At the commencement of hostilities, the Russian army appeared as a formidable military machine – a numberless mass of fighting men, ready to lay down their lives for the Tsar like the hero of Glinka’s opera. The German officers were impressed, then appalled, by the sight of vast numbers of grey overcoats advancing remorselessly over open fields, only to be mowed down by German machine guns. Surely, here was the famous old Russian army described by Tolstoy in War and Peace, made up of mindless peasants willing to follow the orders of their superiors with blind obedience, and submit, patient and unquestioning, to the harshest impositions. This myth about the Russian people, which even surfaces today as a supposed ‘explanation’ of the present situation, despite its patently unscientific and quasi-racist character, was blown sky-high by the real historical experience of 1914-17. The Russian army did not benefit from the vast number of troops at its disposal. It was gravely under equipped in everything. Even such elementary items as boots and rifles were in short supply, to say nothing of tanks, aeroplanes, shells, and artillery. In 1914 there were no more than 679 motor cars (and two motorised ambulances!) for the whole of the army.
Throughout the war, the Russian army was expected to play the role of cannon fodder for the Allies. Thus, the original plan of the Russian high command had been to launch an offensive on the South Western Front against the weaker Austrian forces, while defending the North Western Front against a stronger German force. But under pressure from France this plan was changed to an all-out offensive on both Fronts to force the Germans to transfer troops from the theatre in the West and thus relieve pressure on the French. The offensive, which seemed to start well, ended in the bloody disaster of Tannenberg, where at the end of August Samsonov’s army was surrounded and cut to bits in four days of the most appalling butchery. 70,000 Russians were killed or wounded and another 100,000 taken prisoner. By contrast, the German losses amounted to a mere 15,000 men. In answer to the condolences offered by the French representative, the Grand Duke Nikolai, the Russian commander in chief, replied nonchalantly: “Nous sommes heureux de faire de tels sacrifices pour nos alliées” (“We are happy to make such sacrifices for our allies”). By the end of 1914, Russian casualties were already in the region of 1.8 million.
All this slowly worked on the psychology and morale of the soldiers, as slow dripping wears away the hardest rock. Just as the Russian working class was in the main not patriotic in outlook, so the mass of peasants in uniform were unenthusiastic about a war which they did not understand and could not identify with. The proverbial obedience of the Russian muzhik was soon strained to the limit by the months and years of hardship, suffering and death. Orlando Figes affirms that: “The soldier of the Russian army was, for the most part, a stranger to the sentiment of patriotism.”
And to underline this point, he quotes several instructive examples:
A farm agent from Smolensk, who served in the rear garrisons, heard such comments from the peasant soldiers during the first weeks of the war:
“What devil has brought this war on us? We are butting into other people’s business.”
“We have talked it over among ourselves; if the Germans want payment, it would be better to pay ten roubles a head than to kill people.”
“Is it not all the same what Tsar we live under? It cannot be worse under the German one.”
“Let them go on and fight themselves. Wait a while, we will settle accounts with you.”
These sorts of attitudes became more common in the ranks as the war went on, as Brusilov had cause to complain:
“The drafts arriving from the interior of Russia had not the slightest notion of what the war had to do with them. Time after time I asked my men in the trenches why we were at war; the inevitable senseless answer was that a certain Archduke and his wife had been murdered and that consequently the Austrians had tried to humiliate the Serbians. Practically no one knew who these Serbians were; they were equally doubtful as to what a Slav was. Why Germany should want to make war on us because of these Serbians, no one could say… They had never heard of the ambitions of Germany; they did not even know that such a country existed.”
An army always reflects the society from which it is formed. The class divisions in the tsarist army, the brutal discipline, the corruption and inefficiency, the callous indifference of the officers to the suffering and slaughter around them, did not pass unnoticed by even the most politically uneducated peasant soldier. The Allied commanders themselves were shocked by the rottenness of the Russian general staff, which was but the mirror image of the rottenness of the tsarist-Rasputin regime. The Supreme Commander himself, the Grand Duke Nikolai, had never taken part in any serious fighting and was little more than a figurehead, writes Figes. “General Yanushkevich, his Chief of Staff, had nothing to recommend him but the personal favour of the Tsar, who had discovered him as a young Guardsman at the palace. He had never even commanded a battalion. Colonel Knox, the British military attaché at Stavka, gained ‘the impression of a courtier rather than a soldier’.” The rot seeped from the top down. “The aristocratic generals committed endless blunders (one even had the distinction of ordering his artillery to fire on his own infantry’s trenches).”
The growing mood of revolt is mirrored in the declarations of the troops:
“Look at the way our high-up officers live, the landowners whom we have always served,” wrote one peasant soldier to his local newspaper at home. “They get good food, their families are given everything they need, and although they may live at the Front, they do not live in the trenches where we are but four or five versts away”.
Any study of army mutinies will show that the leaders are usually the NCOs. These ‘natural leaders of men’ are usually selected from the most energetic and intelligent layers of the soldiers. In charge of most of the day-to-day running of the army, they are frequently hostile and contemptuous of the upper echelons. Sixty per cent of the NCOs in the tsarist army were peasants, mostly in their early twenties and with very little education. But, as Figes points out:
The war was… a great democratiser, opening channels of advancement for millions of peasant sons. Their sympathies lay firmly with the ordinary soldiers, and any hopes that they might form a bridge between the high-born officers and their low-born troops were badly misplaced. This was the radical military cohort – literate, upwardly mobile, socially disoriented and brutalised by war – who would lead the mutiny of February, the revolutionary soldiers’ committees, and eventually the drive to Soviet power during 1917. Many of the Red Army’s best commanders (e.g., Chapaev, Zhukov, and Rokossovsky) had been NCOs in the tsarist army, much as the marshals of Napoleon’s wars had begun as subalterns in the king’s army.
One such sergeant in the tsarist army, the peasant Dmitry Os’kin, who later became a Social Revolutionary, wrote in his diary, April 1915:
“What are we doing in this war? Several hundred men have already passed through my platoon alone and at least half of them have ended up on the fields of battle either killed or wounded. What will they get at the end of the war? …My year and a half of military service, with almost a year at the Front, has stopped me from thinking about this, for the task of the platoon commander demands strict discipline and that means, above all, not letting the soldier think freely for himself. But these are the things we must think about”. (O. Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924, p. 257, p. 258, p. 259, p. 260, p. 264 and p. 265.)
Out of such stuff are revolutions made.
From May to September 1915 the Germans inflicted a series of shattering blows against the tsarist forces. The Russians were pushed back 300 miles, surrendering a territory bigger than France. Three quarters of a million Russian soldiers were in prisoner of war camps, and ten million people became refugees. The losses of the army in killed, wounded, and missing amounted to between 7.2 and 8.5 million men, i.e., between 45 per cent and 53 per cent of all the men mobilised. A million men surrendered to the German and Austrian forces during the Great Retreat. “The army was no longer retreating but simply fleeing”, Polivanov, Minister for War, stated. “Confidence in its strength is completely destroyed… Headquarters has completely lost its head. Contradictory orders, wavering hither and thither, feverish changes of commanding officers, and general confusion unnerve even the most courageous men… The confusion at headquarters is no longer a secret and still further demoralises the army.”
At the end of July, Krivoshein, Minister of Agriculture, told the Council of Ministers:
Hungry and destitute people are bringing panic everywhere, and extinguished all the vestiges of the enthusiasm of the first months of the war. [Refugees] move in a solid mass, they tread down the fields, destroy the meadows and woods… The railway lines are congested; even movements of military trains and shipments of food will soon become impossible. I do not know what is going on in the areas that fall into the hands of the enemy, but I do know that not only the immediate rear of our army but the remote rear as well are devastated, ruined… it is in my competence to declare, as a member of the council of ministers, that the second great migration of peoples, staged by general headquarters, will bring Russia to the abyss, to revolution and to ruin. (Quoted in L. Kochan, Russia in Revolution, pp. 181-82.)