The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (55 page)

The network as a whole might have stood the strain, if the quality of labour had been higher. But, with the expansion of the labour-force in wartime, from 40,000 to 250,000 in the railway-battalions, and from 750,000 to 1,100,000 on the civilian-run lines, men were taken in who were not in the least skilled. This affected the storage of goods; and it came, also, to affect the maintenance of rolling-stock. One train in four
was out of order by 1917, as against one in eight before the war; and although the number of locomotives increased quite substantially, the number of working locomotives declined, at one stage in 1917 to 15,500. Technical labour fell off in quality; the American Stevens Commission, sent in spring, 1917, to assist the ministry of transport in working the railways to better effect, felt that this was the real problem, and not a lack of rolling-stock. It was asserted, for instance, that to turn a Russian train about took twice as long as to turn an American one. The problem of inflation also affected the quality of labour. Railwaymen’s wages were directly controlled by the government, and fell behind, as public servants’ wages do, in the inflation. At one stage in the summer of 1917, there were complaints that railwaymen were not turning up to work because they had no shoes; and in any event there was a closing of the gap between skilled and unskilled railwaymen that demoralised the skilled, and drove them towards revolutionary courses. The Russian railwaymen had always considered themselves to be the aristocracy of labour: with uniforms, skills, higher pay to mark them off from the rest. Their refusal, at decisive points in 1905–6, to take part in the great strike-movement allowed the government to shift troops from one area to another, and ‘pacify’ them in turn. But by June 1917, the demoralisation of railwaymen was such that their old self-esteem and apartness dwindled: they too went on strike.

The interaction of railway-problems, failure of grain-marketing, confusions in delivery and use of fuel condemned the old system. It was all very well for soldiers and workers to listen to a speech from Kerenski, demonstrating that the war
must
be fought, the bosses obeyed, and wage-increases controlled. No doubt, most of the soldiers accepted Kerenski’s thesis at the time. They would then return to their units, to hear in letters that their wives and families were hungry and cold, perhaps even diseased; if they were workers, they would go home to find that their wages still bought nothing; and yet both soldiers and workers were aware that food was there, if only it could be got at. There was always a curious duality to their behaviour. The soldiers, for instance, did not want to fight the war. On the other hand, they were overwhelmingly patriotic; and it is a complete fabrication to suggest that the army had dissolved in 1917.
²⁵
In November of that year, there were, by
Stavka
census, 6,500,000 men in the front area, excluding civilians. Officers said that the army had dissolved: but mainly because the men had repudiated the more extreme forms of their authority. They mistook questioning for disobedience, committees of the soldiers for mutiny, whereas
‘tout au plus, les soldats exigeaient la mort d’une certaine conception de la discipline
’. Of course, the army was demoralised: and this was shown in the high sick-lists of 1917, or the great number of ‘delegates’ (by one account, 800,000) who found theirway
to the rear for long periods. But the officers first invented ‘the disintegration of the Russian army’ and then, by their behaviour, provoked it. Supply-problems completed this picture. The soldiers of 1917 began to receive poor rations, irregularly delivered, in accordance with the country’s economic crisis. Living from rotten herring, sometimes even given paper-money in place of rations—paper-money, moreover, that was almost useless in the stores of the rear-area, where only black-marketeering would succeed—the soldiers drank from illicit stills, mutinied, attacked and sometimes killed their officers. By November 1917, there was almost no resistance to the Bolshevik revolution on the soldiers’ part, and, after the December armistice, many of them went back to spread the Bolshevik doctrines at home. In the towns, it was much the same. The huge mass of workers, some long-established, some newly brought into industry, were pushed together by inflation, which reduced differentials between old and new, skilled and unskilled, men and women. The growth of starvation and disease in the towns brought them together as a revolutionary force, in a way that no amount of Bolshevik agitation could have done. All were agreed that capitalism had failed, and they became increasingly prepared to listen to a Lenin who offered them hope. The First World War had not been the short outburst of patriotic sacrifice that men had expected. It became, instead, a first experiment in Stalinist tactics for modernisation; and 1917 was a protest against it. In the summer of 1917, virtually the whole of Russia Went on strike. The Bolshevik Revolution was a fact before it happened.

Notes

CHAPTER ONE

¹
K. F. Shatsillo:
Russki imperializm i flot
(Leningrad 1966) p. 44.

²
A. Kersnovski:
Istoriya russkoy armii
3 (Belgrade 1935) p. 578.

³
Generally on the Russian army: Kersnovski op. cit. (and vol. 4, Belgrade 1938); J. S. Curtiss:
The Russian Army under Nicholas II
(Durham N. C. 1965); P. A. Zayonchkovski:
Voyenniye reformi 1860–1870gg.
(Moscow 1952), a penetrating work; H. P. Stein: ‘Der Offizier des russischen Heeres im Zeitabschnitt zwischen Reform und Revolution 1861–1905’ in
Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte
(Berlin 1967, vol. 13 pp. 346–507), a very thorough piece of work with excellent bibliography; B. Shaposhnikov:
Mozg armii
(1 Moscow 1926, 2 and 3 1929); L. G. Beskrovny:
Stranitsy boevogo proshlogo
(Moscow 1968); N. P. Yeroshkin:
Istoriya gosudarstvennykh uchrezhdeniy dorevolyutsionnoy Rossii
(2 ed. Moscow 1968) pp. 200ff. for 1861–1904 and 258ff. for 1904–17. G. Frantz:
Russlands Weg zum Abgrund
(Berlin 1926) contains an excellent introduction (pp. 3–132) which should be used to correct the versions of the better-known works of N. Golovin:
The Russian Army in the World War
(New Haven, 1932), in which what is true is not new, and what is new is not true. The most recent work is P. A. Zayonchkovski:
Samoderzhaviye i russkaya armiya na rubezhe 19–20 stoletiy 1881–1903
(Moscow 1973). There is a serviceable, short piece by K. F. Shatsillo:
Rossiya pered pervoy mirovoy voynoy
(Moscow 1974).

⁴
Stein p. 380ff.; cf.
Voyenno-statistichesky yezhegodnik
1912.

⁵
V. Zvegintsev:
Kavalergardy
(3 vols. Paris 1936, 1938, 1968) vol. I p. 33 gives the following list of officers in the Maria-Fedorovna Regiment—Dolgorukov, Grabbe, Cantacuzene-Speranski, Golitsyn, Gagarin, Shebeko, Bezobrazov, von der Osten-Driesen, Panteleyev, Bagration, Kochubey, Sheremetiev, Tolstoy, Repnin. cf. P. A. Zayonchkovski:
Samoderzhaviye i armiya
pp. 168 ff., 333.

⁶
A breath of these would-be technocrats’ world comes from Knyaz Kochubey:
Vooruzhennaya Rossiya
(Paris, probably 1910), a privately-printed regurgitation of half-eaten French doctrines.

⁷
Ye. Barsukov:
Podgotovka russkoy armii k voyne v artilleriyskom otnoshenii
(Moscow 1926) p. 17ff; cf. his
Russkaya artilleriya v mirovoy voyne
(Moscow 1938–9, 2 vols.) and
Istoriya russkoy artillerii
(4 v. Moscow 1948). Barsukov is throughout my chief source on matters of artillery, together with A. A. Manikovski:
Boyevoe snabzheniyeb usskoy armii v mirovuyu voynu
(1st. ed. 3 vols. 1920–23, 2 ed. 2 v. 1929 and 3rd ed. 2 vols. 1938. The second edition, edited by Barsukov, is to be preferred).

⁸
Barsukov:
Podgotovka
p. 56.

⁹
M. N. Pokrovski:
Drei Konferenzen
(Berlin 1920) p. 28 for Izvolski’s view of the need for a navy. Shatsillo remains the outstanding source on naval matters (and cf. his articles in
Istoricheskiye Zapiski
75 (1965) and 83 (1969) on naval matters). There is still much use in M. Petrov:
Podgotovka Rossi k voyne na more
(Moscow 1926); cf. the official
Soviet history:
Flot v pervoy mirovoy voyne
(2 vols. Moscow 1964) which takes a surprisingly pious attitude.

¹⁰
W. A. Suchomlinow:
Erinnerungen
(Berlin 1925); Rödiger: ‘Iz zapisok’ in
Krasny Arkhiv
60(1933) pp. 92–133 esp. p. 93–4; V. Kokovtsev:
Out of my Past
(Stanford, Calif. 1935); V. A. Apushkin:
General ot porazheniya V. A. Sukhomlinov
(Leningrad 1925, French translation Paris 1952) which collects all the legends; Sukhomlinov’s ‘Dnevnik’ in
Dela i Dni
(Petrograd 1920–21) vols. 1 and 2; and various of the hearings in
Padeniye tsarskogo rezhima
(7 vols. Leningrad 1924–27), especially the ‘dopros Polivanova’ in vol. 7 p. 54ff. Golovin’s attacks on Sukhomlinov;
Plan voyni
(Paris 1936) pp. 160f.,178, 212.

¹¹
A. A. Ignatiev:
50 let v stroyu
(2 vols. Moscow 1955) I. p. 526 quotes this view of Belyayev’s.

¹²
B. Pares:
The Fall of the Russian Monarchy
(London 1939) pp. 283–4 for a characteristically cracked version of the fall of Grand Duke Nicholas; A. A. Polivanov:
Memuary
(Moscow 1924) vol. 1 p. 62; Rödiger ‘Iz zapisok’ p. 106, ‘dopros Polivanova’, pp. 62, 85, 176. Polivanov was one of the most successful tacticians of the Russian army—he identified the winning side well in advance, and always, somehow, managed to keep afloat in that most difficult period of a régime’s decline, when the old is clearly going but the new has not yet arisen to replace it. He abandoned the old establishment in time to keep his credit and profit from the changes of 1905–6; then stuck to Sukhomlinov rather than to Palitsyn; then cultivated links with the Duma (Guchkov) in preparation for Sukhomlinov’s fall; in 1912, fell foul of Sukhomlinov, had to sit out of affairs for two years or so, and surfaced again as Grand Duke Nicholas’s candidate for Sukhomlinov’s succession in June 1915; managed to be dismissed by the Tsar in 1916; took only a very modest rôle in the Provisional Government; and surfaced again in the Red Army, to sign the Treaty of Riga for the Bolsheviks.

¹³
Voyeykov’s ‘dopros’ in
Padeniye
vol. 3 p. 58ff., cf. p. 313ff. (Beletski) and vol. p. 361ff, 2 p. 9ff. (Andronikov); Sukhomlinov’s ‘Dnevnik in
Dela i Dni
I (1920) pp. 219—238 refers to some of these intrigues; the ‘Tagebuch des Grossf. Andrej Wladimirowitsch’ in Frantz:
Russland auf dem Weg
p. 146 repeats some ‘inside’ stories; and an irreplaceable source for these currents in the army is always M. K. Lemke:
250 dney v tsarskoy stavke
(Petrograd 1920) pp. 89–90, 476, 485 and passim. Lemke—who edited the works of Herzen and Bakunin—served in
Stavka’s
press department, and wrote an immense diary that also contains a large number of documents that came his way. It is a work of great perception, distinguished by the width of its want of sympathy.

¹⁴
Zuyev:
Padeniye
vol. 3 p. 19. Hecame from the Police Department (usually allied with Sukhomlinov’s war ministry) and attained the command of 25. Corps. After confusions near Krasnostaw, Grand Duke Nicholas removed him; but Sukhomlinov and Ivanov then arranged for him to take command of 12. Corps. Bonch-Bruyevitch’s career: his memoirs,
Vsya vlast Sovietam
(Moscow 1958 and 2 ed. 1964) and Ya. Lisovoy: ‘Revolyuts. Generaly’ in
Bely Arkhiv
(Paris) vol. 1 (1926) p. 50. He cultivated Sukhomlinov through Dragomirov’s widow, publishing an edition of Dragomirov’s work on tactics, and being introduced to Sukhomlinov in recompense. He served with Sukhomlinov in Kiev, and received a high post in III Army—commanded by Ruzski, a friend and client of Sukhomlinov—when war came. In mid-September, Ruzski and Bonch-Bruyevitch went to command the army group against Germany. But
Stavka
seems to have been out for his blood. After the Myasoyedov affair, which, despite Bonch-Bruyevitch’s efforts to tack round to the
Stavka
side, discredited all the
Sukhomlinotsy
, he was sent off to be third-in-command of the passive VI Army, and was later demoted
still further, to be garrison commander in Pskov. Here, he declared sympathies with the revolution and, with the help of his brother, a prominent Bolshevik, achieved prominence in the Red Army, Some hints as to the behaviour of the cliques in ‘Zapiski N.N.Romanova’
Krasny Arkhiv
1931 No. 47 p. 159, Lemke p. 220ff. for Rennenkamf’s career and cultivation of links with Grand Duke Nicholas and court-figures hostile to Sukhomlinov (Beloselski-Belozerski).

¹⁵
Α. L. Sidorov:
Finansovoye polozheniye Rossii v gody pervoy mirovoy voyni
(Moscow 1960 is the outstanding source on army finance.