The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

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  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 ga
ve 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.