42. Von Moltke, Erinnerungen, 21; von Zwehl, Erich von Falkenhayn, 58–9.
43. Following an agreement of October 1907, effective January 26, 1910, international law required a declaration of war before commencing hostilities.
44. “The [German] government,” the naval cabinet chief approvingly wrote in his diary, “has succeeded very well in making us appear as the attacked.” Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War, 213ff.
45. A. J. P. Taylor famously called it the “war by timetable,” wrongly blaming mobilization, and even asserting that none of the great powers had sought war. Taylor, War by Timetable.
46. The British government had the assets to enforce the blockade but not the ability to coordinate the many British agencies involved. Economic warfare went from being the cornerstone to the afterthought of British grand strategy. Lambert, Planning Armageddon, quote at 189 (Robert Brand). See also Ferguson, Pity of War, 189–97; and Ferguson, “Political Risk.”
47. Whereas Taylor argued that “peace would have brought Germany the mastery of Europe within a few years,” Ferguson countered that British neutrality would have been followed at worst by a temperate German peace imposed on France and the future integrity of Belgium. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery, 528; Ferguson, Pity of War, 168–73, 442–62.
48. Lieven, Russia and the Origins, 142–3.
49. This is not meant to absolve von Moltke: In June 1915, after he was replaced by Erich von Falkenhayn, the megalomaniacal von Moltke complained privately to a friend that “it is dreadful to be condemned to inactivity in this war which I prepared and initiated.” He died one year later. Mombauer, “A Reluctant Military Leader?,” 419.
50. Stevenson, Armaments; Van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive.” See also Dickinson, International Anarchy.
51. Lieven, Russia and the Origins, 139–40. On honor, see Offer, “Going to War in 1914.”
52. For a basic overview of decision making, see Hamilton and Herwig, Decisions for War.
53. A focus on statesmen, using memoirs (not then closed archives), characterized the phenomenally influential Tuchman, Guns of August. See Strachan, The First World War [2004], 68; Strachan, The First World War [2003], I: 4–162; Stevenson, Cataclysm; and Van Evera, “Why Cooperation Failed.”
54. Christensen and Snyder, “Chain Gangs,” 66.
55. Horne, A Companion to World War I, 249. “All the nations of Europe to-day, in my humble estimation, if I may say so, have gone mad,” remarked the prime minister of Canada (Wilfrid Laurier) already a few years before the war (1911). Quoted in Offer, The First World War, 268.
56. French, British Strategy, xii, 200–1.
57. Pearce, Comrades in Conscience, 169; Keegan, The First World War, 278–99; Ferro, The Great War, 91–2. See also Prior and Wilson, The Somme.
58. Edgerton, The Shock of the Old, 142–6.
59. Ellis, Social History of the Machine Gun.
60. Haber, The Poisonous Cloud, 243.
61. Gumz, Resurrection and Collapse.
62. Russell, Justice in War Time, 13–4.
63. Harding, Leninism, 8–11, 113–41.
64. Bol’shevik, 1949, no. 1, reprinted in PSS, XLIX: 377–9 (at 378); Lih, Lenin, 13. Lih, whose corpus of works brims with original insights, unfortunately makes Lenin out to be a mainstream European social democrat, kind of the way that Nietzsche’s English-language translator, Walter Kaufmann, made the German radical thinker into an American liberal.
65. “Patriotism was on display only sporadically and disappeared almost completely in 1915 . . . Russians had a pretty good idea against whom they were fighting in the war, but not for whom and for what.” Jahn, Patriotic Culture, 134, 173. War patriotism was an upper-class sentiment: Gurko, Features and Figures, 538.
66. Lieven, Empire, 46.
67. Hull, Absolute Destruction, 5–90.
68. Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost.
69. Prior and Wilson, The Somme, 222; de Groot, Douglas Haig, 242 (citing Haig, “Memorandum on Policy for the Press,” May 26, 1916).
70. Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction. One historian observed that “The Allies, and particularly the British, managed to give the impression that they acted brutally or unscrupulously with regret; the Germans always looked as though they were enjoying it.” In fact, the early unprovoked atrocities in Belgium, although exaggerated, were real. Taylor, The First World War, 57.
71. Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj, 117–8.
72. PSS, XLIX: 101, 161.
73. Thatcher, Leon Trotsky, 212. See also Martynov, “Ot abstraktsii k konkretnoi deiatel’nosti”; and Thatcher, “Trotskii, Lenin, and the Bolsheviks.”
74. Biulleten’ oppozitsii, August 1930, no. 14: 8; Trotsky, Stalin School of Falsification, 184–5. The last entry in volume II of Stalin’s Collected Works dates to January–February 1913, and the first entry in volume III dates to March 1917. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 37.
75. Van Ree, “Stalin and the National Question,” at 224, 237, n64 (citing RGASPI, f. 30, op. 1, d. 20; f. 558, op. 1, d. 57); Shveitzer, Stalin v turukhanskoi ssylke. Even when Stalin was preparing his collective works the unpublished article, which was said to have filled two exercise books in longhand, could not be found. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 62, l. 308ff, 424.
76. Van Ree, “Stalin and the National Question,” 225 (citing RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 54, d. 56).
77. Sverdlov, Izbrannye proizvedennye, I: 386–90.
78. Krasnoiarskii rabochii, July 25, 2003 (citing Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Krasnoiarskogo kraia): http://www .krasrab.com/archive/2003/07/25/16/view_article; Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, 1924, kn. 2: 66; Sverdlov, Izbrannye proizvedennye, I: 276–7. Volkogonov, Stalin: Politicheskii portret, I: 51. See also Sverdlova, Iakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov [1985], 171–208.
79. This is a quote from October 1938: Istoricheskii arkhiv (1994), no. 5: 13; RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1122, l. 55. On his marriage vow, see Istochnik, 2002, no. 4: 74.
80. The library had belonged to Dubrovinsky. In 1929, when the gendarme Mikhail Merzlyakov faced expulsion from his kolkhoz because of his tsarist police past, he wrote to Stalin, who wrote to the village soviet: “Mikh Merzlyakov carried out the task he was given by the chief of police according to the book, but without the usual police zeal. He was not spying on me. He did not make my life a misery. He did not bully me. He tolerated my frequent disappearances. He criticized his superiors on several occasions for their many orders and prescriptions. I regard it as my duty to confirm this to you.” RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 662.
81. Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 21 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 53, l. 1–3: Feb. 27, 1915); Allilueva, Vospominaniia, 118. Anna was another of Sergei Alliluyev’s daughters. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 662. Stalin was in Kureika (1914–16), and later told the local children: “I was capricious, sometimes cried, hard, a tough existence.” TsKhIDNI Krasnoiarskogo Kraia, f. 42, op. 1, d. 356, l. 22.
82. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial, 414–8. Sverdlov escaped the war, too, because he was a Jew.
83. Best, “The Militarization of European Society,” 13–29.
84. Russia’s army went to battle mostly on foot, with horse-drawn and ox-drawn carts, even though Russia’s soldiers were scattered across some 8 million square miles of territory. Each Russian conscript in 1914 had to travel three times as far, on average, as each German, Austro-Hungarian, or French conscript to reach the arena of mobilization. Knox, With the Russian Army, I: xxxiii; Dobrorolski, Die Mobilmachung der russischen Armee, 28; Golovin, Voennye usiliia Rossii, I: 51, 61, II: 69–71; Brusilov, Moi vospominaniia, 76; Danilov, Rossiia v mirovoi voine, 191–2; Rostunov, Russkii front, 100–1.
85. Many of them perished en route to far-off hospitals in the rear, having been “piled up on the floors of freight cars, without any
medical care.” Of the 5 million Russian soldiers hospitalized, around half had war wounds; the rest suffered disease—typhus, typhoid, cholera, dysentery—or frostbite, which frequently required amputations. Viroubova, Memories of the Russian Court, 109. See also Miliukov, Vospominaniia, II: 199; Rodzianko, Reign of Rasputin, 115–7.
86. In 1916, the belated introduction in tsarist Turkestan of conscription—on top of a forced supply of horses and livestock to the army at below-market prices—provoked full-scale rebellion. In the violence, which killed perhaps 2,500 Russians, at least 300,000 steppe nomads were displaced, many fleeing across the border to China. Piaskovskii, Vosstanie 1916 goda; Kendirbai, “The Alash Movement,” V: at 855; Pipes, Formation of the Soviet Union, 84. The British also faced wartime revolts in India, Egypt, Ireland, and elsewhere in their empire.
87. Stone, The Eastern Front, 215.
88. Showalter, Tannenberg.
89. Golovine, The Russian Army, 220–1. See also Polivanov, Iz dnevnikov i vospominanii, 186.
90. Stone, The Eastern Front, 12, 93. Russia’s air force, established in 1912, had perhaps owned 360 aircraft and 16 airships in 1914—the largest air force in the world—but most were grounded for want of spare parts, allowing the Germans to move about unobserved.
91. Ol’denburg, Gosudar’ Imperator Nikolai II Aleksandrovich; later expanded into Ol’denburg, Istoriia tsarstvovanie Imperatora Nikolaia II; and translated as Ol’denburg, Last Tsar. It was not just the Duma. “The antagonism between the imperial authority and the civilian society is the greatest scourge of our political life,” lamented Agricultural Minister Alexander Krivoshein during the war. “The future of Russia will remain precarious so long as Government and society insist upon regarding each other as two hostile camps.” Quoted in Paleologue, La Russie, I: 289. In February 1914, Krivoshein had declined, citing health reasons, to become prime minister.
92. Gurko, Features and Figures, 19; Mamontov, Na Gosudarevoi sluzhbe, 144–5, 151–3; Masolov, Pri dvore imperatora , 11–12; Lieven, Nicholas II, 117; Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 15–24.
93. The Duma also met July–August 1915, on the war’s first anniversary; February–May 1916; and November 1916–February 1917.
94. Gurko, Features and Figures, 576. “We need to fight, for the Government consists of scoundrels,” explained Vasily Shulgin, of the Nationalist Party. “But since we do not intend to move to the barricades, we cannot egg others on.” Lapin, “Progessivnyi blok v 1915–1917 gg.,” 114.
95. Shchëgolëv, Padenie, VII: 116–75 (Rodzianko, on Maklakov) at 124. See also Gurko, Features and Figures, 521–2. The Shchëgolëv volumes were the work of the “Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry for the Investigation of Illegal Acts by Ministers and Other Responsible Persons of the Tsarist Regime,” formed by the Provisional Government and discontinued by the Bolsheviks, who nonetheless partly published the materials (which were transcribed by the poet Alexander Blok).
96. The state paid 4,000 rubles for Durnovó’s funeral.
97. Kir’ianov, Pravye partii.
98. See the table in Eroshkin, Ocherki istorii, 310.
99. Gal´perina, Sovet ministrov Rossiiskoiimperii; Cherniavsky, Prologue to Revolution. In the western districts close to the front, Russia’s high command did push aside the civilian government (such as it was), but administratively, the military men did not do much better. Graf, “Military Rule Behind the Russian Front.”
100. Jones, “Nicholas II”; Ol’denburg, Last Tsar, IV: 38–42; Brusilov, Soldier’s Note-book, 267–8; Gurko, Features and Figures, 567–71; Golder, Documents of Russian History, 210–1. As Witte remarked of Nicholas II, “a soft haze of mysticism refracts everything he beholds and magnifies his own functions and person.” Dillon, Eclipse of Russia, 327 (quoting a purported interview with Witte).
101. Gourko, War and Revolution, 10–1; Mikhail Lemke, 250 dnei, 149; Fuller, Civil-Military Conflict, 41.
102. Jones, “Nicholas II.”
103. The words of Maurice Paleologue, quoted in V. Kantorovich, Byloe, 1923, no. 22: 208–9.
104. Letters of the Tsaritsa, 114, 116 (August 22, 1915).
105. Fuller, Foe Within; Shatsillo, “Delo polkovnika Miasoedova”; Knox, “General V. A. Sukhomlinov.”
106. Fulop-Miller, Rasputin, 215; Radzinsky, Rasputin File, 40.
107. Court denied his sexual licentiousness. Viroubova, Souvenirs de ma vie, 115. The Sarajevo murder occurred on June 28 by the Western calendar, and on June 15 by the Russian calendar; the attempt on Rasputin’s life occurred on June 29 by the Western calendar, on June 16 by the Russian. The assassin was Khionia Guseva, from Tsaritsyn.
108. Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlogo, II: 40; Beletskii, Grigorii Rasputin, 32–6.
109. Kilcoyne, “The Political Influence of Rasputin.”
110. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra, 199–202; Fuhrmann, Rasputin, 93–8; Radzinsky, Rasputin File, 187. The nerves in Alexei’s left leg had atrophied, causing excruciating pain right through the summer of 1913, but the grave danger of 1912 had passed. Gilliard, Thirteen Years, 28–30. Gilliard, Alexei’s tutor, was not told the cause of Alexei’s illness.
111. Crawford and Crawford, Michael and Natasha, 122–46.
112. Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, 10; RGIA, f. 1278, op. 10, d. 11, l. 332; Maylunas and Mironenko, A Lifelong Passion, 529.
113. Grave, Burzhuaziia nakanune fevral’skoi revoliutsii, 78. See also Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, I: 156.
114. On what he calls the “parastatal complex” of social organizations in wartime Russia, see Holquist, Making War, 4. Lewis Siegelbaum has pointed out that relative to other powers, cooperation with “social interests and groups previously outside, or even hostile to the state machinery” was “least developed in Russia during the war.” But this was probably not true of 1916. Siegelbaum, Politics of Industrial Mobilization, xi.
115. Lincoln, Passage Through Armageddon, 61.
116. Zagorsky, State Control of Industry, 46; Paleologue, La Russie, I: 231–2 .
117. Stone, The Eastern Front, 227; Pogrebinskii, “Voenno-promyshlennye komitety”; Gronsky and Astrov, The War and the Russian Government.
118. Alexeyev objected to Brusilov’s “wide-front” approach, urging him instead to attack on a narrow twelve-mile front, but Brusilov stuck with his plan and, as he foresaw, this meant the enemy could not figure out where to commit reserves. Brusilov, Soldier’s Note-book, 204–75; Brusilov, Moi vospominaniia, 237; Hart, The Real War, 224–7; Knox, With the Russian Army, II: 432–82; Rostunov, Russkii front, 321–3; Rostunov, General Brusilov, 154–5; Dowling, The Brusilov Offensive.
119. Stone, The Eastern Front, 243.
120. He also noted, however, that “sometimes in our battles with the Russians we had to remove the mounds of enemy corpses from before our trenches in order to get a clear field of fire against fresh assaulting waves.” Von Hindenburg, Out of My Life, I: 193; II: 69. See also Asprey, German High Command.
121. Quoted in McReynolds, “Mobilising Petrograd’s Lower Classes,” 171.
122. Knox, With the Russian Army, II: 462–9; Lyons, Diary, 103–10.
123. Daly, Watchful State, 180 (I. G. Shcheglovitov).
124. Fleer, Rabochee dvizhenie, 309.
125. Rezanov, Shturmovoi signal P. N. Miliukova, 43–61; Ol’denburg, The Last Tsar, IV: 99–104; Bohn, “‘Dummheit oder Verrat’?”; Lyandres, “Progressive Bloc Politics.” Miliukov later tried to rationalize his promotion of falsehoods: Miliukov, Vospominaniia, II: 276–7; Diakin, Russkaia burzhuaziia, 243. See also Riha, A Russian European; and Stockdale, Paul Miliukov.
126. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 261–6; Golder, Documents of Russian History, 166–75. Purishkevich had already been publicly accused of wanting to remove Nicholas II. “Sovremen
noe pravosudie,” Dym otechestva, 1914, no. 22: 1–2. British ambassador George Buchanan had bought into the rumors of German agents at the Russian court, and an operative of Britain’s secret intelligence service seems to have been a co-conspirator, fearful of a possible separate Russian peace with Germany: Lieutenant Oswald Rayner, whom Yusupov knew from a stint at Oxford, evidently was present at the murder and dined with Yusupov the day after. An exchange between Rayner’s superiors in St. Petersburg indicates his possible involvement. Cook, To Kill Rasputin.
127. Voeikov, S tsarem, 178; Pipes, Russian Revolution, 266–7. The assassins were never brought to trial.
128. V. Mikhailovich, Kniga vospominanii, 186; A. Mikhailovich, Once a Grand Duke, 184. Alexander Mikhailovich was the son of a brother (Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich) of Nicholas II’s grandfather Tsar Alexander II. Prince Yusupov, one of Rasputin’s murderers, was the son-in-law of Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich.
129. Lincoln, Passage Through Armageddon, 312 (citing “Telegramme secret de M. Paleologue au Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres,” AdAE, Guerre 1914–1918, Russie, Dossier Generale no. 646: 78–9).
130. Buchanan, My Mission to Russia, II: 41.
131. Martynov, okhranka chief in Moscow, noted that the masses were not radicalized because of outside agitators, but because of government errors and a falloff in the tsar’s prestige, as well as court scandals. “Tsarskaia okhrana o politicheskom polozhenii v strane v kontse 1916 g.,” Istoricheskiii arkhiv, 1960, no. 1: 204–9; Pokrovskii and Gelis, “Politcheskoe polozhenie Rossii nakanune fevral’skoi revoliutsii v zhandarmskom osveshchenii,” excerpted in Daniels, Russian Revolution, 9–12.
132. “Fevral’skaia revoliutsiia i okhrannoe otdelenie.” “There were no authoritative leaders on the spot in any of the parties. They were all in exile, prison, or abroad.” Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, I: 21.
133. Burdzhalov, Vtoraia russkaia revoliutsiia, 90–1, 107–8.
134. David Longley, “Iakovlev’s Question, or the Historiography of the Problem of Spontaneity and Leadership in the Russian Revolution of February 1917,” in Frankel, Revolution in Russia, 365–87.
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