The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (29 page)

Moreover, they could not imagine that manufacture of war-material could be anything other than extremely difficult. A rifle had nearly 1,000 different parts, a machine-gun over 3,000 and each had to be made accurate to within a few thousandths of an inch. Shell-fuzes were more delicate still, especially as the Russian field gun shell had a fuze, the ‘3 G.T.’ that combined safety and quality to the great pride of the artillerists. It had a built-in safety-device that prevented the shell from exploding,
²⁹
even if there were premature detonation of the fuze, unless it were already on the downward path of its trajectory. This fuze was expensive, since it needed the best quality of steel and the least volatile explosive, trotyl. But the experts were very proud of it. They could not imagine Russian industry to be capable of producing it. Even the best Russian factories had sometimes made a fool of themselves before the war, when it came to war-contracts. The Kolomenski factory, although capable of producing Diesel engines, failed to produce the ‘3 G.T.’ fuze; the Ayvaz factory, already producing automobiles and aircraft before
1914, could not make rifle-sights; even the Tula arsenal had turned out 900,000 defective fuzes before anyone noticed the defect. Manikovski, who came to dominate the Artillery Department later on, wrote that ‘In this field, all the negative qualities of Russian industry emerged in plenty—bureaucratism, mental sluggishness on the part of management, ignorance sometimes bordering on illiteracy on the part of labour.’
³⁰

Wartime disruption, far from convincing the war ministry that a different attitude was needed, instead confirmed its original judgment: if Russian industry was unreliable to start with, then wartime disruption would make its performance hopeless. The quality of labour was not high: even in the State’s advanced Izhevski factories, 3,000 workers trekked back to their villages at Easter for celebrations there, and of course the prevalence of workers who also owned land meant that there was constant leakage to the countryside at harvest-time—a process that high wages, far from halting, merely subsidised. Russian workers were not used to putting in regular labour. They might have very long working days (in the mines, for instance, women and children were ‘dispensed’ in March 1915 from laws forbidding them to work over ten hours a day), but there were also countless holidays—in the month of May, fifteen. The ways of industrialists were not much better. As was perhaps inevitable in an economy dominated by State finance, corruption was frequent. The Sormovski factory regularly reserved five to six per cent of its orders’ value as ‘compensation’ for the ‘collaboration’ of officials of the State.
³¹
Confusions of foreign trade, conscription of labour, transport and raw materials combined to make the wartime picture still more difficult than the peacetime one. When in spring the minister of trade and industry, Prince Shakhovskoy, was offered ‘full powers’ by the Council of Ministers, he refused them in horror.
³²
The war ministry took the simple view that, to rely on Russian industry would be to pay high prices for shoddy goods, irregularly delivered.

There were of course protests. In December 1914, the banker Vyshnegradski, the businessman Putilov, and the ‘étatiste’ bureaucrat Litvinov-Falinski had visited
Stavka
to find out what plans were being sketched by General-Headquarters, since they could find little encouragement from the war ministry. Many Moscow magnates—Guchkovs, Ryabushinskis, Tretyakovs, Polyakovs—wanted to find their place in the war-economy: they offered skills, machines, raw materials that were, they alleged, only waiting for some understanding on the war ministry’s part.
³³
There were also grumbles within the ministry: General Vankov, head of the Bryansk Arsenal, had noted what civilian industry could achieve if the war ministry prepared to relax its attitudes both to prices and standards. Early in 1915, a fillip was given to these men by the arrival
of a French technical mission, headed by Captain Pyot. He was sent out to show the Russians how to make the simplified French three-inch high-explosive fuze, which could be made in one piece and did not need the complicated screwing-together of Russian fuzes. Of course, introduction of the French fuze would not be easy to begin with, since it needed hydraulic presses that industry often did not have, and no-one could imagine industry producing the presses. But Vankov, and far-sighted industrialists in Moscow, saw a chance to make shell on a great scale, and Vankov went off to prospect things in Moscow and the south. The Artillery Department resisted. Pyot was received with scant courtesy; Vankov’s blandishments were ignored. The French fuze was treated as fraudulent; the possibility of using cheaper explosives, such as Schneiderite or Yperite, regarded as laughable.
³⁴
The French military observer, Langlois, who had frequent dealings with Pyot, wrote that Grand Duke Sergey ‘
appartient à cette catégorie d’esprits imperfectibles, à qui des mois de guerre n’ont absolument rien appris
’; there was ‘
un prodigieux esprit de routine
’ at work;
³⁵
and the Department as a whole was made up of officers ‘
fatigués ou ignorants
’.

It was not until three months after his arrival in Russia that Pyot achieved anything at all; only in mid-April did Vankov receive any kind of authorisation from the Department to involve civilian industry in an organisation to produce shell within Russia. Meanwhile the Department went on resisting initiatives even by highly-placed Russians. A Prince Obolenski wrote officially to offer the services of his factory in war-work, and received his letter back, on the grounds that it had not been furnished with the required government stamp. The bulk of private industry went on producing on pre-war lines, in so far as wartime disruption allowed it to, because there was no alternative. As a result, important items in a war-economy went on being wasted in civilian industry. The chemical industry was still producing, in 1916, 1,500 tons of cosmetics, from materials that could have gone to explosives.
³⁶
Almost no beginning was made in exploiting the various by-products of coal to make explosives, the Department denying, for instance, that benzol could be got in significant quantities in Russia, whereas the chemist Ipatiev found out, a few weeks later, that Russia could have enough benzol for all purposes and to spare. It was these conditions that kept back Russian shell-production for longer than was true of other countries,
^*
for, between January and April 1915, the Russian army received less than two million shells, which was hardly a fifth of its minimum demand for the period.

CHAPTER EIGHT
The Retreat, 1915

Constant talk of shell-shortage, and the blaming of everything upon it, concealed a much more important factor: the increasing crisis of authority in the Russian army. Shell-shortage, lack of officers, and the increasing restiveness of the men were the three factors that most influenced the shape of affairs in 1915, and it is not surprising that
Stavka
, with respectable public opinion in general, concentrated its attention on shell-shortage which at least had an obvious, material remedy, and one moreover that could profit respectable public opinion. But the shell-shortage had itself been greatly complicated by the nature of the army, which in the long run mattered much more than shell-shortage.

Officer and man began to draw apart, almost as soon as the initial patriotic euphoria had vanished. Revolutionary urges began to affect the men: not yet in the form of mutiny, but certainly in the form of
je m’enfoutisme
—malingering, passive resistance, dumb insolence, overstaying of leave. To measure such things is of course difficult. There are several collections, in print, of soldiers letters home in this period, but both they and the censors’ comments on them present the historian with a well-known trap, since much depends on the methods of sampling. Some of the printed collections have the reader wondering why revolution failed to break out in December 1914, and others equally have him wondering why it broke out at all.
¹
Just the same, there are clear indications that, in 1915, ‘incidents’ multiplied. Sick-lists lengthened, with 85,000 men evacuated to the rear in 1914, and 420,000 in 1915. More revealing still, the Germans and Austro-Hungarians captured, in 1915, over a million prisoners, so many that the Russian authorities lost track of them. There was a widespread demoralisation of the army, that had inevitable effects on the commanders’ strategy. In some ways, ‘shell-shortage’ was a mere technical translation of the great social convulsion within Russia.

The difficulties were blamed on ‘agitators’, and at the generals’ conference in Cholm, just before the evacuation of Lwów, arrangements
were made for construction of barracks in provincial towns, ‘so that reserve-battalions can be kept away from the populace’. Hitherto the troops had been kept mainly in Moscow, Petrograd, Kiev, because these alone had housing and supply-facilities, and the bulk of troops continued to be placed there, for lack of anything else. Naturally, their contact with the populace, particularly in Petrograd, and particularly with the women, who were more uncompromising revolutionaries than the men, caused trouble for officers. Still, at this time the soldiers were still overwhelmingly ‘patriotic’ in their orientation, and though they resented their officers’ behaviour, they shrank from full-scale mutiny. There were riots, drunken outbreaks; there was some desertion. But, just as in this period there were not many strikes, so these outbreaks were confined to a sort of continual revolutionary murmur.

It was not agitators, but the collapse of the old army’s structure, that produced trouble. The army’s numbers went up, beyond the capacity of the administrative machinery even to count. The standing army, the first class of the reserve, the recruit-years (by anticipated conscription) of 1914–18 were called up. Beyond these, there was the enormous mass of territorial troops, the
opolcheniye
, who had little or no training, but who found themselves bearing arms—of a sort—as the man-power crisis bit deep. Altogether, nine million men seem to have been called up by July 1915. On the other hand, the number of officers, inadequate even for the peacetime army at its full strength of two million men, went down because of officer-casualties, of which there were 60,000 by July 1915. The 40,000 officers of 1914 were more or less completely wiped out. Replacements from the officers’ schools could proceed only at a rate of 35,000 per annum. Wide recourse was had to ‘‘warrant-officers’, men with little fitness to become officers, promoted straight from their high schools. But by September 1915, it was rare for front-line regiments—of 3,000 men—to have more than a dozen officers. The training-troops of the rear were similarly few in number, because officers were not enough for the purpose. The whole of Russia supported 162 training-battalions, which would take in between one and two thousand men for a training-period supposed to last six weeks. It is therefore understandable that a large number of the hundreds of thousands of troops arriving every month in army depots had nothing to do for most of the day.
²
Moreover, the army leaders would not, until the turn of 1915–16, promote men from the ranks on a sufficiently lavish scale to make up; and even when men were promoted in this way, they never attained substantial posts. It is sometimes astonishing to see how many men, sometimes due for brilliant careers in the Red Army two years later, failed to rise above a non-commissioned post in the Tsarist Army. Zhukovs, Frunzes, Tukhachevskis
were available to the Tsarist army, but they never rated more than a subaltern’s job, much as Napoleon’s marshals had done in the days of the ancien régime.

But the problem with officers was only part of the structural problem. There was also a problem, perhaps more serious, with N.C.O.s. As Dragomirov said, ‘this vital link in the chain of command was missing’. N.C.O.s were appointed
ad hoc
, shared the men’s facilities—there was no sergeants’ mess, certainly none of its ethos—and usually were among the first to go Bolshevik, unless they were in the privileged cavalry or artillery. It was partly the blindness of the old régime that was responsible for this, for officers could not imagine that an N.C.O. could appear in less than ten years of service. It was also a consequence of the social development of Russia, where the N.C.O.-type had not emerged to nearly the same extent as in western countries. France and Germany had a whole range of artisans: men, certainly not of officer-status, who none the less had their own parcel of responsibility, over a counter-help, a Polish maid-servant or seasonal labourer. In the German army, artisans made up two-fifths of the N.C.O. corps and in some regiments even more; independent peasants made up most of the rest. The State offered its support for this process, because it guaranteed a man who served for seven years, and became a Reserve-N.C.O., a job in the Prussian postal or railway-services, which suited many men of artisan-background at a time when excessive competition was eating away their livelihoods. What the Prussian bureaucracy had done for the economically-pressed Junker, it also achieved for the artisan or small farmer in difficulties, and it acquired thereby the most solid N.C.O.-corps in Europe. Russia was a different case. Only three per cent of her peasant population was in the habit of hiring labour, and the village commune indeed existed to dismantle properties that looked as if they would proceed on western lines.
³
Moreover, where Russia had the egalitarian commune, western Europe had a plethora of trade-unions, churches, schools, boy-scout organisations where men could learn discipline and also learn how to transmit it. At N.C.O.-level, there was a smudgy copy of the officer-class, which did excellent service in turning a mass-army into a serviceable military unit. In Russia, this caste was much weaker: in 1903 there existed only 12,109 long-serving soldiers in the army, in place of the 23,943 there should have been—two per company, where the Germans had twelve.