The Eastern Front 1914-1917

by Norman Stone

  The most that Ludendorff could achieve would be a tactical success—certainly not the great advance on Petrograd or Moscow of which he sometimes dreamt. The Russian X Army had concentrated for frontal defence at Vilna, and had also been pinned for some time at Grodno. Its eighteen and a half divisions were therefore weak on the northern side, while V Army was similarly weak on its southern flank. There were only three divisions of X Army north of Vilna, with only cavalry on their flank, towards Sventsiany. Ludendorff achieved a feat of concentration that was remarkable enough given the appalling state of the railways—railways that, even in perfect order, were ostensibly too weak to allow any large-scale, rapid shifting of reserves in the days when the Russian commanders had had use of them. Of Ludendorff’s forty-one and a half infantry and six cavalry divisions, respectively twenty-eight and five were concentrated on the 110 kilometres of Eichorn’s front against X Army, the rest over 300 kilometres.30

  The German offensive took the form of a frontal attack on Vilna, which failed, and a flank-attack to the north, which succeeded. On 8th September three German infantry divisions and three cavalry divisions came round the northern flank of the Vilna defenders. By a peculiar Russian mix-up, there was not much in their path. A small cavalry group, under Tyulin, the oldest cavalry commander—despite severe competition—in the Russian army, with a force of 600 Latvian territorials with antique rifles, opposed them. Further to the rear was a colonel, Nazimov, with two companies of a supply-battalion. To the north, Kaznakov’s cavalry performed services of a sort. By 10th September the Germans had penetrated as far as the railway-junction at Sventsiany, Kaznakov hearing gunfire to the south, but doing nothing, Sventsiany itself was in German hands on 12th September, and the railway from Vilna to Riga thus cut. Subsequently, the German cavalry raided some way into the Russian rear—Molodechno, Smorgon.

  It took some time for Alexeyev to react. Tyulin’s performance was at first written down to poor-quality troops, cavalry arrogance, Ruzski’s nerves. The main German attack was thought to be the continuing assault on Vilna. But with Germans in the Sventsiany gap, there was a risk that the Vilna troops would be out-flanked, surrounded. Alexeyev over-reacted. He authorised further retreats to the south, in order to free troops for this new area of attack. There were withdrawals, before Prince Leopold’s group, to Baranovitchi and Novogródok, Slonim, Lida. The troops thus made free would come to the Vilna side—II Army command, to set up a new army between V and X, followed by two corps each from I and II armies, one each from III and IV. They were to form east of Sventsiany, and on the railway-line east of Vilna. An offensive might be launched. By 16th September Eichhorn’s front had eighteen and a half infantry, five cavalry divisions to thirty-four and six, and had lost 50,000 men, mainly in frontal attack on Vilna, in two weeks. Ludendorff fed more troops to the left wing, out-flanking Vilna. But he had learned prudence: there was to be no ‘second Brzeziny’, the fate that had nearly overtaken the three outflanking divisions east of Lódz a year before. His troops merely pressed south towards the rear of Vilna, while Alexeyev decided on the 17th to withdraw from it. On 18th September the Germans took Vilna. It was their last great capture.

  There followed a series of embarrassments that showed how correct had been Falkenhayn’s analysis. Ludendorff, again with commendable speed, had mustered a new infantry group (Hutier) to the north-east. But the concentration of Russian troops was now too great. Now, a new II Army had been set up along a line of lakes—Narotch, Svir—and, although its transport was confused, it could now attack. The German cavalry was driven back, losing heavily; and Hutier’s infantry was drawn into a defensive battle. Attacks on Molodechno failed, and the Russians later were able to re-take Smorgon. Falkenhayn stepped in to demand thirteen divisions for France; in the Pinsk marshes, a German group was defeated, at Logishin.31 On 26th September Ludendorff admitted defeat, and ordered construction of a Dauerstellung, a permanent line of trenches, on his front. Further south, all German attacks petered out; and there was a Russian offensive in October, which Ludendorff was able to contain only with difficulty. Further south, the campaign ended as it had begun, with an Austro-Hungarian embarrassment that, again, showed how right Falkenhayn had been. Conrad had sought to accompany Ludendorff’s Vilna offensive with one of his own, and dreamt of a double envelopment of the twenty-five divisions of Ivanov’s front, from north and south. This took no account at all of the terrain, or the declining quality of Austrian troops. On the contrary, it was billed as ‘Black-Yellow Offensive’—it would carry the Austrians to Rovno, maybe Kiev. As Hoffmann rightly said, the Austrian high command would see sense ‘only when the knife is at their throat’. Ivanov appealed for reinforcements—sending even an eleven-page letter to the Tsar (which he did not read until March) explaining that Kiev mattered a great deal, ‘on account of the increasing numbers of pilgrims going there before the war’. But he was given only trivial reinforcement, and Conrad supposed a great victory was to be had.32

  His troops attacked in eastern Galicia, on the Sereth, and in Volhynia. At first they made reasonable progress, taking Lutsk on 31st August. But the sick-lists rose alarmingly; transport through the marshy valleys was sometimes so slow as to be barely perceptible. Six Austro-Hungarian divisions were also removed to take part in the new Serbian offensive. In Galicia, there was a sudden reverse, with an extraordinarily high number of prisoners taken by the Russians. In Volhynia, IV Army (Archduke Joseph Ferdinand) blundered forward from Lutsk, exposing its left flank. Russians concealed themselves in the reeds and marshes, and attacked this flank between Lutsk and Rovno. By 22nd September 70,000 prisoners had been taken by the Russians, and Brusilov re-entered Lutsk. Falkenhayn had to divert to Galicia two of the Austrian divisions meant for Serbia—they had already reached Budapest—and German troops were turned south to restore the position at Lutsk. In the last days of September, Brusilov retired from Lutsk, and a line was established between it and Rovno. Conrad grumbled, after his strategic genius had once more, in his view, been betrayed: ‘We can do absolutely nothing with troops like this. Something so simple, so easy as what we planned has not been seen in the entire war, and yet we were let down’. Falkenhayn had a different verdict on these Austrian extra-tours: they were an object-lesson for Central European soldiers who thought they could defeat Russia. Austro-Hungarian losses were astonishingly high: between 1st and 25th September their force in the East fell from 500,000 to 200,000, and the proportions of loss were also remarkable—in IV Army, 30,000 ‘missing’, 10,000 wounded, 7,000 sick, 2,000 killed. It was already notable that, in the Austro-Hungarian army, twice as many officers reported sick as were wounded. In the German army, this proportion was reversed. It was good evidence of the different quality of the allied armies. Falkenhayn, not surprisingly, was glad to be relieved of the need to co-operate with Austro-Hungary on the eastern front.

  The armies now looked elsewhere, the Central Powers to Serbia, the Russians to an internal re-organisation of their forces. Actions, sometimes of some scale, were undertaken in Courland and on the river Styr, north of Lutsk. But even these died down when winter settled in. Between 1st May and 1st December, the Russian armies had lost a million prisoners and in all over two million men. Falkenhayn’s strategy had proved itself, and would have done even better had Falkenhayn been allowed to end the campaign where he had hoped, and intended, early in August. The Russian armies would be unable to interfere effectively with Falkenhayn’s operations for many months to come. Their great superiority on the German front—on the 600 kilometres of Ludendorff’s, sixty infantry and fifteen and a half cavalry divisions to thirty-seven and seven and a half—was useless to them, and a whole force of 126 infantry divisions with 4,650 guns (1,136,000 men) could not be active again for months to come.

  Note on the Tsar’s Stavka33

  The Tsar’s command was a largely formal affair: as Langlois said, ‘c’est à Alexéieff qu’on obéit, ou plutôt à qui on désobéit’. The Tsar was usually too busy with home mat
ters, and in any case knew little of army affairs. If I guess right, his decision was a way of trumping the Duma politicians’ military ace, as a climax to the summer crisis, at home and at the front. The question of an effective commander—chief of staff to the Tsar—was more difficult. Evert was considered, but ruled out because he had a German name, or perhaps because even the Tsar quailed at the nomination of a general so unmistakably valetudinarian. Alexeyev was perhaps chosen because he would show more sympathy for the needs of the Riga front than he had done as commander of the north-western front, if he were given full responsibility at Stavka—a calculation which, if consciously made, proved correct. But if the Tsar wanted an a-political Stavka, he unquestionably got one in Alexeyev and his aides (as similarly in the war ministry, where the Duma politicians’ friend, Polivanov was replaced by the a-political supply-expert, Shuvayev). Alexeyev was a very simple man of humble origins. He knew little of any foreign language, was sometimes embarrassed when he was saluted in the streets, found Stavka dinners an effort (not knowing, for instance, that coffee was usually drunk after dinner) and tended to join the officers only once a week. It was typical of him also that he paid his own mess-charges, instead of living at army expense in the Yanushkevitch manner: even now, mess-charges were thirty-three roubles per week, the cost-price being up to fifty roubles more. He was assisted by Pustovoytenko, Quarter-Master-General—also a man of very simple background—where the Tsar would have preferred the General Staff professor, Shcherbachev, commander of VII Army. Alexeyev’s closest confidant was V. Borisov, dismissed by Grand Duke Andrey Vladimirovitch as ‘a prole’. He had assisted Alexeyev throughout the war, and did good service at the time of the Sventsiany break-through, admiring Alexeyev’s iron nerves. Alexeyev, Pustovoytenko and Borisov were the kernel of Stavka. The rest, in Lemke’s words, ‘are either clerks or furniture’. But Alexeyev’s great defect was inability to de-centralise. He worked himself into a continual migraine, and left himself no time to think things out—his response to the great Brusilov victories of 1916 being extremely unimaginative. It is difficult not to regard his Stavka, never the less, as a great improvement on its predecessor. The aristocratic furniture was removed—only survivor being a Count Kapnist, skilled at devising pompous missives. The various parasites knew that they would get nowhere with Alexeyev—Prince Yengalychev, redundant Governor of Warsaw, or Count Bobrinsky, redundant Governor of Galicia, both given their salaries and demanding military appointments, were shown the door. Rasputin was not allowed in Stavka. The staff functioned rather better than before—partly because it now had a stronger complement, of seven Generals, thirty senior officers, thirty-three oberofitsers—in all, eighty-six persons, with Kondzerovski’s department taking fourteen. Information was now (despite the previous Stavka’s habits, and despite a nightly film-show) taken in after 9 p.m. Alexeyev was an incorruptible man, with only the good of Russia at heart. He was disliked by the cavalrymen and the associates of Grand Duke Nicholas; in a way, this was a shadow-play of the Sukhomlinovshchina, though without the baroque personnel-management that had perpetuated the Sukhomlinovshchina. Alexeyev was a charmless effigy of the virtues his predecessors ought to have displayed.

  The conditions in which Stavka lived were not much more comfortable than before. Various towns had been inspected—including Kaluga and Orsha—to see if they had suitable buildings. Only Mogiliev turned out to have these, and it was there that Stavka was installed—hardly a happy choice, since the root of the town’s name was the Russian word for ‘grave’. The mess was in the café-chantant of the Hotel Bristol, and meals were as before extensive—although only wine, not vodka, was now served. Mogiliev was a ‘filthy, poverty-stricken place’ with no library, only four horse-drawn trams, and a youth that ‘hooliganstvuyet’. It was here that Tsarist Russia was to be ended.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Political War-Economy, 1914–1917

  The great retreat of 1915 coincided with a great political crisis inside Russia. It had been imminent since the turn of 1914–15, and broke, over the question of shell-shortage, in the spring of 1915. To start with, patriotic euphoria had led to something of a ‘civil truce’ in Russia, as elsewhere. But the strain of months of war began to tell, and provoked many problems for Tsarist Russia. In the Duma, Russia’s parliament, there were many politicians who wished to limit drastically the powers of the Tsar, and the Constitutional Democratic Party was self-confessedly Republican. These men had always feared that they might be engulfed in waves of populist nationalism, set in motion by the Tsar; it was therefore their best course to put themselves at the head of a rival patriotic movement. Such a movement, which materialised later on in the shape of a ‘Progressive Bloc’ in the Duma, which included 235 of its 422 members, would demand reform: cabinet government, with ministers appointed from the Duma and responsible to it; the Tsar’s power restricted to narrowly constitutional functions, and possibly even abolished altogether. Shell-shortage gave these men a wonderful chance to show that the existing régime was corrupt and incompetent. There were attacks, particularly on Sukhomlinov and the detested minister of the interior, Maklakov.

  But the political movement was supported by powerful figures within the régime, and it was this support that gave it such success as it obtained in the summer. The army generals also groused at Sukhomlinov’s regime, and were determined to replace it with one of their own. This was a fundamental quarrel, almost on class-lines, that went back to the clash of patrician and praetorian before 1914. The army generals pursued their vendetta against Sukhomlinov, and exploited the army’s material weakness to suggest that Sukhomlinov should be removed, along with his partisans. This led the generals into an informal alliance with the Duma men. It was an alliance that also received powerful support from industrialists. They resented the war ministry’s unbending attitude in war-contracts. Businesses were going idle because of wartime circumstances but were not getting war-contracts to make up, because the war ministry relied only on foreigners and its own tiny set of Petrograd protégés. The magnates of Moscow industry, in particular, resented this exclusion, on which they blamed the crisis of materiel; and their resentment was matched lower down the industrial scale, where thousands of the country’s smaller businesses grumbled that they were on the edge of bankruptcy because of the war ministry’s attitude. The industrial opposition promoted a scheme for ‘War-Industries Committees’ in the spring of 1915, which would bring private enterprise into the war-effort. The elected town and county councils of Russia joined this agitation, and set up a union, Zemgor, to show that they too could provide sinews of war. The alliance gained support from within the government: Sazonov, the foreign minister, recognised that some reform must come within Russia, if only to show that the Entente’s declarations to the effect that it was fighting ‘for Democracy’ meant something; Bark, the finance minister, also thought that the placing of foreign and internal loans would depend on men’s confidence in the régime, and he too supported demands for moderate reform.

  The shell-crisis triggered off political as well as economic explosion in Russia. Politicians, generals, ministers of the Tsar, businessmen great and small demanded change, and blamed Sukhomlinov’s régime as Russian soldiers abandoned Poland and the frontier districts of the empire. Besides, the economic crisis of revolutionary Russia had already appeared. Inflation was already a severe problem; and some essential commodities, among them sugar, had increased in price, in the capital, by fifty per cent in a few months of war. Wages had gone into a bewildering pattern as well. Fuel supply became irregular, and there were cases in southern Russia of factories not working full-time because they had run out of coal. Transport bottle-necks occurred, particularly with the events of September 1915, when the last and most confused stage of retreat at the front coincided with evacuation and establishment within Russia, not only of millions of roubles’ worth of industrial plant, but of hundreds of thousands of refugees. At this stage, labour-agitation had not become uncontrollable—
there were a few strikes, but, as Goremykin told the Council of Ministers, ‘our labouring population has so far shown the utmost willingness to prosecute the war’1—but businessmen were already worried by the pattern of wage-increases, and the government’s apparent unwillingness somehow to ‘control’ the workers. Shell-shortage, for politicians and businessmen, was as much a short-hand version of economic and social crisis as a grievance in itself. It all produced an economic-military-political alliance of ‘respectable’ Russia that foreshadowed the Provisional Government.