by Norman Stone
Two factors, in the main, prevented this system from becoming the permanency it was supposed to be: the vastness of the administrative task, which made it difficult for any central body to exert its will; and the division of the officers’ class, which left General Staff officers talking mainly to themselves. In the long run, the second of these mattered more, for it complicated administrative business—battles of competence and the rest—to an overwhelming extent. The Russian army was not, like western European armies at the time, largely dominated by upper-class figures. Russia was a poor country, without that plethora of jobs in the economy that attracted the socially-mobile in more advanced countries. As in the Hispanic world, church and army in Russia offered roads for social advancement that were not so much needed in other countries: the army was a vehicle for social mobility, and not, as in Germany, a refuge from it. Ambitious peasants needed the army; and the army needed ambitious peasants, because it could not otherwise find officers. Attempts had been made in the past to confine officers-posts to upper-class men, but they had always broken down. The State could not afford to pay officers very much. In Russia, a lieutenant-colonel received a quarter of the salary of a German one, a Russian captain, 1,128 marks to the German’s 2,851. Russian officers usually travelled third-class on the railways, until in the 1880s the ministry of transport agreed to let officers with third-class tickets travel second-class. In the 1870s, despite efforts to make the officers’ corps more ‘bourgeois’ in recruitment, a third of the 17,000 army officers had not passed through primary school; and between 1900 and 1914, almost two-fifths of officers between the ranks of subaltern and colonel were of peasant or lower-middle-class origin.4 A great many more were only one generation removed from such origins: usually, men (such as Denikin, Kornilov of Alexeyev) whose fathers had climbed from serfdom to an officer’s post, after serving for twenty-five years in the ranks and passing a simple examination in the military institutes, scripture, and letters. This element was reinforced by a further ‘hereditary’ one—foreigners, and their descendants, who had made a military career in Russia, and who counted almost as personal legionaries of the Tsar. Germans, usually from the Baltic coast, were the strongest element here, and had supplied a third of the generals in the middle nineteenth century. Even in 1914, foreign names—though the bearers were now, normally, Russian —were much in evidence in high places. Of sixteen men commanding armies in the war-months of 1914, seven had German names, one a Dutch name, and one—Radko-Dmitriev—had even been Bulgarian minister to Saint Petersburg until 1914. Seven had Russian names, but two of them were by origin Poles. The officers’ corps was thus a mixed bag. The Tsar thereby lessened the chances of a military coup in the Hispanic style, and at the same time gave himself a populist argument of some force. The régime might be autocratic: but it was a system in which men of low social origins could find a place. Although upper-class Russians dominated some parts of the army—notably, the cavalry5—they were by no means the dominant element in it, as a whole. By 1902, 23.2 per cent of the graduates of the yunkerskiye uchilishcha producing most of the new infantry officers were of peasant origin, and further 20.2 per cent lower-middle-class, and two-fifths gentry—at that, landless.
There was a contest between patrician and praetorian in the army, as elsewhere in the Tsarist State, and the Tsar preserved his freedom of action by balancing between them. Tsarist Russia was not so uncomplicatedly a ‘gentry-bourgeois State’ as has sometimes been suggested. On the contrary, gentry figures provided much of the active opposition. Their economic basis had been weakened by emancipation of the serfs, and loss of two-thirds of their lands. Some found a way forward in the bureaucracy, or the zemstva; some stayed on their lands, and tried without much success, to make a go of them; some went into active opposition to a State now, seemingly, leaving them little place. A large number of liberals and revolutionaries came from their ranks—a tradition promoted by the Decembrists in 1825, and continued, in one form or another into the ranks of the Bolsheviks, of whose leaders at least Lenin and Chicherin could lay some claim to patrician status. It was useful to the State, in these circumstances, to recruit peasants whom it could then release against their masters; and such ex-peasants were frequently encountered in the army and the police, as Count Tolstoy discovered when the police raided his house, on suspicion that literacy was practised there.
There was a carapace of Tsarist functionaries, men who served for uncomplicated motives of patriotism and self-advancement, who managed the armed forces before 1905; members of military families on the one side (Skalons, Dragomirovs), Germans who owed their all to the Tsar, on the other (Rödiger, Evert, Plehve). The Tsar relied again and again on such men, despite their often very great age, and made Vannovski, octogenarian war minister, minister of education in 1902. When the younger officers campaigned for a General Staff, what they had in mind was the destruction of these old men and their system, which 1905 was supposed to have discredited. The demand for an all-powerful General Staff came unmistakably from the patrician wing of the army. Only gentry or bourgeois figures could pay the costs of the General Staff Academy, the products of which were overwhelmingly upper-class. In 1883, of 122 men accepted, fifty-eight were from Saint Petersburg, and most of the rest from Warsaw or Moscow; later on, almost ninety per cent of the intake was of middle- or upper-class origin. When an independent General Staff was instituted, it occurred quite fittingly with the emergence of the Duma: General Staff officers and parliamentary liberals often were brothers or cousins. There were Trubetskoys, Struves, von Anreps, Golovins, Zvegintsevs, Moeller-Zakomelskis in the General Staff as much as on the benches of the Duma’s ‘Progressive Bloc’. No doubt these men would have inaugurated ‘the career open to talent’ in the army. But they interpreted ‘talent’ in their own sense,6 and their interpretation certainly did not include many of the officers who had found their way through the old system. Not surprisingly, the General Staff officers, whose writ was supposed to run throughout the army encountered much opposition from the old praetorian guard.
Besides, although these officers were self-pronounced technocrats, they had a way of falling into pure traditionalism. Full of bright ideas as they were, they were not sure which ones to apply. The lessons of the Russo-Japanese war were not very clear. The naval authorities, for instance, had appreciated that the shell they used was unsuitable, but they did not know with which type to replace it, and therefore went on supplying the same shell for the next three years. Artillery and infantry, in particular, disagreed as to the lessons of modern war, each accusing the other of high-handed behaviour. Infantrymen complained that gunners had let them down in refusing to ‘waste’ precious shell on infantry tasks; artillerists complained that infantrymen were illiterate, that, for instance, General Dragomirov had threatened to court-martial any gunner who used the maximum range of his gun. A similar quarrel opened up on the subject of Russia’s many fortresses. Some officers read the example of Port Arthur to mean that all fortresses were so vulnerable to heavy artillery as to make their maintenance a waste of time; others read it to mean that fortresses should be greatly strengthened to enable them to withstand heavy guns. The shadow of redundancy fell still more heavily on cavalry, and was still more vehemently denied, although infantry weapons could now fire so far and so fast as to knock out charging horesemen quickly enough.
Artillery,7 like cavalry, formed a strong centre of reaction. The artillerists despised infantrymen, and resented attempts to subject them to infantry orders. By 1906, it had become clear that the old eight-gun battery was unnecessarily large. The quick-firing revolution in gunnery had given a six-gun and even a four-gun battery (as in the French army) as much effective fire-power as the old eight-gun affair. The artillerists agreed, with reluctance, that this was the case, but said they had no money to create smaller batteries, and the larger ones were still in existence in 1914. The truth of this matter was that eight-gun batteries were commanded by senior officers, where a six-gun one would be co
mmanded by a captain. Promotions and pensions were at stake, and the Artillery Committee accordingly found excellent reasons for doing its senior officers a good turn. On the other side, they indulged a mania for heavy artillery, to be placed in fortresses and not in the field, that cost the army a great deal more: in 1906, for instance, they presented a bill of over 700 million roubles for fortress-guns, as against one of 112,900,00 for field artillery.8 They also pronounced against high-trajectory field artillery, such as the Germans had, on the grounds that it was a ‘coward’s weapon’. The infantry should charge field-fortifications, and not expect gunners to lob shells behind them when they had so many important tasks in hand. Palitsyn and his colleagues adopted, though platonically, the infantry standpoint in these matters, but against the united resistance of the Artillery Department, and the Inspector-General of Artillery, he could not prevail. A General Staff representative was duly sent to sit on the Artillery Committee, chief executive body of the Department, but the Inspector-General and the Artillery chiefs (Kuzmin-Karavayev, Smyslovski and Dimsha) deliberately made their discussions highly technical, until the representative faded away. In1907, a statute was produced, governing the relationship of infantry and artillery, but it was so ambiguously-worded that no-one knew what to do. In some units, artillerymen went their own way. In others, infantry captains were allowed to give orders to single batteries. The wrangles within the army reached the Council for State Defence, and the General Staff was speedily discredited in ministers’ eyes. After three years of independent General Staff, there was almost no progress to show.
The system came to grief in 1908, after wrangling between military and naval leaders. Progressive ministers wanted a navy. Navies acquired colonies, trade. They stimulated important industries. They also gave some freedom of choice in foreign policy, unlike armies, which simply made an accumulation of weight on the border and hence reduced rather than expanded a country’s options. Naval authorities sometimes had an air of administrative competence that impressed civilians, who found army men depressingly innumerate. The Tsar wished to promote a Russian navy, and in doing so had support from the Duma. This was expensive: a single Dreadnought cost forty million roubles. The army leaders protested that their own force mattered much more, and was being starved of resources. In the end, the Council of State Defence became unworkable. The army leaders combined to resist naval demands, but could not agree among themselves as to what should be done with the resources thus saved—Grand Duke Sergey Mikhailovitch, Inspector-General of Artillery, naturally had fortresses and heavy guns in mind; Grand Duke Nicholas was an unrepentant cavalryman; Palitsyn inclined to the infantry cause, though, like the bulk of General Staff officers, he would never promote the cause of lower-class infantry officers at the expense of his class-associates in the artillery and cavalry. The Tsar had to step in to arrange finance behind Grand Duke Nicholas’s back. In the autumn of 1908, the Council of State Defence in effect ceased to function. The Tsar dismissed Palitsyn, and Grand Duke Nicholas reverted to his post as Inspector-General of cavalry, and commander of the Saint Petersburg military district.9
Meanwhile, the Tsar had recourse to his carapace of elderly servants. To succeed Palitsyn, he appointed V. A. Sukhomlinov, commander of the Kiev military district, a man connected with the old establishment of Skalons, Dragomirovs, Korffs, Vannovskis. He counted as a conservative, and as such was thought to have sabotaged the General Staff’s attempts to reform infantry in the various military districts. His was none the less the name associated with the progress made by the Russian army between 1908 and the war.10
Sukhomlinov has had an extremely bad press. He was held up as a by-word for corruption and incompetence. The Duma hated him, because of his unrepentantly autocratic attitude. In June 1915 he was dismissed, and arrested. The government imprisoned him in the Petropavlovski fortress on suspicion of corruption, and his management of the war ministry was subjected to a ‘high commission of investigation’. The Provisional Government also imprisoned him, and it was, strangely, the Bolsheviks who let him go. He also made innumerable enemies in the army, and a flavour of this enmity comes through the various works of General Golovin, who works a denunciation of him into all of his books. Sukhomlinov, as a sort of uniformed Rasputin, belongs to the demonology of 1917. But the case against him is far from watertight. He was part of the old army establishment, and as such had strong links with the army’s praetorian wing. In effect, he supported the infantry interest against artillerists, cavalrymen, fortress-officers; and, once he had taken control of the General Staff, he made it work, sometimes despite itself, in ways of which Palitsyn himself would have approved, but which he had never been able to entertain. The difficulty for Sukhomlinov was that the bulk of upper-class officers was unsympathetic to him: high aristocrats, installed in cavalry regiments, regarded his chief assistant, Danilov, as ‘an agrarian revolutionary’ because he pruned the privileges of the Guard Corps; the supports of Grand Duke Nicholas and Palitsyn hated him because he had excluded them from office; gradually, too, he acquired enemies in the Artillery Department and among the Inspectors-General, whose functions the Sukhomlinovite General Staff began to usurp. Sukhomlinov replied by promoting lower-class officers to posts that would have been closed to them in Palitsyn’s day, and he developed a whole clique, throughout the army. It was always said by artillerists, for instance, that Sukhomlinov really wanted to introduce a six-gun rather than an eight-gun battery because it would allow him to create new officers’ posts for his own lower-class clients.11 On the other hand, Sukhomlinov himself would never promote lower-class men too far in the army. Two-fifths of officers below the rank of colonel might be of lower-class origin; but only a small fraction of the generals were of this origin, and Sukhomlinov would have been dismissed if he had tried to extend that fraction.
His position was therefore always fragile, and to survive, and push through his reforms, Sukhomlinov needed control of the promotions-machinery. This was not easy, since the ‘Higher Attestations Committee’ that dealt with senior promotions was controlled to a large extent by upper-class enemies of Sukhomlinov; and in any case, few of Sukhomlinov’s clients would, in the circumstances of Tsarist Russia, have made general’s rank. But promotions lower down could be strongly influenced by Sukhomlinov. He appreciated this at once. Promotions were a matter for the Glavny Shtab, along with other routine affairs which the General Staff had decided to leave alone, and the Glavny Shtab itself was a department of the war ministry. Sukhomlinov decided that the way to real power lay through the war ministry, and not the General Staff, despite its formal superiority, because the former could more easily control both jobs and money. In Palitsyn’s day, the war ministry had not exerted itself: it was in the charge of Rödiger, apedant preoccupied with routine work. Sukhomlinov profited from confused conditions within the war ministry. Polivanov, Rödiger’s deputy, intrigued to overthrow Rödiger, and perhaps supplied ‘inside’ material to the Duma opposition to enable it to attack him. Rödiger’s response was so discreditably confused that the Tsar decided to remove him. But, knowing of Polivanov’s contacts with the opposition, he decided to appoint Sukhomlinov instead to the vacant post; and Sukhomlinov then announced that the old system, by which the war ministry was superior to the General Staff, suited Russian conditions better. Henceforth, the General Staff became a department of the war ministry, along with other departments (artillery, engineer-troops etc.); while Sukhomlinov seized control of the promotions-machinery.12
To prevent the emergence of opposition to him, Sukhomlinov turned the formal position of chief of the General Staff into an empty one, by the simple device of arranging for a constant turnover of occupants: Myshlayevski, dismissed after a year; Gerngross, a nonentity who presently died; Zhilinski, packed off two years later to command the Warsaw military district; the clerk, Yanushkevitch. There were thus as many chiefs of the General Staff in the last seven years before 1914 as Germany had had in the previous century. In the same way, Sukhomlin
ov ran a regiment of rats against his highly-placed enemies at court, in the government and the Duma. His agents, among them Myasoyedov, spied on the officers’ corps while ostensibly working for counter-intelligence; a clutch of gendarmes in the capital also served Sukhomlinov’s cause — Voyeykov, commandant of the Palace Guard, who marketed a Russian version of Perrier, called Kuvaka, had himself appointed ‘Inspector-in-Chief of the Physical Condition of the Populations and Peoples of the Russian Empire’, and discovered that improvement of this condition required consumption of Kuvaka; the manager of Grand Duke Nicholas’s headquarters canteen, Bayrashev, also a marketer of Kuvaka; the unspeakable Kurlovs and von Kottens of the Police Department; the Austrian profiteer Altschiller, to whom Sukhomlinov gave signed, blank letters that could be used for testimonials. To combat the Duma, Sukhomlinov also employed his own client journalists: Prince Meshcherski, with his anti-semitc Grazhdanin; Rzhevski, who ‘ghosted’ Sukhomlinov’s newspaper-articles (including a famous one of 1914 announcing Russia’s readiness for war); Prince Andronikov, who combined in familiar pattern profiteering, snobbery, high-church views and pederasty. All of these supported Sukhomlinov, informing him of currents of opposition, whether in the officers’ corps, the Duma, the government or the court, and received in return advance information enabling them to profit—in Androndronikov’s case, for instance, Sukhomlinov told him which pieces of land the army would try to buy, so that Andronikov could buy them first and then sell at a profit; while Sukhomlinov himself appears to have made handsome profits from inside dealings on the Stock Exchange. The system, overall, was protected against Sukhomlinov’s highly-placed enemies by astute use of the promotions-machine. Grand Duke Nicholas and his cohort of cavalrymen were confined to the military districts; Palitsyn inspected the fortresses of the Caucasus; all manner of their lower henchmen found themselves howling with frustration in some distant regimental command, while Sukhomlinov filled important posts with faceless technicians such as Shuvayev or Vernander, or dim-witted characters of the old establishment—the aged Evert, or the ex-peasants Kondratiev, head of the Glavny Shtab, or Ivanov, chief of the Kiev military district. The lower posts of the General Staff itself were invaded by men of simple origins, though the structure of the Russian empire being as it was, there were always strict limits to their numbers.13
