and 402,000 respectively in 1914, in the territory subsequently to become the U.S.S.R. In 1915–16, 2,188 locomotives and 70,000 waggons were acquired from Russia and America, which added a tenth to the existing stock, and of course, a tenth of higher quality than the rest. It was thus misleading to explain Russia’s railway-difficulties in terms of a declining infrastructure, however much it suited both opposition and government to do so.
The railways’ principal difficulty was that the patterns of economic life altered very rapidly in wartime, as the country modernised. Grain was an obvious source of trouble. It was, apart from coal, the bulkiest item to be carried, whether by waterway or railway. During the war, traditional suppliers failed to supply as before: the great estates, the northern Caucasus and the Kuban region were all affected by problems of shortages; and yet the railway-system had been geared to transport quantities of grain from such surplus-producing areas to the deficit-areas. In reality, the deficit-areas were often deficient, not in grain, but in farmers willing and able to market it; and if their supplies could be got at—as the Bolsheviks got at them—more grain would have been available, both locally and nationally. The railway network thus had to follow a switch in supply, at a time when all manner of other calls were being made on it. It was not trains, but timetables, that offered problems. Trains chased grain, not the other way about, and although the railways had to carry less grain than before 1914, that quantity needed longer railway-journeys and more trains. The government helplessly watched grain, train and fuel competing, and each falling into chaos. This occurred at a time when economic activity at home was making demands on the railways that they had never experienced before. Labour-mobility brought an increase from 235 million to 348 million passengers in the period 1914–16; increased movement of goods similarly caused the railways to shift 17,228 million poods of freight in 1916, as against 13,826 million before the war. It was not that the railway-network declined—rather the contrary: it was rather that railway-development and railway-usage ran higgledy-piggledy after the economic boom, without plan, and to the confusion of all concerned.24
The network as a whole might have stood the strain, if the quality of labour had been higher. But, with the expansion of the labour-force in wartime, from 40,000 to 250,000 in the railway-battalions, and from 750,000 to 1,100,000 on the civilian-run lines, men were taken in who were not in the least skilled. This affected the storage of goods; and it came, also, to affect the maintenance of rolling-stock. One train in four was out of order by 1917, as against one in eight before the war; and although the number of locomotives increased quite substantially, the number of working locomotives declined, at one stage in 1917 to 15,500. Technical labour fell off in quality; the American Stevens Commission, sent in spring, 1917, to assist the ministry of transport in working the railways to better effect, felt that this was the real problem, and not a lack of rolling-stock. It was asserted, for instance, that to turn a Russian train about took twice as long as to turn an American one. The problem of inflation also affected the quality of labour. Railwaymen’s wages were directly controlled by the government, and fell behind, as public servants’ wages do, in the inflation. At one stage in the summer of 1917, there were complaints that railwaymen were not turning up to work because they had no shoes; and in any event there was a closing of the gap between skilled and unskilled railwaymen that demoralised the skilled, and drove them towards revolutionary courses. The Russian railwaymen had always considered themselves to be the aristocracy of labour: with uniforms, skills, higher pay to mark them off from the rest. Their refusal, at decisive points in 1905–6, to take part in the great strike-movement allowed the government to shift troops from one area to another, and ‘pacify’ them in turn. But by June 1917, the demoralisation of railwaymen was such that their old self-esteem and apartness dwindled: they too went on strike.
The interaction of railway-problems, failure of grain-marketing, confusions in delivery and use of fuel condemned the old system. It was all very well for soldiers and workers to listen to a speech from Kerenski, demonstrating that the war must be fought, the bosses obeyed, and wage-increases controlled. No doubt, most of the soldiers accepted Kerenski’s thesis at the time. They would then return to their units, to hear in letters that their wives and families were hungry and cold, perhaps even diseased; if they were workers, they would go home to find that their wages still bought nothing; and yet both soldiers and workers were aware that food was there, if only it could be got at. There was always a curious duality to their behaviour. The soldiers, for instance, did not want to fight the war. On the other hand, they were overwhelmingly patriotic; and it is a complete fabrication to suggest that the army had dissolved in 1917.25 In November of that year, there were, by Stavka census, 6,500,000 men in the front area, excluding civilians. Officers said that the army had dissolved: but mainly because the men had repudiated the more extreme forms of their authority. They mistook questioning for disobedience, committees of the soldiers for mutiny, whereas ‘tout au plus, les soldats exigeaient la mort d’une certaine conception de la discipline’. Of course, the army was demoralised: and this was shown in the high sick-lists of 1917, or the great number of ‘delegates’ (by one account, 800,000) who found theirway to the rear for long periods. But the officers first invented ‘the disintegration of the Russian army’ and then, by their behaviour, provoked it. Supply-problems completed this picture. The soldiers of 1917 began to receive poor rations, irregularly delivered, in accordance with the country’s economic crisis. Living from rotten herring, sometimes even given paper-money in place of rations—paper-money, moreover, that was almost useless in the stores of the rear-area, where only black-marketeering would succeed—the soldiers drank from illicit stills, mutinied, attacked and sometimes killed their officers. By November 1917, there was almost no resistance to the Bolshevik revolution on the soldiers’ part, and, after the December armistice, many of them went back to spread the Bolshevik doctrines at home. In the towns, it was much the same. The huge mass of workers, some long-established, some newly brought into industry, were pushed together by inflation, which reduced differentials between old and new, skilled and unskilled, men and women. The growth of starvation and disease in the towns brought them together as a revolutionary force, in a way that no amount of Bolshevik agitation could have done. All were agreed that capitalism had failed, and they became increasingly prepared to listen to a Lenin who offered them hope. The First World War had not been the short outburst of patriotic sacrifice that men had expected. It became, instead, a first experiment in Stalinist tactics for modernisation; and 1917 was a protest against it. In the summer of 1917, virtually the whole of Russia Went on strike. The Bolshevik Revolution was a fact before it happened.
Notes
CHAPTER ONE
1K. F. Shatsillo: Russki imperializm i flot (Leningrad 1966) p. 44.
2A. Kersnovski: Istoriya russkoy armii 3 (Belgrade 1935) p. 578.
3Generally on the Russian army: Kersnovski op. cit. (and vol. 4, Belgrade 1938);
J. S. Curtiss: The Russian Army under Nicholas II (Durham N. C. 1965); P. A. Zayonchkovski: Voyenniye reformi 1860–1870gg. (Moscow 1952), a penetrating work; H. P. Stein: ‘Der Offizier des russischen Heeres im Zeitabschnitt zwischen Reform und Revolution 1861–1905’ in Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte (Berlin 1967, vol. 13 pp. 346–507), a very thorough piece of work with excellent bibliography; B. Shaposhnikov: Mozg armii (1 Moscow 1926, 2 and 3 1929); L. G. Beskrovny: Stranitsy boevogo proshlogo (Moscow 1968); N. P. Yeroshkin: Istoriya gosudarstvennykh uchrezhdeniy dorevolyutsionnoy Rossii (2 ed. Moscow 1968) pp. 200ff. for 1861–1904 and 258ff. for 1904–17. G. Frantz: Russlands Weg zum Abgrund (Berlin 1926) contains an excellent introduction (pp. 3–132) which should be used to correct the versions of the better-known works of N. Golovin: The Russian Army in the World War (New Haven, 1932), in which what is true is not new, and what is new is not true. The most recent work is P. A. Zayonchkovski: Samoderzhaviye i russkaya armiya na rubezhe 19–20 stoletiy 1881–1903 (Moscow 1973). There is a serviceable, short piece by K. F. Shatsillo: Rossiya pered pervoy mirovoy voynoy (Moscow 1974).
4Stein p. 380ff.; cf. Voyenno-statistichesky yezhegodnik 1912.
5V. Zvegintsev: Kavalergardy (3 vols. Paris 1936, 1938, 1968) vol. I p. 33 gives the following list of officers in the Maria-Fedorovna Regiment—Dolgorukov, Grabbe, Cantacuzene-Speranski, Golitsyn, Gagarin, Shebeko, Bezobrazov, von der Osten-Driesen, Panteleyev, Bagration, Kochubey, Sheremetiev, Tolstoy, Repnin. cf. P. A. Zayonchkovski: Samoderzhaviye i armiya pp. 168 ff., 333.
6A breath of these would-be technocrats’ world comes from Knyaz Kochubey: Vooruzhennaya Rossiya (Paris, probably 1910), a privately-printed regurgitation of half-eaten French doctrines.
7Ye. Barsukov: Podgotovka russkoy armii k voyne v artilleriyskom otnoshenii (Moscow 1926) p. 17ff; cf. his Russkaya artilleriya v mirovoy voyne (Moscow 1938–9, 2 vols.) and Istoriya russkoy artillerii (4 v. Moscow 1948). Barsukov is throughout my chief source on matters of artillery, together with A. A. Manikovski: Boyevoe snabzheniyeb usskoy armii v mirovuyu voynu (1st. ed. 3 vols. 1920–23, 2 ed. 2 v. 1929 and 3rd ed. 2 vols. 1938. The second edition, edited by Barsukov, is to be preferred).