The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (2 page)

How backward was Tsarist Russia in 1914? There could be no better test of this than the First World War itself—as Orwell said, war is a try-your-strength machine, and only muscles get the jack-pot. Early on, on the basis of Tsarist generals’ memoirs, or even just of Stalinist economic histories, I had picked up the standard version, that the Russian economy was too feeble to produce war-material in adequate quantities. This view of things was quite widespread, and it had been taken up by both Lloyd George and Churchill, who wanted to divert British troops from the charnel-house of the western front into more promising campaigns elsewhere to help the Russians.

In fact, when I reached the Hoover Institution, I discovered accounts there of what had really happened as to the supply of war-material, and it was not what I had expected at all. The wherewithal for a proper war-economy was in fact there, and, by September 1915, war-goods were being produced in quantities that were at least respectable. In the mean time, there had been what I now recognize as a very Russian story-of mistrust, of the wrong people in charge, of bizarre rivalries, of paralyzing secretiveness. Especially, the bureaucrats did not trust the industrialists, and supposed that, given state money, they would just make a mess of things and levant with the proceeds. Then, when matters did improve, artillerists did not co-operate with each other or with the infantry. Of course, in terms of the figures for the condition of the Russian economy in 1914, we have known, now, for generations that, in the years before 1914, it was booming. That, in my opinion, was really what made the German government ready for war in 1914: if it had waited until 1917, then Russia would indeed have been too strong to be overthrown by a German army that also had France to deal with. Converting the new industrial strength into a war-effort was very difficult, but the industrial strength was there. E. H. Carr did not like this, and I escaped from his influence, which was not in any event a benign one.

The ‘backwardness’ had less to do with economic power than with
its utilization, and, here, the nature of the Tsarist military organization was of the greatest importance. William Fuller’s
Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia 1881–1914
(Princeton 1985) covers this in much greater detail than I could command, and bears out much of what my ‘hunch’ told me.

My account of the Russian shell-crisis seems to be on the right lines, but in an important matter I may have erred. Soviet historians were a great deal more prolific on economic and social matters than on military ones, and they were no friends to the private industrialists who were engaged on war-work. Until we have studies properly based on the archives of the War Ministry, or, if they survive, those of the factories themselves, we shall not know how effective private producers were. My own account needs correction through two books—Lewis H. Siegelbaum’s
The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia
1914–1917.
A Study of the War-Industries Committees
(London 1983) and Peter Gatrell’s
Tsarist Russian Economy
1851–1917 (London 1986) which is partly based on his own studies of archives in the Soviet Union on precisely this subject. The Institute of History in Moscow also published a four-volume record of the
Osoboye Coveshchaniye po oborone gosudarstva 1915–1918 gg
. (Moscow 1975–1980) and the British dimension of the whole story is ably described in Keith Neilson’s
Strategy and Supply
(London, 1984).

By the end of 1916, the military events of the Eastern Front had petered out, and I should have needed a whole new book to do justice to the Revolution that followed. My final chapter was therefore just an essay on 1917, where I suggested that ‘modernization’ was going on, under war-time disguise, and that our old friend, the Russian peasant, had got in the way, preventing adequate supplies of food from reaching the cities and thereby provoking revolution. Part of this is fair enough, I think: it is right to call attention to inflation as a factor in the Revolution, and it is right to show how the Tsarist government lost control of its finances. However, it now seems clear that the Russian peasantry were not at all as backward as legend has it. On this, there are some important books. Heinz-Dietrich Löwe’s
Die Lage der Bauern in Russland
(Munich 1983) shows that, in point of fact, they ate rather better than the West German population of 1952, and Lars T. Lih’s
Bread and Authority in Russia 1914–1921
(Berkeley, California 1990) has a far more knowledgeable story than my own, which was still quite heavily based on the prejudices of E. H. Carr, not a respecter of peasants. Under the benign influence of Teodor Shanin, whose Awkward Class, about the peasants, had come out in 1972, I had begun to understand something of Russian agriculture, but the tendency to
blame ‘the peasants’ nevertheless makes too much of a showing in this book. Solzhenitsyn in The Red Wheel approaches the problem of food-shortages in a quite different way, showing how they generated anti-Tsarist myths and legendry. Saint Petersburg faced far, far worse shortages in 1942, but never rebelled. Why?

There is one great omission in this book, which, I hope, later generations will make good: the common soldier. Apart from an aside or two, this was not a subject with which I felt at all familiar. Nowadays, partly because of the great wave of sixties interest in the First World War, the study of soldiers’ letters, and of military morale in general, is rather well-advanced, and my old Cambridge colleague, Hew Strachan, is shortly to produce a two-volume history of the First World War which promises to deal with this question at serious length. How did the ordinary soldiers and the junior officers stand the horrors of the Western or Italian fronts? How did their Russian equivalents respond to those of the Eastern front, and what exactly occurred in the summer and autumn of 1917, when the force, somehow, just seized up? Orlando Figes’s
A People’s Tragedy
(1997) and Richard Pipes’s
Russian Revolution
(1990) have dealt with this, in different ways, but until we have a proper investigation of the archives, assuming that they still have the material, we cannot be sure as to what happened. Armies do not usually mutiny, and junior officers usually have close relations with their men, as was shown when, in defeat, the German army had to evacuate France and Belgium. Why, and in what sense, the Russian army mutinied as it did in 1917 is still something of a mystery. I hope that, at some stage, we are going to have a proper, authoritative history of it all from Moscow.

I should like to record some debts of gratitude. Michael Sissons gave me an enormous boost, both when he suggested this book thirty-three years ago, when I was still a student, and put up with its decade-long gestation. I was delighted to take up the offer, from him and from Simon Winder, of Penguin, that we should reissue the book. I have also had much support from Dr Ali Dogramaci, the Rector of Bilkent University at Ankara, who invited me to help establish a Turkish–Russian Institute, for which we have high hopes. I should like to thank Bahadir Koc, a virtuoso of the Internet, for finding out new publications, and to Mr Alkan Kizildel, an amateur military historian of that old and admirable school, for identifying questionable assertions as to weaponry, and misprints which had escaped my own scrutiny.

Bilkent University, Ankara
April 1997

Introduction

Winston Churchill wrote a book about the eastern front of the First World War. He dedicated it to the Tsarist army, and titled it ‘The Unknown War’. His book is a brilliant piece of narrative, bringing out the drama of this front to the full. But the events of this front are still ‘unknown’, for this part of the First World War received much less coverage in English or French than even the Balkan or Mesopotamian fronts. It did receive coverage in German, but very often these works present a purely German view of the Russo-German war, and the bias has been transferred to well-known English works, such as those of Liddell Hart. Churchill’s own book was based on a very narrow range of sources, most of them German, even though his ‘feel’ for the subject allowed him to make much more of these sources than a lesser writer would have done. There has been little in western languages since then, although Soviet and émigré writers produced a substantial number of studies of the front that might have permitted more authoritative western-language presentation of the battles of this front. There is no official Soviet history of the army’s performance in the First World War; and until there is, much that happened must remain unclear. None the less, it is possible to arrive at a basic narrative of events, and to make some effort at explaining them, especially when comparison can be made of the various Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian sources.

My first aim, in writing this book, has therefore been a relatively straight-forward one: to fill a gap in the military history of the First World War. It was often said that Germany could have won the war, if she had pursued a full-scale offensive against Russia in 1915, as Ludendorff wanted, instead of the partial schemes that Falkenhayn preferred. But I do not believe that Ludendorff’s bold schemes for eliminating Russia in 1915 would have worked; and indeed, the effects of the various episodes in Ludendorff’s personal
Drang nach Osten
—Tannenberg, the Winter Battle in Masuria, Kovno—seem to me to have been over-rated. On the contrary, it was Falkenhayn’s policy of limit, attrition that
probably offered the Germans a better way forward, if he had been allowed to stick to it. Ludendorff would merely have led them into yet more square miles of marsh and steppe, for it was not at all as easy to overthrow the Russian army as Ludendorff maintained. Deaths, for instance, formed a higher percentage of German casualties in the east than in the west,
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until the end of 1916; and until the turn of 1916–17, the Russian army had even captured a greater number of German prisoners (and of course a very much greater number of prisoners altogether, in view of the Austro-Hungarian army’s weakness) than the British and French combined. The idea that Germany had limitless possibilities in the east was a legend, however powerful its influence on Nazi thinking thereafter.

At the same time, there was an equally powerful legend on the allies’ side: that Russia, had she received proper help from her western allies, could have contributed decisively to an overthrow of the German Empire quite early in the war. Lloyd George wrote forcefully in maintenance of this view; ‘half the shells and one-fifth the guns… wasted’ in the great western offensives could, he alleged, have contributed decisively to Russia’s performance. I am not so sure. In 1915, the Russian army certainly suffered from material shortages, but the allies could hardly make them up, because they had material shortages of their own; and in any case, to assume that guns and shell would have made any greater difference to the east than they did to the west was to mistake the importance of mere quantity. My study of the engagements of 1915 showed that shell-shortage was very often used as an excuse for blundering and disorganisation that were much more important, in causing Russia’s defeats of that year, than mere shortage of material. In any case, by 1916, the Russian’s own output of war-goods had reached generally satisfactory dimensions. On 1st January 1917, Russian superiority on the eastern front was in some ways comparable with the western Powers’ superiority eighteen months later in France. It would have taken much more than despatch of guns and shell to the eastern front to cause the defeat of Germany there.

This was a discovery that came as a surprise to me, since I had always assumed, following Golovin and others, that the Russian army had lost battles because of crippling material shortages; and I had gone on, as other writers have done, to assume that this was an inevitable consequence of the economic backwardness of the Tsarist State. But when I consulted the figures for Russia’s output of war-goods, I soon found that the shortages
had been exaggerated, and sometimes invented after the event. It is not really accurate to say, for instance, that the Russian army was not ready for war, and that it plunged in before it was ready, in order to save the French. At the time, commanders asserted they were ready even four days before the army crossed the German border. But what they understood as readiness, was of course woefully at odds with war-time reality. They had had no idea what to expect. But ‘unreadiness’ was discovered subsequent to the battles, and was at bottom a hard-luck story. In 1914-1915, lack of war-goods was not a comment on Russia’s economic backwardness, but rather on the slowness with which her régime reacted to the needs of war. The politicians and the generals used shell-shortage as a ‘political’ football against the government and the war ministry, and their tales of shell-shortage were therefore treated with scepticism; the artillerymen wrote off infantrymen as stupid and alarmist; and, when the government did decide to do anything, it turned to foreign producers who failed to deliver on time. But once the government made up its quarrel with industrialists, the country proved able to produce war-goods in fair quantity. By 1916, it could produce aircraft, guns, gas-masks, hand-grenades, wireless-sets and the rest—if not in immense quantities, as in the Second World War, at least in quantities sufficient to win the war in the east if other things had been equal. By September 1916, for instance, Russia could produce 4,500,000 shells per month. This compares with German output of seven million, Austro-Hungarian of one million; and since the bulk of this quantity went elsewhere–to the western or Italian fronts—there was not much truth in the assertion that Russia lost the war because of crippling material weaknesses.

It was the country’s inability to make use of its economic weight that began to interest me, rather than the backwardness of which many writers had spoken. I began to examine the army’s structure, and again discovered some surprises. The army, as it grew before 1914, split, roughly between a patrician wing, of which Grand Duke Nicholas, Inspector-General of Cavalry, and commander-in-chief in wartime, was the head, and a praetorian one, dominated by the war minister Sukhomlinov. I had always read accounts that made out Sukhomlinov to be bungling, corrupt: he was detested by ‘liberal’ Russia on both counts, and was imprisoned after the March Revolution. But, much to my surprise, the evidence as I saw it showed that Sukhomlinov, and not his enemies, was the real reformer. His enemies, though eventually coming to power in the war-years, were much less ‘technocratic’ in their approach than they claimed to be. They resisted essential reforms before 1914 and their old-fashioned attitudes did much to reduce the army’s effectiveness in the war-years. No system of tactics emerged to combat the shell-shortage
of 1915; and the disasters of that year also owed much to the commanders’ wholly mistaken belief in fortresses. Moreover, the division of the army between patricians and praetorians even affected strategy, for it added a dimension to the usual rivalries and battles of competence that prevented emergence of coherent plans, with corresponding movement of reserves. The structure of the army, as shown in tactics, conscription, transport-organisation, strategy, relationship of infantry to artillery and the rest, all of which I have tried to investigate, displayed that the country’s great weak point was not, properly-speaking, economic, but more administrative. I have tried to account for this, as far as evidence allows, at least in the armed forces’ case.