The Eastern Front 1914-1917

by Norman Stone

  Russian output of machinery of all types rose from 308,200,000 roubles’ worth in 1913 to 757,000,000 in 1915 and 978,200,000 in 1916, of which industrial plant, 69,300,000 roubles’ worth in 1913, took 163,200,000 in 1915 and 218,500,000 in 1916.31 In chemicals, there was, overall, a doubling of output. The work-force rose from 36,000 to 58,400, and output per man rose from 5,729 roubles’ worth to 7,590. A survey conducted in 1918–19 concluded that industrial output had risen during the war on lines indicated in the following table: (gold roubles, rounded) 32

  1913

  1914

  1915

  1916

  1917

  Overall:

  (m. roubles)

  1819

  1862

  2139

  2177

  1542

  Per man:

  (roubles)

  2349

  2355

  2590

  2496

  1690

  It is not surprising to find, in 1916 as distinct from 1917, many well-informed voices being raised with much optimism. Ryabushinski produced a plan for future collaboration of State and great industry, with a view to freeing Russia from dependence on foreigners; Litvinov—Falinski sketched a similar plan for great import-substitution, and ended, ‘It is with cheerful anticipation that we await the very near future.’33

  The expansion of engineering and chemical industries permitted the Russian army to receive increasing quantities of war-goods. There was 2,000 per cent growth in out-put of shell, 1,000 per cent in artillery, 1,100 per cent in rifles.34 Four Russian factories—Shetinin and Lebedev in Petrograd, Dux in Moscow, Anatra in Odessa—produced 80 per cent of the monthly 222 aircraft Russia was said to need in 1915–16; five large automobile factories produced not only lorries, but in the end also tanks for the Red Army; similarly, the army’s 10,000 telephones became 50,000 in 1916.35 Artillery showed the advance best:36

  Russian Artillery 1914–1917

  1914

  1917

  light (field, horse, mountain)

  6,278

  7,694

  (batteries of light guns

  959

  1,868)

  light mortar

  512

  1,054

  heavy field

  240

  1,086

  very heavy

  nil

  344

  anti-aircraft

  nil

  329

  Totals

  7,030

  10,487

  The Russian figure for 1917 (1st January) is actually higher than the French one for August 1916 (10,330) and is well over double the British one for that month (4,290). A certain amount of Russia’s artillery was foreign in origin. In light calibres, Russia herself produced 20,000 guns, and foreigners sent 5,625. But of the modern howitzers, production was 100 per cent Russian, and was still three-quarters Russian in the heavier varieties. By 1917, the economy could provide 900 guns per month.

  Shell-production provides a similar story. Once the State and the large firms co-operated, shell could be produced in respectable quantities. Of 54,000,000 light shells sent to the army, foreigners provided 15,000,000; nine State factories 8,300,000; eleven large private factories 26,500,000—mainly, the Vankov37 and Putilov organizations—and seventeen others, 5,200,000 (mainly the War-Industries Committees and Zemgor). Of 11,700,000 medium-calibre shells, nine million came from Russian factories; and even in the heavy category, over half of the shell came from within Russia, mainly from Vankov’s collaborator, Vtorov, whose factory near Moscow could fill 12,000 of them in a day. Manikovski,38 the Artillery Department’s principal expert, gives the following table for Russian shell-output: 1915:11,230,000 three-inch shells, production rising from 358,000 in January to 440,000 in May, 852,000 in July, 1,197,000 in September and 1,512,000 in November:

  1916: 28,300,000, production rising from 1,740,000 in May to 1,980,000 in June, and 2,900,000 in September.

  In September 1916, 320,000 light mortar shells were produced; and if all categories of shell—including gas-shells—are counted, the country could produce four million rounds of light shell, and 500,000 heavy shells, by the autumn of 1916. By January 1917, there was a reserve of shell, at the front alone, of 3,000 rounds per gun; in November 1917, the Bolsheviks inherited a Tsarist shell-reserve of eighteen million. Of course, there were continual gumbles from the front. The generals went on overrating what artillery could achieve, and when in 1916 they still failed to break through, they discovered a shortage of heavy artillery, which they had not talked about before. But, by 1916, the Russian army had achieved considerable superiority, not only in men, but also in materiel. The superiority was achieved at the cost of a gigantic industrial effort, which brought its own social consequences in 1917. But over the facts of the industrial effort itself, there could be little dispute.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Second War-Winter, 1915–1916

  By the winter of 1915–16, the basis for a successful war-effort had been laid—at least, in narrow terms of war-material. In January 1916 Alexeyev informed the French, through Zhilinski, that his front-line strength was now 1,693,000, of whom 1,243,000 had rifles; a few weeks later, the Russian front-line strength became two million, virtually all of them with rifles. The main armies against Germany—I, II, X, IV, and III—had over a million men in February, and of these, only 110,000 lacked rifles; most of the 110,000 were in any case supernumerary. With shell, too, confidence grew, as the correct amount for an offensive operation—1,000 rounds per field-gun—seemed to be secured. Other essential items, from aeroplanes to wireless-sets, gas-masks, barbed-wire, bandages, were now arriving in quantities that led to universal hope that the Russian army could soon take the offensive again.1

  But all of this weight needed muscle; and the characteristic feature of the pre-war army, the growing dichotomy between its ostensible strength and its efficiency of organisation, became, now, still more clearly evident. Legend has a picture of countless millions of peasant soldiers being thrust into battle, armed with long-handled axes, against overpowering German artillery and machine-guns. It is a legend that owes almost nothing to reality; indeed, reality was the very reverse of legend. The army, by the beginning of the 1916 campaign, was not suffering from material shortages of any significance, any more than other armies; it did, however, experience remarkable difficulties in using the countless millions of peasant soldiers alleged to be available for conscription. The front-line strength was less than that of France, with less than a quarter of Russia’s population, until mid-1916.

  The pre-war system of conscription lasted until the end of 1915, and in effect even longer. It had been introduced in 1874, at a time when European armies reckoned, following the example of Prussia, that a large trained reserve had become essential. Theoretically, all physically-fit young Russians then became liable for conscription. But it is tempting to add that they were then exempted from it. The army authorities would have had to take in, annually, about 600,000 men—and, later on, even three times as many—if conscription had been genuinely universal, for these figures represented the number of fit Russians reaching the military age in any one year between 1874 and 1914. But to take in this many was unthinkable. The army did not have offcers and N.C.O.s to train them; it lacked barracks. Above all, it lacked the money to supply them. Supply (‘intendantstvo’) took up over 100 million roubles out of the army’s total revenue, 172 millions, in the 1870s, and ‘administration’, at nineteen millions, took more than all matters of artillery put together. Later on, the demands of supply grew: in 1913–14, they took 450 million roubles out of 580 millions spent by the army.2 To take in many hundreds of thousands of conscripts every year would be to consume in food, blankets, fodder money that was desperately needed for guns (and of course also for pensions and promotions). Consequently, the army authorities found ways of cutting down their recruit-contingents. On the one side, they generously exempted minorities—Finns,
Menonites, Central Asian peoples and, usually, Jews. On the other side, they proclaimed a generous system of exemptions for family-status. Only sons, men with a close relative already in the ranks, men who had lost a father or an uncle in the Polish revolt, only grandsons were all exempted. Finally, in the grandest exemption of all, ‘bread-winners’ were not taken in to serve, i.e. married men. Thus, in 1914–15, one million new peasant households came into existence—a circumstance still bewildering to agricultural economists, but one wholly comprehensible to students of the Draft.3 Together with exemptions for educational reasons these exemption-classes proved to be so numerous that the authorities had difficulty in finding even the small recruit-contingent on which they had decided (150,000 in 1874), and seem to have taken in men whose physical standard was not high. The 150,000 produced among them 76,000 appeals, most of which turned out to be justified.4 In later years, the recruit-contingent rose—320,000 in 1900, 450,000 in 1906 and 585,000, under the terms of the ‘Great Programme’ in 1914—but it did not represent much more than a third of the available man-power.

  Conscription is often put forward as one of the chief factors causing Russia’s economic problems in the First World War. It is alleged to have caused fearsome problems both for agriculture and industry; and no doubt did bring about severe, local disruption. But it has to be put into perspective. Russia called up just over fourteen million men between 1914 and 1917, from a population of almost 180 millions. This was barely more than France, with a population of forty millions, and less than Germany, with one of sixty-five millions. As far back as 1902, the surplus rural population of Russia had been reckoned to be twenty-two millions, so that Russia should have been more able than either western country to sustain real mass-conscription. In reality, the baneful effects of conscription were yet another hard-luck story, exempting government from its responsibilities. It was not so much an economic as an administrative problem, one calling in question the whole relationship of government and people. The government shrank from the creative effort that real conscription would have involved. Like most autocracies, its great strength was, not that it governed harshly, but that it governed less. Its tax-collectors and recruiting-sergeants were little more than a nuisance; and the government rightly feared that, if they became more, it would be swept away in a tide of popular indignation. Real conscription was possible only where a partnership existed between people and administration. A partnership of this kind existed in England, but not in Ireland; in Germany, but not in Austria; in the Red Army of 1918, but not in the Tsarist one of 1916. In 1918, there was a great rush of volunteers for the Red Army, and men who failed to report for it would be ‘informed’ on by their fellows. After 1914, there was a rush to benefit from the various statutes of exemption, and most of the Russian people seem to have sympathised. The Tsarist army thereby came to suffer from a shortage of man-power that no-one could honestly explain.

  A large part of the difficulty was of course the authorities’ simple incomprehension of it. They had never supposed, before the War, that they would need to call on more than a fraction of Russia’s available manpower, since they foresaw neither the casualties nor the length of the war to come, and in any case could not imagine supplying more than a million or so men at the front. They had, indeed, been criticised by progressive critics not for producing too few soldiers, but for producing too many, who swamped the training-facilities. They called up less than five million men in 1914, and thought this would suffice, since both France and Germany called up much the same. The active army—i.e. the conscripts of the years 1911, 1912 and 1913—went off to war, with the trained reserve of the first class, i.e. men who had served in the ranks between 1904 and 1910, respectively, some 1,500,000 and 2,800,000.* Numbers were made up with Cossacks and classes of territorial troops, called up to guard bridges and depots. Altogether, mobilisation in 1914 thus affected some 4,500,000 men.

  Casualties in 1914–15 went far beyond what anyone had imagined possible, indeed far beyond what the authorities were capable of counting. The authorities became aware of constant demands for more men, and lurched about in a fog. The army’s statistical office was the Glavny Shtab, which was run, almost by definition, by incompetents, who had failed to make a career in anything other than this department, which was regarded as a waste-paper-basket. The few dozen dim-witted officers of this department attempted to keep up with losses by installing an enormous set of filing-cabinets, where they faithfully recorded every man’s career—his medals, promotions, permits, wounds. When casualties ran into hundreds of thousands per month, the Glavny Shtab succumbed, and could produce nothing beyond unenlightened guess-work. There is, as a result, much confusion as regards the army’s losses in the First World War—figures between four and eleven million being quoted. Most authorities, Soviet and émigré, inclined to the higher figure—no doubt to display that allied money had not gone in vain, and therefore need not be repaid—but a sober Soviet investigation results in a figure of between 7,000,000 and 7,500,000 for losses of all categories to the armistice of December 1917. Of these, three million were caused in 1916, and the bulk of the rest in 1914–15. With losses running at between 300,000 and 400,000 per month, of whom forty per cent would not be able to return to the front, the authorities were therefore faced with a situation in which each month of the war was eating up the recruit-contingent of a single pre-war year; and the situation was quite possibly more serious still, in so far as the casualty-returns did not include men who were cured at the front-hospitals and returned to their units within a short time.

  The authorities were thus driven to make a much more profound effort of conscription than they had thought possible. They had certain obvious openings. The trained reserve of both classes represented fifteen recruit-contingents of the period 1896–1910 inclusive, and these were taken in. They should have amounted to five million men, but because, in the course, of their liability to reserve-service, many had become physically less able than before, or had acquired a right to exemption, or had simply disappeared without trace, no more than 3,100,000 men were taken in from this set during the war, of whom more than two-thirds were affected by the initial call-up of August 1914. A second obvious opening was for the army to anticipate the conscription of future recruit-contingents, i.e. to summon to the colours in 1914 or 1915 young men who would not normally have served until they reached the age of twenty-one in the years to come. The ‘recruit-contingents’ of 1914–18 were all called up in 1914–15, and were mustered in the usual way, i.e. exemptions and deferments carried on as before, so that each contingent counted 585,000 men, although three times as many Russians would reach the military age in that year. This gave the army a further three million men to use, who were put into the army during 1915 and 1916. Delays in the delivery of these new troops caused difficulties, even in 1915; but in any event they could not cover the demands of modern war. The army would have to conscript some more, from somewhere.

  It would have to delve into the ranks, first of the older men (forty-one—forty-three years of age) who had completed their term of service with the reserve and who had gone into the first class of the territorials. This was duly done, though without much return in terms of numbers. A second step was to call up elements of this class of the territorials who had not served in the army at all, who had not been taken in for full-scale military service, although physically able for it, because they were ‘supernumerary’ to the army’s requirements in recruits in that year. Both sources gave, together, a further three million men. The next step would be to exploit the vast sea of the second class of the territorials: men who had been exempted altogether from military service, or who had dropped out, for one reason or another, from one of the other classes while liable for service. The territorial force was vast, since it accounted for more than two-thirds of the male subjects of the Tsar; but the second class, though presumably including, in every year, 400,000 men, gave only three million men for the army in the First World War. The army�
��s failure to exploit territorial troops properly is a considerable puzzle. Of course, some soldiers simply wrote off the untrained opolchentsy as quite useless in the field. But the real problem was failure of will. The authorities did not want to bring upon themselves the unpopularity that conscription of this kind could bring; more pertinently, it is doubtful if any kind of serious record existed of these millions of men, scattered all over Russia. The Glavny Shtab and the military districts had not imagined, before 1914, that such a record would be needed, and now, in wartime, was hardly the point where one could be set up. Even in countries more advanced, and easier to survey, than Russia, the military authorities made all kinds of blunders in conscription—serving call-up papers on cripples, dead men, lunatics, convicts. In Russia, the dimensions of this would make the State ridiculous as well as detestable. In fact, the territorial troops could be conscripted only if they reported for duty, which they might do for the Red Army, but not for the Tsarist one. It was only in places where records were reasonably good, and where the police could do their work, that territorials were conscripted in any numbers. In practice, this meant the big towns; and of course was followed by complaints from factory-owners working for defence that their skilled workmen were being removed, so that even attempts to conscript the territorial troops of whom the army had some record would produce clouds of demands for exemption—two million, or two-fifths of the contingent that the big towns were expected to produce for the army. Had Russia been able to conscript in the French manner, she would have called up sixty million men; but she called up less than a quarter of this.