The Eastern Front 1914-1917

by Norman Stone

  This was still not enough—the more so as the blockage of Archangel was such that ‘mountains of goods already existed to be transferred by rail at the turn of 1915—16. The government thought of developing an ice-free port: the Catherine Harbour at Alexandrovsk, subsequently known as Murmansk, offered reasonable possibilities for navigation all the year round, and the government picked up pre-war plans for construction of a railway between it and Petrozavodsk, on the way to the capital. But to construct this railway was difficult. It had to pass through the Kola peninsula and along the shores of the White Sea, and the frozen rock splintered when drilled. To ship the material, a provisional line had to be built across the ice of the White Sea, but the tides caused even very thick ice to shift its position, and the provisional line buckled. Labour gave immense problems. Austrian prisoners-of-war were used for some time and the British company given the task of building the difficult northern section suggested bringing back Russian emigrants from Canada. But the war ministry said they would be at once conscripted, if they returned to Russia. The British company (Paulings) gave up the job, after much mutual recrimination with the ministry, and the government then went ahead with the line. By March 1917 it was theoretically open, and its theoretical capacity for 1917 would be 1,300,000 tons per annum. But the line did not function properly until 1923. Meanwhile, huge quantities of material built up both at Murmansk and Archangel: at Murmansk alone, 100,000 tons by March 1917, which could be shifted at perhaps 3,000 tons per day. Altogether, about 3,500,000 tons per annum. could now be shifted by various routes, Archangel, Murmansk, Trans-Siberian in particular.* However, just as the system began to work, German submarines interfered with it. Allied transport became centralised, and Russian requirements came low on the list of priorities. In 1917, control of Russia’s supply from outside became rigorous, and in the Russians’ view, petty. By March 1917, Russians were even using the postal services, in an effort to evade controls—American suppliers of boots for the Russian army were reduced, for instance, to sending their boots, in packets of three, via the parcel-post.22

  Allied help was, in the long run, of vital assistance to the Russian war-economy, despite all of the dislocations with which it arrived. British and, particularly, American machinery was essential for development of Russian production;24 so, too, were certain vital raw-materials, even copper, of which Russia herself at the time produced little. The Russian railway-system almost depended, for a time, on imports of American locomotives and rolling-stock, and a whole range of modern industries—automobiles, aircraft, wireless among them—could not have been developed in Russia without the plant and skills that arrived from the west. This was not a token of Russia’s economic backwardness. The share of Russian economic growth in the First World War that was directly attributable to western help was not, probably, very much greater than the share of British economic growth brought about by imports of American goods and skills. It was the economy’s capacity to adapt to imports, and not the imports themselves, that revealed whether it was still ‘backward’ or not; and the story of Russia’s development of her own resources shows that the country had—despite much legendry to the contrary—become capable of sustaining modern war, at least in very narrowly economic terms. Of course, the shell- and rifle-shortages of 1915 were an unmistakable fact. But it was a whole range of non-economic factors that had led to them: lack of foresight, before the war; mistrust between General Staff and war ministry; mistrust between infantrymen and artillerymen; mistrust between businessmen and government; exaggerated reliance on allied assistance in the form of finished war-goods; transport-problems; the vast incalculable of allied war-finance. All of these contributed to the Russian army’s suffering from material shortages from early 1915, and of course the clumsy handling of the army in the field resulted in these shortages’ acquiring a greater importance than need, in defensive warfare, have been the case.

  The greatest problem, in the long run, was that the Russian people were saddled with a huge international debt incurred for war-material that did not arrive when it was needed, despite contractual obligations on the suppliers’ part, but that did arrive when much of it was redundant. More serious, in the short run, was the government’s initial failure to develop Russian resources for war, because of reliance on foreign suppliers. The war ministry behaved as if Russian industry would be quite incapable of producing war-material, although already Russia was producing more coal, steel, iron than France, where, in 1915, four million shells per month were produced, and although Russia had already begun to develop sophisticated electrical and chemical industries. Three State rifle-factories (Tulski, Izhevski and Sestroretski) and three Arsenals, with trivial contributions from private business, were supposed to supply the war-material, and it was only later that the government discovered how ludicrous was the disproportion between needs on the one side, and the 50,000 rifles per month or half-million shells per month that came from these sources. To meet the gap, recourse was had to foreign suppliers who proved to be inefficient and untrustworthy, and it was not until the failure of this recourse had been shown by events over the next seven months that the government were forced to consider how Russian industry might be developed.

  In August 1914, the war ministry knew only a small section of Russian industry, and relied on a smaller section still—a handful of factories, mainly in the Petrograd region.* Two main factors dictated the government’s behaviour: an overwhelming cost-consciousness, and a desire for the highest quality of war-material. Neither the Council of Ministers nor the War Council were prepared for lavish expenditure. For instance, the Council of Ministers were told in mid-August that the preparatory period for mobilisation had cost 5,600,000 roubles and were also asked to give the war ministry a credit of 1,000 million roubles for the war-fund.25 The Council queried the figure for the preparatory period, and agreed to assign at once only 200 million roubles, to which the rest might be added when ‘details’ were given by the ministry. Even in 1915, 200 million roubles would not have paid for ten days of the war. But the officers of the Artillery Department in particular—Grand Duke Sergey, Inspector-General of the Artillery, Kuzmin-Karavayev and Smyslovski—had been trained in a very hard school, and could not get used to the idea that money must be spent. Before the war, each gun had been allowed to use only forty rounds of shell per annum, in order for money to be saved, and even in 1916 the Artillery Department had not rid itself of its passion for preposterous economies. A flavour of its attitude came when it announced that a programme for construction of 37 State factories would cost ‘607,126,083 roubles and 15 kopecks’.27 Russian business could clearly not be converted to produce for the war unless it got money to pay for equipment; difficulties of transport, finance made the acquisition of such equipment from abroad difficult enough, and the sudden switch of suppliers from Germans, who were known, to Englishmen or Americans who were not, made the problem all the greater. Yet, by law, the State was forbidden from giving more than ten per cent of the value of a contract in advance; and all contracting had to go through a comlicated set of legalistic and traditional rituals before anything could be concluded with a particular company.28 Grand Duke Sergey and Sukhomlinov could only see an endless process stretching ahead of them, by which endless State money would be poured into firms inside Russia, who would merely produce more expensively and less reliably than foreign firms already known to them.

  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, si
nce 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 uncompromisi
ng 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.