by Hew Strachan
Despite its vulnerability as a ‘capital’ organization, the progress of the general staff at troop level seemed more promising. In 1904 there were eighty vacancies a year at the Nicholas Staff Academy, and its graduates held 45 per cent of staff appointments. After the defeat in Manchuria 4,307 officers, including 337 generals, were retired over two years. At the same time the number of places at the staff academy was increased to 150, and between 1906 and 1914 80 per cent of all staff jobs went to the academy’s products. By the outbreak of the First World War eighty-two out of the 100 generals of the army had received general staff training. But the results were more limited than appearances and statistics suggested. The syllabus of the Nicholas Staff Academy was narrow, focusing on administration rather than command, and emphasizing tactics rather than operations. In 1907 Colonel Alexander Gerua called for the study of what he called ‘applied strategy’, ‘to afford a series of firm rules for moving armies along contemporary routes of communication . . . manoeuvring large armies towards the field of engagement’. Gerua was not heeded. Nor did practical instruction compensate for the deficiencies in theory. The officer’s task, according to General M. I. Dragomirov, was to turn peasants into soldiers. Although Dragomirov died in 1905, his influence persisted: district manoeuvres practised tactical drills but did little to promote initiative or imagination. Exercises involving large bodies of troops tended to be entrusted to the command of members of the royal family, so those who would hold higher command in war did not do so in peace.44
The infighting which followed institutional weakness was provoked as much by professional as by political arguments. Fierce doctrinal debate was a natural corollary of the defeat at the hands of the Japanese. The ‘Young Turks’, a group of reformist officers at the Nicholas Staff Academy, identified with western European tactical thought. N. N. Golovin had sat at the feet of Foch at the École de Guerre, and favoured his applied method of teaching; he also rated the importance of technology over morale. Sukhomlinov, on the other hand, had been raised in the Russian national tradition, which venerated the moral rather than the physical elements, and which saw foreign influences as inappropriate. The professor of strategy at the Nicholas Staff Academy, A. A. Neznamov, called for a debate on the virtues of a unified military doctrine, but his opponents warned of the dangers of rigidity, and in 1912 the Tsar told him to stop writing on the subject. In the same year rumours that the Young Turks were hatching a conspiracy prompted Sukhomlinov to return them to regimental and district duty. The effect was not to establish the primacy of the national school but to disseminate the views of the Young Turks throughout the army.45 Rather than embrace a general staff view, the operational thought of the Russian army broke into competing groups. Each military district contrived a measure of autonomy that set it at variance with its neighbouring district and with the general staff itself. Even the individual districts were prey to disunity: if Sukhomlinov secured the appointment of a district commander, then Grand Duke Nicholas or the Young Turks endeavoured to appoint his chief of staff. Common doctrine was forfeit. And, without either a common doctrine or a dominant general staff, Russia’s war plans lacked foundation. Sukhomlinov’s achievements lay in peacetime consolidation, not in preparation for war.
The fundamental doctrinal issue for Russia was whether it should operate offensively or defensively. Like Neznamov, N. P. Miknevich, who was chief of the main staff of the war ministry from 1911 until 1917, sought to fuse the nationalists and the Young Turks in a common solution, which used historical examples but recognized change over time. His treatise on strategy, first published in 1899 and thrice revised, became the dominant text in late imperial Russia. In the edition of 1911 Miknevich argued that the next war would be long because nations would commit to it all their resources. He thought this would work to Russia’s advantage: the authoritarianism of a strong monarchy, the hardiness of its peasantry, and the backwardness of its economy all rendered it less dependent on a quick victory. Because ‘time is the best ally of our armed forces’, Russia should fight defensively from the outset, avoiding combat while exhausting its enemies’ offensive powers.46
The case for the defensive was strongest at the strategic level. Russia’s military commitments lay on every point of the compass except the north: to the west lay Germany and Austria-Hungary, and to the east Japan; competition with Turkey in the Caucasus and with Britain in Persia demanded vigilance to the south. To sustain the strategic offensive, Russia would have to be able to strike a quick blow in one direction and rapidly reconcentrate in another. Even if the density of rail track had permitted such a Schlieffenesque solution (and it did not), the distances between the fronts would not.
A combination of geography, industrial backwardness, and common sense suggested Miknevich was right. But Russia could not simply abandon its border territories, trading space for time. It still needed some system of forward defence. One alternative was to station its active and mobile formations close to the frontier, leaving its reservists in the rear; but the consequence of that would be the separation of mobilization and concentration into two phases, distinct in space and time. The second was to create a barrier of forts to hold off the invading armies. Fortification, however, was particularly susceptible to technological change, and—as the French and Belgians had discovered—its modernization generated an unrelenting and ultimately unsustainable pressure on the defence budget. Furthermore, to rely on fortification was to make strategy dependent on the tactical defensive.
The difficulty of accepting the tactical defensive proved more divisive than any debate over strategy. What Miknevich had proposed on the strategic or operational level was entirely in accordance with the precepts of the historically minded national school. It was what had happened in 1812; it reflected the legacy of A. V. Suvorov—that Russia should fight in accordance with its own nature, terrain, and capabilities. But Suvorov had also famously praised the bayonet at the expense of the bullet. His advocacy of the tactical offensive enabled the nationalists in at least this respect to march to the same beat as the Young Turks, the latter being persuaded of the modernity of the offensive by what they had learnt of French and German thinking. When Moltke studied the reports of Russian manoeuvres in 1913 he saw the repeated rejection of retreat and the persistent requirement that all tactical solutions incorporate the offensive as evidence of Russian improvement.47
In practice, the war in Manchuria meant that the Russians had no cause to look to any other European army for tactical wisdom: their own experience of the battlefield was both recent and extensive. The war provided plenty of evidence of the lethality of modern firepower. Nevertheless, its precepts could not definitively resolve the debate over the respective merits of defence and attack. On the one hand, Miknevich’s ideas were reinforced by the fact that the war showed how hard it was to defeat modern armies, and by the way in which victory was achieved through a series of engagements rather than in a single decisive battle. But the artillery, which went on to argue in tactical terms that a future war would therefore be won by forts and heavy guns, was accused of neglecting the baleful influence of Port Arthur on Russian strategy. Too much reliance had been placed on its incomplete defences at the outset of the war, and too much attention given to its relief during its course. The infantry looked to a more aggressive solution, with field fortifications as pivots for manoeuvre and howitzers to prepare the attack. The 1912 field service regulations contained considerable evidence of lessons well heeded from the battlefields of 1904–5: they emphasized security in breadth and depth, and urged the infantry to use cover and to establish firepower dominance. But the point remained that the Russians had displayed tactical caution against the Japanese and lost; the Japanese themselves had attacked with determination on the one hand, and without regard for casualties on the other. The tactical offensive was explicit in the 1912 regulations; doubts about the operational functions of fortification were implicit.48
The war in Manchuria fuelled strategic as well a
s tactical change. When Russia entered into its alliance with France in 1890 it reckoned—quite rightly at that juncture—that Germany would strike east first, before it turned west. The alliance, therefore, conferred immense benefits on Russia. First, France’s ability to draw off Germany enabled it to face Austria-Hungary, to the southwest. Secondly, it provided compensation for Russia’s slowness in the opening phases of the war: N. N. Obruchev, the chief of the main staff, believed that mobilization was not just a political signal but ‘the most decisive act of war’.49 But Russia’s attention to the Far East drew its forces from both its western fronts, and so increased its dependence on the French alliance. Moreover, with the commencement of annual Franco-Russian staff talks in 1900, France became more conscious of Russia’s preference for an attack against Austria-Hungary at precisely the stage when Germany was switching its own planning priority from Russia to France. Russia succumbed to French pressure, and from 1901 planned an offensive into Germany. But it could not simply abandon its Galician front, and so it continued simultaneously to sustain the idea of an attack into Austria-Hungary.50
Poland was the salient which conferred on Russia the option of attacking either Germany or Austria-Hungary: it outflanked Austria-Hungary in Galicia and Germany in East Prussia. But Poland itself was not well adapted for the conduct of operations. Its farms generated insufficient produce to feed even its own indigenous population, and its railway systems were incapable of supplying an army from Russia’s interior. Furthermore, if Germany and Austria-Hungary launched a joint attack on Russia, and Russia was the defender, Poland would be liable itself to envelopment. The choice which Poland presented was stark. A headlong offensive would enable Russian troops to feed on enemy territory and could forestall the manoeuvres of the Triple Alliance. The alternative was its abandonment. This would minimize any trade-off between Russia’s north-west and south-west fronts, would shorten its armies’ lines of communications, and would create the potential to fuse the phases of mobilization and concentration.
When the Tsar proposed just such a strategy in 1902 the main staff rejected the option on political rather than military grounds: Russia would forfeit its status in the Balkans and would renege on its alliance with France. But the combination of defeat at the hands of Japan and revolution at home made the idea politically viable, and it drew on military arguments for its support. The Grand Duke Nicholas, as chairman of the Council for State Defence, favoured a concentration in the Volga Basin, in the heart of Russia, so that the army could be deployed either to the west or to the east. F. F. Palitsyn, the chief of the general staff, was no Francophile and was fearful of renewed hostilities with Japan: he endorsed Grand Duke Nicholas. Supporting both of them was a general staff study prepared by Y. N. Danilov which demonstrated that Russia could not expect to conduct a successful defence of western Poland.51 Thus, for all the bureaucratic bickering, planning assumptions at the strategic level began to converge after 1907. Furthermore, they were underpinned, rather than undermined, by Sukhomlinov’s determination to make the army readier for mobilization.
In 1909 Russia’s active army was concentrated to the west in recognition of the frailties of its railway system. Thus, on mobilization 220,000 reservists would have to travel to other districts just to join their units, and 87 per cent of recruits were stationed far from their homes, even in peacetime. This geographical separation between the units and their sources of men not only clogged the mobilization timetable, it also limited the Russian army’s capacity for expansion. Sukhomlinov’s solution was to redistribute the active army throughout Russia, withdrawing ninety-one battalions from the Warsaw district and thirty-seven from the Vilna district. Before 1910 47 per cent of the army’s strength would have been deployed between the western frontier and the Dvina-Dnieper line; after 1910 only 10 per cent remained in the same area. As a result, corps drew their manpower from the districts in which they were stationed, and 97 per cent of recruits joined units quartered in their own districts.52
Danilov embodied the new deployment in plan 19, which was approved in June 1910. Poland was to be abandoned, and the army was to be concentrated as well as mobilized further to the east. It would then direct fifty-three divisions against Germany, but only nineteen against Austria-Hungary. In this respect it reflected the experience of the Bosnian crisis: that suggested that Russia could not rely on France, but Austria-Hungary could depend on Germany. Therefore, in the event of war with the Triple Alliance, Russia must be ready to take on Germany.
What Sukhomlinov had not done was adopt the defensive in the terms advocated by Miknevich. Sukhomlinov had imbibed Suvorov’s teaching on the virtues of the attack by way of Dragomirov. His premiss was tactical: Manchuria showed that victory was won by the bayonet. But his conclusion was strategic: Russia, he later wrote, had to break with the Tartars’ principle of withdrawing back into the steppe.53 Sukhomlinov therefore shifted Russia’s deployment to the centre, not to defend Russia as an end in itself but the better to counter-attack. When the Russian armies advanced they would do so with their concentration complete, and they could strike with equal facility to the east as well as to the west.
Sukhomlinov’s determination to imbue the army with the offensive was nowhere more evident than in his decision not to upgrade the fortifications on the Narew, on the Vistula, and round Warsaw. They would consume vast sums of money, and tie both men and guns to fixed positions rather than enable their employment in the field. His decision, though representative of current western European thought, aroused the ire of the Grand Duke’s circle. Like Sukhomlinov, Palitsyn had planned to mobilize in the centre but, unlike Sukhomlinov, to concentrate forward, and so he needed the fortifications of western Poland as a screen. Territorial mobilization focused attention on the line of forts which lay further east, running from Kowno through Grodno and Brest-Litovsk. In the controversy which followed a compromise was struck: in addition to Kowno, Grodno, and Brest-Litovsk, the fort at Osovets (on a tributary of the Narew, to cover any deployment into East Prussia) and at Novo Georgievsk (on the confluence of the Vistula and the Bug, north-west of Warsaw) were scheduled for reconstruction. Those at Ivangorod, the bridgehead on the Vistula south of Warsaw, were not. Thus, resources were dissipated over more objectives. By 1914 Russia had neither one thing nor the other: many of the old fortifications had been demolished, much of the new was still incomplete.54
The basic orientation of plan 19 was, at least in its initial phases, defensive. But when Russia went to war in 1914 it adopted the offensive from the outset. Some observers, then and since, were determined that the shift was not homegrown. They argued that the faith in the tactical offensive which underpinned Sukhomlinov’s thinking had not percolated through to replace the defensive orientation of Russian operational thought.55 They therefore attributed the change to French pressure. At the 1911 staff talks the French, already anxious because of what they knew of plan 19, told I. G. Zhilinskii, the newly appointed chief of the general staff, that they would attack the Germans by the twelfth day of mobilization. They demanded that the Russians do the same by the fifteenth day. A year later, at the 1912 meeting, Zhilinskii gave this undertaking. Furthermore, in 1913 France used the loans raised on the Paris money market for Russian railway construction to gain additional leverage: in the past Russia had diverted most of this money towards commercial track, but the 1913 loan was made conditional on a third of it being used for military railways. Joffre demanded that the lines to the frontier be double-tracked.
France was undeniably worried by Russia’s plans, but Russia acceded to the pressure as much to suit its own needs as to assuage French anxieties. By 1912 the Japanese threat had receded. In its stead loomed war in the Balkans and the dangers of an Austro-Hungarian bid to reassert its suzerainty over the region. If Russia persisted with the 1910 version of plan 19, ceding the initiative on its south-west front to the dual monarchy, it courted revolution in Poland. But Vienna would not act without Berlin’s support, and the indications that
the Germans would first concentrate against the French and only later turn east were multiplying. Once again the attraction of the French alliance was its ability to confer an offensive option on the Austrian front, but its corollary— not only because of Russia’s alliance with France, but also because of Austria-Hungary’s alliance with Germany—was a simultaneous operation on the German front.56
The renunciation of an early attack on Austria-Hungary was the other principal domestic criticism—alongside the fortifications dispute—of plan 19. The Russians received a steady flow of accurate intelligence on Austro-Hungarian intentions, culminating in the revelations of Colonel Redl. They saw the Austro-Hungarians, in contradistinction to the Germans, as beatable. Galicia’s position athwart the flank and rear of any Russian army facing Germany to the north meant that it could not be neglected; more positively, its ground favoured offensive operations. The focus of this train of thought was M. V. Alekseev, chief of staff first of the Warsaw military district and then of Kiev, the two commands closest to Austria-Hungary. At a conference in February 1912 the district staffs, dominated by Alekseev, prevailed over Danilov and the general staff. They favoured a concentration in Poland and an attack across the Vistula so as to threaten simultaneously the flanks and rear of the Austrians in Galicia and the Germans in East Prussia.57
Danilov was not completely routed. As quartermaster-general on the general staff, his continuity in office ensured his influence at a time when chiefs of the general staff rotated fast and Sukhomlinov himself showed little interest in war plans. He believed that French pressure for a Russian offensive did not take sufficient account of the difficulties of the East Prussian theatre, which was divided in two by the Masurian lakes. He favoured a northerly concentration, at least partly because he was worried that Sweden would side with Germany, so threatening Finland and St Petersburg. Thus, his defensive preoccupations were reinforced by a deep pessimism. The intelligence which he received— which was not integrated with that of the Kiev district and was also less accurate—concentrated on the German army and its strengths. He was in possession of a German war game suggesting that they would not attack in the east. But his calculations continued to include the possibility of a German offensive by up to twenty-five divisions within ten days of mobilization, and in the spring of 1914 he was still allowing for a joint Austro-German offensive against Russia alone.