The Eastern Front 1914-1917

by Norman Stone

  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,* 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.

  This book proved difficult to conclude. The fighting stopped in January 1917, except for a few episodes; and yet it was in 1917 that all of the problems that I had seen came to a head. To narrate the year 1917 would have made this book intolerably long, and I should have gone far beyond my original strategic brief. What particularly interested me was why the country, the war-economy of which was successful as never before, should have gone through vast social change even though, with the German enemy at the gates, there was ostensibly every argument for retaining an unbroken front at home, at least for the duration. My last chapter is an effort to explain this. I have seen the First World War, not as the vast run-down of most accounts, but as a crisis of growth: a modernisation crisis in thin disguise. It was much more successful than is generally allowed. It failed, I think, against the bottle-neck of peasant agriculture. Inflation had accompanied the country’s economic growth in the First World War; and it was inflation that, in the end, caused Russia’s food-suppliers to withhold their produce at a critical time. A book that began with battle-fields thus ends with discussion of war-economy, inflation, revolution in the towns and the countryside. This was the pattern of the First World War itself, and I have tried to record its course in eastern Europe as best I can.

  In the course of writing this book, I have had a great deal of support and encouragement. I should particularly like to thank the staffs of the Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine in Paris, and of the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, where the bulk of my work on Russia was done. The Kriegsarchiv in Vienna has also been, for many years
, a second home for me, and I am always grateful, particularly to Dr: Kurt Peball, Herr Leopold Moser and Frau Professor Christina von Fabrizii, to whose interest and support I owe so much. Academic colleagues have given me stimulation and encouragement. Professors Marc Ferro and Teodor Shanin have taught me a dimension of Russian history that I should not have found by myself: they bear some of the responsibility for my last chapter, however much they might wish to repudiate it. I am also grateful to Mr. Raymond Carr, Mr. Peter Gatrell, Professor Israel Getzler, Professor F. H. Hinsley, Professor Michael Howard, Mr. Dominic Lieven, Mr. Donald Tyerman, Mr. David Warnes, Mr. Andrew Wheatcroft, Mr. H. T. Willett—to whom I owe two very stimulating discussions in St. Antony’s, Oxford—and Professor S. R. Williamson for their willingness to submit to bombardment. It is, finally, a pleasure for me to record my debt of gratitude, collectively to the Faculty of History at Cambridge, to my colleagues—and particularly Mr. D. J. V. Fisher—in Jesus College, to whose kindness and tolerance I owe so much, and to Madame Andrée Aubry, for her generous hospitality throughout the writing of this book.

  Norman Stone

  Jesus College, Cambridge

  4th October 197

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Army and the State in Tsarist Russia

  In 1906 the Tsarist empire seemed to be on its last legs. It had just been defeated in war with Japan; and a series of internal disturbances had almost swept Tsar Nicholas II from his throne. Now, the empire had barely recovered. Its finances were in disrepair, being dependent on French loans that were given tardily, and on insulting terms. The army was in confusion, and even some of the Imperial Guard units were openly seditious. The navy had been shattered: the Pacific Fleet sunk at harbour in Port Arthur, and the Baltic Fleet, after a blundering Odyssey to the Far East, defeated in battle in the Straits of Tsushima. Fifteen capital ships and fifty-four other vessels had been sunk: losses calculated, with a maniacal accuracy as characteristic of the Tsarist bureaucracy as the sinkings themselves, at 255,888,951 roubles.1 In the land campaigns in Manchuria, there had been a similar epic of incompetence. Infantry, artillery, cavalry had each gone its separate way. Supplies had broken down—even three years later, soldiers still did not have iron rations. Yet the generals were at a loss to explain what had happened. Kuropatkin, for instance, had recognised that charging Cossacks had been defeated by small bodies of Japanese infantry, but instead of seeing that this was an inevitable consequence of changes in infantry fire-power, he supposed that it had happened because the Cossasks had been cowardly; he ordered their carbines to be removed, so that henceforth they would have to rely on sabres.2 General bewilderment was such that it took the authorities years to produce an official history of the war, and it was produced, in the end, only for form’s sake.

  But this defeat, though humiliating, was salutary: it showed even the most convinced conservatives that the system must be changed. There came a series of reforms in the army, and in the State as a whole. An effort was made to enlist middle-class Russia for the régime: the old system of autocracy was modified, with the creation of a parliament, the Duma, and a form of cabinet government, with a functioning Prime Minister and a Council of Ministers less dependent than before on the whims of the Tsar and his wife. Certain liberties were guaranteed, though grudgingly: freedom of speech and assembly made their first appearance in Russia, and so did trade unions. Restrictions that tied the peasant to the land were lifted; and there was even a gesture towards emancipation of the Jews. It seemed, for a time, as if the energies of Russia were at last to be tapped, if only for the benefit of a régime that was almost universally detested.

  These political reforms coincided with a period of unexampled economic growth. After 1906, the country moved out of the depression that had bankrupted much of its industry at the turn of the century. Years of government railway-construction and foreign investment began to pay off, as new markets, new sources of raw-materials and labour, could be tapped. A series of good harvests, combined with high prices for grain—Russia’s principal export—gave prosperity to the country as a whole. The war with Japan itself had a salutary effect, since it forced the government, usually painfully orthodox in its application of deflationary policies, to spend money: 2,500 million roubles beyond ordinary outgoings, which gave a much-needed fillip to consumption in Russia. The new prosperity even enabled Russia to reduce her dependence on foreign capital. Foreigners lent much the same–indeed rather more–in terms of quantity, but their share of Russia’s capital formation declined from one half in 1904–5 to one eighth just before the First World War, and the direction of their lending also altered significantly, from government bonds to growth-related stocks in banking, commerce, industry. The government’s revenue reflected the country’s rising prosperity, since it almost doubled between 1900 and 1913–14, when it reached 3,500 million roubles.

  Russia’s armed forces profited from this, since a regular third of government revenue was devoted to defence; and by 1914, her recovery from the disaster of 1906 was, as the German General Staff noted with alarm, complete. The army contained 114½ infantry divisions to Germany’s 96, and contained 6,720 mobile guns to the Germans’ 6,004. Strategic railway-building was such that by 1917 Russia would be able to send nearly a hundred divisions for war with the Central Powers within eighteen days of mobilisation—only three days behind Germany in overall readiness. Similarly, Russia became, once more, an important naval Power. In 1907–8 she had spent £9,000,000 on her navy, to the Germans’ £14,000,000; but by 1913–14 she was spending £24,000,000 to the Germans’ £23,000,000. Plans were going ahead for seizure by naval coup of Constantinople and the Straits, and a naval convention with Great Britain allowed for co-operation in the Baltic against Germany. It was small wonder that Germans took fright in 1914 at the size of Russian power to come.

  But, to overcome economic straits was one thing; to overcome the social and administrative heritage of backwardness, quite another, since the days of backwardness had created mental attitudes less easy to eradicate than backwardness itself. Whether the régime could survive into the twentieth century depended on its making its institutions fit modern requirements; and this was a problem that the armed forced experienced just as much as did Russia as a whole. As the European arms-race went ahead, armies became much larger, and the pace of technological change increase. Training had to go beyond the acrobatic drilling of the past, for the men had to be given essential skills, as their weapons grew more complex. The composition of officers’ corps had to change: courage had to make way for trigonometry, the horse for the internal combustion-engine. Modernisation altered the terms of military relationships: it altered the rôles of cavalry, artillery, fortresses, infantry, and sometimes abolished their rôle. To make the necessary changes, and to plan for war in accordance with them, armies needed a central planning body, the dictates of which might over-ride the vested interests of the past. A General Staff was needed—a corps of officers specially trained, in an academy and by experience, not so much to lead troops as to study war in its higher aspects.

  The need for a General Staff had been clear in Russia before 1905, but fulfilment of it had been resisted. Administration, rather than policy, dominated Russia, and power tended to go to bureaucrats capable of working the system rather than visionaries who wanted to replace it. There was a General Staff Academy, but it produced too few graduates, and these few were in any case needed, with the overall inadequacy of the officers’ corps, to command troops rather than to do staff-work. Even in the war of 1914–17, chiefs of staff were simply deputy-commanders, and sometimes effective commanders, rather than experts in staff-work. The Inspectors-General in charge of separate arms—infantry, cavalry, engineering-troops or artillery—were usually Grand Dukes, and they resented any attempt on the part of General Staff officers to dictate to them; while regimental commanders, and the heads of the dozen military districts into which the country was divided regarded the General Staff as simply remote and interfering. A
ccordingly, the General Staff had a very limited rôle before 1905; the war minister was head of the army, and the staff (‘Glavny Shtab’ as it was then called) was only one department among several others. It was supposed to be the nucleus of the field headquarters of wartime, and contained a number of sections. One of these, equivalent in scale to the topographical section, was known as ‘General Staff’, but it was small and its functions were not defined.3

  Theorists felt that Russia’s defeat in the war with Japan had come from lack of a proper General Staff, a muscle to move the army’s administrative fat. In 1905–6 a series of reports by influential generals convinced the Tsar that change must come; and, with the rise of the Duma, creation of a functioning General Staff acquired more importance still. Now, the war minister was answerable to the Duma. If power could be given to a new Chief of the General Staff, answerable directly to the Tsar, then the Duma’s sphere of interference would be restricted to war ministry matters, administrative routine. The General Staff became independent of the war ministry, and its chief could appeal directly to the Tsar. Its dictates were supposed to cover artillery, training, fortresses, railways, planning for war, engineering-troops. The war ministry was left with routine work, executing these dictates; and the old Glavny Shtab was now confined to promotions, military prisons, statistics, the affairs of Turkestan. Grand Ducal Inspectors-General similarly remained in existence, but there was always conflict between them and the General Staff. A statute of 1907 failed to clarify the position; but as the General Staff understood the matter, Inspectors-General had the task of keeping material in good shape, and little more. The new chief of the General Staff was named as F. F. Palitsyn, who had studied German military institutions for many years. The new system was crowned by a Council of State Defence, which assembled the Prime Minister, the war minister, the chief of the General Staff, their naval equivalents, and the Inspectors-General. Usually, the body was chaired by Grand Duke Nicholas, Inspector-General of Cavalry, and its terms of reference were simply the whole field of defence.