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.
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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.
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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.43Nicholas 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 Austri
ans 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.
I
t 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.
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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.
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