A People's Tragedy (59 page)

Most of the Tsarina's ink was used on recommendations for appointments. She saw the world in terms of friends and enemies of the 'hidden cause' waged by Rasputin and herself. Ministers, commanders of the armed forces and members of the court all rose or fell in her favour according to where they stood in relation to the 'cause'. The patronage of Rasputin was the quickest way up the greasy pole — and criticism of him the quickest way down. In the seventeen months of the 'Tsarina's rule', from September 1915 to February 1917, Russia had four Prime Ministers, five Ministers of the Interior, three Foreign Ministers, three War Ministers, three Ministers of Transport and four Ministers of Agriculture. This 'ministerial leapfrog', as it came to be known, not only removed competent men from power, but also disorganized the work of government since no one remained long enough in office to master their responsibilities.

Bureaucratic anarchy developed with competing chains of authority: some ministers would defer to the Tsarina or Rasputin, while others remained loyal to the Tsar, or at least to what they thought the Tsar was, although when it came to the crunch he never seemed to know what he stood for and in any case never really dared to oppose his wife.

Boris Sturmer, the longest-lasting Prime Minister of the 'Tsarina's rule', who replaced the senile Goremykin in January 1916, was best known as a provincial governor who had been accused of venality, and as an Assistant Minister of Interior who had been charged with incompetence. In Sazonov's memorable phrase, he was 'a man who had left behind a bad memory wherever he had occupied an administrative post'. The affairs of state proved utterly beyond him. He ran to the Tsarina and Rasputin so often for advice that even the extreme monarchist V M. Purishkevich began to compare this ridiculous figure to Chichikov in Gogol's
Dead Souls,
who, after calling on all the dignitaries of the provincial town, sat for a long time in his carriage wondering who to visit next.41

* * * Perhaps the most damaging change of personnel was the dismissal of Polivanov in March 1916. More than any other man he was responsible for the rebuilding of the Russian army after the terrible losses of the Great Retreat. Major-General Knox, the British military attache in Russia, thought him 'undoubtedly the ablest military organizer in Russia' and called his dismissal 'a disaster'. Polivanov's crime, in the eyes of the Tsarina, had been his readiness to work with the public organizations in improving army supplies. 'Oh, how I wish you could get rid of Polivanov,' she wrote to her husband in January. 'He is simply a revolutionist.' His friendship with Guchkov, head of the War Industries Committees, was seen by the court with special alarm, since in November the Octobrist leader had invited elected workers' representatives to sit with him on the committees' central governing body. 'I wish you could shut up that rotten war industries committee', the Tsarina implored her husband in March, 'as they prepare simply anti-dynastic

questions for their meetings.' As for Guchkov, she asked, 'Could one not hang him?'42

The appointment of General Shuvaev, Polivanov's successor, proved beyond doubt that unthinking obedience was now deemed far more important for a Minister of War than military expertise. Shuvaev himself once told Knox that if the Tsar ordered him to jump from the window he would gladly oblige. And when his gross mismanagement of the war led to growing public charges of 'treason in high places', all he could honestly say in self-defence was 'I may be a fool, but I am no traitor.'43

With the help of the public organizations Polivanov had greatly improved the supply and morale of the army. Nowhere was this more apparent than on the South-Western Front, where Brusilov had been appointed the Front commander in March. He brought in a new style of military professionalism to the Front headquarters, promoting talented officers such as Klembovsky and Velichko (who along with Brusilov and Polivanov himself would later help inject a similar professionalism into the Red Army). Brusilov was quick to establish a good working relationship with the public organizations, and the effects of this were soon felt on his Front. 'Little by little', he recalled: our technical equipment improved; rifles were supplied, of various types perhaps, but anyhow with a sufficiency of cartridges; while ammunition for the artillery, especially the light guns, arrived in abundance . . . We had every cause to reckon on being able to defeat the enemy and drive him across our frontier.44

Brusilov's optimism marked him out at the Council of War on 15 April, when Russia's Front commanders met with the Tsar at Stavka to plan out the summer's operations.

Generals Kuropatkin and Evert, commanders of the North-Western and Western Fronts respectively, were pessimistic about the prospects for an offensive. But Brusilov promised to make things easier for them by launching an attack against the Austrians on his own South-Western Front, despite being warned that no extra men or supplies would be spared from the north. The other commanders were shocked and annoyed by his boldness. 'You have only just been appointed Front commander,' one of them told him as they sat down to dinner, 'and you are lucky enough not to be one of those picked out to take the offensive, and so aren't called upon like them to risk your military reputation.

Fancy rushing into such colossal dangers!' But this complacent attitude, so typical of the Tsar's favourite generals, was a long way from Brusilov's own determination and, perhaps naive, optimism. He was sure that God was leading Russia to victory, a faith reflected throughout the war in his letters to

his wife. 'I remain convinced', he wrote to her at the height of the Great Retreat, 'that somehow things will work out and we will win the war.'45

Nor did the scorn of Brusilov's colleagues take into account the sheer ingenuity of his tactics, which were set to make his offensive, in the words of Norman Stone, the main historian of the Eastern Front, 'the most brilliant victory of the war'.46 What distinguished Brusilov's military genius was his willingness to learn from the tactical lessons of 1914—15. Ever since the Fronts had become fixed and the war of mobility had given way to the war of position, Europe's generals had attempted to break through the enemy lines by concentrating men and munitions at a single point of the Front. The German breakthrough at Gorlice was a classic example of this 'phalanx' method, which Russia's generals slavishly followed thereafter. Brusilov was the one exception. He argued that the Russians, with their primitive railways, could not hope to concentrate their forces in one place without the enemy learning of it with plenty of time to bring up defensive reserves. As long as the element of surprise continued to be sacrificed on the altar of strength, Russia could not hope to gain a decisive breakthrough. He proposed instead to attack simultaneously at several points along the Front, thus making it difficult for the enemy, even with intelligence of the offensive positions, to guess where defensive reserves would be needed most.

Intensive preparations were made for the offensive. Nothing quite like it had ever been seen before. The key to Brusilov's plan was surprise, so everything was done to safeguard secrecy (even the Tsarina could not find out when or where the attack would begin). Offensive trenches were dug deeper than usual and camouflaged by a novel device of spraying the ground with paint. Assault tunnels were built under the Austrian barbed wire to within a hundred yards of their lines, so that when the assault was launched the first wave of attackers could reach their trenches in one rush. The enemy's positions were carefully studied with the benefit of aerial photography. This enabled Brusilov to build full-scale models of the Austrian trenches and train his assault troops on them. It also meant that when the offensive began the Russians knew the precise location of the Austrian batteries and, in some places, even of individual machine-guns.

Despite its inferior numbers, the Russian artillery thus had the one decisive advantage of knowing its targets, and this was to ensure the offensive's initial success.47

The offensive began on 4 June, in Brusilov's words, 'with a thunderous artillery barrage all along the South-Western Front'. 'The entire zone of battle was covered by a huge, thick cloud of dust and smoke,' an Austrian officer wrote, which 'allowed the Russians to come over the ruined wire-obstacles in thick waves and into our trenches.' Within forty-eight hours the Russians had broken through the Austrian defences along a fifty-mile front, capturing more than

40,000 prisoners. By day nine the number had risen to 200,000 men, more than half the Habsburg forces on the Eastern Front, and Conrad, the Austrian Chief of Staff, was starting to talk of the need to sue for peace.48

If Evert and Kuropatkin had followed up Brusilov's advance with their own promised attacks on the Western and North-Western Fronts, the enemy might have been pushed back and the course of the war changed entirely. Hindenburg later confessed that with a second offensive, 'We [would have been] faced with the menace of a complete collapse.'

According to the original war plan, Brusilov's Front was considered secondary to both Evert's and Kuroptakin's. Yet neither of them was prepared to attack. To be fair, their task would have been much harder than Brusilov's. For they would have had to fight the German troops, which were much stronger than the Austro-Hungarian forces whom Brusiloy had overcome on the South-Western Front. But their vanity was also a factor: the increased risk of defeat made them all the more afraid of losing their own precious reputations. Perhaps the real blame lay with Stavka. Alexeev had served under Kuropatkin and Evert during the Japanese War and was still too frightened of them to force them to attack. The Tsar also indulged the cowardly generals — they were the favourites of his court — and ignored Brusilov's daily requests to order an offensive.

The Tsarina was partly behind this. She bombarded her indecisive husband with Rasputin's 'expert' advice against an offensive in the north 'because', in his words, 'if our successes in the south continue, then they [the Germans] will themselves retreat in the north'.49

Such military stupidity was largely to blame for the slow-down of Brusilov's advance.

Instead of starting a second offensive Stavka transferred troops from the north to Brusilov's Front. They were not enough to maintain the momentum of his offensive, however, since the Germans, with their position eased by the inactivity of Evert and Kuropatkin, were also able to transfer reinforcements to the south. Conscious of his declining advantage, Brusilov now reverted to orthodox tactics, advancing towards Kovel but fighting, in his own words, 'at a lower pressure ... to spare my men as far as possible'. Slowly but surely, the Russian advance was grinding to a halt. In eight weeks of fighting Brusilov's armies had captured 425,000 men and a large part of Galicia; the enemy had been forced to withdraw troops from the Western Front, thus relieving pressure on Italy and the French at Verdun; while Romania, for what it was worth, was at last persuaded to join the war on the side of the Russians. Ludendorff called it 'the crisis in the East'. In 1918 he would pay the ultimate compliment to Brusilov's tactics by using them himself on the Western Front.50

Coming as it did after a long year of defeat in the east, and of bloody stalemate in the west, Brusilov's offensive turned him overnight into a hero not just in Russia but throughout the Allied countries. Giliarovsky wrote a collection of panegyric poems 'To Brusilov' which sold in their tens of thousands in leaflet form. French and Italian composers dedicated cantatas, marches and songs to the war hero. And throughout Europe people flocked to see the film called
Brusilov.
The General himself later wrote:

I received hundreds of telegrams congratulating and blessing me from every class of Russian society. Everyone would have his say; peasants, mechanics, aristocrats, the clergy, the intelligentsia, and the children in the schools, all wanted to let me know that the great heart of the country was beating in sympathy with the well-loved soldiers of my victorious armies.

Brusilov had shown that under competent commanders the imperial army was still capable of military success. Had it not been undermined by Stavka, his offensive might have served as the springboard for the restoration of the army's morale — perhaps even one day leading towards its eventual victory. But it is doubtful whether even this would have been enough to save the tsarist regime, such was the extent of the political crisis in the country at large. In any case, with the failure of the offensive it now became clearer than ever, even to a monarchist like Brusilov, that, in his own words, 'Russia could not win the war with its present system of government.'51 Victory would not stop the revolution; but only a revolution could help bring about victory.

For Brusilov the final damning proof of the old regime's incompetence had come at the start of July, when Alexeev transferred the elite Imperial Guards to his Front in a last desperate bid to save the offensive. These young blue-bloods were described by Knox as 'physically the finest human animals in Europe'. In their dark-green parade uniforms, trimmed with golden braid, each guard stood over six feet tall. But they came with a gormless commander, General Bezobrazov, another favourite of the court, who disobeyed Brusilov's orders and sent them into attack through an exposed swamp. As the warriors waded chest-high through the mud, the German planes flew overhead, raking them with their machine-guns. Knox watched in horror as the planes swooped down to hit their targets and 'the wounded sank slowly into the marsh'.52 In one stupid action the core of the country's finest fighting force had been lost, and with it the final chance of victory under the old regime.

* * * Brusilov's impatience with the government was increasingly shared by the rest of society as 1916, the third long year of the war, dragged on. Patriotic nobles like Brusilov and Lvov had hoped that a successful war campaign would bring the government and society together and thus forestall the need for radical reforms. They now realized that the opposite was true: radical reforms were a necessary precondition for military success. The growing shortages of food, fuel and basic household goods, the rapid inflation of prices, the breakdown of transport, the widespread corruption of the government and its military suppliers, and the steep increase in crime and social disorder — all these combined with the endless slaughter of the war to create a growing sense of public panic and hysteria. 'More and more', Gorky wrote to a friend in November 1915, 'people are behaving like animals and madmen.