Administrative Incompetence or Economic Weakness
Descripción
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‘Russia’s poor performance in the war arose from administrative incompetence rather than economic weakness’. Discuss with reference to the period 1914-16. Strong sentiments of patriotism and solidarity behind the Tsar and his government which swept across the Russian Empire at the dawn of the First World War, but administrative disorganization, blunder and most importantly, incompetence slowly began to characterize the Russian army between 1914 and 1916. Its poor performance between 1914 and 1916 is undoubtedly attributed to this, more so than it was to economic weakness. This thought-provoking approach to the causes of the poor Russian performance is one which contradicts prior historiography on the topic. In The Eastern Front, Norman Stone began this rethinking, claiming that Russia’s ‘great weak point was not…economic, but more administrative’. 1 From Tsar to Soviets by Christopher Read supports this assertion, proving that twenty years later, in light of further archival declassification, Stone’s writing remains current and relevant in the support of this argument. Prior to the war, the Russian army had split into a ‘patrician wing’, of which Grand Duke Nicholas was the head, and a ‘praetorian one’, of which the Minister of War Vladimir Sukhomlinov led. Stone argues that this division ‘prevented emergence of coherent plans’ and that the technocratic patrician faction stunted the progressive actions of Sukhomlinov. 2 This division can be witnessed between Generals Rennenkampf and Samsonov at the Battle of Tannenburg, where a tenyear-old antagonisms between the two prevented their armies from contacting one another, resulting in the defeat of Samsonov’s 2nd Army and a loss of the battle. The 2nd Army subsequently joined forces with Rennenkampf’s 1st Army for the Battle of 1 2
Norman Stone, The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (London, 1975), p. 14 Stone, The Eastern Front, p. 13
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the Masurian Lakes, a second early loss for the Russian army and one which represented a conclusive German victory. By the end of 1914, one and a half million Russian soldiers had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, a figure which represented nearly half of the prewar trained manpower and was especially devastating to the officer corps.3 This led to profound changes in the composition and organization of the armed forces, for untrained and inexperienced men were forced to assume these positions, inevitably exacerbating the army’s administrative incompetency and resulting in further casualties.4 Another serious problem arose from the lack of non-commissioned officers, the “vital link in the chain of command”, according to General Dragomirov, between officer and soldiers and one which continued to destabilize the Russian army.5 Commentary on the state of Russia’s economy after the 1970s does not label it as “backwards”, much like Pyotr Durnovo did in his Memorandum to the Tsar, but instead as being paralyzed by its ‘inability to make use of its economic weight’.6 Stone argues that Russia possessed an adequate production base, but that it was the ‘administrative inefficiency of the old guard’ which prevented this realization.7 The industrialization of Russia was set in motion by former Prime Minister and protagonist of Russian industrial development Sergei Witte, and by 1914, many sectors were considered to be developed by Western European standards. The railway network was regarded as one such sector, with seventy-seven thousand kilometers of track having already been laid by 1914.8 However, there was a crisis of transportation – one which saw a lack of supplies such as food, armaments and 3
Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt (March-April, 1917) (Princeton University Press, 1980) 4 George Katkov, Russia 1917: The February Revolution, (Oxford, 1967), p. 38 5 General Dragomirov in Stone, The Eastern Front, p. 167 6 Stone, The Eastern Front, p. 13 7 Norman Stone in Christopher Read, From Tsar to Soviets: the Russian people and their revolution, 1917-21 (London, 1996), p. 38 8 Read, From Tsar to Soviets, p. 17
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munitions being delivered to the front line, and a lack of grain being transported to the cities – which Stone attributes to ‘the hopelessly inefficient way in which it was used’, showing how the misallocation of war materials arose from administrative incompetence.9 Progress in Russia however had seemingly bypassed the agricultural sector, where production in relation to the amount of space available was mediocre and mechanization was only slowly being introduced. 10 The struggle for immediate improvement of conditions forced widespread peasant migration towards the cities of Petrograd and Moscow, initiating their population problems, and leaving fewer peasants to feed an ever-increasing population. This shift towards the production of war goods was part of a wider reconversion of the economy, where more than eighty percent of factories were taken over to supply war needs.11 This created, as Stone terms it, an overheating within the economy and consequently, a crisis of growth.12 With the inability to direct these materials to their necessary recipients through a lack of infrastructure and also knowledge, one can note a paralysis within the Russian economy stemming from administrative incompetence and subsequently witness the negative effect that this had upon Russia’s performance in the war. The 1915 campaigning season ‘was one from which the autocracy never recovered’, seeing an increase in the number of Russian casualties, wounded and captured to nearly four million, and the continuation of the incompetent administration of the army, with officer casualties totaling sixty thousand by July.13 The Great Retreat thus epitomized the year, with Warsaw being evacuated in August in addition to preparations for ‘the abandonment of the Mother of Russian Cities’, 9
Norman Stone in Read, From Tsar to Soviets, p. 38 Marc Ferro, The Russian Revolution of February 1917 (London, 1972), p. 14 11 Ferro, The Russian Revolution of February 1917, p. 19 12 Stone, The Eastern Front, p. 208 13 Read, From Tsar to Soviets, p. 35 10
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Kiev, being made.14 Stone’s research has shown how the blame of shell-shortages was used to largely explain the year’s defeats when actually, it was ‘the increasing crisis of authority’ within the army that depicts the true picture for its poor performance.15 The Council of Ministers strongly believed that defeats at the front had created a revolutionary mood in Russia, meaning that the Tsar’s decision to ‘remove the Grand Duke and to personally assume the Supreme command of the army’ would threaten ‘the greatest and most irrevocable consequence for the whole country’.16 His decision to leave Petrograd to assume this new position at the Supreme Headquarters was urgently advised against by his Council of Ministers. They were worried that the Tsar’s link to the generals would make him the scapegoat for future military failures, and that abandoning an already disrupted administration would only put further strain upon it, having the potential to spark chaos and disorder across Russia. Being unable to be dissuaded, his decision therefore ‘removed effective leadership from the war effort and absented himself from the seat of political power’ in one stroke.17 Through not consulting his ministers, the Tsar’s decision confirmed that there was no confidence in the Council, sparking deep concern within the political parties in the Duma regarding the government’s conduct and competence. With the Tsar and Tsarina’s constant replacement of competent ministers with malleable mediocrities, and ‘unwillingness to consult with or accept help from’ the legislative bodies, members of the Duma and State Council formed the Progressive Bloc out of the 14
Michael Cherniavsky, ‘The Meeting of 19 August 1915’, Prologue to Revolution: Notes of A. N. Iakhontor on the Secret Meetings of the Council of Ministers, 1915, p. 147 15 Stone, The Eastern Front, p. 165 16 Cherniavsky, ‘The Meeting of 6 August 1915’, Prologue to Revolution: p. 76; and Cherniavsky, ‘The Meeting of 16 August 1915’, Prologue to Revolution, p. 113 17 Paul Du Quenoy and David L. Ruffley, ‘Tsar Nicholas II and World War I’, 4 September 2007. (25 November 2014)
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conviction that ‘only a strong, firm, and active authority can lead [Russia] to victory’.18 Their most important demand was “the formation of a united government consisting of persons who enjoy the confidence of the country”, capturing the political sentiment of the time and highlighting the country’s administrative incompetence, which had managed to infiltrate the front lines and cause widespread psychological demoralization, with soldiers blaming the “barines”, gentlemen, ‘for all their misfortunes’, emphasizing the class divide.19 The picture of the following January did not lighten the mood within Russia. The economic condition of masses had become ‘worse than terrible’, stemming from the industrial sector being forced to focus almost all of its resources on the war effort, thus leaving very little for civilian requirements.20 Whilst this was not new to the population, the effects were exacerbated due to the increased population density of the cities, which saw populations swollen with millions of newcomers, many of whom had been made refugees by the Great Retreat of the previous summer. This increasing ‘disorganization of the rear’ began to ‘threaten results achieved at the front’, a factor which the Petrograd security police said would help to plunge the country into elemental anarchy, showing strong believe that the incompetency in the interior would be mirrored on the front line.21 Despite the success of the Brusilov Offensive in the summer of 1916, the incompetent command of Generals Evert and Kuropatkin, and the high mortality level, meant that achievements were almost countered. Additionally, the inadequacy of medical and supply services robbed the men of what little patriotic fervor they still possessed, and as winter approached, the 18
Alexandra Korros, ‘The Progressive Bloc in the State Council, 1915-1917’, The Home Front. < http://russiasgreatwar.org/media/homefront/progressive_bloc.shtml> (25 November 2014); and Vernadsky & Pushkarev, Documents of the August 1915 Crisis, p. 846 19 Read, From Tsar to Soviets, p. 37; and Ferro, The Russian Revolution of February 1917, p. 33 20 Vernadsky & Pushkarev, Secret Police Reports February – October 1916, p. 867 21 Vernadsky & Pushkarev, Secret Police Reports, p. 867
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threat of isolation became a worrying reality once again.22 Independent and voluntary organizations such as the Zemgor, Red Cross, and the Union of Zemstvos and Cities began to step in to fill the gap, left by the government, of assisting the wounded and organizing the supply of food and ammunition. Through doing so, they attempted to ‘open the eyes of the monarch’ and establish a true alliance between him and the people in order to achieve success in Europe, but were unsurprisingly ignored.23 Whilst the army had become better supplied than it had been in 1915, shortages prematurely cut this progress. The cost of the war became increasingly financed by ‘the almost unlimited printing of paper money’, inevitably leading to inflation and the rise in the price index to ‘almost three times above the level of 1913’ during the latter half of 1916.24 Due to the influx of workers into the cities, salaries could not keep up with rising prices, and efforts to control these came too little too late, meaning that the masses were not able to purchase food products and essential goods, creating situations within cities where the outbreak of disorder was imminent. The 1916 Resolution by the Congress of the Union of Towns commented on the critical state of the situation, and how ‘the government’s latest measures complete the disorganization and threaten [us] with social anarchy’, capturing the true nature of the Russian atmosphere at the time.25 The mood of opposition towards the government and the Tsar was seen to have reached a level that even the period 1905-6 did not attain. With eight hundred and fifteen strikes of an economic or political character taking place in the first half of 1916 alone, an increase in over three hundred from the same 22
Hans Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution 1881-1917 (London, 1983), p. 259 23 Vernadsky & Pushkarev, Secret Police Reports, p. 866 24 Read, From Tsar to Soviets, p. 38; and Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, p. 260 25 Vernadsky & Pushkarev, ‘Documents of the February Revolution’, A Source Book for Russian History, vol. 3, p. 874
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period of 1915, and with over four hundred thousand more participants, it is empirically evident as to why such comments had been made.26 Consequently, the army ceased to be a reliable instrument ‘for the use against an incipient revolution’, for their interests were seen to be ‘closer and more comprehensible’ to the civilian population than to the fulfillment of their duty, showing the transformation of the army since the breakout of the First World War as a result of the administrative incompetency it faced.27 This truly demonstrates how ‘they had spiritually opted out of a war they never considered theirs long before they deserted it physically’.28 With the Special Council having spent fifteen thousand million roubles between 1914 and 1917 on armaments, providing Russian industry with more direct assistance in this time frame than it had in the whole of the nineteenth century, it is easy to see why Stone holds that in 1916, Russia’s industrial sector was still maintaining progress. 29 The enormous demand placed upon the country’s rail networks and the lack of fuel supplies to the cities were not representative of economic and industrial decline, but were crisis of growth. Hans Rogger also believes that Russian industry was able to supply most of the army’s needs, highlighting how there were both economic and non-economic limits to the maintenance and bettering of the industry’s performance and thus agreeing with Stone’s theory of ‘rapid modernization, not backwardness’. With the ability to produce four and a half million shells per month by September 1916 as an example, Russia’s poor wartime performance cannot be attributed to economic weakness.30
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F. Golder, Labour Unrest 1914-16, p. 187 Katkov, Russia 1917, p. 36; and Vernadsky & Pushkarev, Secret Police Reports, p. 867 28 Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, p. 259 29 Stone, The Eastern Front, p. 205 30 Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, p. 258 27
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With neither growth nor investment being problems for Russian industry, Stone points to the ‘series of bottle-necks’ which threw the economy into chaos as explanations for the army’s poor performance. 31 With the Tsarist regime being unable to solve or neutralize these problems, it is evident that they must have stemmed ‘not from industrial backwardness, but rather from a too-rapid industrial advance’. 32 Economic development had seemingly set in motion forces that threatened social and political instability, for the cost of the gigantic industrial effort between 1914 and 1916 ‘brought its own social consequences in 1917’.33 Roughly half of the fifteen million men who served in the Russian armed forces during the First World War were affected in some way by enemy action, displaying that whilst being on the side that won the war, Russia managed to lose in many ways. It is evident that Russia’s problems were deeply rooted in its economy and society, and that the Revolution of the following year was ‘the outcome of a whole epoch in Russia’s history’.34 But these problems were also visible during the First World War, and contributed to Russia’s poor performance in it. The patriotism which was rallied in support of the Tsar in 1914 was slowly replaced by widespread discontent amongst ranks, dissatisfaction with supply chains and resentment of the ruling government and its leader, the Tsar, all being direct results of administrative incompetency. As Norman Stone concludes, economic weakness was not a factor in Russia’s wartime performance, for it was in fact a period of rapid modernization and industrial advance, the effects of which were largely stymied by the country’s inability to harness and utilize them.
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Stone, The Eastern Front, p. 209 Stone, The Eastern Front, p. 209 33 Stone, The Eastern Front, p. 211 34 Read, From Tsar to Soviets, p. 27 32
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Bibliography Cherniavsky, M, Prologue to Revolution: Notes of A. N. Iakhontor on the Secret Meetings of the Council of Ministers, 1915 Ferro, M, The Russian Revolution of February 1917 (London, 1972) Golder, F, Labour Unrest 1914-16 Katkov, G, Russia 1917: The February Revolution, (Oxford, 1967) Korros, A, ‘The Progressive Bloc in the State Council, 1915-1917’, The Home Front. < http://russiasgreatwar.org/media/homefront/progressive_bloc.shtml> (25 November 2014) Quenoy, P. D, and Ruffley, D. L, ‘Tsar Nicholas II and World War I’, 4 September 2007. (25 November 2014) Read, C, From Tsar to Soviets: the Russian people and their revolution, 1917-21 (London, 1996) Rogger, H, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution 1881-1917 (London, 1983) Stone, N, The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (London, 1975) Vernadsky & Pushkarev, Documents of the August 1915 Crisis Vernadsky & Pushkarev, ‘Documents of the February Revolution’, A Source Book for Russian History, vol. 3 Vernadsky & Pushkarev, Secret Police Reports February – October 1916 Wildman, A. K, The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt (March-April, 1917) (Princeton University Press, 1980)
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